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Irish Times recently quoted me in a story on how Iran’s Twitter (Non-)Revolution was a figment of our collective imagination.

Earlier, I have written extensively about how the Western media had over-hyped Twitter’s role in Iran’s Green Revolution.

Here’s the full text of the story –

The revolution was not tweeted
The Irish Times – Saturday, February 20, 2010

The protests following last year’s Iranian election were hailed as the ‘Twitter Revolution’. But a new reports claims Twitter had little or no effect on the events that unfolded. So does social media have a role to play in social activism? asks MARY FITZGERALD Foreign Affairs Correspondent

REMEMBER ALL the headlines breathlessly declaring last summer’s post-election turmoil in Iran to be some kind of Twitter Revolution? When tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed return to power, countless western commentators rushed to declare the microblogging service the hero of the hour. Twitter was hailed as a valuable instrument for organising demonstrations, acting as a means of communication between protesters, and providing the latest information on the dramatic events unfolding in the Islamic Republic. “The revolution will be twittered,” proclaimed US-based blogger Andrew Sullivan.  Read More

Outlook Money recently quoted me in a story on social media as a career option –

I am not a social media specialist. Should I acquire social media skills?

Yes. “Social media skills are a multiplier to all sorts of conventional functions. A layer of social media skills over and above your core skills set can help you add value to yourself and your organisation,” says Gaurav Mishra, CEO, 2020 Social. This specially applies to people in the PR and marketing domain, those who have a primary responsibility in engaging with an audience… (but also to) HR professionals can use the social media as a recruitment tool to locate the right candidate based on skills and work profile.

Here is the full text of the story –

The Right Connect
As Companies increasingly use social media to reach out, it opens up a new career avenue
Anagh Pal

***

The Guiding Lights  Read More

Randy Farmer (@frandallfarmer) and Bryce Glass (@soldierant) share some insightful tips on designing web reputation, or karma, systems:

- Karma is user reputation within a context
- Karma is useful for building trust between users, and between a user and the site
- Karma can be an incentive for participation and contributions
- Karma is contextual and has limited utility globally. [A chessmaster is not a good eBay Seller]
- Karma comes in several flavors – Participation, Quality and Robust (combined)
- Karma should be complex and the result of indirect evaluations, and the formulation is often opaque
- Personal karma is displayed only to the owner, and is good for measuring progress
- Corporate karma is used by the site operator to find the very best and very worst users
- Public karma is displayed to other users, which is what makes it the hardest to get right
- Public karma should be used sparingly – it is hard to understand, isn’t expected, and is easily confused with content ratings
- Negative public karma should be avoided all together. In karma-math -1 is not the same magnitude as +1, and information loss is too expensive.
- Public karma often encourages competitive behavior in users, which may not be compatible with their motivations. This is most easily seen with leaderboards, but can happen any time karma scores are prominently displayed. [i.e.: Twitter follower count]  Read More

Neil Vidyarthi (@neilvidyarthi) lists the seven elements that should be included in every social game: real friends, gifting, leaderboards, challenges, messaging, teams and customization.

The most important feature of a social game is a user’s real-world friends list. So when I invite friends to play, or look at the leaderboard, I should be able to see my personal friends in my social network. This is one of the main aspects that make today’s “social games” different than social games of the past. It’s not like today’s social games are the first to use buddy lists and social features, but it used to be such that I was playing against random people that I had met within the game. That’s fun for certain players, but it’s hard to deny that being able to cooperate or compete with a real-world friend is a stronger social experience. This feature is activated by ensuring your game is a Facebook application or uses Facebook Connect, so players can import their real world friends.

Social interaction designers are increasingly acknowledging the role of game mechanics in creating compelling user experiences on all types of social platforms, not just social games. This is a good list to start with.

You might have noticed that I’m linking out a lot from my blog, but not really to Indian authors, and I really want to.

So, if you have recently read an insightful post on social networks or online communities from an Indian author, share a link in the comments below. These posts can be about tips, ideas, analysis, case studies, or best practices, but I am not really looking for news release rehashes.

If I find the post insightful, I’ll link to it on my blog (3000+ subscribers), and tweet about it (5500+ followers) with a hat tip to you.

At 2020 Social, we use a simple Engagement Architecture framework for designing social platforms, including online communities. The framework has seven elements —

1. Three types of Social Objects: lifestyles, interests, causes.

2. Five types of Social Dynamics: consumer generated content, conversations, collaboration, community, collective intelligence.

3. Three elements of the Social Graph: profiles, activities, relationships.

4. Seven types of Social Roles (related to profiles): lurker, learner, connector, moderator, organizer, teacher, super-user.

5. Seven levels in the Ladder of Engagement (related to activities): consume content, curate content, create content, connect with others, collaborate with others, try offering, evangelize offering.

6. Four types of Social Contexts (related to relationships): alone, with others, with cohorts, with friends.

7. Three types of Social Intelligence Systems: reputation systems, recommendation systems, reward systems.

Each of these seven elements translate into a set of benchmark features and practices that can be modified to suit different types of users (employees, partners, or customers) and different business contexts (enterprise, business to business, business to consumer).

So far, we have been using the Engagement Architecture framework for designing communities, but haven’t really documented it.  Read More

Susan Scrupski (@itsinsider) –

The 2.0 Adoption Council and MIT’s Center for Digital Business will be co-producing a series of case studies that explore the modern dynamics driving the 2.0 phenomenon in a sampling of large enterprises. We’ve identified the following themes that are present in most initiatives:

* Innovation: Leveraging collaboration and social activity to spur discovery, idea generation, and breakthroughs for the organization or customers
* Time-to-Market: Accelerating the time to bring products/services to market by collapsing artificial silos/boundaries and time zones
* Cultural Reinvention: Using the philosophies of 2.0 to reshape the organizational DNA, embracing transparency, collaboration, trust, and authenticity
* Visibility: To provide a real-time view into operations and business process by connecting people and ideas.
* Cost Reduction: Substituting more agile, lightweight tools for connecting and sharing that are easier to manage and significantly reduce operational cost.
* Knowledge-sharing: Harvesting institutional knowledge of the enterprise for the purposes of retaining it, exposing it and providing easy access to it.
* Expertise location: Indexing and surfacing hidden and known talent in the Enterprise.
* Productivity improvement: Providing socio-collaborative tools to the workforce for measurable gains in productivity.
* Talent Retention: Providing tools that add to workplace satisfaction and positive employee work experience, especially germane to retaining GenX and GenY talent.

On April 23, I’ll be leading a full day NASSCOM workshop For B2B marketers in New Delhi.

In the workshop, I’ll share hands-on tips on how B2B marketers can use social networks and standalone communities for brand building, lead generation, and customer support.

Here’s the program schedule:

9:00am to 9:30am: Registration
9:30am to 11:00am: Introduction to social media for B2B businesses
11:00am to 11:30am: Tea/ Coffee
11:30am to 1:00pm: Strategy, tactics, measurement
1:00pm to 2:00pm: Lunch
2:00pm to 3:30pm: Social media tools for advanced users (focus on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)
3:30pm to 4:00pm: Tea/ Coffee
4:00pm to 5:30pm: Tying it together: using social media for brand building, lead generation, and customer support.

The registration fees is INR 6000 for NASSCOM members and INR 7500 for non members.

For companies that send groups of 5 or more, I will also lead a 4 hour long customized workshop at their office (only in NCR).

Please confirm your participation to Ms. Ranjita Kamat at ranjita@nasscom.in along with the following details: Name, Company, Designation, Email and Phone.

John Sumser (@johnsumser) includes Gautam Ghosh (@gautamghosh) in his list of 100 top influencers in HR –

In my conversations with Ghosh, I’ve always noticed an undertone of something particularly HR-like in his approach to developing his vocation. “I was always looking for my place in the world,” he said in a recent phone call. This emphasis on ‘fit’ is at the heart of what social media makes possible.

That’s part of the reason that Ghosh joined the startup 2020 Social, where he heads the talent practice. The company’s clients are mostly in the marketing space. 2020 Social has Ghosh in its ranks because they understand that the difference between customers and employees is mostly theoretical.

Gautam Ghosh is a role model in his home country and around the world. A decade of demonstrating that alternate career paths work while focusing on big ideas and implementation gives him a platform for influence all over the world.

I really like, and fully agree with, the line: on online communities, “the difference between customers and employees is mostly theoretical.” Bravo Gautam!

Amit Klein (@amitklein) has invited me for a guest lecture on social media in India in his class on internet marketing at ISB Hyderabad.

I plan to cover the following case studies in the guest lecture –

- SEA-EAT blog and wiki
- Valentine’s Day Pink Chaddi Campaign
- Blank Noise Project
- Bell Bajao Campaign
- iJanaagraha (disclosure: I am a member of Janaagraha’s technology advisory group).
- #mumbai terrorist attack on Twitter
- NGOPost
- Vote Report India (disclosure: I am a co-founder of Vote Report India)

- Tata Tea Jaago Re
- Sunsilk Gang of Girls
- Aircel Save the Tigers (disclosure: Aircel is a 20:20 Media client)
- Royal Challengers Bangalore (disclosure: United Spirits is a 2020 Social client)
- Dell Go Green (disclosure: Dell is a 2020 Social client)
- OK Tata ByeBye
- Mitsubishi Cedia Great Driving Challenge
- Pepsi Youngistaan (disclosure: PepsiCo India is a 2020 Social client)
- NASSCOM

- L K Advani’s election campaign
- Shashi Tharoor on Twitter

- NDTV Social
- Talk To HT
- CNN-IBN Citizen Journalism

- Slideshare
- Lifeblob
- Deskaway
- Gizapage
- Uhuroo
- Remindo
- Kwippy  Read More

Ken Banks (@kiwanja) on the importance of storytelling in spreading social innovation –

The ‘a-ha’ moment innovators-to-be hear about is rarely the discovery of a new metric, or a new business model, or a new way of presenting or collecting data. It’s the realisation that a problem can be solved, and solved in a new way. These answers often come by doing and experiencing, being out in the field, and there are almost always stories behind why the person was there, sometimes how they got there, and what they suddenly saw which gave them their big idea.

Innovation and entrepreneurship start with passion, so we ought to focus more on that. We can help by speaking about our own interests, passions and stories – which most of us have – and less on the mechanical stuff (some of which, incidentally, includes the actual technology we’ve invented).

I had earlier written a post on Three Reasons Why Storytelling is the Key to Social Media Marketing Success.

Jim Tobin (@jtobin) posts notes from the SXSW China panel with Jacqui Zhou (@jacquizhou) from Dell, Benjamin Joffee (@benjaminjoffe) from Plus Eight Star and Sam Flemming (@samflemming) from CIC –

The 5 Cs of Chinese Innovation –

1. Copy: We always start with something.
2. Combination: By combining two things (i.e., instant messaging and virtual goods), you can get a great idea.
3. Competition: As soon as there are two strong video sites, for example, they need to compete and differentiate, which leads to innovation.
4. Constraints: Because you can’t do everything, the constraints foster innovation, even new business models (because online advertising isn’t workable, for example).
5. China: It has to work for China, and the unique settings of the country, which might be different than for example a Japanese consumer.

On April 27, I’ll be leading a half-day workshop for NASSCOM Foundation in New Delhi to help non-profits leverage social technologies to connect their supporters and promote their causes.

10:00 – 11:00 Introduction to social media for non-profits
11:00 -11:30 Tea/ coffee break
11:30 – 12:30 Strategy, tactics, measurement
12:30 – 1:30 Lunch
1:30 – 2:30 Social media tools
2:30 – 3:00 Tea/ coffee break
3:00 – 4:00 Tying it together, using social media for raising awareness, fundraising and driving advocacy

The title of the workshop is ‘How To Scale Passion’, a question I have been trying to answer ever since my close friend and co-conspirator Jasmine Shah (@jasmine441) asked it some time back, in the context of iJanaagraha.

My working hypothesis is that you scale passion, as a business, non-profit, or government organization, by following three simple steps —

Step 1: Identify Passion — Select a BIG lifestyle, interest, or cause.

Step 2: Ignite Passion — Build a focused community around it.

Step 3: Scale Passion — Build scale by leveraging existing social platforms.

In the workshop, I’ll build upon these simple three steps and help the attendees build a step-by-step guide to igniting and scaling the passion of their supporters in their chosen domain.  Read More

Adrian Chan (@gravity7) is as insightful as ever on Mashable –

In designing for social participation, we can consider user goals and needs — even interests, features, functionality, adoption and scaling issues. Best practices and popular ways of using social media guide us in our decisions. But there’s a basic concern we seem to often overlook: “What is the user good at?”

If we really take the user experience to heart, we ought to think about user competencies. Users have different competencies in social media applications, just as they have different social skills in the real world. In the case of social media, this is as much social and interpersonal as it is technical.

At the recent e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action, it became evident to me that there are two dramatically different paradigms of digital activism: empowering with information and engaging with inspiration.

In the first paradigm of digital activism, you work with a disadvantaged group that suffers from limited access to even the most basic information and tools for self-expression. So, you use simple-to-use digital devices like Nokia mobile phones and Flip video cameras and simple-to-use digital technologies like text messages and online video to enable them to access basic information and share their own stories. Frontline SMS, Ushahidi, Freedom Fone and Video Volunteers are good examples of the ‘empowering with information’ paradigm of digital activism.

In the second paradigm of digital activism, you work with a group that is anything but disadvantaged. This group is at ease with using always on internet and mobile devices, both for instantaneous access to information and for self-expression and social interaction. Here, the digital activist isn’t trying to solve a crisis of capability, but a crisis of caring. Here, the aim is not to empower with information, but to engage with inspiration. Move On and iJanaagraha are examples of the ‘engaging with inspiration’ paradigm of digital activism.  Read More

I was recently quoted in a Business Standard story on e-book readers where I shared my mostly good experience with Amazon Kindle.

Here the full text of the story –

Turning a digital page

Neha Bhatt, February 22

Bookworms warm up to the e-reader, but the device will take a few years to catch on in India.

When Gaurav Mishra, CEO of Delhi-based media consultancy 2020 Social, took a holiday to Miami last year, he spent seven days at the beach reading six paperless books. This was made possible by the Amazon’s e-reader Kindle.

“I bought the Kindle last year. When I returned from the US, I was willing to leave behind my collection of 2,000 books, since the e-reader could hold over 300 e-books,” says Mishra.

Should you buy an e-reader?

Mishra is just one among many consumers who are happy with their e-reader purchase. An e-reader is a handheld reading device that can store a large number of digital books. A recent survey conducted by market research agency NPD Group claims 93 per cent of e-reader owners are “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with the device.  Read More

I recently wrote a book chapter for a book published by Empodera for the e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action. You can download the PDF version of the book here.

Here’s the full text of the book chapter is titled “A New Approach to Citizen Activism: The 5Cs Framework” –

Social Technologies and Power Structures

The debate on whether internet and mobile technologies are transforming traditional power structures is dominated by three divergent narratives.

According to the first, utopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies enable individuals to publish and distribute content, self-organize into communities of interest and participate in collective action. As a result, they can create new types of media outlets, build new types of civil society organizations, and monitor, protest against and even bring down governments. Even though these new degrees of freedom are far from universal, they are fundamentally changing political power structures. The future has already arrived, this narrative insists, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.  Read More

At the e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action, Osama Manzar (@osamamanzar) of Digital Empowerment Foundation talks about why a billion Indians need to tell their own stories firsthand –

Earlier, I had shared my thoughts on the Social CRM use cases report from Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) and Ray Wang (@rwang0) and shared ten use cases for corporate online communities.

Now, Michael Specht (@mspecht) and my colleague Gautam Ghosh (@gautamghosh) have extended the same thinking to talent and employee communities across the “employee life cycle”.

Gautam’s post also has implications for how we think about designing communities in general. Basically, Gautam says that communities can be designed to enable four types of communication:

1. From few to many: Blogs
2. From many to few: Ideation platforms
3. Between few: Wikis
4. Between many: Forums and social networks

It’s easy to see that the relationship between the host company and the community members is dramatically different in these four contexts and the choice of a platform will define (and limit) the relationship. It is true for employee communities, but it is also true for customer and partner communities. Fascinating.

Larry Hawes (@lehawes) wonders what is the right balance between simplicity and functionality for enterprise micro-blogging tools:

Early adopters of web 2.0 software in the enterprise appear to value simplicity in software they use. However… that may not be true for later, mainstream adopters… Having adequate features to enable effective, efficient usage is also necessary to achieve significant adoption. Later adopters need to see that a tool can help them in a significant way before they will begin to use it.

Alan Cooper in ‘About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design’ says that all users start as beginners, then become perpetual intermediates, while only a few become experts. So, software should be designed to quickly convert beginners into intermediates, but also provide for hidden-away high-end functionality for experts.

In the context of enterprise 2.0 software, it means that tools like Socialtext or Salesforce Chatter, which introduce users to collaborative software through easy-to-use activity stream features, but quickly move on to more advanced functionality, will win over Yammer, which is too simple, or traditional enterprise software, which is too complicated. Your thoughts?