Shopcorn.com Exclusively Uses SlideShare and Twitter For Marketing

 

peppysophia Shopcorn.in is arguably India’s first ‘Social Shopping Community’, where sellers can post their bargains and users will vote for them. Voting these bargains up and down is the site’s cornerstone function, respectively called a pick and kick. The site is being exclusively promoted via Social Media Marketing only.

We caught up with Vishwalok Nath, Co-founder of ShopCorn to talk about how they plan to use Social Media to promote their product:

1. How did the @peppysophia account on Twitter begin? Is this an online identity you created or a real person?

Peppy Sophia is the name of the mascot for Shopcorn.in.  It started with uploading presentations on Slideshare. After that, we took up a Twitter account to drive visitors to the slideshows.  However, after joining Twitter, we realised that it’s more than just inviting visitors to your website, you can create an identity for your company on Twitter and start replying to questions and feedback from your target audience in real-time. 

2. What is your rationale for choosing Twitter as a marketing medium for ShopCorn.in?

Since Twitter gives instant access to your target audience, you can communicate live and take feedback for your product from users in real-time.  Twitter can act as a company’s mouthpiece to the world. In fact, we have received a few partnership leads via Twitter from a travel search engine, a shopping website and a custom gifts company!

3. While you interact with the community, we have noticed that most of your strategy revolves around gifting prizes, gifts and other material benefits to increase the amount of buzz you create for your clients. Do you see any other way of doing this apart from giving out gifts and prizes?

As Shopcorn is a unique concept, our first goal was to create awareness & entice users to try out the product.  Hence, we adopted this strategy of holding contests and gifting prizes to get visitors to test our product. Going forward, they would get benefited by simply being there in terms of great deals, reward points, free gifts etc.

4. What is your strategy on Twitter?

We would like to use Twitter as our mouthpiece to the users.  While looking for relevant contacts for building alliances for Shopcorn, we felt that it takes a lot of time to reach out to the concerned person in most of the online portals.  But with an active twitter account your customers, prospective partners etc. can easily reach you.

5. Do you have a Social Media presence on other websites such as FaceBook, etc? If yes, what is your overall Social Media strategy and where does Twitter fit into the scheme of things?

We have presence on Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, and Orkut.  We are most active on Twitter as it gives instant results.  We are also planning a Twitter App of our portal

We are believe that Shopcorn used Slideshare very innovatively to drive traffic to their website! They do tend to generate a lot of buzz within a small section of the Twitter community. We will be watching them…

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Guest Post: Twitter Invites Community Backlash with @Replies Change

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[Mayank Dhingra is co-founder of Kwippy. His thoughts on Marketing and Social Media are widely read at http://mayank.name.]

Oops, Twitter did it again. After logging on Twitter after a day’s break I was  greeted by two inconspicuous messages atop my Twitter stream about their planned maintenance and a small settings change to the @replies feature. Though I could not care less about the planned maintenance break the changes to @replies left me curious. Here’s an excerpt from Twitter’s blog post about the changes:

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable.

How exactly does hiding @replies to unknown people “better reflect user behaviour”?

Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option. Confused? That’s understandable and exactly why we made the update.

Is someone trying to be funny here? Needless to say the unasked for changes are not going down well with Twitter users and there aren’t keeping mum about it.

The hashtags #fixreplies and #twitterfail started appearing immediately all across Twitter. It was only a matter of time before #fixreplies became a trending topic, becoming more visible and wide spread amongst the Twitter users.

So how will Twitter react to all this, is what everyone’s thinking. Will it stick to it’s decision that it knows what’s best for their users or relent to the storm that’s brewing and give up to it?

Twitter’s Response (so far):

1) Original blog post updated: In less than three hours since I saw that "we know it better than you all" post the content has updated with removal of that apparently funny line "Confused? That’s understandable and exactly why we made the update." and addition of the following text to reassure it’s users that things aren’t all that bad, you can still discover new people by either incidentally or by altering how you use @replies.

The Importance of Discovery Spotting new folks in tweets is an interesting way to check out new profiles and find new people to follow. Despite this update, you’ll still see mentions or references linking to people you don’t follow. For example, you’ll continue to see, "Ev meeting with @biz about work stuff" even if you don’t follow @biz. We’ll be introducing better ways to discover and follow interesting accounts as we release more features in this space.

2) Tweet from EV: "Reading people’s thoughts on the @replies issue. We’re considering alternatives. Thanks for your feedback."

From what I’ve seen Twitter hasn’t really been one of the most responsive sites when it comes to hearing the voice of it’s community and doing the needful for them but given the scale it has reached it better start changing things on that front too to avoid a large scale user backlash.

Image Credits: GapingVoid.com

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