Be a Thought Leader with Social Media: Wipro Case Study

Just about every brand has a social media presence today. Most are boring, and built with vague goals. When you create an official social media account, you should ask yourself why others would want to seae your updates on a daily basis. When Wipro started using a social media platform, they considered it as a driver of business-strategy. A focus was laid on creating an experience for users.

In 2007, Wipro decided to use social media as an effective channel to engage and communicate with its stakeholders. In order to foster internal collaboration, Wipro created an internal social media channel, MyWiproWorld-an online forum for collaboration, networking, ideation, and innovation-which enabled over a hundred thousand of Wipro's global workforce to come together on one platform and simultaneously share experiences, build relationships, and engage in various discussions. This platform connects over 110,000 employees with over 3,000 communities providing seamless networking and collaboration.

Challenges in Adopting Social Media

Relevance and reach were two of the most significant challenges that were involved in the adoption and implementation of social media at Wipro. The spokesperson comments, "When we began our social media journey, we were faced with questions like:

• How do we create magnetic content that strike the right chords with our target audience?
• Which are the various social channels that we need to engage in?
• How do we enhance the reach of our programs on social media?

We began answering the above questions by first establishing the Wipro Council for Industry Research -a content engine within the organization comprising domain and technology experts from the organization in collaboration with leading academic institutions and industry bodies to study market trends and address customer needs. This council generated insights and perspectives on issues faced by our customers thereby facilitating their business and IT strategies." As a result, the digital team works in close collaboration with the thought leadership team and internal marketing teams at the respective business units to drive conversations online. The objective of this team was to strategize, drive, and monitor conversations across multiple channels.

Having established an organization-wide discipline to create engaging content, the next challenge was to identify the channels of engagement.

Wipro formulated a 2-pronged strategy to address this. "Firstly, we mapped our target audience with various social channels to identify channels which show maximum likelihood of reach and engagement. Secondly, on the identified channels, we practiced a distributed communication strategy with dedicated handles on every platform. Each one catered to a different set of audience. This enabled us to stay relevant to each set of audience," the spokesperson reveals.

With the content and platforms in place, the next challenge was to enhance the outreach on social and increase the engagement levels. The digital team increased the frequency of engagement on social channels.

Now, there are daily updates surrounding a variety of aspects related to Wipro, its customers and its employees such as business insights, company events, job postings and many more areas. spokesperson comments, "The quality and consistency of our messages on these channels have resulted in extremely positive engagement levels. Our Klout score of 84 on Twitter with a style of ‘Thought Leader' is ahead of majority of the IT services companies. Some of our campaigns on social media, including the latest ‘Wipro Online Marathon' have been a roaring success indicating that we are on the right track of solving the social media jig-saw puzzle."

LinkedIn to Bait Niche Targets

One of the successful channels which enabled the digital team to focus and reach IT decision makers and influencers from top-companies was LinkedIn. The case study states that Wipro was able to reach their focused audience, ie, over 90% decision makers from companies with over 10,000 employees. Wipro has seen some great results and and decided to increase the investments by 110% in LinkedIn since they saw a consistent value for their marketing efforts.

Worth the Journey

By embracing social media, Wipro has been able to increase its interactions with stakeholders, better understand their viewpoints and opinions, and work collaboratively towards making Wipro a better workplace for their employees and a partner of choice for their clients. "With a social reach in excess of 1 million, we use it as a communication medium to reach out to our internal and external stakeholders. As an engagement tool, we utilize our online channels to accomplish the following objectives:

• Keep the stakeholders up to speed regarding the company and related news and information
• Enable social users with latest insights and perspectives on business," shares the spokesperson.

Pass on the Gyaan

Today, a majority of the enterprises look at social media as an awareness platform. A lot of thinking goes into gaining fans, making impressions and going viral. However, with social being the one single platform which influences customer at every point in his journey, organizations must look at it as a driver of business strategy. "The focus now shift from engagement to creating an experience. Some brands have successfully cracked social; however, it is a bottomless pit which offers newer insights and opportunities with every passing day," the spokesperson concludes.