Tag Archive: new media

Can Twitter work as a usable media dashboard?

Posted Jun.14, 2010 under Media dashboards, Microblogs

My online life revolves around Twitter.  I get all my industry information from there. I connect with so many of friends via Twitter.  I connect with other industry professionals on Twitter.  I get my breaking news from there. But what Twitter hadn’t been for me till now is a centralised and organised source of news not unlike a magazine or blog. So, it was a pleasant surprise when I saw the dashboard for the football world cup on Twitter.

First impression: Looks slick. Very clean UI as usual. Woohooo!

On deeper testing: I can only think of one thing. What am I supposed to do now?

It does not solve any purpose for me. The tweets that are whooshing past in the activity stream are either very irrelevant or they move past too fast. How are they selected? On the basis of most no. of RTs? Or most no. of followers of the original source?

Well, whatever it is, it is clearly failing. There are some tweets which are not about the world cup and some which are not in English (how hard can transliteration be, man?) :

A decent feature seems to be the Top Staff Picks which is a collection of the best Twitter handles (experts and players) on the topic.

The individual page for each page sounded promising but turned out to be a bigger disappointment, full of bots, hashtags and random information.

What is happening here?

The current model is way too reliant on trusting individual users and then streaming their tweets to the visitors. What Twitter needs here is a better search based UI which is good in its algorithms and measures influence properly.

Otherwise, I am afraid Twitter will always be what it is in this dashboard: Noise.

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Lack of dedicated and professional new media teachings in Indian curriculums

Posted Mar.01, 2010 under Industry status

I myself being a recent graduate (engineer) I know how frustrating it was to learn everything on my own. I think the Indian schools and colleges, right from primary to top IIMs and IITs are very very deficient right now in teaching our country’s students about the new media.

I have seen people coming out from IIMs with MBA in journalism and not knowing what Twitter or Blogs are. Suggesting some ideas from my own personal experience – please put in yours in the comments and work together to change this!

1. What should be the right age to expose a student to new media technologies?

I think it should start from 7-8th grade itself which is the usual age when kids come in touch with computers and internet. And if they can be moulded in the right way, some percentage of them will grow up to use Twitter and Facebook in the right way and not to send ‘fraandhsip requests’ to anon chicks

2. What are we doing about teaching in B schools and journalism schools? What about the top marketing schools like MICA?

Any thoughts or personal observations here? I find the results woefully low. Even small efforts like guest lectures are not being taken.

3. Can we implement an industry / government defined course?

We will have to find interested colleges. Professors. Some survey of readiness of students to this topic. Then work together to define goals and results of the course. Its timing etc.

Amit Klein, Product Manager at Directi is doing some pretty good stuff in this regards. teaching online monitoring and marketing at NMIMS, Mumbai and ISB, Hyderabad. He’s been experimenting a lot even using Google Wave for internal collaboration.

Wat do you guys think? Can this dream be realised?

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The underbelly of Indian social media industry

Posted Jan.26, 2010 under Industry status

Having been on the hunt for a social business executive to join our team here at Superchooha, I have had the pleasure (and sometimes horrendous) experience of meeting over 40 applicants in the past 3 weeks. Some shocking facts that I have come to realise from the experience:

Disclaimer

I’m not a social media guru / evangelist / stalwart in any way; but hell yeah! I know when things are going the wrong way. And yeah, this is not a rant – I am seriously surprised at the situation.

The industry is in a disorganised mess

  • For most of the agencies out there, social media is about Facebook and Twitter (and maybe Foursquare 2 years down the line) And this holds true for firms who have been around for more than 2 years now. Shame.
  • Weekly deliverables are in terms of of X updates on Twitter and Facebook! Billing is generated in terms of number of conversations achieved (relevant or irrelevant)
  • Huge amount of mailers are sent to randomest of email databases to increase the number of fans on Facebook

Well, if you have fallen prey to this system of doing social media then:

Is this really social media strategy / consulting / execution? This looks more like social media outsourcing to me!

People are stuck on social media marketing

  • I deeply, truly believe that the SMM hype bubble is about to burst soon. And it’s gonna take the whole industry down with it unless radical changes are made. Brands will soon realise that Social Media is no more the cool thing to impress your boss. We need to start giving actual value to the organisation – externally and internally
  • Though measurables like hits / time spent on the landing pages are good ways to judge success; they fall short of the actual business results that strategic social media can provide.

Conclusions

  • Expand your viewpoint. Move away from the SMM bull**** and harness the true power of communities within and outside your organisation to deliver results.
  • Move social media away from being platform-centric to results-centric.
  • It’s not about the technology, it’s about driving a cultural change from within the organisation.
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