Featuring a Social Media Agency: Gecko Worldwide

Who are we?

We at Gecko Worldwide help our clients understand the market and help delve deep into consumer insights. We enable brands tell their story through content that educates, is reliable and is valuable to the consumer. With so much information flowing around, our skill to place information in the context of the audience is one of our core strengths. Being a 360 degree communications organization, we pride ourselves in being able to identify audience engaging platforms for brands and enabling information dissemination through various channels catering to both, internal and external stakeholders.

A graduate from Mithibai college in 2006, Keyur began working at his father’s architectural glass manufacturing business as a member of the marketing team. But the desire to herald a venture by himself drove him to begin Gecko Worldwide – A 360 degree communications agency. The company was given birth to on the 1st of September, 2010. Equipping himself with the ins and outs of public relations with the help of guiding mentors, Keyur took centre stage and kicked off to nurture Gecko. The first client for Gecko Worldwide in the October of 2010. It was The Islamic Research Foundation. But Gecko’s biting point was the biggest client in the form of Times of India in January 2011. Since then Gecko has serviced clients across industry verticals in PR, Social Media and Creative collateral development.

The Core team:

1. Keyur Barad – CEO

2. Khushi Ahuja – Account Manager Public Relations

3. Nasir Engineer – Content and Social Media Executive

4. Ritu Jindal- Communications associate

5. Avinash Kadam- Operations

What's in the name?

Why we chose the name ‘Gecko’ is because of its existence through 1000’s of years,in the same physical form possessing the innate ability to adapt to changing environments. Plus the Gecko is the only species among the lizards to be able to vocally communicate with other geckos. Nearly 50 names were looked through to have finally decided the one that symbolizes Gecko Worldwide. And the green colour is to stand out from the rest of the brand logos which are either red or blue. Green itself gave off a different identity. The idea was to promote our core strengths in adaptation in changing market environments and communication.

What we do?

Gecko Worldwide is a full service communications consultancy. We are young, vibrant and persuasively innovative and strive to personalize ourselves with the brand’s journey to become a perfect fit. We offer our services in Public Relations, Social Media, Creative Marketing Collaterals and also help look out for cross marketing initiatives for our clients.

Why we do it?

It is imperative for an agency to learn and adapt to the new and changing trends in the market adopting them into the working of the agency. We, at Gecko Worldwide are focussed earnestly on constant innovation, training our thoughts for development, a lot of networking, sharing ideas and researching on new tools introduced in the market to stay on track and at the right speed.

Social responsibility in social media

Being the platform that it is, Social media allows every person to comment on anything and everything. Comments can be both, negative and positive. A social media agency plays a vital role in managing the reputation risk to the brands we represent. Our mantra is to revel in the positives and being honest and humble in the face of adversity. There is also a need for 24x7 engagement to mitigate the risks of a multiplier effect. At the same time, we encourage our clients to take calculated risks, to be themselves than be something they are not. Hence, we try to avoid putting into place a strict editorial policy for our social media campaigns.

Need of the hour

Social networking laws are not properly drafted yet. Things we consider that need to be taken care of from our experience.

As social networking platforms entrench deeper into India, it has become imperative that we have effective laws in place. The recent controversy over internet censorship in India reiterate the same. Social networking has increased tremendously in India over the last few years, this has given rise to many legal complications as well. Editorial columns in newspapers are similar in their approach. They are opinions of individuals but are governed by the editorial policy of the publication. Hence wrong facts and defamatory statements are weeded out. Reputation, Patents and content linked laws need to be place in India for the way ahead.

We learned the hard way

Preparation is the key! Social Media is the fastest platform to disseminate information, however the trick lies in the content, the more researched and interesting the content is, the more attraction it creates. Hence a lot of preparation goes into every blog post, every facebook post is thought out in advance.

Also, in this industry which attracts and repels so much talent, it is imperative that we take good care of our team members. So that they feel like a part of the client’s organization and give more than their 100 % to keep the audiences engaged, to bring creativity to the fore every single day. Also, performance peaks when the pressure is the most.

They work with us 

Through our journey of about 2 years now, we have worked with some excellent organizations across services and across industries. Some of them are: ORO, The Mumbai International Motor Show by the Times of India group, The Islamic Peace Foundation, Sq.Ft. Consulting, Neo Glass Tiles, NYUZ, IL & FS, Forty Red Bangles, Dekor Group, Umbel, Airawat Group, Ascend International School etc.

Industry as we foresee

Social Media is going to evolve a lot faster than what most people expect. It is bursting out and businesses are cutting a piece of this pie. Twitter, for one, will do better than facebook in the short term. The speed of information sharing will quadruple and for that necessary laws will have to be put in place. Everyone is jumping onto the Social Media band wagon but not all of them are well versed with the way it has to be used. The digital space is gaining importance amongst clients. Content consumption of the audience is increasing day by day specifically in the 20 to 35 age group. Brands who are targeting the youth cannot afford to ignore the digital platform.

A day without Internet

A day without the internet would be like the day the earth stood still. There is a major clog at work when that happens, since most of the networking and interaction takes place online.