By Uddeepta Bandyopadhyay
In the dark of the night, you want to reach home after a party. You call for a cab using your mobile app. A pleasant gentleman turns up and drops you home safely. In return, you post a positive feedback on the social media. Or, you order for a swanky smart-phone on a famous online portal. After you received the package, you open to find a faulty phone, again you go and post a feedback in their followers’ page....oops this time it is not so positive!
Sounds too complicated? Let us take help of a close to reality story to make it more fun.
In the dark of the night, you want to reach home after a party. You call for a cab using your mobile app. A pleasant gentleman turns up and drops you home safely. In return, you post a positive feedback on the social media. Or, you order for a swanky smart-phone on a famous online portal. After you received the package, you open to find a faulty phone, again you go and post a feedback in their followers’ page....oops this time it is not so positive! Sounds too complicated? Let us take help of a close to reality story to make it more fun.
Our protagonist is Linda is a successful entrepreneur. She is the CEO of Sporty, a famous outlet selling sports- and fitness-wear. Linda holds an MBA degree from an Ivy League recognized institute. Since its inception, Sporty has been highly successful in selling high quality sports-wear that has reflected in a profitable business.
After Sporty has had Linda as its CEO, the company has witnessed a double digit growth, thus making it one of the market leaders in the fitness-wear segment. For four consecutive years, Sporty has never had a set-back, and thanks to Linda’s efficient business techniques!
Initially, Sporty began with just 10 outlets, but today, it boasts of 45 stores all over the United States. The company has also begun expanding across various geographies and expanding its business footprint all over the globe.
This year has also proved good for Sporty, with the company experiencing exponential growth from the beginning of the year. Yet, over the last few days, Sporty’s sales graph has taken a dip. With each passing day, this depreciated growth figure seems to be prominent, which will surely get Linda worried. While Linda’s family vacation to India is all set for the next month, the dipping graph of her company may take her by surprise. The only solution is to fix it as quickly as possible so that she can not only have a sigh of relief about her company’s performance, but can also enjoy her long planned vacation.
All the top notch executives of Sporty are back to drawing board. They are determined to stop this sudden fall in sales.
First thing first, what actually caused this problem? The sales managers, the store managers, marketing, or PR, no one has any idea what actually caused it. But, it is clear that for some reason, customers are not turning up. Why so?
Emilia and Sunil, stars of the sales and marketing departments, have prepared a report on the topic together in just two days. They have gone through all the relevant data in their ERP, all the reports from the in-house BI system, quality reports, packaging standards, everything. As Linda has stated, there is no problem with respect to the inside process. There is something else that is not right and probably the clue lies outside. Perhaps, a full-fledged customer interview will take long time, it is expensive and success is not guaranteed.
Subsequent to a lot of discussion, George suggested something. George heads the IT department; he is calm and poised, and talks only when required. He had heard of an Indian company during a data science conference. It gave him an impression that their Social Sentiment Analysis Service can give Sporty a direction. After a brief discussion, it is all thumbs up. Within the next 48 hours, the Indian team signed in.
The Indian Company has assigned Prakash Raj, a young and dynamic project manager for this assignment. Above anything, Linda liked his enthusiastic spirit and cheerful attitude. Within a few hours, Prakash and his team got started.
Prakash set up a Sentiment Analysis Tool for Sporty in Sporty’s server (as Sporty desired). After a discussion with the stores manager’s and the sales team, Prakash quickly figured out that before Thursday (a fortnight back), the trend was normal. Now the question was - what happened after Thursday? With few clicks, Prakash’s team set up a data ingest job for all the online media, which relate or connect groups that can be Sporty’s customers. It is now almost 40 minutes since the data ingest started. Linda could feel she is a bit nervous, and decided for a quick coffee break.
In the cafeteria, her thoughts took her back to the great days of Sporty. In her memory, she remembered the initial days of struggle and the efforts they had put forth to build the company. And now, all of a sudden, everything was at stake. She was brought back to reality by Albert, the sales head. Prakash now had some definite clue.
Through sentiment analysis, Prakash had figured out that the problem started with a poster in store 32, a local promotion poster, which offended some group. The members of the group posted about it on social media and the comments spread like wild fire. Clearly, the drop in the footfall was a conscious decision by their customer base.
The problem was clear. Now it was action time for the PR. An official clarification went to the press and with a proactive approach and with information from the Sentiment Analysis Tool, it reached the intended audience quickly. And to Linda’s relief, the sales graph was again up north.
A month later while flipping through her page turner in a famous resort in Goa, she received a text message from Albert - “Sporty is opening its 50th store today”.
Linda chuckled, “India is a cool place indeed”…..
In the above case, the Sporty brand was at stake due to some event, which was proliferated by a viral expansion loop. If there were no action taken, it would have spiraled out of control. As we see in the above scenario, appropriate tools and strategy are a must to control the viral expansion loop and use it in your favor.
Are you ready yet? Do you have the right tool, expertise and strategy in place? It’s time to introspect.
Welcome to the New Age of Social Media!
Read Part I at http://spansys.blogspot.in/2015/02/branding-in-age-of-social-media-part-i.html
After Sporty has had Linda as its CEO, the company has witnessed a double digit growth, thus making it one of the market leaders in the fitness-wear segment. For four consecutive years, Sporty has never had a set-back, and thanks to Linda’s efficient business techniques!
Initially, Sporty began with just 10 outlets, but today, it boasts of 45 stores all over the United States. The company has also begun expanding across various geographies and expanding its business footprint all over the globe.
This year has also proved good for Sporty, with the company experiencing exponential growth from the beginning of the year. Yet, over the last few days, Sporty’s sales graph has taken a dip. With each passing day, this depreciated growth figure seems to be prominent, which will surely get Linda worried. While Linda’s family vacation to India is all set for the next month, the dipping graph of her company may take her by surprise. The only solution is to fix it as quickly as possible so that she can not only have a sigh of relief about her company’s performance, but can also enjoy her long planned vacation.
All the top notch executives of Sporty are back to drawing board. They are determined to stop this sudden fall in sales.
First thing first, what actually caused this problem? The sales managers, the store managers, marketing, or PR, no one has any idea what actually caused it. But, it is clear that for some reason, customers are not turning up. Why so?
Emilia and Sunil, stars of the sales and marketing departments, have prepared a report on the topic together in just two days. They have gone through all the relevant data in their ERP, all the reports from the in-house BI system, quality reports, packaging standards, everything. As Linda has stated, there is no problem with respect to the inside process. There is something else that is not right and probably the clue lies outside. Perhaps, a full-fledged customer interview will take long time, it is expensive and success is not guaranteed.
Subsequent to a lot of discussion, George suggested something. George heads the IT department; he is calm and poised, and talks only when required. He had heard of an Indian company during a data science conference. It gave him an impression that their Social Sentiment Analysis Service can give Sporty a direction. After a brief discussion, it is all thumbs up. Within the next 48 hours, the Indian team signed in.
The Indian Company has assigned Prakash Raj, a young and dynamic project manager for this assignment. Above anything, Linda liked his enthusiastic spirit and cheerful attitude. Within a few hours, Prakash and his team got started.
Prakash set up a Sentiment Analysis Tool for Sporty in Sporty’s server (as Sporty desired). After a discussion with the stores manager’s and the sales team, Prakash quickly figured out that before Thursday (a fortnight back), the trend was normal. Now the question was - what happened after Thursday? With few clicks, Prakash’s team set up a data ingest job for all the online media, which relate or connect groups that can be Sporty’s customers. It is now almost 40 minutes since the data ingest started. Linda could feel she is a bit nervous, and decided for a quick coffee break.
In the cafeteria, her thoughts took her back to the great days of Sporty. In her memory, she remembered the initial days of struggle and the efforts they had put forth to build the company. And now, all of a sudden, everything was at stake. She was brought back to reality by Albert, the sales head. Prakash now had some definite clue.
Through sentiment analysis, Prakash had figured out that the problem started with a poster in store 32, a local promotion poster, which offended some group. The members of the group posted about it on social media and the comments spread like wild fire. Clearly, the drop in the footfall was a conscious decision by their customer base.
The problem was clear. Now it was action time for the PR. An official clarification went to the press and with a proactive approach and with information from the Sentiment Analysis Tool, it reached the intended audience quickly. And to Linda’s relief, the sales graph was again up north.
A month later while flipping through her page turner in a famous resort in Goa, she received a text message from Albert - “Sporty is opening its 50th store today”.
Linda chuckled, “India is a cool place indeed”…..
In the above case, the Sporty brand was at stake due to some event, which was proliferated by a viral expansion loop. If there were no action taken, it would have spiraled out of control. As we see in the above scenario, appropriate tools and strategy are a must to control the viral expansion loop and use it in your favor.
Are you ready yet? Do you have the right tool, expertise and strategy in place? It’s time to introspect.
Welcome to the New Age of Social Media!
Read Part I at http://spansys.blogspot.in/2015/02/branding-in-age-of-social-media-part-i.html
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