TECH TALK: CREATING A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

MIS - TERM V - PGPBM 2018-2020 - IIM TRICHY (CHENNAI CHAPTER)

Case Abstract

Background
Founded in 2012 by Dr. Aditya Khare and Dr. Arshiya Chak, Tech Talk is a premium
technology, business knowledge portal focused on promoting knowledge in the domain areas
of information technology and systems. Articles in the portal encompassed specialized areas
such as business analytics, e-governance, e-commerce, internet technologies, information
technology, big data analytics, project management, telecommunication, general management,
service science, e-payments, digital marketing, smart cities and other related themes. Tech
Talk also published focused case studies, which could be use a mini-cases or caselets for
discussions in classrooms and workshops. Tech Talk content was differentiated from textbooks
in the way it was represented pictorially and graphically. Infographics were liberally used
throughout the website and drew a lot of views and reviews from visitors. Despite being a new
portal, the financial performance of Tech Talk from 2013 to 2016 has been fairly good.
Context
Dr. Khare and Dr. Chak were evaluating the type of traffic that Tech Talk has been
receiving and found that 84% of the traffic to their portal came from search engines only and
that too mostly from US and India. Interestingly, only 4% contribution to the overall traffic
came through social media. Tech Talk was deployed on the WordPress content management
system and each page of the website was integrated with social sharing tools. Sharing facilities
were sometimes used by page visitors, but not as frequently as Dr. Khare wanted. By using
Twitter feed and Twitter trends, Tech Talk acquired a lot of followers and as of December
2016, Tech Talk had more than 60,000 followers in Twitter. Even though Tech Talk had huge
number of followers, it was not generating a significant amount of referral traffic, which is
usually is an outcome of such large following. Dr. Khare wondered why the Twitter followers
were not converted in traffic.
Dilemma
Dr. Khare knows that Tech Talk had very low presence in social media and he wanted to
change the situation. He also realised that ignoring social media in growth strategy was not
possible. Dr. Khare wanted to increase the ‘traffic’ to his portal directly through platforms
such as Facebook and Twitter. He also wanted the portal to have strong presence among special
interest groups on social media so that discussions could be initiated and carried forward to
enrich the body of knowledge on the web. To attract investors and propel future growth, Dr.
Khare had to devise a strategy that would increase the traffic by making the publishing portal
to have a strong presence in social media. He is wondering on how to understand and
incorporate the functional blocks for social media websites. Given choices of number of social
media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, he needs to decide which of
these platforms will be more suitable. Dr. Khare is also contemplating choices for social media
marketing; i.e. whether to keep it in-house or outsource it and how to design the KPIs in
implementing the social media strategy. Next section in this document lists out all the
questions that Dr. Khare is considering to improve Tech Talk’s presence in & through the world
of social media.

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TECH TALK: CREATING A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
MIS - TERM V - PGPBM 2018-2020 - IIM TRICHY (CHENNAI CHAPTER)

Tech Talk - Case Questions

1. How should Dr. Khare strategize the interaction with readers on social media?
In my personal experience, I have seen many people that love sharing and discussing about
the books/articles in digital form that they are reading, and social media plays a massive
role in ‘spreading the news/message’. As this is one of the critical success factors for a
publishing company like Tech Talk, we can see why publishers are hopping on to the
bandwagon of social media. In today’s world, with millions of people going online to
search for relevant digital publications, social media is the platform & tool that spreads the
word about recent releases at an amazing speed.

Below are few strategic initiatives that Dr. Khare could consider for increasing interaction
with the readers on social media.
Connecting the readers with the authors - Dr. Khare can consider creating ‘virtual
reading clubs’, host a blog where readers could share their thoughts and raise questions
that could be addressed by the authors directly. Tumblr could a potential platform that
Dr. Khare could consider, as it provides a social networking website for microblogging
about authors and articles.
Enabling discovery of new publications - Many publishers are turning to social media
as an effective way to increase discovery of their new articles & publications. For
example - some publishers are partnering with social media services like Pinterest
where readers are allowed to post about their favourite authors and titles, and publishers
use social media analysis to see what is trending and act accordingly.
Personalized services - By knowing the likes and preferences of its readers, Tech Talk
could connect with them by providing heads-up on all upcoming articles that will be
relevant to the specific group of people.

2. Which platforms should Dr. Khare focus on?

While there are number of social media platforms to choose from, there are only few that
are tried and tested in publishing industry and they are: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
There are few other strategic options like Snapchat, Tumblr, Houzz, etc. that requires deep
pockets. However, these platforms usually complement one or more of the top three
mentioned above. To begin with Dr. Khare should focus on Facebook, LinkedIn and
Twitter.

3. How should Dr. Khare invest in building a presence on these platforms?

Good thing about spending money in social media platforms is that one can literally can
start with zero investment, as there are multiple choices available in the digital world that
could be tried out to ‘test the waters’ first. If Dr. Khare decides to keep the digital marketing
activity in-house, then he should consider ‘crawl, walk and then run’ approach. Once he
figures out how he would like to approach advertising through social media and choice of
platforms (eg. whether to launch an advertising campaign on Facebook, Twitter or
LinkedIn or any other platform), he can consider spending minimal amounts and

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TECH TALK: CREATING A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
MIS - TERM V - PGPBM 2018-2020 - IIM TRICHY (CHENNAI CHAPTER)

experiment first. After trying out different avenues Dr. Khare can slowly and steadily,
build & increase Tech Talk’s social media presence. On the other hand, if Dr. Khare wishes
to outsource the social media management activities, then he should consider investing in
understanding the market landscape and reader’s perception of Tech Talk’s publications
first. He can continue investing more to address areas that will be of great importance in
order to grow Tech Talk’s presence in social media.

4. How should Dr. Khare try to understand and incorporate the functional blocks for social
media strategy?
Typically, managers miss the opportunity of leveraging the power social media, as they
find it hard to find answers to questions like “Which social media platforms to
choose/ignore?”, “What are the capabilities of the platforms and how are they differentiated
from one other?” and “What should be the strategy for each of the platforms?”. To address
such questions, researchers have developed a framework called ‘Social Media - Functional
Building Blocks’. There are essentially 7 blocks viz. i) Identity ii) Conversations iii)
Sharing iv) Presence v) Relationships vi) Reputation & vii) Groups. Dr. Khare can use
these blocks either individually or in combinations or all together. By mapping these 7
blocks and their relevance with respect to the social media choices, Dr. Khare can make
appropriate social media choices and increase engagement with the readers. To explain
further with an example - Twitter has a restriction on the number characters and therefore
more suitable for sharing & having short conversations. Likewise, if we look into
functional blocks of Identity and Reputation blocks, LinkedIn is more suitable and
functional block of Sharing is more relevant with YouTube, Instagram.

5. How should the scope of social media be defined in fine tuning Tech Talk’s social media
strategy?
The immediate problem on hand for Dr. Khare is to increase the traffic through social
media. Instead of keeping a huge scope for social media activities, Dr. Khare as an
immediate step, should focus on ways & means for generating more traffic to Tech Talk’s
portal. Dr. Khare should understand the reasons for less traffic via social media, and based
on the findings should scope the activities that will address necessary gaps and increase the
traffic.

6. What websites and key performance indicators should Dr. Khare focus on in implementing
his social media strategy?
KPI is an indicator or metric that tells a story of how successful an action has been. Dr.
Khare should focus on 3 groups of KPIs, when it comes to measuring social media strategy
in digital publication industry. The 3 groups are:
a) Growth related metrics - these KPIs quantitatively expresses follower’s growth goals.
Count & growth of followers, likes, comments, etc. are some of the basic metrics that tells
how actively people are reading/accessing the publications.
b) Publication related metrics - KPIs under this category are specific to the publication
industry and presents quantitative view that will help Dr. Khare to identify Tech Talk’s

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TECH TALK: CREATING A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
MIS - TERM V - PGPBM 2018-2020 - IIM TRICHY (CHENNAI CHAPTER)

posting behaviour in comparison to the competitors. Few KPIs that Dr. Khare could focus
in this category are:
Posts - This KPI will show Dr. Khare the number of the posts that have been posted by
Tech Talk.
Posts Type Distribution - Dr. Khare should also focus on to monitor distribution of post
types and performance of each of the posts in terms of likes, comments, and other
growth-related metrics
c) Engagement metrics - On other important area that Dr. Khare should focus on will be on
the engagement. Total interactions, Post-wise interactions and Post-type wise interaction
are some of the KPIs that will be relevant for Dr. Khare.

Tools and websites from companies like Zoho, Peerindex and Buzzinga provide social
media analytics capability in real-time.

7. Should Dr. Khare manage the social media marketing in-house or outsource it?
If Dr. Khare goes with in-house - The team should consist of capable workers with the right
skills, attitudes and skills to achieve Tech Talk’s social media marketing goals. Biggest
benefit of going with in-house team will be that the team members will be familiar with the
strategy, marketing goals and will be able to get the act together to meet the corporate
vision. In absence of necessary skillsets and digital marketing strategy knowledge in-
house, Dr. Khare can consider social media marketing to an outside vendor specialising in
that space. Going with outsourced model will also reduce the marketing overhead
substantially. Therefore, recommendation to Dr. Khare will be to consider/go with
outsourced model.

8. How can Dr. Khare identify potential influencers from among his subscriber base and
engage with them appropriately?
Social media analytics would help Dr. Khare in a big way to identify the influencers from
Tech Talk’s subscriber base. KPIs that help to identify each & every subscriber’s action
like giving comments, likes, sharing with other subscribers, will highlight the potential
influencers from the subscriber base. Based on the ‘trend’, Dr. Khare could intervene early
by interacting directly with the subscriber if he/she is impacting in a negative way.

9. What are the major topics of discussion on Tech Talk?

Looking at Exhibit 11 (Tech Talk Topic Word Cloud), some of the major topics of
discussion have been:
 Technology
 News
 Business
 Mashable
 Gadget
 Techcrunch

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TECH TALK: CREATING A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
MIS - TERM V - PGPBM 2018-2020 - IIM TRICHY (CHENNAI CHAPTER)

10. What does the emotion analysis of Tech Talk content imply?
Emotion analysis of Tech Talk identifies and categorizes emotions of readers of
publications, expressed in texts after going through certain post/publication. Amazing, joy,
surprise were some of the positive emotions and sadness, anger, fear, disgust, etc. were few
negative emotions that could be seen in the Emotion Word Cloud (exhibit 13).

11. Comment on polarity of tweets posted by Tech Talk

Positive, Neutral and Negative seems to be appearing in equal proportion.

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