I have been taking guest blogging (my brainwave that turned out to be a common idea) seriously, A few days back I wrote the Sherlock Holmes Movie Review, let me know what you think of the movie if you have seen it.

My review
I have read a few Sherlock Holmes books, but I did not know what to expect from the movie. Both the actors Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man fame) and Jude Law (Cold Mountain fame) are two that I think can do some real good work. They along with the old London setting full of carriages, hat wearers, women wearing those big skirt gowns and ongoing construction of the tower bridge have created a very vivid and engrossing movie. Read More.

Just got profiled at Web Worker Daily as one of their readers! Its a cool place with tips for web workers (as the name suggests). They review web apps, give tips about remote working and useful stuff about online professions.

Read my profile.

Couple of their recent interesting posts:

The Fine Art of Persuasion via Email

Can Twitter save your Day

A few days back Twitter released Local trends. Tweeps can now see the Top 10 trends of a particular locality. Currently few countries and cities of US can see their specific trends, not yet available for India.

Location will soon be playing a huge role in social media. With their geo-tagging feature Twitter is not just about What are you doing? its also about Where are you?

Some uses for these local trends:

Trend for Less (Marketeers alert!)

It takes a huge number of tweeps to be tweeting in huge numbers about a topic for it to trend. Now with localized trending topics, these numbers are all reduced.

It will be much easier to trend for say Ireland than it is to trend Worldwide, even easier to trend for a city Las Vegas than trend for a country US! So even less popular stuff can now get quite a bit of publicity for a localized region!

This will definitely make Twitter even more marketeer friendly!

A Travel Guide

Going traveling? Check out the Twitter trends for that area! It can be a real good way to get to know the buzz in that place.

So if you are going to Ireland, the Irish seem really concerned about Football and Wayne Rooney, while if you were going to Los Angeles then the peeps there are a lot more affected by the funny commercial by MadTV on the iPad.

These trends when available for various cities in the world, will inevitably create communities. Any local event in the city that affects tweeps strongly will trend, thus including others in the same city to take interest in the event.
It will enhance a community feeling around tweeps.

What are your thoughts about location, social media and local trends on Twitter?

This one is for all the people out there who have still not g0tten what Twitter is about!

Facebook recently released its version of the 'Retweet' feature. Its pretty cool and works for updates from Fan pages as well.


One glaring difference is that the original source is not maintained for a second generation of retweets, i.e. if you have retweeted something on your Facebook, then for any retweets of this update, You will appear as the source not the person you picked it up from.

This again leads to trouble about the origin of the particular status update and reduces the 'viralness' of the feature for a person, cause his status update can only be retweeted by his friends, he will not be source if its retweeted by the friends friends.

Read about Twitter's retweet features
I also guest blogged on this: Facebook Retweet v/s Twitter Retweet

First there was NASA, they sent out humans in the Big, Empty, Dark of Space. Back on Earth a few geeks made a contraption called Twitter to exchange information, these information snippets were called Tweets.

Now there is the first tweet from the humans in the Big, Empty, Dark of Space :)



So finally NASA gets on the social media bandwagon FULL ON, they have given access to real time web for personal use to the astronauts in space. I think they could have done this before but now in social media there is publicity, hype and money! A way to garner public support!

Read more about NASA on social media.

(pic courtesy)

There are a lot of jokes floating around that any gen Y kid can become a social media consultant, there is no need for any qualifications or experience other than some basic knowledge of blogging, Facebook, Twitter etc... I recently came across a leading digital media agency in Mumbai, where the oldest in the SMM team was about 30! Here I have looked at some problems in hiring newbies as social media people and also some plus points.

Problems

Username - Email
Generally the usernames on a social network, once taken cannot be changed or re-taken. So its important to decide which email id should be used to create the company account. Often the newbie social media guy will use his personal email id! This can be really risky cause this means that the company head has secondary importance in the account!
At some point if the guy leaves (which he probably will) it can be troublesome. Also if he gets pissed off at your company (which can also happen), he could simply delete the page!

Tech Savvy
Often youngsters maybe good at personal social networking, but for companies there is a requirement of some knowledge of Tech. Not having this can be troublesome. Newer, improved technologies will not be adopted by the company, giving the campaign an oldish look to it.

Public Responses
Social media consultants have to very often comment and respond to customer queries. The responses need to look professional, even better if they show some depth of conversation. Handing over such communications to a bunch of inexperienced youngsters could be harmful for your companies reputation.

Plus Points

Public Responses
One of the most boring things when conversing with company representatives, is that they tend to be too formal and give us the same rote. Often I have seen that youngsters are genuinely enthusiastic, which comes across! So the touch of un-professionalism can be a good thing, sometimes!

Freshness
Since they have not spent too much time in the industry they could come up with really fresh ideas for social media campaigns which is a hit with other youngsters (a huge online population). This could make the difference needed for a viral campaign!

I find young people in this field pretty amazing! Frankly I feel that most of the education (at least in India) is unnecessary and it tends to make people rigid in terms of their thinking. It kills innovation rather than foster it, anyway thats another matter.

What are your ideas, about a newbie social media consultant? What are the risks and advantages?

I have heard quite a few people go ga-ga over Posterous - a blogging platform for quite some time. Recently, I took a look at it and was pleasantly surprised! What is most evident is that its made for TODAY, a time when social networks, RSS feeds are a must addon and when bloggers want to post a blog on the fly, from their smart phones.

I have noted some of its features here, to give you a better idea about what I am saying.

SignUp and Blogging

Login: What can be so different in a login procedure? Well what if there was none! I am serious you can just email post@posterous.com to start a blog. This will set up a blog with an automatically generated URL like www.priyanka-gmqhp.posterous.com (It probably picked up Priyanka from my email name).
When you do want to customize the blog or URL then you need to signup.

Post via Email: This is the feature that Posterous is really playing up. As shown above, they are totally promoting blogging via email, and the entire feature is very smooth. I have been trying it out on my photoblog (shifted from Wordpress) take a look, all the posts are via email.

Promotion

Auto Notification: This is another reason I said its made for today's social networking people. It has inbuilt pinging feature, where any new post gets posted on various social networks (once you authorize it). Moreover it enables a huge number of social networks for autoposting! No need to hook up and configure a twitterfeed or ping.fm etc...

By default it shows the icons to these authorized sites on your blog page, too! (Awesome).

Tracking Traffic

Google Analytics and Feedburner: The third that a blogger would go for is measuring traffic, namely Google analytics and Feedburner for feeds. It has been simply integrated so that we only need to input the respective codes.

Other

Theme Customizability: Themes can be customized since the templates HTML code is open. Hence blog theme is no bar to choosing Posterous over others.

Changeable web address: The blog web address is changeable. This is really cool, with most other platforms we have to start a new blog or buy a domain if we want to change the blog address.

(Another site which allows web address changeability is Twitter)

It makes the process of configuring auto updates for social networks and RSS subscriptions and statistics so easy that it feels blogging itself is simplified! Moreover these features make it feel tuned to a bloggers needs!

Just came across the Chase community giving contest. Currently the 2nd and the final round is ongoing. In the first round some 100 charities from all over the world were shortlisted and now out of those, the one charity that garners the most votes will be winner of $1 Million.
What really got me interested was when I saw that the number of votes for NGO's was increasing by huge numbers!

I think this is a great case study to see how tens of thousands of people have been mobilized by online activities (maybe some offline ones too) to vote on Facebook, for the charity of their choice.

Yesterday Early:

Late Yesterday:


Today:

A jump of about 20,000 people who voted for Twloha Inc! Moreover if you consider that many of these NGO's really don't have any ongoing social media campaigns beyond a Facebook page or Twitter and a website. Usually these are managed by volunteers who are not professionals in online marketing or any such.
Amazing!

So go ahead and caste your votes. Some of the NGO's I voted for,

Invisible Children Inc: Serious concept. They are working towards rehabilitating kids abducted and made into soldiers of war torn nations! The little experience I have with street kids only lets me imagine how difficult what they are attempting to do is.

Feel Your Boobies: I came across this campaign while looking into the Whats your Bra color Viral that happened a few days ago. I love the concept of something as kinky and rad as this to be crucial for something as serious and morbid as breast cancer.

Voting for NGO's this way is always a trouble for me cause they are all so important! The world has too many causes. Let me know who you are voting for!

(pic courtesy)
A few days back Google published an article on its blog, stating its decision to move out of China or at least stop censoring its search results for Google.cn its chinese search page.


"In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different. Read More."

An interesting article by TechCrunch covers the different sentiments around the web on this move. There are people applauding Google's stand 'against communism' and other who state it has come to this only because Google was not the leading search engine of China anyway (It was Baidu) and there was no way it was going to be numero uno in the BIG C.
Read more on those two sides.

I frankly think both sides are too extremes. If Google was number one, then what it would do could be very different, but the thing is that its not on the top. So when it is not getting the largest market share in Big C, and it is seeing all sorts of 'unethical' surveillances by western standards it may not want to take it sitting down! So they are standing up and saying NO, which is fair enough.

While it may not be a decision made solely against the communism in China due to ethical reasons, it would still be a blow to the communistic regime of China. That is the other issue here, the Chinese communism. Towards this I read an interesting article today, it states that while China has been doing a lot of talk towards becoming capitalist and it opening up its market, in action it still remains a communistic regime and might become even more so! Read more on this here.

Another aspect of this entire debate is the role of Government in the 'free web world'. Recently a cousin of mine from Germany said that the German government actually tracks pirated and illegal web content like movies, audio etc.. to the violaters computer. Where in it automatically takes a picture of the illegal content and then simply sends a summons to the person for cyber fraud. So this raises another question of ethics, how much of access should the government have to a citizens net access.

I have just penned down some thoughts, what are your ideas?

I have been slow to respond to this Haiti crisis. Frankly, I do not know for what reason maybe the large geographical distance, lack of any contacts in Haiti or because I see too much hyping of small things around me, but for quite some time I did not respond to the Haiti crisis at all. Maybe I am just growing old and cynical.
Anyway I finally came around and posted this blog, also I am following @redcross on twitter, they are putting up constant updates on the situation, that should help me get involved in any way I can.

Here is a link to 6 reliable charities... The simplest way I think is to,

Text "HAITI" to "90999" to donate $10 to the Red Cross (prolly only for US people)

I am a little dazed, it would be so difficult to cope with a disaster of this sort if it happened somewhere closeby. Even if I could help I might not know how etc.. I am thinking of taking up a disaster relief management kind of small course which gives the basic 101 in such situations.

Yesterday the Iranian Cyber Army found its second major target in Baidu, China's main search engine. The first major target was the very popular microblogging site Twitter in the last week of December. (source)

This attack on these sites brings to fore yet again the problem of Internet security which at best seems to remain just enough until the next hack or crack.

This strike directs the people coming to the site the armies own page with Farsi writing and the Iran flag. (as shown in pic) As of now they have not taken any user data, their intention seems to be only to raise public awareness (in a very anti-social manner).

The fine print under the flag mocks the US by saying they think they control and manage internet access but now its the Iranians that have put the US in the embargo list and not the other way around.

Just came across the most hilarious episode of 'Star Wars in the Facebook age' ....


Many more such funny conversations here....

I came across Ramayana and Mahabharata on Facebook, they have also been very popular. I find them ok, however this Star Wars one takes the cake!

Taking it forward from my last post on guest blogging here are some of my guest blogs in the last few weeks,

The Religious Nasik

After a four-hour drive from my house in South Mumbai, I found myself approaching Nasik city. Spending a day there, I was surprised at the myriad host of religious places that the city has. Here are some of them to give you an idea about what a multi-religious fanfare this small city close to Mumbai really is.

5 Killer Tips to select a Blog theme

Some things I learnt while choosing this new blog theme...

Marketing on google Wave

After all the hype about Google wave and many people being disappointed with its usability and lack of invites. The question remains, how is it as a marketing tool? Here are some simple steps to begin marketing on Google Wave.

Google Wave Basics

BTW I still have Wave invites with me, let me know if you need one!

So finally I get a brain wave and its not really anything new for the world, its quite a common occurence. :D (has this happened with you? Its so funny when it does happen with me!)

Sticking to the Blogs Niche Topic
One of the main problems with maintaining a blog on only one topic like social media, is to avoid writing about other various things in my life. Being an avid blogger I find myself penning a lot of stuff down. Small incidents in the building, travel trips, the book I am reading etc... So definitely a lot of material but blogging it all on the same blog will result in a really hodge podge blog. Finally I just had a brainwave, to write Guest blog posts!

Yea it is not really a new idea, I know, (sheepish) but a brainwave none the less. It solves a big problem for me, to maintain this blog only on social media and yet allow my creative energies to blog on myriad topics.


Getting Good Backlinks
What I also realised later is that it gives me really good backlinks from other blogs which refer my blog in their guest blogger intro.

I can only say to this, 2 birds with one arrow! A hindi proverb, where two works are done by just one action : Guest blogging!

LinkedIn has quite a professional look to it. It often daunts people who want to talk about their product or service. Here are some simple tips to get you started with your online marketing on LinkedIn

Answer Relevant Q's
Search for answers for the keywords related to your business.
You can go through some of the 'All questions' they can be very insightful read! More importantly see the 'Open questions', just to give you an idea of the relevancy, the results for searching social media just now were the following....


The relevancy and importance of these questions is amazing. So basically there is some really good, high quality information exchange happening on LinkedIn.

One simple way to market is to find questions that talk about your type of product or service and reply to it by mentioning your brand/service.
(I am NOT talking about SPAM answering where you answer is not relevant to the Q, but you still keep it to create a link!)

Status Update
I have configured my Feedburner to send out a tweet whenever a new blogpost is published on this blog. The prefix of that blog post tweet has a #in to it. This way every new blog post gets posted on LinkedIn via selective Twitter-LinkedIn update.

This post is visible for all your LinkedIn contacts to see.

Applications: Blogs and Slideshares
LinkedIn allows adding various applications to your home page. The bloglink and slideshare apps allow you to share your recent blog posts and Slideshare presentations.


Create a Group
This can be a good way of having a community. You need to figure out a niche that does not already have an active group. Create such a group and it should soon have quite a few members. Initially you might have to generate some discussions here but later it should pick up on its on.

Join Groups
Be a part of relevant group discussions, often you will find questions where you can talk about your brand or service. Be an active member of groups sharing your insights. This way you can then create a discussion yourself that talks 'around your brand' and it should not be marketing.

Network
Once you become active on groups. You will often come across people who are looking for information or blog on the field that is related to your brand/service. You can message them, and network about the field, your brand etc... this can often be really helpful and you can land up with a customer or blog review or just some interesting chat.

Any other tips that you might wanna add to this list?

One thing that I have seen after spending time with social networking is that one never really knows what goes viral and how! One such incident has started sometime last night. Women on Facebook have been pasting colors on their status updates.

Apparently those colors are the color of the bra those women are wearing right then and it is being done to spread the awareness of breast cancer!

It is not yet clear who has started this 'campaign' if it can be called that and whether it was truly for breast cancer. What is clear is that it has gone viral cause I have found many of my non-techie friends send out these updates. (I always check whether my non-techie friends know about stuff to figure out whether it is truly viral).

Moreover many top traffic blogs like Guy Kawasaki's Holy Kaw, Mashable have reported it and connected it with Beast Cancer! So while the actual campaign is kinda odd, as it does not spread awareness of cancer by itself, these posts sure do!

How much do you know about Breast Cancer? ( I scored merely 40%, really worth taking esp. women)

Quite often in social media you will come across the term 'loyal' community. While loyal is quite a subjective and proverbial type of word, in a general context it means a community which is there for you and is listening to you.
That is pretty simple to understand but it is still too subjective... I thought of putting down some very tangible points that would be the Signs of having a loyal community.
Frequent @replies or Pings
Sure anyone can @reply you on Twitter and pin you on Facebook, but these pings should be genuine, leading to a constructive conversation. Not the a/s/l type of a chat room ping but thoughtful and insightful ones.

If you are not really generating any of these then make it a point to at least connect with one individual on your community and converse with them!

Generate conversations
A constructive ping or @reply could naturally lead to a conversation. Are such constructive conversations happening often on your community? These conversations give you an idea of the person and might bring forward new ideas.

Reply to your Queries
If you post a query are people responding? With helpful suggestions and tips? This is one of the first signs of a thriving community that people are helping each other (and you) out!

Connecting on Other networks
Often after a few exchanges on Twitter people send me a friend request on Facebook and LinkedIn. This frankly is often spammy! However there are the few cases where you really interact quite a bit on Twitter and then move to Facebook, LinkedIn and/or chat. It makes more sense and is a step towards closer friendship.

Offline Meetups
These are generally one of the best way of connecting well with the community. Having offline meetups can lead to making very good friends who become part of even personal life, once this starts happening then your online community pretty much rocks, cause you have friends on it :)

Any other signs of a healthy, thriving community? Let me know!

I could have said Saad Akhtar, but surely for the title of Twitter person of the Year, we can refer to him as Flyyoufools, his twitter id.

(Moreover "Fly, you fools!" were Gandalf's words in Lord of the Rings and it is only right that they become famous outside the purview of the book)

Midday received more than 6000 votes in this poll, that has named Saad the top twitterer above offline celebrities like Sashi Tharoor, Priyanka Chopra, Gul Panag, Anand Mahindra etc...

His victory is interesting cause all his fame is only due to twitter and his comic site, most of the others on the list are offline celebrities (exception being @asfaq and his friends, which in a wider range also includes me)

Read a lovely article today about how the internet has changed writing in the 2000's. It brings to fore a really important aspect of internet, web and the social boom about how people are constantly communicating through the typed word! Formulating a status update, chat message or comment, typing it down and ENTER! Its out into the world, for people to read!

Especially in the younger social network savvy generation this leads to a developed skill in communicating/writing albeit in their own slangy or sms language.

At the same time, people are mastering more kinds of writing. Other technologies that grew more popular this decade required a different mode of expression: Instant messaging invited a breezy, fast-thinking tone; blog comments (again, the thoughtful ones) sharpened our debate skills; Twitter enforced even more economy onto our words. In all of these, we were nudged toward something all writers aspire to: a strong, distinct voice.

Read the Article!

How do you think social networks particularly affects the communication skills of a person? Moreover do you think that the newer generation will be better at writing and networking skills due to social media?

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After the #chetanblocks debacle (which is quite a hilarious exchange of tweets and sentiments flying high), Chetan Bhagat the Indian author of many books has again started a controversy. He claims that his book '5 point Someone' has not gotten enough credit in the Aamir Khan bollywood block buster 3 Idiots. I personally cannot really say much on this cause I have not read the book, but the movie is pretty damn good!

Even other celebrities have given their views about Chetan's claim including media person Vir Sanghavi. You can read his views on this controversy here.

What I find is that controversies can be magnified on Social media. People, maybe celebrities or maybe not, pitch in to take sides. Seeing their views a lot of people who otherwise might have ignored the issue will also think on it and maybe speak up, thus increasing the controversy's scale.

Also the medium allows people to directly address the person/institution concerned. Its not giving views to a journalist about an issue and hope the politician reads that paper but to directly address a tweet, makes a whole lot of difference.

With all the attention maybe the issue gets resolved.

Is All Publicity Good Publicity?

#Chetanblocks was trending on Twitter for quite some time. Without doubt it drew a lot of attention world over, but surprisingly when I looked at @chetan_bhagat's twitter follower count there wasn't much difference. A slight wobble in the follower count is all there is around 7th Dec when this incident happened. I got this graph from Twitter Counter.


Around 1st Jan when Chetan's credit controversy was raging there has been quite a jump as you can see in the second boxed region in the above pic.

So maybe all publicity is not good publicity on social media! Definitely bad publicity would lead to brand recognition albeit negatively, it apparently hasn't led to more brand followers in Chetan's case.

The second incident interests people and now they want to know Chetan's side I think that is why there is a jump in the followers. This follower increase could also be due to the interest generated in 3 Idiots movie.

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Generating buzz for a brand is big business and crucial work! Who would think that making a punny image on the Indian politicians could be the key to generating huge buzz for your business? Well with social media, you never really know, if the image is funny and appealing enough it would do just that!

Recently Faking News a website on satirical articles about Indian people and the government put up this pic on their twitpic (which they got from a reader).
Lot of people were retweeting it and it has got more than 3000 views! Not only that but some very prominent people online have read it and are joking, commenting on it.

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