Companies are getting socially active

BANGALORE, INDIA: It is not new that companies have realized the power and impact of social media. Today almost every brand is using the social media to engage with the customers. And these platforms have become important tools of grievance readdress and keeping an eye on brand abusers.

According Rajan Kohli, chief marketing officer (CMO) at Wipro's Global IT Business, Wipro targets present and prospective employees and customers through social media engagements.

“Social media management is important to build healthy rapport with not only present engagements but also the future ones,” he said.

The present world of social networking is not only about Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, but it has new entrants like Slideshare, Groupon, Tumblr, Shuffler, Yelp and more.

How it benefit companies?

The benefits that companies are realizing is understanding their customer/client habits, requirements and interests before putting their proposals. Moving a step ahead of the customer relations management or CRM, companies will see adoption of Social CRM, which would be a sophisticated social media engagement tool.

Ramswaroop Gopalan, country manager of SapientNitro India, an interactive marketing, creative design, and technology services agency said, “Analysts typically tout social CRM space to become multi-billion dollars big in next couple of years. Companies are trying to understand these platforms, be it B2B or B2C.

Best brands yet to exploit Facebook, Twitter

He added, “The best brands in the world have still not exploited Facebook and Twitter to the fullest, and only a handful of companies have moved beyond the typical exercise of opening a fan page or getting a Twitter handle.”

With the help of the technology, companies from various verticals like apparel, telecom, banks to retail have started virtually talking to their customers. For every complaint mentioned to Airtel (@Airtel_presence), it asks the customer to write an email at the provided address. Vodafone recently got into legal strife with one of its customers, who according to the company was making mala fide comments on Facebook.

Agrees Sweta Sharma, social media strategy analyst at In Rev Systems, “There is a huge demand for social CRM tools. Since the tools help capture the sentiments and understand the conversation, more and more companies are looking for it.”

The company has social media management application named Simplify360, a web-based social media engagement and analytics platform. The company has partnered with a leading bank and FMCG brands, that look for brand monitoring, brand comparison and even campaign monitoring.

She said, “These tools gather data across social platforms including social networks, blogs, news, social video sharing sites, which is further analyzed and presented in charts and graphs. For companies, this is a single dashboard to map the influence of the brand, in form of graphs and statistics.”