Some WoC( Words of Caution) for Social Media Marketing especially in IT

While many companies are entering the Social media space for marketing, caution must be exercised before launching into it completely. First and foremost, the company's culture needs to support this change as it involves being much more vocal about company's happenings. Below, i present before you some cons on Social Media marketing:

1) A news can spread like wildfire on the internet.While this may work for you at times, if the news is negative, it would go against you and there is very little damage control possible on social media.

2) A high degree of involvement or reciprocity is expected at all times in case of social media. If you have updated your blog with useful information and someone enquires about it or asks for more information, you should be in a position to respond quickly. This is the true essence of social media and if not done properly, the audience/prospective customer might lose faith in you.

3) You must stay abreast with all the latest developments and be adaptive and receptive to changes. On social media, things keep changing constantly and you need to have information of all the latest trends to safeguard the interests of your business.

4) If you intend to build your company's brand through social media, be ready to invest your time and effort, much more than the usual marketing techniques. This is truer once you become an established name and there are large number of followers or queries. Hence it has to be well managed else the entire exercise can backfire.

These are what seem to be the main tripping points...Please feel free to add to this list based on your experience or thoughts...

Importance of Information System for small and medium sized companies

Hi guys. This is my first blog here and I would begin with a caselet to see how important IT is even for a small business. Please give your suggestions as to how the company could have done better.

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HML is a leading alternate energy solution provider that provides services to numerous companies in North India. It requires generators, batteries, invertors and spare parts for these product lines. HML has 30 sales cum services offices in North India.HML service workshop provides 2 types of services: one preventive-cum-routine maintenance and second on call basis.It tries to offer an uptime of 98% for most of its products that are covered under preventive maintenance schemes.It also offers warranty of 1 month on all call basis repairs.
Customers who have HML products are quite happy but services offered are not as per claims. HML has a large workforce of 100 employees at its service workshop to handle on an average about 300 complaints on daily basis. Due to large number of service requirements, a large amount of inventory of spares is needed to be maintained.

Thus the basic challenge HML is facing is to manage the spare parts inventory and to keep the service schedule for better customer satisfaction. This requires the replacements of critical spares, testing of various systems and regular servicing etc. It was found that items received at Service workshop were not serviced properly during "preventive maintenance" and hence it leads to load increase at service workshop.

Food for thought:
What do you think are the problems being faced by HML and what kind of Information System would help HML achieve serivce level of 98%?