SmartTechie event called StartUp City

I visited the StartUp City event from SmartTechie yesterday May 24, 2008.

The event was worth to attend just to listen to Mr. R.K. Mishra, the Lead India winner (reality show organized by Times of India). The audience was awed by his wit and presence of mind. The way he handled all controversial questions without naming anyone was awesome. Though the event was about enterpreneurship but the audience has asked questions about politics and the state of the nation. The entire session was very enlightening about your own nation.

Regarding the event; it was good exposure to some upcoming start ups and VCs. It was a good visibility for the satrtups I would say but some big brands were also there like Amazon, WebEx, Akamai etc. The turn around was extremely good may be because the registration was free and the event was on a weekend, still it is remarkable to get this kind of crowd. Good job Pradeep!!

The management of the event could be improved like there were no sign boards indicating the Auditorium where the talks were happening and I had to struggle to find that out. The comparing of the event was really sad. Lunch arrangement could have been better; very sad food and only one counter for hundreds of people. Increasing the no. of counters would have really helped to retain people including me for the rest of the event.

Overall I enjoyed my 3 hours of stay there and I really loved listening to Mr. R.K.Mishra. He simply rocks!!!

SNS – New way to make friends or to take revenge

Man's natural tendency of socializing with friends and like minded people online has been given a name “Social Networking” and very soon it has become the buzzword and the greatest online Marketing FAD.

They have provided benefits like everyday people are learning presenting themselves better on online media like Facebook and MySpace; Linkedin is connecting millions of people to get the jobs as per their skills set; Orkut is connecting long lost school mates; Yahoo! Groups is uniting like minded people for a common objective.

On the other hand many teenagers have committed suicide so that they can have a dedicated online memorial website for them; check out the link. MySpace is just saved from a lawsuit by a teenager Austin girl who was sexually assaulted by a 19 year old man who she has met on the site. Read More

Since SNS is all about freedom of expressions and aggression is one of the expressions as well. They have become the easiest place to vent out all your aggression or bad feelings. I have some real life examples from India:

A friend of mine was completely taken aback just few days before his wedding when someone created a fake Orkut profile and started claiming that he is already married to her and he can’t possibly marry again. Because of Orkut she got a quick access to all his friends and within a day all his friends know about it. Imagine the situation of bride and groom at such crucial time.

I know a girl who found a guy from a Matrimonial site and were seeing each other for couple of weeks. Then this girl found out that they are not compatible for a life long relationship. She ended any possibility of marriage on a polite note with genuine reasons. Still the guy created a fake Orkut profile for her and created a mess in her name on Internet.

I have several other examples where people have vented out their anger, frustration publicly while keeping their own identification secret just because they have easy access to all the contacts of victim on internet.

SNS are an amazing medium of interaction and you can do wonders with your professional and personal life through them but all these cases make one thing sure that they should not be used casually. You can make great friends and take your business to new heights by being a little careful about using these networks.

Groups PA button on yahoo.in

Anyone who has joined the world of Internet recently doesn’t have many online friends. They open their inbox everyday and get disappointed to find few or no emails lying there. In such case, the best way to receive emails in your inbox or to know people online is to join online groups.

The next problem is how to find out the best group of their interest category? Which groups to join? How to know which group is interesting? Which group does not have spam messages?

To answer all such questions Yahoo! India has added a PA (Personal Assistant) button for Groups on its home page at http://yahoo.in/.

If you are logged-in on the page; the PA button will show you all the groups that you are member of and if you are not logged-in then it will show you featured groups. Featured groups are groups short-listed by Yahoo! after proper screening to give you a wonderful and spam free groups experience.

So if you want to add some interesting groups in your kitty, just visit the Yahoo! home page and find out the group of your choice and let those interesting emails flowing in.

Big Money in Big Networks

Ever growing social networks are not only attracting millions of people every day but are also reaping big money for their owners.

Many of the top 20 websites on the planet are social networks. Presently 20% of the internet population is present on one or more of these social networks and this number is expected to grow to 50 – 60% says CEO of Friendster; Kent Lindstrom. Refer the article.

And he is not the only one to have this opinion; you can see this happening all around you. Compete announces its list of top 20 social networks and it clearly shows the new players with focused approached are gaining popularity very fast. Notably, Fubar.com had an increment of 3272217% in total visits in last one year.

Very popular business networking site Linkedin has almost doubled its members from last year and reached a mark of 18 million subscribers. More than 1 million people are joining the site each month giving the business networking giant revenue of $75 million to $ 100 million. With its all new look and feel Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman is all set to launch an IPO for the company before 2010.

Facebook; another social networking site boasting of $15 billion market value with 60 million users is also not thinking any differently and might come up with its IPO around the same time frame of 2009-10.

IPO is not the only way to make big bucks if you are armed with a very popular social network; buy out is another option. In the past some very popular social networks has opted for the second option and made fortune by finding suitable buyers for them. The best examples are Google buying out YouTube for whopping $1.76 billion and Yahoo! acquiring Flickr for $ 40 million.

Sell it off or make it open for the market; if you are able to make your social networking site popular; loads and loads of moolahs are waiting for you.

Blogging and Promoting your Blog

I don’t claim any expertise on blogging; I have just started blogging myself; but I am reading a lot on blogging these days and have figured out couple of ways to make your blog successful and attracting more readers to your blog.

I am courageous enough to post this as my first post here and have not acquired any readership myself but what the heck, even if one point help someone – my time is worth spent in writing this post.First thing is first; why on earth you want to create a blog? It could be any of the following:

a) For having a huge Internet presence

b) Because it’s a FAD

c) Convey your ideas to the world

d) Discuss various topics with the experts across the globe

e) Share – Link, Pictures, Travel Tips, Poems

f) Building your community on any topic

g) For your passion of a subject

You have one or many such objectives; my question is – do you want to create multiple blogs. According to me; not a great idea – if you are doing full justice to the single blog that you are maintaining well – kudos to you. Keeping a blog active and updated with interesting content is a job in itself. So I would suggest; create one single blog and with the help of various online tools and widgets available free of cost (yippee!!) try to maintain your blog catering to all your objectives.

Not to mention; Posting regularly and keep the interest of users up is of supreme importance; refer the link for some handy tips.

Now, once the blog is created and being maintained as per your requirements; the next big issue is promoting the blog to increase the readership and getting the right kind of audience visiting your blog for the healthy discussion that you are looking at.

I believe (solely my opinion); there are couple of ways by which you can promote your blog:

a) Social Bookmarking sites:

i) Mybloglog

ii) Delicious

b) Microblog about your blog on sites like:

i) Twitter

ii) Utterz

iii) Seesmic

c) Integrate your blog with social networks like:

i) Facebook

ii) MySpace

iii) Technorati

Once you have created your reader community and you get to know couple of interesting people make your own community using Yahoo! Groups or any other community building tool and you are all set.

Get the ball rolling with lots of interesting posts and your blog is a hit!!

Community Management

A Community Manager (CM) is someone who breaths and eat blogs and practically lives on Internet. CM’s internet social presence is much more important than the physical social presence. CM has to drive a vibrant online community by engaging and retaining readers online.

Community is all about people so needless to say CM has to be a people’s person. CM should be able to congregate people for a common cause/objective/interest. CM is the tipping point of any community. CM brings together people and creates a community and grows it until it reaches to a critical point good enough to tip the cause for which community was created.

How do a CM create and grow communities successfully is a very subjective question and there can be thousands of opinions for the same. I am collating certain points that I have figured out from reading and managing communities myself:

Internet presence
CM’s internet presence is critical; your community consists of people who are online at different times; so to have a comprehensive overall view point of the entire community it is very important that the CM is online most of the times.

Motivation
Most of the people are consumers rather than producers. They love to read the messages posted on community forums but rarely do they want to respond due to different apprehensions. CM must act as a catalyst to encourage, facilitate and moderate user generated content on the community forum.

User profile
CM should categorize the community members as high, medium and low users and should incorporate customized marketing strategies for different categories of user profiles.

Interesting Community
All work and no play make Johnny a dull boy. Information is good to have thing but loads of information and only information cant keep people interested for a long time so provide your members with loads and loads of fun quizzes, contests, games and other fun stuffs in addition to critical information about the product.

Dialogue
Community is a platform for communication not only for company but for the users as well. Take the feedback seriously and give them regular updates about their feedback. In other words, don’t just listen to their feedback; get back to them.

Transparency
It is of supreme importance to create the trust for you within the community so for a CM Transparency is the best policy.

Last but not the least
CM should be updated all the time with the latest happening about the subject in the market. Keep reading and participating on all the blogs and events related to your subject and keep on updating your community. That’s the unique value proposition that a CM should provide to his/her community.

That’s my two cents regarding Community Management; you can join some active groups around Community Management as mentioned below to discuss it further:

Yahoo Groups:
a) E-Mint
b) Online Facilitation
c) Successful Website Marketing

Facebook Groups:
a) Community Manager, Advocate, and Evangelist
b) Web Community Forum
c) Online Community Roundtable

Using Social Media for Direct Marketing

Social Media is defined as decentralizing the authority of one individual over content from the World Wide Web. It’s a website that contains everything from posts, videos, photos, links, bookmarks to pod-casts and web-casts via user submission. All these submissions can then further distributed via RSS feeds to the second level of networks.

This content is open for world to comment / rate / vote which essentially means not only you are sharing your knowledge and ideas with the world you are also authorizing them to be judgmental about it and when they do its a happy sign for you as it means that your site is becoming popular.

Social Media brings new opportunities for Direct Marketing as it gives readymade and packaged audience to marketers according to different geographic, demographic and social factors. The social media platforms like Yahoo! Groups, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Linkedin, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, and blogs are the readymade base of millions of users. It is a platform where in a marketer can advertise and be assured that his message is being heard.
Suddenly it has become the buzzword as the technology has made this concept quite sellable; though the concept is not new. The approach is new as it is better empowered from technology. Earlier also marketers have used tools like Bulletin Board systems and live chats to spread the word across the online communities, but today’s technology have changed the entire ball game all together.

All you need is a wireless network, a laptop and a camera and you are all set. You can market your products / services instantly anytime from anywhere using live streaming over the internet, video/audio blogging etc. All the technology is available to make you mobile and productive 24*7 in doing direct marketing over social media.

Web 2.0 has made the web as advertising paradise for the marketers as they can customize their marketing efforts for different set of customers on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 has transitioned websites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionalities. Web 2.0 has enabled machines to understand and extract meaning out of users profile for social networking and delivering information to users in innovative ways creating consolidated information about the users to marketers.

What is critical for a marketer is to understand how to connect with this readymade audience. Now when you have reached the audience; what to do with them sets the rule for further game. The marketer has to be very careful with his message as traditional messaging and too much of exposure can result in offending the audience rather than wooing them. Understanding and implementing proper community engagement protocols is of supreme importance.

So, all needs to be decided now is to what to speak – whom to speak and how to reach them is pretty sorted!!!!! :)