New Media, Marketing and Entrepreneurship

Before I share my ordeal, I must say something, which as a small start-up we believe and as a leader, I truly, passionately believe in: employee first, Customer second is good, but only when your employees are trained enough with solid integrity to keep their commitments, otherwise, well, your customer will truly be a second and will probably stay with you as long!

HCL is one company, which I always used to cherish since my early days of entrepreneurship and the professional career, as a home made global brand!

But today as I stand, cheated, frustrated and upon being bombarded with FALSE PROMISES by HCL, I must put across that being a so called BIG 5 billion dollar global brand DOES NOT mean that you don’t care a zilch about your smaller retail customers, who are the reason of you being where you are!

The Ordeal!

A few days back HCL gave a full page print AD in the News Paper about the fact that they were giving away prizes and an assured Philips Home Theater with a HCL Desktop. There were certain numbers mentioned in the newspaper.

I called one of them and asked if its true (just to be double sure of every *conditions apply) and I dropped the call and went to the nearest market “Nehru Place”. The first shop I found there, with a genuine, HCL Brand Logo, a fairly big board which said ONLY HCL, upon enquiry, the shopkeeper said, YES Sir, this is the last day of this deal, go and register your product online and you will get your gift.

And that’s what I did. I brought the system home, and well its been over 1 month and after absolutely crappy and false promises of a truly “CUSTOMER SECOND” (Mr. Vineet Nayar, you stand tall to your claim here, your employees truly believe CUSTOMER SECOND) service, today I stand as cheated.

After I received a message from HCL about 15 days after the promotion was over and I had the system at my place, I called up a number mentioned in that SMS and a certain Mr. Kashish from HCL HQ referred me to Mr. Rahul (who happens to be their Online Marketing Head).

HCL’s Online Marketing Head Says – Its not my department, I am not at office today, please send me an Email and I will connect you to the right person – But its not our responsibility to keep a check on all what is happening in the market

Mr. Rahul, as a comment to you – I am an entrepreneur and run a much smaller company in Size as compared to HCL, but well, all my team members are empowered enough to SERVICE our customers in every way. Absolutely every way! Period. We know how to take responsibilities and owe up to them!

Anyway, I sent an Email to Mr. Rahul on May 20th, today its over a month and NO REPLIES. I presume Mr. Online Marketing head is a little too busy facebooking than looking at his customers, and if he is one, well, I must believe, he should reply back to this post immediately (if his team is tracking HCL’s reputation online).

A few weeks back

A few weeks back I got a follow-up sales call from a sweet talking lady to whom I repeated the entire case, and she said, Sir, I personally will take up this matter with the management and make sure your gift gets delivered. I was relieved.

But HCL – being what they are (CUSTOMER SECOND, your’s truly), we treat you as second always and forever, well, it was again an empty, totally blank promise with no substance to it. NO action, NO follow-ups, NO nothing!

What happens today?

Mr. HCL if you dont know what is happening in the market and if you are NOT interested in knowing what is happening to your market and who is duping your customers where, well, you truly are a company worth never doing business with.

Mr. online marketing head – Rahul, you still don’t really know what customer service is about, its passion, it runs in your veins and when you are truly passionate about your organisation and its brand, well, Sir, you care, without conditions!

Do I want this gift?

Mr. HCL, go play with the gift at your home and listen to songs. If you want some, I have a fantastic collection, I would be happy to share

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Meena Vaidyanathan (Head, External Communications) HCL presents on how HCL created a highly successful campaign, branding the company in the corporate space, by  leveraging the power of Social Media.

According to Meena, there existed a big potential clientele in these markets for HCL, but the problem statement was without spending zillions of dollars in advertising budgets, how to effectively reach to these potential markets and still be as effective, by investing smartly?!

And HCL came out with an innovative solution!

The solution was Social Media Marketing! (I am happy) doing this post because as OMLogic, this is what we do, I am a Social Media Marketing Evangelist, and at OMLogic, we work closely with clients in creating Social Media success stories!

If you don’t have a defined objective for Social Media, you are wasting resources for your company says Meena, well, Meena I couldn’t agree less on this:)

Chosing the right Social Media tool/channel

We decided on Slideshare as a tool, we discussed with senior professors from established universities and after intense discussions and brainstorming we decided upon Slideshare which was the perfect tool for us to realize the full potential from Social Media for the campaign that we were looking for.

Employee First, Customer Second

The campaign as Meena remarked has been highly successful. Selected as one of the best campaigns to be discussed at Davos and other major case studies to be taught at Harvard. Meena speaks about how the entire campaign was positioned to create the outreach and shared how they strategically created the content for the presentation which she terms as generic in nature.

Sharing of statistics

Meena shared a few statistics with the audience which simply said that one of the major aims of getting people to a microsite especially created for the campaign was superbly achieved. More than 50,000 hits on the microsite is what we achieved in almost a months time. Our focused leads have increased from 40 to 60 leads a month, which we are satisfied with.

We created business, bagged a few major deals

Nokia and another big client is what we bagged from the campaign, though not specifically only from slideshare, but the entire campaign which has been on for quite sometime, but took the viral route once we decided on Social Media as a medium!

it is never a one man show and never a one stop game

We have a community page on Facebook and have a focused campaign at Linkedin, which is in line with the overall focus of the campaign.

Meena ends the interactive session with a high recommendation for Social Media Marketing, especially for startups and emerging companies who are looking to create tangible value and business results with a realistic budget and cost.

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