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Quick Summary: Read a soon-to-be-real scenario featuring imaginary Indian Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) company BuzzPundit to understand why SMO will be the next big business opportunity for India after BPO and KPO.
If you found it difficult to believe my assertion that social media outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India, let me present a soon-to-be-real scenario featuring imaginary Indian SMO company BuzzPundit.
Imagine a sprawling corporate campus on the outskirts of a large Indian metro (take your pick from Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Gurgaon or Pune). Imagine 10000 twenty-something Indians sitting in front of their computer screens. If you must, think of a call center. Except that these twenty-somethings are not making call after call to customers in the US; they are reading articles, posts and comments and tagging them, or responding to them.
Welcome to BuzzPundit. You are at the corporate campus of one of India’s many social media outsourcing (SMO) companies.
If you visit BuzzPundit’s website, you’ll find that BuzzPundit claims to provide end-to-end social media solutions to Fortune 500 clients. In fact, it often does. It has an impressive client roster of Indian multinationals who now have an international footprint and want to engage with a global audience via social media. BuzzPundit provide the entire gamut of social media solutions to such clients, including online reputation monitoring, development of social media strategy and deployment of social media tools.
However, only less than 10% of BuzzPundit’s 10000 strong workforce works (directly or indirectly) with Indian clients. 90% of BuzzPundit’s workforce works on international client accounts.
BuzzPundit has sales offices in the US and Europe and its international clients are a mix of Fortune 500 corporates and social media agencies who work for them.
BuzzPundit rarely provides an end-to-end social media solution to such clients. Such clients have basically out-sourced two social media processes (SMPs) to BuzzPundit —
- Social media monitoring, which basically involves reading and tagging thousands of articles and posts on a daily basis and presenting the results in pre-decided formats.
- Business-to-consumer or B2C community management, which basically involves reading and responding to thousands of customer posts, comments and complaints on a daily basis.
But enough background now; let us go back to BuzzPundit’s corporate campus and see for ourselves what a typical day at work looks like for its 10000 employees.
Neha has been working with BuzzPundit for the last two years. When she joined BuzzPundit fresh after graduation, she was put through a rigorous six week orientation program and given an understanding of concepts like social media, conversations, buzz, reputation and sentiment. She was also trained and tested on the speed and accuracy of her reading comprehension.
She was then assigned to the Nokia account — BuzzPundit handles Nokia’s global English language social media outsourcing account — and put through another six week orientation program on Nokia’s and its competitors’ products, the business drivers in the mobile phone industry and the meaning of reputation in Nokia’s specific context.
For almost a year, Neha worked as part of a 500 member Nokia team in BuzzPundit’s social media monitoring department. Almost 7000 of BuzzPundit’s 10000+ employees work in this department.
Every morning, Neha would log into her computer and BuzzPundit’s proprietary crawler would have 100+ articles and posts ready for her. Every entry would pre-classified with source, product, location, spokesperson and other pre-defined tags. Neha’s work involved reading the entry and answering 50+ multiple-choice questions related to the entry’s context and sentiment, such as –
What is the overall sentiment of the entry w.r.t Nokia? Rate on a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is strongly negative and 5 is strongly positive.
What, if any, customer complaints are discussed in the entry? Choose one or more from the drop-down menu.
What is the overall sentiment of the entry w.r.t Nokia’s handling of customer complaints? Rate on a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is strongly negative and 5 is strongly positive.
After a year, as Neha’s understanding of Nokia’s mobile phone business and the nature of online conversations matured, she was transferred to BuzzPundit’s business-to-consumer (B2C) community management department as a community manager. Almost 1000 of BuzzPundit’s 10000+ employees work in this department.
Now, when Neha logs into her computer, BuzzPundit’s proprietary crawler has 100+ posts, comments and forum entries ready for her, culled from the 25+ blogs, forums and groups about Nokia that are assigned to Neha. After a year of being a part of these communities, Neha has learned the nuances of each one of them. Every day, she responds to hundreds of customer comments and complaints about Nokia’s products, and, if the conversation turns particularly nasty, escalates it to her supervisor Ram.
Neha has been told that she will be promoted to a supervisor position in BuzzPundit’s business-to-consumer (B2C) community management department next year. As a supervisor, she’ll handle a team of 10+ community managers who work on the Nokia account. She’ll have overall responsibility for the 250+ blogs, forums and groups about Nokia that are being handled by her team members. She’ll monitor the tone and content of her team members’ interactions in these communities and step in herself every time a conversation turns particularly nasty.
After two years of working as a supervisor, Neha hopes to be promoted to the position of the account manager in charge of Nokia’s community management program. She’ll have 20+ supervisors and 200+ community managers reporting into her. Some of the supervisors will be in charge of communities focused on Nokia and others will be in charge of distributed conversations about Nokia and its products. Overall, Neha’s team will participate in 20000+ conversations about Nokia and its products on a daily basis.
Some day, Neha hopes to become a social media analyst at BuzzPundit. Aditi, who is BuzzPundit’s social media analyst in charge of the Nokia account, has 5+ years of experience in the mobile industry after doing her MBA. She works with Nokia, and its advertising and public relations agencies, to design and direct their social media monitoring and community management programs. After understanding Nokia’s strategic and tactical campaign-level or product-level social media objectives, she works with the two Nokia account managers at BuzzPundit (one each for social media monitoring and community management) and the technology and delivery department at BuzzPundit to design and upgrade the tagging system and the social media dashboard for Nokia.
The technology and delivery department at BuzzPundit has 500+ software engineers. It is responsible for developing and upgrading BuzzPundit’s proprietary crawler, tagging system and customizable client dashboards. It also works with BuzzPundit’s 100-strong social media solutions team to do the coding for the proprietary social networks, social applications and other social media campaigns developed for BuzzPundit’s local clients.
BuzzPundit is now planning to open three more campuses in India, apart from campuses in China and Mexico to handle Chinese and Spanish social media outsourcing accounts for its present clients.
Now that you can visualize the business BuzzPundit is in, the business of social media outsourcing, let me ask you the same question again —
The global BPO industry is expected to grow to $230 bn by 2012 with $50 bn of it coming to India only (Nasscom-Everest study).
How much of that $230 bn will be social media outsourcing? How much of that $50 bn will be social media outsourcing?
Do you agree with me that social media outsourcing will be the next big business opportunity for India?
Comments (8)
I noticed BuzzPundit does not have a website. Can you point me to one?
Your post is fascinating-any idea why mainstream media has not covered the phenomenon yet?
@Anjali: BuzzPundit does not have a website because it doesn’t exist. Please read the quick summary again:
Gaurav,
Social media outsourcing is not a new phenomenon and a couple of KPO outfits have been playing some over the last year or so… there have some interesting assignments right upto the highest point on the value chain.
I also know of outfits which handle outsourcing of a totally different kind - creation, management and SEO of fake blogs. Why are these fake blog s created? To kill negative reportage on relevant categories by generating content on an ongoing basis.
Factory like in their orientation, they are alive and kicking, these outfits.
More face-to-face.
Cheers.
R
@Gaurav,
But I have some concerns about this model:-
1. See, taking your e.g. only, Nokia has a large number of employee database. & mostly are on social n/w sites. Many are themselves bloggers. Now, the scenario might be that these social n/w sites are inaccessible as per silly corporate rules.. but what if they understand this fact & open the gate. Their incentive system will add a parameter called social branding.. No other 3rd party can understand the company better than the Nokia employees.
Then there will not be any need of outsourcing the SMO thing as “Divide (the job among huge Nokia employee base) & conquer” will work for sure..
What is you say on this?
2. Leave the employee base, fans & devotees are doing it for “FREE OF COST”. You can see many communities on orkut, groups on Facebook, run by fans only in self interest.
I am a blogger [though a lazy one ;-)], i have received many times news, beta service invitation .etc. from CEO’s, CTO’s directly to blog upon.
Because bloggers need only one thing, RECOGNITION. And any breaking news .etc. will help drive traffic to their blog. That’s what they want most of the time.
I would appreciate if you & others continue the discussion from where I left…!!
Gaurav,
To add more-
3) social media is a part of web 2.0… correct?
but when you are talking with the e.g. of Nokia, it says a dedicated social media firm will be always there to look after Nokia talks… right..?? then what about Web 2.0 approach… involvement of users..??
Also, users will always be there to write negative about the brand.. and who knows may be they are also doing as Negative SMO..??
BTW, did you read this post http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/03/three-internet.html ?
As I said before, corporates will start their own SMO units & will do it in-house.
The trend has already started in US. check out- http://socialmediajobs.com
I guess, India is not too far. What say?
hmm, definitely possible.. my only discomfort would be the cultural nuances that are associated.. rough eg. a communication of nokia that’s a spoof of a local happening somewhere in europe.. would an outsourced unit be able to comprehend that and be part of the conversations? while its true that bpos handle this even now on a smaller scale, would it be replicable in social media? but as always, the ideasliver
is great 
@Rajesh: Interesting. We should have that face-to-face (or phone) conversation about these KPOs soon. As for fake blogs, well, what can I say…
@Rupesh: Apologies for not replying earlier. Since you raised such interesting points, I wanted to respond with a full post, but couldn’t.
Well, you are right. Ideally, all of Nokia’s employees should participate in social media conversations about Nokia, and engage with customers and citizens directly. This is the approach most social media purists would prefer.
However, this is not always possible. Only a few Nokia’s employees would be comfortable with directly talking with consumers or citizens and even fewer will be comfortable using social media tools. Even the employees who have the ability and the inclination to engage in social media conversations may not have the bandwidth. Therefore, the need for a dedicated social media resource.
In a high-value, low-volume B2B context, an in-house community manager may be the correct answer, as the number of social media conversations will be fewer.
However, in a low-value, high-volume B2C context, like Nokia, a dedicated in-house team will be too costly, and outsourcing will be the only option.
Call centers operate on the same logic. Ideally, all customer complaints should be handled by company employees, but they are handled by a third party call center because of cost considerations.
Response-based social media outreach is basically online customer support. If Nokia can outsource telephone customer support, why not outsource online customer support too?
I hope I have answered some of your questions.
@Manuscrypts: I guess that answers your question too. And, in response to your tweet, yes, this is similar to what Rajesh does, only on a much larger scale.
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