I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Srivats Srinivasan, a really interesting guy and Research Access contributor who runs a digital agency called Nayamode. Srivats filled me in on his Event Mobilizer app, which provides conference attendees the opportunity to give real-time feedback and provides them in-the-moment information. He also gave insight into running a creative technology shop in this day and age.

Dana Stanley: Thanks for taking some time to chat.

Srivats Srinivasan: Absolutely. My pleasure.

Dana Stanley: Your latest solution is something called Event Mobilizer. This is really cool; can you tell our readers a bit about it?

Srivats Srinivasan: Sure. The idea is that traditionally, people have gone to events, anything from a corporate event, whether it’s for their internal sales force or just a marketing event, or it could be an event for their partners or their customers. Or think of events which are on the lines of large trade shows, whether it’s a Consumer Electronics Show or something else, which are organized at these convention centers and basically get thousands of attendees over several days.

If you think what the experience has been traditionally, it can be overwhelming, in terms of the amount of stuff there is, and the amount of stuff there is to see, the number of booths you need to go to, the number of sessions you’d like to attend. And that information, while it’s always available on your laptop, as in on their browser, it’s not easily accessible when people are actually at the event. And traditionally, organizers have handed out paper schedules, paper feedback forms, and so on and so forth, which honestly, in this day and age, are little bit outdated.

This is where our Event Mobilizer app comes in. It’s a cloud-based, hosted solution that is platform independent. So basically, it’ll run just as well across iPhone and Android and Windows Phone and BlackBerry without any download, without any installation. And provides some really, much needed and compelling features for the users.

And those features are everything from the basic, ‘What’s the schedule,’ to how do I provide feedback, whether it’s on this booth, or on this session, et cetera, to I need a virtual concierge to answer questions, to a networking module which allows people to basically opt-in for networking.

Our approach is that we offer a little bit of an a la carte kind of approach to our customers on this. As in, “There are a dozen different things you could do here. Which are the things that you actually want to offer?” And they also get the ability to offer a very customized UI and UX for their users, so that it’s very specific to them. And they can actually make it their own.

So that’s something that, like I said, has been already deployed and is now getting deployed for several other customers. And we’re getting a lot of interest in it from, literally, places all around the world.

Dana Stanley: And for the conference or Event Organizer, I suspect there’s some kind of analytics they can tap into during the event.

Srivats Srinivasan: Absolutely. So the beauty of this is partly because it’s completely cloud-based. So everything is real time, everything is always up to date. And that includes all of the numbers and reporting that we can do. And the reporting is everything from how many people are accessing this, to what kind of feedback are we getting on this, to what kind of information are people looking for the most, or where are people come from, where are they going to, et cetera.  So there’s a whole bunch of rich reporting that’s made available through a pretty rich admin back end that we provide that the organizers can get access to in real time.

Dana Stanley: So, for people who may not quite be familiar with Nayamode, could you give an overview of what you guys do?

Srivats Srinivasan: Sure thing. Nayamode is an integrated digital marketing firm based out of the Seattle area. And we’ve been in business since late 2005 and currently work with several Fortune 500 companies, such as Microsoft, Wipro, Conde Nast, amongst others. But we also work with several much smaller firms, start-ups and similar, that are in the Bay area or other parts of the country.

When I say integrated digital marketing, our focus is on how do we combine rich, creative work with smart technology solutions. Because if you think about it, traditionally, people have turned to firms for one or the other. And I believe that in today’s world, you actually should not have to choose. And you need somebody who can bring all of those competencies under one roof. And that’s exactly what Nayamode does.

To give you a sense of the services that it covers, it ranges from core content and collateral for our customers that can be both offline and online, extends of course to how do you take those and create an online presence for them, via regular dot com websites or internet portals for our customer companies, to one of our fastest-growing areas, which is in the mobile arena, which is, how do you actually extend our customers’ campaigns into mobile devices, whether they be smartphones or tablets, et cetera.

And then finally, because of our technology strengths, we often come up with custom solutions for specific problems that off-the-shelf solutions would not work.

Dana Stanley: That’s all very interesting and very current. How do you balance the technology and the artistic or creative side of what you do?

Srivats Srinivasan: That’s a great question. There’s a couple of different ways in which we do this. The part that I did not mention earlier is that I think of us as a truly global firm, in that we have our headquarters here in the Seattle area, but we also have our development arm offshore in India. And one of the interesting things about how we bring our solutions to bear is that the marketing or creative side of our solutions are delivered from our Seattle offices, whereas our development is done largely out of our India offices.

Now, this is not this is not really so much a cost play as much as asking where can we go to really find the maximum efficiencies in terms of the right resources, as well as how can we optimize for literally a 27 by 7 kind of operation. So to answer your question, how do we find the right balance, I think we find the balance in terms of where we find the people to perform those functions. And we do not bring, say, the creative side or the technology side in a gratuitous form to our customers’ problems. Our approach is very much on the lines of, let’s understand what your situation is, what is the problem you’re trying to solve, and what’s the optimal solution for this.

And sometimes, it’s going to be largely a creative solution, and oftentimes it’s going to be largely a very technology-oriented solution. And that’s how we allocate our time and effort and resources to that particular problem.

Dana Stanley:  You’re truly operating in the new way of doing business, which is having people distributed, and sourcing people where people are that have different skills. And it must be an interesting challenge to get the best of everyone and yet have account managers and the like who understand two quite different disciplines, creative ad and campaign creation and technology.

Srivats Srinivasan: You’re absolutely right. And this is something that, honestly, we’ve taken a few years to really fine tune and hone. Because what we do today and how we do it is certainly different from how we were doing it, say, three or five years ago. And that’s not a surprise, because there’s obviously a learning curve involved, and there’s really an understand of how do you maximize both the productivity and efficiency in how we’re doing things.

And I think the best testament to how we’re doing is the fact that our customer base is continually growing and most of our business comes from referrals. And I often joke that our best sales people are our customers, because they’re the ones who actually do the most for us.

Dana Stanley: That’s so neat that you have been reinventing and evolving how you do business. And it’s very fitting, given the name of your company.

Srivats Srinivasan: Thank you. Yes. In fact, people often ask me ‘what does Nayamode mean?’ And I tell them, that there’re are a couple of different meanings. One is Naya in Hindi means new, and mode is just a way of doing things. So I tell our customers, when you work with us it’s a new mode of doing things, not necessarily something that you will be exposed to, but that’s how we are delivering, that’s how our execution model is based on.

But Nayamode also means a new turn in Hindi. And it was a new turn my life when I started the company after spending several years in corporate America.

Dana Stanley: Excellent. What are some examples of challenges that clients have when they turn to you for solutions? What are the pains that they’re experiencing or the opportunities that they see before them?

Srivats Srinivasan: Let me take a few different examples to illustrate that. I think the classic example would be, you’re either a new company or you have a new product or a new campaign that you’re trying to launch and you need an agency that can actually literally hold your hand through that process.

And that’s where we come in, literally from starting up front with consulting on, thinking through what problems we’re trying to solve, and what’s the best means to actually go and solve that problem, to figuring out what the execution plan needs to be. And then that plan will often be a combination of creative and technology pieces. And then actually executing that.

So as an example when we work for some of our customers over at Microsoft, who use us for their product or campaign launches, we’ll come in early in the process, help define what the plan is, help identify what the various options are by way of solutions, and then those could translate into a whole bunch of core collateral and content that we create for them.

It would translate into a whole bunch of digital assets that we create for them, assets such as everything from online properties to web banners and so on, to actually creating the online presence for them, whether it be a dot com site or a SharePoint site or another CMS, extending it to mobile devices, which is becoming more and more a requirement these days. And then doing the last couple of things, which are driving traffic to their site through search optimization or search marketing, obviously, driving the right analytics and reporting for their campaign, and then in certain cases also integrating social media aspects to their efforts. So that, hopefully, gives you a sense for the prototypical example of what we do.

Now, we’ll often also come in to solve a specific point problem that our customers may have. For example, they may be in the middle of a campaign, but a piece of it isn’t working well, or their website isn’t doing anything for them and they need somebody to come in and really change how that’s working. And that’s something we might do.

Or another example would be, just recently we’ve been working with the Windows Server team at Microsoft and helping create all the core content and collateral for them for their upcoming Windows Server 8 launch. So the point is, we can do either pieces or all aspects of a product, program, or campaign launch for our customers.

Dana Stanley: Interesting. As a Research Access contributor, you know quite well that our readers tend to be focused on marketing research and, more broadly, analytics and data. How do you incorporate analytics and data and reporting and customer insight into your services?

Srivats Srinivasan: One of the fundamental principles that I’ve always believed in, even when I was in the client side several years ago, whether it was at Microsoft or Coca-Cola or Johnson & Johnson when I was running large marketing campaigns or other programs was, you’ve got to be able to measure it. Because if you cannot measure it, you really don’t know what your money’s doing for you, or whether your efforts are really being successful.

So if you start with that premise and then you figure out, OK, what are the aspects that I want to measure– And that’s going to vary depending on what kind of a campaign or program you’re trying to run. Everything from whether it’s visits or satisfaction or downloads or what have you. I think that’s really a function of what problem you’re trying to solve.

And then thinking very clearly upfront about, OK, these are the problems I’m trying to solve, and this is how I’ll know whether I’ve got toward or closer to my solution. Then have some very clear idea around, what will indicate to me whether I’m successful or not, and how do I measure that.

Now, the thing that I love about digital marketing today compared with– and I’m going to date myself a little bit here– the marketing that many of us were doing back in the early ’90s, is how much more measurable things are right now. And the ability to be able to track down to the user level, the ability to be able to get granular information on whether it’s feedback from your audience or what have you on whether they like the product, whether they’re going to recommended it, so on and so forth. That is just invaluable.

So to me, it’s really about identifying what goal you have, identifying how you’re going to measure success, making sure you’re instrumenting for the right measurement, and then, whether it’s using an off-the-shelf solution such as a Webtrends or Google Analytics or whatever, or in several of our cases where we’re actually instrumenting custom analytics for our customers. So as an example, the Digital Asset Manager is a custom solution that we deploy for several of our [INAUDIBLE]. And most of the analytics on those are actually custom built by us, because there’s specific requirements people have in solutions are very different from what would get measured by the standard analytic solutions.

Dana Stanley: Interesting. And how does mobile come into play in all this?

Srivats Srinivasan: Well, I would say you’ve got to be living under a rock to not see that mobile is becoming more and more an integral part of any digital marketing effort. And the interesting part of mobile is, a lot of people know they’ve got to do mobile, but they’re not sure what to do. And they’re not sure how they’re actually going to measure success.

And the space is evolving so fast, both in terms of users, in terms of platforms, in terms of solutions, that honestly most marketers that we know are stymied by just the rapid pace of innovation, and trying to figure out, what do I need to do? I know I need to do something, but what do I need to do?

So our efforts on the mobile front actually began in a couple of different ways. And one of them was our partnership with the Microsoft Tag team. If you’re not aware of what that is, Microsoft Tag is a proprietary version of 2D barcodes with several features that we believe are actually superior to the regular QR codes. But the point is, we were an early partner of the Microsoft Tag team, and they worked with us to actually develop a whole bunch of solutions that we could bring deploy for our common customers.

It began there, but if you really think about it, whether it’s Microsoft Tag or QR code, those are great technologies. But at the end of the day, they are triggers or means to an end. And by that what I mean is they’re a means to get people to be able to get to your mobile site or to have that mobile experience.

And that is of where we’ve evolved to right now, which is over the last year or so, we’ve been specializing more in creating those actual mobile experiences, creating a lot of technology and solutions that live on the back end, often in the cloud, that power those mobile solutions, and really enrich them and provide their end user a much more engaging experience.

So at this point, we’re largely agnostic whether our customers want to use a Tag or QR codes. And our focus is much more on, OK, now that you know you want to get your people to a mobile site, and you have the means to do that, let’s figure out what are we going to do with them. How are we going to engage them? Are we educate them? Are we going to inform them?

Are we going to entertain them? Are we going to gamify the experience? Are going to have sweeps and contests? Or are we just going to provide information that’s very time-sensitive, it’s very contextual, it’s very location-based? The idea being, find people where they are, when they are, and give them exactly what they need at that point.

And keep it simple. Because the other challenge that a lot of people run into when they’re trying to do something on mobile, is to over-complicate things, because they want to try to fit the regular desktop paradigm into the mobile space. And clearly, that doesn’t work. So you’ve got to really think through what’s the bare minimum that I need to be able to provide this person with so that it’s something that will engage them and get them hooked.

Dana Stanley: So help me understand the experience. Where would somebody encounter a tag or a QR code? And then what would happen when they scan it?

Srivats Srinivasan: Great question. I’ll give you a couple of examples which have been actually super successful in our context. And the first one is a campaign that we’ve been running for Conde Nast, specifically in several of their magazine properties, such Allure. And this is a contest that is triggered when people, readers, are going through a copy of the magazine and they see a reference to this contest. And they were asked to participate by way of Microsoft Tag in the pages. And when they see that and they read that, people effectively scan the tag, they’re taken to a mobile site where they’re entered into a mode sweeps. And then a few different steps later on, you have people who either win or come back.

And the campaign has been super successful. They’ve got about half a million scans in less than a month in one of the months that we did it. And it’s been repeated pretty much every year since then, because of its overwhelming success. The back end is reasonably complex, but I don’t need to bore you with the details. But that’s one example of where people would find a tag and how they would engage, and what the payoff is, and how successful it can be. In fact, I believe it’s the single most successful such campaign anywhere.

Another example of where people would find these tags and how they would engage would be another campaign that we’ve been doing for the Compass Group, a hospitality services company. Specifically in some of their cafeteria promotions. So an example is what we’ve done in their Microsoft Cafeteria business, where people scan a tag and they get one of several outcomes.

They can choose to get information on what are the menu choices today. They can get an instant coupon to redeem at one of the cashiers for a couple of dollars off for their mean or the coffee or whatever. They can enroll in a scavenger hunt. They can take part in a March madness contest, which was, obviously, relevant in March, and so on and so forth. Again very, very successful. It’s been now running for about a couple of years and continues to get great feedback.

One of the things we did with that more recently was to actually use tags to get feedback from customers in real time on what they thought of the food. And that was actually very well received as well and got a lot of traction, both with users as well as with the cafeterias.

Other examples would be, literally, I think most of your readers would have seen QR codes and tags. They’ve become so ubiquitous now, whether it’s at a retail or outdoors or in a magazine. They’re pretty much everywhere now, and the usage is growing exponentially out here.

Dana Stanley: Well, thank you so much for telling us about Nayamode and about Event Mobilizer. And I look forward to working with you on Research Access in the near future.

Srivats Srinivasan: It has been my pleasure, Dana. Thank you so much.