 on the best kept secret, Tamanna Dhamija, CEO and co-founder of ConvoSites. Now, she, Tamanna Dhamija, CEO, co-founder of ConvoSite, which is the world's largest community marketing and community building platform, accredited by Facebook. Now, in the last five years, she's built 22 communities with over 2 million members that has helped over 3,000 communities with over 15 million members grow and scale via ConvoSite. And she plans to share with us the best kept secret up to now, Tamanna Dhamija. Thanks for such a warm and nice introduction. I'm super excited to be here with you all. Thanks to Anurag, thanks to Exchange for Media for enabling this experience online, right? In this world that we are today, I'm just great to be, I'm just very happy to be connecting and talking to all of you remotely. So before we get into the best kept secret, I just wanted to take us a decade back and talk about what was the best kept secret of 2010. It was digital paid marketing. That's when paid marketing started featuring in the innovation slides of CMOs and in a couple of years, digital became a big part of the way we were spending our monies we were connecting with our consumers. In 2015, that same spot was taken by influencer marketing, you know, where we started testing and experimenting around these Cuban leaders or influencers who started emerging on platforms such as Instagram. Couple of years later, that moved into the main slide of a CMO or a CEO of a large Fortune 100 company. Any guesses on what is that today that's been appearing in the innovation slide for the last one and a half years or so where some of the most thought brands that have been thought leaders have been innovating and experimenting with that platform. So while you guess and tell me your answers, I'm just going to present my screen. So the best kept secret that a lot of forward thinking brands have been innovating with is the unexplored world of community building and community engagement. And for the next few minutes, let me take you through a few slides and the journey of how we have experienced it first hands and built the first ever community building platform in the world, community building and engagement platform. Let's talk about the situation that all of us are in today. The world as we know has changed. We're on in the midst of a massive global trigger because of the pandemic. Human beings are social animals, right? And what happens when you cage these social animals at home? Behavioral changes which would normally take tens of years to happen have happened in the last five months and are slated to happen in the next one or two years because all of these people have been staying inside their homes. It does seem like online will take over offline as the most preferred last mile touch point for a brand. What are these people doing online? Well, I'm talking to all of you online. I wish I could see you interact in person, but here we are children are learning online and we are interacting online. We are meeting people online. We are having conversations online. Where is all that happening? Facebook groups have emerged as the hub of online social interactions. As we speak, there's 1.4 billion people across 10 million Facebook groups. And what are they doing there? They've congregated in small tribes where they talk about their shared pain points, their interests, their hobbies, their challenges on parenting, nutrition, education, arts, travel, science and tech, humor. So if you're curious, think of any category and just go and search on Facebook and you'll find a Facebook group on it. That's the power of enabling people with a platform that gives them the ability to interact and connect with others during these times. What happens when people talk? Conversations are the leading indicator of behaviour changes. If I'm talking about something, I'm very, very likely to change my behaviour if it's not changed already. Are we listening? I'm going to talk about a favourite analogy that one of my friends at Facebook speaks about. It's the balcony versus hall analogy. For a second, just look at the left side and the traditional channels where we have been tapping into consumers for research through surveys, etc. Or where we have been interacting with our consumers, which is open social media channels, a Facebook page, an Instagram, a YouTube, a Twitter. It's like a balcony. Just think of those channels and think of you as a brand marketer being in the balcony, talking to all the consumers. They are listening. They are consuming the content, but they are passively engaging. They are not talking amongst each other. They are listening to you and passively engaging with you. Now let's look at the situation that we are in today and look at Facebook groups as channels. Think about a hall. What happens in a hall? People walk in, they take time to warm up and then they start talking. They start having open conversations, real people talking about real pain points, real passions and start having real authentic conversations. That is what Facebook group communities are where there are peer-to-peer interactions. The fundamental difference is a one-way versus a two-way trusted communication. People that you care about are talking in these communities about things that they care about. What if we could unearth all category building insights? We could become a part of the safe, trusted spaces of our consumers and offer genuine value, leading to massive adoption at scale. I know it sounds and looks like a dream, but let me just tell you what we've done over the last few years. Conversite, as I mentioned when I started, we are the world's first community marketing, management and community building platform. This has become possible because of our personal experience, combining that with technology and conversational AI, which has led to explosive results in terms of insights, driving our communication, driving our authentic engagement and eventually an ROI. Let's go through a couple of examples to talk about this whole journey. We partnered with Rekid Ben-Kaiser with wheat post-COVID. What happened for this category? A traditionally out-of-home category became an in-home category. A push became a pull. The problem shifted from awareness to demand. Of course, as a knee jerk, we saw a massive spike in these hair removal conversations and the first thing that should have happened is absolute immediate demand. But there was a core insight. There was a big barrier to adoption there. The barrier to adoption was that this category initially did not exist. People were not comfortable doing hair removal at home or did not even know how to do it efficiently. That's where wheat stepped up. Did a series of activities where they engage with consumers in communities, brought experts to them, dermatologists, beauty experts, provided information around how to get through this barrier in a series of campaigns, wheat cares, pull it off. The result last three months where the category has seen a 5x increase, there's been a 10x increase in brand conversations, trials and adoption. Let me take another example. This is a category which was maybe once a month used and now it's a multiple times a day use. Yes, I'm talking about sanitizers. The daily demand in sanitizers went up 60 times just in a few days post-COVID. The problem here was not demand. It was over demand where there was talkouts happening because sanitizers became synonymous to life-saving drugs. What did this lead to? An increase in frequency of use of sanitizers and the use cases. So people were using sanitizers, antiseptics everywhere left, right and center. That's where Detol stepped up, did a public awareness campaign on do it right with Detol. Informed consumers engage with them in conversations around the right frequency and use case of sanitizers and taking care of our skin while doing it. The key to all of this is we should always stand for what our brand values are and not just what the product stands for. Fast forward a couple of months as sanitizers have become a multi-use, a daily multi-use category. Preferences have started to emerge where we want a milder sanitizer. We want a milder soap. We want the Jomkin, but we also want it to be mild on our skin. And that's where again Detol has launched an entire new product called Detol & Moms, which is tough P gentle B. So a little bit about why are we so community obsessed? How did we get here? We started this journey in 2017. I'm one of the founders and before this, I was in finance, I was in investment banking for five plus years of my career. When I became a mother, I realized there is a need to set up online communities for support between mums. From 2017 to now, we launched multiple communities under baby destination on Facebook, where we are today close to 1.8 million members in 28 organically built communities. During this journey, we built a lot of tools to automate community building and also conversational analytics. What happened then was magical. We got selected by Facebook. They recognized us as one of the top community leaders across the globe and the top community platforms. The picture on the side is during one of the meetups where I met all these awesome people from across the globe that are leading awesome communities and community entrepreneurs. That's where we realized the scale of what we are doing. The aha moment was that let's put all of this onto a platform and enable individuals and brands to build communities and engage with communities. Here we are. Conversite was launched six months back and there are already 3,000 plus communities using Conversite with over 50 million members across categories. We've partnered with several of the Fortune 100 brands helping them create and engage with communities. Yes, we do believe our superpower is building communities. How do we tap into this massive opportunity? One, build your own brand's community. Now, more than ever, this is not comparable to a page, to an Instagram, to any other social media account. This is only comparable to any other platform where you can have consumers talking and you being a part of those conversations. This is the biggest revolution that has happened in the last 10 years where you have an ability to bring your consumers together and be a part of those conversations. The second way is you can partner with existing communities where there are consumers talking about your category, your brand, and engage with them meaningfully. Understand their top of the mind pain point and provide value. It's a marketer's dream come true. Let's again talk about 10 years back where the entire story of attribution started from an impression, reach, and ended at engagement. Today, it starts at engagement and not passive, but active engagement which is conversations. Engagement is the means to an end and the end is everything that's there on the slide. Talk about customer support which is really knowledge sharing of super users. They start telling each other about your product's benefits. Talk about tapping into real time insights, real people, real conversations, real insights, real top of the mind that helps you draft your marketing strategy, your communication, your product inputs. Identify advocates. Why do we care about advocates? This is our word of mouth, our organic word of mouth. Acquisition. What do we all care about? That final sale, right? How does that happen? This is a constant always on engagement source. The average engagement in a Facebook group is north of 85%. In an average group, there's 90% plus active members. Just compare that to a less than 1% reach platform like a Facebook page. And finally, retention. It provides an opportunity for us to create remarketing channels to retain our customers and to increase share of wallet. All of us know some of the most legendary brands that exist in the world today have been built on the back of communities. Communities are not new. We all used to say it takes a village to raise a child. We've always existed in tribes. What's new is that all of this has shifted online. One, because of the platform that's available to us and two, because of the pandemic. And this is the best kept secret. So if this is your deepest desire to build a legendary brand by truly engaging and co-creating it with your consumers, I would love to talk. Please feel free to reach out to me at themanaatconverside.com or do sign up on converside.com for a personalized community assessment. Happy to take any questions. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Tamanda. We do have questions that have been written in for you but we're going to just take one because of positive time. It goes like this. What about platforms like those who have blogs content? They are also communities as they have millions of members every month. Can communities be public also? Do I get all member information and how do we compare this to Instagram? That's the question. Sure, sure. Thanks, Ketika. So whoever has asked that question, it's a very apt question. So let me just talk about platforms that have blogs. These are, again, let's go back to balcony versus hall. This is a balcony. This is where I publish content. I publish blogs or videos and people come and consume that content. How do those people come? How do you discover a dot-com website? Whether it's any platform, how do you discover it? Either you type it or you see a Google ad or a Facebook ad, click on it and go. So a lot of the people that come there could be paid traffic or organic but essentially it is a one-way communication channel. Instagram, again, is a one-way communication channel. The influencer has a lot of influence over the followers but the followers are not interacting amongst each other. There are no conversations which are peer-to-peer. And the second question that you said was around member information. There is no member information that's available. So all of this is through official Facebook APIs and all we get access is to category-level insights. There is no personal information that you get. So I hope that answers all the questions. Well, the word community is overused a lot but community is essentially any place or forum where there is a two-way conversation. What I just did, by the way, was a balcony. I wish it could be a hall and we could have met in person but until the world gets in a better place, that's the perfect example. So thank you for whoever asked that question. And you should have answered that. I won't say that we're getting there one step at a time. I'd say we're getting there a million steps at a time. The pace at which we're moving. Yes. Thank you, Tamanna. I would have loved to ask you a few more questions, really, really. But I have to move on because of the positive time and we have the presenters. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much.