An article titled Social Networking plagues India Inc which is based on a survey conducted by Assocham just goes to show that they’re really sleeping or threatened, while their world’s moving forward!

A recent national survey conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India’s (Assocham) Social Development Foundation revealed that 84% of Indian employees who have access to the world wide web are showing symptoms of internet addiction. They spend more than the “normal’’ amount of time online, and show signs of irritability when they are interrupted from surfing, concludes the study.

With 93% of youngsters saying they were aware of social networking sites, and most averaging an hour a day on MySpace, LinkedIn, Orkut, et al, employers are looking at a productivity loss of nearly 12.5% every day. “The growing use of browsing sites can be dangerous for overall productivity. IT companies have already installed software to restrict use,” said Assocham secretary general D S Rawat said”.

And this, from a psychiatrist and HRD trainer:

“On the other hand, being constantly logged online and indulging in ‘faceless’ communication is detrimental to one’s health,’’ he said. Dr Rajendra Barve, psychiatrist and HRD trainer concurred “This mindset is making people a slave to machines,’’ he said.

India Inc, and Dr. Barve, you must be kidding!!  Build firewalls, and people will find ways across them. Kill their access on their computers, and they will turn to their mobile phones as your study has shown.  How will you block that? They will never stop, because the internet is a way of life, with its own ecology, culture and social behaviours that more often than not, enhance our world. It is a part of my world, and yours, and theirs. It is not a fad that will pass and it’s definitely not about “faceless communication”, nor is it a drug you get addicted to.

You must learn how to embrace it, and use the flows to your advantage in this emerging knowledge economy. Here‘s a start. [picture credit: Gaping Void].

Update: Bonus Link – Can an organization not be ready for Enterprise 2.0? [via @dhinchcliffe]

Aaah finally …. a Twitter shortcode for India which means we don’t pay international SMS charges! Nice. Thanks to Moksh Juneja for pointing this out. The shortcode is 5566511.

“Twitter asks you to verify your phone so we know that you’re you. You’ll never be signed up for mobile updates unless you really want to be. To get mobile updates, add your phone number to your Twitter settings page, and verify your number. Here’s how:

1. Log in to Twitter.
2. Click the Settings link in the top navigation bar.
3. Click Phone&IM.
4. Enter your phone number in the field provided.
5. Wait for the verification code to pop up and text it to Twitter at 5566511 (for India). In the US, use 40404. In Canada, use 21212. Anywhere else, use +44 7624 801423

Bonus Tip:

Also know that you can shut text messages from Twitter off at anytime by replying with “off” (and back on by sending “on”). And you can even specify that it turn off automatically at night.

More ideas on what you can do with Twitter at the Big Juicy Twitter Guide and at Mashable’s Top 12 Twitter Apps on your Phone.

So I tried it out – sent the sms – I see it on my twitter homepage on the web. However, I got this strange sms back from “55665 Reply cntr.defined” which says “This service is not yet enabled” – what gives???

Other thoughts – given recent Twitter outages and timelags, I wonder what’s going to happen when about 240 mn Indian mobile phone users start using this! Also, anyone know how much each SMS will cost?

I was at a meeting today, and I learnt that Orkut is banned by the organization, but not Facebook and LinkedIn.  I was told this is true in many organizations in India.  The perception is that Orkut is frivolous  and people spend lots of time playing.  The funny thing is,  I have never spent as much time on Orkut as I do on LinkedIn and more so, Facebook.  There’s just so much more to do at Facebook than responding to scraps, and sometimes just looking around and replying takes up an hour or two.  The guys banning these social networking sites in companies are way behind, as usual!

[Image: Hugh MacLeod - Gaping Void]

Wow!!!!  What a great collection of articles – I haven’t yet read them in detail but the titles themselves are really promising – covering a whole range of issues in the area of social networking – politics, interpersonal relationships, civic engagement, trust, copyright, community, cultural differences, mobile, And all seem to be backed by real ethnographic research, often rare to come by.  Thank you for this gift danah!

I first saw a demo of Flock at Pop!Tech in 2005 – I remember feeling it was cool because it brought together so many tools into one space. And I’m re-visiting Flock today, withe the launch of Flock 1.0 beta.

What I like:

I’m liking it – it is like integrating my desktop-browsing-bookmarking-tagging-publishing-social networking all in one. More specifically:

• It just looks so much more appealing than most other browsers – brighter and more vibrant somehow
• The sidebar is really pretty cool – i like the People sidebar a lot – it lets me login to my Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube accounts and it displays pictures and latest updates from my friends and community. That’s quite special – because it’s all coming into my space now, without my having to go to my Flickr or Facebook homepages, or use IM or Twitterific to tweet. And all this without actually having to download toolbars and extensions. It also lets me send updates, load pictures etc so easily. That’s a big wow to have all of this in one place.
• I like the Media bar too .. its lovely to actually just have pictures up there .. makes work so much more fun! And the drag-and-drop features.
• And the Clipboard is cool too – I could clip an image I wanted into it and Blog it from there.
• The blog editor misses some things, but I like the idea of having one editor that lets you publish to several blogs across blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress (which I use) right from your browser, without having to go to each blog.
• I found I could post links to and tag in del.icio.us in a similar manner as I do from Firefox – that’s good.
• I got myself the screenshot extension – it’s cool – just click that star on top! Am waiting for more plug-ins and extensions to be developed around Flock.

What I miss/don’t like in Flock 1.0:

• My biggest grouse is that the blogging editor is very basic. Am not sure I will really be able to blog from there – no picture uploads, not much WYSIWYG formatting possible. For this post, I had to get the logo from someone else’s blog, and use their bandwidth to be able to display it here. Still, I found a way to insert the image without having to upload it to Facebook or Flickr – I got into image view at the post where the image was located, and dragged the image into the inbuilt Clipboard in Flock. Once there it gave me three option – view, blog and delete. So I clicked ‘blog’ and it opened up in the blog editor. That’s fine for images that are already on the web, but what’s really required is for it to allow me to bring in my own images saved on my computer, or even better, straight off my camera or mobile phone into the Clipboard! Also, it doesn’t allow you to post to multiple categories.
• My second grouse is that although I have changed my default search engine in Preferences to Google, I am always taken to the Yahoo search page. That’s not good.
• Teeny third grouse – when I use livesearch on the top right corner of the browser, it opens up on the same tab I am on – I want it to open the page in a new tab

Other random thoughts and my watchlist around Flock:

• Is all this activity in the side bar going to burn huge holes in my pocket – here in India, we pay a lot for half-decent broadband and there are limits on your usage (I pay approx. Rs.1700 ($42) every month for bundled usage of 7.5 MB – anything over that is charged to me at Rs. 0.90 ($2.25 per 100 mb’s).
• Am wondering too whether it’s going to eat up my memory, and slow down other applications.
• The other thought I had was with a browser that’s so intuitive, and one that can become a real dashboard for your own footprints on the web and for your community of friends, am wondering what happens to measurements and web metrics like time spent on site, page views, unique visitors, click rate etc. RSS and Newsreaders are already redefining how we search and navigate the web and forcing people to redefine how they measure popularity and ‘success’.

Am posting this from the Flock editor now .. let’s see how it works!

UPDATE:  that was easy .. and was quick too to show up at my blog.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock1.0, browser, flock1.0review,

Am speaking at the World Women’s Forum on the 11th and leaving for Paris tonight. Thought I’d just bring back a post I did a few days ago at Mosoci, on our session. There’s also going to be live-blogging from there, and I will do my bit too.

Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society Third Edition will focus on “Building trust in our societies”. I’ve been invited to participate at the session on “The new social networks: What do they mean for trust and the way our societies evolve”

Description:
The information and communication technologies are creating new communities with an increasing impact in shaping and disseminating perceptions. How is this new trend affecting the way our societies make some key choices? What is the impact on social cohesion as – paradoxically – a new sense of virtual community is coming along with a growing sense of isolation? Are these new forms of socialization leading to an even more narrow sense of identity, or, on the contrary, identities that build bridges across communities?
Speakers:
Bruno Giussani, author, entrepreneur, European director of the TED Conferences, Switzerland
Susan Kish, VP Network & Community Practice, Xing, Switzerland
Anne Lange, Senior Executive Advisor, Cisco Systems, USA
Dina Mehta, Ethnographer, Blogger and Social Media enthusiast, Director with Explore Research & Consultancy, India
Caroline Mille-Langlois, Senior Vice President, Communications & Brand, France Telecom / Orange Group, France
Moderator: Maria Cattaui, Member of the Board of Directors, Petroplus Holdings; Vice-Chairman, International Crisis Group, Switzerland

I’m excited to be meeting a whole new set of folks at this forum – the only person I know of on our panel is Bruno who writes the excellent LunchOverIP Blog and is a friend on Facebook! Maria, the moderator for our panel, asked for some points of discussion for this session — some of her thoughts were:

“For instance: seen from the point of view of an analyst of this new social network phenomenon, and from the point of view of India, is this having the same kind of impact as in Europe or the USA? Is it an accepted form of social networking? Do people in India willingly “share” their private views? Easily collaborate in virtual settings?”

I expanded this list to the following:
I understand your need for defining questions … and some of the examples you have listed are really good ones to discuss. Just to give you a perspective on my own personal feelings on this area of trust and intimacy in the online world, I’d encourage you to check out this article I had written a few months ago for a newspaper in India – The Mirror of Change: This is Who We are Becoming. I’d also like to share, on another note, how these social tools online are bridging gaps and bringing communities together in unprecedented ways … my experiences with the tsunamis blogging completely changed my world – Social Tools – Ripples to Waves of the Future.
I think a lot of the talking points are in there – and not really exclusive to India – the cultural landscape of India is undergoing a huge change today – and one of the key catalysts for this has been the mobile phone, which is in many ways our gateway to the internet. The other one, to a smaller extent (simply because we are still waiting for it to tip), still one that’s bringing huge changes, is the internet. And it is the social nature of the web that is emerging as one of the harbingers of change.

So some of the things I would love to contribute to in a discussion (outside of what you have already listed):

– why do we say software is social today … what are these tools that enable what I call ‘technology with heart’ —- blogs, wikis, facebook, newsreaders, youtube, social networks etc — how do they foster better flows in communication, collaboration and community — how do we use them to determine our circles of privacy and how do we leverage them to meet our needs for the social, public, private and sacred selves — why do they make some of us feel and really believe that we ‘belong’ – in a way never possible earlier due to the breaking down of physical, geographic and temporal boundaries —- how is trust built up in networked societies, what are the new rules emerging —– are these worlds really separate from our physical worlds and how do we deal with the bonds we form when our physical and virtual worlds intersect —– are we any less ‘real’ and why do some of us believe that this virtual world has on the contrary indeed made us more ‘real’ and shown us ways of who we can be and become that our physical worlds never permitted to us. And as with any social institution or system, what are the dangers and pitfalls really … for eg. in India, there’s been a lot of negative flak a social networking site called Orkut is undergoing – as a bunch of youngsters actually kidnapped and murdered one of their Orkut buddies — how are we equipped to deal with these?

I could go on and on Maria … these are just random thoughts in no order or structure whatsoever … but do feel free to try and pin me down some more .

More details on the Forum here:

2007 Information
General Program & Info Brochure
Updated Detailed Program
Special Sessions
Confirmed Speakers

Partners
Theme: “Building trust in our societies”

is today:

Free Burma! International Bloggers’ Day for Burma on the 4th of October

International bloggers are preparing an action to support the peaceful revolution in Burma. We want to set a sign for freedom and show our sympathy for these people who are fighting their cruel regime without weapons. These Bloggers are planning to refrain from posting to their blogs on October 4 and just put up one Banner then, underlined with the words “Free Burma!”

Remember, it will take a whole lot more than just putting up a post with the graphic and the text free Burma. You can sign this petition from Amnesty International

1 – Write to your elected official – they will respond if enough people contact them.

2 – Email the companies that still operate in Burma, their email addresses are listed here http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=24957770200&topic=3071

3 – Sign up for the petition!

•http://www.uscampaignforburma.org/action/action.html
•http://www.petitiononline.com/BUR_2007/petition.html
•http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_burma/h.php/?cl=20589575

Tags: free burma, support myanmar

Its been quiet here too long ……. the result of many many shifts. A new home, getting things to work smoothly, much travelling, transferring from a PC to a Mac, not being able to figure out how to get my Radio blog easily onto a Mac (Paolo has very graciously offered to help after I left a comment at his blog)….

And mosoci β

Mosoci is more than an idea – it is a beta platform, an emergent plan.  It is jazz, bricolage and serious play.  It lets us play a little music where chaos, creativity, diversity and complexity are all welcome. It fulfils our desires and needs which are driven by the fundamental experiences of our souls, to live and work in an emergent, globally connected community.

What it is not, is a formal traditional organization.  We hope the lifestream we have built at the Mosoci blog demonstrates this.  We want it to be more than just the two of us.  Stuart spells this thought out really well:

“We
know we would not be doing this without everyone that has read our
blogs over the last few years. Social Media built the platform for our
collaboration and the sense that our network and community would
support, participate with us and help us grow. Now it is beyond an idea
and yet it is still being formulated. We certainly don’t want to end up
as just the two of us. Today though we are happy to feel like we are in
a constant state of beta. That’s the zone where it is a real rush.



Thank
you for your support, praise and interest. Our blogs and blogging will
evolve just like our other social media activities are. For example we
are really enjoying bringing our bookmarking
into the feed. For now our tweets are there too. That may be
overwhelming. Then it may also be helpful. We’ll let the readers tell
us.

It is born out of our curiosity, passion and deep belief in the strength of social technologies to make a real difference, our willingness and drive to share, learn and grow allowed us to experiment with and use those very technologies to communicate and collaborate on several projects over the years. More details from Stuart:

“Much happens today by chance. Things also emerge and we find ways to
jump on them and adapt. Over the years Dina and I have enjoyed telling
parts of our story. We first met in an online forum. I set her up
blogging “Conversations with Dina” with install instructions over an IM chat session, long before voice and video connections were possible. Skype
also helped to revolutionize our collaboration and connectivity. Open
channels between India and the US made collaboration around Learning
Journeys, research, and just links and interests possible. Working in
India for most of the last year, attending some conferences together
around the world and we knew we were at the point where where 1+1 makes
more than two.

Mosoci is the platform of our collaboratory around the interests we
love, are passionate about and to reinforce the direction and learning
we need to go in. We won’t be successful without our network and our
community and the power of social media. Blogs, wikis, forums, twitter,
bookmarking have enabled who we are today.”

You may ask, what does Mosoci do?  Simply put, a) we immerse ourselves in research and deep dives, b) we facilitate change and help re-frame value for organizations.  The time and opportunity to conduct and deliver research and strategies in new ways is here. We constantly push the boundaries with emerging
social tools (blogs, wikis, SMS, RSS, social networks, beta
communities), with clients when and as appropriate.  We want to take this practice, this method of working, along with others who are doing some excellent work in this field, to the whole world.

Let’s create that map together, in the hope that the map will bring forth the features of the territory. We want your comments, perspectives, and just plain old honest
help and advice to make this a success. We are open to suggestion and
really don’t want to stop at just a few of us.

It would be great if you would jump in on the conversation at Mosoci and add Mosoci Feed  to your reader. We’d love your feedback and suggestions.

I will be in the US from July 18th to 27th – am attending meetings in Cambridge MA on the 19th and 23rd. Have some free time over the weekend July 21-22nd. Am meeting up with Yazad who touched base with me on Facebook when I mentioned I was going – and looking forward to meeting him on Sunday. Would love to meet up with bloggers and other folks in the Boston area who are interested in the social media scene or in qualitative research and ethnography or just want to hangout and yak!

I will also be in London for a few days on my way back – July 29-31st where I am going to hangout with friends. Again, would love to meet anyone who’s free on those days.

Do drop in a comment here or send me email to dina(dot)mehta(at)gmail(dot)com if you’d like to meet up.

Had an interesting interaction with an FMCG Client for whom we are setting up some presentations and workshops around how they can take their brands into the social media realm. I sent a client a detailed note on what we could provide, and she forwarded it to one of the marketing guys who felt it is exciting, but perhaps too focussed on blogging and not enough on youtube!

This is not just an international phenomenon – a recent study
in India revealed that 85% of active internet users claimed to read
blogs regularly! This is their growing influence. Today most news
channels in India have a list of bloggers they call
upon on general stories they are covering – to get the buzz on what’s
going around on the web. When Sunita Williams and her safe return to earth was the big thing on TV, I was asked by a TV Channel to participate in a show on it – I turned it down, as it was not really relevant to either blogging or my areas of interest – but that’s a different issue. A lot of civic and political action is now
being mobilized through mobile phones and online. Many of these use
blogging platforms for their causes, and build large communities around
them by taking them into Orkut and Facebook.

Bloggy thought three. Something I was mulling over for a while, even shared in a completely inarticulate manner with Rajesh yesterday, who by the way awarded me with the Thinking Blogger Award.  He shared with me some links that report on the recent IAMAI Web2.0 conference, with the comment – “am getting a bit restless with marketers”!  Then I got a call from a journalist, who wanted to discuss ‘unconferences’ – and I took off on her a little and told her how I dislike the term – any activity that is prefaced with an ‘un’ makes me feel not-so-nice about it.  Anyways, it also reminded me about another phrase or term in the social media realm that I generally dislike —- user-generated content and I started my rant on her! 

I particularly dislike it when I hear mainstream media and corporate organizations get a high on the phrase ‘user-generated content’.  In India, many times, its shortened to UGC (the only UGC I know of is the University Grants Commission!) and it bugs me no end. 

I dislike it, especially when, in the background, I hear their minds ticking away the rupees they can generate, behind all this buzz and excitement around the term.  When they have not really embraced it themselves.

I dislike it when they distance themselves from it – it’s something other people — oops users do.   How many of them have actually generated content themselves?

I am happy with adopting the term when I am talking about content that is created by users of a service – so there is user-generated content on Youtube, or on blogging platforms, or on wikis.  But I dislike it when marketers, PR agencies talk about the ‘potential’ in harnessing user-generated content for their brands, products and services through advertising messages on the user-generated content spaces or sites, and then believe they are really using social media in their strategies.  Am not knocking advertising based strategies – I just feel they are skimming the surface of the true potential in participating in the conversations, co-creation, community and collaboration that occurs when there is user-generated content.

I think they have it wrong, when they feel that getting onto the user-generated content bandwagon is a quick-fix for their social media strategies. Inherent in the phrase is a division, the notion or assumption of ‘us vs them’.  They have got to see themselves as co-participants and partners rather than marketers or advertisers who are ‘using’ user-generated content as another media opportunity.

I simply loved Toby Bloomberg’s rant at Unilever which so well illustrates what I am trying so hard to articulate!

“So I really want to see that ad. I really Need to see that ad. What do I do? Do I search for Lux? Do I go to the Unilever website? Nope. I head for YouTube and sure enough here it is! It’s a must watch. Oh and the Unilever Lux site?
Good I didn’t head that way, my coffee would have turned cold looking
for any mention of the campaign. Anyone for integrated marketing?

Questions To Ponder
Does a marketing campaign have to be “social” to be successful?
Is traditional advertising dead?
Is there room in the proverbial marketing mix for the good old 60 second TV spot?

Diva Marketing Thoughts
Marketing 101 tells us to hang where our customers hang. For some the “tube” means television and for others it means YouTube. And for many people it means Both. 

Bonus link: Here’s Jon Udell on why he dislikes the term per se.

Bloggy thought two. It’s not worth it, if it’s not searchable. Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel seem to feel so. Am actually feeling the contrary only because of my recent experiences with Facebook and Twitter. The other day, I was chatting with a young friend who is 18, and he told me a few things around Facebook. His dashboard and homepage is Facebook – all his social interactions happen around it, along with a few IM clients. He doesn’t really use email very much. And most pertinent to this post, was his comment that he was disturbed that his whole family including aunts and grand-aunts could ‘peep’ into his entire life. In fact, it was so funny when he related a story about how an aunt actually sent his grandma some pictures of girls who wanted to ‘marry’ him. He’s now got most of his family on ‘limited’ profile — but his friends have full access to him!

I still believe that what you write or say or show on the web is there for everyone to see, read or hear, and I like that openness and transparency of the web. Still I am enjoying the levels of privacy that Facebook offers me. When I blog, I do sometimes (not when I am feeling particularly ranty) wonder whether what I write will come back to bite me some day or how people will view me as a result of what I write. I do feel more ‘responsible’ about what views I share on my blog – perhaps this happens when you have been blogging since 2003 and when your blog becomes your single-point public profile, for the whole world to see – family, friends, clients, potential clients etc.

But on spaces like Facebook and Twitter, I feel so much more comfort – I can rant, I can be silly, throw some food at a friend, hug someone else, share when I am upset or ecstatic. I don’t ever ‘think’ too much when I am on Facebook – my mode is a more feely one. It’s more about me and who I am. And less about my thoughts on a particular subject and less of the ‘Dina’ I want to project or promote or share around what I do.

I loved this comment at Steve Rubel’s post by Ryan McKegney – it resonates:

I was driving back from a meeting when I had a few bloggy thoughts … long drives in traffic and beating rain tend to do that to me! It was a good meeting – regular (I actually said that!!!) qualitative research project among IT students and professionals to understand motivations that drive them to join certain sorts of organizations in a highly competitive field, to figure out a strategy to draw them to my Client’s organization. As we were discussing the research, I suddenly felt – wow – this is the perfect case for a social media / new media strategy —- you have young professionals, in the IT industry, probably heavy users of the internet, a captive target audience that must be familiar with blogs, social networking sites, youtube and the like! When you think of motivations and drivers for this segment, how can you not think of The Influentials, who help them frame their opinions. Am waiting eagerly for my copy which is winging its way here currently. It would be neat to figure out who or what they are in the project I am doing. So somewhere midway in discussing sample definitions, I broke away and asked my client – do you have a social media or blogging strategy – you need one! She was interested I think, particularly since one of her marketing objectives is to build a powerful corporate identity in order to attract the best talent.

Now am hoping it’s a qualitative research +++ project!!  Am beginning to believe any organization or brand that is targeting an audience that is ‘online’ must have a social media strategy.  Social media is in-your-face today, no web user or surfer can really escape it.  

OMG this is soooo funny – a supermarket going web 2.0!! Thanks Toby.