Social Media conversations can spell business success for brands: DMAi's CxO Roundtable

The marketing and advertising industry is undoubtedly inclined towards Social Media and Digital, the most widely accepted mediums in terms of engagement today. There is also no doubt about the fact that the presence of social media by itself is no guarantee of building a robust conversation or meaningful interaction with your customers. In fact, diving into these unknown waters without proper planning and tools has resulted in several brands floundering to stay afloat.

Recently DMAi (Direct Marketing Association, India) a 21 year old body, conducted an interactive and immersive discussion in association with SAP on September 19, 2013 at The Leela, Gurgaon. The agenda was to discover, learn and share how actionable insights can spell business success, more specifically on social media measurement which has gained currency. Humans are highly social and the digital has reshaped our interactions further. It’s a new era. With the advent of social media in the digital age, we are social 24x7 with our actions or intentions on millions of sites simultaneously. This has empowered the masses hugely and given them an opportunity to discuss their independent views on any product or services. It is also a great opportunity for leading marketers in their quest to understand their discerning customers even better.

Few brands that leveraged the potential of their social media presence have achieved far-reaching success only because they knew how to navigate the treacherous world of likes, shares, hashtags, tweet and freedom of speech with the right tools working for them. Much like the dolphin that uses echolocation (dissemination of sound and analysis of feedback), they know how to identify opportunities, ward off threats and evolve and adapt to the ever-changing marketing environment.

The DMAi roundtable focused on analyzing social media conversations which can spell business success for brands. It had some of the foremost names from airlines, banks, consumer goods, FMCG, automotive and electronics sectors participating in intense discussions.

Industry stalwarts from various industries with varied experience participated to discuss and share their opinions on the changing face of social media. Vivek Bhargava, Founder and Managing Director, iProspect, Communicate2 moderated the conversation, with Sandeep Pandey, Principal Partner, Consulting, Analytics & Intelligence, Mindshare India as the SME. Sandeep Nagpal, Director Marketing-SAP was the subject evangelist.  The panelists included: Anupam Dixit, Head Digital Marketing and ecommerce, MTS; Abhishek Sinha, Head Digital, Apollo Munich Health Insurance Company; Vikas Swarnaka, Case Mate; Sudeep Narayan Marketing & PR Director,  Volvo Auto India; Sanjeev Kotnala, VP & National Head, Brand, Dainik Bhaskar group ( DB Corp); Sandeep Arora, VP Marketing, Bennett, Coleman and Co.(Times Group); Prasanjeet Baruah, Marketing Head, Oberoi Hotels; Sunil Kumar, GGM, Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) and Akash Batra, Head, Digital Marketing and Social Media, Nestlé India.

Giving a sense of the social media and digital media industry, Sandeep  Pandey  said,  “The pace of social media is getting faster day by day. There is no boundary to this medium. It has grown to a large extent and is expected to grow even faster and bigger. Those brands and markets who are receiving reactions directly from the customers are better placed  to create the accurate product. At 4 am in the morning you can know what is happening around the world. In case of any kind of sensitive topics we receive a number of views and comments on the same. Some of the brands are leveraging on the information of the social media.”

Sanjeev Kotnala said, “DMAi roundtable has been interesting in terms of knowing how various brands are approaching social media. All seem to agree that an objective driven approach with some surrogate at times even subjective matrices for evaluation is in place. Depending upon the brand need it is a
great tool for social level messaging - listening - engaging and even as a research tool. A deep dive on analytics can really be helpful.” It was disturbing though to note that most believed that digital agencies have not done enough to educate clients beyond click mentions and customer interactions thus restricting the rate of adapting social media in a  wider way.
Pandey adds, “It is really important to know how people are reacting towards the product. Customers expect if they have posted anything about any product or service they want it to be addressed within 30 minutes or maximum an hour.  How fast and how soon we can respond on it is a concern.”

Social Media is such a powerful tool that is capable of serving information 24x7 around the world. According to Pandey, “The tool which we have available in the market doesn’t provide the exact information in a seminary manner. But we need to figure out that 10-12 per cent of the idea needs to be addressed and included as business insights and in this  way  we can take it to the level we want. It is certainly important to address the need of the customer as soon as  possible.”

Giving his view point, Vivek Bhargava, of iprospect Communicate2 (a leading search and social media specialist organization in India) said that today we all are living in the digital age and the challenge is to measure the on-going viral medium that is social media. Today the thought of using social media effectively and differently is multiplying in the DNA of every organization and every person who executes the strategy relating to social media is believed to be a Digital Officer. He says, “Companies should pay attention towards the fact as to how they can use this medium differently.”

Bhargava also believes that measuring any digital activity aligns with what the company is getting out of it. Also before measuring any kind of social media activity the company should set its goals and objectives for increasing their revenues.

Prasanjeet Baruah says, “Social media is a platform where we need to engage with our customers. In Facebook we measure the number of likes we have.  What matters is people talking about the pages, the engagement ratio.” To illustrate, he explained how they internally evaluate each like by 1 point, a comment by 5 and shares by 10.
Sunil Kumar from IRCTC, agreed that social media is taking a toll these days. He says, “Before getting into this medium one should first understand and identify the correct set of audiences they would want to cater and target. Thereafter the company should try and cater to the needs and demands of their consumers. At our site we listen and cater to the needs and demands of our consumers very seriously and live up to their expectations. Social media is one place that is very effective and short term. The brands should keep innovating their strategies in terms of making their customers stick to them loyally.”

But the question arises; how social media can help businesses, how are the tools and techniques of measurement productive and how digitally fit is the organization ?
Vivek Bhargava here said, “The knowledge from the internet is about 5 per cent and 95 per cent needs to be discovered, but that was 10 years ago. Internet has such a huge potential and we never know how much more it can be explored in the next 10 years. Before we start using any social media it is very important to start setting business objectives that are very much business growth oriented. Also how and where the social media exists and what role it can play in it.”
Abhishek Sinha was of the opinion that social media is more about a two way communication and interaction. It gives a face to the boring subjects. It is a tool which can be used as an open source and can be utilised in a vast manner.

Adding one more point, Bhargava said, “The same mass of the customers who have been associated with the product for 10 or more years can be a source of the brand uplifting. It also gives a better prospect for the brand track; mapping the success of physical objectives of the product and  its growth.”

Vikas Swarnaka opined that as an organization they try to design the best cases in the world.  Being on the known social medias viz. Twitter, Facebook, Bloggers etc. assists in gaining an idea about  the consumer which is good, but customer service needs to be responded to immediately.

Sudeep Narayan sharing some insights about Volvo’s social media measurement said, “We are all about listening to the people. May it be online or offline we are listening and responding. I get up early and login to get an idea of what’s taking place globally. Online it's become an A-Line touch and we are more into digital media where social media is only a subset. The basic tool for us to improve is to analyze the comments and feedback we get and integrate it.”

Sandeep Arora who looks after the marketing and business expansion for Times of India and its mirror publications also procures information from digital and other channels. He says “Any social media marketing that we do as a means of reaching the communication objective should be backed by sheer business objectives and it should not just be any kind in itself. In most cases this seems to be the problem.”  Adding further he said, “I have a social media presence but how it contributes to the communications objective or a business report matters and having clear objectives here becomes very important. However compared to digital advertising as Subhranshu was saying, social media tends to have a lot more intangibility. It is a lot more about engagement, about conversations and the quality of conversation and engagements. It is very difficult to put balancing cores to some of these. So as a marketer it is necessary to  rise beyond adwords, digital presence, number of impressions, number of clicks, this is how I am sought   or this is what I am paying which are very easy to explain but also becomes slightly difficult.  So as a marketer I believe it is a responsibility for all of us to rise above all this because it is eventually about the brand building and engagements or there will be intangibles.”

Sharing some insights in terms of how they are using it in Times of India and some of their other publications, Arora said, “I think the first thing we have done is passively tried to use it as a medium to share news. Since we would get feedback we started to use some of those feedbacks as conversations. The ones that would have more comments and conversations both, for that we would go back to the writers and say that should we be  doing the follow ups too.”

“The other piece that we have done very well is to use it as an engagement tool which is to build an engagement, act to seek brand statement and make the brand a part of the conversation. One of the things that we have done is that through social media we have made the consumers the champions of taking the message forward rather than us taking it forward and it has worked very well,”  Sandeep Arora adds.

Towards the end of the discussion Anupam Dixit, said, “One of the overall takeaways that we all got was a larger sense of the social media market and that too from  various industries. Since the topic was all about measuring social media I think we got some amazing insights about how to add value to each engagement that happens in social media that can further add value to your business. We all knew the points that were discussed today but what is important is how we all articulate the measures of social media.”

What are the measurement tools and solutions?
Akash Batra said, “Digital fraternity has created the social media ids measurement. This medium can give the effective insights relevant to business objective. With digital media we can build brands and delight the customer. We are able to respond to thousands of queries and be a part of many views coming from different minds. Our approach is to listen to consumer needs and monitor the performance of our assets. We do a lot of projects, campaigning  and associate with celebrities.”

Nidhi Khera Verma opined that listening is primarily knowing what people are saying and how they are reacting towards a product. Analysis is more human nowadays. The current challenge is how to integrate the digital property with the offline and online world. It is a term of research as to what kind of news can make the consumer feel interested.

In conclusion Vatsal Asher, Vatsal CEO-DMAi assured, “As a follow up action, the DMAi will commission a comprehensive report of the best in class KPI’s for social media measurement used by verticals of E-Commerce & Retail, Media & Entertainment, FMCG & Manufacturing, Automotive and CDIT & Telecom with specific case studies on ROI driven through social media measurement.  This report will be unveiled at the third edition of the Annual DMAi Convention scheduled for January 22nd - 24th, 2014 in Delhi.”

Shelly Singh, COO-DMAi added, “Apart from the very interesting topic of common benchmark and measurement metrics that can be utilized for digital world, the DMAi further promises to bring numerous roundtable discussions on current burning issues for the industry and invites experienced marketers to share their views over it. Also, DMAi invites topics, subjects and groups which can express codes of invaluable best practices.”

It goes without saying that companies and brands need to keep a check on how social media is impacting their businesses and vice-versa. There was no doubt that the round table was full of great learning’s with a thought that revolved around social media and a lot of knowledge-sharing with marketing experts from different industry verticals.  Invaluable data too was shared on critical aspects of social media conversations. It was a great opportunity of addressing one’s thoughts in terms of the on-going and futuristic trends in the fields of social and digital media.