Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Dear Friends,

As we look back on a year filled with surprises, adventures, major developments, unexpected challenges, and enormous gratifications, we are keenly aware we wouldn’t be here without you, our clients, proteges, well wishers,  partners, supporters and friends.

Thank you for helping us learn and grow.

Here’s looking  forward to a wonderful and joyous 2012 together!

“Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.”
~Hal Borlan”

Cheers from all of us at Dot Now Social

In continuance with our previous post, here we’d like to widen the scope of Social Media with respect to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which Businesses these days term as Consumer Generated Media (CGM) or simply- User Generated Content (UGC).

In the coming weeks, the Dot Now Social team will come up with a series of blog posts highlighting how Social CRM can be effectively applied in some Domains/Verticals, keeping in mind the basics of Social Media (i.e- Listening, Engagement, Alignment, Integration, Measurement) and CRM (i.e-Acquiring, Servicing, Retaining) and we’ll also try to bring the SME/SMB perspective into the picture.

This series of blog posts has been named as the Social CRM-Consumerization of the Enterprise(SCE) series

Deep Red Ink, as I think about the name it reminds me of the explanation behind the name which ran into number of pages. Well today I will consider it as an accomplishment as CEO of Dot Now Social. But when I accepted the invitation of Santhan and Deepti to be part of the ecology it was an easy, obvious and humbling choice.

DRI is an ecology formed to support great ideas. DRI is not any other business, not one that can be defined by the boundaries of capacity and limitation of bandwidth. DRI is a “concept business” which is all about supporting great ideas driven by passionate entrepreneurs. Though it may appear that DRI is about providing great content, the fundamentals of how the content is generated is the true crux of the business.

While enough has been said about the importance of content in the internet age and on social media, one thing that gets usually ignored is understanding what kind of content goes viral. Many schools of content strategy have spoken of different things, some like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki have sighted it as mere chance. DRI has a fundamentally different approach rooted in the “spiritual” foundation of the founding team. Well, I cannot call myself an expert on the subject but I can say that it is a unique approach and as someone who is building a business on social media I can say it is working. A content strategy based on passion of the entrepreneur, authenticity in communication and “spirit” level approaches may not directly appeal to the ad hoc ”internet age” youngster who claims to be a Social Media expert. But as a student of marketing, the success of the content produced at DRI is a close certainty.

DRI is a concept business also because their interactions with the client are never merely to accomplish the details of a brief. DRI is an evolved business because it strives to connect with the deepest sense of purpose of the client, which is the most amazing form of building customer relationship. DRI is a concept business because profit doesnt drive the reason it chooses a client. The joy derived by working with the client is the only parameter of gauging whom to work with.

This is my favorite part. DRI is a concept business because of the way it is structured. DRI is an ecology of 6 partners. Santhan, Deepti, Anil, Netrix, Quick Silver & Dot Now Social. The structure of the partnership is that all revenues are divided between the 6 partners equally irrespective of who participates in a particular project in what capacity. I’ve been enamored by entrepreneurship and enterprises for over 4 years, and have studied business models with the vigor of a geek, but DRI beats them all. To common sense it does not appeal, nor does it sound totally logical, even remotely viable. But it is perhaps the most interesting journey of my entrepreneurial journey to see DRI evolve as a sustainable, profitable and growing business.

Dot Now Social is proud to be part of this successful experiment as takes this opportunity thank all members of Deep Red Ink ecology and all the clients of Deep Red Ink. I’m very keenly observing how DRI is shaping up and giving meaning to a key learning of last year that Ecologies are the new Business Ethic. As Social Media partners at DRI, we have received amazing work, from amazing clients with the most interesting challenges. We are looking forward to more.

In this blog, I’m going to talk about my journey, after Engineering and the factors that influenced my decision to join Dot Now Social.

Even before I finished my Engineering, I had two jobs in hand. Both were startups. I was spoilt for choice. One dealt with Social Media strategy consulting, while the other was a global technology, services and consulting provider which coincidentally belonged to my kin.

I had always wanted to go through the startup experience. After sitting through numerous Entrepreneurship seminars, panel discussions and by just reading their books and articles, I had decided that someday I want to be an Entrepreneur. After my 4 years of Engineering, I realized that, there’s more to my life (like many of my peers) than just programming, networking, solving security issues or anything remotely close to what I had studied in my Information Technology course. I was more inclined towards Business Development and elements surrounding it. Having demonstrated Leadership roles and my flair for organizing activities and events successfully led to a lot of people (including a few of my professors and peers) suggesting me to look at this option of ‘starting my own thing’ or simply joining a startup.  I had learnt a lot about startups and the huge amount of challenges they face on a regular basis, through books, blogs and seminars that I had attended during my days at the Entrepreneurship Cell at college, AIESEC and various TiE(The IndUS Entrepreneurs) events.  The kind of growth they are poised for, the enormous amount of learning associated with this experience, it all sounded really exciting. It was something different, something adventurous.
So, joining a startup became very much a part of my ‘future’ plans. Even the fact that at this age, I could really experiment with my yet-to-start career gave me a big morale boost. So, the day finally arrived when I was actually offered a job in a startup. But, as luck had to have it, I got another one, following my first offer in just a space of 3-4 days. And, I was in a big fix. On one side, I had job security (thanks to my kin!), while on the other hand, I had a bigger challenge and a chance to see the Business world, right from its grassroots, i.e Small/Medium Businesses or Enterprises and learn and do everything right from scratch. Joining my Uncle’s firm would have put me into a ‘comfort zone’ of sorts.  I knew that I’d end up earning more at my Uncle’s firm but the kind of learning would be restricted and will be accompanied with a lot of aversion. I’d be eyed by all my co-workers as the ‘Boss’ nephew’. All my work, how much ever effort I put in will be regarded as a palpable fact and my failure (if I do manage to!) would be looked down upon . It would have definitely outcasted me from forming a healthy bond with my co-workers. But, I had some time before I got started with Dot Now, so I thought I’d do an internship at my Uncle’s firm. Being an former of Sitel (PanAsia) and Director(Outsourcing) at Dell, I knew I stand to learn a lot from him. Over the next 2-3 months, I took care of the Web-site and helped in revamping it, designed marketing collaterals, drew out branding and communications strategies, and also managed logistics.

Soon after that, I went for a short holiday and on my return, joined Dot Now Social. Its been almost a month now and its been through a great learning experience. Got to see Small/Medium Businesses very closely, working with our clients. Understood their constraints- theirs small budgets and diminutive resources and the challenges we face in scaling them. Apart from that, learnt a lot of new things about Social media sites- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon and many more. Also gained substantial knowledge about the Strategy and expertise building concept. Represented my company in around 3 conferences already ,got well-versed with a lot of business jargon and lastly, started Blogging!
Its too early to say that “ I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference”
But, today, into my 4th week at Dot Now Social, I’m proud to have made this decision!

Social Media is the umbrella term for blogs, social networks, micro blogging etc. There is a lot of talk about these media being very beneficial to businesses. We are part of the same band wagon and have the same strong belief that social media is very beneficial to businesses.

I was an early adopter of social networks, one of the first few thousand to begin using Hi5 and Orkut in India, but soon found very little use. I was attracted to professional networks and began exploring LinkedIn and found the concept very useful. Much before LinkedIn popularized jobs, I was searching for interesting people and interesting startups to join after my education. I found the company I went on to begin my professional career with on LinkedIn.

The CEO of the company I joined used to write one of the most popular CEO blogs in India. Obviously blogging was a habit in the company and thereby was drawn back to the blogging revolution after a couple of unsuccessful attempts. I blogged about my own learning, knowing little about popular blogging conventions. The blog enticed some interest in my clients and potential clients and greatly aided in establishing my competence as a Management Consultant.

Keeping in view of the growing global consensus, with firms like McKinsey opening dialogue, of social media becoming extremely useful for business, I began exploring the opportunity of helping businesses. In this process I conversed with Vemana, an avid blogger and social media researcher, and explored the Idea. His extensive knowledge of social media, thanks to his research in the space, and how it truly resembles the real world kicked off our endeavor.

We have begun our journey with firm belief, supported by rationale, that social media and social technologies can prove very useful for businesses. As we studied the social media consulting space in India we found that the firms were using case studies based of businesses in the developed world or campaigns from large India consumer companies which ran parallel campaigns in traditional media. So we have set out to help real businesses, irrespective of their size or industry, to benefit from social media.

We hope to add real value to the space of businesses benefitting from social media. Based on our understanding of media and social culture we hope to design strategies for our clients so that they unleash the potential of these new media and achieve their business objectives. We have devised an offering spread we hope will deliver 360 degree benefit to our clients. We hope through our research, both independent and through engagements, we would bring out stories of real success.