2020 Social: Because Business is Social

WSJ Story on SMS-Based Social Networking Platform SMSGupShup

Posted on 13. Jan, 2010 by gaurav in Media

I was quoted recently in a WSJ article on SMS-based social networking platform SMSGupShup. The article delved into the business model for SMS based social networking platforms in India and focused on the need to limit usage to control outgoing SMS costs –

Analysts say restricting the number of user exchanges is the only option SMS GupShup has to hold down costs. “If 1,000 people in a group can keep sending messages to everyone else, that cost quickly becomes unmanageable,” said Gaurav Mishra, CEO of 2020 Social, a social-networking media consultancy based in New Delhi.

SMSGupShup is often compared to Twitter, especially in US media, but the comparison is problematic because SMSGupShup is essentially a group SMS service. It doesn’t have a searchable public timeline, a robust API and application ecosystem, or the highly engaged user behavior we see on Twitter that is driven by public one-to-one conversations.

Most importantly, the default user behavior on Twitter is to “create” a status update, but the default user behavior on SMSGupShup is to “consume” updates created by others. I’ll not be surprised if less than 5% of SMSGupShup’s 26 million users have ever created an update, or created a profile.

SMSGupShup is hesitant to change the user behavior from “consume” to “create” because sending text messages on behalf of users costs serious money. So, it has limited the number of messages group creators can send daily and restricted many-to-many messaging to small groups. It’s focusing on creating new revenue streams by creating custom channels for brands, opening up its API to application developers and creating an online marketplace for subscription plans, premium groups, and merchandise.

However, SMSGupShup will find it difficult to become an attractive platform for brands to engage with consumers, unless the default user behavior on the platform changes from “consume” to “create”. Brands use Twitter for market research, lead generation, viral marketing and customer support: use cases that are made possible by users talking to each other and to the brands themselves.

Given the compulsion to control outgoing SMS costs, it won’t be an easy change. Perhaps, the solution is to segment the users into those who have access to the mobile web and those don’t. For users with web access, SMSGupShup can become a “social platform” driven by compulsively updated status messages. For users without web access, SMSGupShup can remain an “alerts platform” where they subscribe to groups and receive SMS updates. The two sets of users will have an overlap, though, and the success of this web-SMS hybrid model will depend on how SMSGupShup manages this overlap.

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

Announcement: Kaushal Sarda Joins the 2020 Social Team

Posted on 09. Jan, 2010 by gaurav in Announcements

I’m delighted to announce that Kaushal Sarda has joined the 2020 Social team as a consultant.

Kaushal will head the Bangalore office for 2020 Social and focus on B2B, technology and startup clients. He will also work with Gautam to develop our collaboration/ innovation practice, where we connect employees and partners to help clients achieve their business objectives. Finally, he will work with Upasana to strengthen our “build” practice, where we build online communities using white label or open source platforms.

Previously, Kaushal has worked as a CRM consultant at Capgemini Consulting and founded SaaS based enterprise collaboration platform Uhuroo. He writes about collaboration and innovation at his Creating Connections blog and is a regular speaker on these topics. Kaushal holds an MS in information systems from George Mason University.

Do connect with Kaushal on email, Twitter or LinkedIn.

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

My NASSCOM Talk: Made in India, Made for the World

Posted on 09. Jan, 2010 by gaurav in Events

Yesterday, I gave a talk at the NASSCOM Emerge Friday 2.0 event about how the time is ripe for Indian startups to target the global market: ‘Made in India, Made for the World‘.

So far, Indian startups have focused on tweaks for the local market, not inventions or tweaks for the global market, partly because Indian VCs have tended to fund me-too startups with a business model focused on enabling transactions for the local market (book a air/ rail/ bus/ movie ticket).

However, in the last one or two years, several Indian startups have dared to build products for the global market. On my list are enterprise collaboration players Zoho, Deskaway, Uhuroo, Remindo, Cyn.in and YouSuggest, consumer focused web 2.0 startups like LifeBlob, AuthorStream, GizaPage (and the now dead Fachak and Kwippy), widget company Tell-a-Friend/ SocialTwist, flash-maker Toufee and online tutoring company TutorVista. Do let me know if I have missed out startups that should be on this list. With a little luck, several of these startups can become global players, and some already have.

I think there are five trends that are enabling Indian startups to target the global market –

1. SaaS/ Cloud Computing: The SaaS based delivery model enables such startups to sign-up users without a significant upfront investment in a sales and distribution channel and the cloud computing infrastructure from players like Amazon allows them to scale seamlessly as more users sign up.

2. Application Ecosystems: The application ecosystem created by Facebook, OpenSocial, Twitter, iPhone, Android and Nokia Ovi enables startups to build and distribute applications quickly. Over the next two years, as more players set up structured marketplaces like the iPhone marketplace, I expect these applications ecosystems to become the key driver of entrepreneurial innovations around the world, including in India.

3. Social Connections: The people behind the tech blog ecosystem (TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, WebWorkerDaily, Scobleizer) that drives initial adoption for tech startups are more accessible than ever, on Twitter, Facebook and their own blogs. The Indian tech blog ecosystem is also evolving with Digital Inspiration, Pluggd.in, WATBlog and MediaNama building a large Indian and international readership and some of us are beginning to build a global reputation as thought leaders in the web 2.0 space. There is increasing interest in finding and highlighting startup success stories from the emerging world, especially India and China. The world is eager to listen to us and we have more means than ever to tell our stories. Not only that, these social connections can even help startups find international employees, partners and investors.

4. Viral Loops: Social media doesn’t only help startups leverage social connections; startups can also tap into the viral loops created by social platforms to build buzz. Aggregators like Techmeme and Tweetmeme and virality machines and platforms like Facebook Connect enable startups to grow virally by tapping into Facebook’s 350m user base.

5. Support Ecosystem: Social media and web 2.0 tools can also help startups convert and support customers. Startups can use Twitter to find prospects and track customer complaints and then use Skype to convert or close them. GetSatisfaction is emerging as a strong customer-driven support platform that can enable tech startups to offer support at scale without building a big support team.

At one level, ‘Made in India, Made for the World‘ is a manifesto to encourage more Indian startups to build web 2.0 offerings for the global market. At another level, it’s also a reminder to myself as I try to build 2020 Social into a global social technology firm, based in India. The journey has just started, for all of us, and I hope that we’ll have the will to go all the way.

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

Forbes India Nominates Facebook For 2010 Person of the Year

Posted on 02. Jan, 2010 by gaurav in Media, Trends

Forbes India named nominated Facebook for 2010 Person of the Year in its December 2010 issue and asked me why it should win.

In a recent post, I shared five reasons why Facebook is good for your soul, so my love for Facebook is no secret.

In the interview, however, I highlight the fact that Orkut, not Facebook, is the default social networking platform for Indians. Orkut introduced Indians to social networking, it’s still much bigger than Facebook in India, and with its recent redesign, it might have more staying power than most people give it credit for. Speaking for myself, I have started spending much more time on Orkut after the redesign than I have in the last year or so.

I also highlight the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook in the interview. Most people use LinkedIn like a rolodex, exclusively for professional networking. On the other hand, Facebook reflects our real world relationships better, where we switch between the personal and the professional, almost seamlessly. LinkedIn too offers a vastly improved user interface after its recent redesign and I expect myself to spend more time on LinkedIn in the coming weeks.

So, yes, Facebook is great, but the other social networks have a lot going for them and the battle for the Indian social networking space is far from over.

Here is the full text of the Forbes India story –

Bitten by The Zuckerbug
The Facebook effect: Why a billion people like this
by Rohin Dharmakumar
Jan 2, 2010

Account information
Name: Rohin Dharmakumar
Network: Network18
last update: is watching newbie twitter CEO Rajeev bajaj take on questions from random people on twitter
personal info: self critic and cynic with mild OCD

Rohin Dharmakumar is wondering if there is anything or anyone that scares Google?

5 people like this.

Rajesh Lalwani Facebook? I think it’s the most significant threat to Google. Google represents the Internet of yesterday when we searched for information…information that had to be indexed first. With Facebook information finds you, right here and now.

What is happening to search? Earlier when you heard an announcement you went to Google and did a search, but now you see a video and share it on your Facebook page…and half a day later it’s on all of your friends’ profiles and everybody is talking about it. Put simply, earlier you sought news, now news finds you!

Prashant Mehta While seeking answers people like us will trust information from friends on Facebook a lot more than Google. Facebook is people while Google is just a machine.

Alok Kejriwal I don’t think so. The biggest challenge for Facebook is this: Facebook = Friends whereas Google = Information. I will never think of Facebook while searching for information about, say, rheumatoid arthritis. Besides the average number of connections on Facebook is 100-150, and you cannot get a wealth of info from that small a network.

Rohin Dharmakumar Hmmm, interesting thoughts. But isn’t Facebook more of a Western phenomenon?

Prashant Mehta When 2009 began Facebook’s ranking among the most popular Indian Web sites was in the 20s. It is now Number 7. No Web site has moved that fast in a market like India.

Rohin Dharmakumar wants to know how big the Facebook phenomenon is in India?

Alok Kejriwal I would say no Web site has ever had such an impact on Indians! Two girls from Dehradun will spend 5 hours a day on Facebook because there’s nothing else to do. Though in cities it’s a conversational medium, in smaller places it’s an entertainment medium…which means that’s where the games and apps are getting played and explored.

Gaurav Mishra Facebook was not the first platform to become big in India, Orkut was. And what Facebook does is fundamentally most of what Orkut does too – connect with friends, share interests. But Facebook does have more applications, a more sophisticated user interface and better privacy controls.

Rajesh Lalwani Though Orkut is currently Number 1 in terms of numbers, Facebook is probably growing much faster. It is also poaching a lot of Orkut users through its Import Profile feature.

Rohin Dharmakumar Thanks for those comments folks. I thought of checking on some figures around Facebook’s popularity in India, just to be objective, you know Data from both comScore and Vizisense says 10.3 million Indians, or roughly one in four Indians with an Internet connection used Facebook in October 2009. But the data also says Google’s Orkut had like 15.5-17.5 million Indian users. But Rajesh is right on the growth aspect – compared to Orkut’s annual growth rate of 43.4 percent, Facebook grew at a whopping 229.7 percent!

Prashant Mehta Orkut might not be #1 by 2010!

Charles Assisi These are fantastic figures Rohin. Can we consider Facebook as a contender for our Person of the Year awards? Let’s talk once you’re in office.

Rohin Dharmakumar commented on Forbes India’s page – 2010 Person of the Year

Rajesh Lalwani wants to know what makes Facebook special for you? (via Rohin Dharmakumar, who’s writing at article about it for Forbes India)

3 people like this.

Gaurav Mishra I was a typical IIM MBA working in a 9-to-5 job. Then through Facebook and Twitter I came upon writing book chapters, articles, a fellowship (at Georgetown University) and finally a new company (20:20 Social)!

Rohin Dharmakumar Not everyone is going to be as lucky as you, Gaurav!

Alok Kejriwal You know about the famous “Speaker’s Corner” in London’s Hyde Park? You know the one where anybody can stand and address the world? Well Facebook is my Speaker’s Corner to the world!

No other medium has ever existed where I could broadcast my thoughts to 5,000 friends at the click of a mouse. Thoughts that everybody notices, whether or not they react doesn’t matter.

Prashant Mehta Some Facebook apps have completely consumed us. My nine-year-old cousin comes home to get online and use Facebook. My 65-year-old mother-in-law connects with me from the US. There is no other medium that has an impact on such a wide segment of society.

Rohin Dharmakumar Interesting! But I’m curious to know if Prashant’s experience is isolated, or if it is more widespread in India?

Rajesh Lalwani I have my 12-year-old niece and 65-year-old former boss on Facebook. Everybody is a wire agency today!

Alok Kejriwal Rohin, my 13-year-old daughter has a Facebook account. Initially I and my wife were concerned, but then we found out that she is connected to five of her school teachers too! My daughter also plays Facebook games with my Mom. Sure they could have played together at home, but the point is they don’t.

Rohin Dharmakumar created a poll.
If you could be on only one social network, which one would it be?

Facebook 78% (7 votes)
LinkedIn 22% (2 votes)
Orkut 0%
BIG Adda 0%
IBIBO 0%

Rohin Dharmakumar Surprised that LinkedIn isn’t more popular among my “working class” friend list?

Rajesh Lalwani LinkedIn is static. I don’t know my LinkedIn contacts well enough because it tells me yesterday’s biodata, not what you’re doing today.

Gaurav Mishra True, LinkedIn has this very tight business networking context due to which you can’t really get to know people. Besides if you choose to then Facebook can be used primarily for professional networking, or personal, or both simultaneously. I think that ability is unique to it. I think that’s because of Facebook evolution from US Ivy League colleges where personal and professional contexts merged. And when those students grew out of college Facebook evolved with them, but it has its roots in that context.

Alok Kejriwal LinkedIn is like a large auditorium of business folks, all dressed up and not willing to talk to each other!

Charles Assisi is wondering if Facebook kills office productivity…at least this research says so

Study: Facebook use cuts productivity at work

Survey finds 77 percent of Facebookers use the social networking site while on the job

5 people like this.
Rohin Dharmakumar There should be a dislike button on Facebook!

Alok Kejriwal I don’t agree. I think Facebook relaxes the workplace, making it less stiff and formal. Besides, the Indian work culture is moving from disciplinary to results-based – everybody knows what they need to do. I use it for work too. I link to my blog posts on Facebook and get around 1,000 additional hits. Every job offer I post on Facebook gets me 20-30 responses. I found my current PR agency through Facebook.

Prashant Mehta People are using Facebook at work to connect with colleagues. And given that we spend most of our time at work, it helps us bridge that gap there.
I was in Dubai recently and set my status message to “In Dubai for 4 days”. In those four days I ended up having four meetings with professional contacts from my Facebook friends list.

Rajesh Lalwani Facebook has further blurred the boundary between work and personal lives. On Facebook I manage communities, engage with business contacts and connect with friends and family. It has beautifully ensured that people are connected to it every second…I know people who log in every 30 minutes just to check status messages.

Rohin Dharmakumar is going to vote for Facebook as Forbes India’s 2010 Person of the Year!

14 people like this.
Prashant Mehta In the social media space, both momentum and trust are important. It’s amazing to see people putting up pictures of their kids etc. on Facebook, which I feel they would not do unless there was this trust that Facebook will not misuse my information.

Alok Kejriwal The other day I met someone interesting on a flight and quite naturally said to him, “Let’s Facebook each other?” In return he said my name is so-and-so and I am from Pune. Our lives are about people and memories, and discovering people is why Facebook is important.

Rajesh Lalwani Just a few years ago who would have thought you would connect your girlfriend from 15 years ago, family and friends all together on the same platform?

Notes

Facebook was the 3rd most popular online destination, after a Google search and Windows Media Player videos, for US citizens aged 65 and upwards – Nielson

The Wall Street Journal recently estimated Facebook’s 2010 revenue at $710 million, up 40 percent over the year before

To test Facebook members’ willingness to trust complete strangers, IT security firm Sophos sent out 100 random friend-requests from two newly created accounts, “Daisy Felettin” and “Dinette Stonily” – anagrams for “false identity” and “stolen identity” respectively. In both cases 95 out of 100 accepted the requests.

According to Bloomberg, Facebook is valued at $9.5 billion, up 42 percent over July 2009, but down 36 percent over its October 2007 peak valuation of $15 billion

Microsoft invested $240 million in October 2007 for a minority stake in Facebook, according to the Wall Street Journal, beating out rival Google

Only 15-20 percent of Facebook users have ever modified their default privacy settings, according to the company.

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

DNA Story on Nowism, Twitter and the Real Time Web

Posted on 02. Jan, 2010 by gaurav in Media

I was quoted recently in a DNA story on how the popularity of Twitter and the real-time web are a reflection of our desire to want everything now: a trend Malvika Tegta calls “nowism”.

In the email interview, I had mostly talked about how real-time web is changing the nature of content creation and content consumption, but “nowism” is an interesting idea indeed.

Here is the full text of the DNA story –

I want tomorrow yesterday

Malvika Tegta

Wednesday, December 30, 2009 23:06 IST

Nowism is not the 21st century equivalent of the Vedic ideal ‘live in the moment’. It is, in fact, a mindset of importing the future into today; to want and to have it all now — information, experience and self-actualisation. Simply put, it is a demand on life for instant gratification.

Though an ancient human drive, the intensity of the instant is current. And, in the age of the Internet, this need to have everything ‘now’, or real-time, is finally being satisfied. We have the money, the reach and the capability to legitimately stake a claim on what can easily be ours, only by stretching a hand.

Choices, availability of information to aid decision-making, and rising incomes to execute those, says Gayathridevi KG, associate faculty at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, fuel the new worldview of high-speed acquisition. This collecting of goods or information, however, may not necessarily be competitive, but often comes from the anxiety to experience immediately all that is anyway well within reach. Since “nowism has an economic value, that brings it public sanction”, she says.

With everyone endorsing the means to the now, selfishness is no longer a four-letter word; a lack of commitment to people and places becomes the practical thing to do. Education continues to be careerist, career becomes priority, and the institution of marriage as a means to the completeness of family loses currency. In all this, travel becomes a booming industry.

An obvious byproduct of all this is the coffee/Red Bull culture. The race has stretched time; work targets need swift delivery, career growth often demands intensive working for long hours, online networks extract time investments, and life, at the end of the day, expects balance between work and other loves. A year into our jobs and we begin to worry about the other things on hold. “In our culture today, you are expected to continually move laterally or vertically,” says Gayathridevi.

“Most people in their 30s come and tell me that by 40, I want to earn this much money, buy this property and then retire. There’s an increasing sense of insecurity and distrust. Ultimately, what I hear more and more is ‘I want to travel to Ladakh or go to a yoga retreat’,” says Veechi, life coach at New Leaf. She, however, adds that for those in their mid-20s, nowism stretches to include spiritual nowism too, even though the very idea of that is competitive. “They tell me that I want to feel this and they want it soon,” she says.

The Internet leads the way in furthering this trend, where you Google and you get. Instant feedback makes us impatient and the multiplying claimants on our 24 hours have cut attention spans drastically. Attentiveness has become the new scarce commodity of the attention economy.

Platforms like Twitter — the new poster boy of nowism — are changing the ball game of the ‘now’. “I use Twitter search to discover what people are saying about a breaking news story, find out who else is present at the event I am attending and what are the first reviews for a movie that was released earlier in the day,” says Gaurav Mishra, CEO of 2020 Social, who has been closely tracking the use of social media. “The next big step is an ability to search for what my friends, people like me, or people near me are saying. As this behaviour is adopted by the mainstream, I expect profound repercussions for both brands and publishers.”

That has meant the breaking news culture, and a slant towards simple, digestible information as supported by the move towards commercial fiction. “People are looking for quick satisfying reads and this is the genre for them. Their readership is limited to those in their 20s and early 30s, who are more rushed. Our company itself follows a commercial publishing plan; we are focused on readable, light literature,” says Riti Jagoorie, product manager, Hachette India.

Even in the realm of advertising, where the Internet initially had brought sharply targeted marketing — where if you searched for coffee, Google turned up related ads on the same page — Twitter, says Mishra,will “mean 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. Suddenly, all marketing is beginning to look a little like word-of-mouth marketing”.

The now is infinite in its possibilities, yet restricted to the very real time dimension; there are a million parallel universes of choice that can be owned; and we have begun to see that. In this ephemera of choice, short notice decision-making is making us flexible. And nowism? It is ensuring that we never live in the now.

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

Mail Today Story on the Biggest Technology Trends of 2010s

Posted on 27. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in Media, Trends

Mail Today interviewed me recently for a story on the biggest technology trends of 2010s.

I think Augmented Reality will be the biggest digital technology trend over the next decade.

Augmented Reality applications add a data layer to physical objects, and augment our physical reality by making it interactive. Basically, you point your mobile phone camera at any physical object (a building, a book, a person) and get information about it, superimposed on the screen, in real time.

As an example, you will be able to point your cameraphone at the cute girl in the neighborhood cafe and see that she is single, likes super-achiever type men, and has three friends in common with you, but tends to complain about her ex-boyfriends in public. The app will achieve this feat by identifying her through face recognition technology, then quickly scanning her profile information and status messages on Facebook and Twitter. If you still fancy your chances with her, it will request your common friends to introduce you to her via Facebook Connect driven dating service Thread.

Layar and Mobilizy/ Wikitude are early examples of AR apps and Pranav Mistry’s talk at TEDIndia is a sign of things to come.

Augmented reality has the potential to transform how we create and consume content (read blog post that mention the red fort while you are there), how we connect with people (Googling someone before meeting them will be so 2000s in the 2010s), and how we relate to brands (read reviews about a new movie by pointing at the movie poster).

The step before Augmented Reality (a world that is digital by default) will be a web that is social by default. You will be able to sign into very website with your Facebook/ Google OpenSocial/ Twitter ID, see what your friends are doing on the website and seamlessly publish your activities to your Facebook/ Orkut/ Twitter activity streams. For the rare anachronistic website which still won’t enable these social features, you will be able to use a browser add on like Glue to do the same.

Here’s the full text of the article.

WORLD WILL FIT IN YOUR MOBILE

By Neha Tara Mehta in New Delhi

Life is going to be about e- xistence, literally. Digital technology will rule us in abigger and better way

CIRCA 2020: You have a thing for the new girl in office and want to know if she is single and as perky as she appears when she’s around the coffee machine. All you have to do is discreetly point your mobile phone camera towards her. The face-recognition software linked to her social networking site will give you information about her in real time — superimposed on the camera.

You may not like what you see: the software tells you she is single (yippee!) and likes super- achievers ( do you qualify?). But a quick scan of her blog, Facebook and Twitter status messages may reveal she gets irritated with a boyfriend who smokes and plays games on his mobile phone when he’s out with her. Still interested in her? Perhaps the girl in the next cubicle would have fewer hang- ups? Give your dating the digital edge and whip out the mobile camera again.

Then again, if you’ve settled into happy domesticity but are engaged in warfare over who’ll do the laundry, go for the Home Management Application on Facebook/ Twitter , which is connected to your washing machine.

In the middle of your board meeting, you could use your phone to write on your washing machine’s wall that it needs to get down to washing. The washing machine, in turn, will write on your wall (as well as that of your wife and maid, if she is also on a social networking site), that it has achieved its key result area for the day.

If 2009 ended with news of a website (www.seppukoo.com) that allows you to commit an online ritual suicide on Facebook , the new decade is certainly not going to see the liberation of your digital body.

If anything, online social networking is set to grow exponentially — and not just between people. In an increasingly wired world, people as well as machines will interact socially — dramatically altering the way we perceive reality and connect with others.

“Googling someone before meeting him will be so 2000s in the 2010s,” says Gaurav Mishra, CEO, 2020 Social. He predicts that Augmented Reality — which adds a data layer to physical objects, thus making our physical reality interactive — will be the biggest digital technology trend in the next decade. So your mobile camera will be your walking encyclopedia or the ultimate voyeur.

Online market research company Juxt Consult estimates that as of May 2009, social networking was an activity undertaken by 41 per cent of the regular internet users in the country (around 15.05 million). Internet penetration is still less than 5 per cent. Things will change in the next few years, with an array of devices getting connected to the Net.

The dominant trend in the next decade, says Nikhil Pahwa, editor of the online telecoms and digital media news website Medianama, will be the availability of media across interactive platforms. “With 3G, LTE and 4G, every connected platform will have the ability to be an access point to a social environment,” Pahwa says.

What will ensue is a far more intelligent use of social media than now, says Rajiv Dingra, founder and CEO, Watblog. So your level of social interaction will be leagues ahead of just throwing sheep at each other on Facebook .

As of now, only one in five mobile users log on to the net. In the future, the mobile phone will be the primary mode of connecting to the net, and will emerge as the fulcrum of a connected reality the way we have never known it before. “In the last 10 years, we have primarily used voice-based services on the mobile. In the next decade, the non-voice services will become more important,” says Rajesh Jain, MD, Netcore Solutions.

The mobile will make social networking a lot more instantaneous. “Once people take to social networking on the phone, the interaction will become a lot more frequent,” Mrutyunjay Mishra, co-founder, Juxt Consult, predicts.

The potential for social media driven activism is also enormous. “Imagine 50 million mobile cameras connected to 3G,” says Pahwa. “We can have unquestionable truth on a video recording making it to the net in realtime.” You could have a villager filming a politician distributing money to voters, and posting it on the net in real time.

Jasmine Shah, the brain behind the Jago Re! One Billion Votes campaign, is bullish about using social media to engineer social change. Janagaraha, the NGO he works for, will soon launch Ijanagraha, which will be like Facebook tailored for social change. “We will connect citizens who are unknown to each other, but feel for the same cause,” he says. “We will launch the site in 10 locations and put people in the same polling booth area in touch with each other,” he says.

Maybe these neighbours will want to check each other out with their mobile phone camera. Reality is set to become a far more augmented experience.

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

Five Reasons Why Facebook is Good For Your Soul

Posted on 25. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in Ideas, Media

I just came off a panel discussion with writers Greg Atwan and Tom Hodgkinson on BBC World’s ‘World Have Your Say’ talk show. The topic: does Facebook improve our lives?

The discussion touched upon several topics. We discussed how governments, businesses and individuals can use Facebook in good, bad and ugly ways. We talked about reasons why Facebook is the most popular social networking platform in the world. We also touched upon some fascinating conspiracy theories from Tom on why Facebook is evil.

I believe that Facebook is indeed good for your soul and here are five reasons why –

1. The Facebook activity feed enables an ambient awareness of your social circle. Even if your friends are scattered across five continents, you can keep up with their lives on Facebook. So, when you meet again, you feel as if you were never really out of touch with each other.

2. The boundaries between your online and offline lives have blurred. If you meet someone interesting at a party or a conference, you are likely to friend them on Facebook, and get to know them better, so a chance encounter is more likely to result in real friendship. Similarly, if you meet someone interesting on your blog or Twitter, then friend them on Facebook, you are likely to meet them in real life and sometimes become close friends.

3. Even your closest friends get a more well-rounded picture of you on Facebook. When you meet your friends offline, you are likely to talk about some topics, but not others, based on what the context of the conversation is. On Facebook, however, you are likely to reveal more sides of your personality and talk about what you are reading, watching, listening to, feeling or thinking about. So, your friends get to see sides of you they haven’t seen before.

4. On Facebook, you choose to share what you want to and with whom. The Facebook privacy settings are the most comprehensive of all social networking platforms and give you granular control of who can see which parts of your profile and activity stream. If you don’t want your school classmate to see what you are doing, you can only share a limited profile with him, or even unfriend him.

5. Finally, Facebook is great for discovering interesting friends of friends, especially with the new privacy settings. If you and I share a common friend, we are also likely to share at least some common interests. Services like Thread enable you to discover interesting people who are friends of your friends and even let you ask your common friend to make the introduction. If you are single, you know where to find your next date.

How has Facebook improved you life? Do share interesting anecdotes in the comments below.

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

2010 Social Media Predictions: Online Brand Communities Will Come of Age

Posted on 24. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in Trends

I was recently quoted in two compilations of social media predictions for 2010, by TrendsSpotting and Junta42, along with social media influencers like Pete Cashmore, David Armano, Chris Brogan, Peter Kim, John Batelle, Drew McLellan, Jason Falls, Charlene Li, Robert Scoble and Paul Gillin.

I think the big social media trend in 2010 will be that online brand communities will come of age.

Brand marketers will create compelling micro-content to seed these communities, then run contests to invite consumers to interpret their brand, create their own content.

I also see brand marketers investing in communities that are built around a bigger social object: a lifestyle, cause or passion.

Here is the TrendsSpotting 2010 Social Media Predictions –

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

Singapore Management University Social Media in Asia Wiki

Posted on 17. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in Trends

The students of Singapore Management University have put together a nifty wiki on social media in Asia.

The wiki has sections for each country (see India) with pages for introduction, case studies, resources and interviews with local experts (Kiruba, Rajesh and myself).

In my interviews, I talk about how the social media marketing scene in India is maturing –

:: Tell us about the use of social media by businesses in India.

About 5% of Indians have access to the Internet and 35-40% have access to mobile services. These numbers may seem small but actually it means 30 million users. For several businesses such as Pepsi and Reebok these 30 million internet users are sufficient because they are urban, educated, and upwardly mobile. For other business this number is not enough. Eventually we need to analyze who the target audience are for businesses. Hence, not everyone needs or wants to use social media at the moment. Further down the line, this might change.

:: Could you give us a brief comparison between the Indian and the U.S. market?

I spent the last year researching how users in emerging countries such as Brazil, Russia, China and India use social media. Emerging countries often lag developed countries in terms of penetration and in some cases the absolute numbers of internet users. But there is no lag in terms of actual usage behaviour. In fact, we find that in the emerging countries, especially Brazil, China and India, the percentage of internet users as a proportion to the whole population is small, but the proportion of social media users to the internet users is very high.

The difference between the most sophisticated internet user in India and the most sophisticated internet user in the U.S. is not much, but the variability in India is very high. There are those who are at the cutting edge of usage and thought leadership while others don’t even know what the internet is.

This means that a lot of the things you can do in the US market in terms of branded communities, collaborative workspaces and conversational marketing can also be done in India. In fact, research shows that Indians internet users are actually more willing to become members of communities and share their personal information while connecting with strangers than Americans are. This might seem surprising and counter-intuitive because India is a collectivistic society. But it’s true because all the cultural baggage we’ve come with is more than offset by the early adopter bias of Indian internet users.

What we can’t do in India is use the internet for mass market research because the internet user base in India is not representative of the general population as compared to the U.S.

:: From a marketing perspective, what do businesses do given that research on the internet is not reliable for the Indian market?

I said that I would not take the opinions of the 30 million internet users and extrapolate it as a representation of the rest of the population. But if a brand’s target population is these 30 million users only – users from the top cities – then this could work. It depends on who you are talking to. For example, if you are talking to Unilever, and I am talking about soap brand which 80% of its sales are accounted for by small towns, then of course anything you do on the internet is not relevant. But if I’m talking to Dell then most of their laptops, especially the higher end laptops, would sell in the top 8-10 cities. Hence, their entire target population is on the internet. The same goes for Microsoft if they’re targeting small and medium enterprises (SMEs) because their target population (the most profitable portion) is already on the internet already.

:: Are Indian companies (especially indigenous ones) starting to adopt social technology (such as wikis, blogs etc) within the organization? Or are they still resistant to using these tools?

Some companies are doing it. You must realize that a lot of Indian companies don’t even have well-run enterprise 1.0 programs (CRM, ERP, project management), so they aren’t quite ready for enterprise 2.0.

However, these are being widely adopted in the IT industry. Many of these companies utilize internal enterprise 2.0 systems which include blogs, wikis and knowledge management tools. A bunch of Indian start-ups and young companies are building products in the enterprise collaboration space; Zoho, Cynapse, Deskaway, Uhuroo and YouSuggest are good examples. But we still have a long way to go; much more than in the consumer space.

:: Do you often come across points of resistance to adoption of enterprise 2.0 or is it because internet penetration is not as high in India?

Here’s the funny thing about enterprise 2.0: it does not depend on internet penetration, as large Indian companies have internet access and several of these applications are hosted on company intranet anyways. Internet penetration is only an issue in terms of the consumer application of these technologies, and like I’ve said previously, for some businesses, 30 million internet users are enough.

:: What is the current state of blogger relations in India? Are companies taking bloggers seriously in their marketing agendas?

Companies are beginning to do regular blogger meetups and blogger outreach programs. However, the listening/ response and longer-term blogger relations aspects haven’t yet become ubiquitous. In the end, blogger meets are only effective if they are part of a larger long-term strategy.

:: Is India becoming more sensitive to social media?

There certainly is a lot of enthusiasm amongst everybody. People are open to listen, experiment and invest time and money behind this new technology. We’ve had a very good experience so far in terms of openness. There are also 40-50 social media agencies of all types in India now. The ecosystem is evolving and awareness is increasing about this space.

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

Tata Indicom Uses Account Statements to Invite Customers to Participate in Its Blog and Forum

Posted on 15. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in Case Studies

I was pleasantly surprised recently to see that Tata Indicom is using its account statements to invite customers to participate in its blog and forum –

I have been presenting slides on how real employees (including old friend Nidhi) use the Tata Indicom corporate blog to have real conversations with their customers –

I tend to be very particular about building the right customer community platform using the right software (which, very often, is something like Lithium), and for a reason. The right platform enables and encourages the right behavior, opens up new degrees of freedom, both for community users and the administrators.

However, the Tata Indicom example is a reminder for me that brands can do a lot of right things without using sophisticated software. Their blog is built on the free Wordpress blogging software and their forum is built on vBulletin, not a particularly sophisticated forum software. The forum user interface is unwieldy, the different pieces of software don’t speak to each other, and there’s only so much that Tata Indicom or their customers can do with it.

However, even though Tata Indicom doesn’t have the right software to run a customer community, it sure has the right soul and, in the end, the right soul matters more than the right software.

When we build online communities for our clients, we work hard to get both the software and the soul right. Ask us how.

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