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It’s the season for predictions (see Peter Kim and Rajesh Jain) and here are my top 7 social media predictions for India for 2009 –

1. Citizen journalism will come into its own in India.

We saw a preview of the power of citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack. We also saw that mainstream media is increasingly willing to integrate citizen journalism in its news coverage. News organizations are not only promoting citizen journalism platforms like IBN Live’s Citizen Journalist, but also engaging with platforms like Twitter (see @DNAIndia, @LiveMint, @BangaloreMirror, @IndiatimesNews). We will see a continuation of these trends in 2009. More news organizations will experiment with citizen journalism, both by creating citizen journalism platforms on their own websites and by actively tracking social media for stories and sources.

2. Social media will play an important role in the 2009 Indian general elections.  Read More

I was interviewed by Ned Madden of E-Commerce Times recently for a story on social media outsourcing.

I have earlier written that social media outsourcing is the next big business opportunity for India and may already be leading the third wave of Indian outsourcing.

Here is the full text of the first part of the E-Commerce Times story –

Social Media Outsourcing, Part 1: Choosing an Image Maker
By Ned Madden
E-Commerce Times
12/10/08 8:00 AM PT

Like it or not, your enterprise is being talked about extensively in media in which you wield very little control. Customers and potential customers are communicating via social media like wikis, forums, blogs, newsgroups and message boards. Joining the conversation may be worth your while — but who to put in charge is not a decision to be taken lightly.

The familiar social media paradigm of “Listen … Learn … Engage … Earn” has a correlative imperative: “Publish or Perish,” and enterprises probably need to find someone else to do the job for them. But be really careful about whom you select.  Read More

In March 2008, when I called social media outsourcing the next big business opportunity for India, nobody else was talking about social media outsourcing. Now, less than a year later, it seems that social media outsourcing may be leading the third wave of Indian outsourcing.

Recently, Daya Baran at Webguild wrote a great post on social media outsourcing in India –

While U.S. companies struggle to figure out how to monetize social media, India’s tech industry has quietly figured out a way to make hundreds of millions (maybe billions) by servicing it. Everything from simple comments on blog posts, to breaking sophisticated Google CAPTCHAs, Craigslist listings, Gmail invites, Yahoo personals, MySpace profiles, YouTube uploads, Facebook friends, and now I hear Twitter tweets are all being performed in India on behalf of social networking sites, blogs, photo sharing, video, and other social media and Web 2.0 sites that depend heavily on online advertising as a revenue source are using these services to boost traffic and users.

Evan though India’s $2 per thousand CAPTCHA-solving companies like DeCaptcher have become the most debated example of such outsourcing, thanks to the expose by ZDNet’s Dancho Danchev, they are hardly representative of social media outsourcing in India.  Read More

Quick Summary: Read a soon-to-be-real scenario featuring imaginary Indian Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) company BuzzPundit to understand why SMO will be the next big business opportunity for India after BPO and KPO.

If you found it difficult to believe my assertion that social media outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India, let me present a soon-to-be-real scenario featuring imaginary Indian SMO company BuzzPundit.

Imagine a sprawling corporate campus on the outskirts of a large Indian metro (take your pick from Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Gurgaon or Pune). Imagine 10000 twenty-something Indians sitting in front of their computer screens. If you must, think of a call center. Except that these twenty-somethings are not making call after call to customers in the US; they are reading articles, posts and comments and tagging them, or responding to them.

Welcome to BuzzPundit. You are at the corporate campus of one of India’s many social media outsourcing (SMO) companies.  Read More

Quick Summary: Read why Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India after Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO).

Social media practitioners often talk about it in cryptic “conversation is an art form” terms, but you can break down the social media delivery process in six discrete steps that correspond to the oft-quoted Listen -> Understand -> Engage model:-

1. Data collection
2. Data mining
3. Data analysis
4. Insight delivery
5. Consulting
6. Solution delivery

If you look hard at these six steps, you’ll find that many of them are driven by dynamics that make them very susceptible to outsourcing –

While the details are best dealt in a white paper, or a business plan another post, here’s a summary of what steps in the social media delivery process are most susceptible to outsourcing –

- Data-collection and insight delivery will involve a one-time process set-up, after which they’ll be more or less automated via crawlers and dashboards respectively.  Read More