Looking at leveraging Social Media for your organization? Want to know how can you exploit the power of Facebook, Twitter and other Social Media platforms for Branding, Lead Generation and Customer Acquisition? You will find this article interesting and useful!

1. Tweet me, Like me, Buy me
Pradeep Chopra, co-founder and CEO of Digital Vidya, shares his views
on how companies can leverage social media effectively
AS TOLD TO POORNIMA KAVLEKAR
Pradeep Chopra has established himself firmly in the towards this activity? And how do they integrate this
digital marketing space in India. Having been a part of with the mainline marketing strategy of the company?
the Internet Industry since 1999, he co-founded Whizlabs,
an information technology education company and later Social media can be used to fulfil various business
OMLogic Consulting, a digital marketing company. And objectives that go beyond marketing. The company needs
he helped both these companies to leverage the digital to have clarity on the key objectives for which they are
medium in establishing their brands. Having seen the interested in leveraging social media. It could used for
role digital media, especially social media, plays in a brand building, lead generation, customer acquisition
brand’s development, he decided to impart the same and customer
knowledge to others. A graduate from IIT Delhi, he co- relationship
founded Digital Vidya, a company that imparts training management.
on digital marketing. The company has differentiated Then, based on the
itself from other competitors by being among the first target audience,
to hold workshops on social media marketing. Chopra, they should choose
a principal trainer for the company, is one of the most the social media
sought after speakers in digital marketing and he has been platforms they
invited to speak at Search Engine Strategies in the U.S., want to leverage.
World Social Media Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Global For example, if
Youth Marketing Forum and NASSCOM India Leadership their objective is
Forum. He writes on entrepreneurship and digital lead generation and
marketing for many business publications. they are targeting
IT professionals,
Chopra defines social media as any media in which user it makes sense to
generated (vs. editorial) content dominates the page. There leverage LinkedIn.
are hundreds of social media platforms such as Facebook, For budgeting, they PRADEEP CHOPRA,
LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, SlideShare, Pinterest and need to look at CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, DIGITAL VIDYA
Flickr. He shares with us his views on how a company can resources, especially
leverage social media effectively. people, who are going to participate than just looking at
monetary investment. In this case, leveraging LinkedIn for
A two–year old company with a total staff strength B2B lead generation should be a part of overall sales and
of 15 wants to start a marketing campaign through marketing strategy.
social media. While the company does plan to
expand its scale of operations in the next two years, A consumer products company wants to hire a person
it is currently willing to hire one dedicated resource dedicated to handle social media campaigns. What
towards this marketing campaign. How should should be the skill set that they should look for in this
it develop and execute a successful social media person?
marketing campaign keeping its future plans in
mind? Ideally, what should be their budget allocation If they are looking at building a community on Facebook
44 • The Smart CEO | August 2012
2012

2. thesmartCEO.in
for customer engagement, the person responsible should if they go live on social media they will have to deal with
have strong communication skills as the basic skill. negative conversations. The reality is they don’t have a
However, if the objective is to do lead generation or sell choice about what and when their customers are going to
their products using Facebook advertising, the person speak about them on social media. By not being on social
should be good at writing advertisement copy and must media they are only putting their reputation at risk.
have good analytical skills.
There’s nothing wrong in having negative feedback unless
Advise a startup entrepreneur to plan out how to use it’s extreme in which case there must be some fundamental
Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. What is the broad issue with the product or service. If the company can
level purpose to use each of these platforms? address the negative issues in public, they are not only
addressing the concerns of the people who have shared
Almost all of these can be used to achieve varied their feedback but also addressing the concerns of many
business objectives. However, Facebook is best suited others, who have not shared their feedback but are
for creating visibility for the brand and to engage with its undergoing a similar experience. It begins with taking
customers. In case of an e-commerce business, Facebook responsibility and just by acknowledging the situation.
advertisement can be used for direct sales as well. For Almost 50 per cent of the problem gets resolved as the
example, Chumbak, an Indian souvenir product company, dissatisfied customer feels that someone is looking at his
generates over 25 per cent of its revenue through or her feedback.
Facebook. For further details, check out https://www.
facebook.com/advertising/success-stories/chumbak. Trudy finds that his company’s ice cream brand’s
Facebook page has one lakh likes. How does he
Given the professional nature of LinkedIn, it is best suited convert them into customers?
for B2B lead generation including partnerships. Twitter
being an interest network is a great platform for building There are a number of ways. They can make regular
thought leadership, performing market research and can announcements about the launch of new flavours, new
be a great channel for lead generation for a number of stores and special offers. They can run contests and
business verticals. To share an example, in our recent connect them with an activity at their stores. Cocoberry
social media workshop in Mumbai, a participant, who runs in India is a good example to refer to. Find more details
a web development startup generated three business leads about their Facebook presence at http://www.facebook.
from Twitter during the workshop. com/cocoberryfrozenyogurt.
The marketing manager of a five-year-old food In our case, we are able to leverage the cover photo of our
products company has been trying to convince the Facebook page to announce our upcoming special 100th
founder to make social media campaigns a part of social media workshop across India. You can have a look
the company’s marketing strategy. But the founder at the same at https://www.facebook.com/digitalvidya
is apprehensive about the open negative feedback
from this platform. Can you help this entrepreneur Vaibhav, the marketing officer of Triple Home
understand why it is important for him to leverage Security Solutions, finds that the company’s Facebook
social media and how to handle negative feedback? page is active only when there is an email newsletter
sent from his company on a fortnightly basis. How
Unfortunately, a number of business owners believe that can he otherwise keep the interaction with his
“ Unfortunately, a number of business owners believe that if they go live on social
media they will have to deal with negative conversations. The reality is they don’t have
a choice about what and when their customers are going to speak about them on social
media. By not being on social media they are only putting their reputation at risk.
”
August 2012 | The Smart CEO • 45

3. social media guides to help small and medium businesses
effectively use these tools to grow. Find more details at
https://www.facebook.com/dellsocialmedia
The Facebook fan page of a comic book brand has
5000 likes. Can it get to 100,000 likes and what
strategy can it adopt to make this happen?
Unless they have some other media to reach out to their
potential fans or they are able to create an exceptionally
powerful viral campaign, they don’t have a choice but to
use Facebook advertising to expect this kind of inorganic
growth.
How does a quick service restaurant owner measure
the success of his company’s social media marketing
campaign? Is there any way to measure the return
on investment of such campaigns?
It depends upon the objective the restaurant wants to
fulfil using social media. For example, Gun Powder
restaurant, with little more than 5000 fans on their
Facebook page, is able to leverage it for generating table
bookings on regular basis. Here’s more about them at
https://www.facebook.com/gunpowderkitchen. Similarly,
Faasos, which makes and delivers wraps in Pune and
Mumbai is able to creatively leverage twitter by offering
Tweet 2 Order system. More about it at https://twitter.
com/#!/faasos
Figment Solutions is a two-year-old IT services firm.
How important is social media for them? How does
any B2B business leverage social media?
customers alive on a daily basis through the social LinkedIn can be a great source of lead generation for
media pages? the company. A number of Indian companies are using
LinkedIn for incredible amount of business generation
They need to answer the fundamental question, ‘What’s through the participation of their key sales executives.
in it for their fans to participate in their Facebook page Evalueserve in India is one of the best examples of
on an ongoing basis?’ Accordingly, they need to plan a company which has used LinkedIn for B2B lead
their content calendar and then regularly engage with generation. Through our social media workshops, we’ve
their fans. ‘Social Media for Business – Powered by worked with a number of IT companies across India to
Dell’ is a great example of how a brand is looking at help them leverage both LinkedIn and Twitter for B2B
offering value to its fans than just directly promoting lead generations.
their products and services. It has created a series of
46 • The Smart CEO | August 2012
2012