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1. Social Media – A free introductory guide to the world of blogs, wikis, and other new media. Select PR case studies also included. Get it from the Corporate Engagement blog.

2. PR Measurement – A free PR measurement book by KD Paine on measuring relationships with the traditional media, social media, investors, and other communities.

Spotplex is a new social bookmarking site with a difference. Blog posts are rated and listed on its homepage just like in Digg. However, the difference here is that the rating is done not by user votes but according the number of page views that post receives.

All you need to do is register your blog and install the Spotplex script on your blog and you are done with it. The more number of times your posts are viewed, the higher are their chances of getting into the Spotplex front page.

I’m quite excited with this new model.  Posts can actually be rated by how popular they are on the Web and not by a select number of voters on a particular site. Soon, many bloggers will have this on their blogs and we can see some good results soon. Sometimes I wonder if this model has a chance of becoming as popular as the big league sites of today like Digg.

However there is one concern. I wonder if it will only be the posts of big blogs with the largest number of readers that will always make it to the front page. This way, it becomes very obvious which posts will be rated higher than another, and it becomes just another plain news aggregator.

Check out Spotplex here.

Chacha has been around for almost a year now and it is already a Webware 100 winner. For those who are new to Chacha, it is a search engine where you can chat live with human guides who will help you get relevant search results. The Chacha guides are supposed to be those who are skilled at searching online information and who are knowledgeable on the subject that you search for. Chacha describes itself as ’the ultimate fusion of computer technology and human intelligence’.

Now over my recent chats with Chacha guides and some blogosphere searches, I came to realise many interesting facts. Much has been discussed about this service already. While some praise the service, others are full of brickbats.There have been testimonials of someone recollecting how helpful a Chacha guide was in helping him get proper medical help when he was having a back pain.  Chacha guides also recollect how they have help certain users in getting their searches right for over 15 minutes when they are paid to search for only 6 minutes per query/user. Then there have been counterpoints saying that one Chacha guide didn’t even know what Digg was.

The Guides system – how it works

According to the guides, there are around 40,000 Chacha guides in the US who are paid around USD 10-15 per search hour. Anybody who is skilled at online search with good knowledge about particular subjects can apply to become Chacha guides. Upon admission, they are given a software that they can install on their home computers. This software helps them access the Chacha database of sites that they can use to search for information to answer queries of Chacha users.  The amount of time they spend searching through the Chacha database is monitored and counted and they get paid according to that. They can also refer their friends to become guides and can get referral commission out of that, just like the Amway chain.

User searches – how relevant are the search results

I did a couple of searches like ‘best chicken tikka masala in New York’ and the guides showed me a site which lists the top 10 Indian restaurants in New York. Not bad. Then I did a search for the ‘Best PR agency in India’ and it showed me the link to some PR agency that I didn’t think was the best answer.

I searched for terms like blogging hacks, which the guide asked me to define what is a hack. When I did and requested for a peekaboo post hack, he couldn’t find one. My friend did a search on my name and she got transferred to a page that said ‘ you are shown this page because you have used abusive content’ or something like that. Since when has my name become an abusive term?!

One guide told me that search queries are transferred to agents randomly. Ow! That is bad. I was hoping that Chacha would have some intelligent software solution like an intelligent call center ACD that can transfer specific queries to specific guides based on search terms and skills sets of the guides.

So if I get hooked to a smart guide, I’m lucky. Otherwise I can get frustrated explaining to the guide what I am trying to search for.

Another concern is local relevancy. Since all the guides are in US, how familiar will they be with certain searches and keywords of other countries? Say what if I want to know something like the best Manipuri resources or dishes on the Net? Not every best sites come out top of Google, but I might know of certain regional sites that has tons of information on that topic.  

Why would I search in Chacha

One question I often wonder is why should I search in Chacha – the Chacha guides takes times to search for results on their end. Why cant I just Google it? Maybe those who use Chacha are those who don’t know much about Internet searches or who are plain lazy.  Other than that, why would somebody search on Chacha? Maybe someone who has searched what he could on Google and still has not found what he was looking for.

Looking from this angle, maybe then most of the searches that comes to Chacha will be advanced searches – not ones that can be done easily on Google. So we might need specialised guides – who are skilled in certain areas. So if I want to search for something on blogging, may I should be given the option to choose or get connected to a guide who knows pretty much on blogging and knows various sites about blogging. For instance, if I become a Chacha guide, I might be able to search quickly and provide information on social media or PR related queries.

Now when users are looking for advanced answers, they might not necessarily be looking for answers rightaway. Maybe they can wait for sometime- say a day. So instead of just searching through the data base that moment, Chacha can give an additional option wherein users can send questions to Chacha on the email. This question can be circulated among Chacha guides who are good in that particular subject and their answers can be sent back to the searcher.

Chacha also need to internationalise its system. By this , I mean hire guides from out side the US. Maybe a chacha.co.in for India. This will help search more relevant local information rather than searching everything from US. Also, employment opportunities for many.

Overall, it is a good service – and many people like it apparently. Nice and unique idea. Only that I need to ask myself now – can I rely on Chacha everytime I need an answer that Google cant provide?

By the way, Chacha also has a offshoot called ChaCha Results – directory of quality results of searches done on Chacha. This is one site where webmasters would like to get their sites added to.

If you are new to the social media, there are a couple of great sites that list and reviews lots of new web 2.0 startups, provides lists of such sites categorised in groups. One of them is Mashable.

And recently it has come out with some good lists of web 2.0 sites and applications that you simply cannot afford to miss. Check them out.

1. Blogging Toolbox: 120+ Resources for Bloggers – A wonderful list of tools, advice, forums, and other resources for Blogger, Wordpress, Movable, or independent bloggers.

2. No Download Required: 30+ Apps That Are Killing Microsoft – List of web alternatives for MS Office

3. The Ultimate RSS Toolbox – 120+ RSS Resources – A detailed list of everything about RSS – readers, RSS to email convertors, plugins, directories, pingers, tips and hacks.

4. 90+ Online Photography Tools and Resources – Don’t have Adobe Photoshop? No worries. Here is a list of services you can use to edit your pictures online.

Also, Mashable allows you to create your profile page wherein you can link to your blogs, and other social networking sites, acting as a sort of social network aggregator. For example, here is my page. Further, you can have your own personalised Mashable page that will list the pages at Mashable you have been to, your profile, picture, links,and Mashable friends.

Another Indian PR blogger, Jai Xavier Prabhu David, Director & CEO, PRHub, Bangalore, writes for PR Week’s The Global Account. Good for us, readers.

An excerpt -

I would characterize the PR business in India as being in between the second or third stage of evolution if we were to take the US as at the fourth stage.

The key trends that we see are:

- outbound work out of India is likely to leap as Indian companies go global with a vengeance, acquiring and establishing presence in markets overseas; infact this will change the contours since it then positions India not as a market for local PR services but a market where global PR itself originates

- more and more maturing of the local industry with the processes and systems getting more aligned to the global ones

- increased footprint of the large global players in India and most large and medium firms getting aligned to some global network or the other over a period of time

- the large global players unless they grow inorganically cannot dominate the marketplace in India for some time to come due to variety of reasons

- there will be some attempts at vertical focus though it has not been a successful model in India

- the fee levels will raise in India to global levels or atleast closer to it

You might like to see this one also from Deepa Thomas, Manager, corporate communications, eBay, India:

An excerpt-

The big change in India in late 2006 and 2007 is the large number of television channels in English, Hindi (National language) and in various regional languages.

Another emerging medium is online. Online news sites are no longer just picking up news from a print newspaper or a wire service, but instead focusing on writing their own stories, doing their own interviewing.

Online sites include general interest ones as well as advertising and marketing focused news sites whose daily news updates go directly to tens of thousands of marketing folks. They have also started the concept of breaking news and sending out alerts on stories that they know about first.

Related post: Indian PR blogger writes for the PRweek Global Account blog

There are hundreds of social networking sites today and hundreds more are coming up. Often we find ourselves registering for a couple of these. Some of our friends are in places like Orkut, while some are in other places like Linkedin or Facebook. Over time, we keep on getting invites from friends at new social networking sites and finally we find that we are everywhere. Often in such situations, we lose track of which login ID we have created for a specific site or which friends are where.  

There are more to handle. I am talking about the social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. Add to this the picture and video sharing sites like Flickr and Youtube.

Almost every web 2.0 sites today requires you to create a login ID to use its services. How do you manage your identities in the midst of all these? We can simply jot down our login IDs on a MS word file or use a service like Roboform. But what if we want our friends to know where all places are we? What if we want to access and manage all these identities and sites from a central place?  

In come the social networking aggregators. These sites basically lists all your social networks in one page. Some of them offer advance services such as getting content from all these sites like your list of friends or all your friends’ scraps in that page, so that you don’t have to visit each site individually.

Below is a list of such social network aggregators. Check them out: 

8Hands – This is a desktop application that allows you to offer you to send IM your social network friends, share your online content like YouTube videos, Flickr Pictures, etc. with them by a drag & drop feature. It can also show a summary of all your online social networking activities with statistics like the number of friends in each network, activity meter, etc. 8hands will notify you upon receiving any comment, message, friend request, new video or any other event on your and your friends profiles.

Ex.plode.us – Explode is a social search tool that lets you find others online irrespective of which network they are on, as well as those running their own sites and blogs. You can also create your profile on Explode where other users can leave comments.

HypeIt – You can create a HypeIt profile page where you can display a mash up of all your sites and share it among your HypeIt friends. You can vote on their stories on their profile pages, just like in Digg. The most hyped stories get on to the HypeIt homepage. 

Minggl – Minggl is a browser toolbar that lets you organise your social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook allowing you to decide what to show in these sites by password-protecting sections of your profile. You can maintain a single friends list from various sites and email them directly, without the need to navigate to their profile pages.

With Minggl, you can put your profile information in little portable suitcases called Minggl Notes. When you edit these notes, Minggl can push all those changes to other sites/profiles automatically. It is currently available by invitation only.You can request for an invitation.

Naymz – Naymz allow you to create a personal profile page where you can include a brief about yourself like profession and location, and have the links to all your profiles at various social networking sites, blogs, and other sites. Naymz will promote your profile page at the top of Google and monitor it through its ‘Reputation Monitor’ that will let you know everytime your name appears in a new blog, online news article, or Web page.

There is a Naymz Premuim Service that will provide detailed reports of visitors to your profile, top search engine placement in Yahoo and MSN search, and customization of your search engine listing description. There is also a Premium Plus service that will provide SEO service to your profile page.

OtherEgo – This lets you create a Otherego profile page on which you can import all your social network pages, blogs, and sites that you like. You can browse your sites through tabs just like in iGoogle or Netvibes. You can choose which parts of your profile is shown to the public.

Profilactic – Allows you to create a profile page and a mashup of your sites and share it among your friends at Profilactic.

Profileomat – Formerly known as LinkMyBox, Profileomat allows you to list all your personal websites, social networks, blogs, contact info, photo albums and other profiles in one profile page.

Profilefly – Allows you to create a profile page where you can stream all your links and contents from your social networks, blogs, photo sites, emails and IMs, social bookmark sites, personal websites, etc. and share it among your friends at Profilefly.

Profilelinker – This allows you to link your social network profiles in one central location. You can also get message alerts from your favorite social networks, get updates on your friends, search for users across several networks, get your horoscope, weather, sports news and more.

Snag – Snag aggregates information from your accounts at various social networks. Instead of having to visit each of your networks separately, you can find friends, read messages, and get updates from all of your networks in one place by using Snag.

Socialnetwork.in – With this, you can aggregate links to all of your profiles into one page and widget (coming soon), including social networks, chat, VOIP, and other communities. You can aggregate links to social sites you wish to monitor or your friends on various social and chat networks. You can also rate social and chat networks using a 1-10 scales and comments.

Socialurl – This allows you to create an online profile through which you can search for old classmates and love matches, share photo albums online, and control who sees them, or keep them private. You can also organise to-do lists and bookmark favorite sites, and add additional profiles including EBay, Facebook, Myspace, LiveJournal, Yahoo360, YouTube and more. You can also upload your YouTube videos to one profile.

Tabber - This is an online address book on which you can import your contacts from your web email accounts, IM, Outlook, MySpace, Digg, etc. If you ever need a friend’s address, phone number, need to remember their birthday, etc, you can go on Tabber and look it up. It also allows you to get Google map directions to your friends’ houses, organize them through the use of tags, keep up to date on what your friends are doing online, and be alerted of any changes your friends make to their personal data provided they are members of Tabber.

Upscoop – With Upscoop, you can find out which of your contacts from your Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL contacts are on which social networks. You can also add the Upscoop Social Networks application to your Facebook profile to show off what social networking sites you use.

Surfing the Internet today involves a lot of visits to Web 2.0 sites. You want to read blogs, submit interesting items to your social bookmarking sites, check out the latest videos, and pictures uploaded by users at photo sharing sites. To remember all these site urls, either we use our browser favorites, a social bookmarking site, or use a feed reader. We also install select individual bookmarklets of social booking sites in our browsers to do the job.

Then we conduct tons of searches on the Internet – not only on Google, but dozens of blog aggregators, and other social bookmarking sites – as we want to search for not only news items or simple Internet searches, but among blog posts, forum comments, uploaded videos, and pictures. To do all these, we go to the individual search sites or use the search box in our browsers, or use a browser toolbar such as the Google toolbar or a Yahoo toolbar.

How about we use a single toolbar to do all these mentioned above? Enter Web 2.0 toolbar – a browser bar that lets you do dozens of things including:

What I liked about the toolbar is that it offers me the option to access all these Web 2.0 daily essential visits at one place in my browser, so that I don’t have to type any individual urls or log on to my feeds reader. The toolbar has versions for Inter Explorer and well as Firefox.

1. Submit interesting items to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Spurl, Blink, Yahoo MyWeb, Reddit, Newsvine, Mag.nolia, and many others.

2. Read feeds of popular blogs such as BoingBoing, Techcrunch, Digg, Netscape, and many more.

3. Search on 32 search sites such Google, Wikipedia, ebay, Youtube, Dictionary, Blogger, etc. and also on the site you are on.

4. View job boards like CrunchBoard, GigaOM Jobs, etc.

5. Links to popular videos pages like Youtube Most Viewed, Google’s Most Viewed videos, etc.

6. Links to popular pictures pages like Flickr Most Interesting, Today’s New Webshots Album, etc.

7. Interesting items on the PRWeb site

8. Gadgets like weather, email notifications, etc. There are more widgets available.

9. It can also place a MS Office shortcut menu on the toolbar itself, so that you can access your favorite Notepad or MS Word from the browser itself.

Just one recommendation I have is that it should allow users to add their own specific feeds, search sites, and links to the list already there on the toolbar by default. This way, users can customise it to suit their taste.

Custom make your own browser toolbar

Now having written this, I did some more searches and realised that this toolbar has been created with a service from Conduit that lets webmasters and bloggers create their own toolbar. You can in fact create your own toolbar for your blog with this free service from Conduit.

The Web 2.0 toolbar is fine as it has got most of the sites covered. But just in case you are one of those who are keen to experiment, head on to Conduit.

Mobile service provider Airtel has tied up with UK-based Affle to provide SMS 2.0 – a new generation SMS service in which SMS messages will have colour fonts and lots of better looking emoticons. The ads are supposedly going to be shown on the mobile phone after someone sends a SMS, in those few seconds when you see the ’sending message’ icon.

Tolerable so far! But if this becomes like you have to listen to an ad jingle before sending a SMS message, I have serious doubts how many users would opt for it.

Before this, we have seen two new start ups based on a similar consensual SMS ad marketing model – mGinger and mGarlic. These services allow their users to receive ads of their mobile phones and pay them in return. The ads served are based on the user’s specifications.

How does this work? You get 20 paise for each SMS you receive on your mobile phone. You can get around 10 SMS ads in a day. Then, you can refer your friends to the service. For every ad that your friend receives, you get 10 paise. Further, for every advert that your friend’s friend receives, you get 5 paise. The chain stops here – not like the Amway chain that you can extend endlessly :-) You can also specify what time of the day you can receive ads.

These services are new and so you might not start receiving ad messages instantly though.

Now I wonder how many users would like to participate in such schemes. The people at mGinger and mGarlic insist that it is more for the information that users should sign up and not entirely for the money. After all, how much can you earn accumulating Rs.2 per for 10 ad messages a day. But where is the lack of information? Today, if I need anything, I just need to search on the Net. In addition to that, we are anyway bombarded with ads on TV, newspapers, magazines, billboards, etc. However, this is just one way of looking at it.

On the other hand, there might be mobile phone users willing to receive such SMS messages in the hope that they can at least recover their mobile phone expenses.

Recently there was another news that talked about Cellebrum planning to pay its consumers royalty fees for ringtones and pictures composed by them if they are downloaded by others users. 

The story quoted the Cellebrum spokesperson saying that they are piloting user-generated content in Punjab and Karnataka. Users can generate their own content and upload it to their data centre. Each such content will be protected through a username and password. On any content that is downloaded the user who generated that content will be paid a royalty.

Seems like interesting times for the mobile phone users. More interesting times for the advertiser. 

This one is for Google newbies as many pros would be knowing it already. But myself being a newbie, I thought I might share this one, as I recently stumble upon it.

Using Google News to get the online coverage of clients in a particular country or publication

We all use Google News and News Alert to get information on new developments. As a PR professional, many of the News Alerts I used is of clients’ coverage. However, if we are handling MNC clients, then often many of the coverage are on news portals outside India.

What if we want Google News Alerts on only coverage of our clients that appeared on India-based news sites? What if we want to see the coverage of our clients on only a particular news portal? Or what if you feel like comparing the coverage you got for your client vs the coverage its competition got? :-)

We can get that too. It’s simple using Google Advanced News Search.

These are the steps involved:

1. Click the ‘Advanced news search’ link below the search box on the Google News site.

2. Now when you see the ‘Advanced search box’ like the picture below, type the name of your client in the ‘Find results-with the exact phrase’ box. Then type ‘India’ in the ‘Location-Return only articles from news sources located in’ box.

3. Now when you click the ‘Google Search’ button, you will get only news coverage of your client from India-based news portals.

4. You can subscribe to the ‘News Alert’ of this configuration (link on the left hand side of the Google site), so that Google sends you updates whenever there is an additional coverage.

5. Instead of the country, you can type the name of a publication in the ‘News source- Return only articles from the news source named’ box if you want to see coverage on that particular site only. You can see a list of the top news sources of Google in this recent post here.

Note that Google News gives you news links on the current month only. If you want to see older coverage, you have to use the News Archive search service.

Now if you want to skip going to the Google Advanced Search page and use only the Google News Search box instead, you can type the following to get the desired results:

“xyz abc” location:india (where xyz abc is the name of your client. You have to used the quotes too) For example: reliance location:india

“xyz abc” source:cde (where cde is the name of the publication. Put an underscore between words if the publication source is more than one word)For example: reliance source:business_standard

Using Google Trends to study online searches on our clients

What is Google Trends? This is the Google explanation – With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

How can we use this to compare searches for our clients and their competition? Let me demonstrate with a simple example. I typed the terms – Hutch, Airtel (two competing mobile phone operators in India) – on the Google Trends homepage. This is what I got:

The graphs of online searches conducted on these two terms:

Further below is the searches by countries:

and cities:

and languages:

So anybody wants to have a look at these results and try use it for planning the next Tier II cities campaign?

1. India’s first real-estate TV channel – India’s first 24-hour TV Channel on real estate will be launched next month. The channel’s promoter, Alliance Group, has made an initial investment of Rs 100 crore. This channel will provide comprehensive, latest and authentic updates on all aspects of real estate, including infrastructure, to viewers all over the country, the south and south-east Asian region and Gulf States.

2. Text 100 opens office in Chennai – Headed by a long-standing Text 100 employee, Joshy Mathews, Text 100 Chennai opened its doors to existing clients including Nokia and Nasscom.