Universal Print Systems Limited

1. From where you sit in the worldl, how has social media changed your business, biz outlook?

We are in the Graphic Art business for the past thirty years. Images and image manipulation techniques fascinate us. I’m amazed by the volume and quality of photos and images in photo sharing sites like flickr. Phixr( http://www.phixr.com/ ) like services, that define the shift towards do everything online intrigues me. Phixr is in sharp contrast with an era when we employed many people just to draw images.Now, we are slowly realizing that early adoption game is not limited to investing in the latest equipment. Indeed, more than equipment, investing in people adapt to fast changing technology landscape is very relevant. In the early days, our business operated even with no telephone at all, and responding within a day was considered quick response then. Now the number of channels of communications have multiplied and response time expectations have narrowed down. Yet in Chennai, doing day to day business using social media is yet to catch up in a big way. But it will happen soon enough.

2. From where you sit in the world, how do you think your personal and business lives will change over the next five years? How about for the rest of your family?

I’m not familiar with many aspects of social media. This is exactly what we are trying to figure out.

3. The folks at SAP are particularly interested in social media’s impact on the global enterprise as well as small to medium-sized corporations. Do you have any knowledge or advice for them?

We believe social media based interaction will become ubiquitous sooner than latter. When our customers wake up to this reality we don’t want to be caught napping. Just like telephone skills are taken for granted now, soon workforce will have to be social media savvy. Some time back we encouraged our people to explore game like social media viz. SecondLife with the brief of making them learn social media quickly. [The choice of SecondLife as a starting point for social media exploration is unique to our situation: Our people use 2D graphics tools like Photoshop day in and day out. These tools are handy in exploring advanced/pro usage of SecondLife like dress making and building.] We are happy to share that, an initiative started as manpower upgrade exercise, is now promising to be an exciting business opportunity, marketing channel, and a small revenue stream too. Graphic arts is illustration biz, with social media the market has expanded. The machinima video above is our jab at illustrating with the new tools.

There is a lot SAP can help to make doing business through Social Media sustainable. There is a lot of drudgery in engaging with multiple social media. For instance, uploading photos and tagging each one of them takes a lot of time. SAP with its tight involvement with the internal and external ‘business process plumbing’ can make Living the Business Aloud easy and drudgery free. For example, workflow could auto generate a draft of a blog post summarizing the work done for a customer, with pictures and link to relevant customer public profiles, relevant tags, etc. This draft could be further embellished with human interest elements by a human and published.
I have high hopes on SAP in helping SME businesses ride two significant trends, viz., Mashability and Serendipity. Let me explain.

Make Our SME Business Mashup Ready. I believe judicious exposition of capacity through mashup(interface) is a good technology antidote for technology driven rapid commoditization. I believe mashup is an attractive channel to graduate cold calls into revenue generating relationships. An ERP with built in support for mashup exposure: a doorway that knows both sides – the internal business process, as well as the Wild Wild Web, will be very attractive. I believe mashup is a potent strategic tool to increase capacity utilization as well as a low cost business development method.

Enhance Serendipity for Our Network of Suppliers and Customers. When Geography is History, Serendipity is the new Geography. This, I believe, again is a strategic tool that will prevent premium erosion. With our continued practice of Living our Business Aloud, our social media engagements will increase the findability of whoever that has done business with us. In other words we want ‘Doing/Done business with UPSL’ as a social networking factor just like musical preference, interest in books, pet ownership, etc. And of course the ERP will have to help in achieving it in a sustainable manner.

4. Do you have any interesting case studies of unique uses of social media?

Being in the publishing pre-press business, the concept of Wiki has immense attractions. Last minute minor content change and getting the proof sign off are part of our regular work. A Wiki has immense potential to ease this process. Just to experiment and learn about Wiki, we initiated a Wiki2Booklet experiment. It was a grand success and a very rich learning experience. There were some interesting conversations around it too. What our team members did with the learning from Wiki2Booklet is even more interesting.

5. What social media tools do you use? Which are your favorites? Why?

As mentioned earlier, we love Wiki. But our staff are not prose savvy to be Wikipedians. They are visual people with good color and image sense, thus SecondLife attracts them better. SecondLife is also a wiki in many ways. SecondLife has an added bonus of an integrated micro-payment mechanism. Given our Graphic Art background, and SecondLife’s micro-payment, and Second Life as a video( Machinima) making platform, it is our natural favorite.

Apart from regular Social Media tools, we are a big fans of Unconferences. Much of what we learned about social media is through the vibrant Unconference community in Chennai. We participated in them and ended up sponsoring pre-press and publishing services for the events.

6. Do you see language as a barrier for social media? Will English become the global language of the Internet? Should it?

Language is indeed a barrier. Within our organization, the Intranet Wiki is bilingual( English and Tamil).We find that language integration is still non-trivial and can do well with better design and ease of use mantras from web2.0 trends. The shift away from text to video, podcasting and virtual space like SecondLife creates opportunity to overcome language barrier. English will play a role in serendipity of non-english content. Should English be the de facto language? Social Media is about inclusion, celebration of the fringes. Anything that creates exclusion will naturally fall out of favor.

7. Write a question(s) for yourself and answer it.

Why are you so excited about Mashups? How will it help your business?

There is lot commonality shared between pre-press business and the art of mashups. When we are doing a brochure, we play with the basic text, images, color and other elements to bring out what the customer wants to say in an aesthetic way. Social media brings in a wider variety of elements to the pallet and we will thrive as mashup artists.

We are also keen on making our business mashable. The rationale for making our business mashable is same as rationale of a Bank installing ATMs. Just like ATMs, Mashables make common transactions frictionless. By making our business mashable,

• We are increasing our capacity utilization. ( We continue to be inspired by Amazon Web Services. Amazon as always a good place to watch trends translated to practice)
• We are pro-actively acknowledging the rapid commoditization.
• We cut down our cost (and our customer’s too) of negotiation and discussion over a commodity offering – the time/effort can be better spent on adding value to the same customer.
• We will be able to cost effectively acquire customers and also widen our customer base.

8. Additional comments

Alison Bolen’s comment inspired us to plunge into the Survey. I’m also thankful to Balaji Sowmyanarayanan, our Social Media coach and our long time tech consultant for brainstorming and executing our social media initiatives. I appreciate our team member Maha’s effort in assisting in linking.

Pre-press and last minute action/value addition go together. And that is why we are participating in the survey in at the tail end . By the Way, we need better collaboration tools for doing last minute changes/value adds painlessly.