Name Pratik Gandhi Subject Digital Marketing

About Tata DOCOMO

TATA DOCOMO is Tata Teleservices Limiteds telecom service on the GSM platform arising out of the Tata Groups strategic alliance with Japanese telecom major NTT DOCOMO in November 2008. Tata Teleservices Limited has received a license to operate GSM telecom services in 19 telecom Circles and has been allotted spectrum in 18 of these Circles. It has rolled out its GSM services in all of these 18 CirclesTamil Nadu, Kerala, Orissa, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh, Haryana-Punjab, Kolkata, Rest of West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, UP (East), UP (West), Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan (subsidiary company Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Limited has launched GSM services under the TATA DOCOMO brand in the Mumbai and Rest of Maharashtra Circles). TATA DOCOMO recently became the first Indian private operator to launch 3G services in India in all the nine telecom Circles where it won the 3G license. In association with its partner NTT DOCOMO, the brand finds itself suitably positioned to leverage this first-mover advantage. With 3G, TATA DOCOMO stands to redefine the very face of telecoms in India. Tokyo-based NTT DOCOMO is one of the worlds leading mobile operatorsin the Japanese market, the company is the clear market leader, used by over 50 per cent of the countrys mobile phone users.

Tata DOCOMO Many independent observers refer to Tata DOCOMO as a child of Social Media. In effect that is quite close to being the strategy for Tata DOCOMO even before the time the brand was officially unveiled.

Why Social Media When Tata DOCOMO was planning to enter the Indian market as the 9th GSM operator, it faced entrenched incumbents and strong brand communication barriers from other telecom operators. However Tata DOCOMO was determined to change the game and cut through the clutter through pure innovation and doing the New.

Social Media became the first opportunity which had not been picked up by most Indian brands in June 2009 leave alone the telecom operators. It was unchartered waters but we knew that Social Media connects us with the exact TG that the brand wanted to associate with. It further had the wow element and was clearly doing the New. The perfect reason for Tata DOCOMO to draw up an extensive strategy to harness the power of Social Media and build the brand with its consumers. Laying the Social Media Strategy At the very core of the Social Media strategy was the idea of humanizing a telecom brand and make it warm, friendly and conversational. The strategy was simple yet brilliant. Reach out to every corner of the web and to every possible TG not as a corporate brand but as a friend willing to engage the consumer in a one-on-one dialogue on anything and everything pertaining to the brand, its offers, its deficiencies as well as anything to do with telecom per se. The desired outcome was clear in everyone's mind to build the most loyal set of beta customers who will champion the brand in their micro-communities at every moment

The execution A dedicated Social Media team at Interface was built to execute the plan. Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Youtube accounts were opened up and optimized even before the brand launch took place. The website itself actively solicited visitors to signup to the Tata DOCOMO communities months before it became a fad for others. The Social Media team set about targeting each of the Social Media platforms differently.

Twitter typically has a more evolved and techy audience that other Social Media platforms. Tata DOCOMO acknowledged the importance of these thought leaders and made sure they got their worth by following the brand. All products, offers and schemes were first announced to our Twitter followers before they were allowed on any other media. On many occasions Twitter followers were given teasers and prelaunch feelers much before the product was even in a state of launch readiness. Today Tata DOCOMO has more than 7500 followers and we know most of them by name. We have solved their telecom problems, passed on their messages to relevant people in the company and brought about resolutions or simply just said a hello when someone was missing in action for an extended period of time.

Facebook clearly has a large influential community that was identified right at the start as being a major influencer of brand advocacy. Tata DOCOMO set about creating conversations among its fans on Facebook. Like Twitter a one-on-one communication was maintained with all its fans helping resolve problems, providing information and escalating issues. The community was kept engaged through a variety of status updated including discussions on TV commercials, jingles, product service launches and fun and games.

Orkut has a mass user base and was identified as an important element in managing mass sentiment around the brand. The forum has been used both as a community feedback tool as well as a platform where free discussions were enabled on specific topics (either product-service related or band related). The platform has also extensively been used for contests to keep community members engaged.

Youtube has been a central repository for all brand commercials and videos. Tata DOCOMO has made a departure from the traditional way of only uploading videos created by the brand to also showcasing user generated content, specifically animation videos submitted by users at the create.tatadocomo.com platform.

In continuation of its strategy to be omnipresent in Social Media, Tata DOCOMO is perhaps one of the few Indian brands to have reached out to less popular social networking and community portals in India. It carries through the same brand promise of being everywhere that out potential consumers could be however small the reach of the portal might be.

The Tata DOCOMO strategy with respect to third party blogs and forums were both proactive and reactive. Everyday 100s and 1000s of blogs and forums were scanned or any mention of Tata DOCOMO and whenever a user had posted a question, comment and complaint, the Social Media team made it a point to go and respond to resolve (wherever necessary) every post or comment. Tata DOCOMO is probably the only brand in the Indian landscape who have gone ahead and created official accounts on hundreds of blogs and forums and have always responded through its official id.

Demystifying the strategy The Tata DOCOMO social media strategy has been carefully built on five pillars. Build consumer engagement Beyond the day to day and one-on-one interactions with our fans and followers, Tata DOCOMO has constantly launched consumer engagement programs with a heavy social media angle. This has helped us build repeat engagement points with a large number of our fans. Be it dietsms which was rolled out exclusively through social media, ageekthing which involved Orkut, gadgets , Facebook applications and automated Twitter tools or happy DOYear which could be played through Facebook, Twitter and Orkut.

Address and resolve complaints Even before the launch of social media engagements, a dedicated customer response mechanism was laid out for priority resolution of all social media grievances / enquiries. Top management at Tata DOCOMO has taken great pains to make sure that literally the buck stops when an issue is raised through social media channels. From activation problems, network issues, handset settings or billing related matters, every single issue has been promptly addressed and resolved. Comes as no wonder therefore that initially the Tata DOCOMO Twitter account was nicknamed the unofficial helpline. Crowd sourcing Very early in the social lifecycle of the brand Tata DOCOMO realized it had hundreds of well wishers who were all brimming with ideas on new product-service offerings that

could be a real differentiator for the company. The social team has repeatedly engaged with its beta consumers, collecting feedback about usage, preferences, bounced off product ideas and pretested concepts to help the product team develop compelling product service offerings. The icing on the cake was when we involved our techy Twitter followers to hack into a social game launched by Tata DOCOMO as part of the ageekthing contest and suggest ways to prevent others from doing so. Many of the recent product service launches like gprs packs and parts of the buddyNet program have been built on crowd sourcing inputs. Build brand advocacy Continuous engagement and proactive problem resolution has helped Tata DOCOMO build extremely loyal fans on social media. Innovative ways of recognizing such efforts through fan of the week on Facebook and Twitter has further enhanced the cause.

Micro communication With close to 100,000 direct followers and over 6 million secondary reach, all communication from Tata DOCOMO enjoys a sizeable instant audience. However our social team remembers the names, occupations and past communications with thousands and thousands of our fans. This helps us micro communicate with each individual building a personal touch and therefore a high impact to our messaging. The Outcome Each media of the social media strategy has helped Tata DOCOMO build a strong and loyal fanbase amongst the youth and has unmistakably taken ownership of the innovator platform this firmly establishing the brand essence of do the New. The brand values of honesty, transparency and sincerity have been well established in the minds of consumers. Tata DOCOMO social presence is not seen to be a marketing gimmick but a genuine effort to connect and engage with every fan and follower with sincerity and with the authority to solve their problems. Perhaps the apt summary of the success of Tata DOCOMOs social media has been a comment posted on Twitter. In the world of telecom if airtel is Microsoft, Tata DOCOMO is google. DoDo do Do Do... Tata DOCOMO won seven prestigious metals under the various categories such as Best Website (Corporate and Micro site), Best Use of Blogs, Best Integrated Campaign and the Best Use of Online Advertising Interface Business Solutions, Tata DOCOMOs digital media agency too won Best Social and Digital Media Agency of the year award Doing the new, doing it in style and changing the game yet again. Tata DOCOMO, the GSM arm of Tata Teleservices Limited, has been awarded with the most coveted Best

Social and Digital Media Advertiser of the year award 2011 at the prestigious Indian Digital Media Awards 2011 (IDMA). Tata DOCOMO was awarded the prestigious Digital and social media advertiser of the year for path-breaking marketing across digital and social media platforms. The brand successfully leveraged digital medium to create strong consumer affinity and connect through innovative creative and media strategies and rode on the viral power of Internet to drive engagement and cut-through the clutter. In addition to the top honors, Tata DOCOMO bagged four Golds across various categories including - the Best Website / Micro site (service) for its innovative and educative 3G Life website, Best Use of Blogs (for the innovative integration of Online chat with top Telecom Blogs in India, as a new way of leveraging blogs for driving customer satisfaction), Best Video Creative (digital media) and Best Website (corporate) categories. Tata DOCOMO also won one silver and one bronze metal under the category of Online Advertising for Rich Media and Best Integrated Online Campaign respectively. As a cherry on the cake, Interface Business Solutions (Tata DOCOMOs Digital Media Agency) triumphed with the Best Social and Digital Media Agency of the year award. Tata DOCOMOs work often took a very simple but effective approach to digital media for example, for the Best Video category, the brand ran a video pre-roll ad of 15 seconds showing the buffering image, before the main copy telling the audience that this buffering wait dispels if they use Tata DOCOMO 3G.

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