The International Social Media Club Comes To Chennai
Agriya is a big believer in using social media to connect to our customers and listening to what people are saying about our company and brand. We have an active following on our Facebook page, which is updated daily with the latest news and gossip from the web development and online startup industries (please come along and say hi!), along with hundreds of followers on our Twitter account.
Our belief in using social media has meant that some of our staff have been actively involved with setting up the Chennai Chapter of the international Social Media Club which is due to hold its first public event on Saturday, 27th August. Since it’s the first event for the Chennai Chapter it will give a brief introduction to social media with some do’s and do not’s and then it will be followed up with a focused presentation on how to use social media for public relations.If you are from the Chennai area and wish to attend, please let us know on the Social Media Club Events Page. It would be great to see you there and will be well supported with many knowledgeable staff from Agriya in attendance. Since the event is being sponsored and supported by various companies from Chennai there is no cover cost and it’s completely free to attend.
The international Social Media Club was started in 2006 by two social media enthusiasts who had a vision to spread the word about the new way to connect and reach out to people. Their guiding principles was to promote media literacy, industry standards, ethical behaviour and to share the lessons they have learned from working on various online media campaigns.
The Social Media Club is a de-centralized, non-profit organization run from offices in New York. Any city in the world can start their own social media club and then apply to SMC to be recognized as the official chapter for that city. Each club is autonomous and run in the way the members see fit, but they can rely on the infrastructure and expertise from SMC – if a club has a large and very active community the SMC will even help arrange world renown speakers to come and speak at your event.
Earlier this month the Chennai Chapter organized an informal meetup, which again was strongly attended by Agriya staff. Here’s a couple of snaps from that meetup…
If you have any questions about the event, please post a comment here or visit the official event page. If you are located in Chennai, Agriya looks forward to meeting you there!
With such a Fragmented Geolocation Market, how does one keep Track?
South by Southwest (SXSW) is a group of immensely popular cultural festivals for music and film in Austin, Texas,that rouses tremendous interest in culture buffs everywhere, and this year’s edition, is set to start this week in March. The reason this is of interest to a tech blog like this is, that social media services get a tremendous boost catering to events of this magnitude where there is always something spectacular happening undiscovered that someone or the other needs to spread the word about. But in the months leading up to the festival, social media reports have been completely swamped with one new buzzword – Geolocation.With breakout services like FourSquare, and Gowalla leading the charge, and now with Twitter and Facebook getting in on the act, one has to wonder, if geolocation as a market really big enough to take all this action? To begin with, there are at least 50 new geolocation services coming up right now. And that is on top of the players that make it crowded market as it is. But some of them can be quite useful. Take the Twitter app SitBy.Us. If you are at a conference for a festival, it lets you see exactly where everyone is, physically.
Vicariously is another. It collects check-ins across all kinds of services around the city, to give you the exact locations of the people you’re interested in. It is quite Beta as of now though, as it isn’t really reliable. Or take AOL Lifestream – you don’t have to track specific people on it, you just need to check out the location you’re interested in, and it’ll give you the names of everyone who was there. And it works with Foursquare. So there are alliances forming already; and this can’t be a really good thing. There are so many competing services, that people will probably miss out on check-ins on a service other than one’s own. These geolocation services just need to get together and share their data, before the market gets too fragmented. Gowalla for instance, isn’t readily available on any of these third-party services. Google of course, has an answer – GeoRSS. As you could probably well imagine, the service aggregates information from all the location services for any given place.
When geolocation really takes off, we’re going to get used to a new way to look at a representation of our neighborhoods on the Internet. And if people are not to lose interest, new applications will have to keep coming in. But these innovators are going to have to offer new ways to people harness all the information. Facebook and Twitter could be answer to this problem. They are entering the geolocation space soon; and after the really throw their weight behind their vision of getting every service to come together.
Might Twitter have Peaked Already?
Most of what made the news about social media last year, certainly makes it in general, to appear unstoppable; specific reporting about Twitter in particular couldn’t find enough good things to say about the social networking major. Twitter seemed to have its game plan completely figured out – about 60 million registered users, real-time search deals with Google and Bing, and an overzealous crowd of app developers. You would think that a company that was at the very the the zenith of social media success, would find it hard to be written off, but a CNN report does just that.According to the report, Twitter hasn’t seen a major rise in its membership in six months; in fact, towards the end of the year, monthly visitors actually fell on the Twitter site. Of course, Twitter is countering this, saying that all the company lost were the casual users. The true loyalists, have been visiting Twitter in an alarmingly dedicated fashion, they contend. And of course, there is the old stand by – to use Twitter, you don’t have to visit the site; you can use any number of other embedded services. In fact, it has been estimated 70% of the Twitter membership, access its feeds through embedded specialized services. Twitter has declared that it wishes to regain the custom of users back on the home site, away from alternative ways.
But it cannot be denied, that Twitter has become so large now, that the fun, and intimate feel that it was well-loved for to begin with, is now, just not there. This might suffer further still,, when Twitter begins to try to serve advertising on posts in tweets. Twitter is barely 2 years old now; this young, and certainly inexperienced company will have teething problems, and it would be silly to write it off just yet. But expert users still insist today on saying, that there is something missing in Twitter these days – something that simply wasn’t felt, in its glory days. This coming year should have important lessons for all in how the social media, really works.
Location Sharing à la Foursquare – the Latest in Social Media
Facebook makes a business out of helping you tell people who you are; Twitter makes it out of telling people what you have on your mind at any given moment; there probably are other things about people that could be exploited for a business model, but Foursquare appears to have a particularly compelling status you can let people know of: where you are. They call this Geolocation; and Foursquare isn’t the only player in this field, that is expected to enable lots of new services. Twitter,for instance, has a new API that allows it too.When Google planned to map out in real time the spots in the world where diseases spread, they said that this proved stupendous new possibilities. Location-enabled Twitter, could actually alert you to how many location-tagged messages are coming in from doctor’s clinics in any given area. If you have a political cause in mind, say, veganism, you don’t ever have to wait for a poll of any kind to find out what part of the country would be the friendliest your views – you can merely check out the number of vegan-related political tweets coming in from any given location. And then you could move out there, either to live in, or to participate.
What if you are waiting in line at your local superstore for a hit Christmas toy that would be just the gift you need, and it is reported to be running low on stocks? If people at different locations around a geographic region could put out a location-tagged tweet about what kind of stocks there were to be found in their local store, that would give a whole new meaning to guerilla shopping.
Any time you are in a given location, newspapers online could send you stories that were reported from that area in the last day. Or, you could be given a running subtext on your mobile phone, by Wikipedia, of all the interesting stuff that it has on its records, that have to do with your location. And of course,if there is a new story being covered in your immediate neighborhood at the very moment you are passing through, news sites could alert you to those too.
Google’s Near Me Now, a service that’s a month old now, runs off your mobile, and automatically finds all the top-rated entertainment, eating places, or anything else you are interested in right on your screen. You don’t need to manually search for anything anymore. It’s almost enough now, to put Yelp to rest with.
Corporations find New Uses for Social Media
If the social media aren’t hot-houses of product promotion today it is not because there is no one in charge of any business marketing department out there who understands how to take the best advantage policies in a phenomena. At advertising agencies around the world, marketing experts can think of nothing other than the whole hoopla around viral advertising campaigns on the social media. The mad rush for advertising on the social media will happen soon enough; but perhaps this may not entirely be a good thing for the open and friendly community that Facebook and Twitter have grown a reputation for. With too much going on that is glittery and commercial, social media may soon cease to be particularly social, with the conversations, the quiet atmosphere, that will help people latch on to an idea and make it blossom. But for now, here is one way in which they really are using social media in the true tradition of the community.Consider the Fiesta campaign that Ford undertook on the social media recently. What Ford did was to round up a hundred regular people off the street, to drive and review the latest Fiesta on Twitter, primarily, but also on Flicker and YouTube. It did work exactly as they planned; viewership on YouTube has been through the roof. Twitter has seen nearly five million impressions of the whole Fiesta deal. But the more important question here is,has it actually sold anything for Ford?
Companies do not look to social media to help them sell anything, although it must be committed that their Fiesta movement certainly got a lot of sales inquiries from potential customers. With the whole buzz they generated from this, they got lots of user input on how to improve the Fiesta, and make it better for the American customer. It’s easy for those corporate executive types to grow too insulated from the everyday people who make their company profitable. They gain a valuable ability to actually see the dialogue blossom between the car designer and car user, filled with the kind of urgency, the emotion that goes with car ownership. This has to be one of the best uses that the social media have found so far. Of course, GM tried it recently, and they were not pleased. You do have to have a certain amount of basic goodwill to go on, before you go asking people what they think of you.
Why Businesses that Use Twitter can Come Off as Needy
Imagine the scene if you will: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey tries to drum up some financing capital for his great idea, and the venture capitalists keep telling him, “That sounds like a very attractive idea, but how are you going to make any money off it?” The trouble is that social media is about having fun with your friends; it is not about business promotion. Advertising and rallying a customer base around your product on Twitter may work, but not for every kind of business.
There are too many examples from the past of how businesses use a poorly managed attempt to look young and with it, and hurt the image of their business. Think the videogame chain owner in the movie Wayne’s World. A business school advertising degree cannot help anyone figure out how to be cool on Twitter. Some companies figure that they can just put their Twitter presence on autopilot: they just sent out their press releases to their followers on Twitter like automation. This can be the wrong thing to do for many reasons; people are going to figure out that you’re just sending them everything you have without thinking of the relevance to their lives. This is the reason people tune advertising out when it arrives by text message: it just seems so automated. The whole point of tweeting is to show people that you deal with them as a friend. You will need to approach Twitter as the unique opportunity it is, and think afresh each tweet, the way you would in any personal relationship. If you have an agenda to your communication, it will have to take a backseat to the personal message you have for them, every single time.
Many businesses that use Twitter, somehow feel that their feed couldn’t be considered happening, if they don’t have something to say every day.. You don’t want to turn into that annoying friend everyone has on Twitter that they don’t know what to do with. You can’t go into Twitter planning for it to boost your business. Social networking is a brand-new opportunity; not even advertising executives really understand how it works. The best you can do is to take tentative steps into it and experiment to find a solution that works for you. Experimenting is key; and it is pretty clear now that no single entity out there has really figured out the real secret yet to it.
Learning to Exploit Facebook at Journalism School
News establishments have watched the new social media overtake at their own game them a couple years now. And they are ready with their comeback now. The news majors are beginning to create new departments to exploit social media in their news-gathering, and traditional journalism institutions have formed their strategies on how to bring social media into the journalism classroom as a tool in news-gathering and production. Here are some of the top ways that journalism students today are learning to exploit social media tools.
News is reported on social media outlets by locals much more quickly than it can be found by a couple of reporters sent out to cover an area by a paper. Journalists are learning to use social media searches like SearchMerge, Twitter and OneRiot to be able to keep on top of things.
Finding a source for a story, a volunteer in a troublesome controversy, can be much more effectively accomplished with social media. You just put the word out on Twitter; with time you could have a list of informant followers on Twitter who could respond to your need for a source of information, quite quickly.
Journalists don’t need social media just to get their stories for the major news companies they work for; with social media, they can be their own publishing outlet. All they need to do is put out a blog, or gather a following for their honest niche-journalism on YouTube.The major media are doing social media on the side too as it happens; every major newspaper for example has a blog, and CNN has iReport.
Journalism schools today are encouraging students to get their wet building an online community; to pick a point of view and really put it out there. They gather a following and enrich the world with their work.
It can be heady feeling being given the tools of the journalism trade and a way to publish your opinion too. Responsible reporting is a major lesson being taught at journalism school these days; whenever one is a publisher and can change public opinion in a way that is beneficial or harmful to society, responsibility is certainly called for.
New Tricks at the Social Media Hubs to get your Address Book
It must be really important to new websites and established social media giants alike to get at your address book, to mine your contact list. Facebook and Twitter for example, ask you upfront if you would like to open your e-mail account to their view to help you identify which friends have accounts on their services. But they use sneakiness too. For example, once you let Facebook peek into your contacts, it will gather all your references and send messages to all of them with your name on the subject line with an invitation to them to pay you a visit on Facebook. It makes them think that you personally sent out the message, when in fact it was just an automated Facebook message that you had no idea was going out. Facebook can also be unnecessarily complicated when you want to get your name off the mailing list.
If these are the tactics the big boys have to adopt, consider what one will need to do if one is an up and comer, like WeGame.com. If a sign-up to WeGame.com gives them his contacts list, the website will proceed to send the misleading e-mail to every one of those contacts, with a message that asks them by personal invitation, to see some of your photographs on WeGame.com. When you click on the link, you will be taken to the site, but you will be asked to enter your e-mail password, for “identification purposes”. That of course is just what they need to do to get your contacts list and do the same thing all over again to everyone on it.
It is not uncommon for a website to ask you for your e-mail address and password for legitimate purposes. All of Google’s services ask you for your Gmail password for example. But it looks like these day, this model is being exploited for spam created by legitimate websites. It looks like we will need to go back to the old model where you just do not give out your e-mail and password anywhere at all, and just create a new one for each website afresh.
How Facebook is Useful Keeping a Sprawling University on the Same Page
The public relations office at most major universities usually have their hands full trying to attract the best students each year; and the best way they had of doing this was always by trying to court the mainstream press. But now they have social media, a way to bypass the papers and magazines, and to speak to their audiences one-on-one, directly.To begin with, the universities can do the most obvious thing, maintain a presence on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter for each academic department, and release regular news of the latest and that goes on in each. A star recruit for a professor at a department would be good material for Twitter, for example. Award-winning research done by star pupils is great material for a university’s image too.
Free stuff is great for a reputation. There are some universities that broadcast on their own YouTube clone page, all the lectures and seminars that take place, for students who happen to miss one or two. Needless to say these are very popular auditions for the university, for potential students.
Inviting scholars on TV interviews as experts in attendance, is great fodder. The more the TV channels get to see professorial experts in action on camera before they put them on TV, the more confident they get University websites are great places to see lots of video clips of scholarly professors speaking on their topics of expertise. The star professors who look good on video, can quickly catch the televisions channels’ interest, and bring great viral interest to the university.
Some universities organize seminars, and invite student participation, expressly to broadcast on YouTube. Everyone gets more serious and earnest just to know that their scholarly interaction is really going to count this time.
Social media just seems to get more and more meaningful with each passing day. Having universities use them though has to be the most powerful of any use discovered so far.
Chrome Frame: Injecting New Life into Internet Explorer
Most ordinary folk get by on the computer with a few seat-of-the-pants skills. When you don’t really know the difference between an operating system, a browser, a search engine and “The Internets”though, the first sign of a complication could spell trouble. Google estimates that more than half of all computer users have no idea what a browser is, and what kind it is they use. This is a big problem for Google; how are they to get people to upgrade their old IE5 and IE6 browsers to the latest versions that are capable of running the best new Google applications like Gmail and Google Maps, and more importantly, Google Wave , when users don’t even know what a browser is?
The answer is a version of Google Chrome, a browser that has been out for more than a year now, and has seen no more than 3% in market acceptance. People may not aware of what a browser is, they all certainly know what a plug-in is, thanks to Adobe Flash, a plug-in that has achieved a 97% installed base on computers worldwide. Google’s idea in converting the vast numbers of browser upgrade holdouts is, to present their new browser Google Chrome not as a total browser they will need to upgrade to, but as a plug-in for their antique beat-up Internet Explorers.
The thing that will achieve this, is Chrome Frame. Google is working with web developers around the world who are similarly frustrated with the resistance people have to upgrades. From now on, anytime a Web user looks up a page that has complex JavaScript and HTML tag needs that an old Internet Explorer can’t handle, the webpage will serve up a pop-up that will ask the user if they would like to install a Chrome Frame plug-in to better display the page with. When the user clicks Yes, the pop-up will proceed to delete the old Internet Explorer’s coding on the computer, and replace it with brand new Google Chrome innards. It will still look like the old Internet Explorer, but it will function like the brand-new Chrome.
Google Wave is a particularly demanding Web application; it is supposed to work off the Internet, but work with the responsiveness of a desktop installation. This just would not happen with an older browser; and it makes it very important that a way be found to get everyone to upgrade. Google doesn’t actually profit from Chrome; donating its function to someone else’s name really doesn’t hurt Google.
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