KOCHI: The city celebrated ‘Social Media Day’ with the who’s who of Malayalee Twitter world on Monday. Going ahead of the times, the Kochi Corporation had proclaimed June 30 as Social Media Day for the metro city.
The connected generation, including some influential twitter users in terms of followers and content generation, gathered at the Udyan Convention Centre at Vennala to mark the day with their social media success stories.
Director Aashique Abu inaugurated the event in a typical new generation style with his tweet “I, Aashiq Abu, hereby digitally inaugurate #smdaykochi. Its good to be social” and then went on to share his successful experience whilst using the ‘sm-platforms’ for the promotion of his movies.
The occasion was part of a global chain of events to celebrate the potential of social media platforms. Though June 30 has been celebrated as ‘Social Media Day’ across the world for the past five years, this is the first time a city in Kerala hosted an event to mark the day.
The inauguration was followed with a workshop on the theme ‘social media for an empowered tomorrow’ that saw seven speakers from various industries sharing their successful social media stories.
The audience lent a keen ear as Dominic Salvo, vice-president of DDB Mudra group, spoke of the blurring lines between traditional and new media and Sreenath Vishnu, executive director of Brahmins Food India, spoke of the waxing and waning of brands in the social media in Kerala.
However, the ‘tweet generation’, as they are called, couldn’t restrain from quipping with queries about food while Vishnu Gopal, CTO, MobMe, discussed about the emerging patterns of content consumption in social media just before the lunch break.
The discussions throughout the afternoon focused on the best content creation in Kerala social media. The speakers included Hrishikesh Bhaskaran from ‘Swathantra Malayalam Computing’, a free software collective for popularising Malayalam-based softwares, Ann Mary George, CEO of the popular Malayalam website ‘Marunadan Malayali’, Jaseem TS, co-founder of WowMakers, a design oriented start-up known for creating a buzz with its flagship product crowdstudio.in and Orion Champadayil, co-founder of Malayaleegraphy, the Malayalam typography experiment which grabbed attention via Facebook and Twitter within hours after its launch.The event was live-blogged all the way and the hashtag ‘#smdaykochi’ was trending in Twitter India by afternoon. The event also felicitated key social media players from the state including industrialist Kochouseph Chittilappilly, social media campaign team ‘Pappaya’, popular app ‘Ocha’, dedicated blog for KSRTC transportation ‘KSRTC blog’, and the non-profit group ‘Against Ignorance’.
The meet-up also resulted in some interesting turnout of events. Some of the participants were so popular for their Twitter handles that instead of real names, they were called out in conversations using their Twitter names such as ‘@pullipuli’ or ‘@njanara’, which gave enough chuckles for the newbies around the corner.
They event also saw some thick friends in the ‘virtual’ world meeting each other for the first time in ‘real’. Take the case of the three from the team ‘@ochapaad’, whose story would be difficult for the old generation to digest. They built a top-grossing app ‘Ocha’ together, but shook hands for the first time at #smdaykochi!
