Facebook will surge ahead in India

I was just reading an interesting news-story, published in today’s edition of Economic times. It compares Facebook & Orkut in India. The story which quotes data from Vizisense.com, predicts that inside 7 months Facebook should be able to overtake Orkut.

There was a time, when Orkut was a dominating force in India. If you trackback to 2005-2006,  you hadn’t even heard about Facebook.

The article rightly compares the Orkut > Facebook transition to Hotmail > Gmail’s. Although it emphasizes Orkut’s rapid decline in India some of the comparison parameters are quite interesting:

Comparison table: Facebook & Orkut

What are your thoughts on Facebook’s phenomenal growth in India?

Preventing Social Media Spam

Image by Josh Russell via Flickr

Sometimes it feels really sorry to see the tactics of a select group of folks in the name of using Social media as a Conversation Medium ! By-and-large this is applicable to Twitter baring the first couple of points.

The Problem

1. Email spam: They  continue to send you bulk promotional emails, although you never opted-in for their newsletter. On the name of customization, they start the email with your name prefix and believe they are not spamming your email box.  To your surprise, you are not allowed to copy & reproduce their email although they didn’t take your permission at the first place.
2. Blog Spameeters: They start a one-dimensional blog to blatantly promote the poor client’s new product offerings.
3. RTing & RTing: They create multiple accounts on twitter, send tweet from one id and then re-tweet from others. End-result = The user ends up thinking that there is a great conversation going on.
4. Follow mania: They follow all the celebrities and all those who have more than 1000 followers in a hope to attract some eyeballs.
5. Twomit dosage: While it is the lifeline of many, they continue to talk about the color of their underwear on twitter. Eating food, walking dog, brushing their teeth. It’s a moral obligation.They all know twitter has a threshold when it comes to maximum requests at an instance and maximum no. of tweets. However, they never refrain to curse twitter every time it suffers from an outage.

The Proposal

1. Architectural change: Won’t it be interesting if twitter tweaks its structure to introduce a cap on the no. of tweets in a minute, an hour or in a day. At a technology level, it would protect against reaching the threshold & at a business-level it could be a possible revenue model for the users, where-in the pro-users could pay to cut the limit.
2. Third-party app: If (1) doesn’t hold true, a third-party vendor could build an app. for this and sceptical organizations could roll-out this app to save productivity costs. It is a controlled approach towards embracing social media medium.
3. Auto un-follow: A possible variant of (1), if a user witnesses too many tweets from select IDs in his timeline, he/she could have an option for automatic un-follow.
   1. Simply speaking, a user could set a time interval for e.g. ‘5′ minutes
   2. Within that which he could also set the max. tweet counter for select user-ids
   3. At any instant, if an id exceed this limit he/she is automatically un-followed from the user’s list.
   4. A user could also have post un-follow actions. For e.g. whether he she wants to permanently un-follow an id or whether he/she wants to automatically follow back an ID after specified time interval.

Off-course, if we’re to define a business case for this approach, the above model needs to be elaborated & thought about closely. But the real case-in-point is not the solution ! Instead we need to think deep-down and consciously ask ourselves (you & me) included, are we contributing to the spam/noise and making it hard to differentiate from the Signal?

What do you think? Is this something that could help in cutting down the spam? Are there viable alternate propositions that can be thought about?

Enterprise 2.0 Conversations

Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

Over the course of December, I have been closely following Jacob Morgan’s blog-posts on Social Media, emerging Enterprise 2.0 trends and the variety of issues companies face during adoption. He has been having a series of exciting conversations with industry veteran Wendy Troupe and some of the points discussed are absolutely amazing !

While I would highly recommend all the ‘5′ posts, here are some interesting pieces that I really like:

1. “If there is no “R”, then the “I” becomes a “C” and that cost is always going to be too high.”  I think ROI should always be a consideration but I don’t think it should be the only consideration. [In a presentation by Aaron Julius Kim about ROI].
2. A tool is much easier to adopt than a strategy.  With a tool you simply “turn it on” and see what happens.  A strategy requires a lot more work and is much more complicated.
3. “A fool with a tool is still a fool”. [In a presentation by Aaron Julius Kim about ROI].
4. In a small organization, the collaborative barriers are thinner and more easily overcome. In a larger organization, adoption of new methods is often stunted by ownership silos.
5. You need to speak in terms of “supporting” rather than “changing”.  “Change” implies that people are doing things wrong.  “Support” however, implies that you recognize value of their efforts and you want to help further those efforts. [In context of strategic principles of Enterprise 2.0 implementation]

To read all the posts in this series please visit http://www.jmorganmarketing.com/

o read the other posts in this series please see below:Strategic Principles of Enterprise 2.0 Implementation

Enterprise 2.0: Paradigm Shift or Incremental Change?

Enterprise 2.0 Tools vs Strategies

Why do Enterprise 2.0 Market Predictions Vary so Greatly?

Criticising Social Media ?

Criticizing social media?

Are you doing so for any of the following reasons:

• Because you think this is a buzzword which will eventually die-down
• Because your mind tells tells you that there’s nothing to social media beyond twitter, blogs and Facebook
• Because every second person you have seen on twitter claims to be a social media evangelist or a catalyst
• Because you do not seem to understand the differences and similarities between digital media and social media

Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

• Because you are fed up of blog-posts talking about socialmedia ROI & budgets and don’t understand what is the ROI
• Because you see brands jumping on social media bandwagon and you fail to understand what they’re gaining out of it
• Because you witness endless talks about conversations, communities, content
• Because you are trying to understand the meaning of terms of ’social’ and ‘media’ and combined together
• Because you discuss your problems with consultants and every time you talk to them there’s more confusion than ever before

Rather not do it as it is more a perception issue than anything else !!  Understand  Social Media as a Philosophy and its application as a Culture.

Entrepreneurial resources

Customer development methodology

Good product manager bad product manager

Customer development process

Minimum Viable Product

Project rifle

Research writing methodology

Conducting market research

Twitter’s Retweet feature (beta)

Many of you might have already seen this, but just-incase you haven’t here is the update. Finally ‘Twitter’ has come up with the ‘Retweet’ feature which changes:

• Current style of Retweeting via twitter
• Seeing retweets (there’s an all new way of seeing retweets)

The Retweet announcement from Twitter

Retweeting the new way

The only catch is that this feature is still  in beta, so not all of you might be able to see this.