Gauravonomics Blog

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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!

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

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

In my series of posts for the Global Voices special coverage on the 2009 Indian general elections, I have written about how political parties, civil society organizations and corporates are using digital media in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.

Yet another category of new websites aim to become the default source of news and analysis related the 2009 general elections.

These websites, however, are directly competing with election microsites from mainstream media — Hindustan Times/ Google, TOI, Mint, DNA, The Hindu, Yahoo!, MSN, Rediff, NDTV, IBN Live, India Today, The Week, Economic Times, India TV, Aaj Tak, Business Standard, BBC and Al Jazeera– and need to offer something different to be useful.

All the mainstream media election microsites have similar features: details about parties, constituencies, candidates and manifestos, statistics about previous elections, and an overload of news and opinion related to the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. However, some microsites have unique features which stand out, so let me start by pointing to my favorite, often interactive, features on the mainstream media websites.

DNA, India Today, Business Standard and IBN Politics have user friendly pages for columns by some very well-known writers.  Read More

Soumyadip has complied a great list of 66 Indian celebrity bloggers, mostly Bollywood actors, actresses and directors.

He has also compiled a consolidated Indian celebrity blogs feed and a widget that features the 10 most active Indian celeb bloggers and displays the latest posts from their blogs.

I don’t know what to say except ‘wow!’ — the list is the perfect resource for the chapter on celebrity and gossip blogging in the State of the Indian Blogosphere 2009 report that I’m trying to compile.

Twitter Grader, the tool that provides the data used in the HubSpot State of the Twittersphere Report, is also an interesting tool to find influential Twitter users.

Twitter Grader gives a percentile Twitter Grade and a rank to each user based on factors like the number of followers, the power of this network of followers and the number of updates. Twitter Grader also has a list of the top 100 Twitter elites.

I’m ranked #448 out of 714,551 users and have a percentile score of 99.9.

Here are the Twitter Grader ranks of some other Indian Twitter users –

- @drmani: #194
- @gauravonomics: #448
- @dina: #499
- @labnol: #708
- @kiruba: #1147
- @vimoh: #1857
- @goobimama: #2089
- @ankeshk: #2514
- @asfaq: #2754
- @naina: #2920
- @yuvipanda: #2921
- @aalaap: #3006
- @gsik: #3323
- @s4ur4bh: #3610
- @meghnak: #3730
- @simplyarun: #3824
- @gautamghosh: #3826
- @baxiabhishek: #3927
- @shahpriya: #4006
- @shankargan: #4049
- @indianguru: #4124
- @jaytweeter: #4126
- @netra: #4428
- @preshit: #4850
- @twilightfairy: #4983

Do let me know if I have missed out any Twitter users in the top 5000 on Twitter Grader.

Almost a year back, I had compiled a list of Indian blogs in the AdAge Power 150 rankings of top media and marketing blogs.

Gauravonomics was at #224 then, and the other Indian blogs in the list were India PR Blog at #266, Rajesh @ Blogworks at #340, Desi Creative at #451 and The Online Agency Blog at #481.

I decided to update that list today and here’s how the Indian blogs are ranked on the AdAge Power 150. I’m also including a automatically updating banner after each blog to make it easy for me to track this list in future –

- Gauravonomics at #123 

- WatBlog at #140

- PageTraffic Blog at #399

- Rajesh @ Blogworks at #425

- Marketing Practice at #456

- Marketology-Emerging Trends at #556

- Bhatnaturally at #590

- MisEntropy at #629

- Brants at #668

- IndiaPRBlog at #684

- Technology, Mobility, Usability and other Musings at #721

- SEO Tips PodCast Blog at #746

- eCommerce Retail Blog at #763

- People As I See at #764

- Interactive Marketing Blog at #834

- Customer World at #836  Read More

A few months back, I had compiled two lists to help define the social media scene in India — a list of marketing, public relations and social media blogs in India and a list of social media agencies in India.

Now, Sampad Swain has taken the idea further by compiling a ranking of social media blogs in India, using a combination of metrics — Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Number of Feed Subscribers, Technorati Authority and his own qualitative assessment (Sampad’s Rank).

I appreciate the hard work Sampad has put into the list (and it’s flattering to be ranked first), but I personally believe that blog rankings are premature for the India social media scene. Blog rankings are useful as filters when there are hundreds (or thousands) of blogs. As of now, there are only twenty odd social media blogs in India, so, focusing on rankings will make some people defensive and detract from what we need to do — build a community by highlighting each other’s work.  Read More

As promised, here are my top ten resources on social 2.0 or how to use social media for social change —

- Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant who writes about the effective use of social media tools in the nonprofit sector to enable social change.

- NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network

NTEN is a community of nonprofit organizations that aims to help them to use technology more effectively via it’s blog, webinars, newsletters, conferences, events, research and online community.

- Net Squared: Remixing the Web for Social Change

Net Squared is another community of nonprofit organizations that helps them use technology via its blog, online community, events, conferences and mashup challenges.

- BlogHer Social Change Section

Posts on social change, non-profits and NGOs by women bloggers at BlogHer.

- TechSoup: The Technology Place for Nonprofits

TechSoup.org offers nonprofits a one-stop resource for technology needs by providing free information, resources, and support

- NPTech

NPTech is a resource developed by Peter Campbell that aggregates nonprofit technology information from across the internet.  Read More

It seems that I’m not the only one putting up goals on my blog.

Alex Shalman has started a Gotta Get Goals meme and blogging biggies like Liz Strauss have joined in.

Consider yourself tagged.

Also see – Aaron Potts.

Cross-posted as a guest-post on Melody’s blog.

The voice in my head is telling me that it’s time to begin a new life.

As I move into a new role at work, in a new financial year, almost thirty months away from my thirtieth birthday, my thoughts turn to the questions I have often asked myself –

- What is the purpose of my life?
- What do I really want to do with it?
- What will I leave behind when I’m done?

As always, I don’t have answers to any of these questions. I don’t know the purpose of my life, or what I want to do with it, or what I’ll leave behind when I’m done. What I do know is that I haven’t done enough with my life, not nearly enough.

Sometimes, I think of a fat, ugly, awkward twelve year old boy I once knew. He studied in a Hindi-medium government school at one godforsaken end of Patna, read Chacha Choudhary comic books in Hindi, and struggled to put together one sensible sentence in English. He wore thick glasses in a cheap plastic frame, hand-me-down ill-fitting too-short shorts, and white-and-blue rubber slippers from Bata. He watched Chitrahaar on Doordarshan and third grade Hindi movies on a black and white TV with his parents. He sucked at sports, stammered when he spoke to girls and was bullied by his classmates for being the teachers’ pet. That totally pathetic boy was me.  Read More