CIOIN

According to an August 2010 report from digital marketing intelligence researcher comScore, over 33 million Indian Internet users visited social networking sites in July 2010, representing 84 percent of India’s total Internet audience. With these numbers, India now ranks as the seventh-largest market worldwide for social networking.

More importantly, the total Indian social networking audience grew 43 percent in the past year—more than tripling the growth rate of India’s Internet audience.
Many sceptics dismiss these figures with a wave of their hand and the argument that these numbers only represent 3.3 percent of India’s total population. But here’s another perspective: those 33 million probably constitute about half of the country’s tax payers (Only 4 percent of the Indian population pays tax.) So if your customers belong to the great Indian middle class, you can be pretty sure that a bulk of them are on one or more social networking sites.
These channels of communication allow marketers to connect with consumers like never before. But, it’s vital to remember that social media operates differently from WORLDmarketing will turn to CIOs to look for more efficient solutions to manage this rich source of customer information.
CIOs who want to be ahead of the curve need to grasp the dynamics of the medium. And this starts with developing a thorough knowledge of what it means to be a marketer in the world of social media.
Simeran Bhasin, marketing head Fastrack and New Brands at Titan Industries, has deep experience in this field. Fastrack is arguably the most popular Indian brand on social networks today. When the brand started its Facebook page in April 2009 it had about 300 fans. Less than a year later, that figure touched one lakh. And today Fastrack has over 5 lakh fans on Facebook and has been voted as the third most popular brand by Brands Going Social, India’s first and only resource that monitors and ranks the performance of Indian brands on Facebook.

Q CIO: Fastrack is one of India’s earliest adopters of social media marketing. How did you get started?
Simeran Bhasin: We started looking at social media seriously four years ago when we noticed that our consumers had created communities on Orkut, which was big then. We tried to create our own communities but realised we’d be competing with our own consumers. So, we wrote to the moderators of the communities and told them we could help if they needed any information directly from the brand. All we did was observe.
A couple of years later, we got the opportunity to lead the way with Facebook. Today, whatever we are doing with the brand is reflected on our social networking channels. And soon, we are going to start exclusive social media campaigns, that’s how big the market is for us today.
Q With the rise of social media, what’s the one thing that’s changed for marketing?
Social media marketing is a lot more dynamic than traditional marketing. Today, marketers have the added responsibility of being a lot more responsive. This is not an age where you can put an advertisement on television or a newspaper and wait for a response. Club this with the fact that social media is the only platform where you have a real opportunity for two-way engagement. The moment you have real-time feedback, you have no option but to respond in real time. If you don’t respond to a consumer complaint you’re going to end up agitating the customer even more. This will eventually lead to negative PR because the customer’s going to go out and blog about it.
Social media presents a huge opportunity to engage and form close relationships with customers. But there’s also a responsibility that comes with it: dealing dynamically with the noise that social media initiatives create. You cannot respond to a complaint made on Friday on Monday because you had the weekend off. Two days is a very long time on the Internet.

Dealing with Negetive Feedback

Q How do you deal with negative feedback?
It puts a mirror in front of us. We take it positively and take a hard look at ourselves and look for learnings. If it is a consumer complaint we respond immediately. We try and help consumers as much as possible, whether it’s about locating a product or a service centre. Very often, depending on feedback we just thank them and let them know that we are listening.
Q Give us one do and one don’t while engaging with customers on social media platforms.
We try not to behave like Fastrack ‘the brand’. Rather we try to behave like Fastrack ‘the personality’. We are careful not to indulge in hardcore sales pitches online. The tone and the manner in which we interact online is more at a peer-to-peer,sharing level. For the most part, we refrain from advertising our products. We’ve organized contests in the past, but it is never a real push. Tonality is very important.
Also, marketers must remember that what works for one campaign doesn’t necessarily work for another. Consumers are easily bored so it’s important to keep experimenting.
Q What are the benchmarks to measure the success of a social media campaign?
Buzz value is the best metric to measure the success of any digital media campaign. You can measure this through the number of people who have participated, commented, liked, tagged friends and shared on their walls.
However, at Fastrack, we focus not on the quantity but on the quality of engagement. A mix of positive and negative feedback reflects a healthy engagement. And if people are just clicking a button and liking a page but not really commenting then you know that the level of engagement is low. When a user takes out the time to write something you know that there is a greater level of engagement. If he goes and clicks a picture of himself wearing a Fastrack watch and posts it, that’s an even better.

Q What’s a common trap marketers fall into when interpreting social media conversations?
Conversations, that is direct noise you’re listening to. If you want to capture what people are saying verbatim, make sure you’re listening to a focus group or else that noise could lead you to a wrong decision. You need to carefully examine finer things: the tone and the demographic profile of the people talking; it is these things that actually make a difference.
Q There’s a notion among some CIOs that social media marketing is only for youth brands...
While youth brands have seen the most amount of success with social media, it is important for every business to start embracing it. The fact is, when today’s 18 year-old grows into tomorrow’s 38 year-old, he will be a lot savvier than today’s 38 year-old. And he will also change as a person and will need to be talked to differently. Each brand has to identify their target group and speak to them like they speak to each other.
Q What’s the role of IT in social media here?
I remember when we had this contest on Facebook in which we uploaded videos and asked viewers to reply. We got such a huge response that our server shut down. It is going to get much noisier in the near future. And from an IT infrastructure point of view, the basic fundamentals of a high-speed connection, high bandwidth and not shying away from providing handhelds, all go without saying.
I also think CIOs need to embrace the openness of social media. This must start with allowing social media access to relevant departments. They should not view it as something that employees waste their time on