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NASSCOM Fridays 2.0 sessions….
By Kshiti Garg | January 15, 2010
Last Friday, Bishal asked me to attend this session on online social media at NASSCOM office. Reached there with team mate Vijay… Well now a gist of the session.
Since, we reached there much ahead of time (actually we were the first ones to reach,) we had plenty time to ‘Network’ with industry people over tea before the session actually started. Now give me an opportunity to talk and I would never let it go unexplored…lol…tried talking to these ‘serious’ people. Okay let me not get wandered away…
Let’s focus on the core event…
It was the 55th Fridays 2.0 session. It started with a key note from Ankur Lal, CEO Infozech.
Ankur introduced the format to the audience that every attendee first introduced themselves, a brief about the company they are representing and their sole reason of being there for the session.
Okay one thing I’m missing here is the audience strength. As Ankur and Avinash, NASSCOM pointed out, as opposed to the expected crowd of around 30-35 people, the session had an audience of over 50. I would prefer to give the credit to the hot topic of the session – leveraging social media as a tool for online marketing.
The presenter for the session was Gaurav Mishra, CEO, 20-20 Social. Gaurav is more popularly known for his blog gauravonomics. He’s in his own words a thought leader and a major promoter of social media and social media analytics.
Gaurav’s presentation focused on Indian product start-ups. He began with defining a quadrant of target users on x-axis and type of innovation on y-axis. The quadrant defined how any product start-up in India can be classified as either a tweak or an invention and can have either local or global audience.
The question that hooked everyone in the audience was – Where do most of the product start-ups we can name belong? As Gaurav aptly pointed out, most of the Indian start-ups have been tweaks for the local markets and hardly any targeted Global market.
He named a few that have not just dared to build products for the global market but also turned into successful ventures. These examples saw some contributions from the audience as well and heated up some discussions on the USPs and potential of these startups.
Gaurav listed out five trends that would prepare Indian startups for a global stage –
1. SaaS-based delivery models and Cloud Computing - enabling widespread sales and distribution and easy scalability with minimum investments since it is always easy to get trail users and eventually migrate to pay per use models.
2. Application Ecosystems – These are user-friendly and easy-to-use platforms where anybody can build their own innovative applications.
3. Social Web – The global Tech Blog Ecosystems are showing interest in Startups from emerging economies like India and China. The gatekeepers driving initial adoption of tech startups are waking up to success stories from Indian tech blogs. Leveraging these to find the right resources as well as customers could prove to be a highly fruitful investment of time.
4. Viral Marketing – besides using the social web to build effective social connections, Gaurav pointed these could also be used for creating a buzz about a new product or application by reaching out to millions of subscribers of virality platforms like Techmeme, Tweetmeme and Facebook Connect.
5. Support Ecosystem – Tech start-ups can either build and maintain their own support platforms or leverage social websites like Twitter to find prospects and track customer complaints and then use Skype to convert or close them. Customer-driven support platforms like GetSatisfaction can enable tech startups to offer support at scale without building a big support team.
Couldn’t agree more to the must haves Gaurav listed here. The great part was - I see Drishti fulfilling the first two very aptly. Also we have our in-house 24 X 7 support team answering the 5th one. And the remaining… tech blog ecosystem and viral marketing parts are definitely the ‘Take Aways’ for us.
Another lesson learnt…Social media could be a powerful tool for B2B type of businesses and could prove to be worth the time and patience invested. I’m not considering the costs here since it’s probably the cheapest when mass advertising comes into the picture.
Let me sum up now with a Thank You to Gaurav Mishra for making me understand the core principle of any form of marketing - sell the idea as in “What is the benefit that the end user can derive from your product or service?” The product and brand become secondary to this. Also a confession to make… It was the very idea of - How we can leverage the power of social media for online marketing of our business that brought us to the session.
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