Social Media replaces lunch?
This week I’m at the NASSCOM conference in Mumbai, India.
It’s the biggest technology and IT services conference in Asia and although
focused on the Indian IT industry, there are representatives from more than
twenty countries here all making the case for IT in their country.
The failure of many Indian technology service companies to
adopt social media as a way of engaging with customers and industry influencers
was a topic discussed on the NASSCOM blog prior to the conference. Many in the
industry took offence at the discussion, and many asked why B2B firms such as
those in IT services, really need to be all that concerned anyway.
I’ve been meeting people from all over the industry and
asking them about some of these issues. Yesterday, I sat down in the speaker
lounge with Sachin Tikekar, Chief of People Operations at KPIT Cummins, and
asked him about their own efforts in this area – something I wanted to ask as I
had seen them talking about the industry on Twitter. They were clearly
experimenting with online tools and so I wanted to just ask how they – as a
technology service player with strong connections to the automotive industry –
found social media working for them.
The first thing I wanted Sachin to explain was why KPIT
Cummins was doing this, because most social media activity is still in the B2C
area. What can a services player get from engagement? He said: “We are still
just experimenting with this area, but we are seeing a lot more activity. A lot
of very large companies are out there talking to customers and creating
communities for creating knowledge, but a really important reason to have this
online debate is to attract talent. I am not talking about just loading up jobs
on a portal, but you can recruit talent and find people by having conversations
online.”
That’s an interesting point. India has suffered in the past
with sky-high year-on-year wages increases and eye-watering attrition numbers
as people hop around employers with les loyalty than former England captain
John Terry. It’s only been the recession that has created any stability in the
Indian IT jobs market, but now the sector is growing again, there could be a
‘back to chaos as normal’ effect.
Sachin went on to elaborate that there is a possibility in
places such as India to connect even more using social media because they never
had a lot of the tech we are used to in the UK. He said: “Everyone in India has
a mobile phone. There is a kind of leap in that many people in India have
jumped straight to mobile computing rather than growing up through generations
of PCs and browsing that way on a laptop. That means you can reach and interact
with people very directly using these social methods, they are extremely
comfortable interacting this way.”
That’s also a good point and something worth remembering for
tech companies with origins in places like the UK and USA. Sachin finally
reinforced some of the reasons why their social media experimentation is
important for his company. He said: “It’s not really for directly accessing
customers, it’s about reaching influencers, advisors, and analysts, the people
who we want to update and ensure they know what our company is doing. I don’t
think that we will directly find a lot of customers this way, but we can reach
out to the industry in a more conversational manner. Of course you might have
had a structured way of meeting people before, but how many times can the
executives have lunch with how many advisors or analysts through the year? This
way, you can have conversations with many more people and have far more
meaningful real meetings with people in the industry because you have been
talking in between lunches.”
That’s a clear vote of confidence in the use of social media
for B2B conversations.
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