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by Lhendup G Bhutia & R Krishna

It was July 14, ’09 and looking out of his window, Asfaq Tapia seemed worried. It had been raining incessantly, offices were closing early and people were leaving for their homes. Reporters on TV were predicting that a repeat of the 7/11 Mumbai floods was possible.

Tapia logged on to Twitter. His first tweet was: ‘Take stock of the rains’. In a few minutes, his Twitter profile was inundated with tweets, from people who had read his tweet, telling him exactly how flooded or not, parts of the city were. He forwarded those tweets to his other friends who planned to take the road. In a few hours, Tapia had sent more than 250 tweets. “TV news is not instant enough,” he says. “A lot of exaggeration happens; many of the footages shown are of the worst-hit areas and of the times when the rains were the heaviest.”

Mumbaikars are swiftly discovering the new uses of online social media as a commercial or communication tool, or indeed as a way to gather people. According to estimates, in India, Facebook has around 70lakh users, Orkut 1.6crore and Twitter around 8lakh. “The number of people who visit these sites daily and the time they spend on it is far greater than what they do watching TV programmes or reading newspapers,” says Mahesh Murthy, CEO, Pinstorm, a digital marketing agency.

Companies have latched on to the possibilities. When Lenovo India was launching seven products this year, apart from the conventional launch, it decided to hold meetings with bloggers. Karthik S, Text 100 Public Relations’ account director, which handles the public relations and online communication of Lenovo India, says, “Earlier, PR would be done through mainstream media. Today, we have many micro-influencers online. It is essential for any brand to reach out to them”.

Not only are large firms tapping into online social media, smaller enterprises have been quicker to adapt to them. Blue Bus Tees, a Mumbai-based enterprise that sells T-shirts, shunned conventional modes by opting to sell their products online. Advertising solely through Facebook, they managed to sell 100 T-shirts in the first month. By the third month, their sales had tripled. They have a Facebook group page, fan page and a Twitter account.

“This helps us get the word out about Blue Bus Tees,” says Pranav Kapur who founded the company with his friend, Abhir Khanna, “We have hired a company to manage our fan pages. But it’s never direct marketing. For example, we have a Bollywood group on Facebook where we discuss tees that we would like to gift to our Bollywood stars,” says Kapur.

The social media is poised to be a bigger part of our lives. The best part is that once you start contributing, you get to play a role in shaping this medium as well. If you need help getting started, just tweet for it!

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by Sruthi Krishnan

“Those in Mumbai, slums @ Geeta Nagar destroyed in rains, help with rice/atta/tea/pulses/clothes.”

Recently a variant of this message kept echoing online in Twitter, the short messaging service. These messages would be tagged with #mumbairains, and anyone who wanted updates on how the city was coping with the annual monsoons — be it traffic jams, college attendance or office woes — could log in. And perhaps, wade through the water to Geeta Nagar with some hot tea.

These messages were not being posted by one person, an organised group, the authorities or an institution; they came from the crowd — spread all over the world, united by a desire to help.

Crowdsourcing involves taking a task and letting others do it, says Gaurav Mishra, founder and CEO, 20:20 Web Tech, a social media research and analytics firm.

The crowd voluntarily took on the task of monitoring the rains. Interest was a major driver.

A company may want to know how to put pictures on potato chips. There would be many people in the world who would know how to go about it. The company could ask for contributions from all of them and choose the best one for use, says Mr. Mishra, explaining how crowdsourcing worked.

As these people are amateurs, the company would not need to pay as much, and the person, whose motivation is to make that advertisement rather than commercial ends, is also satisfied. So a person living in Italy could give an idea to a person in India — something made possible by the Internet.

Innocentive ( www.innocentive.com) is a crowdsourcing site based on this idea.

In India, crowdsourcing as businesses is just catching up. Lattice Purple, a Delhi-based firm, has created a platform ‘YouSuggest’ (http://yousuggest.us) for companies to crowdsource ideas from customers. “The best of the ideas could be implemented for the product,” says Arvind Nigam, one of the founders of Lattice Purple. The platform is available for use through a SaaS (software as a service) model.

“This is a democratic platform for ideas,” says Mr. Nigam. If the company does not implement an idea, there could be risk of a backlash. But companies could moderate discussions.

Other tweaks may be needed for crowdsourcing to work in India. Myidea ( www.myidea.co.in), started by a private cellular service provider as a platform to crowdsource ideas on Indian politics, integrated SMS. “We kept in touch with the crowd using email, SMS and Web, because we’re not as “on the net” as people in the U.S. are,” says Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm, a digital advertising firm that managed Myidea.

Crowdsourcing could take on other forms. For instance, Amazon Mechanical Turk ( www.mturk.com) calls itself a ‘marketplace for work.’ If you need to translate 10 pages in English into Telugu, you could advertise on this site. This task will be broken down and parcelled out to many people and then aggregated to provide you the translation.

The photo site iStockphoto ( www.istockphoto.com) and the T-shirt site Threadless ( www.threadless.com) are some popular examples of sites using crowdsourcing.

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by Seema Sindhu

The digital media industry will grow over 80% Y-o-Y as the base is quite small.

The growth potential of digital advertising is prompting traditional ad agencies to join hands with online companies.

In Cannes, Microsoft announced partnerships with two leading advertising companies — the WPP Group and Publicis Groupe. Rishi Srivastava, consumer and online marketing officer, Microsoft India, did not comment on the nature of the deals but said Microsoft was already working closely with all major agencies in India and such deals were the need of the hour.

“Online advertising is increasing rapidly and the deals are aimed at offering better solutions to large brands,” he reasons.

Figures speak for themselves. While the traditional media will not grow over 13 per cent year-on-year this year, analysts believe digital media will grow over 80 per cent Y-o-Y as the base is quite small in India. Internet advertising is a Rs 250-300 crore market and, according to a Ficci-PwC study, is expected to touch Rs 1,100 crore by 2011.

Tapping this growth requires deeper relationships between stakeholders. Some data are with agencies, some with publishers. To convince clients to put money into a new medium, the stakeholders will have to work together. Agencies are tying up with publishers for consumer research, data sharing, training and leveraging of technology platform.

Parminder Singh, business head, technology, at Google India, adds: “Now agencies are willing to do joint pitches (for accounts). One reason is also that digital is a very dynamic medium. Agencies have to collaborate with publishers for technical know-how to keep pace with the medium. Also, the social media frenzy has opened up new avenues. Offline agencies need publishers’ expertise to explore such avenues.” Google works closely with all big agencies in India.

Nitin Mathur, director (marketing), Yahoo! India, adds: “Creative agencies play a very critical role in incorporating digital at the core of any idea. This is vital because when they begin to think digital as a key alternative at a campaign conception stage, there will definitely be a larger shift of ad dollars moving from offline to online.”

Yahoo also works with them closely at a client account level, in helping shape the digital component of all marketing campaigns. It also invests in time and effort in educating creative agencies on thinking digital and even helping them learn how to develop creatives for the medium. Sidharth Rao, CEO and co-founder of Webchutney, concurs that internet companies and advertising agencies “will have to spend a lot of time and effort evangelising the medium to their clients.”

Most of the top 500 advertisers in India, according to a recent Webchutney survey, are allocating only 5 per cent of their spends on digital advertising. And, though the industry will grow a healthy 44 per cent this year (more than most other mediums like print and television), “We have a long journey ahead, which requires stronger partnerships and coordinated efforts,” Rao says.

Prashant Mehta, COO, Komli Media (an ad network which provides products and service for digital advertisers and publishers), agrees the space is witnessing more deals. Komli is also chasing some deals with some big names, but Mehta refused to divulge any details.

Independent digital advertising agencies don’t feel any threat, though. Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO of Pinstorm, believes traditional ad agencies are yet to understand how to work in the digital medium. Their structure, which separates creative and media buying, is not suited for the integration that digital needs.

Moreover, their business models, based on flat fees or commissions, are also unsuited to the performance-driven digital advertising industry. For this reason, he feels this space will probably be led by independent digital agencies. Conventional agencies also realise that independent digital ad agencies are tough rivals, according to industry observers.