By Flipkart, On Flipkart

http://www.livemint.com/Companies/Jahf24u7CoTbbsodjHIgvK/Flipkart-by-Flipkart-on-Flipkart.html?trk=pulse-det-art_view_ext

Mumbai: Not a single media outlet—digital, print or television—broke the story. Perhaps the biggest story in the start-up ecosystem in India.

On 11 January, the country’s largest e-commerce platform, Flipkart.com, named co-founder Binny Bansal as its new chief executive officer (CEO), replacing Sachin Bansal. The news was broken on Twitter, the micro-blogging platform. At 11.58am by a handle called @FlipkartStories. The tweet, which went out to 11,200 followers read:

News: @_sachinbansal will be the Executive Chairman and @binnybansal is the new CEO of Flipkart. Read more http://bit.ly/flipkartnews

At stories.flipkart.com, the restructuring news didn’t read or feel like a press release. It had a nice, large picture right at the top of the page, Sachin and Binny, smiling, facing the camera, seated at a desk. The story had space for tweets to be embedded. Followed by another picture, of Sachin and Binny, standing in front of Flipkart’s first office in Koramangala (Read: nostalgia). Plus a comment section, for engagement. If a reader felt like it, he could share the story, across popular social media platforms—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even WhatsApp. And 1,292 people did.

Sachin Bansal retweeted @FlipkartStories’s tweet, a few minutes later. At 12.09pm. To his 55,222 followers. And just like that, the biggest story in the start-up ecosystem in India was broken.

By Flipkart. On Flipkart.

There was no press conference. No fielding questions from pesky journalists. Nothing of the sort. Sure, a press release was issued, but only after a while; and it was identical to the story already put out on stories.flipkart.com. Journalists followed up on the news. Bloomberg put out an alert at 13:36:43. It read: “Flipkart names Binny Bansal as CEO, Co. says on website.”

It will be fair to say that on 11 January, at Flipkart, a milestone was achieved. And in the world of corporate communications, it can only be called a public relations coup.

Perfecting the art of communication

Senjam Raj Sekhar, head of corporate communications at Flipkart, doesn’t do much to hide his ambition. Of what he is trying to do with Flipkart Stories. After all, Stories, as the initiative is popularly known, is Sekhar’s baby.

“We will tell our own stories,” he said, when this reporter met him in Bangalore in December 2015. “This will be the platform to tell our side of the story. The story of the people who sell on Flipkart, customers, employees, everyone. Everything we have to communicate will be done through this platform. There will be journalistic rigour to it. This is why we have a team of journalists writing the stories. They are free to travel wherever they have to and tell good stories.”

It is quite likely that you’ve never heard of Sekhar before. In his last assignment, Sekhar was the global head of communications at the Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta group. In 2011, he was named among the 100 most influential communicators in the world by Holmes Report, a leading source of news for the public relations industry. Before Vedanta, Sekhar was the global head of communications at Bharti Airtel Ltd. Before Airtel, he spent several years in public relations, on the agency side, including two years as managing partner at Genesis Burson-Marsteller.

Quite clearly, he is a man who knows what he is doing. And at Flipkart, he is creating an organization which can control the narrative.

Bijoy Venugopal is the editor at Stories. In his last assignment, Venugopal was the travel editor at Yahoo India in Bengaluru. He’s also contributed articles to several publications, such as Outlook Traveller, Open, Mint Loungeand Tehelka, among others. Till about January, Stories had a small team: Vishad Sharma (a journalist, who quit last month); Arjun Paul, the graphic designer; Pushpendu Kumar, the project manager; Madhu Karuthedath, the assistant manager in the corporate communications team, who also doubles up to write/edit stories.

And then of course, what does and does not see the light of day is decided by Sekhar. He is the behind the scenes editor-in-chief.

So, what will Stories do?

Remember the hard-hitting Forbes India magazine article—Can Flipkart Deliver?—published in July 2012? Well, if that story were to be published today, Flipkart will not write a letter to the editor and blow hot and cold on social media. It would just publish its response on Stories. It would communicate directly with its stakeholders and readers—people interested in Flipkart and its business. Sekhar calls it direct communication.

In a way, his logic appears to be, why bother with journalists? First they ask questions. Then they hang around and ask more questions—some related, others not related. Then they reach out for perspective to the competition. Then they find neutral parties or experts who can comment on the story. And they write the story, from their point of view. So seriously, why bother with journalists? After all, effective communication is all about getting the message across. Why invest time in communication that will go through so many steps? Plus, without any control on the outcome.

So, with Flipkart Stories—direct communication.