On CIOs and Social Media Ban

A lot of companies (read CIOs) ban the use of Social Media sites as a part of their Internet policy.

Few factors such as fear of negative reputation, employee productivity, wastage of time etc. forces such moves. Check out this study on social media behaviour in companies for deeper insight.

Good to know that almost 10% of the companies are open to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube usages inside firms. High time companies redefine their “cultures” of Freedom and Respect!

How to subscribe

I see a surge in traffic on this blog off late. Thank you all! God Bless!

Now, the deal is I would like to keep this blog as is. Not buying a domain and transferring it. Neither am I planning to do an email subscription to the blog.

…. …

The coolest way to keep in touch with a blogger is to have an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication feed). For this purpose you need to have something called an RSS reader. I use Google Reader. This works in a very similar way like your Gmail and all you need is a Gmail id to subscribe to this blog.

If you have read till here, get yourself an account on Google Reader and click on a button which says “Add subscription” and type in www.kiranspillai.wordpress.com.

Every time I post a new one, it appears on your Google Reader as a “feed”. If you like me, please do it!

Fosters – Art of chilling – how it rocks

Lets get one thing straight – i dont drink even if the beer flows free on the house! (yup, i can do that)

So, a good friend of mine mails me on linked in saying “Indiblogger meet” and I got one keyword which said “Free beer”.

I lugged John’s laptop and took off to Pune. Twitter meet types with beer shouldn’t be a bad idea.

I was on for a surprise. A pool party with beautiful babes thrown in man! Awe-fu**in-some!

I am a man with a laptop who wants the least to be the geek. No, its cool to run XP but women hate laptops. But hello, now that the scene is on, lets be the cool geek! Straight clear questions were asked to the models if they blog which they happily answered in the negative.

DJ Lokesh and DJ Tally were told clearly to take care of John’s laptop and also to play good old reggae and jungle, which they happily did in the positive.

Was a lot of fun. I took a pirate hat called “Fosters Art of Chilling”. I am wearing my headphones right now. But I did go to a Tribal DDB farewell party wearing it and claimed to be an ex-Webchutney fellow. The bouncers liked the hat too. They told me so!

Take one more look at the models.

Oh BTW the Pune tweeters think social media can one day change the world! Cheers to them! But they surely missed the Marilyn Manson mix (Beautiful people). Man, that rocked my bald head off!

How to connect your society and the social media

I have been tripping major on social experiments.

Ever since late 2007 when I moved into online advertising, people all around are going major gaga over ’social media’. The Facebook way of doing your thing, the iphone way of seeing your thing and the Twitter way of saying your thing. A big huge bunch of keywords and people revolving around it.

Somehow, this strikes an idea that social media is a mirror of the society around you. 300+ friends on facebook is a sign that 300 people trusts you and you are somehow or the other responsible for these 300 people with the little things you say and you do. Just like everyone else, one may find himself / herself (i know) in sticky situations once in a while. This is the time when you could use some help from your friends and then come clean.

1. Try creating a sticky situation – could be one that existed before and you have not really come out 100% clean. There are chances that you might find yourself back in the situation if not checked / controlled.

2. Make use of your friends in an offline way – I tried SMS. Its good, its easy and no use of vocal chords.

3. Come online and push it – Use Facebook messages, email, Twitter, personal blog (I use this one) etc. to clean yourself out.

I see results in terms of numbers on the internet. I also see results in the form of an easy, quiet, non-sticky mind.

Definite winner!

Trying out the social theories

Been reading a lot of theories on how to handle Facebook and such social networking sites.

Now playing around Facebook just like how my friends drooled over monochrome screens and Multi User Dungeon (MUD) – a text based game. This would be 2003. I find Facebook is a lot of fun with the quizzes, funny updates and such.

Trying out some old school comment deal here. Created an event around the theme. Do check what happens here. Could turn out interesting!!

I am updating my Twitter stream with interesting tidbits. Do a Twitter Search for #FBX for details.

What happens in the social media scene

Something cool I did when I got some time.

I know there are spelling errors – came to know of it later. I was a little too enthu I guess!

forgive and forget

Marketing – Art or Science or both?

Seth Godin has come out with a really beautiful “Art vs. Science” argument for marketing.

Its good to speak numbers and analytics in marketing. Very vital to measure your progress at each and every step. However, the target of all marketing is human attention. Numbers could not always speak for human attention. Art could though.

The solution lies in switching art and science thinking hats depending on various parameters. I second this idea

What you are not!

Spoiler: Moral Science-ish!

1. You are not your twitter handle
2. You are not your Gtalk status message
3. You are not who you are “in relationship with”
4. You are not your professional summary
5. You are not who you follow on Twitter
6. You are not who follows you on Twitter
7. You are not your blog
8. You are not the blogs you read
9. You are not your “5 things”
10. You are not your feed
11. You are not your shared items on Google Reader
12. You are not your job

13. You are not always a team leader even if the company calls you a team leader
14. You are not performance appraisal
15. You are not the college you attended
16. You are not the school you attended
17. You are not the number of your facebook friends
18. You are not your Orkut fans
19. You are not your email sent items
20. You are not your email received items
21. You are not your phone
22. You are not your laptop / computer
23. You are not your motorcycle
24. You are not your car
25. You are not the city you live in
26. You are not Tom Cruise (unless you really are Tom Cruise)
27. You are not your boss (unless of course – he he)

Then WTF are you?

New kind of forms happening on the web

I see a new kind of marketing where the landing page looks something like this. One form – two entries – your name and email and a video to go with it. Twitter is the main source of marketing here. Catch those social media types with a huge huge following and then broadcast this link to people with a relevant 90 character message which usually goes “Blah Blah” – awesome video. go watch!

Word of Mouth usually happens with retweets or maybe even a few emails to follow up on that deal. Personally, I think this is sweet. I am slowly removing my hatred for online videos too! Just fire me with quality stuff. I ll come with you!

KLPD experienced – too much expecation to FAIL!

I just had an experience which made me expect too much from some dude on the net which later left me quite disappointed. This again started with a link I got from Twitter or some (I don’t exactly remember where) which lead me to a really cool video.

This video had a dude with a lot of surfboards on the beach; unshaven-long-haired-t shirt-jeans-f word filled-marketing-consultant kinda dude. He talked really cool about his success, how he made some cool money by catching on human psyche and stuff. Really cool. The video even had some neat bass lines in the back ground to give that ‘funk feel’ if you get what I mean.

Next to the video was a box to enter your email id and access to more videos from this guy. “Damn cool” and I clicked to see those videos all of which sucked major ass. MAJOR ASS! Later I got one email from this guy saying thanks and related jazz – straight to spam! I did not even want to know that my email id has been misused!

The key here is – Do not be super awesome. If you happen to do so, make sure the rest of the stuff you made atleast stand up to hype you created by being super awesome. Or else you get spammed.