‘Social media is the emerging tool for customer engagement’

Going beyond customer service area, social media researchers have underlined the need of using social media for customer engagement.

At the 5th International Communication Management Conference (ICMC) held at MICA recently, researchers and faculty members presented papers focussing on social media as an emerging tool for customer engagement.

Several customer-centric multinational and national companies such as telecom players, Reliance Jio, Vodafone India, besides some of the FMGC players, have active engagement with customers for complaint resolution or for customer feedback.

Sukanya Roy from IIM-Udaipur, in her paper ‘Social Media: The Emerging Tool for Customer Engagement’, stated that “Social media engage, acquire and retain both potential and active customers. In the past decade, a significant practitioner interest has developed into a business relationship with the notion of engagement. An engaged customer plays a vital role in the development of new products/services.”

Echoing similar sentiments, Abhinita Daiya and Mohanlal Sukhadia from Udaipur University investigated the ‘Effects of Social Media Advertising on Consumer Behaviour’. Categorising consumer responses to social media advertising (CRESMA) into four groups — Attraction, Avoidance, Active engagement and Affiliation — the paper notes that the CRESMA scale would include both cognitive and behavioural aspect of the consumer responses.

Hence, for academicians, it would add to the knowledge on social media advertising through the development of a reliable and valid measure that can be used for future studies exploring new phenomenon. For practitioners, the scale would provide a ready measure to assess consumer responses thereby assisting them to design their advertising strategies, said Daiya and Sukhadia.

The three-day event on ‘Media & Entertainment Disruptions and Beyond’ was held during January 11-13 aiming to understand effective marketing strategies for managers in the media and entertainment industry.

Among the other important papers presented was one by Nandita Paul from MICA discussing ‘How to Increase Monetization from the Gamers and the Gaming Ecosystem in India.’

At a time of increased penetration of digital technology and hand-held devices, gaming is emerging as the important revenue driver for programme development players.

Monetisation of games comes from two avenues, the primary avenue being the ecosystem, such as in-app advertising, brand placement and incentive-based advertisements. The second avenue is the gamers such as freemium upgrades, subscription and pay/download. The second avenue will account for steady and continuous income for the organisation. It requires the least effort and yields maximum returns.

Despite the high levels of downloads and the surge in active game time over the last three years, more active users gaming on a daily basis for a varied genre of games and a large chunk, 90 per cent, of the gaming industry revenue coming from mobile games, India still accounts for one of the lowest rates of in-app purchases on the Google Play store and Apple iOS store. India is perhaps the lowest among the Asian and South-east Asian countries, the paper by Paul said.

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