Social Media Agency Feature: Ethinos

Who are we?

Ethinos Digital Marketing is a digital marketing agency that delves into the world of digital media activities for both, B2B and B2C focused companies. We are a team of creative, motivated and insightful individuals who understand whom to talk to, what to say and how to say it to make sure our clients are a happy, profitable lot!

The Team:

Siddharth Hegde – Managing Director
(Has worked with a diverse group of companies right from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies in his 14 years of experience across different industries. The last 7 years of which have been focused on digital including setting up a community of ex-GE CXO in 2007)

Sameer Shriyan – Head, Search and Design.
(He has over 11 years working on both the Agency side as well as the client side. One of his past roles has involved him supporting one of the world’s largest IT hardware company’s with their design & world beating ecommerce initiatives)

Social Media Gang – Ashish D’Souza, Shirley Ferreira, Glynford Machado, Nishanth Warrier, Divya Kamra , Priyanka Kulkarni, Tushar Kishnani, and Mihika Shetty.

What's in the name?

Ok. So we call ourselves Ethinos Digital Marketing. ‘Ethinos’ means ‘native wisdom.’ And that’s exactly what we bring to the table. We’re enthusiastic, keen, observant natives of the digital space who love tinkering and playing around with every new app, tool, feature, so by the time our clients approach us, we’re always ready and good to go!

Our logo is a combination of the double helix strands of the human DNA and an electrical pulse. Because Ethinos has digital marketing in its DNA and a constant finger on the pulse of the World Wide Web at large and our various target audiences in particular.

What we do?

We make life simple! For our clients and their customers.

We build brands…online. And do all it takes to keep them alive, interesting and relevant to customers.

Digital Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing and Monitoring, Email Marketing to Branding and Design, Search (SEO and PPC), Media Buying and Mobile Marketing are the areas we can help out with.

In addition to knowing our way around the vibrant exuberance of the B2C space, our experience so far has given us an uncanny knack of handling even complex, subtly corporate B2B messages with ease.

Why we do it?

Siddharth Hegde, Managing Director at Ethinos has a diverse experience for working with Fortune 500 companies and also a number of start-up ventures. While interacting with various agencies, there were a lot of times he saw a disconnect between the company’s requirements and the agency’s understanding of the same in terms of B2B or enterprise management functions. It is this gap that he decided to fill when he chose to launch Ethinos Digital Marketing.

And still remaining true to that decision, Ethinos has a team with digital media enthusiasts from a variety of backgrounds. It lets us steer clear from the blinkers of a ‘traditional agency’ mindset, so our clients never feel like we’re on the other side of the table!

We do what we do because we love the space we are in. We get a high creating the perfect cocktail of strategy, creativity and technology that gets us a lot of Hi-5s from our clients!

How we evolve?

At Ethinos, we have one rule. To share is to care (except if its food!)

Research reports, best practices, new tools, new features, anything that anyone reads is almost immediately in everyone’s inbox…and we make sure it gets read! We have our in-house techno-freaks and digital geeks who pride themselves on being the first to know stuff and share it with everyone!

The other way we evolve is by listening to each other. We enjoy brainstorming sessions that include everyone. Whether they’re from search, social media, or design team, everyone makes their voice heard! It is these sessions that give us a chance to learn from each other and be wiser at the end of the day!

Listening to our peers and competitors also helps us grow. We take comments on our blog or our Facebook page seriously. Experts’ opinions on various digital media groups and forums and responses to content that we regularly put out there are an excellent way of keeping up with trends.

Membership of leading digital marketing communities and research sources like Econsultancy, interactions with associations like NASSCOM, Word Of Mouth Marketing Association, etc. allow us to keep abreast of the latest trends and developments in the world of digital marketing and technology.

We always encourage clients to be early adopters of new technologies and platforms because it challenges our limits and broadens our horizon.

Subscriptions to databases, white-boards and markers everywhere, a shelf-full of books are some of the things we have in place to always remind us that a day spent without learning something new is a day wasted!

Social responsibility in social media

Social Media has completely changed the way we communicate. Customers can now easily comment, interact and respond to branded content. As representatives of our clients in the social media, we ensure that we uphold their brand values, do not misrepresent them in any way, respond to positive and negative criticism and see to it that nothing we say goes against any particular group or individual. There is a thin line between what’s legal and what’s ethical. We walk that line every day…ethically.

We, at Ethinos, firmly believe in doing our bit to society. Social Responsibility isn’t just about supporting a cause, but going out there and doing what you can to support it. And being the digital natives that we are, we use our experience and expertise to give a lot of social causes the right kind of voice on social media. We believe this is a part of our CSR activities and thus do not bill the organizations for our services. Some of the organizations we work for are Olympic Gold Quest, NASSCOM Foundation, and Catalysts for Social Action.

Need of the hour

Regulations on data security, prevention of data theft and prompt, strict implementation of laws related to information technology is the need of the hour. Considering the viral nature of digital media, an information leak in terms of financial, strategic or confidential information can mean huge losses to a company. In the day and age of cloud computing, ecommerce, internet banking, even the privacy and security of personal data needs to be legally secured with proper redressal mechanisms in place.

The digital media community needs to ensure that steps are taken to prevent the social media industry from getting commoditized like the search industry. Recognized certification from social media platforms is one of the steps that could be taken.

The laws regarding people’s ‘right to publicity’ are non-existent in India and there is a need to first create awareness and put in place a framework for regulation. This will greatly reduce users’ privacy concerns and appease their apprehension to sharing their location, preferences, etc. The more open people become, to sharing their lives on social media, the more enriching their interactions get and eventually, social media becomes more and more relevant.

We learned the hard way

Never say “OK” to everything a client says. It’s sure to come back and bite you in the end!

Attention Deficit Disorder leads to disastrous client meetings!

Love thy clients. Especially the ones who give you the hardest time ever. They’re the ones who make you learn the most. (this realization will generally dawn on you only AFTER the work is done!)

Treat the design team like Greek Gods and thou shalt be blessed with the right spark of creativity at the right time! (*Valid till we get our final logo design)

Did we just share that?

We get very ‘excited’ when our clients order us to flash ASAP…content that is!

Our boss is so obsessed with social media, that we the employees bear the brunt of being Poked…literally (when he runs out of people to poke on Facebook). And now we all have sore arms!

They work with us

We have worked with both. Some really big names in the industry as well as startups that we are sure will be big names soon!

Our clients include Times of India, CODS India, Netsurf Entertainment (Bryan Adams and Akon Live in Concert), Olympic Gold Quest, NASSCOM, NASSCOM Foundation, Capgemini, Extended Stay Hotels, Ahuja Constructions, MISB Bocconi, eClerx, Ocean Blue Roopkumar and Sunali Rathod, and many others. We also work in for a couple of VC/Angel investors and provide digital media support to all their investee companies.

Industry as we foresee

Though there is a great divide between digital haves and digital have-nots in the country today, it is only a question of when, rather than if, most people in India will be able to access digital media in the future.

As far as the Indian Social Media industry is concerned, we see Mobile becoming very big. Any digital marketing initiatives that do not consider mobile as part of the plan, are on a way to nowhere.

We also see a shift in the roles of traditional and new media. Today, digital media is seen as a complement to traditional media, but in the years to come, we foresee traditional media being used on a large scale to ensure greater connectivity between online and offline communication in order to support and meet the business objectives.

QR codes in print ads, television ads for online contests, hoardings using Near Field Communication, are a few steps in that direction.
As technology gets more and more accessible and adoption periods get shorter, creative original content is all set to emerge as the single largest differentiating factor for brands.

Along with continuous development in deeper and more insightful metrics, social media monitoring will increase focus on measuring Return on Effort/Engagement in addition to Return on Investment.

It remains to be seen if technological development supports it, but if it does, then Social Media platforms in regional languages for the diverse Indian audiences might give the Indian Social Media scene a brand new twist in the years to come.

 A day without Internet

a) Fake smiles and awkward conversations
b) Fighting for the bean bag
c) Finding out how many people actually exist in the office
d) Increasing the revenues of all the eateries around the place
e) Realizing that Word, Excel and Powerpoint don’t need an internet connection to work