Priyanka Writing
Long time since I interviewed in the entrepreneur spotlight series. Rajesh aka @r113 from Twitter, is a friend of mine. I know how he shifted from his telecom work to start a frozen foods business. Despite starting out in a whole new industry sector he has done very well. I asked him a few questions and here is what he said,
Business: Frozen Foods Supplier, Mumbai
What led you to prefer the idea of starting your own venture as opposed to a job?
The Challenges, the ownership(of the challenges etc) and more importantly enjoying the fruits of success… While I was studying for my CAT, I heard one of the trainers say that while getting a nice paying job would be nice, the real challenge lay in entrepreneurship…. ofcourse it helped that I belonged to a family of entrepreneurs.
After few years you have changed your field of work. Any particular challenges or experiences you would like to share especially to people considering the same?
Product Life cycles have become shorter than ever before. I started working in the telecom space in 2000 while it was still at a nascent stage. By the time I was done with telecom in 2010, it had gone through a lot of ups and downs and is looking for a new lease of life.
The greatest challenge here was to let go. I was seeing the writing on the wall for about 2 years and was looking for a change but nothing was happening. Finally I decided that I would risk sitting at home, doing nothing, perhaps pursue my passion with Accounting ( I signed for my CA studies just about the same time) but would not be in telecom anymore. That’s when opportunity to work in the frozen food business came my way. But I had to let go of one to be able to see the other.
What would you like to say to anyone who is considering taking the plunge into starting up?
Behave like a frugal person. Try to save as much money as you can in the beginning till you are confident about your venture. Starting up is hard work and demands your full time and energy. But at the end of the tunnel is a sweet bright ray of light waiting for you!
How important is it and how can a startup create a distinct brand?
Find out at first whats a distinguishing factor in your chosen industry. Focus on one aspect. That in turn will help you create a brand along with your own niche! The importance of the brand will of course come in the visibility it provides along highlighting the distinguishing factor that you have chosen to focus on.
Success secrets?
No secrets, just plain old hard work, passion, focus.
So if you are planning to shift to a new work sector, starting up or want to know more about frozen foods industry you can ask questions here in comments or just ping @r113 on Twitter.
Quick Recap of this blog series:
#1: Vriksha Nursery – Exotic work which is very well leveraged for social
#2: Corcoran Group – Simple and engaging strategy around their employees
#3: Amboli Jcombinator – The usual fun in good workplaces made into very creative updates
In today’s post I want to look at how a distinct work culture can lead to content for the social channels.
A distinct work culture can often lead to short campaigns like When Dimagi shifted its office to Brazil for a month. These can be very interesting and memorable but I want to focus on how this work culture can lead to sustained content for your social channels. I came across Asana, a task management tool with a strong culture of transparency.
They have a blog which I find is very well written and presented. In fact going through their blog I got intrigued and signed up for their free plan. It is one of the most intuitive user interfaces I have come across.
They have a internal work system called Episodes and every few months they circulate a summary of the work they covered in each episode within their team. This was an internal process, now they publish this summary on their blog (removing sensitive details) in the spirit of transparency.
Blog series in the spirit of the company culture
These posts are generated solely because of the companies distinctive work culture. They also have many other insights into their working and company processes as part of their culture posts. I think their blog is a good example of how a strong company culture becomes the backbone of social content generation.
Another company in the news recently due to their company culture is Buffer App. They have also been featured for their highly transparent work processes. I was checking out their social presence and would like to mention the blog of one of the founders Joel Gascoigne.
Work culture will inevitably reflect in all your work including social. It would be well worth the time to think and figure out what your company culture is all about and once you do inevitably it will point you towards your content strategy.
Next will be the concluding part in this series where we look at another different way to generate awesome content from your workplace. Leaving you with an exciting video trailer about the Naked Brand,
Last two blogs in this series I talked about Vriksha Nursery – they utilize their people-friendly work very well to have a hit social media presence, then I looked at Corcoran Group a more serious Real Estate company with a very interesting social campaign around their employees.
In both those posts I was harping about a Mumbai startup that I will cover next.. it is not a startup but more a startup hub. A co-working space where a few different startups are meddling on their ventures. Individually these startup brands have a more focused social media presence relevant to their target group but as The Startup Hub also called JCombinator or Maa Sharda Devi Villa they have a very informal Facebook page about various fun happenings in their co-working space.
Gangs of Amboli 😉
The above post is one of their most popular ones. It is a picture made into a movie poster similar to a recent mainstream movie. As you can imagine this is very catchy content.
There are a few reasons why I wanted to highlight this page,
Relevant to all Demographics
This content is so funny that it becomes relevant to all. I know only one or two people there and yet not only have I started laughing at some of their updates but also started interacting…
Organic Community Building
Since the advent of Facebook & Twitter ads, contests and viral content creation (which costs big bucks) – the zero budget, organic community building has become a thing of the past. Yet, for a lot of startups this makes a lot of sense.
Creativity
There is a lot of creativity and imagination that goes into creating fun content just from your workplace. This page is a great place to give you lots of ideas towards the same.
Workplace Engagement
All workplaces should be cool, awesome and fun. This kind of a Facebook page would only add to that kind of environment.
So I asked Annkur, one of the people at the Startup Hub couple of questions…
1. What is the objective behind the page?Simply fun. It is to share the human side of our work. Years back I heard that having a company blog is the way to show the human side of you. I think times have changed, a Facebook page for our co-working page brings a different level of energy and comfort within the group we interact with.2. Who generates the content for the page?We do. Jcombinator is a co-working space for HeadStart.in, PriceBaba.com, Switchme.in and ProjectHeena.com. Our people have lots of fun and share some of it on the page 🙂
A lot of startups which have more workplace content to showcase on social media often fail to be creative & imaginative enough to actually pull such a content strategy off. This page content can be honed a little to make it a very competitive content strategy for any brand to have. Some suggestions to make it a lot more dynamic,
Consistent Updates – at least 3 to 4 updates a week
Tagging – the strength of this content is the number of people involved. Tagging them would provide good organic visibility (this is already being done)
Formal – it could use a touch of professional feeling. Maybe just a introduction of various members with their startups or mentioning the startups in the updates about their team. This way the startups also get added visibility.
For most brands this should be one part of their content strategy. I think it works really well to build a personal connect between your fans and your brand. These kind of pages can be easily leveraged for recruitment as well.
So next time I will be writing about another very interesting San Fransisco startup and how they use their work culture to generate content for their community. It is quite an unique example I have come across so stay tuned! 🙂
Recently came across some brands that are doing interesting stuff on social media. The content they post is pre-dominantly stuff that happens in their place of work. Content strategy for most brands involve serious content generation – usually hours of online research & compiling of status updates – but these pages are able to keep their office or behind the scenes operations so interesting that its all they post on the page and it works!
Vriksha Nursery
I don’t remember how I came across this page but I found it very eye-catching from the beginning. The page is so green, full of flora & fauna! I ‘liked’ the page and decided to watch out for their updates! They are posting daily sometimes even multiple updates a day and its so interesting!! I didn’t know that snake gourd had this beautiful flower did you??
Obviously the nature of their work is in their favor. Any brand very B2C like jewellery, animals, plants, travel have things easier for them on social media which is all about conversations. Vriksha Nursery also being a brand about plants, flowers, greenery already has great potential to be a big attraction on social media for precisely this reason,
- Interesting stories
They can generate so many interesting & exciting stories around their daily happenings!
- Generate awesome pics easily. The above flower pic is just one example!
Along with the interesting stories they have exciting pictures which would attract attention even without particularly smart update!
- Affordable
These plants many of which survive indoors too cost close to 250/- for one, which is easily affordable. So they have a mass target group which makes their work easier!
- Exotic & Innovation
Apart from their field of work which makes social media for them easier, it should also be notes that the work they are doing is not the usual run of the mill. They are doing some interesting urban planting projects, flower arrangements using exotic flowers and many of their posts include unknown but exquisite flora! This makes it unique! At least I don’t know of any other nursery which deals with such different projects and plants!
You can see some leads on this update! The update is also very relevant to the urban city folk! Probably affordable too!
Its no wonder then that not only are they hugely popular but you can see a number of leads generating on their posts itself and I am sure some of these leads would convert to sales!
So you would say sure well if I had such a fun and cool business I could do this! The fact is that many cool & awesome brands are not able to manage this. Sometimes they don’t have a person in the office who can do this or they just can’t think of portraying their work in short, intriguing updates!!
The second example in this series is a very different business one that is purely online and doesn’t have any of the above flare but still manages to have a similar content strategy where its all about their work space! It is a lot more informal too but its still interesting! Stay tuned! 🙂
