@dvocable

There is a very interesting report on Indian youth trends at Ingene.  What stuck me the categorisation of the Indian youth:

1. The Bharatiyas: 67% of the Indian youth who lives in the rural areas with least influence of globalisation, least economically priviledged and high on traditional values and highly Bollywood influenced.

2. The Indians: 31.% of the youth who have moderate global influence but still rooted to Indian family values.

3. The In’glo’dians: Minimal in number but globally inclined, exposed and affluent. Always try to be different.

So thus when it comes to social networking, the report reinforces what many of us intuitively know. The site is filled with the aam junta or the Bharatiyas. The In’glo’dians are rapidly moving to Facebook, and distancing themselves from the masses.  This, coupled with all the recent controversies surrounding the site, ‘Orkut is no more cool’.

I remember recently creating Orkut and Facebook groups for two of our clients. Both the Facebook groups have been growing and the conversations are happening. The Orkut groups just refuse to get active. I now tell my colleagues to think extra hard before including Orkut on any client campaigns.

What is also interesting is that the top layer of the In’glo’dians are moving to Twitter, and soon after some years Facebook might just end up getting the same fate of Orkut. And witnessing how Orkut had peaked in India and fall, it won’t be long for another wave of change to happen.

I couldn’t agree more with what Lakshimipathy Bhat wrote in the Financial Express that the Sunsilk Gang of Girls, often taken as the benchmark on digital campaigns in India owes a part of its success to the massive offline mass media support it got. Often for our clients we most of the time try to integrate digital support to PR and marketing activities. I think to pull off really big digital campaigns, it is now time for the other way round. Big bang digital idea, which has its heart on the web,  executed well online and supported by offline mass media. And of course, supported by mobile phone marketing as well.  For instance, a simple online contest can grow many fold when we add in an element of receiving the entries through SMS or voice calls.

We have heard of rock bands giving away music for download. Now what I think is really interesting is that the new movie 3 Idiots is going to be available for download on YouTube, though not likely to be free. I would like to wait for the price, and if it is high, I don’t think it will change anything on the illegal downloads front that they are hoping to change.

What is also interesting is that this can set a trend for other movies from Bollywood to be available for download. And while Youtube is the perfect platform, I wonder what will the guys at movie rentals like Seventymm and pocket friendly movie DVD makers like Moser Baer say about this.

So a TOI blog wrote about Haagen Dazs’ ‘Exclusive Preview for International Travellers’ banner it got almost 800 comments pouring in and a stream of Twitter discussions in wave of protest. There is also this story about the online protests. What do I take away from this?

a. The immense influence media blogs have today – Yes, we  have big bloggers and we have media bloggers, the latter that have come out recently but yielding the reach of its already established brand platforms

b. Crisis can broke out online and it’s not something we read about a brand in the US, it’s happening here – We saw this during the Mumbai attacks last year when the news was first reported on Twitter. Now we have a blog covering the story, irrespective of it from a media house.

c. The potential danger of giving out a diplomatically worded media statement in a crisis instead of being genuine. The media statement of yesteryears need to change.

Once for an internal newsletter, I was asked, how is the internet changing issues and crisis management. I was thinking about what I wrote apply so aptly on this particular situation.

Critics, customers, activists, and other influencers today have the opportunity and the tools online to easily voice their opinions across to many people. They can rally supporters online who in turn can help an issue turn viral across networks and communities. Seemingly unharmful online discussions can spiral into crisis situations for organizations in no time and participants can quickly take sides to an issue.

Another important emerging trend is real time reportage. When Mumbai was under terrorist attacks in November last year, it was the consumer generated online media like Twitter and Flickr that broke the news. Digital communicators today need to think quickly, be an active listener, and understand the culture of the online communities where influencers are active at. Organisations on their part need to provide their digital communicators the authority to engage with online influencers, especially during crisis situations, without having to go through lengthy approval processes.

Saw this news about movie star Aamir Khan coming on to a Facebook fan page and live chatting with his fans on Sunday. I missed that, but thought this was another nice way to build buzz around your Facebook community. I wonder how many people got logged on to that page at that time to chat with the star, and how many members got increased in the community post that event.

But judging by the number of current members in that community, which stands at 95,000 plus, I think the purpose of that live chat was to just promote his new movie, 3 Idiots. So from Twitter, now Facebook fans…celebrities are on a  high to leverage social media to the fullest. Good going.

Update Dec 22, 2009:

A tweet from Ravi Kapoor mentioning the number of people on the chat.

Check out ebay Census, an amazing tool from ebay where you can see over a Google Map which part of India buys what stuff online.  Very interesting to see small towns are among the top cities in India.

So while Delhi shops majorly for loose Gemstones-Diamond, USB Drives, British Indian Coins, Indian Stamps, and wrist watches; my home town Manipur shops for laptops, Puja Accessories-Rudraksha, Desktop PC – Motherboards, loose Gemstones-Diamond, and digital cameras.

Thanks Alootechie for the hat tip.

To those who came in late, ’social media comments’ or ’social media reactions’ have been coined to refer to the comments, reactions, and conversations around your blog post in other social media sites like Twiter, Friendfeed, Facebok, Linkedin, etc. Today with the plethora of social media sites around, it is not guaranteed that your blog readers will leave their comments on your blog itself. Rather they might Twitter it, post it on Facebook, discuss on Linkedin, and the list goes on. As a blog author, you are definitely interested in checking up all these comments. But how do you track all of these? Going manually to every site and checking  what your readers said would be a waste of time. What if you could just gather all those comments and toss it on your blog?

In comes the social media comments aggregators. The basic version of this was started perhaps by two companies, Co.mments (now gone) and CoComments, which allows you to create a profile page that will aggregate all the comments you have made on different blogs. These were limited and confined to just blogs. They wouldn’t bring your comments from Twitter or Facebook.

Today, there are tools that can do those.

Backtype: Backtype offers a Wordpress plugin that does the aggregation for you. It gets comments from Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, and backlinks.

ChatCatcher: This is another like Backtype bringing Twitter posts around your posts linking back to your comments section on your blog.

Chirrup: This is another tool that you can use to aggregate Twitter posts and display it on your site.

Disqus: Comment management system Disqus also does the same thing with a host of other features to manage your blog comments.

However after checking out these tools, I realised that the conversations captured from other platforms are through one factor only – the inclusion of your post url. Suppose someone just tweets ‘ Palin has a nice post on social media aggregation’ on his blog today’, it might not get captured because the url of this post hasn’t been included. What we need next is now aggregators that can index social media conversations with intelligence and bring them back to your blog. Anybody listening?

We are creating Newscast, a news release distribution site at India PR Blog. Everybody is free to register and submit their company/ client press releases. This is how you can start:

1. Register with Newscast

Visit the registration page and fill in your details. It is important you use your full name as your username, like ‘Tina Anand’, with space between the two words, and you use your official email and not Gmail, Hotmail, etc. This is to help prevent abuse in the system. Please fill in your company name, address complete with phone numbers, and a short profile of yours.

When you are through filling up, click the ‘Register’ button. Then wait till you receive two emails from us. The first one will contain your password. The second one will mention that your account has been activated. Then, you can login to your account. Note that your second email might take an hour to a day to pass through a review by a Newscast editorial member.

The registration is a bit lengthy as we want to be sure of those who we allow to submit news releases on Newscast. But once the registration is done, users can submit and publish news releases directly on the site, without any intervention, though the editorial team will constantly check for abuse in the system.

When you log in for the first time, please review your contact details are correct and add a picture of yours and update your profile. It looks nice. It will come out at the bottom of every release. See below.

2. Submit your news release

Access the submission form, fill in the news release details, preview, and submit. Your news release is live on Newscast.

If there are any bugs you encounter, please write to the team here. Happy posting!

• #PRdebate: Can PR step up to the digital challenge? – If by ‘the PR industry’ you mean traditional agencies or ‘the dinosaurs that run PR who don’t get the significance of digital’, as James Warren put it, then i agree PR has already lost. But if we’re talking about the growing band of smart new agencies and the intelligent approach of the larger agencies of which a few were represented last night, then no. These sorts of comms professionals know they still have a lot to learn, but they are building digital skill sets by hiring in experienced individuals or looking beyond the boundaries of what would traditionally be PR. Yes, the social media specific agencies and digital agencies have a lead in understanding the environment, but they also need to skill up in terms of comms strategy and delivery.
• The Great Online PR Debate (#PRdebate): PR Agencies are Losing the Right to Learn – The skills required in the Online world are very different to those practised in Media Relations. What clients need in the Online domain is a set of direct service offerings. They need direct management of reputations amongst communities and forums. They care for direct, bottom line events like sales and bookings conversions, and other direct, tangible outcomes like traffic acquisition. This involves a specific set of direct Online skills: Online people talking directly to lots of other Online people (customers, partners, influencers, stakeholders, etc), not people talking through people (the media). These aren’t Media Relations activities and I don’t think that a traditional Media Relations agency can carry them with any level of assurance. More to the point, most traditional PR firms aren’t comfortable with this kind of work.
• Ignore Twitter? Major brands learn they’d better respond — and quick – Los Angeles Times – “Our social media marketing approach is that we want to be everywhere our consumers are,” said Michael Donnelly, Coke’s director of global interactive marketing. “There’s significant risk in being perceived the wrong way.”
• Difference between PR and publicity – Regis McKenna was great at PR. Yes, he got Steve Jobs and the Mac on the cover of more than 30 magazines in the year it launched. That was just publicity. The real insight was crafting the story of the Mac (and yes, the story of Steve Jobs).
• How to Demo Twitter – One of the great challenges for anyone who loves Twitter is to show other people why they should love it too. You can start off by showing how businesses use Twitter. For example, AmazonDeals increases Amazon’s revenue, and ComcastCares provides support to Comcast customers. Zappos promotes the caring brand image of the company because its CEO, Tony Hsieh, is doing the tweeting.
• How to create a hosted Wordpress blog – a step by step guide from booking the domain to getting your blog seen – Everything you need to know to create a blog, seo it, and promote it well. This has a step-by-step guide and dozens of resource links.

Facebook provides us an engaging platform today and I see a lot from the PR fraternity participating. Let’s hope we can make use of this to discuss some good PR and marketing stuff. Join us at the new PR community on Facebook.