Virtusa (Pvt) Ltd, a global information technology services company in Sri Lanka is effectively using social media to listen and engage with local community to promote its products through this new medium.
The company has devised a system to harness maximum benefits by using social media tools while providing training and guidelines to its employees. In an interview with Business Times, Rasika Withanage, Manager, Marketing & Corporate Communications of Virtusa said that social media marketing in Sri Lanka is gaining momentum every day. “Not only some of the popular brands but we can see some artists, politicians, celebrities, photographers and even some religious organizations trying to make their presence on Facebook and other social media channels. Among many other sources, Facebook will emerge as the most popular social media marketing tool for Sri Lankan businesses,”he added.
Social media provides organizations with the ability to build brand awareness, demonstrate thought leadership and gain insight from the collective, he said. He noted that a case study has been conducted by the company examining the approach developed by a midsize technology services company to capitalize on the opportunity of social media without incurring an unreasonable amount of risk. The study reveals that the first step in getting value from social media requires organizations to define their goals for the use of social media, what they want to accomplish, where they will engage, what contributions they expect to collect from social networks, and how they will use the information garnered.
Many employees of the company are already engaged online with family, friends, business associates or potential customers and partners. To keep the Virtusa brand strong both online and offline, the company has defined how it wanted to utilize social media, develop working principles to give it a collective online voice, and creates a social media training plan that would educate employees about opportunities and risks, he said.
Head of Public Relations of Virtusa Ashan Kumar said that one of the things unique about social marketing is its ability to eliminate the middle men. It provides the brands a unique way of building a relationship with their customers in a more direct and personalized way. He noted that in Sri Lanka there is an escalating growth of bloggers, with sites like elakiri.com having more than 289,000 members.
hat started from chatting, chat rooms has now developed to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, RSS feeds on one’s mobile to podcasts. “Many forums and networks are created amongst groups with similar interests where they share and comment about there experiences and we at Virtusa are aggressively using these tools to listen and engage with our community,” he said.
Virtusa uses an offshore delivery model to provide a range of IT services, including IT consulting, technology implementation and application outsourcing. The company is based in Westborough, MA. |
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