Mobile Social Network, RockeTalk Shares Its Cricket Strategy

From its formative days in 2008 to now, RockeTalk has traveled a long way. The brain behind this popular mobile social network is Rajiv Kumar. As Founder and CEO, Rajiv leads the development team and oversees the development of RockeTalk’s core technology and infrastructure, while guiding the strategic vision of the company.

Prior to RockeTalk, he was the co-founder and CTO at Uniden’s San Diego development center where he was in-charge of the development of its advanced wireless data product line including GPRS modems, CDPD and 2-way pagers. He also had start-up experience at Widcomm which was acquired by Broadcom in 2004.

RockeTalk is his latest product with over 4.7 million active users. His successes come with strategic thinking and deep expertise in the mobile sector. This week, we have witnessed how RockeTalk leveraged the Cricket World Cup wave with its users. The effort is hugely successful and we thought it would be great for all to learn the strategy behind it, right from the mind of Rajiv.

(1) How many Users out of the 4 million people on the network are actively participating in World Cup related promotion?

World Cup special initiatives has been receiving an over whelming response from the users. On one hand where out of 4.7 million active users out of India more than 0.5 million have interacted with Rocketalk World Cup related programmes in one way or another. On the other hand out of 2.6million active outside India 0.2 million have actively interacted with World Cup related engagement programmes (users mostly from subcontinent, Middle East and few from UK). Amongst the active users we have seen a lot of action happening on communities, people posting live feeds of the games and there’s so much more.
We are witnessing an active growth in terms of numbers and participation and we are confident that as the series will progress and especially towards the quarter finals or as more important matches come in play, these numbers are expected to grow.

(2) What is the main objective of promoting the Cricket World Cup?

RockeTalk is people’s network; everything that happens on RockeTalk is actually driven by interest, demands and expectations of users. We have always believed in understanding what does are the demands of the end users and providing them with something that not only interest the users, gives them satisfaction, is engaging and is also innovative. This is not the first instance where RockeTalk is promoting any kind of sport, we had special engagement with our users around Common wealth Games 2010, we have witnessed high activity around games like soccer, tennis and so much more.

Talking about Cricket, the cricket world cup is not only just the biggest sporting event in India and the subcontinent in terms of sheer eyeballs but also the one with maximum amount of audience connect. Cricket as a sport and world cup are very emotionally charged events for audience in subcontinent and this served us yet another opportunity to connect users from different states and countries to voice their opinion about the way the matches are progressing, to share video feeds of celebrations and hoopla around matches. It’s like just from your phone you can see how people in Kolkata are responding to a match and how celebrations are taking place in Mumbai, what does a guy from Bihar thinks about a particular decision and what does a girl in Delhi feels about Zahir khan.

It is just this sport that brings out the crazy in us Indians and RockeTalk is just giving every Indian a way to show that side of his/her to rest of the world and that what is working in favour of RockeTalk as people are broadcasting live footage, participating in our contests, doing commentaries, sharing pictures of the way they are cheering their favourite team, there are images of people painting their faces to support India and the likes.

(3) Any brands that you have joined hands with for the same?

RockeTalk is a personal platform of each mobile user and we wanted to utilize this opportunity to further strengthen and map our observations about user mindset and behaviour patterns. While we aim at providing our users a totally uninterrupted experience; we also are ratifying a framework that will enable brands and marketers to reach out to a very targeted end user in future. We are facilitating a platform that will not only customize a brand reach but will also be more specific as we are offering a media vehicle on basis of their habits of content consumption and psychographic patterns. Initiatives like these help us in planning the future user engagement related programs and programs that will cause better mind share connect for potential advertisers

(4) Considering Indian Premier League (IPL) is after the World Cup, what do you think are the future plans for that?

We are gearing up to provide a rocking experience for IPL; since we have been reaping success at CWG and now World Cup is yet another affirmation that RockeTalk is people’s favourite. For the brands and marketing teams we are all set to offer them a platform which will help them reach to their desired users carefully and will have a direct impact.

Our experience with the World cup program will benefit us in two ways one that the learning’s from this series have already been going in drafting the IPL related programs and also it is giving us ready bucket of users who will be more acceptable of sports related content and advertising. So, keep looking out, who knows RockeTalk might be the IPL winner.