'Facebook and Twitter will come and go'

There is an informal air in the small but cosy office tucked away in a residential suburb of Mumbai. A bunch of kids, most of them just out of college, are on Facebook. Some others are busy tweeting.

Unlike most offices, where social networking sites are banned, there are no firewalls here. Everyone can access any website they want to, especially if it's a social networking one.

That's the beauty of being in a social business communications firm, you actually get paid to update your Facebook profile or catch up on your tweets! Superchooha is one such company. It was formed about two years ago when Ankita Gaba, a 24-year-old management graduate, decided to venture out on her own.

A former public relations executive, Gaba worked for a major Indian music label before she got tired of the nine-to-five routine. Along with a former colleague she formed Superchooha. Before long however the colleague branched out and joined another startup.

This was around February last year. For about three months, Ankita held fort by herself. And by May 22-year-old BITS Pilani graduate Aditya Rao joined in. The two share their story of 'going where no one has ever gone before':

What is social business communications?

Aditya: Social business communication involves using social technologies to make more efficient business operations within the organisation for employees and outside the organisations to connect brand with customers. This kind of interaction cannot be possible in any other medium. If a celebrity wants to interact with his or her fans without meeting them in person, s/he can do it using a social media platform. Such platforms also help in marketing, R&D, product development and crisis management. Fastrack sells watches and Dell did business of some 6$.5 million only through their Twitter handle.

What they do:

Aditya: We don't so much manage online profiles of celebrities and brands as much as we provide a platform between them and their followers. For instance we don't update their tweets or FB status messages or respond to their fan messages. We encourage them to do it themselves and step in only if they cannot. In such cases we always ensure that the readers know it's us who is talking and not the celebrity.

In a broader perspective, our approach is two-fold. On the one hand we focus on consulting and telling clients how to behave online and stepping in when they have problems. This is done via internal workshops and training seminars. On the other we scale up from just Facebook and Twitter to create custom communities for the brand where the employees / customers can engage with each other. The result is feedback / R&D / data on social behaviours of the brand's customers. Now the brand knows what people like and don't like.

How they started off:

Ankita: Three months into my last job I knew I wanted to get out. So when a colleague came by and suggested we start something, I jumped at the idea. Even though I might have not known them personally I knew how to reach out to celebrities, since I had been in public relations for about two years then.

At first everything was a cold call. We called a bunch of celebrities including (television actors) Manav Gohil and Ram Kapoor who responded. When we met Ram, he told us that he gets such messages from a lot of people but was intrigued by the name of our company. Ram was doing a show called Kasamh Se at the time. We convinced him to blog about it and share stories that happened on the sets and other related stuff. I also managed to get the story of his blogging in Mumbai Mirror (a prominent Mumbai newspaper) and we were off! The blog became quite popular and became a great platform for his fans to interact with him.

By then we had a few celebrity clients but the money wasn't really coming in. My then partner decided to bow out because he also had a family to support. Around the time I was introduced to Aditya over Twitter. We exchanged ideas online and before we knew it Aditya and I were working together. After he joined, we started looking at corporate clients. This changed a lot of things. Since the time Aditya has stepped in, we are growing at the rate of 500 per cent.

Despite this there are always times when we have a cash flow crisis when clients don't pay on time. At such times my family helps and chips in till we get our payments. My father is retired while my mom is one active housewife. Neither was happy when I decided to give up my postgraduation in business administration. The college was in Mysore and the weather didn't really suit me. I had to give it up and return to doing what I really liked -- public relations. My mom insists I finish my post-grad, which I am appearing for. It took them some time but eventually they have got around to understanding what I do and even support me in times of distress.

Aditya: I was interning with Mercedes Benz in Bengaluru when I first saw Ankita's tweet. The internship was compulsory to get my mechanical engineering degree from BITS, Pilani. I can't say I enjoyed working at Merc a lot. I'd finish whatever I was supposed to do in a few hours and then bounce off ideas with Ankita and work on Superchooha.

Somewhere deep down, I always knew I would be doing something related to the internet. So when Ankita made me the offer, I grabbed it with both hands.

At first one of Ankita's former bosses let her use his office out of goodwill. As business grew, we shifted our base to a two-bedroom apartment in suburban Mumbai. I used to live in one of the bedrooms while the other was the office!

My mother hasn't really understood what exactly I am doing. I was supposed to be the smart kid in the family, destined to be an engineer, always good at studies. When I told her about Superchooha, she wasn't entirely happy. But now she has come to terms with it. A lot of people from my family are businesspeople. My father has always been a businessman and he was pretty cool with me starting off something on my own.

The challenges:

Ankita: A colleague's mother thinks we are a pest control company! A lot of people don't know what exactly social media is, let alone what it can do for them. When we started off a year and a half ago, not many people we dealt with knew about blogging. Our initial challenge then and to some extent even now, remains to convince our potential clients about the importance of having an online presence. Somewhere along the way Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan started blogging and that helped us to a certain extent to convey our ideas to some of our celebrity clients.

Aditya Rao continues, "One of the biggest fear a lot of people have is that they'll get to hear negative things about them once they go online. We try and tell them is that it makes better sense to be online and address those issues rather than let them fester. A classic instance is how Caf Coffee Day responded to the hashtag ccdsucks on Twitter. (A Caf Coffee Day branch insisted on a cover charge for a tweetup, which resulted in a barrage of tweets criticising CCD till the company decided to step in and handle the matter on Twitter.) Once they are convinced that it is better to join in rather than ignore, they are game. The other issue is that of the Internet's reach, which is limited in India. So, convincing people to get online becomes difficult.

Scalability can be an issue as is the case in the service industry as a whole. Today we have a decent sized team but if we were to get one large project, we will have to expand and move out of this place. Servicing old clients or getting newer ones is always a dilemma. Also when clients don't pay on time, which invariably happens, we have a cash flow issue.

Besides these, there are the usual issues that most startups face. We can't afford high-speed internet connections or new machines. All of us multitask. Someone has to double up as an office boy, someone has to clean the office things.

We have been getting offers from people who want to incubate our company. While we are open to incubating and don't mind a merger with a bigger company, the final call creative/strategic call must rest with us. Some digital agencies have offered to 'incubate' us but have been asking us to give up our IP rights, which we resisted and therefore rejected them.

How they plan to stay in business:

Aditya: The key is simple: you just have to continuously innovate. Facebook and Twitter are not going to last forever. Remember there once was Orkut! To stay in business we will have to diversify into various things. We have managed the online reputation of ICICI Prudential, engaged in Social Customer Response Management and engagement programmes for Zapak.com and build communities for Ponds and Mahindra.

We are also looking at venture capitalists to invest in our firm. Again, incubating is fine as long as we retain our IPR and are given the freedom to take creative and strategic business calls.

Future plans

Aditya: Online communities are the future. We are looking at creating custom-branded communities for organisations, engaging in social market research, introduce social media technologies and create social media products and tools for business operations. Basically we hope make people a part of the social web because e-mail is no longer enough to connect with MNCs.