Social Media Agency Feature: Niswey - A Digital Marketing Agency

Who are we?

We’re an ROI-driven digital marketing company. By ROI-driven I mean we only take on those projects where the marketing activities have specific objectives related to business growth. While social media marketing and branding often comes with little or ill-defined ROI, our focus remains on working with clients where the ROI can be clearly calculated, in terms of growth in leads, subscribers, or engaged users.

To make this happen, we follow agile marketing methodologies. We plan out our work in short sprints with each sprint not lasting for more than 2-3 weeks followed by a review meeting with the client. In this meeting we look at the performance and the impact of our activities and brainstorm on modifications needed. In some cases though, the impact can be measured only after a substantial time period.

Niswey was started three years ago in an attempt to bring more accountability in social media marketing. Before I could realize, we’d turned into a full service digital marketing company. Since we were driven by content, real content and not what was picked up from Google, we started working very closely with a content solutions company, Knowiz Solutions. Ever since we started working together, our clients started getting more value from our work. Last year, we thought it would just make more sense to merge and work as a single entity and that’s what we did. On September 1, 2013, we officially merged.

Our Chief : Abhinav Sahai, COO, Niswey

What's in the name?

Niswey is a term in the na’vi language, the language used in the movie Avatar. Yes, we’re THAT geeky! It means ‘optimally, best’. That’s what our vision and aim are: to continuously strive to be the best in whatever work we do. And in the effort to be that, we are always, ‘optimally the best’.

What we do?

We deliver end to end digital marketing services. We start from the strategy and handle content, SEO, SEM, Social Media, Email Marketing and most importantly, Analytics. We handle a range of content activities for our customers, from web and social content to blogs, even webinars. We also take up trainings and consulting assignments.

Since we are driven by ROI, we have a very strong focus on analytics. Hence for most of our activities, we do A/B testing, right from web pages to email campaigns to even small Facebook ads.

We also have a unique service of One Day SEO and One Day Digital Marketing wherein we do a complete assessment of the SEO (or Digital Strategy) in just one day. These, essentially, are for startups or for companies which are still evaluating options or are exploring whether to go for digital marketing or not.

Why we do it?

I started my first social media company back in 2009, in Bangalore. At that time, Gaurav Mishra wrote on his blog that we were among the first few companies in India to do so. At that time, I had a pretty hard time making customers understand social media and the ROI in it. That company shut down (for various reasons) and I went back to a job. During the next 1.5-2 years, I saw a lot of social media companies coming up in India.

While a lot of them were doing well financially, most of them were goofing up when it came to justifying social marketing budgets. There was a lot of fluff that was being sold. In fact, it still is the case today, but I have never been okay with it. So, in an attempt to do some real work and work with people who valued that, Niswey was born.

How we evolve?

I think the most important factor in evolving ourselves is our mindset. Being in the digital space, we have to accept that everyday something new will come up. Once that mindset is built, half the job is already done. To execute it, we do a few things:

• Follow the right set of channels to gain knowledge from. There are enough blogs and media portals that help us keep updated.
• We maintain a Knowledge Repository, wherein any learning that’s been had during the execution of any client project, is uploaded and everyone’s notified. This way, efforts aren’t duplicated and learning continues.
• Internally, we share a lot of gyaan, we have closed groups on multiple social channels where everyone keeps sharing what they’ve learnt or found.
• We do regular sessions within the team. Someone would share about SEO algorithm updates, another one about Facebook’s UI change and so on. Most importantly, our learning sessions are not limited to our work, we also hold discussions on soft skills, like time management and life goals.

Social responsibility in social media

That’s a tough one, but from our experience, honesty is the best policy. Although we have multiple sets of eyes going through each and every content piece that goes out, once in a while, mistakes do happen. We believe in owning up. Accepting your mistakes also builds the trust factor with our customers and with the audience. Unless it’s a really big blunder, everyone is usually forgiving. Thankfully, we haven’t made any such blunders yet where people were unforgiving. :)

Need of the hour

We follow a simple rule: don’t do on social networks what you won’t do in real life (offline) in public. Just because we have a keypad or keyboard available doesn’t give us any right to behave differently.We will not use coarse language, demean any community or race, be sexist, or give in to mob behavior just because it’s online, or all we have to do is hit a Like button! Respect others, it’s as simple as that. Social platforms are great for expressing opinion, but do keep basic decency in mind and the Indian Constitution tenets we all learnt in Civics back in school.

We learned the hard way

We’d just want to share one very important learning. If your fan base on your social channel is real, then real content works. Don’t mess around with generic copy pasted from Google. Here’s one of our experiences. Sometime back we started working with a new client in the packaged foods business.

They had an engaged Facebook community with some reach. When we took over the page, we actually took a 1 week break from sharing stuff. During that week, we studied and analyzed their fan base along with six months of content.

After our study, when we started posting content again on the page, their organic reach and engagement was 150% higher than the paid reach earlier. All we had done was that we had started posting real content along with actual images, that we had clicked ourselves.

The content was created by talking to the clients’ customers. That immediately struck a chord with the target audience. Unfortunately, most of the agencies I see, just keep picking up stuff from various places in an attempt to keep the page/profile alive. Yes, I agree generating original content takes a little more effort, but then the results are truly worth it!

Did we just share that?

One of our design partners had this query from a client: “Make a website for us, which is visible even from the US!” (Our partner had a good mind to say, “Sir, that will cost more!”)

One client called us on a Friday night, asked us to quickly insert keywords into their upcoming website, so that they would rank first on the Google search page by Monday!

They work with us

In the past we’ve worked with clients like Yahoo, Business Today, Airtel, Sapient etc. Currently, we are working with Intel, Raritan, NIIT Technologies, Getit Infomedia etc. We work with a mix of companies from large to mid level to even startups. To be honest, we’re very choosy about the clients we work with. We like to work with people looking for real results, real people in their community, and real engagement. It’s very challenging, but that’s what keeps us energized.

Industry as we foresee

Right now Indian social media is on a huge growth path, with a sizeable population still untapped. As broadband penetration grows, the base is only going to grow exponentially. An important point to note is that social media marketing in many Indian languages will gain prominence.

Many users are new to the various channels, and hence are unaware of how to use it. Issues related to expression and privacy will continue to reign supreme for a few years. With users being not fully aware about the medium’s potential, brands will continue to struggle to build an informed, engaged audience.

From the social brands’ perspective, they will have to continuously evolve in order to:

• keep the users engaged
• collect more user data
• keep the advertisers happy too

So, we will see more efforts being put into innovation and research (in terms of UX) and eventually new features being rolled out to enable large-scale community building and virality. Right now, we are worrying  about media being taken over by big business houses. We should also worry about social channels. And social media is where the debate about freedom of expression, or the lack of it, will play out.

A day without Internet

As far as work is concerned, it’s difficult to imagine. Forget a day, even if internet’s down for an hour, we tend to feel as if the world is collapsing!

However, apart from work, personally, I often take Internet breaks. In fact, last year I took a complete week off without Internet and even the mobile phone. It’s a great, refreshing experience and a good detox. I would suggest all Social Samosa folks and readers to try this at least once a year. Believe me, you’ll love it! I know a lot of you will say, it’s not practical, I would say you just have to find a trustworthy resource/friend who will take care of stuff in your absence! :)

Lastly, are you hiring?

Yes, we are continuously looking for great people. As of now, we have openings for a visualizer, a digital strategist and an analytics person.