It had to happen. Once I started a company and got down to recruiting, the first few attempts later I realized that recruitment is a hell of a job. Today 7 months down the lane I had the worst interview ever!
I explained to the potential candidate the work I would require from him and the guy saw no point in the activity. I tried to explain it.. but he really did not see any point. I thought that was fine considering his previous works had been in other domains - content writing and SEO.
I asked for alternative ideas that he might have, since he was clearly not happy with the strategy I had. Some of them were really crappy which could create a serious backlash for the client, others were good ideas but that was a different strategy altogether... and frankly nothing new. However, the interviewee promptly went on to tell me 'why not do something more constructive?' aren't you answerable to your client? Which was a bit too much! Considering that as yet I had not seen any concrete evidence of the person ever having handled a social media project before.
The interview ended by him telling me that he was ust trying to add value to the project. He was concerned about my reputation as a social media professional (yes, he used the exact words) and thats why he wanted my work to be good. After all this he kept insisting he was only trying to provide value to the company and client. He still wanted the job, But he was not a robot who would take instructions from me and not question them.
What I saw is the lack of any humility to take up work from another person. This is something that I have been seeing often even happening when I myself was an employee. Very often there have been colleagues who think they are too great for this mundane works we are doing. "The boss is dumb, I know better and my genius is being stifled" except that often its the case of not being able to be humble enough to first learn the work, and learn it well.
I don't know whether there are always such people or its the times where at a young age people get exposed to lot of information. Where they are thinking about major business workings read on a blog without having an ounce of real life experience. Then when they do get to the point of 'Real Life' work they think they should be on the board of directors rather than intern position.
Again online media brings important breaking news to the fore. Usually this happens due to technical reasons.. Where people tweet news and it goes viral, before traditional media can boradcast it. This time however its not the technology that is the cause for traditional medias silence over the matter. Twitter has been abuzz about this for more than three days. BarkhaGate has been continuously trending on the Indian twitter trends and often other names like Sanghavi have been seen.
The Matter
Open (and Outlook) magazines released phone conversations between N Radia (suspected to have a hand in the telecom scam) and media house biggies.. Barkha Dutt, Vir Sanghavi and others.
Hear the tapes.
These tapes clearly show conversations where the reporters and Radia are talking about sensitive matters and how it could be shown to the people via their media channels, lobbying for governments and more.
This cannot lead to fair news coverage
This was my first thought when I heard these tapes.. when the reporters are so involved with 'the news events' they really cannot be giving any sort of 'fair coverage' to the events.
Traditional Media biting its own tail
I was also thinking that the media houses are in a soup.. as can be clearly seen by the way they have clammed up about all these tapes and such. It seems B Dutt and Vir Sanghavi are giving some replies on twitter itself, but nothing has been reported in the main news channels (papers or TV). The thing is that if the matter is only trending on Twitter for days.. a large public mass will remain ignorant to these developments unless some newspaper or TV broadcasts it.
To be cool the traditional media for long have been publicizing every small thing about Twitter I dunno why, probably to be in on the 'big thing' thats happening abroad or because the celebs are now on Twitter... they probably never thought of such a scenario haha They are biting their own tail when they give publicity to the online media because as online media becomes more powerful and more of the 'mass' , the offline media loses power in society.
Journalists to keep a distance from actual event
This incident also raises deep questions about 'What is role of journalists/reporters?' 'how involved can they get in an event?' as they are also supposed to be covering it. Often such examples as below are cited where journalists act totally crass over only 'covering' an event and not taking part in it.
Can a bigshot journo/reporter who has many contacts high up, choose to use them or should they just keep covering events, situations and not take part in it. I feel between fairly covering an event and taking part in it, so as to become biased the line is very thin. Every journalist needs to make their own call.. but if tapes like these come out surely it will shake faith of people in media, if they had any faith in the first case :D
While Facebook Project Titan takes everyone by storm.. Facebook has been bringing subtle changes in its features...
Friend requests
Before there were two options confirm or decline (or some such) now the second option has become 'Not Now' which means it doesn't get deleted it gets stored for later!
Deleting the friend request can only be done via clicking 'Not Now' and then quickly 'I don't know this person' in which case they wont be able to send you another req. The option disappears very quickly so if we miss it then the FR gets saved for later god knows when... and prolly will show up in an email reminder a month later!
Page Insights
Another small feature has been page insights which shows up after every post showing percentage of feedback. I really like this feature... overall FB insights are pretty good. They can be much better obviously but better than anything Twitter or Linkedin are providing!
I don't have much to say about Project titan cause I wonder how useful it would be. I don't see it replacing Gmail. Moreover it will be quite sometime before which we can trust Facebook security and privacy features ot really use it as an alternative email service. Though I haven't yet checked out the feature so will wait for that.
Just saw the BlackBerry Playbook preview video. They have marketed it pretty well - "The first multiprocessing, multi-tasking professional tablet". Being able to use multiple processes simultaneously is its big edge over iPad.
This is something I always keep in mind about any clients I am working with. Whats their big edge over other products/services? Why should anyone use their product. In fact I have just realized that I should include this when I market my company!
Of course a lot of companies especially startups in India, think that 'making up' an edge will do! Which is really dumb, I mean the other day I came across this small dingy website that started a few months ago and they called themselves the no. 1 IT company in India! Are you kidding me?! If you wanna do that be smart and fudge your starting dates so that it looks like you have been around for a while :P and then of course make up a few clients too :D
Some time back Twitter introduced the promoted tweets which I am sorry I could not cover on this blog. Today there was a trending surprise! Disney's Toy Story 3 is a promoted trending topic!
Quite cool, I think!
I really like the fact that the 'promoted' is very obvious so there is no ethical issues where a paid tweet appears like its organic. It is a good integration of an advertisement into the twitter culture. To put it in @chin80's tweet,
What do you think about these new Twitter promoted ads?
Some interesting blog posts I came across on the iPhone4,
RIP, Macintosh
This blog talks on how Apple Inc. is now forgetting its laptop Mac and focusing on the iPhone type stuff. The only reason I don't think the Mac can be pushed out of usage is cause the iPhone screen is too damn small, and also the iPad's. They are very good for mobile units but really don't compete with laptop UNLESS...
Unless the sci-fi type idea of a virtual screen becomes real. Like if the iPhone5 or iPhone6 has a button which I can click to create a working BIG touch screen and keyboard in front of us, like the 6th sense device. That would ROCK and would probably soon through the Mac out.. including all other laptops and laptop type devices.
What would the iPhone4 cost?
Well of course that is THE Question, isn't it. To really understand how much of our lives it will impact. If the cost is 50k as suggested on the blog, thats quite high! Would you buy a 50k iPhone?
How this will affect the existing Apple devices?
Apple just announced its iPhone4 and it looks pretty Kickass! Take a look at the video,
- Video calls with amazing clarity and a front and back camera
- Better pic quality
- 5 mpixel camera
- Video editing
- Thinner with a bigger battery
Everyone keeps talking about Facebook, and how it is growing. Though a lot of the talk is also about its lousy privacy setting changes and all that.
Recently I came across an article that Skype is bigger than Facebook.
Facebook has a big habit of going around reminding everyone that it has cracked the 400 million registered accounts benchmark. (they say “users”, and I say “registered accounts” because I know numerous people who have more than one account for reasons such as forgetting their original login information) But over at Skype they might snicker at that number as the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service has bypassed 560 million accounts. Read More.
That got me thinking, about Skype. Recently I have started my own digital media company along with a friend in Hyderabad. The last time I met this friend it was about 3 years ago. We kept in touch via phone, but obviously for company planning phone talks become too expensive. So we have switched to Skype!
And.. its very cool, their color theme (sky blue!), service, features, user interface. All in all creates a very good product! This article however made me think of its marketing side. As the article mentions,
Skype and Facebook are very different creatures, but it’s interesting to see how large a company that provides an actually useful service can get bigger than one who’s apparent key reasons for existing are for you to share embarrassing photos of yourself and tend a virtual farm. Skype has also not felt a need to try to weasel its way into every corner of the Web with questionable tools that track your movement from site-to-site, or manipulate your profile because you click a “Like” button somewhere. Skype just exists. If you choose to use it, great, but if you don’t, they aren’t in your face about it.
This made me think that these are the aspects that make a 'Brand'. The aggressiveness in marketing campaigns or lack of it, whether they are pushy, do they provide value or do they play to people ego's, have they copied other services or are they original etc...
This is important, cause even though I use Facebook more than Skype I think FB is crappy. Someday if there is some other alternative I would gladly shift.
To change Skype I need too much reason. Only if another product is much better or some such would I change to that.
I was interviewed for this months, Yuva magazine. It was a feature on professionals who spend after work hours doing some social work. I must confess that I was a little tongue tied over the whole interview phone conversation.
Thats me with another HF volunteer Nupur in the cover picture. She chose to teach the kids a crazy, difficult origami heart in this class. I just sat there in the middle so I could get the picture taken :D
Paper rockets are more my forte rather than all this Dil ka maamla! Here is another photo the Yuva photographer took which is also quite cool!
All in all good fun, and Hamara Footpath gets some visibility this way!
Ning is a platform that allows people to easily create their own social networks or groups. I myself am part of many networks there, one of the prominent ones being cyclists.in for cyclists around India. Though the signing up is a lil problem cause I have to sign in everytime to comment or read discussions.
Recently they have announced they will be ending their free service which is quite sad. Must be a shock for quite a few people! Some time back there were similar ideas about Facebook that they might start charging. I think it wouldn't be a good idea at all cause
- Adoption
There are newer areas that are still slowly adopting the network who will now bypass it and look elsewhere.
- Elitism
Many people would get out of the network leaving it for 'elites'. This however could be a good thing, as it would ensure ingenuity of the members. Even if there were blatant marketeers there, then they would be only the high end ones :P
Here is an article on BlogHer that has a list of other sites that can be used instead of Ning to create groups or social networks. What do you think about Ning turning into a paid service?
Too much web stuff blogged yesterday. About time I shared my TEDxMumbai experience,
The event was at a well known place called The Blue Frog, where I had never been before. Yes strange as it may sound to some, my 'night life' mostly extends to staying awake for MahaShivratri :D
Well the The Blue Frog Audi is very nice, dim lighting but all in all gave a cozy feel to the place. I had met the speakers the previous night where the incident with Lakshmi took place, (I did not know it happened cause I was talking to a speaker about some great tips he was giving for Hamara Footpath. Dim that I am, didn't see anything strange in the entire room just walking out all of a sudden) Let me mention here that from what I saw, Lakshmi is a very nice person who speaks to everyone with a smile.
Coming back to TEDx, I had spoken to the speakers and thought they were pretty amazing bunch of people, but was not sure how their talks would go. As the day proceeded it was a little mind blowing in many ways.
The talks were fantastic which you will see as the videos come out.
Also to mention is that I have volunteered a lot and this was one of the best events I have helped out at.
The team I was working with were just so very accessible, and open to whatever I had to say. They were very friendly and helpful!
There were moments where I had goosebumps and tears welling up due to a touching talk, or cause I had bumped into someone really serendipitous ( I am not joking, will talk about some of the contacts I made and how they have helped me with my NGO in other blog posts) and there was a warm feeling of being part of a really nice team.
And so... that was how this Saturday went for me! I am now left with wanting to blog about each individual talk, but have time constraints.
I also need to sift through all the contacts I made and follow on the very, very helpful tips they gave for Hamara Footpath!
So guys, again if you haven't already, do check out TED.com, and stay tuned for the videos of TEDxMumbai.
The much awaited TED event for our very own Mumbai, is all set for this Saturday. It has quite limited seating, but even if you are not at the venue, you can watch the event live streamed on
TEDxMumbai Live Stream
The schedule of the event has also been put up so you can see the slots which you prefer if you have some other work you have to attend to.
TedxMumbai Schedule
Its been sponsored by,
There is this study which suggests that India is the 2nd most spammy countries in the world. With Delhi being the 2nd city and Mumbai the 6th city in the world where most spam originates!
Currently they send me emails that I have not opted for, and so many ads inundating my mobile inbox!
(Source)
 |
| Source |
I have been noticing this for some time, but poignantly now I realise that Indian newspaper articles that are published on the web for all to read have really bad Google Rankings! Its surprising considering how important these results are for the Search term!
Couple of days back I had written an article RIP Harish Maroliya, this incident has been covered numerous times in leading Indian newspapers. When I searched Google for any recent news coverage about the incident I found my blog article to be the 3rd result on the 1st page.
I noticed something similar while doing social media stuff for a client Amara Fashion House, events at this boutique have been covered a large number of times in the newspaper, however a Google search barely showed any of them. Even now a search for it will show all social network/website results not a single newspaper article!
Very surprising, newspapers are such a rich source of content. I guess they need to seriously work on their SEO stuff! I guess what also would help is to have a strong social media presence like the NYtimes.
Today was a sad day. It started with an SMS from a friend asking me to read the news about a classmate of ours. I ran to the paper, fearing...
Well in detail was printed a episode between a Mr. Harish Maroliya at an Andheri society who in a fit against his housing complex ran out with his gun threatening people. In his anger he shot some stray bullets, but then kidnapped a 14 yr old girl to his flat. The police were called and they tried to placate him, they broke down the door and entered. Harish sir (is how we called him) shot at the police and the girl(!! OMG). He died to a police's bullet. He injured a bunch of policemen and killed the girl.
He was a classmate of ours at Bombay College of Journalism. For sometime me and the friend wondered that it might be someone else, but not so. Another classmate confirmed that it was the same Harish Maroliya who we had studied and discussed and debated with many times in class.
The TED events are non-profit ones that bring speakers from various walks of life to share ideas that are worth spreading. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. Last year there was a TED event in India for the first time.
TEDxMumbai is a independently held event in the spirit of TED. It is happening on the 3rd of April, 2010 at the Blue Frog.
The registration was opened couple of days back. If you are interested you can register here,
http://tedxmumbai.com/register/
(The seats are sadly limited and last date for applications is 17 March)
To give you better understanding of the TED event (if you don't know abt it) or to share one of the really cool videos I have come across, here is a lady called Temple Grandin who was born autistic but who went on to become an animal behaviour expert.
Check out more videos on TED.com, most of them are if not mind blowing at least eye opening!
Another God Man has been exposed in India. Seriously I am so sick of these things! India can be considered to be a hub of myriad spirituality and religion. Its terrible when frauds start an industry of this!
One visit at Haridwar is enough to make one see such money grabbing and jerk-type saffron clad people, that made me prefer being an athiest when I was younger. This however is not the point of this blog post.
When Swami Nithyananda sex tapes came out everyone all over has gotten pissed and angry. #nithyananda was trending with some really hilarious tweets that should have shamed this bhondu (fake monk).
What I am wondering is that we as people are quick to anger and to start this sort of thing and get all our anger trending the topic etc.. but how often do we get stuff trending when it inspires us or brings us joy?
Its about time that spirituality or religion trends for the RIGHT reasons and not because there is some anger at a fake sadhu or because there is some fanatacism involved.
When I went to Haridwar its true that the pandals (saffron clad crazies) seriously bugged me, BUT the place was awesome! Sitting on the shores of Ganga seeing it flow by, watching the sunset, breathing the air can be something totally different. Travel further to the Himalayas and it has been the most beautiful place I have ever visited or could even imagine!
When do we ever get a trending topic like #awesomehimalayas or #himalayas with people just sharing how the place truly moved them in a positive way!
Are we as mankind quickly prone to anger and hate but hard-skinned to beauty and inspiration?
Wow look at this image of the internet cables!
Trivia: The longest internet cable starts from Norden in Germany to Keoje in South Korea it connects 32 different countries with 39 landing points!
A very interesting talk about what works on the Internet! As Alexis of Reddit explains any campaign needs to get the interest of people. Its not just about the cause or the gains at the end of the day. In fact it may not even be about your target audience!
Its about Being Social. People want to listen to stuff they are interested in.
Another example of such a campaign that I mentioned earlier is Stripey the Cub.
It started around the 1st of Feb and in a month it has close to 200,000 fans!! Stripey is something people find hard to resist!
Easy integration with Google
Contacts that don't read blogs but check emails are nowing reading blogs and commenting to them on Buzz itself! I have gotten comments from couple of such people!
Though I have heard some people complain that business contacts can read their personal blogs etc... I really don't think thats a problem cause you can choose whether or not to share a site on Buzz.
Rise of the Microblogger from the Inbox
SMS microblogging, using API's all helps people use Twitter, however so many people open a twitter account and it dies down, now they don't have to open an account! I have seen many of my contacts who are dormant on Twitter are all of a sudden microblogging on Buzz!
Easy commenting from the email itself
Comments to Buzz posts come as an email and I can reply to it from the email itself. Now facebook has that feature but its late in its coming, I have already stopped FB notifications for comments!
The ease of use is awesome.
No need to make contacts
All the email contacts and any person has some Gmail contacts for sure, are all on Buzz. Moreover they will get the notifications by default unless they unfollow you.
Often people sign onto Twitter and they don't know what to do, cause they don't have friends there. Especially in India I know many who barely have any of their friends on Twitter. With Buzz there is an inbuilt community already!
Makes your email into a Community!
Man is a social animal and Buzz makes the inbox into a social community. I am genuinely liking it, as I have seen some contacts I never see active on social networks actually update!
What are your thoughts about Buzz?
