How to Create a Talkworthy Experience Ecosystem: The Social CRM Toolkit

Posted on 11. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in How To Guides, Ideas, Reports

The Social CRM Toolkit

The Experience Ecosystem

Companies are beginning to realize that their brand is now realized on the Social Web, in conversations between strangers, who amplify, quash, or otherwise reshape each others’ opinion on the product or service, often based on first-hand experiences. These messages play off against marketing messages pushed by advertising agencies in the mind of the customer, and increasingly, customers are listening to their peers, instead of marketing messages.

The Social Web exposes any misalignment between implicit or explicit expectations set by the CMO in marketing messages and the actual experience delivered by the organization run by the COO. It is therefore critical that the CMO and COO be in absolute alignment, so that the organization (over-)delivers on what the brand has promised, leading to customer delight, loyalty and advocacy.

At the core of this approach is the idea that conversations are driven by experiences. If you want to drive positive conversations about your brands, you should start by creating an experience that is worth talking about.

The Experience Ecosystem provides the framework for creating talk-worthy experiences. It consists of all the touchpoints between the organization and the customer, including products, services and partners, sales and support channels and interactions, and the values for which the organization and its individual brands stand for.

At 2020 Social, it is our belief that the best way to create an experience worth talking about is to design it collaboratively, with your customers, employees and partners.

Deconstructing the Experience Ecosystem

So, the obvious question arises: How do you collaboratively design an Experience Ecosystem that drives conversations and results in close-knit communities?

You start by listening. Your customers, partners, and employees are talking to each other about you, often in public, and their conversations include a treasure trove of feedback about your Experience Ecosystem, along with ideas to improve it. In short, they offer clear signals as to how they will take ownership for the experiences and conversations that will drive your brand.

However, listening is only the first step. You also need to respond to these people and participate in these conversations, not with the intent to direct them in one direction or another, but with the intent to engage them and learn more. Over time, as you track these conversation threads, you should seek ways to build profiles for the people who are participating in these conversations, and identify which conversations, and which people specifically, are the most valuable to you.

Some of these conversation threads will involve responding to and converting prospects who are considering your products or services. Other conversation threads will relate to supporting existing customers seeking an explanation or a solution. Still other conversation threads will be about customers, prospects, partners or employees giving you feedback on your Experience Ecosystem.

In each of these cases, you should try to tie together related conversation threads to unleash the power of collaboration. A prospect considering your offering may benefit from the reviews and experiences of other customers. An existing customer might find that other customers have already shared useful tips on how to solve common problems. Finally, your customers, partners and employees can collaborate to find the best ideas to improve your products, services, and sales and support processes, or design entirely new ones.

Once you have collaboratively designed a talkworthy Experience Ecosystem, you should build community platforms to catalyze the formation of communities, and transform customers, partners and employees into evangelists.

The Social CRM Toolkit is Still Evolving

The toolkit to create an integrated talkworthy Experience Ecosystem is still evolving, but it’s already possible to connect the various activities described above, as my colleague Dave Evans recently pointed out in his October 2009 ClickZ column.

Social media monitoring tools like Radian6 and Visible Technologies already incorporate workstream elements. Not only that, Radian6 connects with Salesforce CRM, apart from Twitter. New tools like Buzzstream are designed for profiling and responding to influencers, and not just listening.

With Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial and now LinkedIn offering robust APIs, it’s now possible to find or build powerful social applications that connect with other solutions in the toolkit and make sharing easier than ever before.

Collaboration solution vendors are an integral part of the mix because they enable your customers, partners and employees to collaborate and co-create innovative products and processes. I expect enterprise collaboration solutions like SocialText and Cynapse and ideation platforms like Accept Ideas and WebStorm to start offering integration with other applications.

Social commerce solutions like Bazaarvoice play an important role in the ecosystem by converting and cross-selling to customers and we should see such solutions offering more integration too.

CRM tool vendors are also expanding in both directions and introducing social media analytics and community features. Salesforce and RightNow now offer a full suite of community features including ideation, support and knowledge sharing and even connect with Twitter and Facebook. Apart from the integration with Radian6, Salesforce also supports integration with the Lithium community platform and customer support applications like Helpstream.

At the other end, community platform vendors like Jive, Lithium and Neighborhood America are also aggressively introducing social media analytics and social CRM features.

Update: Social CRM Resources

Since I wrote this post in October 2009, I have come across several interesting conversation threads about Social CRM. Here is a selection of some of the most useful resources I have found so far:

- Paul Greenberg puts a stake in the ground on Social CRM.

- Jeremiah Owyang starts a list of Social CRM vendors.

- Fabio Kipriani explains the benefits of social CRM.

- Lithium’s Chief Community Officer Joe Cothrel gives a great overview of the evolution of Social CRM.

I’ll be grateful if you will help me understand the Social CRM space better by sharing your favorite Social CRM resources in the comments.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

How to run an advocacy program on social web

Posted on 04. Dec, 2009 by Achintya in How To Guides

Background: Advocacy programs provide a win-win situation for any brand or product on social web. On one hand it lets you recognize that set of evangelists who would be ready to promote your brand/product free of cost and on the other hand it leads effective promotion of your offerings to your consumers. We at 20:20 Social have researched some of the most effective advocacy programs to seek out varous ways in which these advocacy programs on social web can be modeled.

Scope: In our research we have focussed ourselves in studying how advocacy programs can take consumers and visitors across different levels of Ladder of Engagement. The Ladder of Engagement involves identifying various levels at which the consumers ( or site visitors/partners/employees ) can be engaged. It begins with content consumption, then moves on to content curation ( rating, voting, commenting ) , content creation, collaboration and then subsequently to trial, purchase and finally to evangelizing and recommendation( hereby mentioned as advocacy) to others.
Our research on some of the most popular Advocacy programs shows that advocacy can be used to transition consumers across the following levels:
1) Advocacy to content consumption and curation
2) Advocacy leading to content consumption, curation and even creation
3) Advocacy leading to product trial and purchase
4) Advocacy leading to content collaboration

Advocacy to content consumption and curation:

One of the most effective strategies of modelling an Advocacy program on social web is to find a bunch of evangelists who appreciate your brand/product and are ready to write good about them. These evangelists can be popular bloggers or influencers having a lot of connections on social web. A good example of such a program is Microsoft MVP ( most valued professional ) program where the company recognizes talented influencers in the field who write about the businesses Microsoft is related to. Another case where influencial bloggers were leveraged for brand advocacy was in the marketing campaign of Chrystler’s Dodge Grand Caravan where the company loaned the car to influential mom bloggers for a week for trial run, which triggerred a lot of conversation in the blogospere. Similarly Redwood Creak ( An Ameircan wine making company ) has created a community platform around passion for outdoor adventures and recognizes wine evangelists known as ‘The Trailblazers’ as their official brand ambassadors who talk about wines and adventures on the company blogs and forums. Sometime influencers need not be popular and advocacy can be leveraged from consumers who have a strong social network. Something similar was done by MTV in its ‘Elite Influencer Network Contest‘ where members were asked to promote their obsession for the MTV culture on their blogs, websites, social networks like Facebook, YouTube and through this MTV tried to find out the most influential individuals on social web. These contest winners will now participate in further upcoming events.

Advocacy leading to content consumption, curation and even creation

Advocacy programs can even be modelled to take consumers upto creation level on the ladder of engagement, which can be used to find your next set of evangelists. A good example of such a tactic is HP 31 days of Dragon contest which is a user generated contest lanched by the company for the promotion of its HP HDX dragon notebook. The company found 31 popular blogger evangelists/ websites who created their own User Generated Contests on their personal webpages. Thus the task of planning, designing and promoting the contest was taken up by the participating evangelist websites and involved taking the consumers across various engagement levels. Another example is walmart’s eleven moms community which has the popular mom bloggers blogging about money saving ways ( which is core to the brand value itself ) and the consumers interacting with them and sharing their own money saving tips etc.

Advocacy leading to product trial and purchase

Many of the cases we researched showed brands leveraging consumer and evangelist advocacy for product trial and purchase. The Indian gaming website zapak.com uses  a facebook application to give the users an option to recommend the game they are playing to their freinds on facebook and also embed it in your personal webpage. Similarly the cleaning products company ‘Method’ launched a campaign called ‘people against dirty‘ which aimed at finding product appreciators who were ready to share their experience of the brand with others.

Advocacy leading to content collaboration

Now the reason I took up this point last is because I am still not sure about this, but product help communities like that of Intuit can qualify as advocacy programs. This is because if somebody is ready to help you out with a solution on a product help community then that means a) he has already tried the product b) He finds the product interesting enough to make him participate on the community c) if in the future any other problem crops up then there would surely be more people like him to help you out with that product. If such a thing qualifies as advocacy then product help programs can be instrumental in collaborating efforts around a particular problem.

Leadership in the time of Social Media

Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Trends

(Cross posted from Gautam Ghosh on Organizations 2.0)

As organizations get more and more linked to external stakeholders, and their people become unofficial spokespeople on social networks like Twitter and Facebook and become marketers whether or not it is their role.

In such times – specially for organizations that are living in this hyper-linked worlds – what are the leadership behaviors that should be adopted.

Not surprisingly, these behaviors are not new. As I mentioned earlier, the tools of web 2.0 promise real organization development, and therefore, the behaviors of leaders must reflect the tenets of OD and these times.

They are:

  1. Openness and Transparency – In the web 2.0 world there is little there is hidden, even vague terms of services cannot be changed without people noticing. A leader always has to remember and more importantly live this with the utmost sincerity – both within and externally
  2. Conversation – It is not just about being transparent, leaders should also engage with employees and external stakeholders about what issues they face and if nothing else – they should acknowledge it, and if needed communicate what they are willing to do about it. Of course, sometimes legal and stockmarket requirements can require executives not to make forward looking statements. In earlier non-internet times I reckon this was known simply within the organization as MBWA
  3. Content – Leaders must realise that their organizational brand and product brands are what users interpret – and that they cannot control it. Indeed, they must actively work to give it away – understanding that there is nothing so powerful as an idea owned by the users. How can you as a leader encourage content and conversation creation, both within and externally to the organization.
  4. Collaboration – Leaders of hyperlinked organizations know that people and groups cannot do things independently anymore- they have to collaborate with partners, other employees, other stakeholders to create lasting impact. Their own behavior sets the tone for all their employees, so they must be and be seen to be collaborative.
  5. Communities – Leaders understand that people -internally and outside the organization – are part of shared interest groups – around various ’social objects’. For employees that could be “how we use this cool tool to solve problems” to “employees who like football” – and externally it could be “people interested in the benefit our product gives” – and if you are a certain kind of organization, you could have communities around your product too. As a leader you have to understand the deep universal desire of people to connect around a certain shared passion. Identify what ties in to your objectives, and then understand how to facilitate it – give it sustenance. What are the tribes who you will align with?
  6. Collective Intelligence – Leaders know that when communities have conversations and collaborate, new and better ideas get generated. They might be better than the ideas the firm comes up on its own, and there is no shame in admitting it and embracing it. This is the pinnacle of giving up control and becoming part of the community yourself.

The question is – are you as a leader ready to make the transition?

Using social technologies to build Organizational Culture

Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Case Studies, How To Guides

BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE

The Story Until Now
(scenario 3 from here)

Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.

Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.

Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.

When Gautam met Sumit he said “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years – if we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights… my question is how can I help help them to tap their full potential and connect with each other?”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Gautam tells Sumit “You have the right approach, however before jumping into an initiative like this you have to think through certain aspects”

“What are those?” Sumit asked, intrigued.

“The first thing is you have to understand such an initiative will mean disrupting existing power structures – are you sure you want to do that? Will the rest of the management team support this initiative?”

Sumit pondered on Gautam’s question “Maybe not, but I am prepared to push my way through – as this is what will enable us to break to the next level”

“You can’t push an initiative like this Sumit, it has to be owned by all the leadership.. however what you can influence is by leading the way – and influencing others to follow your lead. Let’s assume over all your objective is to increase the engagement of people with the organization and with each other, would that be right?” asked Gautam

“Yes true” agreed Sumit

“You need to build a community that will congregate around areas of work, levels and other areas of interest”

“You mean like a Facebook for the whole group?” Sumit asked.

“Well, it would look like that, and have rich features to encourage people to connect with each other – however there would be features that would encourage a mix of social and business interaction. What would really help this would be the softer aspects of the initiative”

“Such as…?”

“It would encourage people to connect with others, discover people across organizational silos, understand them beyond their roles as individuals – and trigger overall encouragement. It has been proven that having friends is a sign that people will be more engaged at work.”

“Really…?”

“Of course, people like to work in a place that enables them to bring their whole selves at work”

“How do we know that people won’t just goof off? Keep chatting?”

“You’ve got to give them guidelines, Sumit. We can help you in evolving these guidelines. Many large organizations have such guidelines. However, you have to remember that the ‘how we use it’ will become a process when people realise that they have to work with people, not to do things to them. People like you and your senior team will be instrumental in creating that mindset – which is why we’ll have to collaborate with them extensively to make this a success.”

Social Media in India: International Software and services company review

Posted on 20. Nov, 2009 by Achintya in Reviews

Software and Services companies have been believed to be making good use of social media for their marketing and promotion. Our research on the Fortune 50 international companies in India not just confirms this but also shows that these companies have made special efforts for Indian customers. Hence in this blog we will review the social media efforts of these Fortune 50 international companies in India.

The Fortune 2009 lists IBM (#28) and Microsoft (#49) among the top 50 in the software and services sector. Interestingly both the companies have customized social platforms for the Indian consumers. While Microsoft targets the Indian social web with Mera Windows, IBM has an India Page for IBM Smartmarket to target the Indian SMBs (small and medium businesses)

IBM Smartmarket

IBM smartmarket is basically a social commerce platform targeted to SMBs. This platform is specifically designed as a one stop shop where SMBs can find vendors for their required software products, thereby reducing their research and purchasing costs. IBM smartmarket has an India website customised for Indian vendors and clients. Here members can research available software in their industry area and read product information, reviews, ratings etc. Members can also get their queries answered by other members regarding the specific product, compare different software, rate software products and write their own review. Smartmarket also gives access to online product trial and purchase. Moreover there are expert blogs, community forums and a separate blog for it’’s India webpage called India Insights to learn and discuss. That said however there are certain questions which still are to be figured out, like how do these vendors get on the social commerce platform? How does IBM make money from Smartmarket ( if it does) ?? How does one software gets listed above others in a search? (it does not appear to be sorted in terms of ratings)\n\nOverall IBM smartmarket is actually a smart move to engage SMBs on IBM platform. However a social commerce platform can be more than this. For example Xbox XNA community allows third party developers to develop applications which can then be curated and purchased by the community. Wishpot allows users to create their wishlists of the products they want to purchase in future and others can collaborate to suggest the best offers, places, products and prices etc.

Mera Windows

Mera Windows is Microsoft India’s effort in the social web. Presently this community is very actively being used for the promotion of Windows 7 in India. The community platform holds many interesting features like a blogroll of expert blogs and news feed which aggregates the latest updates on the homepage. There are also discussion forums with discussion ranging from ”12 common Windows 7 problems solved” to ”how healthy is your PC battery”.  The community recently hosted the launch party of Windows 7 where all community members were given free invites and a chance to get the RC version of Windows 7 uploaded on their notebooks, which is a good example to leveraging an existing social community platform for promoting an offline launch cum trial event.

We can see Microsoft India is on the right path and has made some right decisions in its social business strategies. However a community of Microsoft Windows in a market as important as India deserves more engagement from the consumers. Microsoft has already set many benchmark examples in social media like Microsoft Dynamics Community for an SMB network and Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) award for an advocacy program and hence in the near future we would like to see similar efforts from them for the Indian social web.

Three Scenarios: How Can Indian Firms Leverage Social Technologies Within the Workplace?

Posted on 14. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

Gaurav and Gautam collaboratively wrote this blog post on a wiki. This is the first in the series of blog posts where we will explore how social technologies, when used effectively within the organization, can create significant business value for Indian firms.

The Five Underlying Dynamics of Social Technologies

A TYPICAL CONVERSATION

Ever since Gautam joined 2020 Social three weeks back, we have had several interesting conversations with Indian firms of all shapes and sizes on how to use social technologies within the workplace.

The typical conversation starts when someone fills the “Ask Us How” form on our website: “I am excited by the possibilities of using social technologies within our company and want to explore what these technologies can really help us with.”

During initial discussions with Gautam, it becomes clear that the client faces a business problem, but she is not able to make the connection between how “the business being social” will help her solve her problem.

In the first post in this series, we have outlined three typical business problems several Indian firms are struggling with. In the next three posts, written over the next week, we will share scenarios for how social technologies can be a part of the solution.

SCENARIO 1: PRODUCT INNOVATION

Bedi Electronics has been amongst the top ten firms in the Indian consumer electronics industry over the last twenty years. Its 1200 employees are spread across six plants and twenty sales offices. Over the last two years, it has fallen behind its competitors in terms of product innovation.

Rahul Bedi, the 28 year old scion of the family, has recently taken over as the Chief Marketing Officer of the business. Rahul knows that his 250 frontline sales officers have the pulse of the market. However, Rahul gets to meet them infrequently, in annual sales conferences and monthly market visits. They share interesting product ideas with them during one-to-one interactions, but he doesn’t know how to validate them with other sales officers and build on them.

“I wish I knew how to learn about consumer preferences from my frontline sales officers,” Rahul said to Gaurav, “help them build upon each others’ ideas. If we can revitalize our product innovation process, Bedi Electronics will regain its strength in the market.”

SCENARIO 2: TEAM EFFECTIVENESS

Alacrity Legal Technologies is a new Legal Process Outsourcing firm which focuses on a complex method of helping law firms in the US get their litigation issues outsourced to India. On each of these teams it needs the various groups of people to work together so that case materials and lawyer’s notes for clients to work on before the start of the day. Hence teams of law researchers, Indian lawyers and US client managers need to work together to get fast turnaround times.

Sundar Raman, the 43 year old CEO of the firm, was concerned at the high levels of customer complaints – the key theme being that ALT teams always seemed to be missing their deadlines. Sundar decided to dig deeper and found that the reason why this was happening was that the nature of serial processing that the work required meant that a delay in emailing (due to whatever reason) would impact the final output by a large extent.

Sundar instinctively knew that a way for people to work on documents together without necessarily emailing versions back and forth would speed up the deliverables.

“But I don’t know what that toolkit looks like,” Sundar told Gautam, “and I don’t know if it’s even possible to change the work habits of seasoned paralegals and lawyers.”

SCENARIO 3: BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE

Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.

Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.

Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.

When Gautam met Sumit and Shalini, Sumit explained his dilemma: “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years. If we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights.”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Now that the stage is set in all the three scenarios, you must be wondering: what happens next? Find out in our next three posts.

Gautam Ghosh Has Joined 2020 Social to Build Our Organizational Collaboration Practice

Posted on 22. Oct, 2009 by gaurav in Announcements

I have a big announcement to make: Gautam Ghosh has joined 2020 Social to build the enterprise side of our Social Business Strategy practice. Gautam will join Dave, Upasana and myself in the core 2020 Social consulting team.

2020 Social is presently working with clients to leverage social technologies to achieve five types of strategic business objectives — increase revenue, decrease cost, design better products and processes, enable stronger relationships and increase productivity.

Instead of focusing on specific tools and technologies, we use a structured methodology to tap into the power of the five underlying value systems embedded in social technologies — user generated content, conversations, collaboration, community and collective intelligence.

Finally, we architect effective solutions in the form of community platforms, social applications, social commerce marketplaces, social CRM programs and enterprise collaboration programs.

Gautam will use his organizational development experience to help our clients think about the organizational culture and governance aspects of using social technologies. Specifically, here are the three questions Gautam will be working on –

1. What are the new challenges face by the customer-facing functions in the organization (sales, marketing, product and customer support) when the boundaries between employees, partners and consumers blur? How do organizations respond to these challenges?

2. What are the new pressures that organizational structures are subjected to when employees freely communicate and collaborate with other employees, customers and partners across departmental, geographical and organizations boundaries? How should organizational structures evolve to handle these pressures?

3. How can organizations use social technologies within the enterprise to simplify communication flows, enable stronger relationships with employees, catalyze innovation and improve employee productivity?

Over the next four weeks, Gautam and I will be co-authoring a series of posts (using, what else, a wiki) to come up with clear and actionable answers to these questions.

Everyone at 2020 Social is delighted that Gautam has joined our team and excited at the possibilities that we will be exploring together. Welcome, Gautam!

Social Media in India: Methodology and Scope

Posted on 07. Oct, 2009 by Achintya in Reviews

With the advent of social technologies grabbing marketing spaces, many brands can be seen embracing social media for adding value to themselves. Dell, IBM and Starbucks are some of the best examples of companies having a majority of their marketing efforts directed towards social media. In India you can see Tata, Airtel, Reliance BIG, HT Media, Toyota and many more doing the same. Hence we at 20:20 social thought it would be interesting to see how different companies are performing in social media specifically in the Indian Ecosystem and document it in form of a report.

In this report we want to look at 2 sets of companies; International companies having a separate social media presence specifically for India and Indian Companies again having a social media presence in their parent country; and rank them on the basis of their presence and engagement. This is to ensure that Companies are compared on an equal platform since most of the international companies have been using social technologies for quite some time while many Indian Companies have recently realized their importance. Also as we want this set of companies to be internationally recognized, we have chosen Forbes top 50 International companies having Indian presence and top 50 Indian companies in Forbes 2000 list as our sample space.

Moreover we will limit our scope of research to either company websites building conversations around a social object like a lifestyle, passion or cause bigger than the company itself. ( eg: Tata tea for jaagore.com) or Community platforms like Sunsilk gang of girls or social applications like Tata Indica Xeta Shootouts.\n\nHaving said that we will particularly look into four things to rate Companies” social media engagement and presence :

1) Social Object: Since communities and conversations don”t happen in vacuum, they coalesce around a social object which can be a lifestyle, cause or passion. We will see whether the company’’s website/ community platform which is meant to engage users or utilize their social behaviour is built around any social object ( See our position paper)

2) Infrastructure for engagement: Brands/ companies can engage their consumers on various levels of engagement like content consumption, curation, creating, collaboration, trial, purchase and recommendation. We will see whether the company’’s social platform has infrastructure to engage consumers on these levels of engagement.

3) Interactions on the social platforms: Once seen that the company has infrastructure to engage consumers, the next logical step would be to see that till what levels on the ladder of engagement ( consume, curate, create content etc.) do the consumers actually interact.  We will be rate companies on their company to user and user to user conversations in social media.

4) Multiple presence: Many companies like Tata, Reliance, Airtel etc have multiple social media platforms and we think that some credit must be given to this.

Also as there is a scope that many outliers who do not appear on the Forbes list might be doing something exceptional worth deserving a mention and for this report we will also look for some such benchmark examples.

However we would like to keep the scope and parameters open to readers for discussions. Any comments, suggestions are most welcome

Social Media in India: Airtel Review

Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by Achintya in Reviews

This is the second post in a series where we will review performance of companies (and brands) using Social media to connect with Indian customers. In the last post we had reviewed the Indian conglomerate Tata. For this post we will review the Indian telecom major Airtel. Airtel is currently the biggest telecom operator in India in terms of annual revenue and operates in businesses like mobiles networks, home phones, broadband, internet and conferencing services etc.

The most prominent presence of Airtel in social media can be seen through their community platform built around the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon (ADHM), which is to be held on 1st of November this year. The first interesting thing you will notice on the website is the runner’’s wall, where all ADHM community members can share their running stories. The platform also encourages discussions on the joy of running and you will see hundreds of registered ADHM community users discussing their running sagas on the discussion forums.With topics ranging from ”whom would you like to run with?” to ”how to improve your running stamina” the ADMH discussions not only keep the participants engaged but also encourage those who are still not sure of their participation. Interestingly, ADHM community also gets running and health experts to participate in the discussions, who impart valuable health and fitness related information to the community members.

Unfortunately, in the past it has been seen that such community platforms promoting a mega offline event die out post event completion. However we see ADHM community as a social platform designed around the passion for running and has the potential of retaining itself by building more user engaging models and applications.

Other than the ADHM, Airtel is also using social media to promote its multi-million dollar deal with Manchester United football club which would give access to ManU’’s football content over their mobile phones. The Airtel-ManU web platform takes you to a virtual Old Trafford stadium where you can book seats beside your friends and get virtual props. Interestingly, there is a well designed reward and recognition system which ranks you on your engagement on the platform. There are points associated with downloading ringtones, wallpapers and inviting/recommending friends and the highest grosser gets free tickets to Old Trafford. We feel that this platform is built around a very strong social object (lifestyle, passion, cause) which is the passion for Soccer and can be used to interact with users on multiple levels of engagement. Royal Challenge whisky is doing something similar for cricket in social media and we would await Airtel’’s similar feat for Indian soccer fans.

Finally, we talk about Airtel broadband services interactive social platform built around the ”fast life” lifestyle where impatience is considered the new way of living for the youth. It features some youth icons namely ”The Impatient Ones” with their blogs, favourite videos and tweet updates. The channel also holds contest for selecting the next ”impatient one”. Hence we see a platform where users are getting to interact with their icons and also getting a chance to become like them. In the near future we see this community using many other social applications to build more conversations around ”an impatient way of life” to engage their target audience.

Summarizing, it can be said that the Indian telecom major Airtel is making a significant online social media presence. It has chosen some very strong social objects (lifestyle, passion, cause) in all of its platforms like soccer, running & adventure, fast life etc. Hence they have got very good foundations to build  rewarding communities along their brand. It is just a matter of time that we see them reaching highers levels of engagement for the users

Social Media in India: Tata review

Posted on 19. Sep, 2009 by Achintya in Reviews

This is the first post in a series where we will review performance of companies (and brands) using Social media to connect with Indian customers.Here we will review a large Indian conglomerate – The Tata group. This 140 year old group of companies is currently headed by Ratan Tata and operates in a large number of businesses like software services, energy, materials to products like cars, watches, beverages etc. The group was lately in the news for acquisition of Cores, Jaguar & Land Rover and for launching the world’s most economic car – Tata Nano.  We researched the umbrella of Tata companies and found Tata Motors (especially Tata Nano), TCS, Tata Docomo, Tata Tea and Fast Track watches worth discussion in this review.

We begin with Jaagore.com ( meaning ”be awakened” in Hindi ) , the Tata tea and Janaagraha (a non profit NGO) initiative for awakening Indian youth. Jaagore.com ‘one billion votes’ is an online voter registration campaign with the mission of generating one billion votes in India. Launched around the time of 2009 general assembly polls in India, it created a lot of media hype. This social platform gave all the necessary information to the user on how to become a registered Indian voter along with registration status. Moreover the ‘awakened’ were encouraged to recommend the initiative to their friends and invite them to join the movement. The Jaagore volunteers took the initiative offline and went to colleges to talk about the campaign and get people registered on Jaagore.com. No doubt in the first year itself it had more than 600,000 registrations. Post the Jaagore success during the elections; Tata tea and Janaagraha have relaunched the Jaagore campaign to eradicate corruption in India. They are currently using the same web platform to publicize their TV advertisement and get members to pledge against corruption. Awakening the Indian citizen and making them aware are clearly an excellent choice of a social object for Tata tea. Also the current Jaagore platform shows excellent member engagement around content consumption, collaboration and recommendation. In the near future, we would like to see engagement building around other steps of the ladder of engagement like content curation, creation, trial, purchase etc.

A substantial social media presence can be seen for Fastrack, the Titan (Tata group Watch Company) brand targeting Indian youth. Impressively, although the company has a 140 year old brand heritage, yet it has a fresh and youthful appearance on social media for Fastrack. What we like most about their facebook and twitter outposts is that they are more than just official pages and we see them brimming with activity. There are genuine interactions on the platform and the brand participating in them, which is something you rarely see. For example, on Fastrack’s facebook page you see more than 90 brand to user and user to user interactions in the last 15 days, which is commendable given that most companies just post basic content without initiating any interactions. With 800 tweets and 7,500 facebook fans, Fastrack is making great use of social media. The Fastrack official website fastrack.in is a cool community platform which entertains users through comic strips, wall discussions, avatars and chill zone. What we love most is that it is concerned whether your internet connection is ‘Go-Kart’ or ‘Bullock-Kart’ ( broadband or dial-up in fastrack.in lingo). In the future, we would like to see more social applications that aid youth interactions to build a vibrant fastrack community.

Another Tata brand using social media for its marketing applications is Tata Docomo. The Indian conglomerate and the Japanese telecom major JV is making some news in the social web. Their web presence is limited to Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Bigadda and Youtube with no single dedicated community. However, the interaction levels are high and users feel a ‘personal’ touch in communications.

Other Tata entities like Tata Nano, TCS (Tata Consultancy Services: Tata’s software services arm) and Tata Motors also have a huge fan base on Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. Similarly Tata Indicom interacts with consumers through its coporate blog.  We expect that these Tata companies will graduate from outpost pages and corporate blogs to cohesive communities built around strong social objects.

Summarizing, here is a conglomerate that has let each of its brands nurture its own social media identity. Most of their social media outposts are brimming with two way interactions. Not only have they touched civic social causes with jaagore.com but they have also developed youth centric engagement platforms like fastrack.in. In the future, Tata Group can bring people together around larger than life social objects to form strong communities with a shared purpose not only because that would mean more economic rewards for Tata but also because big corporations like them can do it with their resources and brand power.