I’m back after almost 3 weeks

I’m blogging after almost 3 weeks. I have lot of things to share about whats been happening with me or this blog and why this sudden change of things around “Interactive Marketing Blog“.

First of all, due to a sudden mishap I met with a car accident which kept me away from blogging (I’m not getting into nitty gritty of it). Secondly, after much dilly-dallying I have shifted over to my own domain which will stay as my name goes. So please if you have been reading my blog at http://managementchords.blogspot.com then please change your bookmarks to make it easier for us to keep in touch. One of the main reasons I shifted over my own domain is the lack of freedom in Blogger which I think most of us know.

Some of the fallouts of shifting over to new domain was to let go off my hundreds of comments which you folks have posted. Sooner or later I’ll figure something out to republish it here. So if you folks have some nifty suggestion on this, please mail me at sampad.s[at]gmail.com or just post a comment.

Finally, rest of the things around me & this blog has been rounded off to make your time spent here in this site more worth it.

Nonetheless, Thank you for all your support via Twitter, FriendFeed, Emails & Phone calls.

Special Thanks:

Abhishek Shah, Santosh P, Daksh Sharma and few others for helping me in setting up this site.

THANK YOU

Perfect Social Media Marketing Job Description

Recently I was going through one of India's online digital news content sites where I stumbleupon this. Below is the job content of a "Social Media Marketing Evangelist". Why this interested me if you ask, then my answer is clear one- I never thought that India has yet grown into a Social Media Marketing bedrock where EVANGELISTS are required. But it seemed like I was wrong to some extent. Even though we have not reached the critical mass of using SMM in our communication strategy but surely it has gained some amount of traction.

Below is the job description of a Social Media Marketing Evangelist required by some Indian SMM company. What excited me is the last couple of lines on the experience column i.e. "Deep Passion for Social Media is MUST". I believe that "Passion" is one thing without which a Social Media Evangelist can't pull the rabbit out of the hat since the very crux of Social Media is formed to democratize the participation of customers. So passionate marketers can always create loyal evangelist customers since the birth of social media was due to the long list of unattended customers who were never heard or given any due attention in the old marketing communication process.

JOB DESCRIPTION

Skills & Knowledge:

• Deep knowledge of social media tools and technologies, including Technorati, social bookmarking, tagging, dynamics of XML and blog publishing
• Exceptional Communication (both listening and writing) Skills
• Relationship Building Skills
• Creative Skills
• Analytical Ability

Qualification:

• Graduate (MBA preferred) with 3 years+ experience in Online Marketing

Experience:

• Experience in social media marketing including Blogging, Discussion Forums marketing, PR and Article Marketing.
• Strong understanding of Web design, applications, navigation, Web 2.0
• At least an year of experience in serving SMM customers
• Deep Passion for Social Media is MUST
• MUST be an active participant in the Social Media Sphere

Is Facebook really Listening?

Click here for the inset picture

This is what Facebook Team has to say about my feedback on their new design. Below is the content of the mail they sent me today.

Hi,

We appreciate your feedback about the new site design. We’re constantly trying to improve things on the site, so it is good to know what is working for you and what isn’t. Unfortunately, we can’t write individual responses to each of these emails, but we are reading them. We hope these changes make the site even more useful for you. If there are any specific changes you recommend, please let us know.

You may also want to check out this note ( http://blog.new.facebook.com/blog.php?post=31033537130) from our founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and read his thoughts about the new Facebook.

If you are having any problems with your account, you can also check out our Help page ( http://www.facebook.com/help.php) where you'll find information about Facebook as well as the answers to many answers of your questions.

Thanks again for writing in.

-The Facebook Team

The highlight bold portion of the above content shows that Facebook cares. But how much care is care if they don't change the new design which I believe is still filled up with useless apps. Though I just hope the Facebook returns to its old design where navigation was so easy and user friendly.

Related articles

• Zuckerberg Responds to User Complaints on Facebook Redesign
• How do you feel about Facebook's redesign? [Poll]

Get More Juice on Google's SMS Channels

Google India has just introduced a new product called Google SMS Channels that lets you subscribe to news alerts, blog updates and other kinds of information like horoscopes, jokes, stocks or even cricket scores via SMS text messages. (Courtesy: Blogoscoped)

So, if you're based in India, and don't have the time to visit my blog on the net, or to read the posts on the email newsletter, then you can now subscribe to it via SMS, using Google's SMS channels in India and get some Interactive Marketing Blog's juice in your mobile handset.

CLICK HERE to subscribe.

More Info: Google SMS Channels, which seems to have lot in common with SMS Gupshup, is free both for content publishers as well as mobile phone users who subscribe to text updates via SMS.

Families or friends can create private SMS groups on Google SMS channels and stay in touch via SMS without paying any fees to their mobile carrier. (Courtesy: Digital Inspiration)

What's your Tweet Worth?

This is a perfect "lazy sunday" post. This post will provide some juice on Twitter and the state of things. For almost a year now, Twitter has been the poster child for everyone who has been chasing Bright & Shiny Objects in the Web.

Now a new service called Twittad is launched which wants to monetize the Twitter background real estate. The company is allowing Twitter users to make their page backgrounds available to the highest bidder. Each listing includes the number of followers, the duration, and the price. Advertisers can then purchase the spots, with Twitter ad collecting a 5% commission on the transaction. So far there aren’t enough transactions completed to estimate the average value of a Twitter follower over a given time period, but this example of a recently sold ad spot for an account with 250 followers went for $5 for one month.

Now the company is sponsoring WhatsYourTweetWorth, a vanity site where you enter your Twitter name, and it tells you how much your Tweets are worth based on how many followers you have.

But there are inherent problems with this new business model:

1. Page backgrounds are not clickable (See here) and there is no easy way for a third-party service to track any meaningful metrics other than impressions.

2. With so much activity taking place on your friend timeline in the Web Interface or in a third-party apps, profile pages are not necessarily valuable estate.

3. Lastly, one most imminent problem is that I rarely go to my friend's Twitter profile since their tweets are visible on my twitter profile or third-party apps. So its like pushing ads to myself only at the end of it all.

Few possible solutions:

1. Try working out these ads in a blended format with the tweet stream (though it may prove out to be annoying).

2. Forget about trying to sell ads on Twitter pages, and put ads on WhatsYourTweetWorth instead.

3. These ads can at the best work out as pure brand advertisements for clients who just want to push in their messages in the twitter profiles.

Despite the inherent problems in Twittad’s model, there are a number of other companies attempting to monetize web page backgrounds, including AdCamo, who is providing a platform to both publishers and ad networks.

Courtesy: TechCrunch & Mashable

Related articles

• Revenue Models for Twitter
• TweetSense
• Twitter Changes to 'New Twitter' with New Design
• Integrating Friendfeed into Twhirl
• Community-led Business Model Monetization for Twitter

Top 10 Predictions on Social Networking

In my last post on Indian Social Networking Trends, I drew analogy between one of Dina's post and beta launch of Yahoo's SpotM. So this time around, I took the liberty to go much beyond trending and give much more concrete and holistic view of how Social Networking space will shape up for the future.

Though I wrote about it here, here & here, so this time around I will try to provide some more juice on social networks. Here are some of my top 10 social networking prediction are:

1. Mobile Networking will catch up mainstream: Interaction in social networks happens most often through messages which is the most common feature. Some call it wall posts, other as scraps etc. It is most frequent among younger generation who wants to be connected 24*7. Mobile devices will become a savior since its the only device which is ubiquitous and its reach is wide. But certain hindrances are still to be overcome like the browser based networks don’t leverage the power of the mobile device, and client based applications are blocked by service providers and handset limitations. So once someone utilizes this potential to create an application that has enough traction to catch the attention and remove the tech limitations of browser apps compatibility with mobile devices and stuff like service providers blockades, then connectivity isn't a issue.

2. "Content is King" will be the buzzword: Yes, the content is the buzzword. Some may find it difficult to fathom it but it's true. The content of the network, we all will be in is going to be the single most factor which could win over the Social Networks battle.

3. The "longish" long tail will prevail: Over the past year, its unimaginable to find that there are scores of social networks on the fringes - social networks for babies, mothers, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Questioning and many more unique yet prevalent social networks. So power of the longish long tail will prevail in Social Networking.

4. Interactive Apps will augment social networks: Sandeep has an interesting take on this one - The new interactive mechanisms for many social sites may be backed by artificial intelligence. This will bring spice to the entire model. For instance, your social network or online group will show itself to be angry, happy, sad, etc., all on its own, as a result of its members' input. These small and unique interactive developments will engage the users to a great extent.

5. Content Creation & Consumption will happen at the source: Social networks won't just be a platform to feed & share your personal life with friends & family. It will become our megaphone to voice about anything & everything around us. Though first round initiatives have been taken - Thanks to Google.

6. Changes in "Content Delivery" of Social Networks: Content delivery via social networks will change over time. Social networks will act also as an entertainment cum information window for users in world wide web viz. ChillX.

7. Monetization of actionable content in Social Networks: Monetization has been a problem for social networks (read here, here & here too). But once social networks are able to position themselves as branded content providers like MySpace have done then monetization won't be pain. But for this enough critical mass is needed for which social networks have to duly rely on other distributive mediums like progressive mobile networks etc to spread their content.

8. Medium will become the message in Social Networks: Since we are talking about social networks which provides vast information pool at free cost for end users, so medium itself is easy to spread and theme based social networks will definitely plug in more users who will in turn out to be evangelists to spread the message. One of the networks which I know is working towards it is ChillX which wants to attract Indian Gen X & Y to form a community of users who share & spread.

9. The power of community will prevail: Social networks are typically measured in terms of registered users, unique users and engagement (in terms of time spent, page views per unique user etc. This will be on the rise once social networks are able to draw users into community. This will be on the rise in the near future.

10. Geographically & Culturally focused Social Networks: The popularity of social networks varies by region. In the U.S., Myspace and Facebook are most popular; in India and Brazil, Orkut rules; China has QQ; Europe has Hi5. So we will see more & more of geographically & culturally focused social networks like Viacom's Flux which will stress on “Personal community”. (Read more on this here).

So these are Top 10 Social Networking predictions that will prevail in the near future. I'll do a series of such posts in the future too as on when it happens.

Related articles

• 2008 social network site data
• Top 5 Emerging Social Networks Revisited
• The Birth of the OpenSocial Foundation
• Who's got the biggest social network? [The Chart]

Singularity, Human Intelligence & Google

The concept of singularity dates back as long as the evolution of computers go if not more than that. But what excited me about the whole Singularity concept is Kevin Kelly. He is a genius and pioneer of Web (and I'm just being modest). In his recent post on his blog, he wrote this:

......a smarter than human artificial intelligence will bring about yet smarter intelligence, which in turn will rapidly solve related scientific problems (including how to make yet smarter intelligence), expanding intelligence until all technical problems are quickly solved, so that society's overall progress makes it impossible for us to imagine what lies beyond the Singularity's birth. Oh, and it is due to happen no later than 2045. I agree with parts of that. There appears to be nothing in the composition of the universe, or our minds, that would prevent us from making a machine as smart as us, and probably (but not as surely) smarter than us. My current bet is that this smarter-than-us intelligence will not be created by Apple, or IBM, or two unknown guys in a garage, but by Google;

Continuing with the same, I want to share few couple of points on Kevin's take on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Human Intelligence and Google of course.

1. The question posed on Kevin's "Thinkism" by Yihong Ding is something which we tend to overlook at times i.e. the evolution of human brain potential with advancement of technology. If we keep both AI and human brain in X-Y axis, then we just can't keep one as constant and other as variable since chances of advancement in evolution will definitely show duality. So haven't we turn out to be more smarter than we were before?

Hypothesis: “Singularity” is that machine intelligence which may be improved rapidly while human intelligence keeps at the same level. However, the reality might not simply be this way. When we improve machines by artificial intelligence, why can’t machines improve us on human intelligence as well? Because of the machines we invented, we can think better and think further beyond the limit of our single brains. We may have collective human brains to think just like machines collaborate their computational power.

2. My second point is ImindI:This new startup company more or less shows what lies in the future. I call it close & personal web. The Web will know everything about us like what we like, what we don't like etc. We can call it as "Our mind on the Web". Read this post, it will provide more insights what I'm talking about.

3. The third point is of course Google- the one point stop for most Web visionaries. It has defined web 1.0, defining web 2.0 and more necessary will define web 3.0, but thats not all. The last & final frontier for Google to embed itself into our lives is "How much is the limit". People will feel strangled for privacy but the question that will be asked in the future is the trade-off between privacy or convenience. I guess we already know the answer, so I don't want to make it obvious here. So Google, even according to Kevin will emerge sooner or later as the World Wide Computer on the internet. And it is very possible that this other intelligence beyond ours would emerge on or long before 2045.

Related articles

• Kelly to Kurzweil: You're a total Thinkist
• A Few Predictions for the Near Future
• What we talk about when we talk about singularity
• What ever happened to artificial intelligence?
• Google: Artificial Intelligence Activity

Lousy Customer Service

Click on the inset picture

There are many things which can make a customer go mad. One of them is lousy customer service. But this inset picture says it all. Just when an unassuming customer is entering a retail shop, he sees this.

Quote-unquote: Management is not responsible for any loss of hand baggage deposited with security.

My question is: Who is then? Isn't security a part of your team? TRUST is one factor which takes a lifetime to build and here it is broken at the very instant when a customer is entering the retail shop.

Image courtesy: Siddhartha Reddy (Twitter handler)

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Indian Social Networking Trends

I've to say upfront that I'm a keen observer of Social Media, which by now must be quite evident if you're a regular to this blog. If not then I may have something interesting for you. So keeping with the blog post, I keep a track about what's hot & what's not in Social Media and much so in Social Networking especially in India.

The genesis of this blog post is Dina Mehta's blog post on "Future of Social Networking" and more so a recent development from Yahoo! Indian Arm which came up with a new Social Networking site dubbed as SpotM for the age bracket 16-24 to capture the growing Indian market (Read my post here).

So on this recent Yahoo! development, I also commented my opinions as to what would fancy Indian users so as the capture their imagination & in turn take advantage of growing Indian market. Below are my comments from my previous post:

....within a span of 2-3 years there have been plethora of Social Networking Sites (SNS) developed by Indians and International giants like Google, Facebook, MySpace etc. So for SpotM, it better be good, different, fast, high on usability and wide reaching otherwise another failed investment.....

On the hindsight, I recently came across another site called ChillX which has tried to position itself as a site where Indian youth can hang out dubbed as "Hamara Desh". Now a quick usability check gave me a very good impression about its various features its blogs, videos, news and my favorite- the chat applet. Though this may be nothing new to most of us, but surely this site has unique Indian community feeling which I saw lacking in most western counter parts as of now. Also if I'm not wrong then this site's positioning is more "Community Based" i.e. it wants to build a community of Indian Youths.

So taking cues from Dina's statement on Social Networking's future

“Networks based on & layered around location, access, presence & context. Those that enhance real-world interactions. Enabling choice, privacy and control”

it seems evidential that without these key ingredients i.e. layered network effects across location, access, presence & most importantly context which enhances real world interactions with different users will define the future of Indian Social Networking Space.

So what do you think will click in Indian Social Networking Space?

Related articles

• Social networking and the Geocities fallacy
• Yahoo outlines plans for world social network domination
• Portals vs. social networks? The new operating system!
• Yahoo Flirts With Social Networking
• Yahoo! hopes Mash will be a monster

Top 10 Social Media Blogs in India

The genesis of this post started long time back when I started the Social Media Marketing space in India for a while now. After hovering around in the Web, I've found very few comprehensive lists on Social Media Blogs in India. So this effort is primarily to put all those insightful & interesting blogs under "Top Social Media Blogs in India's" list and rank them accordingly.

The "Top 10 Social Media Marketing blogs" list ranks blogs according to Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Number of Feed Subscribers, Technorati Authority and My Ranking (as Sampad's Rank).

#1	Gauravonomics (RSS)	8	4	5	3	5	25
#2	Rajesh @ BlogWorks (RSS)	8	5	5	3	2	23
#3	India PR Blog (RSS)	7	4	5	3	2	21
#4	Customer World (RSS)	7	5	3	3	2	20
#5	Kiruba Shankar (RSS)	7	5	3	1	3	19
#6	Dina Mehta (RSS)	5	5	3	3	3	19
#7	Bhatnaturally (RSS)	8	3	5	1	1	18
#8	Technology, Mobility, Usability and other Musings (RSS)	7	5	3	1	1	17
#9	Brants (RSS)	7	4	3	1	1	16
#10	Daksh's Marketing Blog (RSS)	5	5	3	1	1	15

The list down below are the rest of the blog which are trailing behind as per the ranking to get into the top 10 list.

#11	Interactive Marketing Blog (RSS)	6	4	3	1	1	15
#12	Marketing in a branded world!! (RSS)	6	3	3	1	1	14
#13	MisEntropy (RSS)	6	3	3	1	1	14
#14	Saurabh Garg (RSS)	6	2	3	1	2	14
#15	Marketology- Emerging Trends (RSS)	5	4	1	1	3	14
#16	One Size Fits One (RSS)	5	4	1	1	1	12
#17	CheckPosts- On Marketing Media and Culture(RSS)	4	4	1	1	1	11
#18	Digerati Forum (RSS)	3	3	1	1	1	9

Each of the five factors range from 0 to 10, where 10 is the maximum score. The maximum total score for each blog, therefore, is 50. There will be monthly updates on the ranking. Below you will find the details about the algorithm:

Blogs Considered: The list considers only blogs that have high percentage of Social Media related content. Topics might range from Social Media news, information, tips, building communities, conversations etc.

Google PageRank (0 to 10): Google PageRank is a link-analysis algorithm that interprets web links and assigns a numerical weighting (0 to 10) to each site. The actual PageRank was used in the algorithm.

Alexa Rank (0 to 10):Alexa ranks sites with an algorithm that incorporates page views and reach (the percentage of all web users who have visited that particular site). This ranges were determined based on the Alexa Rank (i.e., 150k and up, 150k-100k, 100k-75k, 75k-50k) and each range was asssigned a number (1 to 10).

Feed Subscriber (0 to 10): Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., 1-50, 50-100, 100-150, 150-200 and more) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 10).

Technorati Authority (0 to 10): Much like the InLinks count, Technorati's Authority count is the number of blog (as opposed to individual links) that link to a particular blog. Ranges were determined based on Technorati's Authority rank (i.e., 1-100, 100-200, 200-400, 400-600 & more) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 10).

Sampad's Rank (0 to 10): This is the only subjective measure in the algorithm to be assigned to the blogs which will be ranked. The actual rank depends on the content of the blog posts, quality of the blog posts, frequency, creativity & relevancy.

P.S. These are the best blogs on Social Media in India. If you also want to feature in the "Best Social Media Blogs in India" list, please link back to this post or else mail me at sampad.s [at]gmail.com your Blog Address and RSS feed for review. As soon as your blog gets listed, will mail you back.