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As part of my 2009 Society for New Communications Research Fellowship, I gave a talk titled ‘SMS as a Social Networking Platform’ at the 2009 NewComm Forum in San Francisco on April 29.

I started off by saying that one of the most important lessons my research on social media in the emerging BRIC countries has taught me is that marketers, and entrepreneurs, can learn a lot from digital activists, especially about engaging people who aren’t going to spend much, or anything at all, at little or no cost.

Then, I used several examples to illustrate my three big ideas.

1) The $50 mobile phone will continue to be the default computing device for billions of users in Asia and Africa.

2) SMS (not WAP, GPRS or 3G) will be the primary technology for web access for these users.

3) The ecosystem to create a social networking platform entirely on SMS is slowly emerging.

Stephen Baker at BusinessWeek has a great cover story on how social networking companies and marketers are using network and influence analysis to map social media consumer behavior and target ads to cluster of friends who share similar interests.

While research has shown that friends tend to behave similarly online, it has also raised lots of questions about the nature of online friendships. Most researchers now agree that all friendships networks aren’t the same.

Microsoft Research sociologist dana boyd explains the difference between personal, behavioral and articulated networks –

Facebook researcher Cameron Marlow differentiates between maintained relationships, one-way communications and two-way communications.

Duncan Watts from Yahoo! Research studies the structure and evolution of social networks, the origins and consequences of social influence, and the nature of distributed social search.

Apart from citing cutting edge network analysis research at Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo!, the article also features the work of network analysis firms such as 33Across and Rapleaf.

33Across’s SocialDNA platform maps the social characteristics of tens of millions of people to enable its clients to target users who are most likely to respond to their marketing campaigns.

As part of my 2009 Society for New Communications Research Fellowship, I’ll be doing a talk titled ‘SMS as a Social Networking Platform’ at the 2009 NewComm Forum in San Francisco on April 29 –

Even as location-aware smart phones drive the next wave of innovation in the developed world, $50 mobile phones will continue to be the only computing device for millions of people in Asia and Africa, for at least a decade. Mobile users in Asia and Africa will continue to rely on SMS and voice, and ubiquitous mobile web access will continue to be elusive. Therefore, we need to look at SMS as the default social networking platform for emerging Asia and Africa and imagine a social network where all transactions, including registration, discovery and friending, happen exclusively on SMS.

In some ways, this is already beginning to happen. Mainstream social networking websites like Facebook, mobile social networking services like Twitter, and specialized services like Ushahidi are increasingly relying on SMS to extend their reach in emerging countries. Several SMS only services are also trying to replicate various aspects of web browsing and social networking on SMS.

Update: You should also see my post on Three Lessons Activists and Marketers Can Learn From India’s Valentine’s Day Pink Panty Campaign

The Pink Chaddi Campaign — organized on Valentines Day by The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women to protest against the right wing Hindu group Shri Ram Sena — has become one of the best Indian examples of how a grassroots community can come together, collaborate and take collective action using social media tools.

It all started on January 24th when a group of 40 activists of the Shri Ram Sena (also spelled as Sri Ram Sena, Shri Rama Sena, Sri Rama Sena, Sri Ram Sene, Shri Ram Sene and Sriram Sena) barged into a Mangalore pub and beat up a group of young women and men, claiming that the women were violating traditional Indian values by wearing Western clothes and drinking alcohol with men (Wikipedia). The video of the incident was repeatedly shown on Indian TV channels and widely shared online and became the focal point of a nationwide outrage against the incident (Global Voices) –

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University has concluded after a year of research that online threats to children mirror offline threats and “the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.”

The task force, which was chaired by John Palfrey, released its final report, Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies (PDF), to the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking of State Attorneys General of the United States.

The study also suggested that no one technology is adequate to safeguard children online and “a combination of technologies, in concert with parental oversight, education, social services, law enforcement, and sound policies by social-network sites and service providers, may assist in addressing specific problems that minors face online.”

John Palfrey has been advocating a balanced approach to look at the online activity of youngsters for a while now. In this great 75 minute Authors@Google talk, for instance, he gives an overview of his book ‘Born Digital’ which deals with similar issues –

Rajiv Dingra at WATBlog has a great recap of the social networking space in India in 2008.

The highlight, for me, is the war for the #1 spot between Facebook and Orkut. Orkut introduced the OpenSocial applications platform and replicated several Facebook features, offered themes, and provided regional language and mobile support. Facebook also added key features like chat that are likely to become popular in India. As I showed in my analysis of search trends for social networking sites in India, interest in Orkut is stagnant, while interest in Facebook is growing, even though the gap between the two is still significant.

The other social networking sites in India positioned themselves on content, instead of social networking features. BigAdda and Ibibo focused on entertainment and positioned themselves as quasi blogging platforms by getting celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan and Ravi Shastri to blog for them. However, as I showed in my analysis of search trends for blogging platforms in India, unlike blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger/ Blogspot, which have shown slow but consistent growth, the interest in Ibibo and BigAdda has fluctuated significantly, probably based on whether they were running big ad campaigns at the time.

Priyanka Joshi in Business Standard –

Around 20 million internet users actively use the social media sites in India. According to market research firm IDC, the use of social networking sites will continue to grow, but advertising may not necessarily expand along with it. The result is that Indian start-ups like Ibibo and BigAdda are innovating to get brands onto their networks. 2009 might turn out to be the year when marketers will realise the potential of cross-promoting their media buys on the social networking websites.

“Local marketers are becoming familiar with the best ways to promote their businesses and by crossing online and offline campaigns, they are getting more bang for their buck,” said Shivanandan Pare, COO, BigAdda, that commenced operations 15 months back. The brands that are promoting themselves on BigAdda include Nokia, Lenovo, Sony Ericsson and Intel among others.

Ibibo, which calls itself a ‘talent based social networking site’, is willing to bet that 2009 would be the year when targeting consumer on social sites will have a far bigger payout than any other media. Ashish Kashyap, CEO, Ibibo, has built traction for his site among the 14-28 year olds by running talent-based contests since its inception.

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.

Randall Stross at NYT chronocles Procter & Gamble’s experiments with Facebook and is left unimpressed –

Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.

When major brands place banner advertisements on the side of a member’s home page, they pay inexpensive prices, but the ads receive little attention. When advertisers invite members to come to pages dedicated to their products, they can attract visitors only by investing in expensive creative material or old-fashioned promotions like prize contests.

And when they try to take advantage of new “social advertising,” extending their commercial message to a member’s friends, their ads will be noticed, all right, but not necessarily favorably. Members are understandably reluctant to become shills. IDC, the technology research firm, published a study last month that…  described social advertising as “stillborn.”

While it’s unfair to dish social advertising on the basis of one brand’s experience, advertising on social networking sites is indeed something of a mystery. I think we will see some significant headway in social advertising in 2009, driven by the desperation to crack social shopping. Stay tuned.

Here is some more interesting data from the Universal McCaan study that validates the conclusion that we use the internet for expanding our network of contacts but use the mobile phone to maintain our current network.

In the earlier post, we looked at the number of contacts we stay in touch with using different communication channels. In this post, we’ll look at which communication channels we use to stay in touch with family, friends and colleagues. In the table below are the percentage of respondents who stay in touch with family, friends and colleagues using different communications channels (normalized by the face-to-face field) —

The Universal McCann analysts used the data to reach a rather confused conclusion –

The most remarkable trend is the influence of the virtual connection on our most personal of relationships. Nearly 38% of respondents say they keep in contact with their partner via SMS, 30% via email and 10% via Instant Messenger. All very significant compared to the 55% who stay in touch with a partner face to face. Staying in touch with children is a very similar pattern, remarkably 16% stay in touch by text and 13% by email, which again are very significant numbers considering just 34% have children and stay in touch face to face.