For some reason, December gets your mind working in this manner. Thinking about what went by, thinking about what’s coming up. Though this is something you can potentially do any time of the year, there are these December triggers.

You’ll take this kind of a stock for yourself, and then perhaps larger issues, like the world at large!!

So I got afflicted too. And rather than look backward (more of an analysis and research task), I choose to look ahead. Crystal ball gazing on where the digital space in India is going, in 2012.

The good part about this effort is that you can only prove me wrong, after 12 months, by which time, if I have gone horribly wrong, you’ll not remember, and if I have struck gold with my predictions, I will ensure that you don’t forget that ‘I told you so’! So it is a win-win for me, and hence, here goes.. my 10 predictions for the digital space in India, in 2012:

1. E-commerce or more specifically, online retail of goods, will continue to show fabulous growth: the hockey stick curve has started, perhaps 12 months back. This will continue on a sharp, upward trajectory, right through 2012. The growth is on account of various factors:

• Internet user base growth
• Better bandwidths
• Mobile penetration
• More focused online stores doing awesome job of merchandising, logistics, etc.
• COD and other easy payment options

But besides all of these, I believe that there is one very significant factor here. I believe that a new consumer generation has come into the marketplace at this time, and they are shopping online. And they are digital natives. And not digital migrants. Like the folks who shopped before.

Those who are 20-21 now, on their first jobs, earning their first salaries, and having disposable incomes, these guys never wrote letters, only emailed. They used computers at schools and shared homework with their friends on email. For them, texting and tweeting are like air and water. They were just there. They did not migrate into these from some other planet of letters or faxes! So for this new consumer generation, shopping online’s also as natural a step.

It is my belief that the coming of this new generation has been the biggest contributor in this significant upward swing in online retail. And that being the case, this will only continue to grow, in 2012.

Because Flipkart and Infibeam and few others, are investing so well into logistics and other fundamentals, they will continue to establish themselves as leaders here. But the space is very very young still. These are no permanent leadership positions. You could see challenges, especially in specific categories, emerge in 2012. Perhaps a different brand for lifestyle products, another for household items, something else for motherhood, and a different one for kids maybe.. watch the space. It is about to change!

Amazon should be entering India for sure, in 2012. And even while they are building their own team, and deny rumors of acquisition plans, they WILL acquire. But it may not be Flipkart. Flipkart on the other hand, will use the large sums of money it has raised to make 1-2 niche acquisitions of its own. And most certainly, amongst the rest of the pack, some consolidation will happen. Perhaps driven by the common VC investor!

India’s retail majors will NOT acquire yet. They will continue to be in huge debt burden, and FDI will only reduce their debt, but the economy will not allow them to venture into online retail via acquisition routes, especially at a time, when VCs have driven up the valuation of online retail, and they will not sell cheap. At least not so soon!

2. The Group Buying / Daily Deals space will crack: Yes, while e-commerce / online retail will be hot, some of the ventures which have pretended to be e-retail, but were actually deals’ sites only, will have challenges to face. I have been a verbal critic of the group buying model. I have been a believer that group buying is good for certain categories only, and for certain times (like for liquidating perishable / excess inventory), but the direction that the industry took, and the way everything was being sold at deep discounts, was a dangerous trend. And not sustainable, in any case. And the valuations that these sites have commanded have been a function of numbers, that are unsustainable too. So we will see the model crack. We will see some Deals Snap, and some Groups On fire.

3. Media Buy Spends for digital will increase: Well, the marketers have been talking the talk for a while now. Check out one marketing conference after another, and all they want to talk about is, how digital is becoming big and exciting. And yet, on the ground, the talk has not been walked. Enough. And we still see fat cheques written out to television, and loose change dropping the digital way. Multiple things are happening that will make for big shifts here.

First of all, a lot of marketing is getting integrated now. So while the bulk money may be spent on traditional media, because a contest or some call to action is integrated into digital, there is digital spend too (perhaps an application on Facebook, say). Then again, due to the slow economy, larger mainline budgets may be hard to come by. And yet, the brand has to reach the consumer, and at a lower outlay, digital may be the way for a brand to do so. And the marketer can finally walk his talk then, no matter if it was forced to him, due to his budget constraints.

One way or the other, digital agencies will see increased billings as a consequence.

4. Marketing will get more integrated: We are already seeing a lot of this. Like a TVC having a call to action that goes to a Facebook link. Or when bloggers are invited to brand events, along with press, and there is amplification of the communication sought to happen on social media spaces too. Some of these are already here. 2012 will see a lot more of these happening, and in fact, integrated marketing will become commonplace.

So if there is an iconic TVC campaign, and you have run out your television media budgets, you could create a set of sequele, to continue to ride the popularity, on YouTube maybe. Or where more and more flash mobs are seen (God help us.. !) just to create content that a brand may expect (“hope”?) to viral thereafter. Live tweeting of your on-ground event, a story that begins on Twitter and takes wings on mainline media, etc. are all examples of media merging. So from media spaces like television, print, digital, social, mobile, to Above-the-line, Below-the-line, etc. all combining, are realities that we will see more in 2012.

As Nikesh Arora of Google said, there is no online or offline, now there in just the one line!!

5. Brand Pages on Facebook will have to fight clutter: A Facebook page for my business, then one for my housing society, and then one for my Walking Group, and one also for my pet dog, and oh, one for my bonsai plant, etc. etc. Just because these are so easy to make, there will be tons of brand pages on Facebook. Everyone and their uncle will have one. And names will be misleading. Confusing. And brands that got excited by a Facebook presence, will now realize that the presence is only a starting point, and means nothing by itself.

Creativity will be at a huge premium, and brand pages that stand out for creativity, a unique approach, will emerge victorious.

6. Google+ will get an honorable mention in history: After Orkut, Wave, Buzz, Google+ was yet another effort by Google, to get into Social Networking. Perhaps Google’s best effort till date. Got a lot of initial buzz, many diehard Google fans swore by it, were happy to see competition to a dominating giant. But after a few months, we are already seeing a larger registered user base for G+ (curiosity got people to register) but very little traction in terms of usage. Yes, some of the geeks are there, and love their own private network. There are also some interesting features, like Hangouts, for example.

But it is no challenge to Facebook. Not now, and unlikely to get there. And because people only have so much time in a day, their ‘social media hours’ will most likely go to Facebook and LinkedIn, and not shift to G+ anytime soon. And that’s the reality, like it or not.

So while the fizz has already gone down, 2012 will see Google+ take its rightful place in history, as another commendable effort in the space, by Google. But an effort that was at best, a good also-ran!

7. Social Media embarrassments will happen: Inspired by Anand Mahindra and Ratan Tata, CEOs and other top management are getting tempted by Twitter. Except that they don’t always spend so much time to ‘get’ the medium. And they could make costly mistakes! Likewise there would be others in the organization, who could make some boo-boos. There are organizations who like to keep their social media efforts lean and mean in costs. “An intern could take care of this”, they figure. And they hand over their brand worth thousands of crores to that intern. And yes, they’d save a few thousand bucks each month. Except the intern could also mess up one day. Or for that matter, the social media agency could make a mistake too.

We have not heard so far, terribly embarrassing situations, but I suspect one will happen, in 2012. And the sooner we have it, the better, so that it draws everyone’s attention, and everyone gets a little more careful from that point onwards! Nothing like an incident to make people acknowledge the risk! Oh, and by the way, I hope that the embarrassment is not with any of OUR clients.. lol. I don’t mind learning this with someone ELSE’s experience, rather than mine!!

8. Online Reputation Management will be part of a brand’s budgets: People will cuss brands on social media. Why? Because brands are there, and because social media is there! And cribbing and cussing is so easy to do. Then there will be some mean competitors who think it is easy to use fake accounts and malign a competitor’s brand. OR a disgruntled employee wanting to run down his ex-company. Only because he reckons that he can do it, and get away with it.

So all this was already happening, and so how will 2012 be different? Well, for one, more people will discover how easy it is to malign brands. Secondly, as the base of users increases, and more people use the web and take decisions based on the inputs got from these media, the impact of such negativisms about a brand, will be larger.

For few brands it could be loss of market share. For others it could mean a loss of market cap! And for yet others, it could mean the filing of legal suits and / or a large PR budget to clean up the mess.

The later in the reputation loss that repair is initiated, the more difficult and more expensive it gets. Which is where Online Reputation Management (ORM) comes in. While ORM will also NOT prevent from bad news showing up for a brand, ORM will detect, and enable a fix faster, before more damage has happened.

With that consideration, I’d expect more and more companies to make ORM a nORM in their business!

9. A killer case study will happen, on Social Media, in India: While India has got some brands with very large Facebook fan bases, and there have been some moderate YouTube views, we have not yet seen a thunderous success, like an Old Spice or a Blendtech or something of that level. I think we have come close now. The year 2012 should see a few large Social Media successes in India as well. It will give a well deserved respect for Social Media, amongst marketers.

And yes, in this aspect, I would hope that it is one of our client campaigns, which makes the cut ‘from good to great’

10. We should see some M&A in the agency space: We have many agencies in digital and social media spaces, that are either boutique or small enough, and not part of any big agency group. Between all of these smaller and independent agencies, they manage a large part of the digital and social media businesses. And ad and PR agencies, much bigger than these independent agencies, often do not get a share of that business.

As explained in an earlier prediction, the spends on digital wil increase, and there will be more number of integrated campaigns, too, where the mainline agency and the respective digital agency would probably work together.

It would be time where the larger agencies start thinking of ‘owning’ this piece, and not just renting it. And while ‘build’ is always an option for them, some will look at a ‘buy’. Here is where before end of 2012, we will see some M&A activity amongst the agencies.

We may also see some smaller agencies consolidating in parallel, which wil add steam to the M&A movement in the industry.

So those are my ten predictions. What do you think?

Agree with few, disagree with others? You have any other predictions? Share them as comments. Love to do the discussion.

Meanwhile, here’s wishing everyone in the digital industry, and then everyone else also, a Very Happy and Prosperous 2012.

What do you think? Are advertisers and ad agencies not “walking their talk”??

By the way, I refer to the following blog post that I had don earlier, on the subject of views of Nitin Paranajpe (CEO and MD of Hindustan Unilever Ltd): http://blog.socialwavelength.com/2011/07/thought-provoking-words-from-nitin-paranjpe-ceo-and-md-of-hindustan-unilever-ltd/

It was fun time again this year, at the Global Youth Marketing Forum, organized by Dr. R. L. Bhatia.

I was invited to speak on the subject of how brands are using Social Media to reach youth markets. As our company has many brands that target youth markets using Social Media, I was able to share my experience. A detailed case study that I shared was about one of our clients, Channel V, and a recent, successful campaign that we ran on Social Media, called ‘Sabse Liked College’.

My presentation deck, from the forum is as under:

Nothing ventured, nothing gained!

The statement is valid in all walks of life, and at this time, it seems relevant in the space of Social Media as well.

Okay, need to rewind and start at the beginning.

In our business of being a Social Media agency, we meet a lot of clients. Many of them are large brands with significant marketing budgets and advertising spends. Several of them initiate the discussion on Social Media from their end, while few discussions are initiated from our end as well.

At this point in time, most brands are convinced about looking at Social Media. Few are still hesitant, and few have made good inroads to be confident to place large bets. But most of them are in the middle of the road. They are approaching Social Media very gingerly.

Let us look at some typical scenarios:

1.    Brand is going for a new campaign, in mainline media: an expensive TVC, supported by print, perhaps OOH too. When we hear of these developments, we propose significant strategies around the campaign. Possibly including doing a teaser on social media, then taking the longer versions of the TVC on to social media (why be constrained with 15-30 seconds, when you are not paying by the second on YouTube – build a larger story board!), putting some behind-the-scenes clips (especially where celebrity brand ambassadors are involved), etc. We could even ask users on Social Media, to carry the storyboard further, maybe even propose a sequel for the advertisement.

Few brands have been venturing out with some of these strategies. Many just go ahead and create a Facebook page around the campaign (which is also abandoned, once the campaign is off-air), and many do nothing at all, on Social Media.

2.    Brand wants to get onto social media independent of any other campaign: convinced that this is a place not to be ignored, a brand wants to get there. Where smart ideas of potential high impact are shared, may of them like those, but want to get started with ‘just a facebook presence first’.

3.    And there are some brands who are set to go to Social Media, but are still hesitant, whether to go ‘as the brand’ or do some surrogate work. Since they fear that as soon as they step into the space, on their own name, they will be inundated with large number of complaints.

All of these are examples of brands playing it safe. Lets look at each of the cases.

If the brand has a new campaign out, in mainline media, it’s a great opportunity to leverage this with a decent Social Media extension. Crores are being spent on the TVC – on its creation, and then on the media itself. At a fraction of that cost, the brand can get users on Social Media, engaged with the brand, by smart placement of the campaign story.

Why then, does the brand hesitate? It is inherently a fear of the unknown. The brand is not sure what they are getting into. Will the users rip apart the campaign? What if it creates negative response? What if questions are asked that we cannot easily respond to?

The fact is that these questions are asked anyway. Advertising is one of the biggest discussed topics on Social Media. If a brand is confident about the campaign, then there should not be hesitation in facing the consumer in a direct interaction over it. And in doing so, give yourself the opportunity of creating good mileage on account of the same.

Coming to the case of creating a social media presence, why opt for the safe and boring ‘only facebook page’ presence? The creation of the Old Spice man, with the large number of videos and the interaction, was clearly a brave act. What if it was rejected? But it was not. And went on to become a stupendous success. Would Old Spice have achieved even a fraction of that visibility if it had stayed with a ‘safe and simple’ Facebook page?? As I said at the outset, ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’.

And the brands that hesitate still, in putting their name out in the front, for fear of getting user flak, well, they are also losing an opportunity here.

If the service is demanding flak, the flak is coming, no matter if they are present on social media or not. Their presence, a confirmation of their ‘listening’ to the customer, their responses back to the customers, will generate a positive feel about the brand. Not being present is to let the users have a free hand, to allow the odd complaint to potentially snowball as users keep adding fuel to the fire, with no one giving the brand’s point of view.

I reckon we have reached the point where Social Media is now accepted by most brands as being real, but most of them still have a sense of apprehension about going all out, into that space.

And what distinguishes the few who have taken the bigger calls, and have been successful in so doing, is a sense of dare.

Be it P&G internationally or a Just Dial or Star Plus in India, it is indeed that bravado that differentiates these winners, from the many also-rans.

So dear brand owner, in social media, there is nothing to fear but fear itself! And as Seth Godin put it, “If you waiting for a case study in your business vertical, it is already too late to jump in”.

Go for it! Social Media is indeed, here and now!!

Almost a year ago, I had blogged about the challenges that Advertising Agencies face, while approaching Social Media. And one of the points that I shared at that time was the “campaign” oriented approach that agencies had, whereas Social Media demanded more of an ongoing management approach, rather than a burst of a campaign.

While a lot has changed in a year, including the level of understanding that Advertising Agencies have, about Social Media, the one thing that has perhaps only gone worse, is the increasing campaign-style approach, while making Social Media a part of the marketing mix, for brands.

I interacted with one such agency recently. It was heartening to hear that they had close to 20-25 Social Media activations for brands. Considering the type of brands, and assuming that these are all active at the time, I presumed that they had a large team managing Social Media, at their end. Or that they were outsourcing the execution to someone else.

First of all, they proudly mentioned that they did not outsource anything. Which was fine. But then they conveyed that their Social Media team was all of 6 persons. Which came as a surprise to me.

I did some digging around after the meeting, and I found that almost all of the brands that they had mentioned had had some good bursts when they went online for Social Media, but they were nearly inactive at this time. Except for the 4-5 which were currently active.

It so appeared that the brands did not care (or they did not realize what damage they were doing to their brands by creating a community and ignoring it later) and neither did the agency.

Many a significant FMCG brand in recent times, have gone on to television and in print, with their specific campaign oriented Facebook pages. Given that this visibility to Social Media is heartening, but if the page is left to die, when the campaign goes off air, it will be sad. And we have seen more cases of such abandonment for me to fear the same fate here as well!

And as against these approaches, consider the approaches of brands like Fastrack, Ching’s Secret, Just Dial or Pantaloons, for example, and you will see that these brands have kept their Social Media activations central to the brand, and not to a campaign, and they have nurtured their communities, with good, ongoing engagements, not just when an offline campaign was running. And these are the more long lasting approaches, after all.

So what made that agency I was referring to earlier, to take a campaign approach? The reasons as I can see can be one or more of the following:

1. The agency does not understand better. With a legacy of a campaign oriented approach, they continue to recommend the same thing, even in Social Media.
2. The agency understands the difference for sure, but going the ‘ongoing social media management’ way would demand them to grow their team size, by leaps and bounds, for every new client that goes on to Social Media (like our company, Social Wavelength has done, in fact). And adding heads into the agency is not so easy for them. Sometimes they need to justify every new head to add to the rolls, all the way to Singapore or New York or Chicago or Paris. It is an elaborate process, and someone in the system needs to stick his head out, and take responsibility to bring in revenues to justify the addition. All these are easier said than done. It is easier then, to recommend campaigns to clients, and get done. And manage with the team size that the agency carries.
3. The agency could of course, outsource to specialist social media outfits (like Social Wavelength or many others in the space now) and manage long term social media activities. However here again, there is a demand for effort and energy from the agency’s end. The few agencies that have created some excellent ongoing working relationships with us have put in serious efforts from their end. Like having a few people dedicated to work with us and with the client, and ensure that the agency adds value in the chain. When they take a certain responsibility of delivery on behalf of the brand, they have to be involved. In real-time, when the outsourced social media outfit puts out updates on behalf of the client brand, the agency is still carrying the responsibility of there being no goof-ups. This does not happen without effort from the agency’s end. Few agencies have the attitude or the commitment to social media, to invest that kind of time and effort on this. And so they do not outsource, they manage in-house, and with their small teams then, they end up doing only “short term social media campaigns” then!
4. Many times, the constraint is from client’s end. They are not willing to take long calls on Social Media, and want to experiment at a campaign level. And agencies agree to these suggestions (as they do, to a lot of client demands – after all, the client is signing the cheques!). And which is why we see the short bursts of campaign oriented social media. Unfortunately for the client too, this will not serve as good examples. When you think you are experimenting in social media, with such bursts, you are not really experimenting in social media, but rather you are using social media as one more media platform, to run your traditional marketing campaign. And these are NOT the same thing! What you learn – good or bad – about Social Media, from such an experiment, is not the right research for an ultimately, long term ongoing Social Media presence.
5. The final reason is that of budgets. An ongoing Social Media presence demands commitments to resources say, for the next one year. A campaign may on the other hand, ask only for commitments for 1-2 months. The latter is an easier decision for the brand to take, and for an agency to sell. But it is happening at the cost of not utilizing Social Media, for what it really stands for. And it can often cause more harm to the brand, when social media platforms are abandoned. I have seen many in recent days, where fan updates on a Facebook page include marketing messages of Viagra like pharma offers, competitor offers, or other home business promotions. And no one from the brand or the agency has felt it necessary to go and clean up the page!!

Recently we have also got an assignment from an agency, for a brand that wants to do a campaign oriented social media presence. We advised against. We shared the pitfalls of the approach. The client was not convinced. We are doing the Social Media activity, only for the campaign, much against what we stand for. However, we disowned our responsibility on the ultimate benefit for the brand. And we reckoned that while executing this “campaign”, we will make the case for an ongoing presence. So let’s see how that part pans out.

But for us, this is a rare one. But it is also indicative of the way many brands and agencies continue to take the quick fix approach. It is important to understand that this Is not how a good Social Media presence should be established. We continue to put our efforts to educate clients and agencies that we work with.

What are your views on this? Do you face similar challenges with brands / agencies? Do you even agree to the campaign vs ongoing management approach for Social Media? I a keen to read your views on the subject!

If voting was restricted to Twitter alone, Shashi Tharoor could have been elected Prime Minister of India! Sadly for Tharoor, it isn’t, and there is life beyond.

Without a doubt, Shashi Tharoor has done more for brand Twitter in India than anybody else! Common citizens, who are far away from using Twitter, also recognize the word Twitter, thanks to Tharoor, and the news he made, with his cattle-class and such tweets!

But the same medium that made him famous, could well have spelled Tharoor’s undoing. And which is where, there are Social Media lessons to learn, for the rest of us. But I am jumping to the conclusion. Let me cut back to the beginning first.

So the Tharoor – Sunanda Pushkar –  Lalit Modi – IPL saga has been enough in the news, for me to repeat the gory details. And this piece is not about who was right and who was wrong, but more about Shashi Tharoor, and the Social Media mistakes he made.

The genesis of his mistakes though, can be understood, if we understand his personality. And M J Akbar does a great job of describing this in his Sunday piece in the Times of India. Couples of key facts pointed out by Akbar are that Tharoor did not leave his high profile and high pay UN assignment to join Indian politics, rather he left it to try and get the top job at the UN. And that for Tharoor, half limelight is better than no limelight! Also that Bush considered him to be immature.

In all of these statements lie perhaps, the explanations for Tharoor shooting off his mouth every now and then, and for his landing into a mess now, which Akbar puts as “writhing between a mistake and misfortune”.

Tharoor through his wild and popular run as the favorite Indian Twitter celebrity account, made an art of creating 140 character copy. Tweets that would be cheered by Indian Twitterati, tweets that would get huge RTs, and which as a consequence, generated huge Twitter following, and a cheering squad, which was happy to get a ‘cool and handsome MP who was tongue-in-cheek, and had a great sense of humor too, and who was so different from the boring Indian politicians of the day’! Tharoor looking for that half limelight could have not asked for more. To repeat the first sentence of this post, he had reached a position where if an election was based solely on Twitter votes, he had reached a position where he would win hands-down!

But the fact was that, Tharoor was just a great copywriter and made tweets interesting. He was not really that cool as a person, and he was not that far from the other politicians he would ridicule so often, in terms of his integrity.

And Santosh Desai, in his column again in the Times of India, explains how Tharoor’s slick language and style got him into more trouble than good, and how in this particular case, it landed him into quick sand. When style comes without adequate substance, such slips happen. And Tharoor slipped, ultimately resulting in loss of face, and an ignominious resignation from the ministry.

As Santosh Desai points out, and I have seen in person, in the twitter stream, and in the Tharoor support forums that have sprung up, Tharoor will still remain a favorite on Twitter. But his political future is another issue.

So what is the key Social Media lesson here?

The one and most important fact that this episode brings to the fore, is that on Social Media, you cannot pretend to be someone you are not. Or in other words, it is not just about words you use, but that you really have to ‘be it’. Take into contrast, another celebrity, Anand Mahindra. In fact, there has been a decent compilation of Anand Mahindra’s Twitter efforts, and how effectively he has used the medium. Now Anand Mahindra asks questions, admits he does not know it all, converses genuinely, and helps where he can. In short, he comes out as a regular human being, even if he is not one another common man. On the other hand, Tharoor came out looking larger than life, which unfortunately he was not!

And this is the last thing you do on Social Media. Social Media in general and Twitter in particular, is very public space. It amplifies conversations, and you create a Social Media brand positioning / reputation for yourself. If this is very different from who you really are, the pretense cannot be kept up for too long. Because Social Media has its own way of circling back, and haunting you, for your inconsistencies.

Social Media is about being honest to yourself, it is about transparency, and it is about being fair to your fans and followers.

As someone pointed out, best practices on use of Social Media are yet to emerge. But in the early days as we are, these are some early lessons to pick.

In lighter vein, Shashi Tharoor could attempt another first on Twitter, if he wants. If he chooses to resign from Twitter as well, he could be the first one to auction off his 700-odd-thousand follower account?!

Over the last 7 months of 2009, we have been actively participating in the Social Media industry in India, interacting with large number of clients, and that experience of 7 months has translated into this summary of 7 findings from 2009, and 7 wishes that we have for the industry, for 2010.

Our early client (or even agency) interactions were about a concept sale, for Social Media. And there was an incredulous feel as to what were we doing in their conference room, talking about Facebook and such kids’ stuff!

We’ve traversed a long distance since those days.

Of course, it is still early days for Social Media in India, but in a lot of ways, things have moved ahead:

1. Increasingly now, people know that Social Media needs to be a part of their marketing mix, if not yet, a part of their business processes itself. For those who understand the space, they will appreciate this difference. Perhaps by the time we review the space in end 2010, we may see that Social Media has also become a part of the company’s business processes!
2. We do not need to struggle to explain our business. A simple term like “Social Media Agency” is understood by most now. Though we are not strictly a Social Media Agency, we are close to that, and if a simple phrase can generate a close enough recognition, we are okay to let things be there.
3. In case of a few of our clients, we had picked up their abandoned early efforts of a Facebook page, for others we had started fresh ones. Suffice to say that ALL of those clients realize now that the Facebook page, the Twitter account, the blog, the YouTube channel etc. are their digital assets and  that they will not abandon these creations any more. Whether we manage these for them or they choose to do it themselves, their Social Media activities are here to stay. Note that the word “ROI” did not even come up in this! So there!!
4. In the early days, it was easy to get an acceptance to create a Facebook page or a blog or a Twitter account. From a hygiene factor, these were good to have. Things have changed here as well. While we still get many prospects who want to do Facebook and Twitter for the hygiene factor, there are others who have started seeing beyond. We have clients who have integrated Social Media very well with their offline marketing and others who are now asking for stand-alone Social Media strategies, with specific focus. There are few who have realized, that Facebook could be their new Email, in terms of having a regular and direct reach to their customers.
5. It took a while to get clients to accept our retainer fees. A few commented that our monthly fees were more than their annual PR budgets. Valid point, but  an apples vs oranges comparison really. What did that annual PR budget get them? A few print releases / mentions in the papers? With large reach, potentially, but with a blink-and-miss probability and also the life of just that one day for the effort? Whereas, the Social Media activities were an ongoing effort, an all-day activity done for them every day, and which resulted in strong digital assets being established for them, which were here to stay! It needed a different kind of dedicated effort, and produced a different kind of result as well. Thankfully, from clients who are in the know, our fees seem more acceptable and understood now.
6. We are very pleased to see a big shift from our agency friends. I mean, the advertising, PR and media buying agency partners. We have seen hesitation, threat, doubt and fear in the early days, but we are now seeing an increasing confidence in the Social Media space, from many. They have become open to new ideas, and to some extent, they are putting these up to clients, and many are getting through as well. This is going to be the most exciting part of 2010, I believe.
7. We are also happy to see companies looking at Social Media Monitoring as a part of the Social Media activities. Although still a pariah amongst all of the Social Media methods (in India), a few companies have started seeing the potential of “listening” and we are seeing this number go up. Businesses which are more sensitive to customer feedback, are especially concerned about managing their online reputations, and monitoring becomes an integral component here.

Having said all this, what we would really like to see change some more, are things like:

1. More clients seeing the relevance and importance of Social Media and at least beginning with the reference of the Social Media contact points on their collaterals, their website, their email signature files etc.
2. That clients realize that the challenge for the 0-1000 journey (the first 1000 Facebook fans or Twitter followers, say) is not trivial, and requires their participation. If that means that the client needs to put the Social Media icons and links on their website, on their TV commercial and press advertisements, send out emails to intimate their stakeholders, or whatever else that is required. Same needs to be done! Once a certain threshold level is reached, then the viral aspect kicks in, thanks to content and engagement activities.
3. While we are seeing a few, we hope to see many more of our clients open up to fresh new ideas for Social Media activation, which are in addition to the simple Facebook page, Twitter account, blog and YouTube channel. An activity conceived for and within Social Media itself, and which can bring together a large base of their Target Group. Something of this nature needs a conviction and a larger commitment in terms of time and resources, but the payback is larger, as it breaks the clutter and stands out. It needs bold first mover types to grab such opportunities, and we look forward to seeing more of those, amongst our clients!
4. We are also hoping for more buy-in from our advertising agency partners, to in turn have the conviction to present and sell to their clients, some of these new ideas. They will stand to win awards and we will be happy to stand next to them and get some reflected shine on us too, in the process. We know we have materials that can win awards for them, but we need their conviction to move it ahead!
5. We hope this year, Mouthshut.com and others in the league are able to put better technology in place, to separate the genuine reviews and feedback, from the fraud postings. While the fraud posts impact brands in the near future, in the long run, it hurts the credibility of sites like mouthshut.com, and make them less trustworthy!
6. We don’t really want this to happen to anyone. But it may still happen. A brand-damaging story that starts from Social Media and hits the mainstream media all over, and causes damage to the brand. Much like the Domino’s case in the US, or even akin to the Shashi Tharoor twitter escapades. Because such damage to one brand will open the eyes of all the other brands, that Social Media cannot be taken lightly. Even if a brand does not participate in outreach activities, they need to maintain a watch, and monitor the space, to identify potential PR crisis and plug them, before they go out of control.
7. Finally, we wish for clients to have realistic expectations. No, we do not oversell. At times, the client himself feels a huge surge of enthusiasm about Social Media. Which is perfectly fine, and good, in fact. However if this enthusiasm translates to an over expectation of results, that is tough to manage. The process of growth in Social Media is slow. Especially if done organically. Which is how most Social Media strategies are happening. Done right, the process can be made as efficient as possible. However, benchmarking with the television reach or looking for tens of thousands of fans and followers in double quick time, are all expectations that are bound to fail. A quick look at what other brands have managed, especially in their own segments, and then seeing how good or bad their own Social Media performance is, will be a good starting point to understand the positioning.

The above mentioned experiences are based across a variety of businesses, as from the outset itself, we saw clients from diverse verticals. From chemical engineering companies targeting B2B clients to television channels with millions of viewers, to electrical equipment manufacturers, software companies, hospitals, doctors, electronic device manufacturing companies, educational institutions, etc. We have seen, since then, that the prediction that within 2 to 3 years, everybody will be using Social Media is well on its way to coming true. It’s ahead of schedule actually!

All in all, it is exciting space. We are looking forward to working with many clients through 2010, and we will certainly hope to make a mark with few of our Social Media winning strategies, in course of the year. Watch this space J

Having done an exhaustive Social Media Analysis of the the Indian Elections 2009, we shifted focus to the Travel sector in India. The focus of this monitoring exercise was to extract information and learning which might be useful to Travel Agencies as well as Travel Portals based in India. We wanted to explore Social Media Monitoring as a method of generating leads and identifying prospective clients. We also wanted to see whether it can be used as a feedback mechanism by players in this sector. For the purpose of this exercise, we restricted the search to the 5 day period of 1^st June to 5^th June 2009 (which is towards the waning end of the travel/holiday season).

Objectives:

1. Extract data related to Travel sector in India using Social Media Monitoring tools

2. Using human intervention, validate whether the search results are relevant/useful for travel agencies of travel portals.

3. Categorize the data in a manner which will make it easier to consume/easier to base decisions on.

4. Derive conclusions/learning, if any.

Process:

For performing the initial search, we used industry leading Social Media Monitoring tools. We set up queries for looking up some of the travel websites/portals from India (cleartrip, makemytrip etc.). Apart from this, we set up searches which focused on generic travel related words and phrases (‘travel’, ‘vacation’, ‘journey’, ‘trip’ etc.).

We then came up with a categorization strategy, with the focus being categories which we thought might be useful to the various Travel Agencies (online or offline) as well as Travel Portals.

As mentioned previously, we restricted the search only for items (content created) between the 1^st and 5^th of June 2009.

Our Content Analysts then looked at the data retrieved by the monitoring tool. The activities performed by the Content Analysts included:

1. Identifying relevant and non relevant items from within the returned search results, and classifying them as such.

2. Categorizing content on the basis of the source of the content.

3. Categorizing all the content pieces according to the categorization strategy mentioned previously.

4. After human intervention, doing a before-after comparison on the data.

5. Extracting conclusions from this higher quality data.

Results and Findings:

In the time frame of 1^st June to 5^th June, the total number of results picked up by the tool was 672. The first finding, of course is the number of relevant and irrelevant results. Fully 86.75 % of the results were deemed irrelevant, from the Point of view of value to travel agencies and portals. The remaining 13.25% of results were deemed to be relevant.

From the relevant results, we drilled down further, by the categories we had set up. The results are tabulated below:

Category	Number (percentage) of relevant results
Planning Stage of travel
Early	1 (1.1%)
Mid	1 (1.1%)
Planned (late)	1 (1.1%)
Promotions	10 (11%)
Prospects
India Travel	3 (3.3%)
International Travel	0 (0%)
Travel Reason*
Business	0 (0%)
Pleasure	1 (1.1%)
Religious	2 (2.2%)
Unknown	1 (1.1%)

*Travel can be for multiple reasons

Here are the snippets of the posts/tweets which were classified in different planning stages (early, mid and planned):

Finally, we did an analysis of how much is the chatter around various Online Travel brands in the Social Media space. Here are the results of that analysis:

Conclusions Drawn and Learnings:

1. The percentage of relevant results in the total number of results retrieved in 13.25%. Using search results (even from industry leading tools) without a layer of human intervention will not be very efficient, or even very accurate.
2. Realistic leads (at various stages of planning) can be generated from Social Media. While the percentage may seen small, it must be kept in mind that the search was restricted to a 5 day period, from 1^st June to 5^th June (which is towards the end of the holiday season.)
3. There is a large difference between the amount of chatter around the larger Indian travel portals in the social media space.

Comments are of course, invited.

If you wish to download the White Paper for this study (PDF), you can visit the Resources Page on our website.

** There is a website visibility blog series, which is in the working. Meanwhile, pitching in with this post. **

The inspiration for this post comes from some interactions with Indian brand managers, where we got a suggestion that Social Media may not be on their priority, simply because there isn’t enough of their target market, out there, just yet. When we talked about possible brand reputation risks, and suggested that at least a good social media monitoring exercise should fall in place (quoting cases like the Domino’s story, for example), responses suggested that ‘there have been numerous complaints of cockroaches found in Coke bottles, but that has not hurt their sales growth one bit’.

So why are we like this, in India? Why does customer service come low on priority?

I have personally had outstanding experiences with companies like American Express (for lost traveler checks), Southwest Airlines (for last minute change of bookings, etc.), Cort furniture rental (when I had a short 4 month stay in the Bay Area) etc. I have also heard / read stories of other customer-centric brands like Nordstrom.

But ALL of these are from outside India. I cannot think of one outstanding customer service experience that I would like to talk about, in an Indian context (perhaps, Orange County, Coorg might make the cut for me). Considering that I have spent far more time within the country than outside it, this makes for a generally pathetic state of affairs. Why so?

My analysis of reasons why Indian brands are not too concerned about customer service is:

1. There are just too many of us! When you have a bad experience at a restaurant, curse your way out and promise to never step in again, does that impact that restaurant’s business? Not by much. There are new suckers who are willing to try him out, each day, day after day. Think about a mobile phone or mobile service provider problem?! With millions of new users coming in each month, do they feel threatened by the dissatisfaction of a single customer?
2. Our ‘chalta hai’ culture. We accept mediocrity. Of ourselves. And hence of the service we get. We are a service provider (to an internal customer or an external customer) as much as we are a service consumer. And when we are prepared to accept mediocrity of ourselves as a service provider, the same comes back to us as a recipient of service. And in our true ‘chalta hai’ spirit, we accept it!
3. The slow legal system. So the automobile garage short changed you. You can even prove it. What good does that do? You know you do not have the time for the painfully slow courts of law. And other than taking the law in your own hands, you do not have any other resort. So you resign yourself to your bad luck while the garage continues to give shoddy service.
4. The lack of an effective consumer movement. Again, we have a more active consumer protection mechanism than earlier, but for the size of our economy, it is still too little, and too late. There is no serious case of ‘consumer backlash’. Even with the high media attention that the ‘fertilizer in Coke and Pepsi’ case got, I do not believe their sales were dented by much.
5. The lack of a strong, single point media vehicle that can go after these cases. Yes, when it suits them, mainstream media takes up some of the cudgels. But there are always other ‘breaking news’ fighting for the minutes or the column inches, and the brands at fault, just need to wait out the time. On the other hand, there has not emerged in the online space, any strong brand that can just work to take up the cause for the consumers. At least, none with a serious brand recall.
6. The freeloader attitude that many of us have. Why can’t a brand offer “30 days free replacement” in India? The kind that is a par-value service offering in the western worlds? Because it would be a disaster. Unfortunately, coming from a ‘shortage economy’ legacy that we do, we have a tendency to grab whatever is on offer for free. If there is a 30-days free replacement, you would find the longest queues for returning these, on the 29^th day, after using the items for those many days. Likewise, brands may assume that any leeway given in terms of customer service could end up getting abused. In a restaurant that I know, they will not allow on a single table, people having a buffet and a la carte meals. Because they fear that the smaller a la carte ordering folks, will end up sharing the one free unlimited buffet that is ordered! Unfortunate, but true representation of the average Indian L

It is for all these reasons that we do not see brands and companies getting particularly aggressive towards excellent customer service, and we continue to suffer, as consumers.

Moreover it is for these reasons that companies often do not much care about Online Reputation Monitoring, as they figure that it does not matter!

However I strongly believe that brands and companies are missing a trick, as they ignore this Online Reputation monitoring effort, and believe that it does not matter in India.

1. Online memory is longer. While stories that came in the newspapers or on TV are fresh only as long as the stories are alive, online, these stories do not die. They are searchable, they are accessible, and they can haunt you at the least expected moment of time!
2. Snowball effect. What could start as a whimper or one dissatisfied voice, could soon convert into a community of dissatisfied users, and then become a snowball. Dissatisfied customers in Cochin, Mangalore, Patiala, Lucknow, Pune..wherever.. are now connected. By the medium known as Social Media!! And in size, their voice is amplified and the whimper can become a big holler!
3. When social goes mainstream. Domino’s went from YouTube to the New York Times in 3 days. When such transitions happen, God help your brand. You do not really want to wait for that to happen. Stem it while you can, should be the mantra.
4. You may have many customers, but you have few bankers, investors, joint venture partners. Once you slide down the reputation path, and have tons of bad press (well, more like bad ‘web-content’) , then you may just find it getting tougher to get bankers to trust you, to have investors putting in money or giving you a decent valuation, or to get joint venture partners. Because of our population, customers may still come, but margins may go down, as the premium factor disappears!
5. And what about people? Good resources do not want to work with companies having bad reputation. Not when they have a choice. If you choose to ignore the complaints, customers will write, blog, tweet, shout. And these noises will keep good talent away from your company!
6. This can haunt you at the most unexpected and inopportune moment. When you are going for the IPO and your papers are filed, your competitor might just pull out all that dirt from the web and social media archives, and ensure that it gets the maximum visibility. Since content does not disappear here, you always carry this risk!

It should be clear then, that even if you are selling in a seller’s market, reputation matters today! And especially online reputation or reputation being created via Social Media conversations. It is important to monitor Social Media for social chatter about your brand, your competition, your vertical, and be alert on any unusual developments.

Of course, it is critical that the company gets customer focused in the process, and does not allow much customer ire to happen, in the first place. In many cases, these may be a significant cultural change to bring about!

Do you think Social Media will impact our attitude towards customer service? What is your opinion on Social Media’s role as a reputation builder/breaker? Looking forward to a great discussion.

** Social Wavelength offers the service of Social Media monitoring. Social Wavelength will use industry standard software tools to tap all conversations around a brand. This can generate a very large amount of data, though. Our social media executives then work to ‘clean up the data’ and tag the conversations on various parameters, enabling effective and actionable reporting to clients. In cases where brand reputation sensitivity is extremely crucial, Social Wavelength can also offer 24×7 Real Time Online Reputation Monitoring and Reporting. For more information, please email info@socialwavelength.com. **