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If a young consumer tweets about Nissan's electric car, Leaf, would the company ignore it as mere babble? No, we would probably offer him a test ride, says the Japanese carmaker. What if someone from India was unhappy about the service at a particular dealership? The company says it would immediately act on it.
Nissan is keen to tune in to the buzz on social media to find out what auto consumers are interested in and what they think of brand Nissan.
The company has partnered with Hinduja group company Defiance Technologies to set up a dedicated social media command centre in Chennai.
30-member team
A 30-member team from Defiance, the IT services arm of the Hinduja group, is on a real-time monitoring of social media conversations (in English and Japanese for now) across geographies and platforms.
The team uses a combination of analytics, tools and algorithm to filter out the noise and retain only the relevant data. The data are then reported to Nissan's central team in Japan.
This platform will enable Nissan analyse, respond to and engage with consumers as “we seek to improve our brand and sales power,” said Mr Andy Palmer, Executive Vice-President, Nissan Motor Company.
The company hopes to generate periodic reports on its brand, products and competition based on conversations across media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs and research reports.
“The power of social media for the auto industry is phenomenal as many consumers make purchase decisions based on what like-minded people ‘like',” said Dr V. Sumantran, Chairman, Defiance Technologies.
emerging tech
“With Internet and emerging technologies playing a key role in today's marketplace, a social media centre will soon become indispensable for companies to speedily address customer's stated and latent needs and for brands to manage their reputation,” said Dr Sumantran.
Nokia, Dell, Bosch and Timex are some of the big brands which have leveraged the power of social media for several uses – from brand building, customer relationship management and competition benchmarking.
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