My Bot Will Live On

The web and mobile apps designed and deployed in the digital world are Biblical in their scope, promising that “you will see me. Because I live, you also will live (John 14:19)” long after we breathe our last. There are apps that will continue to publish tweets in your name after your death, bots to chat with your friends and contacts on your behalf, and apps that are only in the concept or ‘mock-up’ stage that are programmed to sign you in a la Foursquare to any of the neighborhood social media hang-outs and ‘let you live the lifestyle you have always wanted other people to think you live.’

LivesOn App

“Starting March this year, one will be able to tweet right form his grave, because LivesOn will be launching its unique Twitter application that makes sure that you tweet no matter if you are around or not. Yes you heard it right; the LivesOn app will tweet for you even after your death. The service utilises artificial intelligence bots that learn a user’s tweeting pattern, his/her interest and topics. All this is then used by the application to create tweets on behalf of the users, reported the Guardian. Although it is not clear yet as to how the bots will function in reality, the idea surely sounds creepy and is worth giving a shot. If the bots manage to tweet all global recent happenings, it would be great.” (Rahul Gupta, The Mobile Indian).

If you trace the history of knowledge, you will necessarily also study about how humans have evolved ingenious ways of externalizing data, so that information and all that it stands for, can live on long after we are gone. Rock art, Hieroglyphs, Papyrus, Palm lead manuscripts, and much later, printing press, books, portable and digital storage devices are testimonies of our desire to leave behind our knowledge and all that we have learnt. We can sentimentalize this human frailty, this existential need to anchor ourselves to this life. All art, music and stories and the products of our thoughts attest to our need to be remembered, to be missed, to have our essence still floating around among the living. This essence is no longer physical, but moving towards the digital. Our physical manifestations are coalescing online. Long after we are gone, our Facebook updates, movie ratings, and reading shelf list will still be in storage, instantly viewable to a friend who happens to remember your groovy ’80s playlist’ on and Googles your name. How sweet. The only catch: you won’t be here to know that you are being remembered. Does it then even make sense for a bot to live on in your name? Doesn’t it become an impostor?

App-i-fication of Living

In this screen shot from the short film Sight, the actor is chopping vegetables as part of playing a game and gaining points for slicing the cucumber correctly.

In the short film Sight, directed by Eran May-Raz and Daniel Lazo, we glimpse a world where every activity and event is interfaced through an app. Cutting vegetables? Cool, let’s turn it into a game and gain points for slicing cucumbers into perfect slices. Exercising? Wonderful. Let’s see how many calories you can burn to be King of Cardio. Dating? Awesome. Select a girl or guy that would earn you maximum ratings from your friends online. All this through the ‘digital contact lens’ that the protagonist in the film sports. While having his meal, he also gets to check out the social media updates of his network on the ‘walls’ of his living room.

Most of the reactions to this film, although entirely laudatory and positive, use negative markings while referring to the specific theme of the futuristic reality as shown through a day in the life of Patrick. Film reviewers use adjectives in the range of ‘chilling, ‘haunting’, ‘dystopian’, dark side’, ‘complicated’, ‘danger’ and more, to convey the horror they feel when confronted with an existence entirely navigated through a digital interface. I am puzzled by this mock horror facial contortion, which sends a message to readers that a future in which apps navigate our reality is something to be afraid of. On the one hand, we eagerly sign up for these services that require us to interact with digital avatars and on the other hand we are threatened when confronted with a future that is barren of human interaction.

If the idea is to live a life tacked to the principles of ‘play,’ then having your moves chalked up to gaming points sounds fun and engaging. It will actually motivate you to exercise, eat your meals on time, dress appropriately, be disciplined with your time schedule and complete your work-related assignments on time. To a certain extent, if the app allows for such flexibility, you can define these parameters and set improvement goals for yourself. The point is to keep it non-competitive though and not engage in behavior solely geared towards maximizing these points and competing with others signed in. If you can maintain this essential difference, this slim digital line between what is optimal for a productive life and what can break your connections with an optimal life, then apps could become an essential component of human life. Just as we took to fashioning tools and implement in the Stone Age to aid our work, so now we take the aid of apps to engage in work differently.

My problem with these web services and futuristic apps is the psychological fall-out that results from being connected to them through the day. You never heard of the woodcutter who became an axe murdered by virtue of handling his tool day in and day out, right? Jokes aside, we have read about the addictive quality of apps, games and social media sites. The engaging and interactive nature of these platforms coupled with the feedback loop and the in-built rewards system induces users to become a fixture of the app universe. Not so good for your studies, friendships, exercise, or good old family time.

Cyber Twin

I signed-up on MyCyberTwin.com for the sheer curiosity of interacting with code that talks! MyCyberTwin.com is a web-based artificial intelligence service founded by tech-duo Liesl Capper and John Zakos in 2005. Launched in April 2007, the service now claims in excess of some 50,000 users who have a ‘cyber twin’ or chat-bot. Promoted as a service that seamlessly represents users anytime online, and across multiple platforms, including web, mobile, Instant Messenger, and virtual environments, mycybertwin can be deployed for the personal and home user, social media addict, large-scale corporations and businesses, government portals and so on. It was the first I heard of such a program, designed as an artificially intelligent chat bot  that would learn from its creator and eventually emulate my online avatar. The bot service requires extensive trainings through hundreds of questionnaire-inputs: snippets of information on what my favorite food is to educational background, religious slant to political leanings, my faith in god to my sexual identity.

But it got exhaustive playing with her after a certain point. Take for example, one of the often repeated chat my twin and I have: ‘Why is English the language of the Internet?’ as this is one of the questions I fed on the back-end for my twin to ask me during a live chat. There are only two ways she has responded to this: ‘I don’t know, you tell me’ and ‘Internet is outstanding, don’t you think?’ The first response would have pushed forth the chat, encouraging the respondent – me in this case – to prolong the chat with varied responses. The twin’s response, however, is a ‘factual’ statement for her, something that her database doesn’t allow her to question, it’s a given that the Internet is outstanding for her, but does she believe that herself? I test this by replying to her statement with the same sentence, “Yes, the Internet is outstanding”, to which she responds: ‘the Internet is an amazing tool, you can learn many new things online’. It becomes obvious that the twin is programmed to pick up on keywords and has stock answers for them.

What of empathy and a feeling of mutual affection? What might possibly motivate the twin to enquire into someone’s health, how my friend fared in his exams, express concern for the well-being of my cousin’s children, or just put in a kind word if my sibling is going through a rough patch at work? While my avatar had personal investments in all her online connections, the twin will function purely on a ‘response to stimulus’ basis. Courtesy might be built-in, but concern cannot be.

Cumulative Identity

Performance theorist Richard Schechner says that “performance, that is, how people behave and display their behavior, is a fundamental category of human life”. The way we represent ourselves has much to do with the idea of how well we think we know about ourselves and perhaps, less to do with choice or control? Consider this, we deliberate over our clothes, are picky with food groups, finicky about television shows, have preferences for certain books, and who we hang out with. Our preferences are largely responsible for self-representation and act as guidelines for others to categorize us. What about decisions and preferences that are not deliberate – the way we react to distressing news (a death in the family); how we face challenges (poor scores in exams); our attitude towards physical exercise; planning a camping trip – are non-verbal and visceral cues that add up to people’s perception of what makes us who we are. So, representation can be controlled as well as non-deliberate in real life.

What these apps fail to take into consideration is that our online patterns are not consistent and interests change over time. Behavior can be repetitive, such as logging into my computer everyday and signing up on Gmail first, followed by Twitter and Facebook, but there is no guarantee that I would continue to follow the updates from a particular follower or tweet about gender politics two years down the line. I may simply not be interested. Can a bot be programmed into speculating how my interests – and in effect my online behavior – change over a period of time and faithfully represent my growth as a living person? I don’t think so. Let’s assume it does manage to, trace the micro-tremors of my activities and postulate that 10 weeks from now, Maroon 5 will no longer interest me and my CouchCachet bot doesn’t check me in to a neighborhood concert fronted by the band. In that event, would it still be the ‘real’ me that my friends are getting to know, or a coded version of reality?

Here’s an interesting question then: If you had to take a pick between the blue pill and the red pill, aka The Matrix, which would you choose? Your answer will determine how comfortable you are with a bot living on in your name, grooving to David Guetta, ordering a shot of whatever poison supposedly gets you going, and writing articles about how ‘a bot can live on forever’.

Facetime to Facebook: Social Cohesion Inside the Digital Network

Are we setting ourselves up for loneliness when we seek lasting social bonds within the network of digital media?  Nilofar Ansher

Straight up, let me ask you something elemental: How difficult was it for you to transition from chatting with your friends in a coffee bar to having regular conversations online, to Facebook becoming your dominant form of staying in touch with them? Really, come to think of it, engaging in discussions or chit-chat online should have traumatized most of us, considering we are social creatures and we love to jump all over our conversations (and each other) – interrupting someone’s train of thought, laughing, saying more with our expressions than with so many spoken words.

I guess you didn’t spend a whole lot of time ruminating over the move, it seemed natural, almost inevitable. A broadband connection would have been cheaper for a family, than using your cellphone to talk to each of your friends at a time. Also, the kind of stuff we now share or talk about has changed. Instead of just talking shop, we have this entire ‘media arsenal’ at our disposal, prompting us to share. News, videos, cartoons, books, funny quotes and memes, songs and lyrics, photographs and other digital ephemera that encouraged a move from face to interface. While a decade ago, we still did all these things without the aid of the social media ‘share’ button, the mechanics of digital conversations are different: sharing chunks of information at a time with a larger group or the public (one-to-many dissemination is more the norm on Facebook), the instant feedback loop (acknowledgement from the network) and the interface of the network (textual, word limit, smileys) mean that the very nature of ‘sharing’ has changed.

That loneliness is a pre-dominant concern of social media users is a trope that refuses to die in mainstream media and academic circles. There are frequent surveys of teenagers and youth who spend long hours online, yet fail to have strong social ties within the network (Pew Research, February 2012). There are several news items that chronicle depression and anxiety (and even bullying) among heavy social media users (here, here and here). This is not to say that the frequent spotlight on this phenomenon confirms this peculiar situation of being hyper-connected, yet hyper-lonely. These studies or surveys are certainly not global, nor are they wide-reaching in the demography they cover or the period through which the participants are tracked. On the other side of this debate are the digital culture gurus, the net experts and geeks, and the cyberculture celebs who cry foul when they read such reports. They deny the validity of these studies and insist that social media fosters connections, help us meet people we would otherwise have not met, and intensify our influence in the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend network (here, here and here).

So, are we all gung-ho and cheerful when we build our social network (and net worth) online or are there slight cracks to this happy portrait? Are people who are social ‘in real life’ equally social online and those who are introvert just as shy online or do the positions and personalities do a switch-over the moment we log on to Facebook? Most importantly, are we connecting lesser with each other – in the flesh and face to face than before – but still maintaining strong social, emotional and filial ties with people, both online and offline? I guess a survey wouldn’t be able to answer these questions. I think it’s a bit of everything: firstly, the nature of work we are engaged in; the kind of social activities we love to be part of; the level of engagement we display in any activity, and our immediate environment.

For those of us who spend a minimum of eight hours in front of our PCs and frequently our phones, loneliness is not an active ingredient of our routine. There is work to be done, multiple tabs to navigate content and avatars to talk to. It’s just convenient that we also use the same medium to maintain and strengthen our social network. But over the weekends, when I am not working, if I don’t make it a point to go out and socialize, then of course I am bound to feel lonely. But since we are also habituated to spending so much time online, perpetually interacting with icons, friends, messages, responding to comments, sharing and linking information – constantly on talk mode – there’s a definite sense of something missing when we are not online, available and swimming in the social tide. Is that sense of disconnect loneliness?

Information overload is an entirely different debate, but one that runs parallel to the loneliness issue as well. We consume media content because the benchmark of what is interesting and fun has also evolved. If we don’t talk about the Kolaveri di video going viral or share the ‘Y U No’ memes, we would be left sharing mundane stuff about that guy next door or our low paying jobs or the family wedding where chicken tikka stains ruined your Anarkali. And while we still do that – share the minutiae of our lives with our best friends, most of us don’t do it so overtly online, and certainly not with our network who are always conspicuously online.

Historically, we are adept at maintaining different sets of friends: school, college, library partners, and music class pals, acquaintances that you meet every day on your way to religious lesson; we perform differently with each of them and the quality of information sharing also differs. But with Facebook or other social media platforms, we face a unique situation: to have all these disparate set of friends on a single platform means the rules of social engagement and intimacy change. While it was alright to crack a joke within my group about my brother’s romantic exploits, to do that on Facebook’s Wall or tweet about it to my followers would be kind of funny, in a socially awkward way. That’s just not information for public consumption. Notice that although we are quite aware of what to share with which group, the position of having several of your close friends sharing breathing space with hundreds of your acquaintances is a tricky maze to navigate. It calls for a certain level of artifice. That’s the fine distinction I wanted to draw out between natural rhythm of social communication versus the ones that we engage online.

The spotlight is also on the nature of these interfaces. Once again, net celebs have criticized that plugging in 24×7 doesn’t mean we are missing out on conversations or walks in the park. However, we have to acknowledge that there’s a distinctly sudden change in the way we say something; face to face conversation would entail so many cues to follow – eyes and expressions, gestures and body language, silences, pauses, stuttering, and the breadth of manoeuvres required to convey a detail or argue over something finely, distinctly and with clarity, elements which we still believe necessary for a satisfying conversation. In textual communication, while you hear their responses, there’s the uncertain element of asynchronicity. On Facebook for instance, you say something first, wait for your friends to respond, then you respond to that – it’s a sequence, which is exactly how the conversation would have unfolded in that coffee bar, with the minor difference being that on Facebook, your friends might reply to your post in a minute or perhaps a week later, and you wouldn’t have the joy of witnessing their cheeky smiles.

You might argue that social media has evolved its own lexicon and codes to bridge that physical divide. We now have emoticons and newer ways to re-present the Body. There is also video and voice chat, so it’s like being ‘in front’ your friends, even if you are not ‘with’ them. This is the homily that sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov projected in his novel, The Naked Sun, where communication is done via holographic telepresence called viewing, as opposed to in-person seeing. This perspective of how ‘presence’ is understood is essential to how conversation thrives and ultimately, inter-personal relationships and social cohesion. I have this rather alarmist view that we are already on the trajectory depicted in The Naked Sun, where personal / human contact is shunned and coded out of practice.  

I guess I grew up at a time when we had the best of all the worlds – we were close enough to our closest friends, maintained interesting relationships with our pen friends, visited relatives every other week for that familial bonding, and also had the novelty of the landline to get in touch with friends during the vacation or a favourite cousin who has shifted to another city. Conversely, the limitations also didn’t fill us with the need to know what these people did every hour or day or find out what movies they saw or games they played, or if their relationship is complicated or rainbowish. All of these were, in simple terms, none of our business!

Facebook users thrive in an environment where all personal remarks are subject to increasingly informal responses by default, because of the way the interface is designed. These responses are not taught or borrowed, but mutate over time (and time itself is experienced differently online). Facebook is all about transparency and the ensuing culture of participation that underpins open systems. If you are open about your life, you engage with people more often and gradually post increasingly greater bytes of information. You don’t pause to think if posting about your boredom is of any value to all your friends. It’s understood that the list will itself understand which information is of value and which can be ignored. The wall posting is seen as just that – a post, and not likened to a person in a room or a coffee house saying something to someone. A post or a tweet has value as an item in a list that needs to be check-marked either with a Like or a smiley or a one-liner.

There is no barometer to measure and ascertain whether your presence is ‘valued’ in the ‘corporeal’ sense – you are present as a body on the other side of the screen, but only really represented through your posts. Offline, a look, gesture or nod conveys fully well a response; silence (in this case, deletions) are not the usual responses to a spoken word. How do you measure the impact of a ‘seen’ or Like? In simple terms, I think Facebook does away with the offline value of courtesy or empathy. Critically, it has given rise to a new breed of conversationalist: the lurker. Offline, you do have the odd person in the group who does most of the listening and chips in with a laugh or just nods their head. However, lurking as a defined ‘online’ behaviour, as characterized by consistent lack of engagement, is quite peculiar to the world of Facebook. What does it say about a system’s emotional quotient when half the posts, comments and conversations pinned on The Wall are subject to only being read, scrolled over or worst, manually hidden / deleted as if the words never existed? What sort of a system consciously engineers a space where a person’s output – her words, ideas, opinions – are not subject to a response? What are the implications of subscribing to and evolving towards a culture of constant stimuli with no visible response? That’s the space where loneliness is born.

Facebook cloaks itself as a platform that is alive and teeming with people all engaged and interconnected with one another. What I see, however, is an aggregate service, which culls our data and archives it. Our every little outpouring might be more important to the servers and algorithms than to our own network. I fear the sum total of what I am will just be a footnote in the codices of the Web. That smallness that we experience when we measure ourselves against the vastness of the universe is nothing but loneliness. If we learn to cope with that sense of insecurity on Facebook and others of its kind, then we are set for long term innings within the network. The point is, while the trade-off from face to interface might not be what we anticipated when we invented these devices, perhaps a guide or toolkit or a ‘Wiki’ resource to adapting to a new way of communication is something that should be penciled in for generations of people who are in the transition phase. Crowdsourcing, anyone?

This is the unabridged version of the article that appears in ‘Home Alone’: Digital Natives with a Cause newsletter | Volume 10 Issue 1 | Hyper-connected, yet hyper-lonely? http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dn-newsletter-volume-10-issue-1.pdf via The Centre for Internet & Society, India

Is Social the New Personal?

Is Social The New Personal?

The word ‘media’ has the ignominy of never being called by its first name. It’s always prefixed or suffixed into playing second fiddle. Evidence? Traditional media, mass media, new media, digital media, hypermedia, social media, citizen media – the list could go on with subsets. What remains common and consistent is that consumers have always accessed finished material from the media. Digital platforms have of course changed all that; the lines between content producers and consumers has blurred.

What is it about social media that drives us to contribute information and in turn become producers? Perhaps it has to do with the design interface of easy log-ins, handy read-and-respond menus and archival features that allow us to store streams of conversations. Having a ready reference to the events in a day, week and month allows us to pick and choose – curate in a way – information that we feel is relevant to a larger community beyond home.

So, don’t we have any qualms in putting up personal information on a public platform? Well, social media never took off with claims of being a strictly “public entity”. Its primary purpose was to initiate circles of friendship and network on the Internet, allowing members to share with each other what they would otherwise do via a phone call or text messages. Thus, personal information remained in a tight circle. What we don’t deliberate over is the fact that circles and communities never remain strictly closed or rigid; they contract with the loss of a member, both physically and with waning interests of some, and they expand, with new members becoming family and bringing their own circle of friends on board. It’s the leitmotif of our offline social circles, why not online?

We are at a cut-off point in history when we can clearly demarcate the line between the generation that looked at the coming of the Internet as a historical narrative, an event that occurred in their lives, versus those for whom ‘digitalia’ and ‘logging online’ is a “way of life”. This second group – perhaps those born in the mid-90s, to middle-class, educated, white-collar parents – sprouted their milk tooth as their parents set-up a yahoo account for them (fear of running out of domain names is quite valid). Their first baby steps, first birthday and first comic act in school is recorded not on photopapers stuck in decorated albums, but in the real-time archives of Picassa, Facebook, Orkut or Flickr; a life span coverage that began when their parents uploaded pregnancy pictures to videos of the hospital visit post delivery and so on from their digital cameras to the Web.

We – the digital dinosaurs and analog junkies – might constantly wonder at the ease with which the digital natives adapt to new technology, be it gadgets, apps, new platforms of expression online, a deluge of social media technology and the very language and etiquette required to traverse these disparate spaces. More than a decade ago, we had English professors lamenting the erosion of their cultured language by the worms of netspeak or sms-lingo: “Y r kidz usin short-hand?” they wondered, in full-fledged literary forums across the Western world. Today, it’s not just how we communicate that has changed; there’s a whole sub-culture involved in even accessing the lingo of the digital native. What do widgets mean? Why is an app way more cooler than an application? Since when did Facebook and Google become verbs? Until the 90s, we never used upload and download in the same sentence while talking about movies and music! Of course, this is just another factor to annotate the digital divide debate.

Does this generation realize that they are unwitting curators and historians, documenting their every waking routine and the meta-narratives of their lives?

Many of their activities – uploading photographs, sending emails, responding to posts and commenting on forums, watching videos and shopping online and simply being available in green indicator – are indicators of their personality, their hobbies and interests, their moods and nature, and gives us clues to their literacy levels, intelligence, emotional quotient, and more. Clicking links, reading news at all times, *Liking* several hundred posts (randomly), participating in a-synchronous messages in real-time (you message and don’t wait for the opposite person to respond immediately) and living a multi-tabbed existence is not only what they do but who they are.

- Nilofar Ansher

A version of this blog appeared as editorial for Links In the Chain, an online newsletter brought out by the Digital Natives project of Centre for Internet and Society. Download Volume 8 of the newsletter here.

Why the Social Network is Feared? And Why We must Rejoice in that!

“Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend…” The Hundred Flowers Campaign, The Communist Part of the China, 1956-57

Digitized Social Networks: Tip of the Pyramid. Image courtesy vaXzine / flickr

Mark Zuckerburg has got us all figured, hasn’t he? He understood market trends no doubt and piggy-backed on other similar networking spaces online to come up with Facebook. It is not surprising that so many of us subscribe and function exclusively through social networks. What is surprising is that critics of social media tools castigate the medium for its apparent ill-effects on youth and children.

I get the sense that the ‘disconnected’ youth are looked upon as innocent goats being lead to the slaughterhouse of disconnection and hyperactivity. In the grand scheme of naming and labelling, we are now info-junkies, who take recourse to clicktivism and the comfort of the cyber-hive to sidestep ‘real issues, real interactions, real life’. We have no control over what sites we sign up for, how much time we spend there, the amount of distraction we give in to and the total inability to monitor, limit and sign off from social media.

Clichés can be such a force to contend with. They aren’t easily discarded and have the tendency to regurgitate through every generation, often with irony. Remember how radio, then TV, then music and fashion and all things younger, modern and Western were thought of as corrupters of the youth?

I think the traditionalists don’t dislike social networks, so much as fear it. Social networks online have become the barometers of our times. Our collective likes, links and loves are voted, discussed, tested, withdrawn, updated and shoved on the notice boards of our extended cyber-groupies. Status updates are slicker than breaking news. There is order in the group and there is cohesion in the network. The network has become a force to contend with.

And I am not just referring to the recent country-wide revolutions overtaking the globe, credited largely to the blitzkrieg of social media users. That is just the peel off the scab. Businesses and financial transactions, social and private occasions, events, political machinations, cultural renaissance, technological innovations in the classroom and health sector – social media fosters that kind of behaviour and inventiveness online.

In a way, we have hewn ourselves a new social order where statehood and governance don’t form the tip of the pyramid (with law and order forming the second rung, economic institutions and businesses forming the third layer and religious and cultural affiliations forming the penultimate block, in the traditional world order). The new social order points to the power of inter-personal networks formed via social media, itself born from the need to communicate, connect and consume the fruits of the online world. (bytes for thought?)

Who are the leaders of this network? Despite what the widely cited definition of who a digital native is and might be, the reality is that no particular age group or denomination or race is the forerunner to this club. Most of us have felt empowered, liberated, influential, and at the cusp of change and an extraordinarily life-changing revolution when wielding social media. And why wouldn’t any self-respecting power-monger in the real world fear that kind of power moving away from his sphere?

I find a happy thought in thinking of the digital native as reforming national alliances, shaping political futures of the global world, transforming the way ideas, interactions and innovations are informed and iterated. The critics of the cyber-social-network have plenty to lose with the rise of the digital native. I say, let a 100 ideas bloom and a 100 social networks engender for every digital native logging in!

- Nilofar Ansher

New Wave: Is a Job in Social Media Making News Yet?

While every young thing out there is on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, few job seekers are aware that the social media industry is an emerging career option in India today. We speak to seasoned social media strategists, corporate houses, newcomers and in-betweeners who have got their “Poking” skills polished enough to make big bucks.

- Nilofar Shamim Ansher

Delhi lad Clinton Jeff starts his day with Gmail, followed by postings to Twitter and Facebook, a couple of breaks for lunch and coffee, with a hard day’s work ending on Flickr, YouTube and his personal blog. Keeping up with a few close friends, several hundred followers and several more readers can be quite exhausting, but doing it as part of his company’s business strategy is a totally different scenario. But hey, he’s not complaining, after all, working extensively on these social media websites is earning him his monthly paycheck!

Clinton Jeff, Blogger's Mind, New Delhi

Clinton Jeff, Head of Consumer Strategy, Bloggers’ Mind, Delhi, says, “On one hand, I use social media to keep in touch with my various friends who are scattered around the globe. On the other hand, I also use it to help my own blog grow and get my content in front of more eyeballs.”

So, what do we mean by the term social media? The term is still too new to attempt any sort of formalized definition, however, the consensus is that social media generally refers to any online portal, community, technology or software application that is deployed or created to disseminate, manage, organize, share and reuse content – both textual and graphic – falls under the purview of social media. In that sense, Wikipedia is definitely a social media platform as you have thousands of users collaborating, sharing and aggregating information via the medium of the World Wide Web. You also have friend connecting sites like Facebook or Orkut, where users create groups, share information and events online and produce and reuse content for multiple users.

Businesses are leveraging social media to build brand awareness, share in on real time customer feedback, launch products and services, advertise beyond the traditional channels of television, print and radio, do damage control over any negative feedback or publicity, and engage audiences in even more interactive, and in extension, immersive product lines through cutting-edge animated advertisements online. “Social media is relevant to any company whose audiences participate in or are influenced by online discussions,” says Jeremy Woolf, the Global Social Media Practice Lead for Text 100, a PR consultancy based in New York, with offices across the globe, including India.

JOINT CEO, SOCIAL WAVELENGTH, MUMBAI

What this translates to is companies hiring social media agencies to understand how social media can be intelligently utilized to drive various objectives and supplement the offline money-intensive activities such as TV ads and print spots. Sanjay Mehta, Joint CEO of Social Wavelength, a Mumbai-based social media agency, explains, “We use social media for multiple functional objectives such as product launch, idea generation, online reputation management, driving sales to online store, and to create a community around a brand.” Adds Abhinav Sahai, the 25-year-old co-founder of Bangalore-based social media agency Zapylacz, “Sooner or later all companies will have to establish their social media presence. It may either be for selling products, generating leads or for monitoring the progress and reputation of their brands.”

Variously, social media is adopted differently by different brands. So, if you have Channel V using Twitter, Orkut, Facebook and YouTube for its 2009 relaunch, there’s car manufacturer Mitsubishi launching its new model Cedia through the awarding winning campaign ‘The Great Driving Challenge’, a dedicated portal for travel enthusiasts. Explains Sandip Maiti, CEO of Experience Commerce, the Mumbai-based digital agency behind the Cedia campaign, “It is important to understand the context in which the brand wishes to engage with its core audience. Some brands like to entertain, some like to seed conversation spaces while many prefer to take the utlitarian track. Social media is best used to build awareness and create buzz around new product launches.”

Another advantage of adopting social media as a marketing tool is that it cuts across market sectors and pre-determined target groups. Amita Malhotra, the 28-year-old Knowledge Manager at Blogworks, a New Delhi-based social media agency, gives us an idea about the umbrella of businesses that social media encompasses today. “Up until two years ago, social media was the mainstay only among technology companies. As social media adoption is on a rise, companies are increasingly realizing its potential and using it for recruitment, marketing and promotions, customer service, internal communication, crisis communication among others. There has been a big shift since then with social media being adopted across verticals such as travel and tourism, hospitality, retail, FMCG, consumer durables, media and NGOs,” explains Amita.

It therefore comes as no surprise that India Inc – our multimillion dollar corporate houses such as Wipro, Hindustan Unilever, Infosys and Maruti – too is catching up to its western counterparts in terms of investing in the new channel. Star Network, the group of channels comprising Star Plus, Star One, Channel V and so on, has hired Social Wavelength to build it social media presence. All these channels now have a huge fan following online via Facebook and Twitter. The Star Network is an example of “a very visible brand, with a fairly large marketing budget, who also want to ensure corresponding visibility now, on social media” according to Mehta, whose agency, Social Wavelength counts Star Group, Lavasa Corporation, Just Dial, India Infoline, Havells, Su-kam, and IndusInd Bank among its clients.

Bloggers’ Mind created the hugely popular “Search for N” campaign for the Nokia N97 cellular phone and the “Tag Your Music” Facebook activity for Nokia India’s Music Page. Says Clinton, the 24-year-old Head of Consumer Strategy at Bloggers’ Mind, Delhi, “What we use varies from Facebook applications, stand-alone widgets, YouTube videos, Twitter and Facebook page activities. Bloggers’ Mind is a ‘Word of Mouth’ and ‘Conversation Analytics’ company – basically, it helps companies such as mobile giant Nokia, to read, understand and analyze conversations taking place online on their products.

Jeremy Woolf - Global Social Media Practice Lead for Text 100, a PR Consultancy Based in New York

What we don’t see yet is official statistics or major research studies by market research firms confirming and aggregating the impact of social media on increased sales or business margins. However, experts says that social media is not an organic ‘tool’ that can be measured for its viability. “It is a myth, we believe, to constantly look at Social Media from an ROI point of view. Social Media needs to be integrated into the business processes of an organization, and to that extent, needs to be evaluated in a very different sense, and not just as one more marketing / sales tool,” says Mehta. Adds Woolf, “Although we do not have any specific data on this, there are examples like Flipkart.com (an online book store) and cleartrip.com (an online travel organizer) having leveraged social media to generate new business.”

In the American and European markets, social media strategies have reached a maturity gradient with consumers quite comfortable reading about products, getting reviews and making purchases online. Songita Verma, Founder and CEO of Delhi-based social media agency, Bloggers’ Mind, cites a 2008 Cone Business Study on Social Media, “…93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85% believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers and 56% of consumers believe that a company is providing them with a better service by interacting with them on social media sites.” That’s a big chunk of consumers weaned away from the staple diet of advertisements and promotions on TV and newspapers.

FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING: “…93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites..” – 2008 Cone Business Study on social media.

Then you also have unconventional entities such as Bollywood stars, cricketers, chefs, new age spritiual gurus, artists, musicians and entrepreneurs making a splash on social media to connect to fans, release titbits of information on their work, upload photos and respond to audience curiosity instantly. Maiti’s agency handled the promotional campaign for liquor baron Vijay Mallya’s Champions League Twenty 20 cricket team, Royal Challengers’ Fan Club, online. Details Maiti, “We launched the club with the Fanatic Fans Challenge (FFC) – fans could apply for a position as Official Blogger, Photographer and Fan and travel with the team throughout CLT20 2009. The campaign made a huge impact, helping the fan club acquire 18,500 new members, and paving the way to our current club which is strong at over 90,000.”

ROYAL CHALLENGERS FAN CLUB / EXPERIENCE COMMERCE'S CAMPAIGN

ALTERNATE AUDIENCES
It’s not just the Fortune 1,000 companies who are benefitting from the accessible nature of social media. Organizations such as NGOs, schools and colleges, public institutions, museums and art galleries, trade associations and informal society groups, are all on social media today. So, we have a mid-sized book publisher such as Tulika Books, now using the online social medium to cater to a new section of their audience – the Facebook generation. Explains Malarvizhi Jayant, 29, the Online Editor of Web & Social Media for Chennai-based Tulika Publishers, “We use social media to announce new books, continue discussions about older publications, talk about issues of literacy and reading, share news, collect reviews of Tulika’s books. The goal is to tell more people about Tulika and the kind of books we publish and to have a communication channel open for fans.”

Social media is seen as a low-investment, high ROI (return of interest) tool for fringe organizations such as NGOs and public institutions who can’t afford the advertising rates of a tabloid or television to garner support for their causes. Bangalore-based Pratham Books, a not-for-profit trust is a children’s book publisher and has championed its cause using social media tools – Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Scribd, YouTube, and Flickr – quite effectively. Says Gautam John, the 31-year-old incharge of New Projects at the organization, “Our long term vision is to build a platform to engage our community to co-create and do so much more to contribute to the cause of a book in every child’s hand using a legal framework that allows for a participatory culture.”

Lindsay Pereira, Editor, Mid Day Online

“If a manager were to talk about the possibility of this happening 5 years ago — the Internet boosting pizza sales — he or she would have been laughed out of a room.” – LINDSAY PEREIRA, MID DAY, MUMBAI

Even news producing agencies such as newspapers, radio, television and now digital TV, and online broadcasting media are tuning in to social media to ramp up circulation, disseminate news, involve readers through promotional activities such as games, contests and interactive quizzes, and constantly provide breaking news. Lindsay Pereira, Editor for Mumbai-based Mid Day Multimedia Ltd’s Mid Day newspaper, says, “Twitter is currently perfect for what we do as a media company — offer readers the hottest tabloid stories as they break across the country — and is, as such, our core media platform. We also use Facebook and Orkut to engage with readers better, and allocate resources to social media marketing using social news websites like Digg and Stumbleupon.”

It’s now a rarity for the once ubiquitous PR guy to handle the entire gamut of product and service promotions for a client as we have social media agencies to do just that – in the online world. And if the increasing population of Facebook is anything to go by – 500 million on last count – social media professionals have their work cut out for them catering to ever increasing fan base for a myriad of products and services. Where do these ‘addicts’ work? The new age social media and digital agencies are springing up across the country, with Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore seeing high profile firms working with India Inc’s who’s-who.

Mitsubishi Cedia - Great Driving Challenge / Experience Commerce

“Any youngster wanting a foothold in this industry, should possess a deep understanding of marketing communications and all related faculties. One could take up a brief internship in the space so they get hands on experience or do some quality projects.”With social media agencies making their presence felt on the market map, it certainly spells good news for job hunters with a passion for a host of key domains – online technologies, consumer behaviour, communications, marketing and brand promotion, advertising, content management and writing, software engineering, and more. A quick search for the keywords ‘Social Media’ on Naukri.com throws up 2,800 plus job postings on last count and the list is growing. There are unique job designations being created all the time. Sample these: Social Media Strategist, Global and Regional Social Media Practice Lead, Online Marketing Executive, SEO and SEM Architect, Interactive Marketing Specialist, Communities Manager, and even the curiously eyebrow raising, Social Media Addict! “

Rishi Seth - Text 100: As social media is both highly-dynamic and fast-evolving, it is entirely possible that social media will emerge as a satisfying and rewarding career niche under the umbrella of marketing and communications in the long run.

Entry level jobs in social media would require graduates to be polished with their Pokes and Likes – Facebook applications – and that’s the least you can start from in an industry where the learning curve is sky-high. It’s not just about updating your Twitter or Orkut account every now and then. “Career options start right from the base level i.e. executive team, content writing team, monitoring team, team leaders, managers, creative cells, designing cells, quality team to building client relations,” explains Abhishek Kisla, 29-year-old Operations Manager at Social Wavelength. Advices Maiti, “A certain amount of geekiness and an affinity for technology and a curiosity for all things digital can take an aspiring social media marketer a long way.” A job within the social media world requires one to be a jack of all trades. One would need to be a communications & marketing expert, or have a background in advertising, consumer behaviour and psychology, or even something as traditional as public relations, market research and software engineering and of course, be deeply interested in the Internet and all its latest social media applications and websites.

Few professionals have a different take on the necessary skills and background one needs to be equipped with for a career in social media. Take the case of Malarvizhi Jayant, who has a Masters in Cultural Studies (English) and a Diploma in Print Journalism. “Training in marketing might not be an asset in this area – social media requires a radical rethinking of ‘marketing’ notions. I think I have gained a better understanding of this medium because I didn’t know the first thing about marketing when I started out.” A point of view also shared by Woolf. “People from diverse backgrounds can certainly play a role. However, it is critical that they understand communications basics (messages, audience, influence, and measurement) as well as how social channels work,” he says. Adds Gautam John, “Social media isn’t so much about the tools and the platforms as it is about the social part. All of the tools and platforms are only methods for us to be social and being social is something that comes naturally to us all.”

HR Perspective: According to a report by ComScore, 50.8% of the APAC population uses social networking sites. Sites such as Facebook and Linkedin have more than 500 million and 70 million members respectively, thus opening a plethora of options to “head hunt” for suitable candidates. – Kamal Karanth, MD, Kelly Services, a recruitment agency

IS IT HERE TO STAY?
As with any new phenomenon, we wonder whether the social media wave will be able to sustain all the hype it is riding on. There are obvious gaps of information in the career mart, be it lack of awareness about the social media industry within HR departments, corporate houses or placement agencies; low or zero visibility of job postings on leading newspapers; lack of any institutionalized or established educational curricula on social media technologies; and a bit of an outdated and unwarranted attitude to what is being perceived as a “timepass” platform for youngsters to make friends and play games. In the dot com domain where fear of the dot com bust of 1999-2000 still looms large, a long term career purely dependent on ‘youth’ centric websites seems a bit of a gamble.

Nidhi Makhija - Experience Commerce

However, social media practitioners are optimistic, and assert that social media is here to stay. Lindsay chirps in, “Social media isn’t just here to stay; strategy in this space will soon become an integral part of any good business plan.” He cites an example of a pizza chain in the UK which recently attributed a 29% surge in pre-tax profits to online promotions. Adds Lindsay, “Its (pizza chain’s) e-Commerce unit grew 61% in 26 weeks, and online sales now account for over 30% of overall delivered sales in the UK. If a manager were to talk about the possibility of this happening 5 years ago — the Internet boosting pizza sales — he or she would have been laughed out of a room.” Maya Hemant, a 24-year-old Content Manager at Pratham Books, also has similar experiences to share. “I’ve seen how social media has grown rapidly in India. It has also been interesting to see how non-profits are using social media to reach audiences they never could have earlier and this reach doesn’t involve huge expenses,” says Maya.

Recent graduates at entry level positions or mid level professionals who have evolved as social media strategists also express no qualms while planning for a long term stay within the social media setup. Says Nidhi Makhija of Experience Commerce, “The industry is so new and many opportunities lie undiscovered. There’s vast scope to grow either into a digital planner or as a business development executive. These are just stepping stones into higher positions – Account Directors and VPs of Business Development.” Rishi Seth of Text 100, too, shares this opinion. “As social media is both highly-dynamic and fast-evolving, it is entirely possible that social media will emerge as a satisfying and rewarding career niche under the umbrella of marketing and communications in the long run,” he adds. Text 100’s Woolf sums it up succinctly when talking about the staying power of social media, “Social media exists because it meets a human need to create, collaborate and share.”

It definitely takes a while to get used to the idea of being a ‘Social Media Star’ (as seen on one Gurgaon-based company’s job post on Naukri.com). With commercial acceptance itself having taken a good bit of time among businesses, it remains to be seen whether social media jobs will find approval and acceptance among parents and youngsters for whom life beyond engineering, medicine and computer science is career anathema. Songita Verma has the last word on this, “Man is a social animal and cannot survive without conversing or expressing his opinion. This is how things worked before the development of Internet. The Internet has broadened our horizons and has shrunk the globe. Now, no distance is too far and no talk is unsaid. Thus, it is not here to stay, it was, is and will always be there.”

By Nilofar Shamim Ansher. For a more in depth report on careers in social media, colleges/institutes in India offering courses on this subject and interviews with experts, get in touch with me here: http://trailofpapercuts.wordpress.com/contact/

This is the original version of the article which first appeared in Careers360, a New Delhi-based careers magazine distributed by Outlook India Group. Read the magazine version here: http://www.careers360.com/news/4704-Social-Media-Marketing-How-to-use-social-media-websites-for-business

Why Social Media Keeps Me Up At Night

It’s an equal ploy by all the social media sites to grab my attention, my eyeballs and my waking hours – and quite successful they are at it too. Less than four years ago, I didn’t know that these two terms existed, and now social media has overtaken my daily routine in a manner quite like how you grow fond of a street dog that you have semi-adopted.

Let me illustrate. Traditionally, I am not a social or outdoorsy person. I like curling up with a good Gothic or Historical novel, with a high-on-fat junk food accompanying the hand’s flippity page turning. So, I have fewer people whom I call friends, and even fewest whom I consider worthy enough to share my daily routine with. My professional life follows the same pattern with the hand pathologically doing a traditional jazz on the keyboard and six to seven breaks taking care of the odd catching up with colleagues routine, luncheons and nature calls.

Facebook At Least Allowed Me Some Vestige of Privacy With My Friend Collection Spree

Along came Orkut in 2003-04, and enticed me with its “sit-at-your-desk” and collect friends bargaining chip and I played right into it. Here was a service which allowed me to connect with long-lost acquaintances, neighborhood playmates, coaching class buddies, never-really-friends school mates, traveling companions from train and bus journeys, childhood romping mates and all the other faces that have peopled my memories and populated my growing up years. I could peek right into their lives, take a measure of their friends and what they have made of their selves through their photos and hourly conversations.

I did my bit by putting up the choices of photographs – all in a vanity bid to promote my talent – and posted witty remarks wherever there was a barren lack of anything stimulating on my friend’s conversation page. Altruistic intentions apart, it kept me occupied, it made me feel important and valued and I could now keep tabs on all the activities taking place in my extended circle’s world at one place! Let’s not forget, hourly updates also meant the end to expensive phone bills for long distance friends, hour long phone conversations and hurried catch-up meetings with near-by pals – all of them were just an Orkutting away!

Facebook and Flickr followed in quick succession in 2004, and although I didn’t know it at that time, LinkedIn had made a virtual name for itself beginning 2003. In the next few years, I had discarded Orkut like a cream gone sour and Facebook was barely there on my mental radar, save for those annoying “friend requests” that popped up in my gmail at regular intervals. When I was at my most busy professionally, I really didn’t find the time or need to keep myself hooked on to these social media sites. That vacuum that exists within most of us – a need to be connected with someone, to have steady companionship or to have people whom you can always count on – kind of gets nulled when you are busy being productive with your energy.

In the lull that followed my break from work and then losing my singledom to marriagehood, I slowly got hooked on to social media networking! Now isn’t that comparable to addiction or drugs or some form of dependency behavior? Hmm, not to get too philosophical out here, but in the spaces between productive life is where I turned to virtual succor again. I reconnected with online regulars whom I had dis-orkutted, and un-Facebooked and non-LinkedIn two years ago. With an abandon that I thought was uncharacteristic of me, I also connected with people whom I shared similar interests with – art historians, museum professionals, graphic designers, amateur photographers, homegrown writers and window-sill poets. This was new for me, to have the freedom to connect with like-minded hobbyists whom you could have conversations with, not necessarily personal, but in a way, engaging, stimulating, intellectual, fruitful and purposeful.

When I entered my second innings with a corporate house, I cut back on my social networking time once again and gleefully ignored all the updates, requests, Likes, Pokes, gifts, quizzes, questions, photologs, chat conversations and myriad other updates of my collection of virtual faces. Honestly, I simply couldn’t be bothered to know what they were up to – and why should it? People whom I have never met for years altogether certainly couldn’t be expected a piece of my heart’s emotion, let alone, my sympathies, time, effort, energies and concern. That’s just the way with the virtual world isn’t it?

I call it the Second Life Syndrome, if it tickles your fancy! Our online world is like the popular-until-recently simulation game Second Life, where gamers would assume a real identity and live a full life within the game. They forget that they have a worthy life just beyond their tunnel vision. A life that gets neglected, ruptured, shrunken and decapitated the more we feed into our Second Life. I don’t know if I would choose to use the word ‘balance’ here, because it’s more about priorities I think.
I honestly wouldn’t need to hang out with the social media sites if I have a full-time job, a family to come home to, kids yearning for my love and attention, a garden to tend to during the odd bits of spare time, plenty of books lining the shelves, relatives and real friends to meet during weekends and a fulfilling personal routine to keep my mind happy. It’s during the dark gaps that seize all these moments that I want to use my Second Life as a security blanket.

It’s Still About Story Telling: Writing in the ePublishing Age

Change is always abhorred by the public and also by the few who envision it in the first place. Being creatures of routine and identifiable milestones, we are a tad too lazy accepting new directions, new ways of life and new ideas that will shake us from our current stick-ups. And so too it is with the literary revolution that has brought on a debate bigger than the mythical King Kong.

We live in the e-Age – where everything that is byte-sized and scrollable is put up in our densely populated second world – the World Wide Web. any form of literature, sound, visuals, design, theory and ideas, concept and technology, engineering and the occult, all find a place online. What this has done to the way we perceive information has obviously gone through a meta-transformation. Info-consumers not only passively absorb information from published sources anymore, or from the TV or radio, we actively seek it, challenge it, distort and transform it, and change its very genetics in the quest to create something new.

What happens when the largely passive public now actively debates and transmutates information that is for ages being passed on by the few groups, clans, communities and cliques in control of the same? Well, there’s a raging debate of course. The critic class, the culturally powerful class, the information transmitter fumes about the gradual change in the status-quo. There are rising insecurities about how the public isn’t capable of handling such transformations by itself and the value of information is diluting. There is also the sharp tang of fear among the monied culturatti – if the masses learn to wield technology, culture and power, where do we go from here?

The debate has always been the same: everytime a new technology comes along and the balance of power shifts – from the hands of the creators to those of the consumers – the former hits the panic button. When it comes to the literary revolution, be it online information, social media, e-publishing, print on demand, etc, we have puritans convincing the masses: You are not good enough to decide what is literature, we decide it for you.

Print on Demand, ePub, online writers, bloggers and critics are facing a tough battle in the 21st century. Not only do they have to make a living by finding a viable audience online, they are also consistently hounded to find respect among the touchstones of the publishing industry in the real world – the publishers, the newspaper critics and the literary agents. So, winning approval ratings, increased readership and Facebook Likes from the virtual community of readers is not proving to be enough of a bargaining chip to prove a writer’s worthiness. He/She still has to go through the Faustian hell of getting his soul-work whetted by the haloed publishers.

Writers, belonging to any background, context or genre, have yet to find respect and acknowledgement of their hardwork, if they haven’t been seen on the New York Times Bestseller’s List every month. Not only have they made no money online, worst, they are sometimes giving away their works for free, in a contest or by installments to the avid online freebie grabbers. Imagine, if no one wants to pay for your work, how can the larger public be convinced of its value? Cause, let’s admit it, a technology, concept, idea or creation is “valued” only at a price (see how we value the nuclear bomb because of the number of lives it has taken?)

This then leads to another thought: Wasn’t art always considered priceless or beyond the scope of having a particular value attached to it? Artists, musicians, writers and craftsmen work in the realm of art and their “products” are viewed as a gift to the general public for consumption, enjoyment, relief and amusement, appreciation and life changing experiences. The point is to take the work of art to the larger public and have them open a dialog or discussion about its merits, its place in the scheme of things, its context, and shelf life in life’s value chain. That’s how art used to be created, distributed, procured or sold, and challenged in the public domain.

Writing was never a viable career option. It’s only post the 1980s that you have writers who don’t hold a day job and write at night for a sustainable living. Else, even today, for every J.K. Rowling, there are 100,000 Ordinary Johns who hold two-shift jobs and write only for a passion, and not to hit the Sunday list of the NY Times Bestsellers. In fact, I think, for the seven long years that she struggled for food and shelter while typing away her Harry Potter stories in several cafes, Rowling could have simply put up her stories online and anticipated the same revolution.

If vote bank politics is what it takes to propel a writer writing for the Web to fame and success, then there’s no dearth of it online. The e-reading community is mammoth and aggressive in its quest to be heard and acknowledged. An online writer has millions of people visiting his webpage, a few thousands downloading his material and a few hundred or less responding to his creation with a comment, a Facebook “Like”, a Twitter comment, and the 365 ways through which the online world spread messages and information to each other. If the number of ‘hits’ be the count by which you measure an author’s readership, just like the number of sales registers a literary author’s success – then the Internet is no poor cousin playing second fiddle to the window displays of a Landmark, Odyssey or Higgin Bothams bookstore.

 

Being an amateur writer in the process of learning the ropes of the publishing industry, I am caught in the middle of a long running debate. It’s more an unsaid subtext in the literary circles, where it’s understood that to be a name to be reckoned with, I need to have a few hundred hardcover books in print in some of the snazziest bookstores of the country, and to hit the peaks of a Vikram Seth, Salman Rushie or Arundhati Roy, I either need to be in exile, a migrant in the USA or UK, or have a fatwa hanging over my head. What’s really amusing and amazing is that these very established authors today, have jumped on to the ebandwagon and promoting their books online, twittering about it and created Facebook pages where the online community can lend them a few more virtual credits, kudos or brickbats.

 

This is not to say that you have to be a puritan and stay well inside the fence of either of the divide – the online versus the old world – and not crossover anytime you wish. But this ignominy and stigma associated with being an online author or a self-publisher has to change. The reading public has to decide whose story is the best told, whether its a 200-page paperback or a 600-page PDF available at Amazon.com. It’s the text that matters, folks. The writer has this story to tell and it doesn’t matter which platform he chooses to be a story-teller.