By Sanjay Mehta
Joint CEO, Social Wavelength
Having sensed the opportunity in social media four years ago, I contemplated starting this social media agency. Besides general business and entrepreneurship understanding, I had the domain knowledge and was well-equipped for a venture of this kind. After all, I had been in the Internet space already for a good 10 years then, and understood the behaviour of an online consumer, which was now being manifested via social media.
However, the one thing that concerned me was the lack of good contacts in the advertising, PR and media space. I reckoned that having started this social media agency, I needed to be a part of that advertising fraternity in the first place.
While social media has a strong connect to the Internet, a social media agency is more about brand building, marketing and advertising. In order to get into that space, it was necessary for me to know the movers and shakers of the advertising industry, and I wasn’t quite there in 2009.
Looking back now, four years later, I can see that I managed to make a decent number of connections and some really good friends in the PR and advertising space, from scratch! Although I still do not hobnob with the big shots much, that doesn’t matter. The connections established among various creative and business folks in the agencies have been tremendous, and have helped us build Social Wavelength in these four years.
How did this happen? Through social networking itself. I looked at not only the virtual social networking media that we know of with Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, but physical social networking too, i.e. actual interaction and face-to face meetings.
What I resolved to do from 2009 onwards was to become a part of the community by attending industry events that I can get into, walking into offices and meeting several people and somehow making those connections happen. The fact that social media became hot property and there were people who were genuinely interested in meeting and spending time with me, who opened doors to welcome us for conversations, also helped a great deal.
All in all, I would definitely give credit to the networking that happened which got me in the right space and gave me the right connections to grow the business. In fact, over the many years of entrepreneurship, starting from our first venture in 1997-98 (Homeindia.com), I can vouch that networking has played a tremendous role.
The purpose of sharing this is not just to sing praises of social networking, but also to inspire other entrepreneurs, who may be hesitating on account of lack of the right connections, to go for it! Take the plunge. There’s a world out there, waiting to embrace you.
Feedback: smehta@socialwavelength.com
