A company can build and host ten different types of communities to serve different business objectives:

1. Communities of Interest: to connect customers and influencers around a lifestyle, an interest or a cause that is related to the company’s or brand’s values.

2. Communities of Practice: to connect customers and influencers around a profession, a skill or an industry that is related to the company’s offerings.

3. Evangelist Communities: to connect customers who are passionate about the company, its products or its brands and energize them to drive advocacy and referrals.

4. Employee Communities: to connect the company’s employees, in order to build an open culture, improve collaboration amongst distributed teams, or enable knowledge-sharing.

5. Partner Communities: to connect the company’s employees and partners, in order to build an open culture, improve collaboration amongst distributed teams, or enable knowledge-sharing.

6. Talent Communities: to showcase the company’s work culture and employees and attract prospective employees to the company.

7. Ideation Communities: to solicit and select product and process improvement ideas from employees, partners, customers and influencers.

8. Research Communities: to identify trends and user behavior related to the company’s industry or products to use in product and process innovation.

9. Social Marketplaces: so that customers can help each other select and purchase a product or service that is most appropriate for them, with some facilitation from company employees.

10. Support Communities: so that customers can help each other solve problems and use products or services in the best way, with some facilitation from company employees.

Each of these ten types of communities differ from each other not only in terms of the business objectives and the business function that owns them, but also in terms of the types and numbers of members, the type and frequency of editorial and user-created content, the functionality required in the community platform, the integration of the community platform with existing social networks and, finally, governance, reputation and reward systems.

Some of these communities are native to B2B or B2C contexts, while others can work across business contexts. Some are public or private by default, while others can work anywhere on the public-private continuum. Some of these communities are built around one primary driver — insights, response, activation, or crowd-sourcing — while others incorporate elements from all four.

The State of Community Management report from the Community Roundtable touches upon some of these aspects in its strategy section, then goes on to discuss the hands-on aspects of community management, based on its Community Maturity Model:

A particularly insightful comment relates to the 1:9:90 rule –

Unlike a commonly held belief, all communities do not develop a 90-9-1 pattern – i.e. 90% lurkers, 9% contributors, 1% authors and they should not necessarily be built with that expectation. That profile is a good benchmark for large consumer brand communities and product support communities, but is not such a good profile for market research, employee, innovation, or customer advocacy communities.

While the report is thorough and packed with practical tips, here are three ways in which Rachel Happe and Jim Storer can make it even better:

- Include case studies from the Community Roundtable members to bring alive the tips.
- Provide a how-to-guide for the organization to move from the Hierarchy stage to the Emergent Community, Community and Network stages.
- Provide tips by type of community, starting with the ten types of communities I have listed above.

Here are some of my other favorite resources on online communities:

- The Art of Community by Jono Bacon
- The Tribalization of Business report by Beeline Labs
- Building and Sustaining Brand Communities by Radian6

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

Roughly, most of these uses cases can be classified across five business areas (Marketing, Sales, Support, Innovation, Collaboration) and four dynamics (Insights, Response, Proactive, and Crowd-Sourcing). I like this simple action-oriented classification better that coming up with names for each use case combination.

Owyang and Wang have further classified these 18 use cases based on market demand and technology maturity. Market demand reflects the urgency by organizations to deploy a use case while technology maturity reflects the market readiness and maturity of the available solutions.

In this matrix, Evangelizables present the most immediate market opportunity, for both product and consulting company, while Early Movers presents the most important marketing opportunity for product companies.

- Evangelizables (high market demand and high technology maturity): Dominated by insights, response and proactive uses cases for sales, marketing and support.
- Near Tipping Points (low market demand and high technology maturity): Dominated by crowd-sourcing use cases in collaboration and innovation.
- Early Movers (high market demand and low technology maturity): Dominated by response uses cases in sales and marketing.
- Early Adoptions (low market demand and low technology maturity): Dominated by insights use cases in collaboration and innovation.

Finally, Owyang and Wang define the 5M’s, foundational processes that cut across all these uses cases:

- Monitoring: to track social media conversations.
- Mapping: to link up social graphs, including profiles and relationships.
- Management: to tie back systems to business processes and priorities.
- Middleware: to define workflows across social and enterprise platforms.
- Measurement: to analyze metrics related to business objectives.

Here’s the Altimeter report on Social CRM:

At 2020 Social, we spend a lot of time thinking about how the Social CRM toolkit is coming together and how it can help organizations design a talk-worthy experience ecosystem.

On one hand, we are trying to put together a toolkit for marketers who want to use social CRM, but we aren’t quite there yet, as the tools don’t quite connect with each other as seamlessly as they claim to.

On the other hand, we are speaking with the product teams of some Indian CRM solutions providers, to help them extend their CRM solutions by incorporating social and community elements in them.

The trick is that social is public, many-to-many and emergent, while traditional CRM is private, one-to-one and rule-based. Social CRM lies at the intersection of social and CRM worlds and I’m not quite sure if we have figured out how to use the best from both the worlds into Social CRM.

By the way, here’s a 70+ slide deck we use for workshops on Social CRM: Decoding the Social in Social CRM. Do share your feedback.

Here are some other useful perspectives on the Altimeter Social CRM report:

- John Lovett, Prem Kumar Aparanji and Brian Solis praise the report for its pragmatic and thorough approach.

- Clo Willaerts and Jacob Morgan point out that few, if any vendors, provide a solution that works across the 5Ms highlighted in the report.

- Stefano Maggi, like myself, tries to reclassify the use cases in a way that is more action oriented, by linking them to the five objectives in “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technology“, by Charlene Li (@charleneli, at Altimeter Group) and Josh Bernoff (@jbernoff, at Forrester Research): Listening, Talking, Energizing, Embracing and Supporting.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

In this spirit, we will be sharing all our research, point of view, conference and workshop decks with the community of social media practitioners and enthusiasts we have learned so much from.

We speak at almost a dozen events every month, and sometimes use the same ideas across talks. For instance, I have given several related talks on “how to scale passion?” or “what can entrepreneurs learn from activists?” at BITS Pilani, IIT Roorkee, TEDIndia, Startup Saturday Delhi, Social Media Club Mumbai, IIT Delhi and Pecha Kucha Bangalore. Each talk is a work-in-progress artifact and I have seen these ideas evolve, each time I talk about them. While individual slide decks for each talk are interesting as artifacts, I’m beginning to think that it’s better to share a master slide deck (that’s in constant beta) so that people can easily refer to the latest iteration of our thinking.

With that background, let me share the latest version of our 100+ slide workshop deck titled “Decoding Social: How Are Social Technologies Changing Business, Media and Society?”

I used a version of this deck earlier today as the first of my three guest lectures at Mudra Institute of Commuications, Ahmedabad on how social technologies are changing business. I intend to use this deck next in the introductory session of my NASSCOM Foundation workshop on “how to scale passion”.

Here are the three key mantras the deck builds upon –

- The future has already arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

- The tools are transient; the values embedded in them are persistent.

- To understand how social technologies are changing media and business, begin by asking how they are changing people and society.

Here are the five key questions the deck seeks to answer –

- What are social technologies and why are they important?

- How are social technologies changing people?

- How are social technologies changing society?

- How are social technologies changing media?

- How are social technologies changing business?

If you want one of the 2020 Social experts (Gaurav, Dave, Gautam, Kaushal) to speak at your event, write to us at contact@2020social.com.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

So, Dave leads our business-to-consumer practice and the plan competency, Kaushal leads our business-to-business practice and the build competency and Gautam leads our employee and partner practice and the engage competency, while I help out across all three competencies and practices.

My target is to take Dave and myself off this grid so that 2020 Social can function even when we are away, let’s say, for speaking at conferences.

To get there, we will need to fill three key positions over the next three months: the business-to-consumer practice lead, the build competency lead and the engage competency lead.

Last week, we announced openings for the first two positions:

- Consultant (1): Ideally Mumbai, but also Delhi or Bangalore

Role: Develop the digital marketing strategy and define the business case for social applications and community platforms for consumer and media clients. Establish thought leadership in the domain of how Indian consumers engage with web, mobile and social technologies through blog posts, white papers and conference talks. Set up the Mumbai office for 2020 Social and establish and grow client relationships. Over a one year horizon, manage a team of 5-6 Associate Consultants and Analysts.

Skills: Consumer marketing, digital marketing, business consulting, business development.

Background: IIM or equivalent with 4-6 years of experience.

Reporting to: Gaurav

- Consultant (1): Ideally Delhi or Bangalore, but also Mumbai

Role: Define the functional requirements for social applications and community platforms for clients. Work with internal account managers/ project managers and external design firms/ development firms to ensure that projects are delivered in cost and on time. Simultaneously, find opportunities to productize these social applications and community platforms as proprietary white label solutions that can be re-used across multiple clients. Over a one year horizon, manage a team of 5-6 Associate Consultants, Analysts and Designers.

Skills: User experience design, product management, project management, familiarity with Drupal and Facebook/ LinkedIn/ Twitter/ OpenSocial APIs.

Background: IIT/ NID or equivalent with 6-8 years of experience.

Reporting to: Gaurav

We are also looking for interns to work with us on a part-time basis:

- Interns (4), Delhi or Bangalore, Rs. 5000 monthly stipend

Role: Research how digital and social technologies are changing business and marketing. Identify best practices and case studies for developing social media strategy and creating campaigns for clients. Part time role for 2 to 6 months with a commitment of 20 hours a week.

Skills: Good communications skills, ability to work in teams, eagerness to learn, familiarity with blogs, forums, and social networking platforms like Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

Background: BBA or MBA students.

Reporting to: Gautam (Delhi) or Kaushal (Bangalore)

Working at 2020 Social combines the best of both worlds: you enjoy the open and collaborative work environment of a web 2.0 startup, the steep learning curve of a strategy consulting firm and the benefits of being part of an established organization (we are related to 20:20 Media, one of India’s largest independent PR firms).

Send your CVs to careers@2020social.com: it might be your lucky day.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

As an entrepreneur, you need to articulate your offering early in your startup’s life cycle, and still stay open to change, especially if you are in the fast-evolving social technologies space.

After nine months of running 2020 Social, I have learned that the key is to define a big enough sandbox early, then stay in constant beta, and play within that sandbox.

THE EVOLUTION OF 2020 SOCIAL

In June 2009, 2020 Social started off as an insights firm, focused on tracking conversations on the social web and identifying trends international clients could benefit from.

Within a hundred days, we realized that the social opportunity in India itself was big enough and reinvented ourselves as a consulting firm, focused on advising Indian and international clients on how social technologies are impacting their business strategy.

By October, we were ready to move beyond pure-play advisory services and offer full solutions to our clients. Since then, we have been working hard on building our BUILD and ENGAGE capabilities, apart from strengthening our already mature PLAN capabilities.

Now, 2020 Social builds and nurtures online communities for Indian and international clients, to connect their customers, partners and employees, catalyze innovation and collaboration, and drive loyalty and advocacy.

2020 SOCIAL COMPETENCY AREAS

As of now, we have three “competency areas”:

- PLAN: which involves doing primary and secondary research on the social web, advising clients on how social technologies are impacting their business strategy, and conducting workshops for senior management.
- BUILD: which involves building online community platforms and social applications, and integrating them with existing platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter using social APIs.
- ENGAGE: which involves creating compelling content for the community platforms we build, tracking and participating in conversations on the community platforms and the broader social web, and increasing participation in these communities through social media contests.

Dave leads our PLAN competencies, Kaushal leads our BUILD competencies and Gautam leads our ENGAGE competencies.

2020 SOCIAL PARTNERS

In some of our engagements, we focus only on the PLAN piece, while the BUILD and ENGAGE pieces are handled by another full-service digital agency. In such cases, we usually work from the client side to define detailed functional requirements and campaign calenders, select the agency and closely work with them through the BUILD and ENGAGE pieces. We have worked with Experience Commerce and Interakt on such engagements and look forward to working with other full-service digital agencies.

In other engagements, we work across the PLAN, BUILD and ENGAGE pieces and partner with design and development firms to offer the full solution. We have worked with Design For Use and Tekriti Software on such engagements and look forward to working with them again.

Lithium (for external communities) and SocialText (for internal communities) are our preferred white label platforms. Drupal is our preferred platform for building custom community platforms.

2020 SOCIAL PRACTICE AREAS

As of now, we have three practice areas:

- BUSINESS TO CONSUMER: which involves building communities of interest, around lifestyles and causes.
- BUSINESS TO BUSINESS: which involves building communities of practice, around professions and industries.
- EMPLOYEES and PARTNERS: which involves building collaboration platforms.

Dave leads our business-to-consumer practice, Kaushal leads our business-to-business practice and Gautam leads our employees and partners practice.

2020 SOCIAL OFFERINGS

So, 2020 Social’s suite of offerings is essentially a matrix of our competency areas and practice areas –

NEXT FOR 2020 SOCIAL

Over a one year horizon, I expect 2020 Social to build offerings beyond pure-play services.

We are working on building some lightweight white label platforms of our own. The first of these platforms will be an ideation-cum-contest platform called 2020 Social Ideas.

We are also working on building some niche communities of our own. The first of these communities will be a private research community for young, urban, Indian trendsetters called Yuvaah.

Stay tuned to hear more about these initiatives soon.

THE 2020 SOCIAL SANDBOX

I am sure that our offerings will continue to evolve, but I am sure that we will play within the broad sandbox we started with:

- We believe that social technologies are changing business and society and we want to play an active role in fulfilling the promise of this movement.

- We will differentiate ourselves based on our insights and do work that extends the boundaries of how organizations use social technologies to connect with their constituents.

- We will build deep competencies in some areas and partner with experts in other areas who share our vision to bring together effective solutions for our clients.

Ask us how we can help you or partner with you.

Cross-posted on Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

I like how Indian social activists are using social networking platforms for fundraising, or creating awareness for their causes.

Isha Foundation’s $100K win in the Chase Community Giving Contest is a good example of non-profits using social platforms to get support for a cause for fundraising. A very persuasive lady from Isha Foundation even called me to ask me to write a post supporting their bid.

The Wall Project, Batti Bandh, The Bicycle Project and The Sapling Project have all got attention recently for using Twitter and Facebook for promoting their programs. The Pink Chaddi Campaign, Grassroutes, NGOPost, Bell Bajao and Blank Noise are some of my favorite examples of Indian digital activism campaigns.

However, using Facebook and Twitter to spread a brand-related or cause-related message doesn’t excite me anymore. I would be excited if activists used social platforms to enable collaboration, like Vote Report India did, or build a long-term community, like iJanaagraha is trying to do. I have earlier written about the need for activists to go beyond content and conversations, to tap into the collaboration, community and collective intelligence layers. Ellen Miller’s Sunlight Foundation is showing us how in the area of government transparency and accountability.

Here’s the full text of the TOI story –

Social networking sites are new age activist’s handiest tools
Mahafreed Irani, TNN

Facebookers had a new distraction last week: a request from 100 US based charities to vote for them so that they could mop up a cool one million dollars to pursue their ‘big idea’ to change the world. Thousands of users from India logged on to vote for their favourites like Give India and Isha Foundation in the Chase Community Giving race. For them, it was the easiest way to contribute to the cause.

Social networking sites have clearly moved beyond frivolous chatter and self-aggrandisement to a worthier cause: they’ve become the new age activist’s handiest tools. From bringing people together to beautify walls in the city (The Wall Project) and encouraging them to save electricity (Batti Bandh) to getting them to donate their old cycles to rural children (The Bicycle Project) and engaging them in sapling plantation drives (The Sapling Project), these sites have built up successful online movements and then dexterously steered them into real life.

The benefits of building a movement using the Internet are self-evident : no capital costs and speedier-thanspeedy responses. Every time Batti Bandh organiser Keith Menon has to make an announcement , he simply posts an update and the over 6,000 members and fans of the Batti Bandh community on Facebook get the news delivered to their inbox. Netizens from countries as far away as Czechoslovakia, New Zealand, Netherlands and Pakistan have joined the group and posted their views on the campaign.

Like Batti Bandh, the other three movements too were initiated in Mumbai and then went national thanks to the online momentum. Take the Wall Project—what started as a touch-up for a Bandra home has now become a movement with over 2,000 volunteers to beautify cities across India. After photographs of paint jobs of walls along Senapati Bapat Marg were uploaded, members from Bengaluru, Pune and Kolkata started discussing their own city walls on the forum. Parag Gandhi, one of the facilitating members , spends a few minutes giving direction to the conversation—the rest of the content, including photos, news and updates are user-generated.

A user in Pune who wants to paint walls asked, “We are a group of 50 people and very enthusiastic about painting. There is no doubt that we have many walls dying for a dash of colour but the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) won’t permit.’’ In response, a member was quick to post, “Forget the PMC, when they see the value you are creating they will automatically come to you. Find private walls, educational institutes, schools or hospital walls instead.’’

Catalysts for change are using Web 2.0 platforms to engage people and spread the word using already existing social networks. Some prefer using technology to initiate the campaign too. Just last month, two Mumbai techies Satish Vijaykumar and Ranjeet Walunj created a website, a Twitter profile to make sure their city could breathe easy. The internet was used as a propaganda tool for their initiative The Sapling Project. A few tweets and Facebook statuses later, over a hundred people had signed up for the sapling plantation drive. They met at Shivaji Park, collected saplings and now post updates about their saplings’ progress on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

Impromptu acts of kindness have sprouted on Twitter too. Last week, tweeple from India started the T4H (Twitteristan for Haiti) by posting links to the Google Crisis Response page and the American Red Cross page to encourage their followers to donate. Popular tweeple like user ‘@b 50/Bombay Addict’ on Twitter posted updates like, “India gives $1m aid to Haiti. What? Rs 4.6 crore? That’s all we got? The daily turnover on BSE+NSE is Rs 80,000 crore.’’ and “The BMC will spend Rs 15 crore to clean Mumbai’s beaches. And that’s all we got?’’ to provoke his following of over 2,500 to donate.

On Diwali day last year, Twitter member Anaggh Desai decided to use the power of online networking to raise some money for charity. The 46-year-old Mumbai-based entrepreneur asked people to send him a Deepwish (Diwali greeting on Twitter) and pledged 25 paise for every wish that he received to Goonj, an NGO. Excited by the idea, 41 other tweeple decided to donate amounts ranging from 50 p to Rs 5 for every greeting tweeted at them. After 36 hours, Rs 55,000 was collected from tweeple all over India and even the US and Saudi Arabia towards educating the girl child.

The city also participated in two twestivals (offline meets organised and promoted online to collect funds for charity). The Mumbai chapter of the twestival last September collected Rs 40,000 for the NGO Help A Child.

Menon from Batti Bandh wants to leverage the power of the community on Twitter to facilitate car and taxi pooling . He is in the process of building an application that will let tweeple tweet their starting point and destination , show the route on Google Maps and allow other tweeters to join in.

However, there are dissidents. Social media researcher Gaurav Mishra thinks that online communities need to take their activities to the next level. “After a person has switched off electricity for an hour or planted one sapling, what next?’’ he asks. “Organisers have to decide on how they want to create sustained involvement .’’

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

The Social Technographics profile is based on in-person interviews with 353 SEC ABC online adult respondents in metropolitan India (including Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, and Chennai) between March and April 2009.

Using the top Indian website in each category (as per October ‘09 data from Vizisense) as a reference, it’s easy to see that these numbers cannot be right, especially for Joiners –

- Overall Internet Population: 42.9m

- Creators: No estimates
- Critics (Mouthshut): 0.8m (2%)
- Collectors (Digg): 0.9m (2%)
- Joiners (Orkut): 15.5m (36%)
- Spectators (YouTube): 10.9 (25%)
- Inactives: No estimates

I had earlier tried to estimate the Social Technographics profile of metro India using public data. Since then, I have revised some of these estimates, based on Vizisense data and discussions with the JuxtConsult folks.

Incidentally, Forrester also released its new Social Technographics in the US report last week and added a new category called Conversationalists, to factor in the increased importance of status messages on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

Based on back of the envelop calculations, with Vizisense data as the starting point, here are my broad guesstimates for each category:

- Creators: 3m (7%)
- Conversationalists: 5 (12%)
- Critics: 5m (12%)
- Collectors: 5m (12%)
- Joiners: 20m (47%)
- Spectators: 20m (47%)
- Inactives: 15m (35%)

What do you think? Do the Forrester Social Technographics numbers resonate with your experience with social media in India?

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

I have earlier written about how caste-based communities on Facebook and Orkut reflects the realities of India’s splintered society.

The ancient Indian custom of caste has made its way into the modern world of social media.

Social networking site Orkut — the most popular social media platform in India — is not only a place where young, urban Indians can connect with friends like Americans do on Facebook. It’s also a platform where they can meet others in their caste… (and) engage in benign discussions and debates on various caste-related issues like marriage, religion and politics.

So what’s happening here on Orkut, Facebook and other social media sites in India? Some argue the country’s young people no longer feel comfortable talking about caste in public. Instead, they retreat to an anonymous online world to debate and discuss issues. Not everyone agrees.

Social media expert Gaurav Mishra said Orkut and similar sites do not increase caste discussions. Rather, they accurately reflect that Indians still very much identify with their caste and want to form groups around them.

“Surprisingly with urbanization, with education, with more people traveling and getting exposed to other cultures, these divisions have not really gone away. Caste even now — even in urban, educated India — is still an extremely big issue,” said Mishra, CEO of online marketing firm 2020 Social. “So therefore it is not surprising given how deeply entrenched caste is in Indian society that it manifests itself online also.”

As more Indians go online, and the internet reaches beyond the most urban and educated layer of society, caste activity will become only more prevalent, Mishra said.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

I believe that real-time search is indeed a game-changer of search. The real power of Twitter lies not in being able to send and receive 140 letter messages, but in being able to search for tweets about people, brands, locations and events in real-time. Twitter realizes this: that’s why it has put search at the center of its redesigned homepage. Facebook realizes this: that’s why they are moving strongly towards a public status message oriented design. Google and Microsoft/ Bing realize this too: that’s why they are working hard to integrate real time status messages in their search results.

The ability to search real time status updates is already changing search behavior for early adopters like myself. I use Twitter search to discover what people are saying about a breaking news story, who else is present at the event I am attending and what are the early reviews for a movie that was released earlier in the day. The next big step is an ability to search for what my friends, people like me, or people near me are saying. As this behavior is adopted by the mainstream, I expect profound repercussions for both brands and publishers.

One important change is that search results will become both more dynamic and more personalized. Which means that search engine marketing will begin to look more like social media marketing. Suddenly, the depth, duration and keyword density of your content will begin to matter less and the freshness, relevance and proximity of our conversations will begin to matter more.

Along with the above changes in content search and consumption, I see a parallel change in content creation. When Blogger, Wordpress, YouTube and Flickr made it easy to create and share articles, videos and photos, several consumers started thinking of themselves as writers, photographers and filmmakers. Still, the focus was on creating content, and it needed significant time and effort to create content, so the barrier was still to high for most.

Then, Twitter popularized the idea of real-time status messages and the content creation barrier came crashing down. Not only that, the nature of content itself changed, to conversations between people. So, people are more likely to organize themselves around conversations now, not content, and that’s a fundamental shift.

The self-perpetuating viral loop is at the core of word of mouth marketing and Twitter and Facebook have made it more potent than ever. Word of mouth has always been the holy grail of marketing and, now that it is more easy to seed and track than ever before, all marketing is beginning to look a little bit like word of mouth marketing.

Here is the full text of the story:

Points of View: Will real-time search affect the business of search?
Kapil Ohri | afaqs! | New Delhi, January 18, 2010

Google and Bing have introduced the concept of real-time search, which will also show results from recent Twitter, Facebook and blog updates. Is this the way to go now?

Pushkar Sane
Chief digital officer, North and South Asia, Starcom MediaVest Group

For starters, it will increase the ‘volume’ of indexed pages and the natural search rankings for brands may change rapidly based on momentum built by social conversations. Brands will need to re-orient their approach for search as it will bring up organic results with social conversations, making it difficult for brands to get their ‘controlled content’ in front of people. They will have to try harder in organising content, integrating ’social elements’ and optimising it continuously.

While positive conversations will help in enhancing brand equity, negative ones will accelerate the erosion as bad news travels fast. Finally, brands need to create a seamless strategy for digital with search and social at its core by getting rid of specialist silos within digital or within marketing.

Mohit Hira
President, Training.com, NIIT

If you had searched, on Google for Copenhagen on the morning after the climate talks failed, you’d have first got a Google Map result and then one old item on the Climate Summit followed by a Wikipedia entry. Now, try the same search in real-time using Google’s Experimental Lab. You’d get links posted by the minute on BBC, Twitter, YouTube and a chronological list that grows longer before your eyes.

The action has been shifting from publishers to user-generated social media content. If you’re smart enough to worm your brand into digital conversations in real-time, you’re likely to get picked up. Not in weeks or months, as is the case with new sites and search engine optimisation (SEO), but in minutes. But this doesn’t mean that life is short for search engine marketing (SEM). It will take a while before everyone switches to real-time search by default. Also, things will be unpredictable in the short term.

Mahesh Murthy
Founder and chief executive officer, Pinstorm

SEO has become a low-value commodity activity, farmed out to individuals. Till a few years ago, all you had to optimise were text results. Today, a smart business will optimise results related to text, videos, images, twitter updates and blog entries – because the search engine results page consists of all of these.

I hope it will lead advertisers to increase their focus on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Advertisers will find that if they are not on Twitter, their customers and rivals already are – and that the conversation is already going on there. Many brands tend to think of things in the TV paradigm – ‘run me a month-long campaign’. A social media campaign has to be 24 x 7 x 365.

Gaurav Mishra
Chief executive officer, 20:20 Social

I believe that real-time search is indeed a game-changer for search. The real power of Twitter lies in being Able to search for tweets about people, brands, locations and events in real-time. The ability to search real-time status updates is already changing search behaviour for early adopters like me. I use Twitter search to discover what people are saying about a breaking news story or who else is present at the event I am attending.

As this behaviour is adopted by the mainstream, I expect profound repercussions for both brands and publishers. An important change is that search results will become both more dynamic and personalised – meaning that search engine marketing will begin to look more like social media marketing. Suddenly, the depth, duration and keyword density of your content will begin to matter less and the freshness, relevance and proximity of our conversations will begin to matter more.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

I have earlier written about noteworthy social media initiatives from Indian news and media companies. Here’s my take on why we haven’t seen more such initiatives so far and why I see it changing over the next 2-3 years.

Newspapers in the US are rushing to build business models for the web because the print business is in trouble. Newspaper readerships and advertising revenues continue to fall and more young people are reading news online than in print.

In India, the newspaper business is in much better shape. Only one-third of Indians read newspapers, which means that there is a lot room to grow readership. Advertising spend in India is low at half a percent of GDP, compared to two percent in most developed countries, so there’s also room to grow advertising revenues, even after factoring in the increasing influence of TV and digital. Finally, the internet user base in India is only one tenth of the newspaper reader base in India, so the numbers don’t always add up for building an online business model.

However, even though newspapers aren’t in a do or die situation today, they do need to build a strong digital business for tomorrow.

Searchable multi-media content, user participating through rating, commenting and sharing, journalist blogs, and presence on social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter are already standard for several Indian newspapers. I won’t be surprised if Indian newspapers also adopt consumer generated content, two way conversations between journalists and readers, customizable home pages, and even social networks and APIs over the next two years.

If they don’t stay ahead of the wave, it will be a do or die situation for them before they realize it.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.