Tete-a-Tete

Saurav Patnaik’s marketing acumen has helped him propagate the meliorating features and services of Social Twist (owned by Pramati Technologies). With their latest widget buffed Tell-a-Friend Social Twist is sure to create waves. Saurav takes us through the Social Twist product offering in this Q&A.

Tell us something about yourself

I am an engineer by qualification, but have been into marketing & business development since beginning of my career. Marketing on the digital medium is my passion. It is very interesting to see the consumer react to communication on the Internet and other digital mediums. I generally put down my thoughts on my blog Ashes2Brands.com. www.ashes2brands.blogspot.com

I love trekking and like experimenting with cocktails ;)

You have been with BC Webwise, India’s premier agency. Share your experience.

I had a great time at BC Webwise(Delhi). In my total stint at the company I had a great opportunity to work with Mr. Vivek Das (Currently the India Business Head of Ishir Infotech) and post his departure, I had to take up the complete charge of the Delhi office which worked as a catalyst to sharpen my business skills.

My boss Chaya (MD of BCWEBWISE) has been a great influence in my career. She was always there to assist me running the show in the Delhi office. Few of the accounts I have worked within my stay at the company are Hero Honda, Coca cola, India Today, CII, Virgin Mobile, Nestle and many more.

I can say that BC has been the turning point of my career.

How did SocialTwist come into existence?

The parent company is Pramati Technologies (one of the best software product companies from India). Socialtwist is the brain child of Mr. Jay Pulur (CEO).

The project started in late 2007 when Pramati team noticed the sheer need of many clients to have an application which allows them to capitalise on the age old phenomenon of Word of Mouth. The need was very evident with the rise of the Web 2.0 era where sharing was becoming a very important aspect for every individual. After initial development work of close to a year or so, Social twist was launched in September 2008.

Elaborate on the “Tell a Friend” widget? What is the USP?

Tell-a-Friend is a widget that allows a website visitor to recommend its content to its family and friends via emails, IMs, Social Networks, Blogs, and 50+ bookmarking sites.

The only Word of Mouth marketing application that gives you both one-to-one and one-to-many communication capabilities.

Tell us something we do not know about Social Twist.

Well there are a whole lot of possibilities about Socialtwist that people in the outside world do not know lolz. So I would just ask you to subscribe to the RSS of our blog to be updated with the latest development at our end.

How has the response been?

The response has been fantastic and we are on the high octane path.

Could you share a few statistics?

Socialtwist has been able to fetch over 37,000 publishers in a short span of 7 months and has crossed 570 million button serves already.

How do you plan on monetising the model?

We offer premium services where we offer to brand the widget and do its deep integration for a rich content sharing - this is very beneficial for e- commerce based sites.

We also offer a service which enables an advertiser to run their referral marketing/loyalty campaign on our system.

We already have a lot of premium clients: NDTV, JetAirways, Quikr, Indiaplaza, Cleartrip, Ixigo, Intel, Sun Microsystems and many more.

The services have been used on many campaigns like HelpBihar, Jaagore, Wills Fashion Week etc. The advertiser has been able to see and acknowledges the value addition that Tell-a-Friend offers.

What is the SocialTwist team currently working on?

We are engaged with the upcoming release of Tell-a-Friend. We will be introducing a lot of new features in the Admin panel of the user and the e- commerce aspect of the website.

The team is also working on something very grandoise for the display advertising world. This will change the way we have been measuring banner campaigns. I would not be able to discuss more on this, but I can assure you that this will be a boon (read: ready palette) to the global online marketing world.

What is the next social media trend to hit the market?

Well, it will be very difficult for me to predict the next social media trend. But as of now Twitter is rocking a lot of businesses with traffic, leads, sales etc. So I would say micro blogging space will attract more action in the coming times and the Indian marketers must focus on this area.

Where do you see SocialTwist 5 years from now?

This is a very dynamic space that we belong to in today’s ever changing technology stream. While it is hard to predict the future trends now, what I could assure you is that Social Twist will always be in the Pioneer/Leadership segmentation….

Tips, tricks, cheats for budding entrepreneurs

I recently gave a talk on “Marketing in the Web 2.0 World” at one of the Startup Saturdays and had an opportunity to interact with a lot of Startup companies and their owners.

I would have a very small thing to say “Just believe in it and act”.