Q. How has the social media market grown over the years?
Social media as an industry has grown significantly over the last few years and this growth is expected to continue in the near future. At one end, social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have grown in terms of users. On the other hand, organisations across all verticals have been increasing their spends on social media. There are over 80 brands in India with over 1 million fans on Facebook. Similarly, e-commerce companies are spending significant percentage of their budgets on social media advertising for customer acquisition.

Q. How has Digital Vidya performed in the social media sphere?
Over the last three years, we have organised over 100 social media trainings across Asia for over 2,000 professionals (including CXOs) from over 500 brands such as eBay, Nokia, Citibank, Ogilvy, Google, Airtel, Yahoo, Microsoft, MakeMyTrip, ICICI, Bisleri, Wipro, Infosys, Cisco and The Times of India. This includes a number of in-house corporate workshops for various brands across India.

Q. What is the vision of Digital Vidya?
Having spent over 12 years in digital marketing, we understand the criticality of educating decision makers and practitioners on the opportunity of this ever growing medium and approach to leverage the same for their organisations. Since November 2009, when we started to conceptualise Digital Vidya, we had a clear goal of contributing to the growth of digital marketing industry through our trainings.

Q. What next?
While we feel proud of the difference we have been able to make so far, we are still far from what we want to achieve. We are currently in the phase in which we have begun to scale by going global through the online training route. For example, we are about to start an instructor-led online advanced Facebook Marketing course for professionals across Asia.

Q. Who are your competitors and how have they performed?
While we would probably be the first company to launch Social Media Workshop series from India, we have seen a number of newer players such as NIIT, Echovme, Gripel, Afaqs entering the market. Meanwhile, a few others who had entered the digital marketing training business have closed down.

To be honest, it is not as lucrative a business as it looks from outside. There have been times in the initial phase when we’ve had to cancel our workshops because we could not achieve the minimum participation. Since I don’t have any statistics to comment on how others have performed, we have always been happy to see others sharing our vision.

Q. Any recent or upcoming projects?
Yes, we are going global through the online trainings route. While we have already successfully run four batches of online courses, I would still call it a recent initiative as compared to our physical worskhops. On the other hand, we are working on subscription-based, video-centric Digital Marketing courses for marketers to continuously upgrade their skills and awareness about the latest developments in the digital marketing industry. We plan to announce it shortly.

Q. What are the challenges that you are facing?
The biggest challenge is to find experienced and passionate digital marketing professionals who share a similar vision. The founding team at Digital Vidya was sufficient to take us to the current position, but we now need more trainers across multiple geographies to be able to scale up our business.

Q. How is social media driving brands’ revenues?
As mentioned earlier, there are a number of Indian brands who are aggresively leveraging social media to fulfill various business objecives. For example, Kaya Skin Clinic is driving over 20 per cent of its revenue through Facebook. Similarly, more than 25 per cent of Myntra’s revenue comes through Facebook. We’ve been fortunate enough to empower and enable teams at all levels, including senior management, at some of the most successful brands in India through our hands-on social media training.

Q. Why do you think B2B social media has not picked up in the manner that B2C social media has grown in India?
I don’t think it is specific to India. At the same time, B2B spend on social media across the globe has shown significant growth in the recent past and the trend is expected to continue. According to Forrester, B2B spending on online medium will increase from $2.3 billion in 2009 to over $4.8 billion by 2014, and simultaneously, B2B spend on social media will grow by over 490 per cent.

Nonetheless, social media is relatively more suitable for B2C brands. Being complex, B2B marketing offers limited media buying opportunities, hence there are only a few agencies that are interested and prepared to take up social media for B2B engagements. In our workshops, we cover a number of success stories of Indian B2B brands who have been able to leverage social media.

Q. In today’s usage of social media, what parameters can be used by brands to gauge the effectiveness of a digital campaign?
The parameters to measure success on any medium, including social media, are determined by the business objectives behind the respective campaign. For online retailers, they are able to define and even measure the cost of acquisition through social media.