Tata DOCOMO Social Media Case study

Twitter typically has a more evolved and techy audience that other Social Media platforms. Tata DOCOMO acknowledged the importance of these thought leaders and made sure they got their worth by following the brand. All products, offers and schemes were first announced to our Twitter followers before they were allowed on any other media. On many occasions Twitter followers were given teasers and prelaunch feelers much before the product was even in a state of launch readiness.

Today Tata DOCOMO has more than 7500 followers and we know most of them by name. We have solved their telecom problems, passed on their messages to relevant people in the company and brought about resolutions or simply just said a hello when someone was missing in action for an extended period of time.

Facebook clearly has a large influential community that was identified right at the start as being a major influencer of brand advocacy. Tata DOCOMO set about creating conversations among its fans on Facebook.

Like Twitter a one-on-one communication was maintained with all its fans helping resolve problems, providing information and escalating issues. The community was kept engaged through a variety of status updated including discussions on TV commercials, jingles, product service launches and fun and games.

Orkut has a mass user base and was identified as an important element in managing mass sentiment around the brand. The forum has been used both as a community feedback tool as well as a platform where free discussions were enabled on specific topics (either product-service related or band related). The platform has also extensively been used for contests to keep community members engaged.

Youtube has been a central repository for all brand commercials and videos. Tata DOCOMO has made a departure from the traditional way of only uploading videos created by the brand to also showcasing user generated content, specifically animation videos submitted by users at the create.tatadocomo.com platform.

In continuation of its strategy to be omnipresent in Social Media, Tata DOCOMO is perhaps one of the few Indian brands to have reached out to less popular social networking and community portals in India. It carries through the same brand promise of being everywhere that out potential consumers could be however small the reach of the portal might be.

The Tata DOCOMO strategy with respect to third party blogs and forums were both proactive and reactive. Everyday 100s and 1000s of blogs and forums were scanned or any mention of Tata DOCOMO and whenever a user had posted a question, comment and complaint, the Social Media team made it a point to go and respond to resolve (wherever necessary) every post or comment.

 Tata DOCOMO is probably the only brand in the Indian landscape who have gone ahead and created official accounts on hundreds of blogs and forums and have always responded through its official id.

The Tata DOCOMO social media strategy has been carefully built on five pillars.

Build consumer engagement

Beyond the day to day and one-on-one interactions with our fans and followers, Tata DOCOMO has constantly launched consumer engagement programs with a heavy social media angle. This has helped us build repeat engagement points with a large number of our fans. Be it dietsms which was rolled out exclusively through social media, ageekthing which involved Orkut, gadgets , Facebook applications and automated Twitter tools or happy DOYear which could be played through Facebook, Twitter and Orkut.

Address and resolve complaints

Even before the launch of social media engagements, a dedicated customer response mechanism was laid out for priority resolution of all social media grievances / enquiries. Top management at Tata DOCOMO has taken great pains to make sure that literally the buck stops when an issue is raised through social media channels. From activation problems, network issues, handset settings or billing related matters, every single issue has been promptly addressed and resolved. Comes as no wonder therefore that initially the Tata DOCOMO Twitter account was nicknamed the “unofficial helpline”.

Crowd sourcing

Very early in the social lifecycle of the brand Tata DOCOMO realized it had hundreds of well wishers who were all brimming with ideas on new product-service offerings that could be a real differentiator for the company. The social team has repeatedly engaged with its beta consumers, collecting feedback about usage, preferences, bounced off product ideas and pretested concepts to help the product team develop compelling product service offerings. The icing on the cake was when we involved our techy Twitter followers to hack into a social game launched by Tata DOCOMO as part of the ageekthing contest and suggest ways to prevent others from doing so. Many of the recent product service launches like gprs packs and parts of the buddyNet program have been built on crowd sourcing inputs.

Build brand advocacy

Continuous engagement and proactive problem resolution has helped Tata DOCOMO build extremely loyal fans on social media. Innovative ways of recognizing such efforts through fan of the week on Facebook and Twitter has further enhanced the cause.

Micro communication

With close to 100,000 direct followers and over 6 million secondary reach, all communication from Tata DOCOMO enjoys a sizeable instant audience. However our social team remembers the names, occupations and past communications with thousands and thousands of our fans. This helps us micro communicate with each individual building a personal touch and therefore a high impact to our messaging.