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…