This is a question many people ask me or at least might like to ask me. If you look at the typical break-up of jobs from a college like IIT Delhi, you will see major chunks going into core engineering, banking, consulting, analytics, software and a very small fraction getting into marketing. Even a smaller fraction gets into start-ups as a fresh recruit. In fact start-ups are usually also associated with those who are not able to get a job anywhere else!
So what am I doing in a social business strategy firm? And why should anybody looking for a serious career in marketing and brand management look for a job in social media?
To address these questions, let me first explain what a social business strategy firm like mine does. A social business strategy firm builds a brand's presence on social web ( i.e. web 2.0). So apart from the general forms of social media that we see everyday like Facebook/ twitter/ LinkedIn, a social business strategy firms tries to establish a sustainable presence for its clients by building and nurturing community platforms for the client's prospects and customers in a way to meet the client's business needs and objectives. Hence although this is a solutions industry where there are mostly projects and consulting assignments, there are tremendous scope for understanding and learning marketing:
1) Overall presence: Although companies use a social web presence for purposes more than just marketing like support, research, ideation, CRM, attracting talent or even creating the core product ( news and media industry), however I think a presence in any form can be attributed to marketing the brand in some way or the other. Since here it is about establishing the brand's social web presence, any sort of effort will have an effect on how people perceive the brand and hence is a part of company's marketing.
2) Sustainable communities and not one time campaigns: As I must have mentioned earlier that the real value of any investment into social media is in building something that you can sustain and nurture with time. As compared to traditional social media agencies, in social business strategy firms the focus is into building these sustainable long term engagement with brands where you are on the same note as the client's marketing team in understanding their business problems and coming out with solutions.
3) Defining a new type of offering in India: For me the best offering from this job came as the opportunity to learn something that so less people know about at least in India. You get ( and in fact need) to research so much into this field that at a very young age you get the confidence to preach others how they should go ahead with their businesses on social web. Looking at the fact that most of the people working in this field are pretty young, entering this field at the right time can help one build thought leadership at a young age.
4) Get a taste of different industry sectors: Social Business Strategy is more like a solutions industry than a services industry. So one day you are understanding a beverage company's business problem and the next day you are doing the same for banks, NGOs, technology, consumer durables, automobile etc companies. Likewise you get insights into business and marketing practices of different industry sectors.
5) Generate a new perspective for brand building: When I learnt brand management, none of the many books and resources I researched talked constructively about building a brand based on what a customer wants it to be or what the customer wants from it. All talked about creating the right brand identity, right brand personality etc to communicate itself with the ultimate goal to generate awareness; basically the right ways to broadcast themselves to their customers/prospects. However at none of the resources I got to read how should a brand be built in an ecosystem where broadcasting no longer works ! ( due to the availability of social tools )
Interestingly, when I first studied Brand Management, I never bothered about it! But now I see that many brands are increasingly becoming concerned with the shift of power from the organization to the customer, and many of them are thinking of different ways of sustaining or building brands. Many companies like Dell and Starbucks have successfully shown that this is possible.
I hope the above mentioned reasons would help marketing enthusiasts and freshers from colleges like IITs to look into a career in social business strategies or at least explain it to some why I chose it. And by the way... it also pays well :)
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