By:Haya Hamid PAKISTAN TODAY 14-12-2011

With 2.2 million internet users in Pakistan, is social media transforming the fundamental tenets of marketing?


They say ‘customer is the king’ and yet the amount of work and effort that the online audience of news sites does is quite like a kings minion. In this time of information overload, the job of sifting through news and reports to get the required data is a herculean job reserved only for this royalty. Smartly cashing in on the opportunity, all online news agencies offered the facility of conveniently checking boxes for one’s area of interest and all news related to your desired subject will be delivered in in your inboxes, a facility greatly appreciated by those who want to avoid news clutter. The demand of those who want hard and fast facts for news rather than opinions also divert their interests online where it’s easier to find information in a much more orderly fashion which is efficiently updated.
The debate of influence of social media in Pakistan is being established by the 22 million internet users within the country. The magnitude of that population can be estimated by the fact that the total population of Singapore is 4.5 million and the facebook population of Pakistan is 5.7 million. Online business networking is also on the rise, as is shown by 0.08 million people connected through Linked In. This reflects the increase in digital immigrants from 1 per cent to 3 per cent in the last decade. For a layman, digital immigrants are those that worked well even before the internet revolution and the digital natives are those that had email addresses before they left the hospital nursery. The power of digital natives is constantly redefining the potency and potential of social media within Pakistan. Cloud computing, if not so reliable for official date storage due to power crisis, is definitely catching speed for telecom users. ‘Syncing’ contacts and other directories are options available to even those that seldom use the internet.
All this technology in the reach of every other individual greatly enhances the wildfire effect of news reporting. The culprit for the Halal/Haram controversy for Lays chips in Pakistan was found to be a single text message and a blog post. Similarly Indian bloggers clarifying Ajmal Shehzads non-relation with ISI was also the result of a Pakistani satirical article going viral online. These new and nippy methods of news reporting also call for an inbuilt check and balance system. When a recent Indian newspaper published photos of Pakistan’s fighter jets parked on their Naval ships, ‘celebrating Indian Navy day’ took an almost comical u-turn. Where foreign news agencies put great stock in individual journalism, Pakistani agencies still lack in timely news deliverance. Bbcnews.com still credits guppu.com for the live reporting on the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. Immediately following the unfortunate Airblue crash tragedy in July 2010, where Pakistani news channels were still repeating the idea of five survivors, international channels picked up tweets and live updates from volunteers on the crash site who started sending pictures and feeds establishing the magnitude of the catastrophe and no chance of survival, news that in the end turned out to be facts based on evidence. It should come as no surprise that the man who live tweeted Osama bin Laden’s death is now the most popular Pakistani on twitter with over 90,000 fans. This on ground reporting is a powerful tool for establishing credibility for any news agency. What it requires is for anybody to be in the right place at the right time reporting the right content.
Encouraging street and photo journalism is a cost efficient option for news channels. It allows for not only non reliance on news agencies but also aims to rectify many news glitches that the audience catches time and again. Utilising the power of social media for on the dot news reporting or advertising/marketing is a resource that if harnessed can greatly contribute to build credibility for the channels. It is a tool that an uneducated ‘Asif Hussain Shah’ successfully exploited to attract customer to his Taxi service, its infiltration in the Pakistani market cannot be underestimated.

The writer is a freelance journalist and a business student at NBS