Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are author's opinions and do not represent e-Zest's view in anyway. © Copyright 2010
Social media in emerging countries like India
India is expected to share a dais with US and China being the third largest internet user base by 2013 - Forrester Research said in a report. There are approximately 81 million internet users in India (as of November2008 which is 7 to 7.5% of Indian population). According to Facebook global report, India is ranked 20th in terms of number of Facebook users which are growing at the phenomenal rate of 200 to 300% year on year.
Apart from the global players like Facebook, Orkut and LinkedIn there are plenty on local Indian players like BharatStudents, Bigadda, Chikka, Corners, Frooper, Khichdee, kyakare, OLX, Picsquare, SlideShare, Tezaa, weRead, Zapak, ZoomIn are trying to create their niche in the online market.
Some of the typical profile types on social networking sites are -
In most of the emerging countries, the main usage of social media sites are Entertainment, Education, Networking, Job opportunities, Gaming and freely expressing yourself. Good news is that Shopping has entered into this list as one of the use of social media sites recently. Users are inviting opinions from peers and professions for their buying decisions.
I know a friend of mine who expressed wish to buy an ‘ABC’ make and company hatchback car on Facebook. When I asked her why she is interested in that particular make/company car, she had no specific reason apart from that she loved the way it looks. Someone from her friend’s network sent her link from critic’s website, information on how to buy your first car? Etc. Well needless to say she bought a car from different make/company of completely different looks, and by the way she had strong opinion on why this is the best car for her! Isn’t it impressive to see that social media has began to play important role in influencing such high value decisions.
One of the biggest concern people have about social networking sites is ‘Privacy’. My personal information (email and date of birth) along with entire listing of friend/social network get displayed on public domain. The problem is most users (Beginners and Observers) registers on the websites and disappear may be after few visits. Apart from basic password protection, no social media sites protect to guarantee any information shared on the sites. Just like you have ‘buyer beware’ in consumer marketplace, in social media space you have ‘user beware’, aware of what personal information you are sharing and with whom, till the time you have ‘privacy’ guidelines and regulations getting in place.
Every another week, new social network is launched by innovative entrepreneurs. This makes really challenging for social application entrepreneurs & companies who wish to develop & implement their social applications across the all popular social networks. Previously there was no choice of generic social application development platform. You need to almost re-engineer social application to make it work on another social platform eg. MySpace/Bebo if its originally developed to work on Facebook. Almost all top social networking sites/plaform have their own proprietary API platform to support social application development & integration.
But now OpenSocial is coming to rescue. OpenSocial is recently launched by Google & it defines a common API for social application development across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers/social entrepreneurs can create their social applications that can access all OpenSocial supported social network's friends and update feeds.
Another major challenge faced by social app entrepreneurs & companies is cost of bandwidth & server requirements. Many social apps which became very successful instantly due to viral marketing failed to stay-up due to lack of proper bandwidth & application hosting environment. Right now Amazon EC2 webservices & similar services are of assistance, still there is a considerable cost & technical management required.
OpenSocial is built upon Google gadgets technology framework. With the Google Gadget Editor and a simple key/value API, complete social applications can be build without separate application hosting i.e. no server at all. OpenSocial also provide option to host social application on social app owner's independent hosting servers. In both cases, Google's gadget caching technology provide breather for bandwidth demands in case social application suddenly become a huge success & faces sudden surge in traffic.
OpenSocial looks like will help to tackle both major challenges (multiple application platform & cost involved in bandwidth/hosting) faced by social application developers & entrepreneurs. Still we need to wait for some time to judge its success, as its still in beta & not supported by few key social networking platforms like facebook.com.
'Enterprise 2.0; : One more buzz word in IT space. Buzz words are very popular in IT industry. Initially Buzz words normally sound simple, stupid still they are successful to generate interest & initiate brainstorming/discussions in IT community on various forums primarily web. Most of the cases these discussions resulted in many sound business ideas & innovations in today's world. I believe Enterprise 2.0 is one of them. Generally speaking Enterprise 2.0 is the use of Web 2.0 technologies & tools like wikis, blogs, mashups, rss, tagging, communities/social networking, RIA, intranet, etc to help make the enterprise more efficient by being collaborative. CMP is organizing Enterprise 2.0 conference from June 9 - 12 at Boston USA. As per conference official site http://www.enterprise2conf.com/, 'Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.' Most important aspect for implementing Enterprise 2.0 is not just web 2.0 technology platforms or tools but ensuring lateral organizational culture of sharing information/knowledge , working together in teams & people-driven processes. Intuitive interfaces, ease of use, lack of bureaucracy, soft incentives should make Enterprise 2.0 initiatives persuasive to the users. The organization thus can successfully fulfill its objective of making people collaborate and contribute towards the organizational knowledge pool. Some of the practical instances of Enterprise 2.0 in day to day business life: * Using wiki to jot down meeting minutes * Finalising corporate website or other marketing content using wiki. ***At e-Zest, we did implemented open source wiki to achieve magnanimous task of writing 300 pages of thought leadership content for website. Workflow of finalizing content was implemented using simple non-technical protocol amongst team members. * Blogs can acts a very effective channel for senior executives to share important messages informally. * Implementing social community similar to linkedin, internal to organization which can help team members to understand each other personally & professionally better. Eg. Projects worked on, sharing of product ideas, hobbies, etc. Key companies/products operating in Enterprise 2.0 space are Microsoft Sharepoint, SocialText, nQuira , Google Sites (previously JotSpot), ConnectBeam etc.
So, it’s high time to take note of this buzzword which is reality now & orient our future actions accordingly. Note: Some of the ideas in this blog entry are derived from answers posted to my question on LinkedIn.