Gandhi gave some examples of the ideas that originated from Mahindra Satyam's shadow board. "The idea of our using social media tools for marketing, both within and outside the organization, came from the shadow board," says Gandhi. "They actually drove it. They come up with many other interesting ideas. For example, we are configuring a service in Australia which is basically a business process outsourcing service called 'social media listening'. This service can give daily reports to a company about the chatter on its social media activities, that is, what its customers and stakeholders are saying about it. The payment is on a per transaction basis. Our logic behind this is that when the social media monitoring volume grows, companies don't need to deploy a separate department to do this.

"The shadow board at Satyam works on an annual basis. The first board has now retired and the second one is on now."

For branding purposes, Satyam hitched its wagon to Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). The tech company handled the IT for the FIFA world cup last year. "For FIFA we did two things," says Gandhi. "One, we did the entire IT for FIFA. We deployed it using the cloud. It was the world's biggest sporting event with three million eyeballs watching the matches everyday. The entire application was built using agile methodologies. Because of cloud deployment and agile methodologies, the overall cost of ownership or running the system was pretty low. Two, we also set up a call centre in South Africa supporting seven different languages."

Satyam also used social media in a big way to report the FIFA events. On Twitter, they had nearly 25,000 followers.