Exclusive | Internet will soon be omnipresent: Moser Baer's Deepak Shetty

Association for data driven marketing and advertising (DMAi) recently announced their forthcoming CxO Roundtable series. These sessions intend focusing on the front runners in marketing with an objective to immerse audiences in a stimulating round table discussion with peers. An interactive and immersive discussion was conducted by DMAi in association with SAP. The CxO round tables are targeted at the Next Generation CMO’s and Marketers’.

The first of the series was held at The Leela, Gurgaon on September 19th, 2013 and the  inaugural session addressed social media analytics. As the key to making marketing relevant and provide sustained customer engagement DMAi advocates for creating industry standards for ethical conduct and effective self-regulation of the Data driven, Marketing & Advertising community.

Adgully caught up with Deepak Shetty, Sr. Vice President- Domestic Sales & Marketing at Moser Baer India Ltd, who was one of the key speakers at the roundtable to understand his views about the growing and evolving social media industry.

Over the last 24 years, he has built his strengths in the areas of successfully leading a business with P & L responsibility and creating Brands for: Samsung IT peripherals, FirstandSecond.com and Moser Baer. His expertise lies in conceptualizing, strategizing, planning, implementation and team building, in the functional areas of Start-up, Sales, Marketing and Operations for IT Hardware, Consumer Durable, and Retail Industry including e-commerce dotcom.

Social media that has become a crux for every industry and organization is now being considered as the most competitive medium for industry stalwarts. Most in the industry are of the opinion that there is a clutter of information for the customer. Therefore, to stand out in this crowd, it is crucial for a brand to capture the customer’s attention instantly and the best way to do it is to use the digital medium effectively. With the increase in smart phones, it is becoming a more prominent channel for commercial transactions thereby increasing the significance of location-based marketing.

Speaking about how digital and social media has impacted his business, he said, “Digital medium even if still at a nascent stage, is proving to be a very powerful tool for marketing and communication.”

Being in the sales and marketing field for so many years, Shetty opined that social media enables a brand to have a detail customer profiling thus allowing the company to deliver highly targeted marketing messages and advertisements to one’s core audience. “Moreover, it also impacts our business in a major way and gives us an opportunity to directly interact with our customers and measure their sentiments on a real time basis,” he added.

No doubt the industry is growing rapidly but the question and the point of concern is how will current web analytics and other digital performance reporting interact with social media marketing analysis in the future? Putting his point forward, Shetty said, “I strongly feel that the current tools are still very broad level ones, and more micro analysis is required in this field. This platform will be a base for many innovative new tools of the future.  As a result, any constant assessment of the medium will prove to be futile as medium itself is very dynamic in nature and is bound to transform and rapidly change over a short span of time.”

Speaking about measures of success (KPIs and outcomes) that will be used and how they are defining ROI for their brand internally, Shetty opined that to measure the success and failure of a campaign in social media space, there needs to be a wide screen approach. Although, one of the major and obvious ways of measuring social media is the traffic to a particular site but it is not the only aspect.

Undoubtedly, the important indicator today is the interaction or the customer engagement which can be anything from leaving comments, to participating in support forums, to leaving customer reviews and ratings. “Additionally, SEO is also a major tool to measure the social media presence and has to be understood thoroughly. A well placed story or a video on a particular site can generate lot of traffic. SEO also helps to generate lot of referral links from other sites,” avers Shetty.

Moser Baer like any other firm uses social media analytics tool before launching an actual product or service since in his opinion this is the best medium to gauge instant customer reaction.

The question arises as to how much can automation do in today’s dynamic world of Social Media Analytics.  We see demos of tools very often, but how much   importance  is attributed to the manual intervention that goes into deriving actionable insights from this data?

Sharing his views on this point Shetty opined, “These new automated tools do help a lot in giving reports related to consumer buying behavior, product preferences, demographics etc, but ultimately it is up to the individual how he comprehends this data and what strategy he adopts basis the data.” Thus, he believes that the manual intervention holds lot of importance as it the only subjective thing in this objective tool of marketing.

In present times, social media is used more for customer acquisition than retention hence Shetty believes that this trend will change the scenario in the near future.

The rise of social media, including blogs and review sites, has created a need to monitor posts and gauge consumer sentiments, consequently the need for reputation management is on the rise. “Marketing will be more mathematical and number driven, the data generated will be more user friendly and the transactional marketing will increase manifolds. The speed at which the internet is growing, it will be omnipresent and surround us like the air that we breathe. The way we connect, communicate, learn, discover and entertain ourselves will change and will see a different course. I really believe it will be that transformational,” concluded Shetty.