Mashable Social Media Day – Colombo 2016

Mashable Social Media Day was held on 16th July 2016 at Havelock City in collaboration with Etisalat Sri Lanka and Neo@Ogilvy for the fifth consecutive time. It was separated into two parts as conference and meet up.

Social Media Day Colombo – Conference was utilized as a platform to meet industry experts while exchanging ideas and learn trends. In short, it was an insight on rapidly evolving Digital Media industry. Attendees were exposed to different personalities of various industries to widen the learning experience.The current conference theme was ‘Revolution of Social Commerce’. At the beginning, keynote speech was done by Ms. Yushika Abeysirigunawardhana, Senior Brand Manager of Etisalat Lanka. Next, Mr. Amitha Amarasinghe, Head of Neo@Ogilvy gave an introduction about Social Commerce. According to himself, Social Commerce is using social media to sell more products and services online. Social Media Marketing is driving acquisitions of new customers by buying more in online platform while increasing life time value to retain customers over a long period. Then, Ms. Crystal Koelmeyer of Kraftsy – Online Fashion & Lifestyle Boutique shared her recipe of success by being in the same wavelength as the customer. Kraftsy is a social commerce driven start-up. It is an online fashion and lifestyle brand that is associated with style, quality and comfort which originated in September 2015. Kraftsy takes the advantage of their massive usage of user generated content with Facebook and Instagram with 70% of response rate.

After that, Mr. Umair Wolid, Head of Marketing – Content and Digital Media of Wijaya Newspapers talked about “How publishers can help for social commerce?”. He emphasized the fact that publishers could create shareable content for social commerce with platforms such as whatsapp, viber which are dark social media. Even, publishers can be great educators to the society too.

Then Ms. Dulanganee Matugama, Assistant Manager of Digital Services in Etisalat Lanka did her presentation on “How mobile technologies help social commerce?”. She explained the necessity of social media for consumers as an awareness booster, decision accelerator and advocacy activator in the modern world. Even she mentioned few cases to support her views. Some of them are:

Diesel jeans launch of in-store QR codes
Find flight to meet your Facebook friends through Friend Compass – Momondo
Unicef of New Zealand’s social media campaign of Food Photos Save Lives
Heineken@wherenext

Even very informative experiences were shared under “How e-commerce is evolving into social commerce?” by Mr. Lahiru Pathmalal, CEO of Takas.lk where he asked to keep on listening to your consumer because in the current scenario, social media can be applied to advertising, public relations, content marketing, community building etc while widening the horizon of digital media industry. After that panel discussion about “How to get the ROI from Social media marketing?” was carried out where Founder of yamu.lk, Mr. Indrajit Samarajiva acted as the facilitator.

The theme of 2016 meetup was ‘Social Media for All’. Finally it was the meet up that everyone was waiting for as it provided the opportunity to join the offline social media conversation with fellow social media enthusiasts. It was an entertaining evening full of fun and learning which lead to awards ceremony in recognizing the social media industry people.

Nerdynaut thoroughly enjoyed this event with couple of take home lessons which might be useful for future development projects. Hence, this particular event should be continued to the following years too as lot of younger generation is entering and are actively involved in this fast moving digital media industry.