By Lata Subramanian
Chief Marketing Officer, Sterling Holiday Resorts (India) Limited
On social media, content is king, or so it is said. The question is, just when does content become king? The answer is, only when it can interest and engage its audience. No different from conventional marketing communication, with one key exception: marketers have to be aware that social media networks are personal in nature and brands can, at best, facilitate conversations. Think Tupperware tea parties - brands cannot directly engage consumers in a conversation other than responding to consumer feedback on product or service. Anything else is more or less wishful thinking.
The challenge for brands on social media, therefore, lies in creating platforms for community conversations, which are related to the core business of the brand. In the case of Tupperware, the tea parties were relevant to Tupperware’s business and served to generate brand goodwill. What do home-makers do over a cup of tea? Why, they exchange notes on domestic affairs, of course!
The principle established by Tupperware long ago was brought home recently when a Facebook post from Sterling went viral, beyond expectations.
Food is an important part of any holiday experience. Food, fortunately, is also a trending topic on the Internet and other media. Recognizing this, the Sterling social media team has always gone with food themes in the company’s social media history. A couple of months ago, the team realized that fatigue was setting in on the food posts and something had to be done to give it a boost. At around the same time, we introduced new menus at all our resorts. These menus incorporated a ‘Cuisine of the Land’ section in an effort to deliver a local food flavour in the holiday experience. Our social media team along with the team at our agency, Isobar, picked up ‘Cuisine of the Land’ from the resort menus and created a series of posts promoting India’s varied and rich culinary offerings.
The first of the posts featured ‘gol gappas’ or varieties of ‘pani puri’ in India. It got a fair amount of traction but it was the second post which made us sit up and take notice. Featuring biryani variants across India, this particular post received at first count 62,890 clicks, 4,522 likes, 1,574 comments and 1,359 shares! So is biryani more loved than pani puri? No. The only inferences we drew were that (a) the campaign was optimized and perhaps, (b) regional biryani dishes triggered fierce feelings of loyalty to ethnic cuisine. Or, maybe, there is something extra special about biryani, because the post was picked up by Highway On My Plate, Eat Treat and other foodie forums. We were thrilled, to put it mildly. But what really sated our appetite was the quality conversations that sprung up around the post.
Our second post was on the historical antecedents of biryani, inspired by a comment from a follower, which said, “I believe biryani’s root is in Persia”.
That post, too, went viral. The journey of biryani was tweeted and re-tweeted by many influential twitterati, and picked up by several content aggregator sites and apps. A Bengaluru-based restaurant even used the Sterling ‘Journey of biryani’ post to create an event. In just a few weeks, a couple of posts on social media had several hundreds of thousands of people hungering for biryani!
The conclusion? Content is king. But you have to serve up what the audience will love.
Feedback: lata.subramanian@sterlingholidays.com
