 So in five minutes we're starting. Interestingly, www.qpay.com.qa was reserved by me back in 2005 because I knew there's a play for this business but I didn't see it yet. And I pulled the trigger on this in about 2011, 2012 and we've been live for about three months now because there's a lot of preparation that we had to get going. So there's a lot going on in this business. Let me explain to you what is QPay, what is the concept that we do. So when you walk to a store and you pay with a credit card a lot of people think that the money is going from your card to the merchant but in reality what's happening is money is being moved from your bank account, the consumer bank account to the merchant's bank account and the instructions come from your card and that point of sale which tells where that money needs to land. Same thing when you buy with an e-commerce online, the same thing you're sending instructions to the payment gateway to send money from your bank account to the merchant's bank account of course after the shipment of the products. If you travel overseas and you pull money from an ATM, you got the cash but what's happening at the end of day there's all this communication between these banks to ask for the money that you pulled from that bank let's say in New York to be shipped all the way back to your bank in Doha. So to make all this happen there's a lot of security, infrastructure, communication and a lot of payment infrastructure or electronic payment infrastructure in place that needs to be established. Now big banks have huge staff, they have all this infrastructure, they have the security, they have the data centers, the technology, the experience, everything to build this type of stuff but smaller banks don't have it or mid-sized banks and I'll tell you a little bit more about this as we discuss this. So a lot of the smaller banks and the mid-sized banks outsource this to a third party payment processor. Now to do this thing as an outsourced operation for a bank you have to comply with a lot of laws, regulations, central banks and a lot is involved in this and being able to outsource this. So QPay is technically the infrastructure behind a lot of the payment processing that I was describing earlier and then when we do it we do it for mid-sized banks not necessarily the large banks, the banks who don't have the infrastructure, the capability experience and they can outsource it to us in a secure way and we can manage it for them but to the front end you're thinking you're buying that product from the bank. This concept has already proven to work of course in the western countries as well as in the GCC. So if you ever travel to Dubai and you're checking out of your hotel or you're buying something at a restaurant you get a printout that will say Network International that's exactly what we do. They're actually an outsourced payment processor that a lot of the banks would use in Bahrain a company called Air Financial Services in Kuwait for some of you who have been in Kuwait it's called Kinet and in Qatar it's QPay. We offer multiple products and our products we would offer them to banks and financial institutions and exchange houses as well and we have two types of products. So products we call issuing, issuing which is products that give you money. So something like if you are a low-wage employee and instead of getting paid via cash you get paid on a card. You take your card, go into your machine, you get your cash, you can spend, you can do whatever you want instead of getting cash now you get an electronic card with a bank account behind it. Gift cards you know happy birthday instead of pulling 500 you know real cash and give you a happy birthday cash I can just go buy a gift card. You have a Visa Mesa card on it I give 500 Riyals at the point of sale I get the card I give you the card in a nice envelope happy birthday now you take that card and you can spend it at multiple locations. Travel card people want to go to the Hajj instead of you know walking around with a bunch of cash they can also have a card and these are issuing these are products that give you money in your hand. There's also acquiring products, acquiring products that will enable an SME a small mid-sized enterprise to receive money electronically from you so these these are point of sale type of solutions there's also a mobile point of sale type of product I'll talk a little bit more about that or e-commerce you know you start a new business you want to you know you want to sell some type of product or electronic and you want to receive payments online in a secure way then we also have those so we have data centers in Qatar we have our infrastructure here and we are Qatar Central Bank licensed and I'll talk a little bit more about that in detail we have a full family of products that we we offer from the different cards as well as the the accepting of the payments. We follow all the Qatar Central Bank KYC which is know your client AML, anti-money laundering, ATF, anti-terrorist funding, CATCH which is Qatar, Qatar Automated Clearing House, I-Ban, PCI, payment card industry for the secured and then all our solutions are offered securely with a chip so that when you use your card you can have skimming machines or they can copy your card and suddenly you cannot they can they can go and transact behind your back it has to have an actual chip on it. We have a very strong management team and local ownership of the business as well as you know as a founder I come from this industry I have 20 plus years of experience barely 20 because I'm still young guy but I do have 11 registered patents now a lot of people could fake that and say hey I had dinner with Brook Shields but when you say have 11 registered patents you can actually Google them and look me up to see that. We won last year's Best Technology Company at Al-Fikr and the Arab Forum and what I want to do now that that I give you a general idea I want to get into specific details of some of the products that we offer in Qatar and can share with you our success story as well. So Qatar if you actually look at Qatar it has about I would say 20% locals Qataris citizens about 10% what we call expats guys like us who are banked and there about 1.3 million and a lot of these are actually growing of immigrant low-wage immigrant workers so actually right now these are statistics from 2011 right now we're looking about maybe about 1.6 million of low-wage employees who get paid less than 3,000 Qatar real from these low-wage employees on payday they line up and the company will bring all the cash you know from from the bank and they set up the cash on tables every employee comes in they put their the thumbprint that they got paid and then immediately after they get paid now it's a huge nightmare for the back office to manage who got paid who didn't get paid etc and these employees after they getting paid first thing they do is they go to the exchange house so they can send money home and they go buy a call-in card and then they leave a little bit of money to spend for themselves interestingly these employees don't have bank accounts so now when they have cash they let a lot of them live in these labor camps so they live together they got that cash they put in their pocket they're sleeping somebody comes in steals their cash there's a lot of issues there's a lot of crime a lot of problems happening in the labor camps interestingly I'd say this is actually happened late last year there was a long documentary of this life of these low-wage employees in these labor camps and following to that Amnesty International has actually issued a evaluation for Qatar for the low-wage employee labor camp abuse of their human rights now right after that happened Qatar Central Bank in February issued a new regulation that all employees need to be paid electronically either on a bank account or on a card what that means is I cannot say hey I got you paid and when you say show me proof so I paid you yesterday at the Starbucks where's your proof now the Qatar Central Bank wants to see every transaction electronically tracked for that employee okay now the banks they don't want these the low level employees because now suddenly if you have four or five branches or ten branches in Doha and you have all this million and a half employees come into your location suddenly your locations are being saturated and actually what they're going after is the high net worth and maybe some expats these employees are growing so we actually did a lot of demographics on how many of these employees by by country and they're expected to grow more as Qatar is getting ready for the World Cup 2022 so what's happening banks are freaking out right now they're saying what should we do you know we are in a really bad situation now we have to build all this infrastructure all these ability to be able to electronically bank these low-wage employees and we just don't have the systems and our costs a lot of money here comes QP our solution is a branded for it's called a private label solution so these banks could actually use our solution fully outsourced and be able to service this low-wage market segment our solution actually is a six-in-one type of product that service the employer as well as the SME or the businesses let me get a little bit more detail part of the solution the bank gives the employer full ability to track every employee okay their information their contact detail their first name their last name they upload their KYC they're you know the detailed Department of Labor information that is required like this their the Qatar ID their passport their visa their their entry visa their exit visa their whole all that information and it also includes ability to track that employees hours because when you say I'm paying you a thousand real what are you paying me for so the Department of Labor will come back to say why you think that employee 1100 reals or a thousand or nine hundred well now you have the ability to track that that employee worked eight hours ten or time ten hours overtime you know he was on sick leave he was on vacation you can track exactly their their payment to the detail and we track that and we keep it on the cloud for 15 years for free for that employer but it's private label to the to the to the bank of course and it will track the employees across multiple locations so we'll tell you okay here's a construction site construction company that has multiple locations where it does temporary work you will track how many hours you've worked total hours worked hours paid hours and then it gives you a actual report that that says how many of those employees got paid this is the the report that the Department of the Qatar Central Bank of the Department of Labor want and it comes for free with our solution plus as an employer now you can order cards you can cancel cards you can have full self service management of your of your employees so you can track their hours track the QIC and pay them at the same time and you have full ability and this whole solution is private label to the local banks so I don't know some of you have seen the square where you can take your mobile phone and put a little widget on it and then now your mobile phone will act as a payment device we have a square solution but in Qatar you cannot the squares only take some mathematics right in Qatar you have to have a chip reader so our device will actually take chip and then we also do private labeling on the mobile app for you to accept money pay with your card send money home pay bills and do all kind of different things and we probably label that to the financial institutions you can also take signature if you want we also have point of sale solutions so a lot of people say wait a second you know I see these in Qatar true you know you only have three banks in Qatar that offer point of sale devices which is Q&B commercial bank and Doha bank but how about the rest of the the other 15 banks in Qatar okay who is enabling them enabling them for point of sale e-commerce solutions we have the infrastructure and we're already are actually talking right now to banks to offer this product so we offer a full slew of e-commerce on the point of sale e-commerce solutions were on the website where you can come in and pay from a secure gateway website or on the device and we have the full infrastructure to collect the money settle it with your local bank or with our bank and then turn around and pay out that merchant either direct on a debit card or into into their into their other bank account so you you technically come in you sign up for an e-commerce solution with us which is private label to a bank name and your consumers your shoppers will come in buy for you we collect that money we settle it and then we say where you how would you like that money would you like it in a check would you like it in a card so you can now you take that card to an ATM machine get your cash would you like to do a direct deposit into your account it's up to you how you want to do that and we all we have the whole infrastructure we also have an easy build your own website something very similar to our Shopify type of solution you come in you get a new merchant account you click new you follow certain specific information because we have to comply with the Qatar Central Bank for example you have to have a CR we cannot give you ability to pay online without a CR because you could be selling drugs or whatever it is we cannot take the liability for that or you can log into your account you can you know go in quickly click click upload pictures build a store if you want so we have a you know a client that has a gym type of business and then immediately now consumers could come to your website and pay with a credit card and it's fully 100% fully secure so we'll have your name on it it's up and running in no time build your store and you're up and and and you can collect transactions in a secure way you can manage all your transactions from the different e-commerce POS or mobile POS you know you have the dashboards and all kind of different transaction reports that we offer that our solution interestingly now one of the things we do is as you build your store okay through our partner banks here in Qatar we automatically have an online mall for you so think of it this way here's this first person building his shoe store another SME is building their let's say electronic store and there's another one building a shirt store as you're building your store in the beginning in your settings you will say would you like to be part of the email so let's say for whichever bank that we're working with they'll say okay we're gonna offer you an email now if somebody comes to your store on their shopping cart they can only buy shoes and then check out or buy electronics and check out because that's all you get in that and that shopping cart but at the same time if you choose to be part of the email somebody could come to the email and in one shopping cart they can buy shoes electronics clothes whatever they want and that's also part of our infrastructure that we offer so what's our revenue model it's pretty straightforward I mean you know when you play with money you can make money it's kind of funny like you say well how do you make money well when you're playing with money and doing all these transactions you always get a little bit here a little bit there so we can make money by based on percent of transaction or fixed fee per transaction when we do setups of our you know solutions per bank per product per you know hardware fees if we are offering POS or point us or a mobile POS and then of course there's a monthly fees per SME and then you know certain minimum per month as we operate our business where we are right now we have contract signed with Qatar National Bank UBL at the bank and then as you can see this is the line this is the target and we're trying to get a lot of these and kind of push them to that to that side until we're done with them we're also finding very interesting opportunities where the exchange house is as well but this is something that we will do in our next iteration of our business model so at the end you know what we're looking for we're looking for partnerships primarily we're looking for banks and financial institutions that can come work with us and potential investors will understand our ecosystem we're not so we would in the US we call that smart money so we were looking for investors who can help add value to our business and then our objective of course is to IPO this business in about 24 to 36 we believe that there's a window for IPO especially in Qatar the stock market right now is going high and I think tech firms are expected to to do very well that's pretty much it questions from the bill on that actually have one question you have to ask a question please yes in the back are we the only company Qatar who does this the answer is yes because to build this type of business it's this is not a matter of millions this is a matter of tens of millions because you have to have infrastructure in place you have to have regulation you have to be you know work with the central banks you have to have the full infrastructure to work with a visa massacre GCB union pay and be trusted by them to do all this transaction because at the end of the day when I was showing you like say when we're collecting payroll let's say you have a company that has 10,000 employees at a thousand reals per employee on average or actually 1500 you're collecting almost a hundred million to 150 million bls per month for payroll so you know for for you to have that type of ability that type of responsibility there's so much you have to do in the back to be able to go to do this thing so yes I get out here we also start what are the transaction fees what are the transaction fees so and if if if you take up if you're a merchant you're accepting a point of sale you have to pay fees because that's how the industry works it's like you saying you know I would like to drive a car on a on a on a let's say a toll fee without paying so the industry is based on merchant pay and it's called an interchange fee that's how it is so we are part of that of that industry so it depends on your volume so let's say if you're a car for you pay let's say between 1.5 to maybe 1.9 percent okay depending on the card so if you have a card some cards will have 1.1 if it's a like a special like high-end card then it will be less than 1.9 but this is car for these are big guys but if you're an SME expect to pay out say between 2.5 to 3 2.7 depending on what you're doing on the percentage there's some maybe some fees for some set up etc but doesn't it's not that much but the whole industry runs on that interchange so I answer your question yes one more we've decided to go to market with through our bank partners so when you come to us and we say who's your bank so let's say we say Q&B to say okay here's a product for you to use let's say we say it's for example QIB or a different bank then well we would take you to this model that we take it with model we say okay we will collect that money we'll have to hold it by law in let's say Q&B but then we will forward that money to your account so you really don't have to have a solution or you don't have to bank with our banks in order for you to have the solution but you have to understand that that money will take one stop let's say at a Q&B or whoever it is that we're working with and then it will land in your account because by law I cannot take your money that you collect on point of sale or e-commerce and put it in the bills account that's by law I cannot do that so I have to put it in a financial institution that is certified by the Qatar Central Bank which is let's say Q&B whomever and then I have to ship it in your account does I answer your question yes okay so we'll break up for five minutes and then we'll be back thank you it's real say hi hi we're having Rishi the digital media guru so Facebook, Twitter, no no Facebook, Twitter Instagram everything so how startups can leverage on the social media how they can bring the products into a public consultancy before they launch it maybe how they can start a powerful teaser campaign so everyone is eager to test their products and many more so entrepreneurs everyone who's interested in social media join us at the innovation theatre counting down so quick quick guide right at the very start which is perhaps obvious to some but sometimes it's worth just recapping a little bit which is why as a startup entrepreneur or as a business are you going to be using digital media digital communications and social so what is the business case for it so there's a few areas that I'm just going to run through very very quickly so brand awareness is obviously very very important most of you as startups entrepreneurs probably won't have big advertising budgets so social media gives you a relatively cheap quick and agile way of growing your brand bringing some awareness to who you are as a company and to help people understand what your product is before you're able to spend more money on TV and radio and print advertising so social media allows you to build your brand in a very very quick way from day one PR engagement is also really really important as well you know lots of what my company does is dealing with the media and you know in days gone by when you dealt with the media used to have to write a press release and email the press release to the journalist and that was your way of getting media coverage now increasingly journalists are saying you know what my email inbox is just flooded with press releases all day long and actually social media gives you an ability to engage with journalists who are going to be covering maybe your industry who are going to be covering your technology who are going to be covering the particular country that you're based in as well as you can start building a relationship with journalists you can start making sure that they're aware that then when they're going to be writing stories about let's say you have a startup in the travel sector we know when they're going to be writing stories about the travel sector or about technology in the travel sector you've already built a relationship with our journalist probably using Twitter probably is a pretty effective means in terms of PR engagement so when they're looking for a quote when they're looking for someone to profile you're there they already know about you and it means you don't have to hire a big expensive company to do that work for you because as a startup again you're probably not going to have the budget to hire you know big company to go and do your media relations for you so PR engagement is a really really interesting area that you can do a lot of yourself thought leadership is a really really interesting area so I'm sure lots of people here who here watches like all the Ted videos and Ted lectures sure lots of people here will watch that and and what's interesting now is a lot of companies a lot of brands especially those who have a very strong research base in a particular industry are trying to get across their thought leadership and intellectual credentials using social media so there are lots of ways you can do that whether it's something as simple as writing a blog using LinkedIn LinkedIn is really expanding itself at the moment so as an entrepreneur you can use the platform to write about your business what you're doing and really help people potential investors potential clients understand that those are very very strong intellectual and technological founding to your business so using social media to build your intellectual credentials as a business is really important and there have been some really interesting exciting innovations by LinkedIn in this area as well influencing the debate is also really important and by this I mean the very often the government which is a really big contractor for lots of the companies who are going to be here it has to think about well how do we contract services in a particular industry and there's a debate about that very often government will be using online consultations they'll be using social media to get on board ideas for how they might think about a particular policy area you're definitely seeing actually ICT Qatar itself is one of one of the leaders in the region in terms of using social media in open policy making so social media gives you the ability to have a relationship with government to get your views across and actually influence when government is trying to use social media to think about a policy area to put your point across in a very very simple straightforward easy way so policy debates and government engagement is a really interesting area that you can you can help develop especially if you're running a startup that's going to be working with and alongside government as well data analytics I'm sure lots of the people here I know when I was in the the entrepreneurship conference a couple of days ago lots of the companies were talking about analytics we were talking about data analytics given data analytics to potential customers for the service you may have and so getting data analytics about what for example consumers are talking about around your products and services what consumers are talking about when it comes to your competitors and what can see what kind of words consumers are talking about as well you know you may be trying to advertise your company using a set of words which you think are going to be very important in terms of advertising your company but actually after looking at Twitter search after looking at the new hashtag search features that Facebook has announced or the new social graph you might actually find that consumers are using a very very different language you might also find that consumers have a peak activity time of maybe six to eight p.m. when they talk about your particular service so that means okay if consumers are talking about my product and service within these hours I'm going to make sure I'm going to use that data to target all of my communication to that particular time frame and you know one thing I find is that lots of companies that we work for who are American brands UK brands think that they can get away in this market using purely English language when it comes to social media and what we'll often do is do a report looking at how consumers are talking about that industry and saying look 87% of consumers of your target consumers are using Arabic and what that means that you have to use Arabic language in your social media as well so it's about using data to make sure your communications are more effective and more efficient as well I think the most important thing is a startup as an entrepreneur is that you don't want to be wasting time doing things that are inefficient and so the use of data to target your communication really precisely is is one of the most important things to make sure that you're not wasting your time it's a very famous old age saying that a chief marketing officer for a big company once said that I know that 50% of my marketing budget is wasted I just don't know which 50% it is I guess the point is with data analytics it means that you have a lot more awareness about what works and what doesn't work as well employee collaboration now this may not be a big issue for some of you where you have no employees or only a very small number of employees but actually when you start growing in when you're trying to get employees and teams to collaborate in a very quick agile way there are a whole bunch of social tools maybe not you know Twitter and Facebook the ones that we're most familiar with but definitely tools that drive a workplace collaboration you know lots of companies which have intranets who here works for company that has an intranet have you have intranet and very often they're pretty old and they look like something built in the 1990s and a lot of employees don't really use their company intranet because they're so old-fashioned and actually a lot of companies now is effectively using their own LinkedIn page especially if it's a private LinkedIn page to try and get feedback about what employees care about what they're talking about because they know that employees they're using their LinkedIn profiles probably more than they're using their own company intranet so using social tools and also there's a whole set of new social tools you know crowd sourcing tools wikis tools to help you collaboration in a business and you know I know that some of you will and I certainly do you might have teams working on a project in four different time zones in seven different countries and actually being able to use social tools to collaborate is a really important part of building teams and making sure and making sure that you're not wasting time on expensive on expensive I'll wait for this and then you're not wasting time on expensive video conferencing solutions and an area that we hope you won't have to use is around crisis and obviously the first time that you might hear about a crisis you know whether it's an airplane crash or a natural disaster or a bad restaurant review to take a very very simple example we'll wait for this to go so who here on Facebook or Twitter has seen one of their friends post a bad review for a restaurant or for a product or for a hotel so a lot of people are getting their information about products and services from their friends and sometimes when there's a big big problem what you get is crisis situations now if your crisis is linked to your insight your data analytics so you can start spotting when there might be potential crises and threats to your business as and when they're happening so you're at least you're responding in a quick and agile way it also means it gives you an ability to deal and respond to crisis situations using the medium that people are using you know when people have a problem now with their customer service they're much more likely to post their comment on social media on Facebook on Twitter than they are to call a premium rate hotline and spend half an hour waiting on hold and so as a business you're going to make sure that especially when you may have startup problems around the technology around customer care you're going to make sure that you're using social tools to have a really great customer experience and stopping crisis situations turning into really terminal situations for your business the final couple of areas is in is recruitment and customer service which we've just touched on as well and again look trying to find staff for startups is one of the biggest problem areas that they have which is trying to find trained engineering talent trained marketing talent trained and experienced managerial staff especially when you're in that critical period where you're trying to grow your business especially in a market might hear where maybe you haven't got access to all the talent pools so actually having access to all the talent that lives on LinkedIn Facebook Twitter means that you can expand your universe of potential employees and it means you don't have to necessarily start ex hiring expensive recruitment agencies and headhunters so your ability to go to potential staff members and to start telling a story about your company and making your company look like a really exciting prospect to potential staff is a great way of cutting costs and getting the right talent on board as and when you need them so very very quick run-through of why digital and social media is important some of these areas are going to be more important to some of you than in others but I think that as you're starting to think about how social media is useful to you as a business and as an entrepreneur as a startup these are some of the things a checklist maybe to start thinking about to at least think well do I have a policy or a strategy in place in all of these areas we'll move through very very quickly I think there's a couple of interesting principles I think it's worth focusing on as well before we open up to questions and some of this is really just about more an analysis of where the market is and why people are using social media and one of this is around sort of consumer psychology as well and you know lots of people put their hands up when they said they saw friends had posted reviews and comments about restaurants or hotels or products and services for they use and you know we've always trusted our friends recommendations you know they always say word of mouth it's always been the most powerful kind of communications you could ever get and social media is really just almost like an accelerated form of word of mouth communications you know we've always been likely to trust what our friends tell us more than what we'll trust from advertising and actually what social media gives you the ability to do is just get many many more word of mouth recommendations and accelerate that process and so we'll see this is a big study that was done from 28,000 online consumers around consumers trust in advertising you can see 92% that trust comes specifically from word of mouth recommendations and that's one of the big driving forces for people using social media it ultimately comes down to people's trust in their friends recommendations and their friends opinions and so this consumer psychology has always been there you know people have always trusted their friends and family members but social media has just been able to bring that together in one place another around storytelling and engagement you know I follow some brands on Facebook especially and some of the content they put out it just makes you want to go to sleep you know it's just press releases it's like we're doing this offer we're doing that off anything do you know what I've I've liked your brand on social media because I want to learn a little bit about who you are what you're about what really motivates you what's what's behind the story of your company and I want to get a little bit more of a personal insight into your organization and ultimately that comes out to storytelling and communications and marketing is all about telling stories about who you are and you know when you've got startups you know your story is a really really inspiring thing so you know I remember you know when you were pitching a couple of days ago talking about your story about why what motivated you to launch your startup here is a really exciting thing you know I want to learn about I want to understand what's made you want to start this company it's a very compelling piece of content that's the kind of content increasingly people want to find they want to get content which tells a story which is rich which is deep which actually gets behind the press release you know in a very very simple graphic you know very often companies are stuck in a sort of old advertising mindset of what I call in what's often referred to as interruption marketing you know when you know when you buy a TV spot when you buy 30 seconds of advertising look I say this is someone who started their career in traditional marketing you know when you bought 30 seconds worth of TV advertising where you buy a quarter page in a newspaper you're interrupting someone so they're watching a TV show they bought a newspaper and you're interrupting them with social media people don't really have to engage with you if they don't want to and so your ability to tell them what you want to say is constrained because they don't have to look at what you're trying to push to them so what can you do to tell them a story that's going to be interesting exciting inspiring educational and there are some great examples of that out there of brands which are really telling a rich story about what it is they're doing educating consumers and actually giving them more than what's in a pressure lease and actually the sweet spot in the middle is I guess the area you should be aiming out which is what is the stuff that you want to tell consumers and what is the stuff they're interested if you can focus your communications on that area then I think you've got the starting point of a really effective strategy the power of peer-to-peer communications is incredibly important as well and you know I started most of my career in in marketing in political campaigns where obviously your willingness to vote for a particular party is often driven by who your friends and family members are voting for and so peer-to-peer recommendations when it comes to a political party or a brand are incredibly important so what can you do to drive peer-to-peer communications and again I hope you can all read this you know but what this is just a few data points that help you understand that when you put things in the hands of consumers and when they they do the most powerful thing was to share some content that you've given them with their friends with their family members that's like an endorsement that they're giving your organization and so what can you do to drive forward an experience where consumers people who like your product and service are sharing that with their friends and with their family members the data and insights you know again you know one of the issues that lots of organizations face especially when they get a little bit bigger is that and again you know I've worked in organizations where this is the case is that your marketing data is kind of stuck in lots of different places so very often you'll see marketing has access to particular kinds of data so brand indices and consume behavior data but customer care and customer service has data on how consumers are actually responding to particular products and services and so one of the challenges that you have as your business grows is making sure that you're collecting all this data in one place so that you're able to treat the consumer in one way and you're not creating false silos in your organization call to action incredibly important and again this comes back to that point when you shared a piece of content in social media what do you want the person receiving that content to do with it you know it's not really good enough for them just to read it you know you're trying to inspire an action and the action can be really simple it can be a like the action can be a retweet the action can be a share the action can be a link to your website the action be can be the start of a purchasing journey but I think a really important area that you've got to focus on is you know when I'm sharing a piece of content what do I want the user to do with this when I put it into their hands you know one of things one of the areas and campaigns that I was really inspired by was the Barack Obama campaign so I worked for Prime Minister David Cameron when he was an officer for many many years before that and we really looked at the Obama campaign what the great innovations that his campaign was doing especially in 2007 2008 where they were really a startup campaign they were they had much smaller budgets and all the other campaigns especially the start and what they were really able to do was use some of these emerging technologies to give really powerful calls to actions to their supporters to make their supporters almost like staff members so giving their supporters tools to do things on their behalf and here these are some of the things that they could do they could make calls on behalf of that campaign they could create groups they could create their own events they were giving over a whole deck of resources that were usually only available to paid staff members they're putting those into the hands of their own staff members within this kind of dashboard which they created now most organizations are gonna do anything as complex as this but using the principle of call to action is incredibly important because I think it gives a bit of purpose to what your communications are and finally how do you aggregate all the information which is out there about what's happening to your brand your organization now there are some companies which take this to it to the next level this is actually Dell this is actually an image of their social media of one of their social media command sensors so Dell has something like 30,000 individual mentions of their brand on all social platforms per day so 30,000 individual instances so a huge amount of data which is being collected which is being generated on a daily basis some of it positive some of it negative some of it care related product related so how do you capture all of those instances of people talking about your company you're gonna have a system now Dell obviously has a very very big complex system so which is why they've got a lot of people and they've got a physical infrastructure but there are lots of sort of plug-and-play systems which you can now use which are either low cost or even no cost to help you aggregate the information that you have you know when I was working at 10 Downing Street putting in place a lot of the digital communications infrastructure we had over 2 million people following us on Twitter so we have tens of thousands of people who are writing commenting about the Prime Minister about government policy you know some of it pretty negative a lot of the time you know a little bit of positive a lot of it in the middle somewhere and so what you have to try and do is work out what matters what is important and crucially what can you act upon as well you know if you have someone who is criticized a product if you have a consumer who's bought your product and service and has complained about it you're going to make sure that you deal with that person in real time and you have the ability in the channel to be able to deal with them in the channel that they complained to you on so if they made a complaint on Twitter you've got to be there as well responding to them reacting in in that environment as well so putting a command center in place whether it's virtual or physical it's really important there's some great technology so that you can have something like this kind of infrastructure the Dell house even on your phone often for free so that's a great thing which is the cost of this kind of infrastructure has really come down very very powerfully so my final thing sort of before hopefully we'll open it up to some questions is how can you start thinking about some of the content that you might want to be generating for your brand and for your organization there's a little bit of a framework that we put in place for the company that I work for called layered narrative it's a framework that you that we use but there are all sorts of different systems and different companies use and really this just a really just a thought starter to help you get thinking about some of the questions you might want to be asking yourself when you're creating maybe a forward calendar for a week or for a month because I think the best thing is it's not just a you know when you're thinking about your own social media you know like most people you're probably not putting in place a calendar for your own personal profiles you're probably just writing what comes to you on that particular day but of course when you're working on behalf of a company or your own starter it's probably best to start planning a little bit whether it's over a three-day horizon or a seven-day horizon or maybe even a month horizon start thinking well what kinds of content do I want to start putting out I think that's a really important thing to start thinking about we have a little bit of a framework to start thinking about that and it gets to the heart that storytelling image I put forward a little bit early which is around what do you want to tell people and what do your potential consumers want to hear about so the first area is around inspiration and so this is where we often start about which is that forget about trying to just sell to people as your starting point I often say that one kind of general rule that I'll often use with with clients and consumers is to say if you're able to pronounce 70 to 80 percent of information which isn't directly related to sales but is around your brand which is around your company it kind of gives you the license to have maybe 20 or 30 percent of your communications which is much more specifically sales driven so that 80 percent 70 percent when you saw when you're talking about things which are inspiring to you they're inspiring to your product and hopefully inspiring to your customers kind of gives you the licenses to sell directly on the platform you know there's no point just using the platform just to try and inspire people you know you're not just a media publication you've got to sell at the end of the day but you're gonna start thinking about well what do I want to tell people that's going to inspire them and educate them a little bit these are some of the questions that we might start on that journey which is what do people want to know about my product and service what are people interested in knowing what do they want to embrace and crucially what do we hope they'll do once they learn about this so if you have a startup for example in the health care sector we know we see a lot of startups now in in mobile health digital health well what are people actually concerned about well people are concerned about often security they're concerned about trust they're concerned about privacy issues when it comes to health so a lot of the really interesting social media channels that we often see from digital health care providers isn't just about selling their service around getting to this issue which is what a consumer is interesting knowing about which is I want to make sure that your product and service is going to protect my information and protect my data so telling a story around how much you care around data privacy and data protection is one of those things going to help consumers think you know what this company is actually going to keep my data safe and secure so that's one really interesting stream of potential content you could be innovating with the next area is you got to start creating that content and information now this is often challenging to people especially when there may be not coming from a traditional heritage of you know being professional writers or professional content creators but you know this is sometimes where people will hire friends or for higher stuff but I often say to especially to start up entrepreneurs that you are your best salesperson you are your best company's advocate and marketer so how can you create content which it's going to be really really compelling so you guys are thinking about what kind of format do I start putting this content out in you know you may not have the patience to write 200 words in a in a blog post which is going to go up in your company website you might be someone who's more interested in using say a 15 second Instagram video because it's just more convenient to you it's more it's more likely that you're actually going to commit to that it may be that if you start asking yourself a question around you know would an infographic or you know with an infographic or blog post you know so ask yourself a question about what kind of content are you going to create is a really important next step and finally you've got something about how am I going to distribute this content as well so how do I get this content out there and again you know they're your owned channels which is that you may have your own Twitter handle your own Facebook page your own LinkedIn page but there are obviously earned so bloggers journalists media publications you know if I was if I was running a startup if I was a startup entrepreneur here knowing that there are any number of journalists media publications newspapers bloggers here I'd be using social media to find out which journalists are here right now in this room and how can I make sure that I'm meeting those people stop building that that relationship with those people so as and when that journalist is going to be writing a story which might have an impact on my business or my business might have a have a story to tell the article the journalist writing they're actually thinking about me the thing about my product and service so the earned space is really important there's also the paid area as well which is a there are obviously paid mechanisms within social media they're obviously ad units within within different social media platforms that you can use you know you can pay to promote individual posts you could be using Twitter ads often a very very low cost if you're employing staff you can use some the really interesting targeting mechanisms of LinkedIn to put in place so sometimes you might want to supplement some if you're organic activity with some low-cost paid experimentation as well so I think something akin to this framework we often find is useful just to start thinking about a social media program which is going to meet your business objectives there's just something about what's gonna inspire consumers how you're gonna create the content and how you're gonna get that content to outer people as well so I'm gonna close it down there really thank you all for listening as well and if there are any questions would love to take them as well but thank you very much for listening thank you first I'd like to ask about you mentioned that word of mouth from the huge influence marketing how can you control word of mouth or major in short so the question in case anyone didn't hear it is how can you control word of mouth because it's obviously such an important channel I guess the simple truth is you can't really control word of mouth because you know people are going to say what they're going to say if they've had a bad experience at your restaurants if they've had a bad experience you can't control what they say the only thing that you can do is make sure that you're listening actively and in real time so that when people do say things you're you're using every available channel to make sure that you know when people are saying things and also to make sure that if someone's talking about your products and service or if someone's spoken something about their experience of your products and service that you're actually going to respond to them as well so they're not just putting their comment into a kind of black hole of social media but I think and again that question which you said is such an important question and especially with marketing people who are coming from maybe a more traditional media mindset where you know when you're buying 30 seconds of TV advertising when you're buying a half page in a newspaper you control what goes on that you know you create the 30 second video you give it to the TV company they run it you know there's nothing they can do about that but social is of course very very different you can't control all you can do is is help drive understanding and also help respond to people if and when they've said something that maybe is wrong or factually incorrect or you want to make sure that you have your own right of reply I think one really interesting area that I've seen this it's some people dispute whether it's it's pure social media or not but trip advisor you know who here uses trip advisor hotels you know when they're when they're thinking about booking a hotel I know I definitely use it and a lot of hotel people hotel managers are using trip advisor to make sure that when people put their comments on they're responding and sometimes you know I remember when trip advisor first started friends of mine in the hotel industry had one that were incredibly scared about it and many people in the hotel industry are still very scared about trip advisor the power of the negative review is very very powerful but you know and I remember at the start all you'd ever see in these very anodyne vanilla responses from hotel manager saying thank you we've heard your comments goodbye even if it's the most scathing critical thing the person said but actually now you definitely see hotel managers being a bit more individual in their response sometimes pushing back to individual posters and commenters if they disagree largely because they've seen a lot of people are using platform sometimes to try and get freebies and sometimes get a free mail or a free hotel stay so actually you're seeing hotel managers and marketing people actually using word of mouth and making sure that they're actually putting forward their their actual point of view in a much smarter more individual way but I guess the long and short of it is that you can't control what people say really that's that's that's not really within your power. Rishi thank you so much thank you a big big hand for Rishi actually Rishi is saying with us I mean till the end of the day so I mean if you have any any thoughts you want to share any questions you'll be there for us thank you so much once again thank you so we're starting the coaching session so we'll be showing now a table with the entrepreneurs the projects and the name of the... attention please the final presentation of the apathons starts at 4 p.m. yeah we start now so we gonna so this is the coaching sessions starting from I mean we're starting a bit yeah no I mean almost time so for each project there is an assigned coach so please if you need to sit with your coach do some rehearsals enhance your pitch has your presentation because you need to submit your final presentation of the apathons starts at 4 p.m. so you need to hand your final presentation to Ahmed Shihata on the AV corner by 4.45