'SMEs must know the impact of social media tools on businesses'

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Saurabh Gupta | 26 Sep, 2014
Social analytic and collaboration tools can help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) use social media to participate and reap rewards from engaging with employee and customer more dynamically, in an exclusive interview the Director of Link2 Connect, Mr. Ankit Arora told SME Times.

He said, "Learning how to craft better branding, quick response to change to the customer preference and making sure their social media has a positive impact on business."

Excerpts of the interview...

As told me that Link2 Connect (L2C) is a global platform for Social & professional networking. Could you please tell our readers more about your group?
Ankit Arora: Link2connect is a global platform with multi-applications. People can write blogs over here, student can find quiz, musician can create his album, job seeker can search job. So in short you will get one avenue that connect your friends, business associate as well as vendor for your households and many more. A technology is getting updated day by day people become more conscious about time and money. So, busy life can get his convenient path for their desire destination.

When there are so many social networking platforms are leading the race then why one would like to go with your platform? What is the USP of your platform?
Ankit Arora: Ohm! that is very much exciting for me to answer such type of question because from this arising question we can sense that people are really want to welcome our new launched site named Link2connect. As we have already transfer some knowledge about this site, it is a platform where you can get all social activity application. Now you must be thinking that what is new about it, yes it has really something new. We all are well aware about that each and every social site has its particular quality suppose in face book we can share picture, upload videos, pictures, can chat with friends and many more, LinkedIn has its character, we can say that it is a professional social site where we are linked with mainly professionals for many reason such as recruiting, transfer knowledge about particular company from its employee so on. But Linked2connect have merged these two character of face book and linked in not only that it also merged the character of common market place that you can write blog as well as you can upload your videos on only that you can create your video page or you can download any movie or any music from this site. You can also create your play; now you don't have to use hard disk for it...you can just login to this site and start your play list to enjoy the boring road trip. There is also dictionary, press release. Market place is there for trading your own goods in your desirable price. And the site has also provide an application where can create quiz or question answer and enhance their aptitude test. Teachers can put sample question-answer for student about his or her respective subjects that can help them to clear any type of entrance exam. So I think you guys should not wait to open up your account in such big platform

How this can help small businesses (SME) in India?
Ankit Arora: Now days we all know that advertising is the one way by which one reaches its achievable position in this competitive market. So everyone is hunting for acquiring a noticeable space for them. In this at race if we look for investing that fact that how social network will help the start-ups I feel that yes it may or may not. Why may yes if the business links share through it people can visibly identify that logo and the advertisement so what wrong on that!! But it can create a negative impact also. One can see their business links have viewed by 1000 people which is really a good no for them suddenly you notice that your tally of follower is overshadow tenfold by the mega brands in your industry. It can give complex. But one should not lose hope. Social analytic and collaboration tools can help SMEs use social media to participate and reap rewards from engaging with employee and customer more dynamically. Learning how to craft better branding, quick response to change to the customer preference and making sure their social media has a positive impact on business.

How a SME can improve its brand awareness through this platform?
Ankit Arora: Statistics shows that customer's purchasing decision depends upon mainly reviews commentary and recommendation of the people inside. And even outside of their circles. So by online reputation management tools SMEs can monitor or can receive the follow up the mentions of their brand. The negative commands can help them to identity their leafless and suggestion can enhance their ideas and positive commands can make them popular. This the way they can potentially convert their prospective link into their customer.

And also how this can improve the customer loyalty and trust?
Ankit Arora: The global economy is driving by increasing empowered customers small enterprises are challenged to find the new ways to stand up. So in that case trust of the people is the USP of such company that can gear up them at the base level of the staircase of the success. Through social media it is automatically building within the common head. Things are become more trust worthy for transparency of the system of SEO. And technological advancement is the key source of maintaining the comparative advantage. So company can provide according to their commitment an also timely.

Data theft is also a big issue posed before SMEs in the social networking platforms. How secure is your platform?
Ankit Arora: Yes data theft is big issue, but everyone knows nothing can be gained without risk. You have to take that risk by adopting relevant precaution. Our company has also taken some effective steps regarding Web application.

Web application Security check list
(1) HTTPS
When a user connects to a website via HTTPS, the website encrypts the session with a Digital Certificate. A user can tell if they are connected to a secure website if the website URL begins with https:// instead of http://. In its popular deployment on the internet, HTTPS provides authentication of the website and associated web server that one is communicating with, which protects against man-in-the-middle attacks. Additionally, it provides bidirectional encryption of communications between a client and server, which protects against eavesdropping and tampering with and/or forging the contents of the communication.

(2) Secure Authentication
Authentication is a first line of defence. The application must determine if the user is who he/she claims to be or if the entity, a server or program, is what it claims to be. This is the recognize who you are.

(3) Data and Input Validation
Cross-Site Scripting and Command Injection take advantage of a Violation of trust, 17 between a user accessing a known and trusted site and an attacker. The attacker bypasses security mechanisms by adding malicious code to open parameters in an application. The strongest defence against these attacks is Input Validation. If the server validates all data entering the web application against known good criteria, the chances of successful attack are greatly reduced.

(4) Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
Cross Site Scripting (also known as XSS or CSS) is generally believed to be one of the most common application layer hacking techniques.

(5) SQL Injection Check
we have used prepared statements to access the database. Always ensured the DB login used by the application has only the rights that are needed.

(6) Secure File uploads
we have Ensured that files uploaded by the user cannot be interpreted as script files by the web server, e.g. by checking the file extension (or whatever means your web server uses to identify script files) Ensure that files cannot be uploaded to unintended directories (directory traversal).

What type of advertising strategy you are following to capture new users?
Ankit Arora: Our company has taken some step regarding its promotion. The personal contact friend request is the best way make popular in local zone. The media bite is one and important tools for promotion. We have already registered in Google search engine

What are your future plans?
Ankit Arora: We started in the month of February and we intended to reach 10000 users within the first 2 months. Initially, for a month, the response was low but from March onwards people have started visiting the website for writing blogs and within a span of 1 month we have got more than 10000 blogs on board. Currently, we have got more than 2akhs users on board.

Till now the American social networking sites have dominated the world, none of the Indian social portals is even close to them. L2C has all the features of the other social networking websites and it has several features which are not present in any of the other social media portals. We have plans to integrate more features which will enable the users to have all the things at one place.