An evening with Mr Ram Bhamidi

On Friday, Sep 23, we had a highly engaging session by Mr Ram Bhamidi, an Entrepreneur and Co-Founder and CEO of Radarr.com. A B2B SaaS platform based out of Singapore and Bangalore, Radarr helps businesses get actionable signals from social media data. The platform has been dubbed by the media as the “Bloomberg terminal for marketers” and is used by Fortune 5000 clients across the world. Later in the session, Ram explained that Radarr is currently not competing in the US or Europe. It is bullish about Asia, where the population and social media usage are still growing. Radarr will think about going global at the right time.

About Mr Ram Bhamidi

Mr Ram Bhamidi is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad and has over 24 years of experience across India, UK and Singapore in industries as diverse as Software Development, Investment Banking, Online Gaming and Online Matchmaking.

Ram started his career with Tata Motors right after his Engineering and also worked for Infosys, Goldman Sachs, Commonwealth Business Council, Bwin PartyGaming and Shaadi.com before taking a plunge into entrepreneurship 9 years ago.

Ram believes that technology can be a great enabler as well as game-changer for businesses of all sizes. A travel enthusiast, he is an eternal optimist who always finds a way to bounce back. He is also a lifelong learner, interested in a wide range of topics from Blockchain to Astrology to medical uses of Machine learning.

The social media landscape

Social media has been around for more than 20 years. But it has gained traction in the last 5-6 years. Today, in addition to the large platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and YouTube, we also have many regional and vernacular platforms. Some media platforms have also become very important.

Out of the world population of about 8 billion, some 4.9 billion are internet users. There are about 4.55 billion active social media users. Asia makes up 60%, Americas 17%, Europe 13%, Africa 5% and others make up 5% of the social media users.

An average user is on 9 social media platforms. More than 4o0 million social media users are added every year. Over 4 billion social media messages are exchanged every day.

Activities on social media

Many of the daily conversations are about brands and businesses. The following table gives an indicative pattern of activities.

Chat and send messages	79%
Watching videos, listening to music	57%
Checking what contacts are up to	48%
Publishing and posting content	36%
Following influencers	36%
Professional/educational purposes	31%
Talk about the “What”	29%
Playing games	26%
Participating in contests	23%

The sentiments in these conversations can be negative, neutral or positive. Ram gave a number of examples.

Social Listening

Social listening is tracking social media platforms for conversations related to topics of interest to us and then analysing them for actionable insights.

These insights fall into various categories:

Crisis detection and prevention: Consider Zomato’s response below:

Brand monitoring and competitor tracking

Some key questions to ask are:

• What are the sentiments for our brand vis a vis competitors?
• What is our digital share of voice?
• Is there a product or service that customers desire but is not available?
• Is there a topic frequently discussed that our band could leverage as a communication tool?
• Are competitors doing something great that we can replicate quickly?

Market Research

Social media is the world’s biggest focus group that we can tap into. We can listen to social media conversations and understand the needs and wants of customers. We can understand consumer behaviour and gain actionable insights.

Other use cases

• Branding and content opportunities
• Campaign tracking and performance
• Real time industry trends
• Influencer discovery and management

Later in the session, Ram explained that large MNCs tend to have multiple teams to manage the social media: marketing/research/social media/PR//customer support. In some large companies, hundreds of people may be deployed in listening to social media across countries. There will also be automated ways of classifying incidents and referring them to the right team.

Case study: Netflix

Social listening has enabled Netflix to connect with its users, come up with new solutions, develop a long-lasting relationship and generate more revenue streams.

The ability to listen keenly and closely monitor pop culture trends has helped Netflix run eye-catching social campaigns and post creative content that encourages users to participate in activities, answer polls posted via stories, and tag them and their friends in their content.

Netflix’s marketing strategies are usually based on out-of-the-box ideas. Rather than adopting a deadpan, serious brand tone that promotes its content, Netflix has targeted the huge meme-loving audience to build a rapport with them through their content. Indeed, Netflix is reputed for its strong meme marketing. Thanks to social listening, Netflix knows what topics are trending among audiences and wastes no time in launching its own memes. The company has introduced memes, which can communicate feelings and situations very effectively as an opportunity to engage with the audience.

Thanks to social listening, Netflix became aware that viewers fall asleep when binge-watching a show and wake up several episodes later. So, Netflix created a pair of tech-enabled socks that could sense when someone fell asleep and paused the show. In addition to its prototype socks, Netflix also put some totally doable DIY ideas online so that viewers could make their own socks. This earned Netflix huge praise for integrating technology into everyday life products.

By going big on video marketing, Netflix produces more video content than any other content type on social media. Apart from videos, the company also posts images, GIFs, and text posts on current movies and TV shows streaming. Using social listening, Netflix creates content around topics the audience is talking the most about.

Netflix plays well on the customer’s psychology by releasing trailers that give a sneak peek to customers and generate interest. Netflix’s “coming soon” videos around the platform’s widely loved shows also work well with the audiences and keep them hooked to the brand.

A lot of stars from Netflix’s shows and movies are active Instagram and Twitter users. The brand leverages this to its own advantage to amplify its reach and presence among its audience. Even celebrities and TV networks join the bandwagon of people engaging with the brand on social media.

Netflix posts witty replies to customer queries and engages them in conversations to help them feel like they are talking to a friend. Netflix prioritizes every customer interaction, no matter how trivial. It considers every interaction as a chance to build a better relationship with the customer and reinforce themselves as a brand that cares. This approach has helped Netflix build a loyal fanbase and a compelling social presence.

Netflix has been using big data insights to determine which new TV series or movies they should create. Thanks to data insights, it can predict viewing preferences and provide personalized recommendations by logging in and analyzing every customer interaction.

What can other brands learn from Netflix? One place to start is to find our own unique voice. What makes us unique? What aspect about us can our customers connect to quickly? Our brand voice needs to be authentic and clearly communicate what we are all about. We must not miss out on the benefits of social listening. We must pay close attention to customer data and unlock the right kind of content that can connect with customers.

Concluding remarks

A small brand can do manual searches across social media sites to understand what is going on. But for larger brands, a good social media listening platform is necessary. Manual searches will be too inefficient.

Later in the session, Ram added that if the number of conversations is small, say 1-2 per day, it may not be worth investing in the platform. But even for small companies, it may be worth investing in the platform to do market research. Thus, there is no threshold as such. It all depends on the objectives. Indeed, a social media strategy will succeed only if we are clear about our objectives.

It is important to keep track of what people are saying about us on social media. As Sudhakar mentioned, we often do not pay enough attention to comments, leave alone taking signals. Ram added that it is indeed important to listen to customers. The purpose of listening is not to respond. It is to understand what is going on. Sometimes, a response may not even be needed.

Q&A
On his journey

Ram became an entrepreneur after spending about 25 years working across industries, in India (15 years) and the UK (10 years). He had always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Having been on social media since 2005 (first on Linked In) and a professional user since 2010, when the time came to be an entrepreneur, Ram was clear about entering the social media space.

Initially, his team started with developing various social media applications. Gradually, they realized the need to productize these applications. That is how the Radarr platform emerged. Ram and his team realized that customers wanted a whole range of digital data. That is how Radarr has grown into a unified platform combining both social media and other digital data. The platform enables brands to listen to conversations and respond to them. The platform also enables campaigns to be managed effectively.

On the use of paid digital advertising

Google and Facebook are the main platforms with a major share of the paid digital advertising market. While their reach is large and they do provide many targeting options, there is not much transparency on the ROI. There is a lot of data about banners, impressions and clicks. But we do not get to know who saw the ad. There have even been allegations of click fraud.

So instead of going to these big platforms, some brands are trying to leverage many smaller channels. That includes influencers who are easier to track. We can see what they are posting and measure their impact more accurately. (This is a point that a few earlier speakers in the WiseViews series have also been making.)

On frameworks and metrics

Technology allows us to process a range of data and generate various insights at both aggregate and granular levels. For example, we can find out whether the person consuming coke is sitting in her home or in a park.

Typical metrics used are volume of conversations, no of people involved, emotions and sentiments underlying the conversations, degree of engagement with a post, etc. We can measure how sentiments are changing over time. Today, thanks to technology, based on the sentiments and the traction the post is gaining in the first few hours, even crises can be predicted accurately in advance.

Sometimes the posts may be more ambiguous. For example, a customer may post that the car is great, but the lights are not good. So how do we interpret the sentiment? Algorithms can be developed to generate aggregated insights about product attributes.

On dealing with noise

We should be clear about our objective and what we want to track. We should be clear about who and what we want to listen to. We cannot listen to all the conversations on social media.

Noise is like spam. It can be detected based on the source and the nature of content. We can use technology to identify fake and spam accounts and bots. We can also use algorithms to eliminate irrelevant data. We can use business rules to ensure that we get the data that is relevant to us.

On the adoption of social media tools in India

Large Indian enterprises are already using these tools like their counterparts in the US. Adoption is higher among the B2C companies compared to their B2B counterparts.

But in the US, even small companies use these tools especially for doing market research. That is not the case in India, especially the advanced tools which use AI and ML. Radarr is trying to democratize the use of these tools so that they are affordable even to smaller enterprises.

On high customer acquisition costs

Both people costs and advertising costs must be considered. It is possible to track advertisements and analyse the numbers. We need a good attribution model to find out what led to the conversion. The contribution of people must also be carefully tracked.

One way to reduce the costs is to reduce the dependence on paid ads and instead create campaigns that go viral. The other is to engage with appropriate brand ambassadors. We should leverage social media and use it to our advantage.

On sentiment analysis

The tools have been around for many years. Today, they are better and more easily available. All the cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google offer generic models. But these models may not be able to pick up subtle nuances associated with say different languages. For example, a message “thank you for losing my baggage” should not be taken at face value. Obviously, it carries sarcasm.

Radarr’s models are trained for 40 Asian languages and have much higher accuracy (80-90%). Client specific and industry specific models can capture the nuances even better. Earlier the models were keyword based. Today, they are intent based. We can measure sentiments at an aggregate as well as an individual level.

Thus, well trained models on huge volumes of data and customized according to the needs of the industry and even individual clients are being used today and are creating a lot of value.

Later, Ram added that these tools can also be used for content analysis of text documents. In fact, it is much easier to deal with these documents compared to the unstructured data that we find on social media.

On dealing with negative comments

Most brands receive negative comments at some point or the other. We must have a plan to deal with them. Otherwise, they can snowball into a crisis. A quick response is recommended. Surveys indicate that 72% of the customers expect a response within 24 hours.

Agents should be well trained and preferably empowered to take quick action. When it is beyond the agents, there should be a good internal system and process in place to deal with the complaint. Responses to complaints should have high empathy and must provide an assurance that the problem will be resolved.

Of course, complaints sometimes may not be legitimate. We must find ways of dealing with them. Where the complaint is not genuine, the facts should be placed in a transparent manner.

An example of a bad response is Indigo. (See the posts earlier in the write up.) The airline responded by first sacking the whistleblower. That blew up the crisis. Then only the senior people responded.

In short, we should not ignore negative comments, we must respond speedily, and we must have an internal structure to deal with the complaint.

On handling negative reviews

They can happen to any product. The first point to note is that we must take reviews with a pinch of salt. Customers who like the product usually do not post any review. It is the unhappy customers who do so. So, a small number of negative reviews need not worry us.

It is also possible that competitors might be doing it. If there are too few followers or if the content is not being forwarded, it is a hint that a bot could be operating. So, we should verify the authenticity. On large platforms, even if the post is anonymous, it is possible to verify the authenticity. On smaller platforms, we should track data over time and see if it is going out of line, based on past averages. Alerts can be set to facilitate this. However, we must keep responding even if they are fake reviews.

The right way to deal with negative reviews is to try to convert them into neutral or even positive reviews by resolving the problem with speed and empathy. Posting fake positive reviews will not help. In fact, we may get caught at some point.

Customers have a right to air their views in public. They are not our slaves. Moreover, prospective customers depend on the reviews of existing customers to make their purchase decision. Rather than asking customers to remove their reviews, we must take their suggestions seriously. There must be a culture of responding to them. Tesla is a good example. Thanks to its speedy response to customer suggestions, Tesla customers are a happy lot.

On dealing with fake news

Every country has its laws to protect brands from fake news. Even in India we can file FIRs. But legal remedies take time. It may be more practical to take it up with the platform. Most good platforms have automated ways of eliminating fake news.