Featuring a Social Media Agency - Iffort

Who are we?

We are a digital agency, bending rules in the fields of social media marketing, digital campaigning and online reputation management. The goal of our services is to help entrepreneurs & business units leverage our imagination and insights to take their offerings to the next level.

While we started off as a focused social media unit, we’ve gradually forayed into the digital segment thanks to the opportunities being provided by some of our clients who have believed in our capabilities as a team and have trusted upon us.

We kick-started our operations in February 2010 when the 2 founders decided to leave their cushy jobs and build an organization on top of their core strengths in digital and technology disciplines. Since then we’ve come a long way having contributed to the digital media growth of many brands – both small and big.

Sunny and Daksh are the founder/director(s) in the company. At present we are a team of 12 weirdos who crack their heads every day to think about things that would actually make sense for our clients in real-time.

We combine the services of a pure-play agency and a skilled IT vendor in one-funnel. For customers who are working with us, they don’t need multiple touch-points or vendors when it comes to working on different projects be it Social Media or IT. This provides them a tremendous advantage in terms of time, cost & effort.

The other thing you’d observe at our workplace is with our culture, which is 100% entrepreneurial as we follow a flat organization structure.

What's in the name?

It's all about branding and image and SMM agencies are all about that.

Reasoning behind choosing your agency name?

When we thought about our name, we wanted it to be short and unique. Short because it is easy for people to remember and type, when they’re looking us up on the Internet. With this as the key thought, we zeroed in on iffort.

Pronunciation: \ˈi-ff-ort-\ (i of 'India' ffort of 'Effort') means innovative effort where everything is first experimented with and then applied.

If you ever work with us or visit our office, you’ll notice that we’re living by this philosophy in our daily work cycle as no matter what we do, we try to create some difference in it.

What we do?

Interactive Campaigning where we focus on Online Brand Awareness and Launch, Customer Engagement, Contests & Promotions and Media Planning & Buying.

Social Marketing where we work on Online Community Management, Brand Identity Management, Online Reputation Management and Social Media Research.

Application Development where we are busy building Brand Sites, Micro-Portals, E-Commerce Activations, Facebook Development and Mobile Applications.

Why we do it?

Simply speaking, we are in love with this domain. It is our soul. We were always fascinated by the rapid developments in Internet. Our love started with blogging and making small time applications. Somewhere our passion made us realize that this industry is meant for us and ever since we’ve been into it.

How we evolve?

In this domain, every single day you experience something new and there’s a new learning from what you read, try and experience. Every day we consume fresh content subscribed from blogs, tweets and the flipboards of the world.

We know that we are in a learning phase. As each day passes, our learning grows. From a new project to a new learning from a mess-up, something new every day makes us more content since we only get better with these experiences.

Social responsibility in social media

Social media is our religion as we practice it day-in and day-out.   Being transparent, legitimate and ethical are vital aspects of worshipping social media. As an agency there are instances where we make mistakes, where we do goof-ups. Respect for the domain means we shouldn’t lie about the mistakes we’ve made and try to hide them. Which means that concepts such as fake fans, pseudo profiles or asking friends to participate in campaigns don’t work for us.

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.

1. The perception of brands and brand marketers about social media is very microscopic. A brand’s presence on social media goes beyond just attaining few likes and followers.
2. Social Media? Ismein kya hai, I know Facebook and Twitter so I know Social Media. That’s the major problem from which our industry suffers. By and large, people still believe that social media is all about making few posts & tweets and running contests. Step into the brand’s shoes, look from the eyes of a client’s customer and ask what is in it for me before you make that post or push that new campaign in-front of your community.
3. India’s social media statistics are largely limited to Facebook. Experts like us and other research firms need to come forward and publish some more insights on the usage trends of social media. It will help brands and brand marketers in understanding this medium in a better way and decide on what actually works.

We learned the hard way

Our satisfaction doesn’t just come from a client saying WOW. At times, our client expressed happiness with our output but when we felt it was not upto our quality benchmark we convinced the client to make it better.

Did we just share that?

What do you do when the link to a big brand’s Facebook community managed by you doesn’t work and throws a page not found error. This is what happened to us one day, when suddenly one of our client FB pages was inaccessible. That was the time when news stories of FB de-activating many brand pages were doing the rounds. We thought and asked ourselves did we do something that violated the guidelines? Did we use the Like button as an entry mechanism to the contest. We back-checked the guidelines and quite clearly we’re running by the law.

Inside 3 hours, the page was back and to our surprise it was nothing but a platform glitch.

They work with us

Samsung, Google, Crazeal.com, Fever 104 FM, xBhp, Holiday Inn Manali, British Council India, Dealsandyou, Fashionandyou are some of the names. For more on it, please check the clients section on our website.

Industry as we foresee

Buzzwords and fancy terms would always come and go. Today we have Facebook and Twitter, tomorrow we might see the growth of many such new networks. The necessity of conversations won’t change, platforms might.

A day without Internet

Oh being a start-up, we have had day(s) without Internet. That’s when we realize how handy our Internet dongle and the GPRS connection on our phone is. Work apart, being net-deprived gives us a chance to be social with our office buddies in real time. At times, we’d go for a team coffee outing or engage in some random discussions. It is healthy to have some of these activities and discussions. We’ve had some great ideas as a result of these random discussions that we keep having once in a while.

Lastly, are you hiring?

Yes, we are always on the lookout for young people to be a part of our team. At times we hire by instincts and not necessarily by client needs. We are currently looking for someone who dreams of making a career in Content and Social Media. A little treat for everyone out there interested in joining us, a video we created that gives a sneak peak of our work.

If this sounds interesting to you, please write-in to us at jobs@iffort.com