Foreign companies beginning to outsource new media work such as data mining, online reputation management, crisis management and influencer identification is being promoted as the latest outsourcing wave directly to small and middle sized Indian social networking organization. Some big agencies are still hiring out some work to smaller companies in India. Founder of Mumbai-based social media company Pinstorm, Mahesh Murthy chooses not to call it outsourced rather he wants it to be called as in-sourced job. He says that the difference in some firms that hiring out work from overseas companies is that they work generally with their own customers. By their own offices over India, the marketers handled work directly.
For over five years with overseas offices, Murthy’s firm has done marketing jobs in India for overseas quality. In addition to the search and display advertising, his company is now doing a lot of social media monitoring and respond to global brands. Hareesh Tibrewala, a Social Media Strategist and Joint CEO at SocialWavelength noted that foreign firms realize that the suite of online monitoring tools and customers talk in real-time on the net are not sufficient, for conversation, you can have some programs search but still you need individuals to manually look for frame work.
All over the world, there are more than 1 billion users who log within sites such as Orkut, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Almost 50 million estimated users in India while this year over $6 billion all over the world were using some social networks, approximately U.S. has $3.1 billion and $2.9 billion in global markets. Based on Deloitte, the average revenue for each social network user are anticipated to be $3.50. eMarketer believed that Facebook’s ad revenues alone was almost $2 billion in the year 2010 and more than $4 billion in 2011, as the social networks still account for a negible pie of the global ad spend.
The main reason why foreign firms particularly from UK and US want outsource work to India is the cost arbitrage. Adhvith Dhuddu, chief executive officer of AliveNow, a social media agency based in Bangalore declared that a brand can cut its social media spend between 25 percent to 60 percent and still it achieve the same results by outsourcing social media functions. Rajiv Dingra, CEO and Founder of WATConsult said that since 2008 they got some interest from foreign firms but now the momentum is elevating. Moksh Juneja, CEO of Avignyata claims that he has been seeing interest even in some Malaysian firms.
Social media outsourcing unlike IT outsourcing carried out many challenges regarding with skilled manpower, cultural differences and price undercutting instead with just wage arbitrage. Murthy said that they need to make changes to be effective for their clients, culture and language are just minor problems. Dhuddu considered that the backend work for managing social media can be outsourced like having a content writing team help with Facebook, developing an application or custom tabs on Facebook, assistance in uploading videos and helping in tagging, getting design options for landing blogs, pages and more. Dhuddu added that developing and establishing a social media strategy for the brand is what should not be outsourced. They’re ready to provide business but they are very specific with timely execution said by Dingra.
REFERENCES:
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/new-media-outsourcing-to-india-gathers-steam/443415/
http://www.brijj.com/group/software-developer-telecom-isp–link–New-Media-Outsourcing-To-India-Gathers-Steam?eid=2774214
http://www.mybangalore.com/news/new-media-outsourcing-to-india-gathers-steam.html
http://billwire.typepad.com/blog/2011/07/new-media-outsourcing-to-india-gathers-steam.html
