To have a website or a Facebook page?

An interesting development is taking place when your brand is reviewing its online presence – whether to have a website only or have a website and a Facebook page or only a Facebook page or may be none?

Keeping in view the time consumers are spending online and especially in social networks many brands have started preferring their pages on Facebook as an invite to potential customers to go online and know more. So for example even if Nokia has its global websites, for certain promotions and targeted activities – they may ask customers to go visit www.facebook.com/nokiarocks . While it all sounds very much in vogue to do something like that but make sure you take care of the following four points before jumping into the band wagon.

Social 999 and Information Dam - How to deal with social emergencies with technology? - Part 1

Today - a post not directly related to businesses or branding as such, something more related rather with my work with social networks, technology,development, human rights - social change in general. Inspired by the latest conversations in the field, especially by the pioneering thoughts of Clay Shirky, I had been thinking along the lines of a concept which I term as 'social 999' and a related concept of 'information dams' and how, I wonder, we could use these to precipitate social change. These are very embryonic thoughts and will require further research, ideas and investigation in days to come.The key question is how would it be if we could use social networking platforms as some sort of a social 999 or a social 911 in which case we could use a combination of existing social media channels where the look-alikes of typical real life emergencies such as 'policing, medical and fire-fighting' could be dealt with by the community members themselves?

If you look at how the emergency numbers and the services that are provided across countries by calling the usually three digit emergency number, you will realise that there are several characteristics related to the emergencies. Firstly they concern with loss, damage or deterioration of properties, health or even life of an individual or a community as a whole. Imagine what happens when a fire breaks out in a block of buildings and there are women, children and elderly trapped inside. Think about a theft or a crime occurring which effect a household or an individual which require police to address the case immediately. In the same breathe, imagine when the paramedics rush with their ambulance to attend to the deteriorating health situation of any unfortunate ailing person in pain. All these circumstances include the threat to health, property or law and order which can influence individuals and communities alike.

Secondly there is this aspect of reaction speed. Imagine what would happen if the fire brigade arrives to a burning block of flats after say 2-3 hours when the whole infrastructure might get reduced to ashes. Similarly what's the point if the paramedics arrive at the scene to attend a heart patient in distress after an hour or so? How quickly the emergency service providers can react is one of the key critical success factors that make 999 or 911 effective and useful for the community.

Thirdly it's important that perfectly skilled professionals are standing by to respond to our emergency calls. How terrible it would be that a bunch of amateurs wearing uniforms would show up with water buckets to extinguish a fire? Even worse if they hesitate to plunge into the fire risking their own lives to save others. The brave-hearts fighting with fire are expected to be brave and well trained. Similarly you will not want amateurs to attend to a patient who have just had a heart attack.

Finally there is this issue of abuse of the system. Imagine the amount of false alarms the emergency services in real life must have to deal with on a daily basis. This can range from old widows calling 999 to help look for their missing cats to panic struck health freak who calls for paramedics after mild chest burns which may be due to trapped wind. In majority of the cases I guess emergency service providers have no other way but to respond and attend to such calls, incase the issues are life threatening, even if they end up with a pure time wasting experience.

Now lets take this opportunity to replace these emergencies with some kind of a social emergency, violations of human rights of some sort against any individual or a community and imagine the services- as actions against those violations. How could we conceptualise a ‘social 999’ like scenario where the user groups, communities of best practices, groups, tribes, tightly or loosely connected networks – whatever you call it, will use social networks to deal with a social emergency, a man made crisis of some nature, which might require urgent addressing by all involved to tackle the challenge. Lets look into some more details of social 999 and the concept of ‘information dam’ in the next release.

Image taken from http://www.snodlandcommunityresponders.org.uk/about.html

Promoting your products and services through Statusbites

Since one of my key jobs is to find out how social media and user generated content can contribute to social change, we recently came up with a simple tactic which I call ‘statusbites’ to increase the circulation, frequency and visibility of status messages in social networks specific to any campaign, cause etc. Since the same principles can be applied to for-profit organisations as well, I thought to share the same for use by Bangladeshi managers who are contemplating how best to use social media for a variety of business objectives. Please note that increasingly consumers are getting to know about your products and services not from your official websites and TVCs but from the newsfeeds in their Facebook profiles through the fan pages and groups of companies they subscribe to. So an important mindshift needs to take place that rather than expecting consumers to travel to your websites to know more about you, you need to make sure that your message is travelling to where they are spending their times these days.

What are statusbites?

Statusbites are a series of short texts which describes a company product, service, news piece, event etc. which can be published and promoted over a period of time through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Why do we need statusbites?
Its not always the case that users come to your company website to know more about your products and services. You need to ensure that your messages travel to digital spaces where an increasing number of your customers spend a significant amount of their daily lives in recent times – social networks. Statusbites aim to inform consumers who are more comfortable to consuming information through social networks with the help of the series of statusbites. So by the end of the run of say 10-15 status messages and provided they have followed the sequence – they would be able to comprehend the key messages, key benefits, objectives, features etc. regarding the product, service your company is trying to promote.

Also, you can’t expect that all your followers and fans in social media come across your posts the moment you publish them. Most of the time your publications/status messages can be buried down a plethora of other messages that the users are bombarded with every second – both from updates from their friends/families and from other subscriptions. So you need to make sure that your message shows up often- not to flood the newsfeed, but in convenient frequencies.

How to prepare statusbites?
•Think of the 10 or 15 key messages you want consumers to know about the product, service, event you are organising
•Write each of them down within 130 characters with space and the hashtag of your choice (i.e. #gpnewoffer)
•State whether you want each of the statusbites to link to your company website, Facebook page etc.

How are they scheduled?
The statusbites can be scheduled to appear in your preferred social networking properties with the help of a third party software called Co-Tweet. The scheduling of statusbites publication can be spread over a week, two weeks etc. depending on the plan of promotion before, during or after a target event, date of your product/service launch.

Example:
Gpfact1/10 - #grameenphone launches #mobitaka to make remittances easier http://shortlinktoyourwebsite

Gpfact2/10 – did you know that #mobitaka allows you to get rewards of 10% for every 100 taka you remit? http://shortlinktoyourwebsite

Gpfact3/10 – did you know that 10,000 people used #mobitaka in November to remit a total of 150,000 taka to their friends and families? http://shortlinktoyourwebsite

So as you can see, you don’t have to do entirely new things in social media for your products and services, rather if you tweak your status message slightly to suit your objectives and the audience, you might appear to be more engaging and informing in social media networks. Let me know what you think.

The beauty of BUZZ!!!

Social networking, microblogging, instant messaging, twitting... all this make up for the world that we live in. A world which is LOUD, too OPEN for the closed-minded and COMPLICATED beyond definition. Yet we enjoy living in it... complain or not, suffer or not... we do like livin' in this "chaos". Such a world is nothing but a creation of ours; well at least I tend to think so. As we get more and more involved with the "power of the internet" over "actual human skills", we consistently make way for the "new world" to take over the old one, the one we define as our planet... a place where we have lived in for thousands of years. This change isn't a overnight process though; over the years... through the million hours we have spent making this world more a spiderweb, grapevine or whatever you wish to call it.... we have become victims of creating a BUZZ about everything. Everything that moves, every soul that sneezes... makes a BUZZ! In simpler words... we are a victim of the very buzz that we create to keep ourselves content, recognized and most importantly going on for more.

Sitting here in my desk on a random saturday night, with my facebook window open, MSN signed on, gtalk in "away" status... I am conveying my message through a blog. A message against buzz is ultimately going to be promoted via another buzz. That's how ironic the whole process is, yet that is how we have come to accept life as. We live in it, we breathe it, we look forward to creating a bigger and better version of it every freakin' time... We simply are... and will be...BUZZed!!!!

Authored by Sabih Ahmed at http://sabihspeaks.blogspot.com/

Kozmo gets social with social media

We recently arranged yet another phone interview with an early adopter of social media for business. Mr. Arif Hafiz is the founder of Kozmo, 'the legendary Bengali culture renaissance institution that arrived on the Dhaka outing/nightlife scene in 2005...a cafe chain that pioneered the lounging culture in the city with live gigs, recitation, readings and off course cosmopolitan cuisine!' as the way it puts it on its Facebook page. A couple of issues became clearer from the conversation with Mr. Arif Hafiz which could be summarised as below.

Communication cost

Social media has dramatically decreased the cost of communication for Kozmo to reach out to its customers - existing and new. Your marketing mix can allow a combination of communication channels such as TV, print, radio etc. but its increasingly getting more appealing that the cost for conveying your marketing messages is the cheapest if done through social media. Companies as big as Coca Cola recently included social media in their ad plans for the Super Bowl. Moreover, communication can be very interactive and personalised which is otherwise not possible in traditional communications channels.

Relevance

It perhaps made more sense for Kozmo to opt for Facebook as its main mode of communication platform because the kind of business it is in, it attracts a crowd predominantly urban, young to middle age and who are techno-savvy. Kozmo is a place for dining out, enjoying gigs and most importantly for socialising. So a strong social media presence to engage its visitors is a natural component in its marketing strategy. Imagine companies like RahimAfrooz, the energy sector pioneer company of Bangladesh. Should companies such as them also jump into the social media bandwagon just because Mr. Arif Hafiz of Kozmo uses it and is seeing returns? May be not. The role of social media may become a bit murky when it comes to purely business to business industries who can be better off by sticking to their websites and extranets. However companies which are more consumer facing and allows consumer interaction within its premises (restaurants, retail shops, banks, mobile customer service centers etc.) are good candidates for extending their service through the social media channels.

Resource

Its clear that Kozmo's social media activities are solely dependent on the founder himself. Its possible that its more because of his natural love for his entity which he founded which makes him the natural spokesperson for his brand through Facebook. What would happen if Kozmo grows so large in all divisional headquarters of Bangladesh in 10 years? Will the business complexity allow Mr. Arif to continue his conversations through social media? Or he will need to appoint someone to carry on the conversation while he can focus on money matters? Its extremely important to atleast to attempt to define some roles and resources within the organisation as to who or which group would take care of the social media communications. It could be a cross-department, it even can be someone external to the company who has turned out to be an accidental spokesperson (like a good brand ambassador) by virtue of his/her love and loyalty towards the brand.

Exclusivity

Fans and followers of Kozmo on Facebook need to enjoy the exclusivity they might receive for opting in this channel over any other. Say if Kozmo promotes daily discount codes to its 'fans'by posting a note like this, 'rush to Kozmo today and write this discount code ILOVEKOZMO24APR at the reception to have 50% discount on everything you eat! Spread the word. The offer is for its Facebook fans and their friends and their friends only, so spread the word and hurry, as this offer ends today!'. This has the potential to create some sort of urgency to loyal Kozmo goers to redeem the short-lived discount. It also has the potential to make the 'fans' feel special as the discount was offered to them only and was not published in a newspaper or aired on TV, radio.

Relocation of marketing efforts

It will be an increasing trend in coming years that consumers will spend more time on social media on a daily basis than they would be reading newspapers, sit in front of TV or be glued to radio stations. As internet will start permeating consumer's daily lives, a lot social interaction, entertainment, education, news breaks, even social commerce and group buying will take place in a social media setting. It doesn't imply that your business should abandon established means of consumer communications, it just implies that your business should start taking social media as the best way to get social with your customers, pretty much the way Kozmo has done it.

Business blogging in Bangladesh - three years on

As this blog enters three years into existence with a view to promote the use of business blogging by Bangladeshi companies, I made a few quick phone surveys to a few contacts working in various industries there to find out how they are perceiving business blogging to start the conversation with Bangladeshi consumers. Following is a summary of the present state of unofficial views from a few Bangladeshi executives.

Lack of knowledge

Many Bangladeshi companies, infact most of them, seem to be unaware about the use of business blogging as a marketing tool or social media as a matter of fact, to engage with their customers. The general impression is that since the companies have websites up and running so that should suffice as far as online brand management is concerned. Moreover, the companies are confident that the existing business functions such as customer services, market research, media etc. are good enough to 'engage' customers through various surveys, ATL and BTL activities. Moreover, since there are dedicated personnel to liaise with the press and media, they are not interested to anything which is untried and uncommon in Bangladeshi business landscape.

Difference between business journalism and business blogging

Those who are aware of corporate or business blogging are still not sure whether business journalism and business blogging are the same thing and who exactly does what. They expressed satisfaction that they are getting required hotspots in TV, radio and print media to convey their brand communications to their existing and potential clients, moreover business journalists are already 'doing a good job' by regularly publishing updates and news on various aspects of their businesses, so there is no need to confuse the situation by experimenting with business blogging.

Issues of transparency and lack of rules

The 3rd category of Bangladeshi businesses have adequate knowledge of various game-changing technologies such as blogs and social media but they are unsure about protocols, regulations in their companies about how much of business information can they divulge in public space. Most are fearful of backlashes from within the company. For example, an engineer from Robi voiced his embarassment with the new brand name, is aware of the recent conversations in online space but not sure whether or not someone from Robi should engage in the conversation in the same social networks with people or not. Moreover, according to him, the management is simply not interested to pay attention to unofficial forms of communications customers try to have with the companies. Its not a priority.

Lack of defined roles and resources

Since brands attempt to share control with customers in the social media space, Bangladeshi companies can't fully stop customers from setting up fan pages and groups for the brand, either to sing praise or do brand bashing. Groups in Facebook for Aktel (Robi), BRAC Bank, GrameenPhone etc. exist but what is not clear is whether these are official representations of the brands or not. It could be the artworks of a loyal employee who thought to make a mark on behalf of his/her employer in the social media space by setting up pages for free and attempting to start conversations with consumers. But unless there are no official roles assigned, its difficult to ascertain who the official spokesperson is. Most of the time, brands discover accidental spokespersons in social media who prove to be efficient mouthpieces for the company, Bangladeshi companies are yet to wake up to this reality. So the companies would prefer to keep blogging and social media 'to a personal level and for fun only'.

A formal media survey by market research companies would be useful to provide more concrete views on this topic. Feel free to share your views and the views of your businesses on this.

The future is Purple

We recently took a phone interview with Mishu Rahman, Editor, Purple Magazine, the increasingly popular Bangladeshi monthly. Please listen to the phonecast and read the supporting transcript below. You can join the Purple group in Facebook here.

1.What is the vision of Purple Magazine? Why do you think Purple is different?

PURPLE was started with a dire need to represent Bangladesh positively to a global audience in an exciting way. Most Magazines in Bangladesh are catalogues of lifestyle shopping and those which offer good reads are presented in a boring format, or else involves stale ideas and people repeating the same things across various media platforms.
PURPLE dared to take a non-political, social research based trend tracking approach which we call tracking “the Pulse of Bangladesh” The presentation in world class, language is international magazine standards and interaction with readers happen at state of the art platforms. PURPLE gives ample space to new and fresh ideas, avoids commercialization of issues and creates excitement about Bangladeshis and Bangladesh to a global audience. The vision is to bring in international recognition of PURPLE as a platform to initiate conversation on things affecting Bangladesh and the region. Already PURPLE has been distributed at a Cambridge Leadership summit as a Pre-reading for a session on Global environment to 110 young global leaders and our Agriculture Issue last November was distributed to all international dignitaries who joined the World Food Summit in Rome as a complete perspective of work being done on Agriculture in Bangladesh. These are small steps but we are getting there with each step.

2. How do you classify yourself i.e. lifestyle magazine, leisure, entertainment?
PURPLE’s mission is to enlighten, entertain, enrich inspire and interact and initiate. It celebrates the Bangladeshi Spirit. We call ourselves a Contemporary issues magazine and we have various segments catering to business, entertainment, lifestyle, culture and politics.

3. Who is your target audience? why do you target them? how do you target them?
Our target audience is anyone in Bangladesh who feel the need to be engaged with the times – and we believe everyone needs to be, so that we our cumulative contribution to the development of our country can be that much greater. We have seen that various cover stories of PURPLE appeal to different segments of the society. For example one cover two years ago on the brash lives of urban school and college students from wealthy backgrounds got a lot of urban parents writing to us asking for more details. On the other hand our issue on Agriculture generated interest of a lot researchers and analysts from across the region. Even Hugh Brammer from London who has worked in Bangladesh for over 35 years in agricultural development emailed us a writeup as a follow-up of that issue. Another Cover story on Looking at Bangladesh 30 years from now created a phenomenal participation of University students who will be middle aged citizens of Bangladesh after 3 decades to get together in workshops and send us their dreams and aspirations. Our Initiative in raising funds for the social victims raised a lot of interest among celebrities, artists and development workers. So through various features we try to engage with different parts of society which gives PURPLE an element of freshness and excitement

4. What is your opinion on the English publishing sector in Bangladesh and how PURPLE fits in there?
The English Publishing sector suffers from a dearth of readers. However, with a rising involvement of various institutions and Corporate houses, Universities and even the government in promoting the familiarity with the language, the scenario may not be the same 5 / 6 years down the line. Today we as editors suffer from a huge crisis of good writers/ reporters in English. And thus most magazines who look to become ‘English’ language magazines get away with mediocre articles, downloaded plegiarised materials and no one is the wiser.
On the brighter side, English publications with insightful articles and engaging presentations can attract a global conversation and has a wider appeal. PURPLE intends to lead in this arena over time. It has been in Publication only since July 2007, so this has been so far experimental learning. We are ready to take on bigger challenges in 2010.

5. Do you make use of internet, mobile phones, social media to promote, inform, communicate and mobilize your readers? How?
What are we today without social media? PURPLE’s facebook group gets a lot of our message across. The online version is a large platform for non-resident Bangladeshis to experience PURPLE. We are aware that as more Bangladeshis go online and use internet enabled phones, online and mobile versions will become more popular. However, the print version will never really go extinct. If this was to be, then when TV came in, the newspaper would have gone out of print!

Status Renting, Status Bites and a range of status categories

Many status conscious Dhakaiyas think that if you manage to reside in the Bermuda triangle of Dhaka city i.e. Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara, you possess a 'higher' status than the rest who live outside, or even on the periphery. However Facebook, the most popular social networking site in Bangladesh too, is poised to make this status vanity blurred, as apparently, everybody and anybody has a ‘status’, as long they are registered with Facebook, or with Twitter as a matter of fact. This certainly implies that these status-savvy digital netizens of Bangladesh have acquired the power of being micro-publishers for free, to start influencing their smaller sphere of acquaintances, through their frequent updates about own situation, feelings, news, etc. From my observation, I could categorize the status-mongers in Facebook according to the following categories. See if you want to add some more and think how each of these could be mobilized to spread the word-of-mouth regarding you, your business, brand. (read more)


1. Stato-holics
This group of people are status addicts, they prefer to update their status as frequently as possible. Most interestingly, even if they are ‘busy’, they somehow manage to get the time out of their busy schedule to update their status as ‘Abdul is busy’ or ‘Abdul is buzzzeeeee’ etc. making others wonder whether that person is busy with work or busy Facebooking!

Tip:
This category of users may be good brand mouth-pieces for your product/service. Riding on their urge to frequent status updates, they need to be equipped with enough information and right incentives to help spread the word-of-mouse for your brand.

2. Status-stalkers
You might be having 500+ friends in your friend list but in reality you might be interacting actually with not more than 50 through personal messages, wall posts and seeing each other’s status updates. Then what happened to the rest of your colourful and long friend list? Have they suddenly turned their face off Facebook? I reckon not. This category of people prefer not to update their own status but prefer to have sneak peaks on what others are doing. Partially it could be because they don’t want their ‘friends’ to know what their own secrets plans are for job, holidays etc. lest their friends exploit this information and race ahead. So they prefer to keep a check on everybody else’s status regularly and remain themselves in a hidden mode. That’s what friends are for huh? In many case’s some stalk a handful of people genuinely to acquire more knowledge, contacts etc. They are Facebook introverts.

Tip:
Good type for market research may be, who keep a check on what other people are upto, or may be saying about your brand, business or even you…and then reports back to you.

3. Stat-vertizers
My favourite type. Those who can happily rent out their status space as a micro-bill board to advertise about your business, either for free or for fee for a certain duration of time may be. I have been investigating with this lately and am keen to get in touch with Facebook to figure out if the idea of ‘Status Renting’ could be made a reality. So if I could convince say 10 of my target Facebook friends to update their status about my custom-made-status ready information on my business/product, then it would be made visible to their own friends, with whom I might not be connected. The audience of your audience is my audience that I am trying to reach here through status messages. Its short, crispy, share-able and more importantly you would be more influenced about anything if you read it in your friends’ status updates rather than hearing it from any unsocilited ad campaign, or from me. In exchange, if its possible to track the clicks from each ‘rented status space’, it would be used to may be pay the interested stat-vertizers for their favour.

Tip:
--Friends and family might be bullied for a while to behave like stat-vertizers for a while but not for long, as there are no binding agreements. But if contextual status renting becomes a reality, it would be interesting to see how this works for businesses in a social media environment.

--Don’t let money ruin friendship.

4. Stat-wasters or Stat-blankers
This type of users are not always sure why they should use their status updates for. So sometimes they publish statuses such as ‘Abdul is …’. I really never understand the meaning of this ‘…’. To me, it’s a complete waste of space. Rather stay quiet and stalk other people than saying three dots. Also, some ignore the basic principle of brevity in status messages and opt for writing long epics in their status messages which certainly gets ignored for a skim-through status surfer.

Tip:
Wish them happiness and wish them well.

5. True socialite
They are bit of a mixed bag. They actually share nearly each of their conceivable feeling/emotion i.e. ‘Abdul is happy, sad, sick, tired, sleeping, eating, walking, thinking etc.’. They talk about food, movies, politics, life, love, pretty much everything being social requires and enjoys status messages just because they themselves are genuinely like that. They also send each other virtual gifts, play games etc.

Tip:
If a true socialite could be converted to a part time stat-vertizer, then it would be bthe est combination for your business/brand word spread. As people tend to rely more on the candid opinion of a True socialite than on the dry and monotonous updates from a stat-vertizer.

Other than ‘status-renting’ I am also researching with a concept I coined as ‘status-bites’. Inspired by what soundbites do, I think status-bites are the next best thing to educate your audience on your business/product on a slow and scheduled status release format. I am applying this specifically for reports that other teams produce for public consumption at my present workplace. It is argued that in times of information economy, attention is the currency, which no one wants to spend too much. So not many people have the time or interest or the access to go through a full report of 30-40 pages. But they would not mind to have a surface level idea, gist of the actual content in small chewable chunks, right through their status feeds so that they can be informed about the key aspects of the issue at hand through the screens of their smart phones or desktop screen. Think about it, is there anything about your business/brand, which can be released through status messages in a planned way over a period of time? May be a week or so?

Lastly, something I call ‘status-serials’. Can you tell a story about your brand/business in 10 status messages in a serial fashion? So that I have the urge to see what your next update is? Can it keep me interested in your sticky status for a week or so? However, none of these terms are in Google yet.

That it, time to update my status about this post now.

Do an identity check for your brand online

There was a time in mid 90s that me and some of my techno-guru friends got excited about starting a domain name business. Plain and simple... you keep on buying domain names of prospective big companies of Bangladesh with the hope of selling it to them in future in higher prices, provided if they would ever wake up from sleep to get a website for their brand name, business etc.

Certainly unethical and a bit risky venture it was, but we did realise that not only company domains but also city domains were still up for grabs. For example, in 1995, domains like dhaka.com, dhaka2000.com, sylhet2000.com, rajshahi.com etc. (major divisional headquarters) were available. We could sense money in the making and started all out efforts to start this 'business' at any cost. We started making lengthy lists of potential 'target' companies, establishments who had no clue then what even websites were and why would they need one. We were excited to experience the desktop based reach of this 'business' and the chance of getting rich overnight.

However, it was no question of ethics or legality that constrained us from launching our venture in the long run. We experienced 'entrepreneurial hiccups' due to three major setbacks. Firstly, none of us had any foreign credit cards with which to buy the domain names online. Secondly, there were not many among our network of relatives or 'boro bhais' who used to possess a prized international credit card. Lastly, some uncles and contacts who happened to possess credit cards did not have any idea what this 'domain business' was all about, so they were extremely reluctant to leak their sensitive credit card information to a bunch of part time neighbourhood troublemakers (us) and they were petrified to learn that the transaction would take place over the internet. So end of our business venture. We got back to discussing higher education, Bangladeshi politics, band music and girls.

Recently with the advent of Twitter, many similar ID or name hijackers seem to have 'booked' Twitter user names for some Bangladesh brands. Check out the Twitter accounts for Grameenphone, Banglalink, Grameen (with Yunus' photo), Aktel, Citycell, bdjobs etc. 'Ke ba kahara' seem to have very cleverly reserved the unique user names perhaps hoping that they can reach to a deal with those companies to bargain for those Twitter accounts. The use of Twitter among businesses is increasing in leaps and bounds in the west and its a matter of time when Bangladeshi brands, and celebrities will catch the Twitter fever. Its also possible that some of these 'reserved' but dead Twitter accounts might be owned by genuine employees from the company, they just haven't figured out what to do with it yet.

However, to spoil the party of the 'name kidnappers', Twitter has recently made some changes in its policies. Read them here. This means that the party is over for those who might want to reserve the brand names or operate them with fake tweets. On the other hand, I am not aware of many companies actively pursuing any social media strategy to engage the Bangladeshi consumers, both at home and abroad. So perhaps they are either not aware or don't bother if their brand identities are being hijacked online. Every one out of five internet users of Bangladesh has an account in Facebook for example, and I am not sure if any traditional market research, media research company have taken up any survey on the use of social media among various age groups in Bangladesh and how the businesses can make use of new media to connect their brand with the netsumers. The opportunities are vast how social media blended with mobile phones can change business dynamics in Bangladesh. Please don't wait for foreign think-tanks to come to Radisson and tell you that.