Category — social media

It’s been a long while since I last wrote a blog post and that’s precisely the reason why I am here. Suddenly realized that I(too) have a blog which despite me hating it, has been neglected for a long while. While making a comeback, what’s easier than a rant .

I’ve been using twitter for a fairly long time now, almost from the month(or so) it was launched. Despite being using it for that long a period and having my twitter stream open most of the day I’ve never  tweeted a lot, and by ‘a lot’ i mean excess of a dozen fairly distributed tweets a day. Different people have different definitions and clearly for some 10-12 tweets isn’t much. At times I wonder about people who tweet a lot(say 25-35 times a day or more) and mostly end up judging them(not the best thing to do but). What are they like in professional life, in real life(assuming they have one)?

I see lots of wannabe entrepreneurs using twitter heavily to network, RT others tweets, sharing links etc or asking for things which Google could answer better and faster. Then there’s a bunch of what I call “Micro Celebs”, the celebrities of the world of 140 characters whose only claim to fame is there number of followers on twitter or how many achievers or real life celebrities follow them back there. What’s amazing is that these people continue to Tweet/RT the same old things, they used to when they started an year or two back. But luckily what works for them is the fact like search traffic on the internet, there’s always enough audience for them on Twitter, which probably explains why the ones who tweet a lot tend to have more followers.

Most people in my TL who tweet a lot work for some or other company and start tweeting almost the minute they reach their office and continue till the time they head back home. I wonder if they tweet this much and this frequently, how do they get any work done at all. But then,as I’ve seen and experienced myself, you don’t need to get a lot of work done in a big MNC to survive.

Anyways I feel some people(ambitious ones at least) should spend a little less time tweeting about what they are eating/drinking/feeling and instead think how addicted they have become and the things they can get done in that time..

My new startup ‘Dial-a-Book’ has got its first mention in print media today. It’s been almost a year since I started working on Dial-a-Book along with my younger brother and it’s been an absolute fun ride.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

Past life

Dial-a-Book is a Delhi-based start-up founded by brothers Mayank and Tarang Dhingra. Tarang, 25, is a final-year student at the University of Delhi. Mayank, 27, is a software engineer who left a corporate job at Fidelity International in 2005 to work for a string of tech start-ups—from SlideShare, an online presentation hosting service, to MPower Mobile, which works with mobile payments. In 2008, before the Twitter bandwagon bulldozed its way across the country’s Internet landscape, he experimented with creating a Twitter-like service for India called Kwippy—which Mayank called a “conversational platform”. The site folded in mid-2009, and subsequent dabbling in ideas on what to do next led to Dial-a-Book

and you can read the complete article here

I know some of you *might* find this surprising and *might* have some questions for me, so feel free to ping me anytime

Another post to keep me attuned on blogging and sharing some useful information in the process.

1) Speed of eating “key to obesity” – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7681458.stm

2) How to build one of a kind Facebook Fan Page: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/how-to-build-engaging-one-of-kind-facebook-fan-pages/

3) Stephen Fry: What I Wish I’d Known When I was 18: http://vimeo.com/11414505

and just for the laughs, this Vicks Action 500 AD(by Anurag Kashyap apparently)

At the starting of this month I noticed a new option while creating a Facebook Fan Page and I wasn’t quite sure what was going on and what to expect next. It was yesterday when I stumbled upon this

that things started to fall into place. The info of this page (Electronics and Communication Engg. IIT Guwahati) reads

Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for Electronics and Communiation Engg. (Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati), sign up and we’ll let you know when we’re ready for your help. You can also get us started by suggesting a relevant Wikipedia article or the Official Site.

Guess that says it all

1. Make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic (Regularly updated/active Content? )
   Think of it, if there were to be a decently popular fan page(community page) on anything, say Yoga or Soccer then it would get updated regularly and would have tons of discussions going on it. This page on Soccer would have far more content than any other page on the same topic and it shouldn’t be difficult to guess the SEO juice it will derive and how advertiser friendly that page is going to be.
2. If you have a passion for Electronics and Communiation Engg. (Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati), sign up and we’ll let you know when we’re ready for your help. (Wikipedia?)
   Yes, another community driven page which could have a few administrators or content curators that’ll ensure that the activity on the community page is sustained.

So while everyone happily takes care of the content and discussions, facebook sells the ad space at a premium to advertisers and earns $$. That’s not it, to facilitate the creation of numerous community pages like the one on E &C IIT Guwahati, Facebook has started to automatically create community pages that are up for grabs and might be promoted via ads or news feeds in future.

So what do you think about this move by Facebook? Should Wikipedia be scared?

Update 1:  There’s something more to the move by Facebook around Community Pages. Apparently they’ve started re-categorizing the generic pages(non brands/company pages) as Community Pages. Here’s an email I received about one of the pages I had created a while back

Clicking on the link(for mis-categorizing) leads here

Does this move worry all those who created pages around various social objects/activities? I think so.

Update 2 (1/5/2010):

While logging on to Facebook for the first time yesterday, I saw this notification

As expected Facebook is indeed on a big mission to turn all the information into community pages. So now all the interests, favorite shows, books etc in my profile are linked to their respective community pages.

Another social wiki in the making

Update 3 (23/8/2010):

Just saw this.

The community pages now also have a Wikipedia tab which pulls in all the information about the subject from Wiki. Let’s see how things shape up from here.

Facebook Ads are something despite trying my best I find myself unable to ignore. In fact I think  my eyes are now always on a look out for conspicuous ads while I am on Facebook, and that’s how I noticed this ad

It’s not often that you get too see an ad like this one “Ashutosh Gowarikar is searching for an actor to play Siddhartha/Buddha. If you are male 20 to 30 years of age then audition now!”. This sure looks interesting. On clicking the ad you are taken to http://www.buddha-movie.com/

where you can find out some basic information about the film and fill up a form to apply for auditions.

This is a really simple and innovative use of using the online medium (mostly Social) to solve a problem(finding new talent) and generating a good buzz long before the movie gets on the floor

Buddha the movie is also on Facebook and Twitter

That new technology, trends etc take their own sweet(not so) time to reach and permeate the Indian market is a well known and accepted fact, and Social Media is no different. While marketing and advertising companies/teams from other countries(especially from the west) might have already dipped deep in the Social Media waters, their counterparts in India are no where close.

When Pepsi ditched Superbowl and chose to spend their budget ($20 million) on a Social Media campaign there were celebrations amongst the Social Media folks world over and everyone(Including we in India) felt that Social Media has finally arrived and the game has changed from being Traditional Media centric to Social Media being equally if not more important. If you think that’s the same with India (transition from Tradition Media to Social  Media at a considerable level), think again.

In the course of last year or so I’ve met numerous Social Media enthusiasts/marketers/analysts and quite a few advertising/media agencies and some guys who are in-charge of marketing campaigns for the brands they represent. Little has changed since last year if we talk about how people who offer Social Media solutions feel and how those who should be using those Social Media solutions feel. Despite all the jazz around Social Media, in India particularly brands are spending a bare minimum percentage of their marketing/advertising budget on Social Media. Not just this, what’s particularly interesting is the fact that in India some brands have started spending more(and not less) on Traditional Media. If these figures are anything to go by

you can get an idea of how things seem to be moving in the Indian market. We are increasingly spending more money on Traditional Media and it’s not just TV ads, the print media is also on a roll with Realtors and FMCG companies booking full page ads like anything.  It’s not just a co-incidence that there aren’t any remarkable Social Media campaigns around IPL despite all the hype and hoopla.

Keeping in mind all this and the response that these Traditional Media campaigns manage to get I would like to believe
that the days of TV-Industrial Complex are not yet over in India and it will be another few years before significant changes start to happen.

I’ve been following the work of Hugh Macleod for quite some time now. He’s not only a great cartoonist but a lot more.

Here’s today Cartoon from the Gaping Void newsletter(Subscribe), hope you too will like it

You might also want to checkout Hugh’s new book: Ignore everybody

With more and more people from India jumping the Social Media bandwagon, local brands are not standing on the edges anymore and have slowly started to test the Social Media waters. Reliance  Mutual Fund seems to be a new kid on the block. I happened to get the following mail from them yesterday

“Accept Button”?
Curious, I tried to check out what they had to offer and here’s what how things stand. The link takes you to their MF site that has the same icons in the tiniest size possible in the most invisible place possible

And here’s what you get when you click the icons

Facebook:

Twitter:

Orkut:

These screenshots pretty much tell the Social Media story for Reliance MF, which is so typical for most companies that are trying to be there but are no where near the optimum experience. It will take them some time and effort to understand there’s more to Social Media than reposting links and hopefully they’ll get hang of things before they run into a Nestle Like crisis

A couple days back the food giant Nestle(after being targeted by Greenpeace) stepped on the wrong side of Social Media by posting rude and insensitive status updates and comments on their Facebook page. As expected, updates like this

and comments like this

did not go down well with their existing fans and those who checked the page because of the brouhaha. Therefore, Nestle suddenly found itself in middle of another debacle courtesy inappropriate management of their Facebook page. The person handling their Facebook page obviously had no idea (nor does he/she have any now) of the blunder he/she committed.

Now that the mistakes have been made and realized, what next? I’ve read as much as ten posts by Indian and International bloggers/social media whatevers essentially either link blogging what others are saying or making the most obvious and superficial suggestions how the tone of the messages should not have been rude etc. Interestingly none of them offered a direction if not a solution of what can a brand do if it happens to run into a situation like this.
Possibly, it’s because none of those who wrote about the Nestle Crisis have ever managed a single Fan page by themselves.

Keeping that aside here’s a quick list of things that I would have done had I been in charge of the Fan page
( I have intentionally limited the scope of discussion to Facebook Fan Page and Off course I don’t expect everyone to agree with my method)

1) Admit you have made mistake(s):
One of the best ways to start your firefighting plan is by acknowledging your mistake and maybe promising that it won’t happen in future. A big brand admitting they did something wrong and apologizing gives everyone the signal that the brand is conscious of what it is doing and sets the expectation right. Also, most aggressive critics and fans turned critics an ego boost from this.

2) Remove offensive content:
Yes, remove the content that offended people. Irrespective of what others feel I am a strongly believer that you should remove offensive content to avoid it offending even more people. An offensive status message will keep getting more eyeballs with time and it’s best to take it out of the loop.

3) Change the Landing Tab:

This is what one gets if they go to the Nestle Facebook page

The deal here is that it shows you the same things irrespective of the fact whether you are a fan or not. This landing page could temporarily be changed to some other tab, say info.

Facebook Default Landing Tab settings.

4)Turn of “Auto expand” comments:

Slightly below the default landing tab drop down is another option that let’s you configure if the comments

on a status will be expanded by default(with top few comments listed) or will they just show up as *x comments*, only on clicking which one can see the comments. The idea here is to reduce the visibility of negative content so as to reduce others doing the same thing.

These are just a few things that can possibly be done to control the situation from flaring further and in case things go really out of hand temporarily stop fans from posting comments to your page all-together.

All the points mentioned above are just for firefighting a Nestle like crisis on Facebook and are obviously not the perfect solution. Some people for example might have issues with removing the offensive content or making it less/easily visible but then a temporary fix needs to be done to avoid things from spilling over. Also, once the basic firefighting is taken care of the brand must get back to doing the right things and work its way out of the Crisis.

It’s a great co-incidence that this post comes right after my previous post with a similar title. As I write this post Steve Jobs is presenting Apple’s next innovation ‘iPad’ which represents a new category between the smart phones and netbooks. This launch would easily be one of the biggest Tech events in the History with millions of people glued on to various nooks and corners of the World Wide Web trying to get a glimpse of Apple’s latest offering. Twitter as predicted by some is almost down and so are many other platforms which were experiencing heavy traffic spikes due to the event.

This post is not about Apple’s iPad, it is however about the Irony that I see. In today’s day and age where every Social Media Enthusiast/Evangelist/Consultant/______ in every SEO/SEM/SMM____ company talks about being “Social”, “Listening to conversations and participating in them” and a lot more, here is Apple, a brand that has been in the market for a good amount of time and is conspicuous for not being “Social” as per the standards but it’s still being able to garner ultra hype about a product launch that is capable of bringing many a social networks down and get almost everyone on the ones up talking about it.

All by just making remarkable products that people are passionate about

PS: I can’t think of any Social Brand being a part of any event/campaign of a scale this big, can you?