Making Content Social: Q&A with Arvind Sethumadhavan

Can you give us a brief intro to Aegis’ social practice’s offering across APAC?

At Aegis, we believe Social needs to be baked into all of the initiatives we plan for our clients across the bought, owned, and earned spectrum. Everything about our clients’ products and services should be leveraged on Social media to generate positive advocacy, which leads to higher Net Promoter Score (NPS). A Bain study showed that a 12 point increase in NPS leads to the doubling of a company’s growth rate – Social is the key to making this statistic a reality for companies. Thus, we view Social as a practice (rather than a department), which is integral to all our operating businesses of Carat, Vizeum, Isobar and iProspect.

How does the ROI analytics portion of your remit fit into this?

Social has pushed the boundaries of accountability in digital marketing by enabling all communications to be truly two-way. Also, a lot of Asian markets have lagged on e-commerce adoption. Social marketing and commerce has the potential to bridge the shortcomings, while showing direct business impact / ROI for clients. Thus, ROI analytics goes hand-in-hand with my Social remit.

What are some of the key metrics you are defining for your clients in terms of social?

When we look at metrics we think about ‘metrics that matter’ aligned to what the campaign can produce and those that will impact business outcomes. In doing so, we work with the clients’ product purchase funnel to overlay Social metrics. One area which needs emphasis is to go beyond simply collecting fans and creating strategies for engagement/advocacy, our metrics place a lot of emphasis o this part of the process.

One of the bedrocks for successful social campaigns is the creation of compelling content. How do you and your team define compelling content?

We define compelling social content as content which you and I would consider sharing and not just consuming – i.e, content which is ‘shareworthy’. We have defined a metric called ‘Sharefactor’ to measure the rate at which content travels on social media.

How do you walk the fine line between content that users care about versus content the marketing folks want to talk about?

This is the difficult balance we are striving to achieve for our clients. Simply put ATL is already doing the task of showcasing the content which marketing folks want to talk about. Social content should keep the conversation going and take it to the higher level of generating brand engagement. Some guiding principles we propagate for best practice in Social marketing are: 1) think targets rather than brands, 2) think content co-creation rather than content creation, and 3) think advocacy rather than attention.

Can you list out 3 to 5 stumbling blocks you see bringing this to life over the next 6 months?

Three I would say are 1) the traditional marketing mindset (i.e., preaching to consumers on social media), 2) social bolted on as an afterthought rather than integral to the comms planning process at the onset,  3) small budgets and an over-expectation on ROI, and 4) lack of a ‘test and learn’ approach.

What’s your ‘one-line’ advice for anyone looking into creating and socializing content in APAC? 

Think hard about what kind of content your target loves to consume & share.