Adgully Exclusive | Sanjay Mehta's Social Wavelength on an expansion drive!

With the surge in Social Media sites world over, Social Media consultancy or solutions is a booming business now a days. Social Wavelength is one such agency in India which has grown its reputation quite fast. The agency is an expert in providing Social Media solutions and brand building exercise through Social Media platforms to brands.

Founded in April 2009 by Sanjay Mehta, Hareesh Tibrewala and Mihir Karkare, the start-up began full-fledged operations only in July 2009. In a short time the business grew and therefor the team grew; a business started with lots of passion is now turning out to be a big business in the digital domain and on February 10th 2012, the Social Wavelength's team decided to move into a bigger and more sophisticated office to address the growing client base and their demands.

Being an entrepreneur for more than 11 years, Mehta has experience at hands on level, in building and running a successful internet based venture (www.homeindia.com). Having more than 20 years of experience in various leadership positions, Mehta brings to the table a keen understanding of how businesses operate. He combines considerable prowess in the field of Social Media, Ecommerce, SEO, SEM and Web 2.0 with expertise in strategy, planning, business development, operations, sales and marketing. Most recently Mehta has served as the COO of Compare InfoBase Ltd.

Adgully, caught up with Sanjay Mehta, Joint CEO, Social Wavelength, who shared with us his thoughts on building the right connect for brands on the social media space/deepening the engagement with the current set of clients and what the year 2012 holds for him and his team.

On asking about the journey of Social Wavelength, Mehta said, "It's been satisfying journey till now, we have grown as a business and as a category. It's one of the milestones that we have achieved. We are growing as the Social Media and digital space is growing.

The trends in the digital space are way different from what is was a decade ago. We asked, Mehta to explain to us the new trends in the domain of social media. He explained, "When we got into the internet 12 years back, we actually got into the connected world. E-mail, websites were the first internet pages of that electronic age. Today, we see people connecting which each other more aggressively after social media came in and that is a big shift."

He added, "Everything that happened in between that time had marginal growth as we got high speed internet, got more websites, more creative got new technologies. But, social media is like one significant account, as the power shift is in the hand of the consumer which is not just limited to broadcast media. People, companies, brands should realise that today people have a voice and the voices are getting heard. Today a single person can post the story about his/her experience with the brand. A company can grow their business by doing well in social media space.

"We started our work by understanding what is Facebook, than what is Facebook page and that is how we began. Some companies are still getting it as a first entry in social media space. It's been two and half year we have seen clients evolving themselves. Apart from this, clients are more concentrated about achieving their business goals out of social media. When you start with it, the next question could be that how you will look back to it as a business objective? How can we use social media for various purposes? This is where more of holistic approach comes in and that would be, you need to do a good job of understanding what consumers are talking about you, to know the competition and where you are, and on the basis of that how you'll create right kind of communication to reach your business goals. After all these you have to see, that does it increase sales, increase market awareness or you are creating better environment to recruit better people, getting right people and creating nice impression over investors." Explained Mehta, about the way to achieve ones goals whichever domain you may be in.

Social media is not just limited to sales and marketing; at present its more about where people are talking what. Sales and marketing, HR, Investors, Reputation Management and CRL are the angle of what all people discuss. Today companies understand how to use the social media space beneficially.

On explaining the concept of measurement metrics in social media, Mehta said, "Whole concept of measurement metric comes from the fact that, digital was always pushed as a measurable medium but social media had no legacy .Right from SEO to SEM, everything was measurable but social media is not disheartened. When you think about how you could measure the HR processes to Web Management, they all can be measured but all these are not the same as the marketing management. This is different as this is what is called as sum total of the benefit. So, if you see the satisfaction of your customers, if you have few people who are complaining, if you are complaints get settled faster, you can measure the satisfaction and the benefit."

Social Wavelength is looking forward to grow their portfolio of businesses and they would be working on individual verticals, they will have HR vertical which will talk about how companies benefits through social media for HR business/ investing on better employee/ employer relations . They would continue to run such activities with the help of domain experts.

"Overall experience and the management team at Social Wavelength allows us to see, social media at a much majestic level. Here, we work to create more of business benefit than marketing, and focus is on the business goal. It makes us look social media at different level." said, Mehta.