How Social Content is Different and What This Means

Social Media signals a brave, new world of communication and interaction. Correspondingly the content on it pushes the boundaries of power, of ownership, of usage and of consumption. In my latest Social Samosa article, I take a look at what this means.

“Think of content on traditional media as a stone that you’re about to throw. Science allows us to determine its speed, direction, trajectory and eventually its destination. In contrast, Social Content is like a drop of water in the sky. It might fall as rain or collect on a leaf as a dewdrop. Or along the way, it might transform into a hailstone or even a snowflake. Each of these possibilities lead to numerous others. A snowflake might get trampled upon, slapped onto a snowman or shaped into a snowball. From here, it might get smashed on a surface or roll on the ground, pick up more material and momentum and building speed, go hurtling on to an unknown destination. The last is the phenomenon of going viral, that wet dream of every social media agencyperson.”

Read ‘How Social Content is Different and What This Means‘ on Social Samosa.

* Image via Master isolated images on FreeDigitalPhotos.

Previous Social Samosa articles this month

• Woman, are you safe on Social Media?
• The Instagram Story
• Shit brands say about Social Media
• Interview with parody blogger, Fake Rakesh Jhunjhunwala

Woman, are you safe on Social Media?

I combine two of my interests in this next Social Samosa post – womanhood’s challenges & social media. Facebook’s claim to fame were its privacy settings. Last month’s big news in this space was that a staggering majority of Pinterest users were women. Among the theories being bandied about was the belief that women felt safer (for some undisclosed reason) on Pinterest. I don’t believe any place online or offline is truly safe for a woman. This post looks at some basic safety tips that a lot of women don’t seem to realize

Head of Women (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

. Stay on the social space ladies, but stay safe!

The flipside of the Information Age is how it has made the broadcasting of personal information a casual thing. A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable to share a person’s phone number without their consent. But today, since every call center and social network has access to a person’s contact details, the sanctity of this information has been lost. As a result, the average social media user may pass on the contact details of someone he knows, without a thought given to how that information could be misused, validating the recipient or how the owner of that information feels.

Read ‘Woman are you safe on Social Media‘ on Social Samosa.

Previous articles this month on Social Samosa

• The Instagram Story
• Shit brands say about Social Media
• Interview with parody blogger, Fake Rakesh Jhunjhunwala

‘Management Lessons from Working Mothers’ by Bajaj Allianz Jiyo Befikar Women

*This is a sponsored post.

After a very successful webinar event last month, Bajaj Allianz Jiyo Befikar Women brings us another event this week. This is a Mother’s Day special to honour working mothers.

In the traditional role of a housewife, women have managed budgets, help staff, inventory and multiple schedules. They’ve been multi-taskers and astute managers. As mothers, they’ve balanced teaching, discipline, health, love and numerous other things that go into being a good parent. In the recent years, more and more of them have come into the workplace and continue to prove their mettle to the world. But they also continue to fulfill their roles as loving mothers and proud homemakers.

The ‘Working Mothers Management Tips’ Contest

Who better to give a lesson in management than this lady who’s juggling diapers, balance sheets, groceries and her own health? This week, we ask working mothers for tips on good management, based on their own experiences. These could do with work-life balance, time management, overcoming personal challenges or any of the other ways in which working professionals who are also mothers successfully juggle their multiple roles.

If you are a working mother or you know someone who is, share a working mom management tip on Twitter:  Tweet #MgmtLessonsFromMom. The contest begins tomorrow, 10 May and will run on till 11 May. Five worthy tweets will bag prizes from Bajaj Allianz.

The ‘Management Lessons from Working Mothers’ Webinar

And that’s not all. On Saturday, Jiyo Befikar Women will host the grand finale: a webinar on ‘Management Lessons from Working Mothers’.

The panelists are:

Deepa Malik: This international sportswoman is a Limca Record holder and has also been a participant in several auto rallies, despite the fact that she has been a wheelchair-bound paraplegic for over a decade. This hasn’t stopped her from achieving remarkable glory in sports too, as she has won gold medals in events like javelin and discus throw in the Malaysia Paralympics featuring 13 countries.

Roopa Kochhar has been identified as one of the top 100 women in Allianz, after she single-handedly set up the team that manages over 3500 employees. At 35, she is also one of the youngest Human Resource heads, especially for a company the size of Bajaj Allianz. Roopa is a big proponent of women-friendly and women-secure workplaces. She splits her time between heading the Human Resource division, managing the operations for the Bajaj Allianz Staffing Solutions Division and bringing up her 4 year old son.

Namrata Arora Singh is a talent development expert. with over 13 years of experience with some of the big names in the corporate world and professionally training as an instructional designer, performance consultant and small business entrepreneur, Namrata is a corporate heavyweight. She specializes in coaching women through transitions in life and at work.

Mahima Tankha Marwa is a pioneer of social media as a sales channel. Her 11 years of experience include setting up and successfully driving the websales channel for Bajaj Allianz. Mahima’s other big priority is her 3 year old daughter, with whom she packs in as many activities as possible.

Deepa Malik, Roopa Kochhar, Namrata Arora and Mahima Tankha Marwa will talk about their lives as working mothers building successful careers. Hosting this discussion will be Ajay Gupta, Head of Web Design & Digital Marketing, Bajaj Allianz. The webinar will be broadcast live at 12:45 pm on Saturday, 12^th May. The winners of the ‘Working mothers management tip contest’ will also be announced during this event.

I will be covering the event on Twitter. Register for the webinar at Jiyo Befikar Women, share a #MgmtLessonsFromMom tip or ask the panelists a question by Tweet #JiyoBefikarWomen.

Schedule: Management Lessons from Working Mothers

Twitter contest on #MgmtLessonsFromMom: 10-12 May 2012
Webinar on Jiyo Befikar Women: 12:45 p.m. on Saturday, 12 May 201

Connect

Facebook: Jiyo Befikar, Jiyo Befikar Women
Youtube: jiyobefikar
Blog: Jiyo Befikar Women
Gmail: jiyobefikar@gmail.com

Official: Follow @BajajAllianz
Contest: Tweet #MgmtLessonsFromMom
Webinar coverage: Tweet #JiyoBefikarWomen

The Instagram Story

The social media was all abuzz last month with Facebook taking over Instagram. I took a hard look at this uber-popular image sharing app. I’m still wondering why it got so popular. Here’s my Instagram story on Social Samosa.

“The word on the street associates Facebook’s interest in Instagram with wanting to acquire a competitor. Before the takeover, Instagram’s features do seem attractive for a standalone app. Especially if you’ve tired of the complexity of Facebook and the noise on Twitter, Instagram would seem like a neat, exclusive circle to share your life via pictures. With this takeover though, the dynamics just changed and it remains to be seen how this affects the Instagram loyalists and what powers it adds to the online superpower that is Facebook.”

Read the full Instagram story on Social Samosa.

Shit brands say about Social Media

If you don’t recognize the reference to the ‘Shit XYZ say about ABC’, you’ve probably not been online this year. I loved the concept of this viral because it picked out those silly things that people say & think but don’t actually realize that they believe.

I’m using that reference to bring out some of the common misconceptions that brands (and the people who represent them) carry about social media. In my first article of the month for Social Samosa titled ‘Shit brands say about Social Media’, I address myths (and corresponding truths) about social media platforms, SM users, key influencers and social content.

Here’s the first:

Myth: Social Media is an advertising platform

Truth: Social Media is a collective of conversations.

An advertising medium allows single direction transmission of a message. The message does not get added to or edited along the way. It is created, directed and owned by the sender. The sender also controls the medium because they pay for it.

Social media does not allow unidirectional transmissions. Every user in the medium, is an active participant in the creation and transmission of the message. Hence a message can and will get changed, diluted, contorted and transformed as it passes on.

The smart way to be on this medium is to treat it like an open forum rather than an advertising platform. A brand cannot force a message across on social media by implanting it in content that users are consuming, the way it is done in print or television. The best bet is to get involved in conversations where the message is a natural fit.

Bottomline: Learn to converse, and not just talk.

Read the full article on Social Samosa.

My April articles on Social Samosa:

• Interview with parody blogger, Fake Rakesh Jhunjhunwala
• Vodafone’s Customer Care On Twitter
• How Social Media Helped ‘The Reluctant Detective’
• Is Pinterest Pricking The Copyright Balloon?

Interview with parody blogger, Fake Rakesh Jhunjhunwala

Those of you who’ve been around with me and my blogs for awhile will understand my allegiance to, even fascination with anonymous bloggers, having been one myself. One of my delightful online associations is the irrepressible Fake Rakesh Jhunjhunwala. I, like all his other readers don’t know his real identity. And yet, we’ve had some funny conversations, over the social media.

I was really curious to know what it was like for an anonymous blogger in these times of IP address tracking and celebrity bloggers. FRJ has managed to build a sizable readership and even landed a few prestigious writing assignments, while never compromising his identity.

“Impersonation and parody are different things. I do not claim to be the real Rakesh Jhunjhunwala. My blog makes it clear and my Twitter account carries a disclaimer too. My intention is to parody Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, to entertain people, not cheat them out of their money!”

Catch my conversation with him on Social Samosa here.

Related articles

• Vodafone’s Customer Care On Twitter
• How Social Media Helped ‘The Reluctant Detective’
• Is Pinterest Pricking The Copyright Balloon?

Vodafone’s Customer Care On Twitter

A funny thing happened to me after I got back from my Goa trip last week. Vodafone attempted to resolve a complaint that I had tweeted about while there, about poor data services. It was an interesting thing for a service provider to try but their actual delivery fell rather short of expectations, causing an opposite effect. I’ve chronicled this episode on Social Samosa and also detailed the process chain and where the gap lay. Here’s an excerpt:

Vodafone has a definite need to upgrade their complaint handling mechanisms to keep up with new services and evolving usage. Tacking on a Twitter account to their existing call center caused the goof-ups in my case. Vodafone’s call operators definitely need to understand the nuances of data services if they are to handle queries & complaints on them. It’s a serious faux pas if the face (or the voice) of a brand of The Blackberry Boys doesn’t know how the internet works.

Read the full article on Social Samosa: Vodafone’s Customer Care on Twitter.

* Image via David Castillo Dominici on FreeDigitalPhotos

Related articles

• How Social Media Helped ‘The Reluctant Detective’
• Is Pinterest Pricking The Copyright Balloon?
• Conversation With Gul Panag on Social Media

How Social Media Helped ‘The Reluctant Detective’

There’s plenty of talk about marketing various products and services through social media. I thought Kiran Manral did something interesting, generating interest for her debut novel, ‘The Reluctant Detective’. Besides the obvious tweeting about it, she also engaged with readers, other writers and organized a number of different events that a social media professional would recognize as astute blogger outreach programs.

I had a chance to chronicle Kiran’s case in my article for Social Samosa:

“Not content with just social media conversations, Kiran also decided to add an offline aspect to her online efforts too. So she focused on driving conversations and creating experiences to generate further conversations. She says, “I’ve realised that it is not enough to talk about your book via social media or book reviews, people actually enjoy seeing, meeting and interacting with an author and that’s what I’ve tried to do.”

Read the full article on Social Samosa here.

Related articles

• Is Pinterest Pricking The Copyright Balloon?
• Conversation With Gul Panag
• Public Shaming as a Social Media tactic

Is Pinterest Pricking The Copyright Balloon?

I’ve been spending nearly an hour of my online time every day on Pinterest. In addition to Pinterest’s own features, this exercise of joining and building a usage profile on a new social network/service is interesting too.

For the unpinned, Pinterest is an image curation service. And unlike older image services like Flickr & Photobucket, Pinterest allows for easier integration with other social networks, sharing of content and connecting to other users.

What I’m finding really interesting is that Pinterest symbolizes an evolutionary step in social media user behaviour. We are moving from content creation to content curation. However, Pinterest has been born into a space and a time where these questions are dividing the space into several factions. What’s the world going to look like when content belongs not just to the creator, but to everybody?

Read my article on Pinterest grappling with the copyright paradigm on Social Samosa: ‘Is Pinterest Pricking The Copyright Balloon?‘

*Image via Carlos Porto on FreeDigitalPhotos.

Related articles

• Conversation With Gul Panag

The Lucky Writer

The promise of morning turned into a winking evening outside my window as I completed my story. Some days I feel lucky, so very lucky.

I haven’t been blogging for awhile. Much work has been coming my way, professional blogging and the workshops. Somewhere through all this, the almost-winter of Mumbai passed into my favorite season of the year. It’s time for cool showers twice a day, ripe mangoes and plenty of talcum powder. It has been nearly a year since I moved out.

The book is finally complete. I feared that I’d experience a sense of loss at not having something to hold onto anymore. But the day I sent it out, my two-and-a-bit year old baby out into the open universe, I felt such a sense of giddiness, you wouldn’t believe. And almost immediately other things have whooshed into the place it has left before I had a chance to brood over it. Maybe I did take too long over it.

There are new curtains on my windows. Actually they’re quite old, nearly a decade or so. I chose these curtains, my first experience of building a home, when we moved out of the tiny pigeonhole flat that I’d grown up in. 11 years later, they still come out of the wash as sturdy, comfortable and subtle as they did the first time I hung them up. They really cut out the heat during the hellacious times of the day. And in the evening, swaying in the slight breeze, the mild blue-and-white tartan print makes me think,

“I’m home.”

I’ve finished a deadline a little ahead of time and it’s evening. There’s another half an hour of daylight at best and no sun to scorch me. I think I’ll take a walk down just for old times sake or to enjoy the breeze. Days like this make me feel so, so very lucky.