Valedictory Session of ICSM 2014

Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English literature, first said, "All good things must come to an end." No matter how hackneyed this idiom becomes, it never loses its pertinence. After two days of learning and introspection, the International Conference on Social Media on Business came to an end.

Mr. Anand K. Pillai, Senior EVP & CLO, Reliance Industries and Member WEF, reiterated the importance of social media to management graduates and corporate employees. On the issue of using social media for recruitment, he said, "A potential recruiter will know about you even before you tell him anything about you. It is important to stay aware about the kind of digital footprint we leave." 

On the issue of importance of social media to the governmental machinery, Mr. Aman Singh, Principal Secretary, Government of Chhattisgarh, said, "Any government needs to look outside the offices and into what is going on in the lives of the common people... Social media is going to impact 160 out of the 540-odd seats in the 2014 General Elections." Towards the end, it was also brought about that while media vehicles and platforms are important, the real strength of social media lies in its calibration with the culture, both local and global.

It is important to understand that all the research and discussion on social media not only underlines the importance of this platform but also points to the vast potential of this media, not just for interaction but also for value creation. Nevertheless, the successful conclusion of the International Conference on Social Media for Business 2014 is another feather added in the cap of Indian Institute of Management Raipur. Kudos to all those involved for all the efforts, blessings and opinions.

This post was written by Jayesh Surisetti, PGP 2013-15. He can be contacted at pgp13082.jayesh@iimraipur.ac.in

Panel Discussion: Creating and building brands in the digital world

Societally speaking, there has been a sea shift in the basic driving ideology behind marketing, especially advertising. Marketing, has become more about a purpose - what the customer wants can simply no longer be confined to positioning, it has to be about a specific purpose. Mr. Aswath Ganesan, National Strategy Director, Social@Ogilvy, Ogilvy&Mather, pointed, "The desire of all brands is to be long-lasting, like Superman. However, as time progresses, brands have to realise that they have move from an image [positioning] to an idea [purpose]."

Brand creation is not just about the market, it is also about how those brands affect people's lives. In order to create and build sustainiable brands, it is important for the forces behind these brands to understand that the current social media vehicles are an easy doorway into what people want, what their motivations are as opposed to simply having a social media presence. "Social media is more about social sciences of culture than social technology", said Mr. Atulit Saxena, COO-Brands, Futurebrands.

There are a lot of peripheral factors associated with brand building. Brands, in a more digital sense, are what they are perceived as. No brand in the current scenario can survive in its communication without being perceived as valuable, especially by the target audience. Mr. Varun Gupta, Marketing Manager, Dharma Productions, said, "Even with everything else remaining the same, brands survive on their perceived value by the TG."

Brand building is essentially very experiential - brands are built on user experiences. The very process of brand building is continuous and cyclical in nature. Digital media enables marketers to get in touch with the emotions of the customers constantly and evolve the brands with changing times, it is here that the real potential of digital media lies.

This post was written by Jayesh Surisetti, PGP 2013-15. He can be contacted at pgp13082.jayesh@iimraipur.ac.in

Panel Discussion: Real time, location-based marketing and e-tailing strategies

Day 2 of the Intenational Conference on Social Media for Business saw the 3rd panel discussion of the conference. The customers of today have evolved; the advent of social media has ensured that the communication between consumers and brands is very immediate and direct. According to Mr. Sanjay Mehta, CEO, Social Wavelength, "The customer of todaylikes or comments or tweets about the brand as soon as he sees a banner or an ad. If a marketer waits for then conventional marketing responses, he is likely to lose out on a lot of customers." 

In these changing times, speed of marketing responses has become a critical success factor. The traditional way of having annual marketing plans and running up the organisational ladder will very soon become obsolete. Moreover, the front-end of marketing is in much more direct contact of customer expectations and consequently, they are in a much better position to deal with them. Mr. Ummed Singh, Head-Marketing, ColorPlus Fashion Ltd., said, "It is very necessary and beneficial to empower the marketing teams, they are in constant contact with the customer and are the torch bearers of the brand."

With the response time becoming very short, real time marketing, in its essence has become very important. Brands have began capitalising on the various situations that keep arising through rela time marketing. "All real time marketing efforts need to have high visibility but more importantly, they need be relevant to the context and meaningful", said Mr. Manuj Bajaj, Vice President (Marketing), GreyBox Technologies.

Just to put things into perspective, the tools of real-time, location-based marketing and e-tailing are essentially to solve or mollify customer problems. These tools, if utilised via social media properly, can provide the quintessential solutions to what the customer wants, when he wants it and how he wants it.

This post was written by Jayesh Surisetti, PGP 2013-15. He can be contacted at pgp13082.jayesh@iimraipur.ac.in

Social Media Analytics – Knowledge and Insights at marketers’ fingertips!

The reach, impact and frequency of social media are truly breath-taking, even more so considering its advent was just a couple of years ago.  This medium has innocuously brought about a sea change in how brands seek to promote themselves, listen to, disseminate info to, engage and seek feedback from their customers.  Analytics is the key to equipping corporations in gauging their marketing efforts; understand customer behaviour and in turn incorporating them in their decision making. 

Some translations from marketing concepts into analytical terms and specific metrics used to measure these can be as follows-

Some of the popular tools that can be used for social media analytics used across different social platforms include –

                                                      

These tools mentioned can be used to arrive at the ROI. The ROI can be chosen to b e from either financial or non-financial outcomes. The non - financial outcomes include followers increase, engagement levels increase, etc. Also, the number of redirections to the company's web page through social medium can be taken as a non-financial outcome. For example, using Google Analytics, this can be got and also how many of these visits actually resulted in further obtainment of information and subsequently requesting a quote or placing an order can be derived. Also, enterprise tools like Salesforce Buddy Media and Adobe Social can be used to measure the ROI.

                                                                 Written by-

                                                                 Shravan Kumar Kailasa
                                                                 E-Mail ID: pgp13119.shravan@iimraipur.ac.in

Valuation of a Social Network

Introduction

Everyday millions of people are interacting ,creating and sharing content on social networks such as facebook ,twitter,instagram etc. These social networks are collectively called social media. Such large number of people on social networking websites make business and marketers perceive that these networks are high value to them. They can use these networks to effectively interact with their customers .Social media has helped businesses to treat consumers as assets as  they use the feedbacks and opinions of consumers to develop their next business strategy.

To use a social network  for their marketing campaigns business must be able to evaluate it’s value. A manager always wants to quantify the perceived value. He must have some method or data to understand the importance of facebook or twitter for his marketing strategies.

Laws such as Metcalfe’s and Zipf’s  can help to estimate the value of a social network.

Metcalfe’s Law:

Metcalfe’s  law is an optimistic but widely used method to assess a social network. It is quite intuitive. It states that value of a communication network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.

The law is nothing but an extension of simple problem of combinatorics in mathematics. Suppose there are n nodes in a network. The number of combination of  two people that one can form is n(n-1)/2.Therefore the value of network is proportional to n^2.Interesting thing to note is that cost of adding a node increases linearly .In fact just a day before IPO of facebook AOL Daily finance valued it using one of the variants of Metcalfe’s   Law.

Limitations of Metcalfe’s   Law:

As already said Metcalfe’s   law is an optimistic approach so it has got it's obvious limitations. Inception of  Metcalfe’s   law was based on the number of Ethernets in a network. Ethernets are homogeneous entities but people in a social network are not. There are cultural and linguistic barriers among people which decreases the effectiveness of a network.

There are so many things on facebook or social networking sites but things that interest people are things that come from their core network. Robert Dunbar a British anthropologist researched and found that a person can maintain a stable social relationship with only 150 people. Thus adding a person beyond core network does not increase the overall effectiveness of network similar to marginal law of productivity in network.Thus valuation of social network based on the number of people in it does not give  a clear picture of effectiveness.

Zipf's law is more conservative approach and it states that valuation of social network is proportional to nlogn. But it is also marred by similar limitations.

DAU vs MAU:

DAU stands for daily average users and monthly average users. A network having high daily average users are very effective. Content sharing and creation is very high on these networks, hence they have high capability to make a story viral. Facebook has been able to maintain this ratio above 50% for quite some time now while other networks are struggling to keep it even 5 percent. Therefore a product launch or brand building exercise on Facebook  can be more effective than any other network.

Conclusion:

To estimate the value of a social one must not look on sheer number of people in that network but look at the interaction level of consumers on that network. A network which has higher level of content. sharing and creation can make a story viral easily.The feedbacks from consumers are fast and abundant.These responses can be used to build effective marketing strategies.

 Before spending any time or labour on any social network one must estimate its effectiveness in accordance with his marketing strategy.

Panel Discussion: Leveraging Social Media for HR and Allied Perspectives

Apart from having a very direct impact on core business areas like marketing, social media has also had an impact on other functions viz., HR. Since there is no directly apparent correlation between social media and certain peripheral business functions, the potential of social media has been underutilised.

Preceding the core business functions, there is the case of individual scouting and development. Social media has this characteristic of making geographic boundaries meaningless. Making the case for allied perspectives, Mr. Gaurava Yadav, founder, UPEPL said, "When a boy in Faizabad can share information with somebody sitting in Chennai, that is something which speaks about the power of social media."

It is however, to be understood that social media platforms are being customised to suit the needs of businesses. Moreover, there are several social media vehicles which aren't being developed and utilised. For instance, China, the most populous country in the world, isn't so big on the conventional social media sites. One such opportunity is real-time translation. In the words of Mr. Rohit Bansal, CEO, India Strategy Group, "Why can't a Chinese talk to us as we talk to one another?"

There is an HR perspective to social media, most importantly focused on employees. The employees are the backbone of every organisation, thus the popular tenet "employee first." Be it recruitment, acquisition or engagement, social media, in a variety of forms such as games, networking sites, has huge potential for the HR function. Ms. Gargi Banerjee, Managing Consultant, PriceWaterhouseCoopers India is of the opinion, "Social media, especially gamification, takes into account the kind of employees that are in an organisation, which makes it very effective in employee engagement."

In its essence, social media is centred around communication, and that is the key to leveraging social media for HR and other associated aspects of core business functions. Business enterprises of the future need to understand this potential capability of social meida and utilise it in non-conventional forms as well to gain maximum benefit out of it.

This post was written by Jayesh Surisetti, PGP 2013-15. He can be contacted at pgp13082.jayesh@iimraipur.ac.in

Panel Discussion: Future of Digital Businesses and Innovations in Social Media

New age enterprises have started taking social media as a strong link between the message, what they want to convey and the audience, to whom the message is to be conveyed. Social media has opened up new avenues of communicating and linking with the target audience; there are so many things which are being experimented upon on social media platforms, things which would never have been on the face of conventional media vehicles. Brands have begun to realise that they can be made or broken by way of social media.

A trend which has emerged is in the field of advertising. Big-time corporate firms have shifted a lot of their advertising and other promotional expenditure to online, digital and social platforms; this is not only frugal in its approach but also very high on penetration. What the social media has also done is that it has made content very entertaining and engaging, having positive ramifications. From the business perspective, this had led to an increasing involvement of social media in key strategic business functions and more prima facie, customer engagement functions.

For individuals and potential consumers, all support and engagement activities come at the cost of privacy. According to Ms. Sweta Sharma, COO and co-founder, Simplify360, "there has been a marked rise in instances of targeted adverts and big data, but the customer is not aware of that." We, as individual entities and consumers, have begun "inventing and re-inventing ourselves" on a digital platform. In light of these rapidly occuring changes, the key is in synchronising the evolution of individuals and consumers with the evolution of social media and the information available. In words of Mr. Thennavan Subbiah, Head, Digital Marketing, Adobe, "the challenge [here] is to utilise the information available and identify what matters to the customers."

The most important point that the panel members reiterated was the importance of content. The key to success of any business in the social media scenario lies majorly in the quality and focus of content; as Mr. Anant Goenka, Director and Head-New Media, Indian Express Limited, put it aptly, "Content is the King, Queen and Jack of social media."

In nuce, the fact is that social media is here to stay. With all its dynamism, social media has a lot to offer. Therefore, it can and should be leveraged by businesses in their future endeavours.

This post was written by Jayesh Surisetti, PGP 2013-15. He can be reached at pgp13082.jayesh@iimraipur.ac.in