Like there weren’t enough numbers for you to watch, here’s another one: How many Facebook fans does India’s most popular social media brand have?
Wait. What is India’s most popular social media brand?

If you don’t have an answer to these questions, you are not alone. Despite social media emerging as tomorrow’s most important marketplace, few IT leaders have made it a priority. Yet, according to a brand engagement study on social media, by Altimeter and Wet Paint, companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers significantly in terms of revenue. Companies with the greatest breadth and depth of social media engagement saw revenues grow by 18 percent over the last 12 months, as opposed to those that were least engaged: Their revenues sank an average of 6 percent over the same period.
Fortunately, there are some CIOs who have embraced social media and are providing their businesses with deeper customer engagement and new revenue channels. Here’s what they have learnt along the way.

The Zoozoo Effect
The answer to the second question is Vodafone.
According to Brands Going Social, India’s first and only website that monitors and ranks the performance of Indian brands on Facebook and Twitter, Vodafone has the highest number of fans across any Indian enterprise on Facebook. Zoozoo, the official fan page of the company, has a staggering 921,065 fans (at press time. It grew by over 30,000 in the last 10 days of writing).
“Social media is not just about posting a feed. On the Web, people are commenting about my brand all over the place. Customer service has now extended from dialing 111 on a phone to engaging with us over online platforms,” says Manoj Nigam, VP-IT, Vodafone. “It is a paradigm shift. If you make a customer unhappy, he could influence five people in the real world. But on the Internet he could influence 10,000. That’s why the need to address this media is vital.”
Nigam is one among a small group who has found a way to integrate intelligence gathered from social media into his backend systems and help his business segment and target its audiences better. But he didn’t always play a pivotal role. Like many Indian businesses, when Vodafone started with social media, it engaged third-party digital marketers to fulfill its needs. But as data volumes exploded, IT was asked to step in and integrate Vodafone’s social media conversations into the company’s internal systems.
Today, Nigam’s work has improved Vodafone’s customer communication and experience. The carrier is able to handle complaints, which would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Nigam and his team are currently devising social media tools that can, for instance, capture and use psychographic data. They’re also in the process of creating knowledge-driven chat-bot, designed to simulate human conversation. For Nigam, these are just the initial steps in a long-term commitment to technology-enabled business solutions. “The focus of customer segmentation will shift from person to persona and online channels will play a big role in that.”
Nigam’s example illustrates how CIOs can drive their businesses into tomorrow’s Wall Street. (For more, read The Great Leadership Opportunity Page 32) But, first, they’re going to have to figure how to best leverage social media for
their companies.
Connecting to the money. Creating a sales channel: It’s the ultimate promise of social media. But very few have succeeded at it. Dell is one of them. Dell’s consumer division has been an early adopter of social media and has seen phenomenal returns. In June 2009, Dell’s outlet on Twitter made twice the sales its own portal Dell.com did. And as of December 2009, Dell’s global Twitter revenues touched $6.5 million (about Rs 30 crore).
“Not only have we been able to connect with over 3.5 million customers using social media, we have also successfully monetized our presence on Twitter,” says Manish Mehta, VP, Global Online, Dell Online.
Closer home, Bookmyshow.com has also found an innovative way to leverage the strength of social media to increase sales with the creation of Ticket Buddy, a movie-ticket booking application on Facebook.
Bookmyshow is the only Indian ticketing company that offers customers the facility to book their tickets two weeks prior to the release of a movie. When Viraj Patel, VP-IT, Bigtree Entertainment, the company that owns Bookmyshow, took this facility to Facebook, he tweaked it to allow customers to invite their friends, using an application called Ticket Buddy. The application could have worked on the website, but it really took off on Facebook. Why? Because it allows people to invite friends, which is easy to do on a social media site, and because it ensures that each person can pay separately for their tickets—a facility not available on Bookmyshow.com. Going Dutch was never this easy.
“The power of social media is phenomenal. We’ve been offering a pre-booking facility for two years. But it’s only since Ticket Buddy that the facility’s popularity has soared,” says Patel.

New medium, new business.

New medium, new business. Bookmyshow is not the only one changing its tactics to fit in better with the new world of social media. Sulekha.com is another example. In the pre-social media world, Sulekha.com operated as the yellow pages of the Internet. If a customer wanted to buy or sell something she posted an ad on the website.
But when Sulekha moved to Facebook, it developed an application called Local Genie, which is turning it’s business in a new direction. The app invites users with this message: “Hi folks! I can save you time and money. Whisper to me what you need done and whoosh I’ll get it for you!”
A bit silly, but it’s getting customers to key in what they are looking for. And in return for their contact information, Local Genie crawls through Sulekha’s database searching for people at the other end of the buy-sell continuum. It then alerts business owners so that they can follow up a solid lead.
Another business that’s found a way to leverage social media is group buying websites. These sites offer customers deep discounts—up to 90 percent—on services and products like a spa treatment or a meal at a restaurant. Key to the business model is attracting the right amount of people to sign up for a deal and create volume. Since these deals have an expiry date, it’s imperative that a group buying site reaches out to as many customers as possible.
Has group buying existed before? Sure it has. But the number of new Indian players in the space is a testament to how social media is fuelling this trend. In the last year alone, over seven Indian group buying sites have been launched.
“India has seen phenomenal success in group buying because we are essentially a deal-oriented society. While group buying has existed for sometime, it didn’t take off because there weren’t the Facebooks or Twitters of the world,” says Anisha Singh, founder and CEO of Mydala.com.
Following the Mydala example, Guneet Singh started DealsandYou.com in January 2010. “The number of friends that a typical Indian has is one of the highest in the world. On an average, Indians have 140 friends, second only to Brazil. Social media has been a key enabler for group buying.” Today, Singh gets 25 percent of his traffic from social media sites.
In the meanwhile, Mydala’s Singh is aligning her company more closely with the rules of social media: One of which is the importance of word-of-mouth or viral marketing. She is converting her customers into brand evangelists by introducing a system of referrals. Each existing customer is offered Rs 100 worth of services for free for every referral they bring in.
That approach is based on another golden social media rule: Be subtle. Rajesh Lalwani, founder and principal, Blogworks, which offers social media solutions, says, “People who exploit social media for a long-term engagement are gaining more traction, as opposed to people who are approaching this as a sales pitch.”
I like this. The third, and possibly the most popular, activity companies use social media for is to create better products and deeper engagements. Today, social media is being used increasingly to crowdsource ideas. User feedback could be used to fine-hone a beta version of a product (Starbucks’ feedback-cum-idea site has collected over 80,000 customer generated ideas, for example) or customize a product.
Meet Myntra.com, one of India’s first customized product delivery services. Myntra customizes everything from mugs and key chains to t-shirts in whichever way its consumers want. “People have an increased need to express their individuality. Social media has allowed people to create an online persona; they can express themselves through their feeds, the communities they join, their blogs, etcetera,” says Mukesh Bansal, CEO and co-founder, Myntra.com.
Businesses that are willing to go further to meet their customers and customize their products are tuned into the social media world. Although Myntra started three years ago, it has grown five times in the last year. Contributing to this success are the 2 million referrals from Facebook, making it Myntra’s single largest source of traffic.
Similarly, Dell’s Ideastorm.com is turning its consumers into producers by allowing them to participate in product development. Customers can contribute an idea and a global community ranks it. To date, the Dell community has contributed 14, 558 ideas, from which over 420 ideas have been implemented—including a very successful initiative of selling laptops pre-loaded with Ubuntu.

Popularity Syndrome

Popularity Syndrome
The flipside to customer feedback is that it can lead to negative publicity, if an enterprise doesn’t take customer complaints seriously. “Social media presents a huge opportunity but there is also a responsibility that comes with it. You cannot respond to a complaint made on Friday on Monday because you have the weekend off,” says Simeran Bhasin, marketing head, Fastrack and New Brands at Titan Industries.
This can be a huge dilemma especially for companies not aligned enough to react quickly. “Once we open up for conversation, we have to respond to every query and comment—be it good or bad,” says Ramandeep Singh Virdi, director IT, Interglobe Aviation, more popularly known for IndiGo Airlines. “Before we get ready to enter this new realm of communication, I think we need to develop the skills to deal with constructive criticism.”
This is not the only challenge for CIOs who have taken the lead into social media. Here are three others:
Sifting through the static. According to Daksh Sharma, director and co-founder of Iffort, a web-strategy and digital marketing consulting firm, “There are conversations happening about your brand whether you like it or not. You can use social media channels to churn out data, discover trends and align these with your business strategy. But first you need to clear out the noise.”
Vodafone, driven by a CIO who is a voracious supporter of social networking, has found a way to separate the noise from the intelligence. Nigam engaged an IT partner to develop a workflow-based tool that listens, analyses, strategizes, performs CRM and then engages with customers.
Placing listening boards, alerts, and reader feeds at various sites was the first step to understand the complexity involved for data analysis and BI, he says. His team prepared a meta-data dictionary to meaningfully filter the junk from the information. This data is then segregated into various buckets for different departments. And after an initial cleansing, some of the data is matched to an existing database to fill in gaps.
Nigam says that when they chance upon a new customer (without enough details to be used in the database), they engage her by sending a link in which she can input her details so that she can be contacted and her issues are resolved. That’s an approach that Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero Honda, would approve of. “Traditional CRM is about capturing contact and demographic information. But, social media gives you an insight into a user’s personality, the communities he follows, his likes and interests. This will help us create a much richer profile of our customers,” says Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero Honda.
The advent of new listening tools. As social media mushrooms, it will be unviable to track conversations. So, as more businesses build out their strategies, listening platforms—technology and analytical solutions that mine and analyze social media to deliver insight—are becoming essential tools for the enterprise.
However, Forrester’s Q3 2010 Listening Platforms report finds that the listening platform market remains in relative infancy. “Vendors come in all shapes and sizes, rolling out new features and tools that enable customers to turn social media data into actionable insight. But all the players face one significant challenge: They sit trapped in a constant stage of reactive development, due to the ever-moving target of social media, pervasive spammers, and buyers with constantly growing demands for their varied use cases. As a result, vendors bring a variety of products and firms remain confused over tools to power their social intelligence strategies,” states the report.
Another problem, which CIOs are increasingly facing, is verifying the authenticity of information. The question that’s before them is: When integrating customer information collected through social media, am I contaminating the authenticity of my database?
For T.S. Purushottaman, CIO, Reliance Big Entertainment, the challenge is slightly different. CRM data out there, he says, is scanty at best. “There is not much you can capture through social media. In most cases, you may, at best, get their e-mail ids. Very few are willing to share other information on their profile.”
Lalwani from Blogworks offers a piece of advice. “Offer your customers interesting pieces of information or content that they will want to download. If it’s interesting, customers will part with personal data or give you permission to contact them. Till the time there is gratification, lead generation is possible.”
Yesterday’s solutions. Today’s enterprises have spent millions setting up touch points for their customers. This sunk cost in terms of money, belief, and expertise, is holding them back from embracing social media.
“The interaction channels that customers are using are rapidly changing. Unfortunately, having made significant investments in traditional channels such as the call center, most companies are disconnected. Today, customers are increasingly turning to online communities such as Facebook and Twitter to get issues resolved,” says Jeremy Cooper, VP marketing, Asia Pacific, Salesforce.com.
If businesses are going to get serious about social media, that mindset has to change. And companies in India need to catch on quickly: India is already the seventh-largest social media market worldwide. Indian enterprises are upping the ante by increasing their social media initiatives. Almost every brand in the market has at least one social media identity.
Social media marketing is not the new kid on the block; it’s a dragon on your porch, waiting for you to tame it. Your enterprise could be a fan or it could be a star. That decision might very well rest in your hands.