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

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?

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

Conversation With Gul Panag

I had a chance to meet Gul Panag last month. This former Ms.India-turned-Bollywood actress is also one of the better known faces of Twitter celebritydom in India. In person, she turned out to be a no-nonsense, intelligent and fun person to talk to. Over coffee we discussed her varied career choices, her attitude to life, Twitter and life, in general. Some of the excerpts from my conversation with her, appear in a Social Samosa interview here:

“The power to choose comes from not having any dependency on any one particular aspect. And yet they all tie in together. I wouldn’t be a celebrity writer if I wasn’t a film star. I wouldn’t be given the kind of value I get given on Twitter, if I wasn’t a film star. They’re all interconnected and yet at some level, mutually exclusive.”

Public Shaming As A Social Media Tactic

What do Siddharth Mallya and Arindam Chaudhuri have in common? If Ayesha Takia met Rashmi Bansal, what might they talk about? Let’s add Dhaval Valia to the melee. Any clues?

This month, I take a look at the grittier, seamier side of social conversations – public shaming as a social media tactic. Here’s an excerpt:

While on one hand, the powers-that-be worry about how to manage this public spewing of individual opinion, the system holds its structural integrity on one premise – the fear of public shaming. All the major parties in the above case used public shaming as tactics. The question was simply who the public at large, decided to side with.

Individuals are starting to feel the power of the media. Public shaming has proven mighty effective when it comes to breakdowns with brands and companies. Tweeting about poor service and other complaints, gets much faster response than call center chasing & other complaint registrations. A corporate entity that fails to respond or responds carelessly, can expect the issue to flare up into something much bigger and harder to control.

The article is titled ‘Public Shaming As A Social Media Tactic‘ and is posted at Social Samosa.

If you liked this article, you might also want to read:

• Social Networking-How Communities Were Built
• Kapil Sibal & The C-Word
• Social Networking-The Creation & Consumption Of Content

Image via Stuart Miles on FreeDigitalPhotos

Workshop On ‘Social Content For Branding’ For Avignyata Inc.

Last week, Payal & I concluded a two-day workshop for Avignyata Inc., a social media agency. The Avignyata team included client servicing executives, designers and content creators for different social channels. The objective of our workshop was to understand the anatomy of a brand, give it a distinct voice, devise a content strategy and create engaging content across relevant channels.

The conversations that came out of it, took me back to my days as a business analyst. I spent most of my last year as a corporate employee, with a young, vibrant group of people with excellent ideas. My role there, was to focus those thoughts, tie them into coherent structures, develop them into actionables and devise tangible metrics to assess them.

So much of good marketing is about fresh, innovative ideas, no matter which aspect of the function you look at. I find young people are possessed in abundance with these. What some of them find missing is the tools to organize them and take them to fruitful conclusions. This of course, is something that I have and continue to develop with experience and a natural maturing in thought. When it comes to social media, the early adopters of the channels are easily the youngest, brightest sparks. But the ability to convert the knowledge of these channels into business strategy doesn’t always follow automatically.It requires an understanding of basic business realities, domain understanding, content creation skills and a working knowledge of the social media.

Since our combined repository of experience and skills covers these, Payal & I are conducting a series of workshops, lectures and other training services. A big thank you to Moksh Juneja, for getting us to work with the Avignyata team over the last week!

Pictures of the Avignyata workshop are posted to our Facebook Page.

The BarCamp Mumbai 8 Round-Up

I spent yesterday at Barcamp Mumbai 8. This has been my first unconference in nearly 2 years. My last Barcamp was over 4years ago, overrun by techie discussions and only drew me because it had a teensy segment for bloggers. BlogCamp evolved as an offshoot of that.

Yesterday was a pleasant return. For one, the event that usually struggles on time, breezed through the multiple sessions, speakers and classrooms easily. There were 4 classrooms in the ultra-posh Mukesh Patel ….. The wiki was flowing with colourful post-its even at 10:15 a.m., which is when I got there. And most delightfully, the subjects spanned a diverse range of intellectual tools, hobbies & interests & scientific applications in fun real life ways. One had to be truly ruthless to pick sessions to attend since there were so many good ones, several happening simultaneously.

Off the top of my head, these are the ones I attended:

• Anatomy of a question – Sumant Srivathsan (How to design an interesting question in a quiz)
• Mindmaps – Rehab Chougle
• Kitne star diye? – Manisha Lakhe (on film reviewing)
• The censorship of AMEN, gay community rights – Harrish Iyer
• Comic book publishing for dummies – Aditya Bidikar
• Diagnosing Bipolar Disorder – Anubha Bhat

Interesting titbits from the day:

I entered Rehab’s session late, having misread the wiki schedule. It was interesting and fun, though occasionally highjacked by someone who claimed that genocide made him happy. Quick tip – if you’re demonstrating or talking without a powerpoint, avoid the big conference room. The larger crowd is harder to maintain & engage. Rehab did a great job though and showed off a mind technique that will help anyone from an artist to an executive stuck in a business dilemma.

Harrish is always entertaining and touching in equal parts. His first talk was about the film AMEN being denied a certificate by the censor board and he did a superb job of bringing out the inconsistencies in their policies. His second talk though, was the one that really had people talking. He was speaking of how gay people are treated in India, when partway through, he was interrupted by a very fervent member of the audience who insisted that,

“According to Hinduism, you can only have sex with your wife, inside a closed room. Only after marriage and only for procreation, not for fun.”

The uproar that followed had to be taken out into the corridor to make way for the next speaker. The episode illustrated one of the reasons that unconferences are a great way to seed ideas, bring out thoughts and get people talking, sometimes about controversial and difficult topics.

My session on ‘Social Content’ happened on the fly. It’s been years since I spoke completely extempore, as I did yesterday and it was a great experience. I was actually hoping to create interest for my upcoming series of blogging workshops, beginning with ‘Unboggle The Blog‘. But instead, I found myself naturally touching on several related but disjointed thoughts about this space. My 20 minute, stream-of-consciousness ramble imitated the way we consume and add to social content, on our Facebook Walls, our Twitter timelines and all out other channels of social media. I touched on the artificiality of traditional media, social media as an extension of normal, human behaviour, how trolls are mirror daily social miscreants experimenting in their own ways and that we’re all creators & consumers of social content. Here’s the talk:

I missed the #TWSS talk by Aditya Sengupta since the room was so packed that even the door couldn’t be opened. From what I hear, it was a tongue-in-geek demonstration of an algorithm used to generate and viral #TWSS (That’s what she said). But the geek in me found a corner in Anubha Bhat’s talk on diagnosing bipolar disorders using algorithms.

I’m not going to dwell on how great it was to catch up with old friends again, since that’s a given in any gathering. Yesterday was more than just friends catching up and people networking. It really was a meeting of minds, a true sharing of ideas. A big thank you to the Barcamp team for pulling off such a great day!

BarCamp Mumbai On 19 Feb @ MPSTE, VileParle West

All of 2011 went by without my being able to be part of a single unconference. Which is why I’m really looking forward to this weekend. Sunday, 19th February 2012, will see the first BarCamp Mumbai of 2012.

Image via Wikipedia

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of unconferences, these are completely democratic gatherings of minds, coming together to share and discuss their ideas on various things. BarCamp in its early days, was an open forum on technology, especially the IT & networking end of it. BlogCamp emerged as a specialized community from within the BarCamp framework. This space has seen much discussion and evolution through the course of various BlogCamps.

I’m going to be attending a BarCamp after nearly 4 years. The agenda has evolved considerably, to keep up with what’s hot and new in thinking minds. A quick look at the sessions list promises that the day will touch on restaurant reviewing, origami, online communities, yoga, urban commuting and graphology among other things. These will continue to be added on, as more participants sign up.

Here are the things you can do at BarCamp:

• Listen to speakers talk about their pet subjects
• Interrupt with questions, opposition or related thoughts
• Juggle between sessions, rooms & speakers, walking in and out whenever you like
• Hear your favorite temperamental blogger speak
• Talk about something that you like
• Connect with other people with similar interests, tastes or opinions
• Have a lot of fun!

And just in case you missed the bold, underlined hint above, I’m going to be addressing a session on something close to my heart these days – Social Content.

Here are the details:

BarCamp Mumbai February 2012

Date: Sunday, 19 February 2012
Time: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Place: Mukesh Patel School of Technology, Management and Engineering,
Along the Mithibai-NM college road, Vileparle West, Mumbai
Facebook: Confirm your attendance and invite others.
Wiki: Register your session and check out the agenda so far.

Themeefy: Curation, Plagiarism & Good Responses

I periodically ego-surf. For the uninitiated, that’s doing Google searches of your name. I’m not ashamed of it. I check myself in the mirror before I go out, after all. What’s wrong with checking on your image online, periodically too?

On just such an exercise, I came across a website that had all my 55-word story posts. I rolled my eyes and looked for a way to contact the owners to tell them they couldn’t plagiarize my content.

The website was Themeefy, a content curation app (itself a premise, I’d find very interesting). One of their users had ‘curated’ this section of my blog. My guess is that a link would normally show an excerpt. But since the content was very brief, the entire posts showed up, one per page.

I tweeted to Themeefy:

Why are entire posts from my blog appearing on @themeefy here- http://bit.ly/xzl8M8 This isn’t sharing, it’s plagiarism. What do you think?

Less than an hour later, I received a response:

We are linking back to your blog, so it’s not plagiarism. However if you object strongly, we can delete this Themeefy Mag.

I replied,

Yes, please do. The entire post has been reproduced. It hurts the SEO of my blog to have it reappear elsewhere.

I received this message a bare five minutes later:

It’s done! Please accept sincere apologies on behalf of the user.

I think this situation happened in a grey area. Curation involves the collection, tidying up, organizing and showcasing of content. Online, it’s a little tricky. Mirroring a website’s content hurts its SEO and seems to actually do the opposite act of devaluing the original. On the other hand, the internet and indeed, blogs work on the premise of link-love.

I’ve spoken often about things that don’t work, services that don’t deliver and people who disappoint on the social media. So I wanted to make a special note of this as a case where this did NOT happen. The situation was resolved well because Themeefy was:

• Prompt with response: An angry person gets frustrated with inaction and angrier over time. By replying immediately, Themeefy saved the situation from turning sour.
• Polite without being servile: All of Themeefy’s communication was polite. They also pointed out that they were not doing anything wrong but would take the Mag down, if I asked.
• Flexible: By taking my concerns into consideration, even though I am not a user, they ensured that I would actually be interested in becoming a user.