Funnily this blog 'professional' as it maybe has a food section. It could have been astronomy, books, movies or any of my interests but not all cause otherwise it would be too diluted. So its work stuff and food stuff :) So far only maggi recipes but now also other 5 min dishes I make,

Chopped Cabbage + Cream (Amul will do) + Mustard seeds (yellow ones) + salt, pepper & spices
Whirl it all in a mixer that is good for making juices or chutney. Everything comes to gether in very tasty creamy dip with slight mustard flavor.

I wanted to make stuffed paratha with it but it was too watery so add some bread pieces and churned it again. Then the texture was good and could have some tasty parathas. It can also be used to make vadas, wait thats too Indian word. You can make Cabbage and Cream Balls!

:)

A few days back came across a book reading session by an author at a nearby bookstore. The author turns out to be a Facebook friend and fellow blogger Amit Haralalka. Lately this is happening so often.

Another friend of mine Ankesh Kothari co-published Strategy Daddy sometime back. Its really surprising for me, cause for some reason I and probably others along with me tend to allot 'writing books' to other more older folk. Blogging is great... but actually writing a book.. naah!

Sahil Parikh, I have worked with at DeskAway recently published his book The Saas Edge and I have been seeing blogs and book reading sessions for the book all around the place! In fact I actually helped him with some data research for it!

So lately even I have been thinking of writing a book. For us bloggers its actually quite simple cause we can just blog it and then publish it. Saves all the tension of 'writing a book'!

Let me know if anyone can help me publish the book, I already have some ideas for it. ;)

Apart from that this is one more impact of social media where you start seeing so many other achievers that it inspires and actually makes you think 'hey maybe I can do that'! Its the same way I feel when I meet all those teen rockstars who have their companies going while they are yet in junior college!

Recruiting community managers is very difficult. One salient quality that a cm must have is to be able to understand the existing strategy that is being followed for a community, and then follow that. If any changes need to be made they can be done along with whats already being done. A revamp can be done ONLY after talking to clients and relevant project managers.

This is something I am currently facing major problems with, despite giving a very clear and in-depth brief on what needs to be done in community. The new cm wants to do their own thing. It is sometimes a pain to get them to actually follow existing strategy and lot of them get fired or quit because of that. If they quit thats better cause the ones that don't just do work thats frustrating for me!

What new employees need to understand very simply is that current strategy is something that has been approved with client and is being tried out. Maybe it is working, maybe its not. It cannot be changed except by talking to client and giving necessary reasons why what needs to be changed. They cannot go ahead and make changes to it on the field without letting anyone know and getting approval in advance!

More than anything I find that community managers need to have an intuitive, intrinsic feel of the project. What sort of brand image are we putting out? Is it 'fun and party-going'? If they get that right then its not a problem but if they skew it for eg. to a 'gossip channel' then there is a problem. Discord is bound to rise. This is something that is a problem with qualified, college students, experienced SM people and all of them.

Running a company I need to think then, how to achieve consistent community management? This question does not apply to just social media companies but also to companies managing their SM activities in-house, cause even they might see a change in the person handling the social media activities.

Came across the lpad facebook page sometime back. Was struck by the interactions it had. Content was interesting and lot of responses by fans. Getting engagement on pages is tricky sometimes it comes quite swiftly at other times its tough. Reasons for it could be varied, and often require deep analysis.

So I spoke to Mohit Bansal, founder of lpad about the behind the scenes of their FB page,

What is your view on social media marketing for small companies and
startups. How do you think it helps lpad?

I think it is a must have for any business in B2C category, even if their customers are not there on facebook. I believe a successful marketing strategy would focus on staying on top of the customer's mind and thats exactly what facebook allow businesses to do.

For L-pad, facebook has not only allowed us to stay in touch with our existing fans/followers/friends but also allowed us to attract various startups/entrepreneurs to be part of this community.
We have straight leads from facebook too.

How did you go about having such a happening page on Facebook with
high engagement?

Thats a compliment for me. :)
Nothing special, just one update a day and read every comment. Strike conversations wherever there is a chance.

This is where he is just being modest. When I spoke to him he was a lot more forthcoming with his thoughts. He has spent quite some time understanding Facebook dynamics about technical aspects like Facebook page updates algorithm. Which updates are shown on fans wall etc...

Basically a good mix of,
1. relevant content
2. conversational
3. right target audience

Let me know which brands social media presence you think rocks!

Sometime back the concept of crowd sourced communities came to the fore where people realized how awesome they can be yadi yadi yada... and now a days we can see these communities around and often their popularity tends to be infectious :) One very novel example I came across lately is txtWeb.

A sms platform where 'developers' can make apps for varied purposes. The term developers may give wrong impression as the interface is so simple that any lay man can just go and make a small app for their keyword.

One quick example, SMS @priyankawriting to "9243342000" to get small snippets about my whereabouts/happenings which I can easily update by logging in to their website :D

This initiative by Intuit is also very interesting as it brings a lot of services/features available to smart phone users to the SMS friendly phones - which are all mobile handsets. Thus opening up many windows of possible interactions for the large mobile user population in India.

From simple apps to tweet and update facebook , there are wikipedia apps to find quick meaning of terms, app to chat with online friends (browser to sms) and a lot more. For this World Cup there would be slew of apps that can help cricket aficionados - stay in touch with game developments even with crappy handsets with SMS.

The Facebooks Questions feature is amazing! It adds a totally new level of interactivity and virality to the social network.

It immediately reminded me of Quora which is mainly a QnA site. It allows asking questions on a page or personal profile also. This question goes out as a poll or ask a detailed question.You can then message your friends to answer the questions something like Linkedin offers. (This is hugely viral for a FB page admin to use)
When replying to my friends question I can choose poll option and also give a detailed reply. I can then publish the answer over to my wall. Another good thing is that I can see all other questions (should we raise privacy concerns here?) when typing my own.

I thought this would be a simple feature but on exploring I think a lot of things can be done using it. What do you think of this feature?

Had this interesting conversation with @annkur and @unitechy about brand communities. I don't remember exactly how it started but basically I was differentiating between pure fan communities and brand managed communities.

It all starts since I became a part of this Wheel of Time community Its really rich with interactions and discussions. People are coming up with theories about the story and making graphic images of what characters might look like, even short movies. In short its like a brands 'wanted' social media presence, except that it is a fan community. TOR books or even the author don't really own it. Some time back when the 13th book got released there was this amazing offline-online game where people had to collect some clues left by the author which would open out chapter names of the upcoming book. Totally cool! So this is where there was an official representation of the brand integrating with the pure fan community. So it made me think about how social media approach would differ when working with these brands who already have established serious fan communities.

This would be applicable to brands which have serious, passionate fans like for eg: DC comics. So when movies are being released Iron Man, Thor and so on the brand can consider serious integrations with pure fan communities which are already present.

You can check out the discussion we guys had on twitter here, I think there was more to it but this is how much has been pulled out by the app,
http://twitter.theinfo.org/20406162138599424

Its a pretty fascinating area of thought. One aspect of social media is to Build communities, but when there is a serious community like this already live then it would be a different sort of ball game to bring about integrations and to align the brands official community such that both communities can go hand in hand.