Think Tagore, think Tata. Both were fearless visionaries. One inspired generations to fight against the poverty of mind. The other created a wealth of opportunities through employment.

Consider the following:

1. Both the poet and the CEO have a very intense relationship with Time.

One figures time is immaterial while the other estimates every moment is time and material.

2. They are both bookkeepers of Profit and Loss. The poet chooses to express his numerous gains and loss through words, while the CEO prefers to use numerical expression.

3. The poet reveals truth through ambiguity, the CEO sees truth in analytics.

I am sure there are more than 300 such similarities you can think of. Dear reader, I invite you to contribute some more.

As long as people are alive, there will be Content creation, for god said: “Be Social. Let the Web teem with living conversations, and the tweets fly above the earth across the expanse of the Internet.”

So conversation took wings and the Web was filled with content of every kind, with corporate and individual blogs, videos and tunes, and flickering images and apps of every kind, animating the Web with the spirit of life.

But mere creation is not enough. You need a place to showcase your creation. And, that is when god spoke about Connectivity: “Be Found. Let there be connectivity. For, all the content is brought to nothing if there is no connectivity.”

Reach out and ensure that the content is discoverable and shows up in the right social media networks such as FB, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

And finally, god let out a little secret about Conversion: “Build Trust. Sustain the content and build credibility so they will come to you.”

This means no selling of things you want to dispose anyway, but listening and giving what your audience really needs. That’s what Santa does. He doesn’t give away old clothes with new labels but only that which you have been dreaming of the whole year. That is why you believe in Santa. That’s how you build credibility. Now go forth and spread the good cheer.

And, no, for the last time, Google is not God.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

There were also days when I waited for hours in a stinking mortuary to take shots of someone brutally murdered. This was life in the traditional media, one day there was a sumptuous buffet at a five star hotel and the next day went without even a glass of water to drink.  Not complaining, I knew this was a part of my job and I did it with passion.

I slept analog and woke up digital.
I was never bothered about the “just a cameraman” notion some people had, but was tired of the sarcasm people showed when I told them what job I was doing. In most news channels, cameramen are not expected to be thinkers. I believed that I could do better than a few of the self-proclaimed ‘intelligent’ reporters in the industry, but was never given a chance. You are considered over-smart if you give inputs for production or pitch in with new ideas, and that was when I realized, that I was capable of doing better things than just shoot news visuals. My transition into the digital media did not happen instantaneously.

One morning, I suddenly decided that I could not stay this way all my life and quit my job. The week after I quit was fun; a week of street party after three years of constant running around. I got time to catch up with a lot of friends, watched movies and roamed like a fanatic. But slowly I started feeling the heat. The jobless feeling began creeping into me. I went looking for jobs in advertising agencies and production houses. Not finding one, I again began freelancing for news channels. I had begun to doubt my decision to quit. I had begun to doubt my confidence. That was when I found pepper square. I slept analog and woke up digital.

Tapes and tripods have been replaced by mails and blogs.
Time wrote an entirely new  script for me to act out. I have stepped into the new media-the digital media. I find myself sitting in front of a computer and working. I never used to sit in one place for a full day. May be having irregular attendance in college was also one of the reasons for this! I always addressed my seniors as sir and madam, and here I am supposed to call the CEO by name. Tapes and tripods have been replaced by mails and blogs.

Clicking goodbye to Chaos
For every story that I covered, I had to rush back to the office or to the broadcast van to deliver the visuals. But here, a picture is uploaded, a blog is posted and in just a click, it reaches millions of people. I have to think, I have to put thoughts in words. This is what I love to do and it is this thinking that pays my salary here.

But I also feel that the smell and dirt of real life in traditional media taught me hard lessons, and this is one thing that I miss here. I have been using the Internet for a long time, but not as extensively as I do now. I am astounded about what it has to offer-the whole world, and beyond, is right in front of me. I even got my Facebook account only after coming here (and no, this doesn’t mean I am on it all day).

When Creativity Clicked
For me, meetings were always the sessions where I got blasted. Here, meetings are held to discuss work and you even have fun. The pressure I have faced before was always sweaty and tiring, but here it is different; I have deliveries and deadlines to meet. Every little communication happens in an organized way. I got a great opportunity to get into the beat of creative thinking.

Now, I have gained more self-confidence and certainly don’t regret the decision I had taken. I now have a routine. I get to go back home on time. Breakfast, lunch and dinner happen at the ring of a bell. The peaceful and organized style of working in the new media has over shadowed the glamor that traditional media offered, though I miss it sometimes.

There is one more thing that makes me feel good – I have gained two kilos in two months!

]]> http://www.peppersquare.com/blog/pepper-mind/switch-2/feed 35 http://www.peppersquare.com/blog/social-media/government-india-drafts-social-media-framework-guidelines http://www.peppersquare.com/blog/social-media/government-india-drafts-social-media-framework-guidelines#comments Thu, 13 Oct 2011 07:08:18 +0000 Prakash http://www.peppersquare.com/blog/?p=453 With India all set to hit a networking boom and the future being predominantly mobile, the Government of India has finally come out with a draft Social Media Framework and Guidelines.

The draft is aimed and designed to engage with all its stakeholders (especially citizens) in real time to make policy making citizen centric. The guidelines have been developed for all eGovernance projects under the National eGovernance Plan.

With social media transforming the way people connect with one another on a 24×7 basis, and with its viral ability for exponential spread of information by word-of-mouth, it is redefining the way organizations and people communicate.

Taking a cue from this, Governments across the world are taking to social media to interact with their citizens. In the US, for example, The White House has its own Facebook page and Twitter profile. In Victoria, Australia, the prime minister’s office uses YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as well as Live Chat and blogs to interact with its stakeholders.

In India, many Government organizations are already using social media in a limited manner. The Delhi Police, for example, uses Facebook and Twitter to ease handling of traffic related issues.

The Public Diplomacy division of the Ministry of External Affairs made its debut recently on Twitter with the ID IndianDiplomacy which was used recently very successfully during the recent crises in Libya and the Middle East.

The Government of India’s draft on Social Media policy therefore comes at the right time and as a breath of fresh air.

Objectives: The clear objectives suggested in the draft are:

1. Seeking feedback from citizens

2. Re-pronouncement of policy

3. Issue-based as well as generic interaction

4. Brand building / Public Relations

5. Generating awareness and education on National Action Plans and Implementation Strategies.

The draft suggests creating a 3C framework – Connectedness, Collaboration and Community – which helps create content and helps share it seamlessly with the stakeholders. It suggests that this should form the bedrock of the content policy.

It further recommends that content should be regularly updated (at least every week or two.)

The draft also proposes that Government departments should have an internal team to oversee the formulation and implementation of Social Media initiatives at a policy level whilst allowing them to outsource the resources, if need be, to manage Facebook, Twitter etc.

These, obviously, would be covered within the law of the land (RTI Act, IT Act 2000 etc.)

In addition, the draft proposes that reasonable security practices be adopted and suggests that ISO 27001 is an acceptable standard.

However, implementation of the whole ISO27001 section standard would not be all that easy for the average government department to follow. That would become a barrier to social media implementation for these departments, so it is suggested that the government provide a subset of minimal requirements from ISO27001 to follow.

I have to admit that I was one of the ‘no’ people, but that’s just the past. Everything changed for me from the day I laid my hands on a motorcycle, a ‘Royal Enfield – Classic 500’ to be specific. So how does a motorcycle really change a person? Isn’t it just a mode of transport for the less fortunate who cannot afford a car? Well, that’s what everybody else thinks at least. But for all they know, a motorcycle is a window to the world out there. It lets you explore, dream and discover. For me, it is my soul reviver.

Look back at your past and you will wake up to a rude shock that people just threw muck at your true potential by institutionalizing your whole life. Twenty years of schooling and they put you on a day shift? Is that the real you? It’s time to think beyond and break free to the other side. Rediscover yourself.

A casual meeting with my friends last Thursday evening sparked the excitement for yet another road trip. “So, guys, we have been riding to all the popular tourist destinations, why don’t we push our limits and ride a thousand kilometers in 48 hours flat? Let’s ride to the Western Ghats,” suggested both Diwakar and Prajwal. “Are you out of your mind? Its monsoon and it rains 24/7 there, plus Western Ghats means off-roading without tarmac!” replied the rest of the gang. I said, “Why not? Let’s get some excitement” and lo! The road trip to Kodachadri was on.

Saturday early morning started with adrenalin rush + 500 Cubic Centimeters of raw power, oodles of torque and 27 horses working in tandem, all waiting to be unleashed with a twist to the throttle. The highway sings its own songs and we were humming to its tunes till we cleared the plains and reached the hilly areas. Then began the overwhelming greenery and the mystic forest and the curvy roads, boy it was a delight to feel liberated, to feel the fresh air, to wonder about how beautiful the world is out there. What better way to do it than riding a Classic Royal Enfield eh?

The real challenge began when we started to ascend the Kodachadri peak, especially because there was no road to reach the top. We had to brave boulders, sharp cut rocks, two feet of slush, freezing cold water paths and insane hair-pin bends all the way up! Some of our biker friends took a look at the magnitude of the task ahead of them and the risk involved and decided to give it a pass. But we persuaded them to accept the challenge and believe in themselves that they can do it with concentration, courage and most importantly, the goal to reach on top of the peak.

Our way up was filled with hardship and risk, every corner was banked with loose gravel and it was impossible to push our bikes because one slip and its good bye dear earth. Two bikes got stranded in the slush and had to be ferried back in jeeps, yet the rest of the gang managed to reach the top! It was a truly exhilarating experience and we got our reward: a view of heaven!

What enabled us to finish the dangerous climb was not ‘only’ the power our bikes had but sheer determination, grit and perseverance. We really need to believe in ourselves. It is amazing to learn about the limitless possibilities we can achieve.

When I returned to office on Monday morning, after 40 hours of riding, I was still fresh as a cucumber and was filled with zest to work. I now know not to be afraid of the challenges ahead of me but to take them up with a ‘bring it on’ attitude.

So, when are you planning your next road trip – your own crazy adventure of self discovery?

With competition intensifying, each company wants its keywords to rank on page 1 of Google but most do not know how to go about the process of improving the ranking.

There are two methods of improving ranking- On-page and Off-page optimization. This blog talks about On-page optimization.

One of the basic tenets of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that each web page must have proper meta tags in place in the source code. These are the title and description tags that one may see in well designed pages (by pressing Ctrl U on either Firefox or Chrome.) Yet, it is amazing that a very high percentage of companies either do not have meta tags in place or have defective meta tags. The starting point therefore is to use a competent digital agency to analyze the meta tags on each web page and get them to insert proper tags.

There are also many cases of large companies whose website has grown explosively and who are then at a loss as to where to start optimizing their web pages.

If your company has over 30,000 pages, for example, where does one start? This was a dilemma faced by one of our clients. The solution that we offered: do an A-B-C- analysis of the pages to see which pages get the maximum traffic and start optimizing those pages first. It turned out that just 300 pages of this company attracted over 70% of the traffic and these pages provided a good starting point for SEO.

Once the meta tags have been inserted, the content of each page needs to be examined to check the keyword density. If the meta tags speak of, say, digital widgets, but the incidence of the phrase “digital widgets” is very low in the page, Google would tend to assume that the page is not really about digital widgets and down-rank the page. A competent digital agency needs to study and fix the keyword density in the content as described above. This would result in an enhancement of ranking. Pages also need to be periodically revisited and their content checked so as to ensure that they are up-to-date. This can enhance search engine rankings.

Many websites achieve high page rankings after having carried out the SEO exercise. However, rankings are dynamic and keep moving up and down (a.k.a the Google Shuffle). Companies must, therefore, constantly monitor the pages on their website to ensure that they maintain the rankings. This is best done by their digital agency who will take corrective steps as soon as a ranking drop is noticed to get the ranking restored.

Finally, make sure that the Google crawler can visit every page of your website. This is best achieved by having a site map on the home page.

If you have a ranking problem, please free to email me (prakash@peppersquare.com)

Rahul Bose, an actor, Chetan Bhagat, a writer and Prahalad Kakkar, the veteran ad guru came on stage together last week in Bangalore to speak about guts and entrepreneurship. Different ages, different approaches, different disciplines but held together by the common thread of creative urge.

While Rahul Bose is driven by what he terms his inner moral compass, Prahlad Kakkar is driven by the sheer force of creative instinct, whereas Chetan Bhagat lets his self belief and the breaking of assumptions drive him.

This triad energy of soul, body and mind defines the nature of each creative leader, marking a signature style to creativity. For what else can it be but the soul that gives direction, mind that applies intelligence to seize opportunities and bodily instinct the survivor’s only tool to rely upon when everything else fails?

The moral compass is the one that guides you in your creative journey. It is the one that separates a Hitler from a Gandhi. It’s the one that speaks to you when you are all by yourself, it’s the voice you have been listening to ever since you were a child, the invisible hand that’s been leading you, even if you happen to be an atheist. This is then the moral compass that sets the roadmap for everything you embark on, be it a public endeavor or a private enterprise.

The need to break assumptions, to break rules that are defunct and perhaps destructive as well, is what led Chetan Bhagat to dwell on Five Point Someone, which was later produced into a movie by Amir Khan titled The Three Idiots. The single-minded determination to go on despite getting continuous rejection letters from several publications carved Chetan’s road to success.

As for Kakkar, he’s the life blood of Indian advertising who brought in a touch of humour to the then existing colonial and snobbish nature of commercials. He added a tinge of Indian flavour, mish mashed it with bilinguals, humour and inspired the youth from remote corners of India to dream big despite their impoverished conditions, so much so that even today, the young sing along in unanimity “yeh dil mange more!”

Innovation is all about breaking assumptions, focus is but the single minded approach to your work stemmed from immense self belief, and the courage to go on despite an unchartered territory is what brings glory. This then, is the saga of every creative leader who has been successful.

What kind of a creative leader are you?

When I read IBM’s global study titled Capitalizing on Complexity, I couldn’t help smiling because this means that they have finally recognized that creativity plays a crucial role in leadership quality.

Why is creativity the topic of interest all of a sudden in the Csuites? Because the business challenges that they are seeing today is something that they have not anticipated in the traditional business models.

Everything around is interdisciplinary and calls for diverse skill sets. Too many cooks spoil the broth is an old dictum, today they come together from distant geographical boundaries to produce a distinguished broth that tingles the taste buds of the hungry audience around the globe. Yeah, consumer taste buds have changed; we can’t feed them the same old recipes.

The crucial leadership skill required today is that of innovation on the go, perhaps with Spartan resources which, calls for the spirit of collaboration and sharing of available resources, of being able to deliver with whatever we have in a complex environment.

Indeed capitalizing on creativity to turn complexity into financial advantage is the focus and strategy of progressive companies like in the crowd sourcing arena, for instance. How do we do it? This calls for original thinking. Put on your thinking caps and start doodling your solution to the problems you perceive, one at a time.

Recipe for Creativity

1. Flush your ego in the toilet.
2. Instead of stealing your neighbor’s idea, suggest, and collaborate to produce better and faster.
3. If you still think your idea is better than others, prove it
4. If this idea fails, don’t brood, take a walk and start working on the next one.

What’s your recipe for creativity, i would love to hear from you…

I think aesthetics are like paradigms. They start developing as soon as we are born, the things we see, the emotions we feel, the colors we taste, the smell we hear. Like paradigms, aesthetics mostly changes and adapts itself to the environment and to the society.

While working with various designers and clients, I seem to notice that the less you know about design, the more your individual aesthetics sense comes to the forefront. For example, a couple of years ago a client of mine was quite adamant to use the color red in his poster which was for his spa.

It seemed to clash with my tinted aesthetics sense – databases of colour theory knowledge – using peaceful soothing blues to denote peace, calmness; lighter shade of blue would also reflect pureness, lightness and tranquility. But how was I to convince this client?

So when I asked him, he said, and I politely quote, “I want to use red because it stands out.”

I guess every person in the design industry must have heard this line. RED – red stands out. It stands out probably because after this color no other color can be seen by the naked human eye, because after red everything becomes infrared.

It’s probably the first color we see in the womb, the color we are made of, the color of our mum’s bindi, anything to do with vanity, the garish scar on the knee, the color fail written on your paper, the road signs, the road blocks, the big fat Indian wedding bride, love – not only on Valentine’s day, anything and everything that wants to stand out.

So what is wrong if this poor chap wants a red poster for his spa just because he wants it to stand out? Are you going to make him remove his paradigm glasses which he built since he could see, to put on someone else glasses whose standing out color was say black because of all the sin he’s seen and the music he’s heard? Are we supposed to swap paisleys and baroque with pickachoos in the future?

You may say it is individuality. But how do we communicate this to a society with norms and regulations? Isn’t that why we created global standards? Everything has a standard to live up to nowadays; it’s easier to work with standards too. Write books, back it up with theories, publicize it with blogs, and bang! It’s sold. You have a million people following it like moths to a light.

The easiest example I guess is the term web 2.0. Oh! It’s hilarious- the number of people using the term these days to fit their own understanding. Interfaces, fonts, colors, usability – everything has started becoming a clone of everything, under the huge umbrella of web 2.0. Buttons in 80% of web pages remain the same, glossy, double shaded ‘web 2.0’.

From where I see, web 2.0 is a paradigm too. When a designer comes up with say, a better button – not necessarily glossy or double shaded – it gets immediately shot down by people like us in the industry who have gotten used to certain ways of looking at things and relating to things. We don’t like changes because it takes a helluva long a time to adapt, right? Then we get this factory one-size-fits-all design out, and boom! The client buys it because it looks very much like the benchmark website.

It easier said than done to create your own benchmarks, but we need to see brands as individuals and not succumb to the client’s personal aesthetic sensibilities. The client probably will quit a couple of years later, but the brand will live on forever.  As designers I think it’s our responsibility to get good functional designs out, and educate clients about designs – on the need to use a particular color, font, image.

Now, we go back to aesthetic sensibilities. As designers we need to feed our brain with all sorts of imagery to constantly change our glasses which are our inspiration. One’s foundation of design sensibilities should not be trends and fads – it should be balance, rhythm, harmony, functionality.

Finally, let me sum it up with: lizard brain is what black is to fashion like blue is to corporates. But we aren’t all wearing black right now, are we? Check and see just in case!

You strategize that Tweeting it will create a huge momentum that will, hopefully, help shut Galvao’s mouth.

And why is Galvao so despised?

His football commentary is annoying. So annoying that he has been compared to a lepata (a stadium horn a.k.a. the vuvuzela which produces a loud, distinctive monotone note). It is reported that Galvao’s commentary results in Brazilians tearing their hair, flipping channels, muting their TVs and the like, no pun intended.

You execute your tweet with a flourish and sit back, monitoring the results with hope in your heart. However, the results startle you.

Instead of Galvao getting the message and shutting up, something else entirely different happens.

A baffled English speaking world innocently wonders what the three words “Cala Boca Galvão” in the tweet mean. This results in a huge number of Google searches for these three words.

An enterprising SEO savvy guy spots an opportunity. He puts up a website overnight and optimizes it for the phrase Cala Boca Galvão. This Google-watcher also knows that if the page has video, Google will index it almost instantly. An appropriate video is shot and inserted ASAP and lo and behold, the site is indexed by Google! People searching for “Cala Boca Galvão” immediately start landing up on his home page. The message that they see there? That every time someone tweets “Cala Boca Galvão”, 10 cents would be donated to a foundation to save the endangered bird of Brazil, the Galvao.

The tweets skyrocket. “Cala Boca Galvão” goes viral. A million people see the video. No one, not even the media, realizes that it is a hoax, that there is no such endangered bird!

The New York Times finally wises up to the hoax and lets people know that they have been had. However, whilst all this is happening, Galvao is still going on and on further irritating millions of Brazilians.

The moral of the story? You tell me. I’d love to hear from you.