Women Leaders In Conversation: Deepika Bajaj on Social Media Trends
In our January 12 Women Leaders in Conversation radio program brought to you by the Monali Jain Foundation, social media strategist, dynamic marketer and woman gamer Deepika Bajaj boldly shared her professional story about all the choices she made in the intersects of her career, how she always embraced opportunities, especially when they were uncomfortable, how she embraced new technologies, new challenges and learned along the way.
As a true entrepreneur, her view is that too many people spend time thinking and contemplating rather than doing and correcting. She was one of the first people to have a cell phone, allowing her to travel internationally and remain connected to important others in her life. As an engineer, she embraced the opportunity to get an MBA specializing in marketing. She launched her own business on a shoestring, and embraced social media as a low-investment, how-impact way to spread the word and build the business. Then she moved into gaming as a rare (and accidental) female gamer, and found that her strengths in technology, marketing, and social media are well leveraged in her current company. As an active blogger and expert in social media, Deepika makes the following recommendations for professional women (and men):
Embrace the possibilities of what social media can provide, rather than resisting it and pointing to counter-examples of its effectiveness. If you don’t join the crowd, you will be left in the dust, as the social media revolution will continue to gather momentum.
Social media is a great way to make your voice heard and impacts your career, your brand, and even the political structure of countries. Never underestimate the power of the written word in real-time communication, shared in community, through social media.
Casual gaming will really take off – and more women play casual games.
The new way of communicating will be more focused on the whole person, a 360 degree view of someone in authentic wholeness. Different generations will have different levels of comfort on how social media will fit into their lives, but the younger generations will have much less fuzzy a line between what’s public and what’s private. Social media will make it easier for everyone to share both.
Get on LinkedIn to share your professional profile, whether you’re in transition or not. Get on Twitter to hear what’s on people’s minds and follow influencers. Join FaceBook to share with others in community. And start blogging if you have content you’d like to share, and would like to start conversations on things that matter to you.
In the end, Deepika says that life is something that you design, with change the biggest constant. She encourages us to 1) be open to possibilities that will stretch us and 2) think how communicating who we are and what we do through social media can open up more possibilities for us.
Contact Deepika at deepikabajaj.com