Gauravonomics Blog

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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.

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

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 –

Dell’s Jacqui Zhou (@jacquizhou) who ran Direct2Dell Chinese blog in the past and is responsible for much of Dell’s globalization strategy in social media —

Earlier this week we launched Dell’s official microblog in China. The microblog will serve as a channel for corporate news, technology discussions and even coupon and deal information. Instead of duplicating what we have in the US, we localize the content and platform to appeal to interests in China and go where our customers in China are.

Three years ago, we started Direct2Dell Chinese, the first corporate blog in Chinese in the computer industry. It has become an invaluable tool for Dell to listen, engage and converse with local customers. Our Dell tech support forum has accumulated a big user base where customers assist each other in technology needs. We have started listening and outreaching program in China where our customer care and tech support agents tune into online conversations proactively and help address customers technology needs. We have implemented ratings and reviews program on dell.com, where Chinese customers can share their feedback of products and help each other make more informed purchase decision. Very soon, we will have our community presence on key local social networking sites like Renren.  Read More

I was quoted recently in a Global Post article on caste-based communities on social networking platforms in India.

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.  Read More

I was quoted recently in an Agencyfaqs cover story on whether Indian newspapers are losing out on the web.

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.  Read More

“Internet in India is like Bharat in Ian McDonald’s ‘River of Gods’,” Maya explained to Tarun, as she sipped her second cup of black coffee at the Green Park Costa. “For every four men here, there is only one woman.”

In the science fiction novel set in futuristic 2047, India had splintered into several state along linguistic lines. In the state of Bharat, as elsewhere in India, a dysfunctional generation of Indian men didn’t even have an outside chance to marry because their parents’ generation had successfully weeded out women from theirs through thirty years of selective sex determination. So, stylish, sophisticated, successful men from big cities Varanasi and Patna wooed simple women from the villages in elaborate swayamvaras called ’shaadis’ and city women fluttered from wooer to wooer, in the pursuit of the gifts and the game, without any intention of marrying them.

Tarun had recently broken up with his girlfriend of two years and wanted to get back into the dating game. So, he had looked around for a good Indian dating website, only to find that there weren’t any. At twenty eight, he was in no hurry to marry, especially since he had recently started his own retail chain, after six years in Unilever. So, he had shied away from the popular matrimonial websites — Shaadi, Bharat Matrimony, Jeevansathi — and turned to Maya for advice.  Read More

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?  Read More

The Indibloggies results are out and I’m delighted to tell you that Gauravonomics has been votes as the Best Business Indiblog of the Year.

Here are some other names I recognize on the winners list: GreatBong Arnab Roy (Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind) has won the Best Indiblog and the Best Humorous Indiblog awards, Amit Agarwal (Digital Inspiration) has won the Best Science and Technology Indiblog award, and Santosh Ramdoss and team (ThinkChange India) has won the Best Group Indiblog award. There was a time when I knew every other blogger in India, but the Indian blogosphere is too big now to keep track of it on a one-to-one-level.

I am grateful to everyone who reads Gauravonomics. I want you to know that you are some of the most important people in my life. A significant part of my self-image and social life is built around you, and I am able to run 2020 Social because you choose to pay attention to me, ask me for advice, refer me to potential clients, and sometimes engage me yourself.

Awards like the Indibloggies are important for me only because they underline this relationship between us. Thank you.

In my previous post on three lessons entrepreneurs can learn from activists, I wrote about the importance of building a partner and volunteer ecosystem and mentioned how we use this principle in our own work at 2020 Social.

Over the last three months, Dave has been working with several other social media practitioners and enthusiasts to start chapters of Social Media Club in a number of Indian cities, including Delhi (Facebook, Twitter), Mumbai (Twitter), Bengaluru (Twitter), Chennai (Twitter), Kolkata (Twitter), Hyberabad (Twitter), and Pune (Twitter). Several of these aren’t yet active, so if you want to take the lead in your local Social media Club, write to @evansdave on Twitter or volunteer on the Social Media Club wiki.

The Delhi Chapter of Social media Club held its first meetup at Hauz Khas Village on November 21, 2009 (the first Social Media Club meetup in India?) and some 40 odd people turned up.

I gave a talk on digital activism in India and China to emphasize the idea that social media goes beyond business and marketing.  Read More

Most companies see social media as a part of communications, sales and marketing. Some, with a little help from us, realize that social technologies have implications for diverse business functions beyond these functions: from market research and product innovation to customer support and process redesign and even to partner relations and organizationsal development.

However, social technologies are a part of the core product for few companies, apart from the tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, standalone social networking firms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and social tool vendors like Jive, Lithium and Salesforce.

I believe that social technologies are becoming a part of the core product for news, media and entertainment companies, because an increasing amount of the content available online is now consumer generated content. As the boundary between content companies and technology companies blur even more, all news, media and entertainment companies will need to become technology companies.

In the US, the ubiquity of the internet has forced news, media and entertainment companies to become early adopters of social technologies and experiment with all the five underlying drivers of consumer generated content (CNN iReport), conversations (NPR Community), collaboration (Al Jazeera War on Gaja), community (NYT Times People) and collective intelligence (CNN News Pulse).  Read More

I was quoted yesterday in a Mail Today story on the launch of the international version of Kindle.

I have the US version of the Kindle. It has more than 100 books on it and I totally love the paper-like reading experience.

When I was in Washington DC, I could download books from the Amazon Kindle Store directly to my Kindle, in seconds, through the wireless service. I remember a one-week Spring Break trip to Miami when I downloaded and read half a dozen books on my Kindle while I was sitting on the beach. When I moved back, the only books I carried with me were the ones on my Kindle.

Since I have moved back to India, I have been downloading the books to my laptop and transferring them to the Kindle. I have also realized that physical books in India are cheaper than books in the US, so the $5-10 savings from buying a $9.99 Kindle book instead of a $20 hardcover doesn’t always hold in India. Still, since I already have the Kindle, I continue to buy all my books from the Kindle store.  Read More

Tweeple.in is a great resource for finding interesting Indian Twitter users. It follows more than 135,000 Indian Twitter users, and generates a ranking of the most popular Indian Twitter users, based on the number of followers. You can even search for the most popular Indian Twitter users by location. Tweeple.in also has a list of verified Indian celebrity Twitter users, which includes @Padmasree, @ShashiTharoor @PriyankaChopra, @GulPanag, @MallikaLA, @BDutt, @VirSanghvi & @AkshayKumar.

However, as I visited the Tweeple.in homepage today, I noticed that the list of top 20 Indian Twitter users consisted entirely of two categories – the celebrities listed above who follow 20-200 people and “SEO/ SEM experts” who follow 20 thousand people.

This distortion is caused because a lot of Twitter users automatically follow back anyone who follows them. So, if you follow 20,000 people, in small steps of 1,000 every week, chances are that at least 15,000 of them will follow you back. It’s also obvious to me that all these people are using Twitter as a pure broadcast medium. I can’t even keep up with the 1,000 odd people I follow on Twitter. I have no idea how someone can keep up with 30,000 people.  Read More

Here are the top ten questions I am frequently asked about building a Social Business Strategy (“social technologies + business strategy”) firm in India, and my short, often one-line, answers –

Q1. What is the difference between social media and social technologies?

A1. Not much. However, most people associate the term “social media” with social networking platforms like Facebook, Orkut, YouTube and Twitter. We use the term “social technologies” to refer to community platforms, social applications, social CRM programs and social commerce platforms, apart from the popular social networking platforms.

Q2. Can social technologies really transform a company?

A2. Yes, they can, if you adopt them and the value systems embedded in them, both in the marketplace and within your organization, on a sustained end-to-end basis.

Q3. Which companies internationally have used social technologies strategically?

A3. Many companies, but Dell, Starbucks, Intuit, and the Obama administration are some of the best examples.

Q4. Which companies in India have used social technologies strategically?

A4. Unilever, Tata Tea and Dell are some of the companies which have done interesting things with social technologies, but no Indian company has used them strategically so far, on a sustained basis.  Read More

I was interviewed recently for a Live Mint story on Indian non-profits (not) using social media.

My view is that there aren’t any short cuts to using social media effectively, for either corporates or non-profits. Some causes spread virally, like the Pink Chaddi Campaign, but most don’t. What non-profits need is a more rigorous approach to social technologies, rooted in a commitment to long-term communities and constituent relationship management programs, and a willingness to let the people set the agenda.

Dave and I have explored some of these issues from the perspective of corporates in the 20:20 Social position paper on Social Business Strategy. I’ll be re-writing it from the perspective of non-profits later this week, so do look out for it.

Here is the full text of the Live Mint story –

The Anti-Social Nonprofit: Looking for Instant Gratification
Saabira Chaudhuri on Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Recently, marketing guru Seth Godin stirred up something of a storm in the blogosphere with a scathing post about how nonprofits don’t use social media because they “abhor change.”  Read More

I was quoted recently in a Live Mint story on Indian brands embracing social media. I talked about how the social web is more than just another media channel for pushing advertising messages.

Last week, Dave and I had written a position paper on the 20:20 Social Approach to Social Business Strategy and talked about how we need to break away from the “media” and “marketing” terminology associated with social technologies and leverage them to collaboratively design a talk-worthy Experience Ecosystem.

Here is the full text of the story –

Firms logging into networking sites to connect with customers
Poornima Mohandas
Bangalore: Diwakar Kaushik, 25, is an active tweeter, putting out short messages on everything from the weather in Gurgaon, where he resides, to cricket on the microblogging site Twitter.

Last Thursday, the management student tweeted, “Trying to decide between a Lenovo or an Acer laptop.”

Soon, and much to his surprise, he had a reply from the Chinese computer maker’s India arm, Lenovo India Pvt. Ltd. “I only expected some users to respond,” he said.  Read More

Earlier today, I gave a talk on entrepreneurship at Conquest 2009 at BITS Pilani.

The title of the talk was “What Can Entrepreneurs Learn From Activists?” and here are three lessons I focused on –

1. How to engage people who aren’t going to spend much, or anything at all, at little or no cost?
2. How to build a vibrant community around a social object that is bigger than the brand, campaign or organization?
3. How to tap into the partner and volunteer ecosystem beyond the organization?

I also talked about what ails tech entrepreneurship in India and highlighted some open opportunities in the Indian internet space.

Here is the slide deck from the talk –

Other speakers at the event included Ajit Ranade, Chief Economist, Aditya Birla Group; Mahesh Murthy, Founder, Pinstorm; Raj Gollamudi, Co-founder, Blue Stream Ventures; Prajakt Raut, Founder, Orange Cross; Naren Dubey, Chief Operating Officer, Scan Café; Shashikant Khandelwal, Founding Member, TheFind Inc; Rahul Chandra, Co-founder, Helion Venture Partners; Mukul Singhal, Associate, Canaan Ventures; and Gayatri Rath, Vice President, Corporate Communications GE.

Rajesh Jain recently wrote an interesting series on the opportunities in the Indian internet space: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

Rajesh’s main point is that “the current crop of portals (horizontals and verticals)… haven’t yet become “utilities” (daily must-visits) in our lives” and there’s an opportunity “to build a hybrid net-mobile consumer media business, if one is willing to invest $5+ million over the next 2-3 years”.

I agree with Rajesh that unlimited flat-rate broadband plans will be the key to driving internet usage in India. I also agree with Rajesh’s assertion that web services need to leverage both internet and mobile to maximize reach and build in multiple revenue streams.

However, I think that Rajesh rushes through the last post and merely lists down the big sectors and players in the Indian internet space, without identifying the big business opportunities.

The big opportunity in the Indian internet space consists of three parts and here’s the missing third (first) part –

Part 1: Build a compelling vertical offering combining rich local content and a vibrant local community.  Read More

Indian Social Media Agencies in Early 2008

Last year, I had created the first list of social media agencies in India, which included –

- Digital Advertising Agencies like Webchutney, Quasar Media/ Quasar Talk and Phonethics offering social media marketing services with a focus on virals, social network apps, social media campaigns etc.

- Public Relations Practitioners like Rajesh Lalwani’s Blogworks offering social media services with a focus on online reputation monitoring and social media outreach etc.

- Prominent Bloggers like Kiruba Shankar, Dina Mehta’s Mosoci, and Rajiv Dingra’s WATConsult offering, basically, corporate blogging consulting services and workshops.

Indian Social Media Agencies in Mid 2009

A year later, I can see at least six type of companies offering social media services in India –

1. Independent Social Media Agencies offer social media monitoring, social media outreach, and community manager services. Blogworks and WATConsult are the most visible example, but other examples include Windchimes, Social Wavelength, Bloggers’ Mind, Sulmoz, Zapylacz, Mercury Communication, Ripple Links, Superchooha and Electrosocial.  Read More

I recently spoke at a panel on “Online Activism Around the World” with Nancy Scola, Ralf Bendrath and Jon Pincus at the Computers Freedom and Privacy 2009 Conference.

Although I was supposed to speak about Vote Report India and digital activism in India, I ended up speaking about how social technologies are value-agnostic.

At each of the four levels of Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence, social technologies can lead to both good and bad outcomes.

User generated content can be used to break news or spread propaganda. Collective action can be used to organize protests against a totalitarian regime or perpetrate violence against its detractors. Online communities can create cosmopolitan open societies or cult-like closed ones. Collective intelligence can be used to benefit consumers and citizens or profile them for surveillance or commercial exploitation.

Some highlights from the talks and the panel –

- Why real political change will not be brought about by online activism, but by using online engagement to build real world institutions.

- Why digital technologies don’t necessarily distribute power by default, but can also be used to centralize power.  Read More