Amy in India

Rajesh and his colleague and I, met in Kahn Market, Delhi’s luxury shopping hotspot. Like all things in Delhi, you can’t judge a book by its cover. The pathways are dug up, the entrances are dusty and small, but once behind the curtain the shops and restaurants sparkle up, glitzy, well presented and expensive. We had lunch in a Burmese café called The Kitchen. Gloriously tasty fresh vegetarian food (though slightly difficult not to spill all over oneself!)

Rajesh runs the first social media agency in India – Blogworks. He has an extensive background in marketing, from client side to PR. It was during his time at BM that he started to play around with social media as part of a PR programme. He wanted to specialise in it completely, but there were no roles out there that allowed him to do this full-time, so he set up Blogworks.

Like Gaurav Mishra at 20:20 Social (unsurprisingly, they are good friends), Blogworks takes a very academic approach to social media. When, where and how to engage with potential customers, and what to do with that engagement. He works with international clients on India only business, such as Samsung and Global clients who want them to run a programme across all English speaking countries outside the US. The difference with Blogworks is that their theories have started to be proved.

I took him through our social media project New Look TV, which he found interesting, but his one comment was ‘it has one step further to go, when does that feedback from those participants feed back in to product development?’

He seems to be facing similar challenges to us – he says everybody who’s out of work is setting themselves up as a social media expert, because that’s the buzz word. Where have I seen that before? Like me, he feels that it will be a few years before real social media experts are cutting through, as right now, everyone’s experimenting – and so they should be. The backbone to his success, seems to be that he is a stickler for measuring and proving the concept - if it doesn’t work, that’s fine, but we need to set up clear objectives to ensure we are measuring the right things fro that client. In their social media guide blah,blah blah they outline 17 potential metrics, of which the client chooses 3, and they rigourously measure it.

As with Shahna, I really enjoyed talking to him about what it’s like to be such a young business, starting at the beginning of the recession, managing an overhead and trying to get ahead. He passionately believes in not compromising on quality, proving the concept, hiring great people (all his team apart from him have post-grads – he says he learnt the hard way!) and trying not to do too much.