20:20 Social - Social Media India-side

20:20 Social are one of India’s only social media pure plays. In the UK, where every agency across the marketing landscape is figuring out how to engage consumers via social media, 20:20 are one of the only specialists in India. It isn’t that surprising given that less than 1m people (out of a population of 1.17bn) have fixed line internet connection at home. Most of the 30m regular users that 20:20 estimate access the internet each month tend to do so on shared computers – internet cafes, libraries, schools and colleges. Both hardware and broadband infrastructure seem to be a barrier to take up (but still 30m online, is half the UK population.)

The team’s background ranges from IT to anthropology. They take a very academic approach to social media strategy, building engagement architecture along side information architecture and creating models such as their ‘ladder of behaviour’ to assess the different levels of interaction along the journey.

They’ve only been going for 4 months and have 4 live projects. With an inherently social society and culture of openness and community, taking this Indian tenet online seems a very natural step. What I found most interesting is that 20:20 are not building Indian versions of social platforms like Facebook. Indians are already using Orkut (15m), Facebook (c.9m), You Tube (11.5m), Twitter (500k), Linked In (1.5m) and Worldpress blogging sites (c.9m). 20:20 are solving business problems with social media principles.

1) A spirits brand (there is no alcohol advertising in India) is using their ownership of a cricket club to engage their customers to interact, share their data and get closer to their brand via a social community hosted by the cricket club / brand.
2) They’re using social media to galvanise citizen action to push certain social issues.
3) They’re helping a big IT company nurture sharing and community among their developers – 4 months a go there were a small proportion of contributors sharing code and best practice, now they have created a virtual environment that emboldens developers to share and collaborate much more effectively.

I found their perspective on using social media to avoid having to use advertising very interesting, Gaurav Mishra, the CEO was particularly passionate about migrating media budgets to pay for social media activity. I have to say that I can see how development in content and community does wonders for customer engagement, as we have seen with our own project New Look TV (www.youtube.com/newlooktv), but we agreed that you still need traditional media and real world engagement to promote your virtual world, which is necessary even more so in India that the UK.

Check them out http://www.slideshare.net/Gauravonomics/2020-social-introduction-to-social-media-in-india