Social Media Agency Feature : EchoVME

Who are we?

EchoVME is a digital marketing and social media consulting and training firm based out of Chennai. EchoVME is 1.8 years old. Echovme was started soon after I gained my first job experience from a Marketing Outsourcing company in Chennai. We currently are 8 member team offering digital marketing services and training. We specialize in Social Media Marketing Training, conducted around 30 workshops and 24 corporate training programs.

What's in the name?

Echovme was thought processed for a long time before it was fixed. echoVme stands for echo in virtual marketing ecosystem. We pronounce echoVME in two ways. Echo V M E or echo-me keeping v silent. It simply means we help brands or individual echo in virtual marketing ecosystem. This could be through sharing knowledge or making it put in practice.

What we do?

We create digital identities for individual or brands and help companies gain knowledge on Social Media from business perspective practically.

• We offer Social Media Services

• We create Facebook applications

• We do SEO

• We Educate!

Why we do it?

We live our passion. Sorav (I) was passionate about Social Media ever since its inception in the country. A mere fun platform was later turned into a business communication tool. An opportunity that was early established by few young minds at work and it became stronger as year passed by.

We also believe we are working upon the future of communication and ensuring to establish a credible presence when marketers would really be wanting us to secure their future of business communication.

How we evolve?

I started blogging on SoravJain.com on tips and strategies I use to implement while working with a Marketing Process Outsourcing company and my blog got me my first project from a company in Spain. 2010 December is when I thought of starting a digital marketing agency.

Since, we were a young team of individuals and Chennai being a poor market for social media and digital services we thought of starting with workshop concept to educate more people about Social Media and it did work out well.

We grew by hosting various events such as Mashable Meetups, Social Media Club Chennai events (initially), echoVME Bonfire ( a monthly meetup with great knowledge sharing sessions from experts at our office premises), social media day celebrations, search marketing summit, social media summit and our regular Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn Marketing workshops.

It took us long time to establish but it did work out well. While I was running short of funds to continue in the 2nd financial year I had got a VC invest in my company. This financial year we are independent again as our VC underplayed and didn’t keep the promises made.

We are back to square one and we are geared up to face it all! We are an honest and transparent agency and we have learnt the ways to survive it all!

Social responsibility in social media

We share what we learn! We create opportunities for people to believe in Social Media. As stated earlier we are very clean with the work we do. Limited, yet transparent and no misleading! We do not mislead our clients and we honestly train our students who attends our workshop with no intention of sales of services we do.

Need of the hour

• Companies need to learn about the importance of having an in-house Social Media team and involvement of employees in creating social media evangelism opportunities.

• ROI oriented Social Media Marketing practices

• Social Media policies for employees and employers needs to be drafted to have a controlled situation in the future.

• Social Media Marketing education needs to be made stronger in the management schools to enhance the career opportunities for students.

• Social Business Ecosystem needs to be redefined as today marketing and sales are not just the purpose of a brand going on Social Media.

• A marketer needs to understand Social Media Marketing is not free and companies really need to invest time, money and resources to develop amazing campaigns.

We learned the hard way

There are various things that I have learned during my entrepreneurial journey:

a. Ask for a token money if a client is demanding for a lot of research or competitor analysis at the pitching stage as this is part of your consulting.

b. Clearly define your goals in agreements and get it signed before kicking start the process as a client might have change of mind and expectations.

c. Have some pre-fixed packages or you might end up spending a lot of time in making customized proposals and packages.

d. Never agree upon the bargains. Remember, we are not selling vegetables.

e. Warn and guide clients if they are forcefully demanding something on Social Media which is not right according to you. Remember, you are the expert and they are not.

How do we make a difference?

a. We read a lot of materials on Social Media Marketing on day to day basis and we figure out ways to keep updated with trends and shift strategies tailoring situation.

b. We think of bringing in some signature events like Social Media Summit which can signify the social media value of India, globally.

c. Pick the right client and do the best job.

Did we just share that?

Well, we have worked with a brand where hierarchy of communication goes through several processes and they were so illiterate about Social Media that a 140 character tweet sent to the team to review came back to us with 435 characters. Funny no?

One of the marketers from a popular brand who attended our workshop in Mumbai was surprised to learn the process of creating a facebook page and facebook ads. He thought it was a tough job to do and ended up paying 2 lakhs to a Mumbai based agency as he thought creating a Facebook page and running Facebook ads needs a lot of coding.

The funniest part is when Brand manager changes. Imagine you took 2 months to convince a brand manager and 1 month to strategize the social media presence for the brand and a new brand manager comes to run the show all your efforts goes waste! You need to convince the new boss ;)

They work/worked with us

Ramco Systems, Amrutanjan Roll On, Relief Cough and Cold (Amrutanjan), Krishnamachari Srikkanth’s Careerstrokes.com, Happiest Minds, Ticketgoose.com, 2020Media (Chennai), Build Your City (INNO – Geocity), Andromeda Loans, Manipal University (Complete Content Partners for MBA in Social Media), Industry Rockstars (Australia), Future Competency, Omate Technologies (Australia), TiE Chennai, TiE Coimbatore, CII, Maratha Chamber of Commerce, Vellore Institute of Technology, Madras Advertising Club, SSN College, and M.O.P Vaishanv College are some of the names.

Some of the clients we have worked with or we work now are under non-disclosure agreement.

Industry as we foresee

• The future of Social Media in India looks promising but cluttered. Many traditional advertising and PR agencies are now claiming to will claim to be a social media agency in the future.

• As per our experience of training professionals across the country. More and more markets will learn in and out of Social Media Marketing thus making vendor management easier for them. The purpose of many coming to our workshops

• ROI oriented Social Media Marketing will be given a preference. Justifying numbers will help agencies serve better.

• Education wise, opportunities are huge as there are less players and demand for Social Media education in the institutes are increasing year on year.

• The market will saturate over a period of time as any other SEO, PR or advertising agency is claiming to be a Social Media Marketing company today and there are freelancers who are ready to run a show at Rs. 5,000/- per month.

A day without Internet

This is the day I am eagerly waiting for and here are reasons for it:

• I am a total internet addict; I can’t imagine a day without Internet and I really want to live it and re-live old days again.

• Since my earnings today are totally associated with Internet, I really want to get uncomfortable and find out other verticals to survive.

• Internet has made life easier: SaaS, email, cloud, social networking sites, ticket bookings, information seeking, entertainment factor and lot more things are closely associated with it. We are connected with world today just because of Internet. I want to see people panicking when Internet is no more and worshiping when Internet is back again!