Gauravonomics Blog

Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!

Quick Summary: Check out the third edition of ‘The Best of Indian Business Blogs’, a weekly digest by business bloggers you trust.

The Idea

The basic idea is simple: we form a network of five to ten influential Indian business bloggers to promote link-worthy posts from other Indian business bloggers in the form of a weekly digest published on our respective blogs.

The People

The present members in our network are (in alphabetical order):-

- Gaurav Mishra, that is, yours truly, is a marketer and a social media enthusiast (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Gautam Ghosh is an HR professional and a veteran business blogger (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Kiruba Shankar is India’s original A-list blogger and podcaster and a regular speaker at technology conferences (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Palin Ningthoujam is a public relations professional and the founder of India PR Blog (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Rajesh Lalwani is the founder of social media agency Blogworks (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Ranjan Varma is the writer of personal finance online weekly Personal Finance 2.01 (e-Book, Blog, Facebook and Twitter).

Quick Summary: Check out the second edition of ‘The Best of Indian Business Blogs’, a weekly digest by business bloggers you trust.

The Idea

The basic idea is simple: we form a network of five to ten influential Indian business bloggers to promote link-worthy posts from other Indian business bloggers in the form of a weekly digest published on our respective blogs.

The People

The present members in our network are (in alphabetical order):-

- Gaurav Mishra, that is, yours truly, is a marketer and a social media enthusiast (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Gautam Ghosh is an HR professional and a veteran business blogger (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Kiruba Shankar is India’s original A-list blogger and podcaster and a regular speaker at technology conferences (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Palin Ningthoujam is a public relations professional and the founder of India PR Blog (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Rajesh Lalwani is the founder of social media agency Blogworks (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Ranjan Varma is the writer of personal finance online weekly Personal Finance 2.01 (e-Book, Blog, Facebook and Twitter).

Quick Summary: Be a part of social media history: buy the one-of-a-kind ‘The Age of Conversation’ collaborative book on Amazon today and the proceeds will go to Variety, the children’s charity.

‘The Age of Conversation’ Collaborative Book

‘The Age of Conversation’ is a one-of-a-kind collaborative book conceived by Drew Mclellan and Gavin Heaton -

- 100 authors. We’re a few but need more.
- The overriding topic is “The Age of Conversation” — where you take it is up to you.
- The items are short - one 8.5″ x 11″ page — it can be words, diagrams, photos (again up to you) If it is words - about 400, give or take a couple.
- We write it quickly and get it out there. We publish electronically.
- We make it available online for a small fee and we donate 100% of the proceeds to Variety — the children’s charity.

Over 100 of the world’s leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators responded to their call, resulting in a unique one-of-a-kind project, which first became an e-book, then a self-published book on Lulu, and now a potential best-seller on Amazon.

Quick Summary: Check out my article on Twitter in Indian magazine Man’s World.

I have written an article on Twitter — based on my post on seven reasons you should sign up for Twitter today if you already haven’t — in the March issue of Indian magazine Man’s World.

The issue — and the story — isn’t yet up online, but you can click on the scanned picture above to read the story.

Quick Summary: Check out the first edition of “The Best of Indian Business Blogs”, a weekly digest by business bloggers you trust.

The Idea

For a while now, Rajesh and I have been discussing how business bloggers in India don’t do enough to promote each others’ content. Out of that discussion came the idea of forming a network of influential Indian business bloggers to promote link-worthy posts from Indian business bloggers in the form of a weekly digest published on our respective blogs.

The People

The present members in our network are (in alphabetical order):-

- Gaurav Mishra, that is, yours truly, is a marketer and a social media enthusiast (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Palin Ningthoujam is a public relations professional and the founder of India PR Blog (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Rajesh Lalwani is the founder of social media agency Blogworks (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Ranjan Varma is the writer of personal finance online weekly Personal Finance 2.01 (e-Book, Blog, Facebook and Twitter).

- VeerChand Bothra is at the organizer of Mumbai Mobile Mondays and head of business development at MyToday (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

Quick Summary: Check out my first podcast on Indicast where Aditya Mhatre, Aditya Mishra, VeerChand Bothra and I discuss why startups need workaholics and why mobile will drive web 2.0 usage in India.

My First Podcast on Indicast

I had a great time last Sunday recording my first podcast with Aditya Mhatre, Aditya Mishra, VeerChand Bothra (tweet) on why startups need workaholics and why mobile will drive web 2.0 usage in India (tweet).

All three of them have extremely rich backgrounds, resulting in an extremely vibrant discussion —

- Aditya Mhatre is India’s leading podcaster at Indicast (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- VeerChand Bothra is at the center of India’s mobile boom, as MobilePundit, as organizer of Mumbai Mobile Mondays and as VP at NetCore Solutions (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Aditya Mishra is deeply involved in the startup ecosystem in India through his work (he has the fancy title of Entrepreneur-in-Residence at TCS) and his role as the organizer of BarCamp and Kickstart (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

Quick Summary: With its new magazine style look and not-only-news focus, Alootechie will strengthen its position as the dominant authority on the Indian digital media industry.

Alootechie, which has established itself as the Indian online industry’s news monitor, has a new look and a new focus.

I have known about the revamp for a few weeks now through conversations with Sidharth, Ravneesh, Saket and Asfaq, so when Ravneesh told me today that the new website was up, I knew what to expect.

Apart from the staple Indian and international digital industry news, the new magazine-style homepage displays a featured news story, an interview of the month, job and event boards and several guest articles. Inside, Alootechie has extended its coverage to include mobile and gaming.

While the present website is still work-in progress (watch out for the newsletter, podcasts and vidcasts), I must congratulate the Alootechie and Webchutney teams for the really cool revamp.

My favorite part of the revamped website are the guest posts, which are basically expert opinion pieces written by industry insiders. While each topic covered in the first set of these guest posts deserves a separate post on this blog, here are my top of the mind thoughts on some of them –

Quick Summary: As conversations become fragmented across social networks, there will be a huge business potential for a killer conversation tracker application that allows you to track and publish all the conversations around your content in one place, on your blog.

Over the last few months, I have noticed a new pattern emerge in how I engage in conversations:-

Step 1: I often use Twitter to pre-test a post idea. I typically tweet the topic I’m planning to write a post on and often get twenty plus reactions and suggested links. This enables me to include multiple perspectives in the post.

Step 2: Whenever I’m writing an involved post, I try to capture the essence of the topic in a graph and post it on Flickr. Typically, five to ten people comment on the graphs on Flickr and Twitter, which further helps me pre-test my post idea.

Step 3: Finally, using the tweets and the graph as a starting point, I write a post on my blog. Most of my posts get five to ten comments on the blog itself.

Quick Summary: Read why language (English vs. vernacular), mode of access (Internet vs. mobile) and social dynamics (global vs. Indian) will be the three dimensions of differentiation for Indian social networking sites.

In my previous post, I wrote about why Indian social networking sites need to differentiate themselves –

Most of the Indian social networking sites are basically India-focused Facebook/ MySpace/ Orkut/ LinkedIn clones. Such clones would only be popular amongst a small set of twenty-something Indians in metros who won’t want a clone anyways.

I also presented a typology of Indian social networking sites on a 2X2 matrix with Indian-vs-global social dynamics on the X-axis and Indian-vs-global user appeal on the Y-axis –

– and suggested that –

To really build an identity and a broad Indian user base for themselves, Indian social networking sites need to reflect the unique nature of relationships in the Indian society.

Three Dimensions of Differentiation: Language, Access and Social Dynamics

Based on the discussion in the comments section and on Twitter, Facebook and e-mail, I have realized that there are, in fact, three dimensions of differentiation for Indian social networking sites — language (English vs. vernacular), mode of access (Internet vs. mobile) and social dynamics (global vs. Indian).

Quick Summary: To build an identity and a broad Indian user base for themselves, Indian social networking sites need to reflect the unique nature of relationships in the Indian society.

According to a recent cover story in the Outlook Magazine, there are almost 10 mn users of social networking sites in India. Orkut has 7.1 mn users, Facebook 1.6 mn, BharatStudent 1.7mn, Fropper 1.0 mn, BigAdda 1.4 mn, Minglebox 0.6 mn, adding up to 13.4 mn (tweet). Add smaller social networks, factor in duplication across social networks, and the total user base for social networks in India may be ~10 mn (tweet).

As the number of Internet users in India is estimated at between 20 mn and 30 mn by most sources, at least one third of all Internet users in India now use a social network.