Social Media has changed the way people have been discussing a brand. From word-of-mouth people have now moved to airing both their dissatisfaction and satisfaction towards a brand, through word-of-mouse. Umesh Jain, CIO, YES BANK emphasized this point at ongoing INTEROP Mumbai 2011 in his session, ‘Using social media for banking.’ “Online reputation management is a key for every organization. Whether you like it or not, people are talking about your enterprise,” he said.

He discussed about various ways to leverage an enterprise’s engagement with customer on social networking platforms. Some of the questions he answered included how social media could be used effectively to engage the prospective customers, consequent lead generation and timely problem-resolution of current customers. He also talked about how enterprises could benefit by connecting the CRM with the profile of the customers at the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn and utilize the flow of the unstructured data for generating cross-selling opportunities.

Jain discussed about how monitoring and analyzing customer feedback on social networks is an invaluable exercise for the enterprises. This enables leveraging inputs from far wider audience in much lesser time, for co-innovation of new products with the customers, he said.

Talking about whether social networking should be allowed inside enterprises, Jain said, “Openness in work culture is what Gen-Y is looking for. It is not a command-control culture anymore. If you implement an internal social network, it would create a tremendous impact by breaking hierarchy and making it possible for employees to voice their opinion to the top management without a filter.”

Talking about what is inhibiting enterprises from adopting social networks, Jain said, “Change Management, getting people to adopt social media and making them feel secure about sharing their thoughts at these platforms is one of the challenges. Also it requires drive from top management and sometimes drives for incentivizing the employees for doing the same.”