• The story of #bachpanstyle

    Myntra’s twitter accounthit a couple of milestones last week. For starters, it overtook me in terms of number of followers – not that I am way up on the charts or hugely active on twitter these days, but it’s good to handle a brand that has more followers than I do, especially when it has more than quadrupled in the last year. 🙂 Growing a personal brand is fun, but as a professional in the domain, growing a brand on social media is more fun because of the increased number of challenges and constraints.

    We have focused mostly on getting the basic stuff right – Customer Care, (utilising GetSatisfaction to a fair degree) promoting interesting content relevant to our domain – created and curated, presence on the website, and when we were confident of taking it to the next level experimenting with various contest formats. Not the “let’s make it trend” kind, but ones that have some meaning for us as a brand/business and that’s fun for our followers on twitter as well.

    And that’s what gave us our second milestone. Long before brands arrived on the scene, Ashu Mittal, (to begin with.. thanks Surekha for the correction) Surekha, Roshni, The Comic Project, b50, Aalaap had made Children’s Day a fun event on Twitter by getting people to change their DPs – to a childhood photo – for a day. I have participated too, at least for a couple of years. Though I didn’t inform them (because I am still unsure on how I should deal with personal relationships in a work scenario) this was also a hat tip to them. All users had to do was share a childhood pic of theirs with a description of it and use #bachpanstyle. We used our larger FB crowd for publicity, ran the contest on Twitter, and made a Pinterest board specially for it. It was a lot of fun, and also got us our second milestone – a little bit of coverage (courtesy Lighthouse Insights) for the activity. That was a first for us. 🙂

    The cake had some icing too! The next day, my Twitter daily digest showed me a tweet from Surekha about #bachpan and changing DPs. Since the contest was over and done with, I sent her the board we’d made. And got this

    Being appreciated is always a great thing, and more so when it comes from my twitter-childhood friends. 🙂

    until next time, childlike glee 🙂

  • A life less rich…

    On Quora, there is a question which has been getting some very interesting answers – “Is getting rich worth it?” I remembered my post “Halve Notes” from sometime back when I saw it. Rich is of course a very relative term – relative not just in terms of comparison with others, but dependent on time, one’s location etc. Also, factors like one’s health, emotional well being etc have the potential to change the worth completely.

    I don’t think I want to get super rich. I still ride an Activa, live in a rented apartment and  my consumption patterns do not really conform to my income, or as some say, my age. 😀 I have been trying to analyse why. I do like to spend on things I enjoy doing – books, movies, food, travel to name a few – and would not want to forego these for lack of money. But I also do not want to get used to things/habits I might find difficult to sustain later without compromising on my belief systems. So it’s a balancing act, with a bias towards caution thanks to my middle class upbringing perhaps.

    My dystopian future is an old age where I cannot live life on my own terms. That’s probably why I found this story -of one Mr. PM Sahay – so distressing. It’s part of The Delhi Walla’s commendable 130000 portrait project. Mr.PM Sahay is a 74 year old retired bank manager who is forced to sell puppets in Connaught Place to  sustain his family. (I am hoping none of his Rohtak neighbours happen to see all this on the web!) He travels 50kms from his town every day. His legs ache, he says and he has to support himself on the columns and sit on manhole covers near rubbish bins. He is a victim of circumstances. The best laid plans can go wrong, after all. Being rich at least takes care of some things, it would seem.

    until next time, a rich life…

  • Under the Dome: A Novel

    Stephen King

    (ex) Captain Dale Barbara is about to leave town when a gigantic, transparent dome envelops the town of Chester’s Mill. He could consider himself lucky since he survived the arrival of the dome. Several animals and people didn’t, as they crashed into the indestructible, impenetrable dome.

    The dome gave an electric shock when a person first touched it, but saved its disastrous results for those with pacemakers and hearing aids. The first victim on that count was the police chief Howard “Duke” Perkins, and that gave the town’s First Selectman ‘Big Jim’ Rennie to assert his superiority with First Selectman Andy Sanders serving as a willing puppet.

    He soon appoints his man as the new police chief and begins machinations to seize complete control. He pays special attention to Barbara, whose reason for leaving town was an altercation with Rennie’s son Junior, and his friends. The only people who can see through Rennie’s game are notably Barbara, Julia – the editor of the local newspaper, ‘Rusty’ – a physician’s assistant, and Howard’s widow Brenda.

    Even as the military reaches the town’s borders to address the ‘situation’, and the media update a stunned nation, Big Jim manipulates the town’s people into believing what he wants them to believe, despite television channels broadcasting his nefarious schemes for making money. The town and its people meanwhile, remain trapped under the unrelenting dome, like ‘ants under a magnifying glass’

    With a huge supporting list of characters, and spanning close to 900 pages, the author has tried to highlight a multitude of things – from human transactional relationships to environmental hazards. Unfortunately, the book didn’t really work for me, it was just too long to hold my attention, especially towards the end. The character snippets, the descriptions of town life and the jarring differences of climate inside and outside the dome, all gets repetitive after a point, and even the vast array of characters, interesting though some of them are, become too tiresome, despite the messages they seem to be carrying for the author.

  • HireRabbit

    HireRabbit helps companies boost their existing recruitment strategy with social-media. In conversation with co-founder Prafull Sharma

    [scribd id=113574291 key=key-16y50vfjlos6nxyvesnc mode=scroll]

  • Create and curate

    Yay! Instagram launched web profiles, and mine, as you can see, is dominated by food! Which meant that I was completely blown by what Zomato did with the Instagram API at Zomato.xxx. If you haven’t seen it yet, now would be a good time. Try to have a full meal before you take a look. One of the bugs in this version is that it makes people hungry. I don’t see them fixing that bug soon! 😉

    It’s not really an original thought, since I’ve seen at least one fashion brand use hashtags on  Instagram and Twitter to generate photos, but that doesn’t really take away anything, since the execution is extremely good.

    I wrote about the reemergence of branded content last week. One way is to create your own content, the scalability of which is debatable, unless that is one of the organisation’s core competency and priority. The other way is curation. Like I have mentioned on the blog before, curation is a great way for brands to engage with content producers and at the same time, provide  great content to those who consume it. It’s not really creation vs curation, but more of their respective share in the strategy.

    On the execution front, crowdsourcing works best if you make it as easy as possible for the for the content producer. In Zomato’s case, adding a #zomato to the food snaps I load on Instagram is hardly a task. The simpler the task is, and the more it is an add-on behaviour than a new one, the lesser the need for incentive. The cooler it is, the more people would want to be a part of it. It distributes itself.

    In a traditional media dominated era, more money was spent on distribution than creation. Now content is marketing and with owned platforms, and earned and ‘sponsored’ media on social platforms, the costs of distribution have fallen. There’s a lot being written about content strategy for brands from a creation perspective, but the costs of distribution fall even further in curation because content creators would want to show off their work. The hope is that brands will spend at least a part of the money they’re saving, into creating platforms, processes, tools etc that make it easy for the user to create and share ‘branded’ content.

    until next time, co-curation is for later 🙂