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A dialogue manager in a converged worldHow can you build up long-lasting relationships with dialogue partners and use social media to attract and engage quality customers?

B y J a y d i p C h o w d h u r y

IIt was not Omar Al Mukhtar who intro-duced the Arab Spring to Egypt but a Google executive, Wael Ghonim, whose campaign on Facebook and the famous #Jan25 tweet that undermined Hosni Mubarak’s political regime in Egypt. Sim-ilarly, it was not a management consult-ant who shaped customer service bench-marks at United Airlines but a YouTube video released by Dave Carol and his band, earning more than 150,000 views for his song about how United Airlines broke his guitar during a transit from Chicago to Omaha.

Social movements like the French rev-olution or American war of Independence were the result of intellectuals indulging in meaningful dialogue. Today, in the 20th century, we are seeing digital Darwinism – where opinion is shaped through social media discussion and results in revolu-tion. Whether those revolutions are riot for good or bad, the fact remains that social media has taken over as central axis of socio-geo-politico- economic and business diplomacy in the world.

Dialogue model

Dialogue and the way communica-tions is driven across industry – or for that matter in society – is not the same as it used to be. Today, publicists, equity analysts, advertisers or even lobbyists or policy change advocates have all taken refuge to social or digital media. In their book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Rice and Jack Trout wrote that “in PR we pray, and in advertising we pay.” With the confluence of social and digital media, perhaps we have to write a new book, one that talks about a converged smart world, where cus-tomers in a crowd-shared model build communication dialogues for the brand, not the other way round. Today, news

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breaks over social media, followed by the conventional media. It is believed that 25 per cent of Twitter users are journalists. So, once you have built the right message in the right context you have won half the battle, as this story will surely trav-el across the multitude of social media word-of-mouth to land up as a big story in print press.

To reach out to either a normative audience such as government and policy makers, or formative such as customers, or even diffusive stakeholders such as media or market analysts, you don’t need to pray but be prudent enough to devise effective messaging on the right social tool.

Celebrities and top rated equity re-search analysts are paid heavily or used as influencers to tweet about a beauty product or a company’s stock valuation. Opinion building and social media activ-ism on important policy matters have started affecting an organisation and its services in the oil, gas, infrastructure, and telecom sectors.

Gone is the supremacy of television: a YouTube video is preferred over tele-vision commercials. A Facebook post is more effective than an in-house news-letter as mode of employee communica-tions. Press releases are optimised and the popularity of online press like Huff-ington Post over the 'pink' press is ever increasing. These facts point to the same conclusion: the age of social media has arrived, wherein conventional media will stay with us but won’t enjoy its tradi-tional monopoly. And as that monopoly ends, communications structures and models change from indirect to direct influence. Here, the network can follow its customers, wherever and whichever platform he or she visits. The good part of this story is that both dialogue manag-ers and their customers are in a win-win situation, weeding out many unwanted intruders who often dilute and digress, misinterpreting core messages during the dialogue process as its flows from organ-isation to customers and stakeholders through conventional print or electronic media.

A change in dialogue

With the influx of social media core to dialogue tools, the way communications is driven has evolved altogether to a new platform and model:

• Word-of-mouth, which used to be the most influential mode of communications, is today seen as social media conversation.

• Advertising (second most in-fluential) has evolved as digital strategy.

• In public relations, dialogue managers are no longer praying to media houses but opening up avenues of dialogue over a plethora of social media, and pushing customized publication over these tools and channels reaching directly to the target audience.

• With these evolutions, market research is shifting to online big data; real time data mining and instant feedback to change a campaign is the name of the game now.

• Customers today can view, give feedback as well as buy content or products simultaneously- opening up new opportunities and higher levels of transparency, trust as information moves from dialogue managers to customers.

The binary code of social media

Instead of zeros and ones, the binary code of social media is ‘like’ and ‘share’: these two ‘codes’ are behind any complex online social media campaign or digital strategy. Built on these two codes, social media strategy revolves around either success or failure. What looks simple can be decisive, making or breaking a brand in the marketplace with things going aw-

fully wrong and/or going viral. On the other hand, a positive wave

can change the mindset of your custom-ers, and result in overnight success of a brand or campaign. Up until yester-day, brand owners were not sure if their product was liked by customers while the campaign was running, unless it was reflected in the increase or stagnation of sales volume. Today, we live in a real time world, where instant feedback is factored to change the plot of a movie or features of a new product. The rule of thumb is simple: if they like, they will share, and if they share, it will go viral. So, it all de-pends upon ‘likeability’ and ‘shareability’ of a product or its campaign over social media.

A strategy to increase reach

Link your Pinterest pin to your Face-book post, which links to your blog, which in turn features a video from your You-Tube channel…. This could be one out of many tactics to increase your reach but, again, the bottom line is simple: content has to be liked and shared. According-ly, choose your medium or tools, which can be interconnected to create a chain reaction.

“Today, we live in a real time world,

where instant feedback is factored to change the plot of a movie or features of a new product.”

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Jaydip Chowdhury head of Corporate Communication and advocacy, Bilcare research

Jaydip Chowdhury is head of corporate communication and advocacy at Bilcare research, the pharma packaging compa-ny with operations across asia, Europe and the uS. in addition to public affairs, Jaydip also oversees investor relations for the company.

Social commerce

The rules of social commerce are clear: if you are not buying any product, you are the target product yourself. As you like and pass on product-related content to your network, it finally lands up in sales. But in the process, it creates a circle of social commerce. Interestingly, in this circle strangers become promoters of the product. Unlike the old advertising mod-el, here you attract>convert>close>de-light (see right), transforming strangers to promoters. What starts as simple blog may end up in brand sale with call-to-action button. Such is the beauty of social commerce.

Social media dialogue is changing customer relationship management (CRM) as well. Social CRM is the use of so-cial media services, techniques and tech-nology to enable organisations to engage with their customers (see table below).

What we see today is a tectonic shift in which customers are reached with specific tailor-made, bespoke commu-nications. The key takeaways for social CRM are:

• Engagement replaces advertis-ing

• Community recommendations outpaces company assertions

• Instant feedback leaves no room for carelessness

• Open business ecosystem inten-sifies competition

This results in transparent, timely and truthful communications by dia-logue managers

Spices for social media success:

Most successful social media cam-paigns will have certain spices added up to make its recipe delectable, palatable and electric to its eclectic audience. It is often said in this context that social me-dia is a cocktail party and not a sit down, fine dining event. The key features are:

• Like and share is central to going viral

• Real time engagement of contest and other activities

• Crowd sharing is the new nor-mal of engagement and content creation

• Conversation boast over social influencers

• Content-driven strategy: short content with info-graphics or AV is preferred

• YouTube, short video replacing television commercial

how CrM EvolvEd into SoCial CrM

WHO CrM Specific departments SoCial CrM EveryoneWHat CrM Company-centric process SoCial CrM Customer-centric processWHErE CrM Defined channels SoCial CrM Customer-driven dynamic channelsWHEN CrM Set business hours SoCial CrM Customer-set hoursWHY CrM transaction SoCial CrM InteractionHOW CrM Message flow outside SoCial CrM Message come inside

BlogSocial Media

Keywordspages

Calls to actionlanding pages

FormsContacts

Emailworkflows

lead ScoringCrM integrations

Social MediaSmart Calls to action

Emailworkflows

visitorsStrangers leads promotersCustomers

attraCt ConvErt CloSE dEliGht

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Ford Figo Aspire #WhatDrivesYou

Ford started their What Drives You? campaign during the launch of Figo Aspire, a compact sedan. With this campaign, Ford roped in actor Farhan Akhtar as anchor for conducting drive-by interviews in Ford Figo Aspire with real life achievers, such as the founder of RedBus.in, co-founders of Happily-unmarried.com and so on. Through the passionate stories shared by the young achievers, the campaign aimed to reflect on the needs of the young consumer in modern India.

Let me conclude by giving few case studies to substantiate my point-of-view; incidentally, these are amongst some of last year’s best social campaigns:

Pepsi #CrashThePepsiIPL

Crash the Pepsi IPL was a crowd-sourc-ing campaign that Pepsi launched in IPL8. In this disruptive campaign, fans were invited to make commercials that showcased their love for Pepsi. Pepsi promised that the best ads of 30-second duration would be aired during the IPL matches. In addition to the fame, the win-ners would also receive cash prize of one lakh rupees. With this campaign, Pepsi was able to leverage the creativity of con-tent creation communities, such as You-Tube users and bloggers on the internet and promote the Pepsi brand.

MRF Tyres #MRFRainDay

Instead of predicting the rains in Mumbai as done in the previous years, this season, MRF Tyres chose to deviate and promote its monsoon friendly tyres. With the launch of a self-tweeting smart cloud, #MRFRainDay, that answered all queries regarding rains, this promotion also encouraged fans to send in Dub-smash videos on the theme song and a gave a chance to win a MRF bat auto-graphed by Sachin Tendulkar, its brand ambassador.

#TheAwesomeJob

Premium whisky maker, William Grant & Sons has launched a digital campaign titled The Awesome Job to find Grant’s India Brand Ambassador. Instead of using a celebrity to endorse the brand, this people-backed campaign helped to promote the brand’s ideolo-gy of Stand Together. The campaign reinforced the ideology of the brand as only friends could nominate one for this contest. All information and updates re-garding the contest are communicated through a microsite launched for this purpose. With this campaign, the brand has set its eyes on India as a lucrative market and is gearing up to introduce more brands in the country. A microsite served to contain the progress and up-dates on the contest.

x Reliance General Insurance #DarkTravelTale

In order to generate interest in its travel insurance plans among the Indian youth, Reliance General Insurance devised this campaign where they gave fans a starting point of a story and invited fans to come up with a suspense story. Fans needed to imagine the worst scenarios that one could face while traveling abroad. With a suspense storytelling effect, the brand attempted to co-create a graphic novel with its fan community. This novel was called Dark Travel Tale and it became the world’s first Twitter-curated graphic novel. •