AdAsia 2011: “If you’re not on Twitter, and you’re in this business, you should resign quickly”: Rishad Tobaccowala

‘From Twitter to Chat Rooms’ was the theme used for the fifth session on day one at AdAsia 2011. As the theme suggests, in this session moderated by Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer, VivaKi, Kate Day, communities editor, Daily Telegraph Online, Arvind Rajan, managing director and vice president, Asia Pacific and Japan, LinkedIn, and Earl Wilkinson, executive director and CEO, INMA, spoke about the importance of social media.

Tobaccowala said, “If you’re not on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook , and you’re in this business, you need to resign quickly." 

Giving an example about the power of social media, Kate Day said, “We had a small front page story in Scotland about a murder. People were interested by this and started sharing more information on the murder via comments on Facebook and Twitter. This made us understand what our readers wanted and we started writing about the murder case again.”

She also brought out the importance of Twitter for journalists. She said, “It’s very important for journalists to be on Twitter. When people are looking for cricket related posts on Twitter, it’s very easy for them to run into a journalist writing on cricket, and thus start following the journalist and contributing to daily page views.”