Making of the Man of Principles

I walked in, there was half carpet and half wooden flooring. And there was a smell of incense Agarbatti that he just finished his prayers with. And there were two landline phones which were off the hook. And my dad's landline phones were never off the hook. This meant there was a serious conversation. So I was slightly nervous. He said, I know what you're up to and you have two options. A, join my business from tomorrow morning. B, get out of the house. At the end of this session, I assure you I will leave you with sureshot ways of taking your website and your social media marketing to the next level. In the next 90 minutes, I will leave you with actionable insights that you can take back into your business and start making changes which will show results in the first month to come. Hello? Okay. Right. 29, 1076, though I don't. Thank you. Where are we? How far are we? About 10, 15 minutes. Hi. Good afternoon. How are you? Very well. Happy New Year to you and your family. I actually came, I was at your Pune hotel and you know, there's a fhrai conference here that they, you know, I'm doing a small talk to them about digital. And so I just saw, I just, you know, I saw the Pride logo when I didn't know I was coming to Pride. I saw it. I just thought I'd call you and say hello. So you're saying things have. Things are definitely improving in the right direction now. Right. They're not deducting that. Okay. Because they told me last time that they're going to. Because last time you addressed this, you brought this issue up and they, you know, before I made this call to you, they, I just spoke to them. They were assuring me that they have deducted and sent the reports. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Take care. What I've done is I've broken the thing down into two sections. One is about. So how I start is I tell.

Them about a little bit about what.

Is the state of the Internet today. You know, you're a hotelier yourself and then getting the associations together and some digital speaker and then social media and something or the other.

You keep doing it for almost now 12 years. So it's been like, how do you.

Take time out with you? You have your own business to do. And then.

No, what I do is when I'm traveling in the car, I write down points. I write it, not jot down a lot of things. So when I'm traveling or when I'm just sitting idle, I just love Tourism, you know, it's 27 on my mind, so even if I come across something very interesting, it just, just strikes a chord. Okay, let's do a seminar on this. Looks like an interesting topic. If I read through a lot of books or through, through Medium or through Web, I come across some good speakers.

You, you go through Medium a lot?

Yeah, yeah.

That's how I got to know you. Okay. Okay.

I first met you was in the Goa Convention, 2012, right. You were a delegate there. I was a coach of the convention.

Right, right.

I read about you. I've been reading about you a lot.

Okay.

So I said, let's call this guy looks to be a young fellow and with some new fresh ideas.

Right.

So that's the way where I first got in touch with you. 13 regional convention.

Yes, I recall that. I recall that. Not so young anymore, but young and hard. Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. 100%. A few weeks back, I turned 40 and my two daughters, my six dogs and my lovely wife chose to take me out for a picnic. We all went out, we spoke about life, we spoke about a lot of stuff. Apart from that, we also spoke about the fact that I am 40. There is something in life which is so very finite and it's called time. The first thing I'd like to say is thank you very much for taking time out for my session here on digital marketing for the Way Forward. Just to introduce myself. I like to say when I'm speaking to hoteliers and people from the fraternity, that I'm one of you. I am a hotelier myself. I understood some of the pain points that we had, and I won't say that I chose to start a company to change things around. It just happened. All I wanted to do in life was to race streetcars. Now my dad obviously was not very happy about that. So he called me one day to his office. He said, I know what you're up to and you have two options. A, join my business from tomorrow morning. B, get out of the house. My first reaction was, I think I should leave the house, you know, And I left the room, came back, thought about a lot of stuff, called up a couple of my friends, spoke to my mother. But then I think better sense prevailed. And next morning at 7:30, I found myself behind my dad's hotel reception. I learned housekeeping, I learnt F and B, my dad graded me. He made sure that I worked 10 hours, 15 hours a day. And there was not much scope for improvement. So for me to be able to have my mark made the only thing I could do was to raise revenues. So with that one mission in mind, I started working. And they like, they say whatever you're thinking about, whatever thoughts you have in your mind is the reality that you put towards yourself. I've always heard first movers advantage. First movers advantage. There are trends. Why is it that all of us sit on the Internet and the most downloadable links are when they say trends for 2017 on digital marketing or social media, everybody looks at trends because what are trends? I understood that trends are like waves for a surfer. A surfer is on the ocean, he looks at a trend, he feels, and he needs to know that there will be a wave and he needs to preempt it. And the guy who's able to preempt a trend better is the first mover. And a first mover makes 18 to 20x in terms of revenue or whatever is your plan than any other person. We can also be first movers because the thing is, every day there is an opportunity to be a first mover. Every day some algorithm is changing with Facebook, Google, TripAdvisor, Twitter, Instagram, and somebody or the other is winning that trend. And you see a case study coming every single day on Google or LinkedIn or whatever saying, this hotel did that, that hotel did that. We see that across a portfolio of people that we work with. Some people have been able to master those trends. Every time that this layer of the Internet has a different affair with a different platform, there are new opportunities for all of us. Now what is happening in 2017? What 2017, 18 and 19. What is the Internet going to have an affair with? The Internet is having an affair with real time consumer behavior. Real time, Real time consumer behavior means my phone will tell me already. We all know that our phones know our exact locations. This phone knows that I've been here for the last one hour or, you know, eventually two hours in the banquet of her hotels, right? There will be. There are softwares available which will allow notifications to come in to say, would you like to have tea? It knows that, you know, and I go into the lobby, it'll ask me, you, you know, three, 10ft away from and half an hour away from dinner time and we have a dinner spread. That level of Automation is what 2017 belongs to. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to talk.

Very informative and amazing. Thank you.

Very informative.

Amazing session by Rajeet. I mean, there was a lot of information related to social media, things which we did not know really about social media. But yes, ensured that we. He passed on the knowledge, which he's, of course, the guru of. That was a great session.

How did you. Like you said, it added on to the knowledge that we have very little knowledge that we had about this. And there are a lot of things that we can look up to now. We can try and practice. We did a little bit and now we can enhance that. What we have done.