 So, we have a very interesting panel of course, the ones before us, the keynotes, even the panel discussions before us, were quite insightful and I was listening to them very intently. A lot of takeaways, but the topic that we have, you know, strategies to make social listening work for brands is equally important in today's times, when we know what social media can do. I was just discussing with you there, you know, there was this movie that released, I can take the name Lalsing Chedda, you know, I think the onslaught led by social is a classic example it has become, you know, I mean, it resulted in a huge loss to the producers. So social is definitely something marketers take seriously, brands take seriously, but the way you gather, you know, the data, what people are saying, the conversations around the brand are equally important and there's a certain strategy that keeps changing with times. We are living in a very complex time where we need to monitor it, ensure that, you know, we make sense of that data and respond to it with a certain campaign, you know, that will have the insights of the social listening. That is the context of this conversation and we have a great panel with us and I want to start with my first question. I can see 28 minutes so I want to pack in as much as I can. I want to start with you, Sathak, you know, in context to your brand, I want your individual story of how are you doing the social listening part and ensuring that the insights that you gather from it are used strategically helping in furthering the cause of the brand and also having an impact with your customer connect, with the sales part. How are you, you know, what's your story like? Well, thanks first of all. Good afternoon everyone. Well, if I were to say social listening, I think it's a necessary evil today. And while we speak on this topic, I'll just give you a very small example like all of us. We would have been into our years, probably two decades from here in terms of getting back into those early 90s or mid 90s. The best, what we could have influenced anybody and everybody could have been like one is to 10, one is to 20, or might be one is to 50, I can say that. But today it's like every consumer can actually influence one is to, I don't know, like a bare minimum count can be a 10,000 also or 20,000 also or 5,000 also, but the impact itself, it's humongous. And I believe as brands, none of us can really deny what the consumer has to speak about us, what they have to say about us. And it's not just on the one channel, I think it's across the channels, whether it is, I would say, Facebook, Twitter, Insta, LinkedIn, I think you just name those platforms and you have to be right over there. But I think one of the most important things for us today is to really categorize and understand what each of the customers has to say. And giving a very typical example of a real estate, I can actually say that. For us, every project is like a product. And we really have to deep dive in terms of understanding what every consumer is talking about a project, wherein what are these pain points or if it's been delivered, how can we address those pain points or if there are anything which you can really do to better it out. Or even certain learnings what we can actually take from one project to another project while we're conceptualizing the next phase of any project. Also, somewhere I can say another important aspect is while consumers are talking about us, a lot of times I would say that for us, social listening is also equal to ORM because somewhere if I'm not doing the justice, the reputation also goes for a toss to the brand. So I think this is something very, very important. Talking about some of the tools, I think we had been using milk water and our loco bars. So they just scan across all the environments and then they just bring back all the insights, whatever comments the consumers are writing. And I think for us as a team, what the most important thing is the time to response because the first response which is going out from a brand to the consumer is really very, very important and how much time we are actually doing that. At least on the other side because today it's like, I believe it's like today everybody is much, much impatient. And when I say impatient, it is the best example I can actually say is when your flight lands and all of us would be doing air travel. Tell me how many of us would really sit back and say that okay, I am just going to get up from my seat after five minutes till the time my number is going to be there as soon as it lands. Everybody's like right up. And then it's like they're just wanting to wait in the queue because, okay, I don't know. If you really rush, can you really come out first? I don't think so. So it's a very typical example of being impatient and exactly on the other side, a consumer who's writing about a brand or wanting an answer from a brand, he too is impatient. So first line of response that okay, yes, we are listening to you and we are going to come back to you. Then again, we just follow it up with our CRM teams. We just look into other divisions also, departments also, whether it might be finance, marketing, even getting into marketing campaigns, I can give you certain insights. Like during COVID, we really curated some of our campaigns, listening to what the consumer has to actually say. Even in terms of our future housing, it's like there are a lot of insights what we actually gathered that okay, what people have actually been talking about and it's not just from a real estate perspective, but even in general broadly. So we said that okay, can we really curate some of these two or three things into our housing societies while we are conceiving that the entire project? So I believe social listening is a must and then one brand has to really, really look into it. So I think it answers you. Absolutely. Look into your category, I've seen social posts and tweets, tagging your MD in those tweets, something happened while traveling. It's not an easy place to operate in when it comes to social listening. Firstly, give me a sense of how your brand is doing the social listening part and what are the insights that you have driven from that that you can share with our audience here? Sure, Rohil, thank you very much and thank you everyone for having me here. Just a quick intro, I'm Chief Operating Officer at EaseMyTrip. EaseMyTrip, I mean most of you must be knowing is one of the fastest growing travel company, online travel company. And coming to the question, Rohil, I think for each e-commerce and that to a B2C focused e-commerce brand, it becomes extremely important that you need to understand these sentiments, what is there in the market, how people are talking about your brand and what are they saying. And the job really becomes extremely tough when you say that you do not really have a USP, so to say, you're selling commodity. At the end of the day, you're selling a flight ticket, which is also getting sold everywhere else. So how do you build that differentiation? And for us, and not just for us, I think for every online travel company, the differentiation is only when it comes to the customer experience. I mean, it could be from the product standpoint, how a product user experiences and how is the post sales experience has been. So one of the findings that we've had and which we have really, really found invaluable insights from is the brand talks that are happening without mentioning our handle. That's almost more than 90%, which are all over the globe. People are writing, ease my trip, and they're not putting any kind of a handle or any kind of a hashtag, and therefore it is very difficult to capture those things. So tools definitely become extremely critical for such non-mentioned gatherings. What is also important is that at our end, what we have realized that, most of the time when these SaaS companies come and sell their tools, they have like 12 months, 24 months, great deals offering for you. And typically they're going to talk about that. It's just a tool that you need to integrate your system in and everything is going to be well taken care of. The truth is that it doesn't work that way. You have to still put in a lot of human efforts into it. A lot of conditions and a lot of logics that you still need to build. For us, HootSuite is a tool that really works really well for us. Falcon is another one that we have started working very recently. Mention is another one that we work on. I think for us, it is also more important to have a very, very strong sense of our social listening. Is because now, ease my trip is also scaling up globally. So we have opened our office in five different countries and plan to offer another 10 more. And with that happening, the conversations are happening across the globe. People are talking about you everywhere. And for that, you also need to have, and this is the third thing which I want to mention, that having the right set of people who understand how to capture the sentiments and how to derive a conclusive response from it is also very important. And without taking much of the time, last thing I would say is that it also is very critical for a brand to not just look at social listening from your own brand standpoint, but also from the standpoint of what is the industry discussions going on? What is that people are really finding more meaningful and interesting around? That gives a great insight in terms of your next product, Navisha. Absolutely. I think a couple of points very important here, as the brand grows, the listening becomes more complex. And how do you deal with it? It's a perennial issue that every brand has to face. Plug in to you quickly, your brand story when it comes to social listening, the tools that you use, and the larger observations that you have of this important insight, insightful tool that we have at your hands. So, thanks for having me here. So see, being part of healthcare, it's a very, very sensitive domain. That goes without saying. Similarly, the way we treat social listening is that you are in a room which has full of mirrors. It's going to show you how you're performing, what's your experience, you're giving out to consumer. And you cannot switch off the light. The sentiments, the feedback, it's going to come in. Doesn't matter whether you're- It's always on. It's always on. It's always on. And how complex it is, is that, for example, we are operating in 42 cities right now. And each city would be surrounded by other five cities. So the feedback is coming in from, let's say, 200 cities every time, 24-7. And this is where I know that as a healthcare brand, we have to be gentle and caring. So I know that this is my character. But this character has been aligned with my consumer. This social listening validates that. Similarly, what is my values? What are my values? It has to be honest, reliable, accountable, being part of healthcare. Are we justifying those values? Social listening and experience which we are giving out to our consumers and they're affecting back on social media channels is a validation. So we treat social listening as being part of our validation exercises because these consumers are writing their feedback without internal biases. So for example, if I send SMS from a brand handle, the kind of feedback which I'm going to get might be biased. But something which is coming out on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter would have very, very less biases. And this is where it becomes helpful. Other thing which Lokendra also said, for the learning part, what's happening in my industry, cross-industry, how do we learn from hospitality? Because ultimately, healthcare has a great hospitality factor also. So we learn a lot from there as well. Coming on to the tool side, I think tool is secondary. They're important, but they're secondary. Primary is that, you know, suppose all of us are part of a consumer care team. Lokendra has a different personality. I'm a socially-offered guy. Saurabh has a different personality. But when it comes to serving a brand, we all have to have same character and same values while talking to our consumer. And this is where a social listening tool or maybe replying tool to the messages which are flowing in from a brand has to be consistent with respect to our values, the way we are going to reply to a consumer. And ultimately, doesn't matter what your brand character or personality is. When it comes to consumer, it has to be sincere first. And this is where our tools need to inculcate these things while designing their processes or the way it's going to work. And personally, we work with One Direct. And along with, you know, we use Simplify360 in the past. We have also worked with Locobus. And all of these tools are great. They have their pros and cons. Generally, we rely on that, you know, the way we are operating right now. If it fits well within our process workflow, it's good with that. But I think empowering internal team is more important than the tool itself. And that has been a strategy till date. Yeah, absolutely. I think the unbiased, unfiltered responses that you receive on social media. I mean, they're not so nice, you know, sometimes, that they can totally kind of tell you some unpleasant things at times. It's not easy to deal with it. Coming to you, sort of, you know, your brand has a lot of social connect and a lot of chatter on social. Of course, a lot of data coming out of it, even to monitor that must be a challenge. I want to also listen, you know, about that, you know, I mean, we want to know how do you ensure that you get all the relevant part of it and you contextualize it into a strategy and the rest of the things, the tools that you use. Yeah. So, hi, everyone. So, I'm part of Lenscard. So, Lenscard is a B2C. We have a different perspective to social. So, and each channel is different for us, okay? LinkedIn is somewhere where people talk about stories and they talk about experiences. People are more formal in it. On Facebook, it's a very different view. What happens on YouTube is more of experience where people do how-to videos and product experiences and Twitter has a lot of customer feedback which comes in. So, for us, having data coming from all these platforms is a good source. When I wear my analytics hat every day, it's a good source of data we see and we see shifts of pattern which happen. So, there is communication which the brand does on different platforms. And we measure the feedback on this by engagement and sometimes good engagement or bad engagement also depends. If you got a comment which is positive, it's a good engagement when you get a comment which is more about a product experience, it's a bad feedback. And then there is user-generated content which comes in where people post about your products, maybe experience or maybe delight experience. So, a lot of this has helped us understand what people want and the way LensCart is moving forward R is not a very high-repeat category, okay? People might have two or three pairs of glasses and things. We are moving into making it more fashionable. So, for your office, for your parties, for your friends, for your tour, sports, you have different glasses you are wearing. So, we are moving towards more fast fashion and categories. So, we are trying to create communities out there where people can, we can expose our products and services out there. One of the interesting examples which I would want to share is when this whole shock tank happened about a year back or in this beginning, we saw two, three ups and downs and especially, I'm not sure how many people followed it up, but there was this episode after Jogadu Kamleshwan, which really saw a huge love for the founder and the brand and we saw numbers really go up. Simple thing which I will share, our YouTube subscriber was 20,000, it went to 120,000 in overnight and we saw a lot of positive feedback coming in across. So, a lot of things which happens not only with the brand but with the people associated drives that conversations and a lot of times the purpose and the story drives this thing. So, reading a lot of these signals helps us strategize it in a much better. The kind of tools, the tool ecosystem is evolving also as things change, okay? YouTube has evolved into more of shots, Instagram is going into reels and this is all the TikTok effect. So, the tools are also evolving and catching up. We are currently using and every three months there's a new set of tools we experiment with. We currently are using Sprinkler and Dash Hudson for both sides, but this only serves us about 60, 70% of our needs but it's mostly, and we see that the person responding and managing the channel is the most intelligent. These tools are enabling him and after a small point as the social media platforms evolve, these tools almost like equalize after a point in time. Ashish, quickly, same, your brand story essentially. Thanks very tough to add a lot of value after such an imminent panel has spoken. To me, I think the way I look at manage the social animal, you give him chances to speak, they would. Social media is nothing different. It's only about enabling almost 500 million media houses, each one of them having outlet to kind of speak. Platforms on a honeycomb model if you want to put it across has different characteristics like my fellow panellists said. On Facebook, life is a party. On Instagram, everybody is traveling. On Twitter, everybody has got a rent or problem to share. On LinkedIn, everybody is an expert, eminent, leader, accomplished. And so on and so forth. On TikTok, everybody can dance. Okay, before the government decided that no, you can't dance. Yeah, so, I mean, that's the platform. That's the platform. To me, the way I look at it, I look at this into three things, men, machine. The very first and foremost thing comes men. And that could be, brand is not, I don't believe, brand is owned by marketers. Marketers are only caretakers, nannies. And the sooner we realize it, the better it is for anybody. We are the nannies. So change the nappy, keep the kid-feeded, brand is owned by consumers. And they will talk what they feel with brand, whether you are present or not. You give them social media. Earlier they were talking near the pawn shop. Now they are talking, sitting, standing at a pawn shop, they are talking on Twitter. The talks are always happening. It's only English pawn shop. Yeah, English pawn shop. Let's say Zuckerberg shoppy, okay, or whatever. So you enable your process, it's not about social media, it's about the processes, and you need to be able to enable. So today, while we are talking about only social, why not look at what is your comment section saying or do, does your even app or website has a comment section? Are you looking at App Store, going there and looking at what people are talking about you there? What about forums? We typically, when we are talking about social media, we kind of limit ourselves still there. And what about these forums? What about who is going on Quora and looking at how your brand is getting used? I mean, whether we like it or not, the milk powder is not typically used, the baby milk formula is not used only for baby milk. It is used to make custard in this country. The maximum amount of custard is made using baby milk powder. So people are manipulating your brand in various ways than you think. So a marketer needs to start looking at that. Is there any uniform tool? I'm sorry to say there is none. So you need to sometimes depend on very basic things. So while we have, in fact, in my stack, you have like some four tools, the one tool which I depend always is Google Alert. You need to know what people will talk and it's not your brand keyword. Get out of the mindset of the branded keyword, non-branded keyword, pick up things, meet your customer, hear them out for a couple of hours, look at the words which they used to define your brand, come back, open a Google Alert, put those keywords and read it. You'll be surprised the amount of treasure trove of data is lying there. No, I think the forum part, I think some of the horror stories are lying there, so let's not go there. Don't even get me started on what is about to come, which is the moment you get into Web 3.0. You have a different word. In the interest of time, I mean, I need to quickly request for a one-minute answer to this question where Sourabh started as she took off and I want to pose this question to you, Sartak, that LinkedIn has a different personality, Twitter has a different personality, Insta has a different personality, and brand is the same, the messaging is kind of targeted towards the same goal. How do you tweak this? How do you ensure that you contextualize your communication? What kind of strategy is best? I think that the target audience over there is quite different when you talk from these three different platforms. Even the mood setting, while I'm on Insta, as compared to Facebook or LinkedIn, my mood setting is going to be very different because while I'm going to be on LinkedIn, I'm going to be more serious, I'm not looking onto a fun stuff or something. Now it's changing, I guess, right? Yeah, so now it is changing. I've just offered me and seen good morning messages on LinkedIn, I'm like, oh, come on, give me a break, but this is what is happening because people just want that somebody should be really watching them. So this is like another, I think it's one of the evils of, I can say, digital or quoted social media, wherein people just feel that somebody should be watching me, somebody would be seeing me, or at least how many clicks or engages my post is actually getting into. But I think what is more important for us is a brand, and I think most of you and even panelists would agree that different platforms will have different requirements, different needs, you need to tweak your communication depending upon those platforms, but again, a lot of times even the consumers are same. But just getting into that mood settings becomes much more important for a brand, I can say that. Quickly, one minute. Yeah, I mean, so each of these platforms have different kind of expectations the users have. You can't really keep one content across all the platforms, but at the same time, as a brand, you need to be extremely cautious in terms of that your brand language does not differ too much, because that actually creates a lot of brand recall in the mind of people the moment it appears. One thing that I want to also tell, which I thought I'll be getting an opportunity to cover, is that our last four product innovations have happened purely on the basis of social listening. We have stopped taking any calls in-house, we do not do anything that is presented to us by our product head or anyone. We say, it's not going to work, let's hear what people are trying to, what they are looking for and what they are not getting in the travel space. And in fact, today we've launched a product called Save Now and Pay Later, which also has Save Now Travel Later as an ideology. So we are making people save continuously for a period of 90 days, starting with as low as 100 rupees, we'll top it up with another 20% on top of it and you can use it for your holidays, whether for domestic or international. So that's purely because we were hearing a lot of people talking about that, you know, we would like to go on a next holiday trip and it's been long and we've not been able to do it. We don't say to ourselves that, you know, we are not very good financial managers ourselves. That is like social listening in practice, right? Yes. Gagan? So I'll give you this answer in a very simplistic way. So as soon as you enter this hotel, right, everyone from the staff is going to greet you in the same manner, right? Doesn't matter if it's 30, 40 or 50, they're going to call you, sir, you know, welcome to the hotel. Similarly, if you're a kid, they're saying, if you want some candy or something. So your message has to be depending on who the customer is, but your personality is going to remain the same. Similarly, for healthcare, my personality is gentle and caring. It has to be consistent across the channel. It should matter on, you know, what this segment, this person belongs to. I can tweak it a little, but it has to be really, really consistent. So this has been our strategy, you know, at pristine care also that, you know, it has to be super sharp, super consistent and depending on what kind of problem or what kind of compliment you have for us, it is going to sound the same if you belong to a certain segment. So I think recipe is very important. It can't be very ad hoc. Similarly, everyone from the team has to be trained uniformly. If you're talking to a customer, it doesn't matter if it's online on call or on this kind of channel, the tone and channel has to be consistent and I think it has worked well for us and this is something, you know, which I have practiced in the past organization also just because, you know, channel is changing, you don't have to change your personality too much. Otherwise you're going to sound something or put on some channel on someday and it might backfire. Recipe has to be the same, but ingredients you can just tweak around so quickly. Your take on this entire, you know, different approaches that one should take and how can one, you know, kind of do that. So one thing, like while my fellow panelists have covered it, what I would say is your teams managing the channels would have to also have a different outlook and generally what I've seen is people who are managing Twitter will be different than people who are managing LinkedIn, okay, because there is a different type of response or communication needed. So different channels also require you to pose differently with a different set of team mindset. So that's one of the learnings. That's how we do it at Lensky. Okay, two things here we follow. Number one, understand that I'm not the same person who is in a mortuary or standing in a pub. If I, my behavior to the, it's not only the medium, it's also in the medium, the movement, and the person. So categorization or customization has to be on three levels. So for us, very, very simple, we have created a communication style sheet which defines basic things. Things, the tonality, things, the kind of a, the brand-wise, tonality, brand-personality. The message is person-dependent because if you really can't generalize the message, otherwise, I mean, you can really, really create a disaster. But there is no one-size-fits-all approach which can fit. It depends on the kind of a probably market you are into, the probably the customer segment you are into, and how your customer segment is varying. We live in a digital world. We are neither completely physical nor completely digital. Your message needs to acknowledge that fact. Message needs to acknowledge the challenge a customer is having or the reason why he or she is connecting or contacting with you and try an address challenge first. Yes, rest everything later. Which brings me to the final question. We are kind of out of time, but this will be Twitter-style, you know? Not 90 characters, of course. Saathak, what's the next chapter of social listening like, you know, the next phase of social listening going to be? Quickly. I think the way I'm looking at this is going to be a bit more complex. I can say that because, again, like, the sort of the voices are echoing around and it's for the brands to really, I can say, conceive those messages and really come out with those curated solutions. So I think we as marketers would really love to simplify it, but again, depending upon that, okay, what's going to be there into the digital spaces, I still believe it's going to be a bit more complex going forward. Yeah, totally agree. I think the biggest challenge we need to address is, you know, filtering real voices from bots. That's something we are actually working very hard towards, but it is still not, you know, an easy nut to crack. So I think Saathak and Lokendra has mentioned this. See, the real challenge is that all the brands want to serve their customers really, really well. There is no doubt about that. But ultimately, there's a limitation to the capacity also. And what's happening right now is that because of fake profiles, bots, no profile authentication at first place. So these things are hampering the quality of services which we can offer to our consumers. So somewhere these tools seem to accommodate where the profile authentication or, you know, the voice authentication, you know, if the bots are being as bought, these kind of services are needed. And probably in the next phase of growth of social listening tools, this tool can come in handy. I think this is out of the need. So two things, you know, generally social media has been managed by either one part is marketing, another part is customer service. While they operate in isolation, both have to come together to manage the channel effectively and deliver. The second part is today when we talk about listening in social media, technically it's not by the years, it is by the text which is coming out. With a lot of video, so a lot of video format and visual coming in, it will be difficult to understand and it will require again either different level of AI to understand it or listening it. Like if there is a video post on a reel which comes about your brand, whether it is love or hate, you will have to see it or you will have to interpret it in a very different manner. So that will be the next time. Listening with your eyes, yes. That's very... Thanks. I have a different point of view. I don't think so that it is going to get easier. That's certainly because of every platform is trying to create a moat around themselves and they are trying to be closed looping them so that they can keep more customer inbound. As a brand, one basic thing which all of us need to think is where my customer is, less is better. 80-20 rule applies here to you just can't afford to be everywhere till the time you are not, say, having endless money. So figure out where your customer is, figure out two, three places and just focus on that. I don't think so. Any tool will be able to support you there universally. So you probably need to look at your stack. This is your consumer journey. Absolutely. So the common point that is going to get complex from here. But thank you, panelists, for this wonderful discussion. I know Shijani is just behind us and definitely wants us to get off stage. But thank you so much for this quick conversation. Really grateful.