Riding the Radia Tapes

Open--the Magazine burst into collective public conscious with their expose of the Radia tapes. The magazine that exposed the unholy nexus between PR, journalists and politicians turned to social media when its servers could not handle the load of too much traffic, to get outs it message. This is their story.

Name of Business: OPEN Magazine

Website URL: http://www.openthemagazine.com/

Industry: Media

Target Audience: Indians and NRIs.

Category of Business

Open is a weekly current affairs and features magazine. It is the flagship brand of Open Media Network, which is the media venture of RPG Enterprises. Other popular brands of the RPG group are Ceat Tyres, SareGaMa and Spencer’s. Launched on April 2, 2009, Open has distribution across 12 cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Kochi, Chennai and Hyderabad. Open has positioned itself as a magazine for the cosmopolitan Indian. Open has three distinct sections – the first is Small World, a 10-page news selection, the second is detailed stories and features on a wide range of domains, including politics, sports, entertainment, science, technology, health and culture, and the third section is called Mindspace, which has literary essays and write-ups on art, gadgets and celebrity gossip.

The website focuses on well informed and well travelled Indians and NRIs. In fact, a significant portion of the new and returning visitors to their website are from North America. Open aims at getting “quality content” to their readers.

Marketing Efforts and Results

Open has a number of blogs, which include posts on a variety of topics from politics to sports. They have a presence on Facebook with 5,556 fans. On their Facebook Fan Page, Open publishes updates on stories featured on their website. Many of these fans are very active, which can be seen from the number of “likes” that each update receives. Several fans are very vocal about their opinions on the stories and comment openly. On Twitter, Open has 3,642 followers. Here, too, links are shared to the stories uploaded on their website.

Open makes active use of convenient widgets on their website that allows readers to share, commend and critique content via other social media platforms.

“The best example of the effectiveness of social media for us was when we broke the X-TAPES/Radia tapes story. The shock of the revelations created such a huge spike in web traffic that the Open website kept crashing in the first few days after the story broke. Even as we were desperately ramping up our servers, it was important that we do not black out, and we were able to do this by staying proactive on our Facebook and Twitter pages,” says R. Rajmohan, Publisher, Open Magazine.

Marketing Investment

All social media interactions are handled by the in-house team. No extra resources are deployed.

Book for every child through social media

Name of Business: Pratham Books

Website URL: www.prathambooks.org

Industry: Education (not-for-profit)

Target Audience: Everybody. Pratham wants to put a book in every child’s hand. So anyone who helps them get there is a target.

Category of Business

Pratham Books is a not-for-profit organization that publishes affordable children's books in multiple Indian languages. Their mission is “to see a book in every child’s hand” and create a “Reading India”. In the last seven years, Pratham Books has published over six million books in up to 11 languages.

Marketing Efforts and Results

Being a non-profit organization, the folks at Pratham Books have made time for people. The same is visible in their social media strategy. Pratham Books realized that it was impossible to accomplish their mission alone. The need of the hour was to collaborate with other publishers, writers, translators, parents, etc to be able to reach the last child. Thus, they began their social media efforts to create a community around reading and their efforts have reaped results.

Pratham Books has methodically tapped on the strengths of multiple social media platforms. “Social media, to us, is not a marketing tool and we have never used it as a marketing tool. Social media has been crucial to us building our social publishing strategy and has allowed us to create a very strong community around our mission of ‘A Book in Every Child's Hand,’ says Maya Hemant, Digital Community Manager, Pratham Books.

The organization maintains a blog - blog.prathambooks.org. This talks about publishing, reading, literacy, kidlit, learning, non-profits, events and more. The posts are a treat for anyone who appreciates creativity. Guest blogs have also been welcomed. Pratham Books sees Twitter as a space where they can engage with the community, share ideas, ask for help, get feedback, listen to complaints, participate and mobilize volunteers, to help their reach their goal. Pratham started using Twitter early in 2009 and has more than 3,000 followers. “Growth has been purely organic and we have built a large, geographically diverse community passionate about reading and always ready and willing to help. Twitter and tweeple have helped us connect with children who run a mobile library for other children in Bengal, bikers who have travelled across states and distributed our books to government schools, housewives who informally teach under privileged children in their locality, parents who coax school administrations to hold book fairs with our books, marketing experts who help better our strategy, organizations that need books and want us to help them in setting up their libraries, authors and illustrators who want to work with us, developers who have developed iPad applications for us and more,” says Hemant.

The organization has uploaded many of its books (available under Creative Commons licenses) on Scribd, so they can reach a wider audience. These books can be remixed/repurposed by the community to suit their purpose. There have been cases when their books have been translated into Lojban (a constructed language), Assamese, French and Spanish.

Pratham Books has more than 1,600 fans on Facebook, where it updates information from the blog as well as about the events organized by them. It uses this platform to communicate with the community. The fan page has a very personal and warm approach. Pratham started using Facebook towards the middle of 2009 and has built a tightly knit community. “One of the things that we do differently is that we do not use Facebook, or any of our other channels, to talk solely about our work or market ourselves. This is very important to us because we want our efforts to be larger than just our organization and to reflect the cause of reading,” says Hemant.

Documentation of the initiatives taken by Pratham Books can be found on Flickr. The organization also uses this platform to upload their Creative Commons licensed illustrations. Again the purpose is to reach more viewers and give the community the flexibility to repackage / reuse the content.

One can find Pratham Books on YouTube as well. Documentation of the work they do and information about some of their initiatives are uploaded here. The organization creates trailers to let people know about their books. Audio books, recorded by Radio Mirchi, are uploaded at Soundcloud.

“A key take away is that patience, authenticity and transparency are fundamental building blocks needed to build a successful social media presence and more importantly, a strong community,” says Hemant. Their social media and publishing efforts were recognized at the IndiaSocial Case Challenge, where they won the first prize.

Social Media Marketing Investment

Pratham Books does not allocate a budget for its social media marketing efforts. There is one person, who anchors the effort, while every member of the team.

8 reasons why Entrepreneurs must blog

4 blogging tips and 3 ways to promote it
"You got to be kidding, on top of EVERYTHING else I have to do myself, you want me to blog. Seriously, do you even know what it takes to be an entrepreneur?" Highly censored conversation with a friend and recent entrepreneur who wanted me to work out a social media marketing strategy. Having tried, and failed, at setting out on my own I do know what it means to head your own start-up and that is why I feel a blog is a critical element for any start-up. Here are my reasons:

Share your passion: Entrepreneurs are some of the most passionate people I have met. They totally believe in their idea and their ability to make it big. It is this passion/conviction that gives them the courage to give up six figure and more salaries and trudge the uncertain path of having their own set up. Unfortunately, their passion is only visible to their family and employees. A blog is an excellent way to share that passion with the world. You never know, who else might catch the infection...a VC, potential customers, potential business partners.

Share your expertise: Many entrepreneurs are domain experts. They have spent years honing their skills and knowledge and now want to use that for themselves. If you fall in that category, you have a lot to share. A blog is a great way to share your expertise and to make your clients comfortable with your company. Your knowledge will help build credibility for your company and go a long way in solving the one question most start-ups have to deal with: "Why should I go with you?"

Blogs are not websites: Blogs are personal, they are not the same as your company website. A website represents the formal online presence of your company. That is where you have details about your business, your products/services, customer interface and even your shopping cart. A blog on the other hand is an outlet for you, your personality and lets your community understand the person behind the show.

Connect and share: Helps you connect with peers in the industry or other start ups. Many of them share the issues, concerns you have or could have the solution you are looking for. A blog helps you get to them, and helps them understand your needs. If you are blogging on your expertise, you will be surprised as to how quickly a community forms around your blog.

Test your ideas: A blog is a great place to test your ideas. The feedback will help you refine and better it before implementation. If it is a bad idea, the community will let you know.

Social Networking Tool: Blogs are at the center of the whole social networking Web2.0 buzz. You can connect your blog to your Facebook page, twitter handle, Youtube channel and improve your chances of getting noticed.

Google loves blogs: Google and other search engines love blogs. Also there are a number of blogging directories that you can list in. A great way to get yourself and your business noticed.


Lorenzo Von Matterhorn effect: Okay, I picked that up from a cheesy dating rom-com. Basically in that particular episode the character has a dating playbook. One of the tricks he uses is the Lorenzo Von Matterhorn. Basically, he sets up a web presence for this fictional character--Lorenzo Von Matterhorn, where Matterhorn is an adventurous European billionaire. He goes to the bar, drops his name and goes away. The girl does a quick search for the name, finds the fake news all over Google and the guy gets his girl. TV dramatics apart, the reality is everyone is checking out potential business partners, investments, employees, employers. Having a strong web presence will go a long way in making the deal happen. A blog is the cornerstone of your online presence.

Yes, I know its takes time and effort (I've already spend three hours on this post and figure I still have a couple of hours to go) so here are four ways to do it really quickly and painlessly:

1) If writing is not your thing, consider a video blog (vlog) or even a podcast. You can actually blog straight into the webcam on your laptop and post. It's that easy.
2) Doesn't have to be long detailed posts full of wit or wisdom. It's personal, so develop a style that works for you. I'm a writer, I like writing so I do it. You can share an idea and that's it. Your community will get used to your style.
3) Don't worry about the writing style. Keep it conversational...but do try and avoid an over casual texting approach...that is irritating to read.
4) Repost. I actually write about one original post a week. Rest I repost other posts, videos, slides that I think are relevant for my community.


Finally, if I've convinced you to start blogging do these to get noticed by your community:

1) Republish: See if your posts can be republished. Mine are republished in Entrepreneur India, biztech2.com and sometimes the big daddy in my space socialmediatoday.com also picks up my posts.
2) Share: On Linkedin, twitter and Facebook. I have set up a fan page for my blog on Facebook and have joined relevant communities on Linkedin. They drive a lot of traffic my way. Twitter too helps as, increasingly people in this community are beginning to follow my tweets.
3) Outsource setting up and marketing of the blog: It has actually taken me more time to set up and market my blog, than post on it. I did it, because I had the time and because I wanted to see what works. But you're probably not going to have the time to write & market your blog and run your business. So consider outsourcing it. There are enough and more firms that will do everything from setting up the blog to marketing it. It is also not every expensive. I have compiled a list of social media marketing companies...take your pick or just google for them. You can then focus on the message, while they take care of selecting the right platform and ensuring maximum audience reach.

What GiveIndia gets from Social Media

Name of Business: GiveIndia

Website URL: http://www.giveindia.org/

Industry: Non-profit

Target Audience: Internet savvy, working class population falling between the age group of 25-45

Category of Business

GiveIndia was launched by Venkat Krishnan, an IIM-A graduate, in April 2000 as icicicommunities.org. GiveIndia is an online platform for people across the world who wish to make donations. There are about 200 NGOs that receive funding through GiveIndia’s online donation platform. They first carefully scrutinized over 3,000 Indian NGOs for transparency and credibility and out of those chose 200 that met the GiveIndia listing criteria. Till date, more than 75,000 donors from across the world have been able to help millions of people through the GiveIndia platform. Donors have the freedom to select a cause of their choice to support from the 200 NGOs.

Marketing Efforts

GiveIndia has used social media integration in order to increase visibility and awareness among the working class and also to encourage people from all over the world to make donations to the causes of their choice. GiveIndia has used Facebook to reach out to its target audience. They began this endeavor two years back. They have customized their fan page to include additional tabs that connect the users and fans to their blog and events. They also have a tab that features videos from YouTube for all of their fans.

GiveIndia has also made use of Twitter to inform users and fans about their activities. They started using Twitter in April 2009. They have regularly updated their tweets for their fans.

Another social media initiative taken by GiveIndia is the GiveIndia page on www.causes.com. This causes page is a part of Facebook where they promote this philanthropic endeavor and aim at connecting people and organizations in the US to 200 Indian NGOs.

GiveIndia also has an active blog http://blog.giveindia.org/, which they use to highlight their programs and causes. They also have user posts and have done a great job in integrating the blog with their website, their page on causes.com as well as their facebook page.

When talking about social media, GiveIndia’s CIO Dhaval Udani said, “It’s a great tool for awareness and reaching out to the mass number of people out there. However, we are yet to see its real benefit.”

Result of Efforts

GiveIndia’s Alexa rating has improved continuously. Their traffic rank for India now stands at 17,972 and worldwide stands at 151,153. Due to their efforts, their fans increased to over 900 on Facebook and to over 600 on Twitter. On causes.com, GiveIndia now has more than 3,400 members and has received donations through this platform.

Marketing Investment

GiveIndia has made marketing investment in the form of employee time and effort. Their current employees, who understanding the objectives of GiveIndia and the message they want to convey, have taken all the initiatives.

Marketing your content

It's been about four months since I started on the topic of Social Media Marketing and its impact on small businesses. While I have enjoyed exploring the platform (and writing about it in Entrepreneur and biztech2.com), the real learnings actually began when I decided to set up my own blog on the subject about a month ago.

Having my own blog had its plus points: For one, I could actually just use it to post links to other great posts on the topic. I could use it also to interact and a build a community that would contribute and help build out a platform for small businesses.

Of course that was the theory. In practice, I discovered that I now end up spending more time figuring out ways to get traffic going for my blog...than anything else. It is during this process I realized the importance, of not only writing great content, but also marketing it. Be it an individual blog, like mine, or a company blog...unless we can get the traffic going...our efforts are meaningless.

Again building the traffic is not an overnight process...especially, I have decided not to pay for any marketing activity...be it SEO, adwords or even Facebook ads. I found this post, to be an interesting and practical guide to marketing content. You too can use it to help drive traffic.

Blogs still work...

...and what do you need to do to ensure a great corporate blog


Following up on my earlier post on personal blogging, I found a number of writers online stressing the need to maintain and develop blogs as part of the overall corporate marketing strategy. While most corporates are looking to integrate Facebook and Twitter in their online strategies, there is still a lot to be said about a well-maintained corporate blog, as a part of their overall social media marketing strategy.

The obvious question would be why have a blog and a website, as most corporates have already set up a pretty decent online presence. A blog differs from a website in that it can serve as an effective communication platform, which can be tweaked to the focus of the moment. For example: Maruti Estillo's excellent social media campaign centered around the Crash Test Dummies can be captured in a blog...whereas on the corporate website, it will only form a part of the messaging.

However, launching a blog is one thing. Maintaining it quite another. Mark Evans lists out the key ingredients to a good corporate blog. Read, implement and watch your circle of influence grow.

Why should you blog, about what...

...And some simple and free tactics to get the traffic flowing


With Facebook and Twitter dueling for year-end honors in the Social Media space, advocating a blog is a bit like driving around in an Ambassador. We know that blogging is not going to make us rich overnight, and we also know we're not going to get a million page views by sharing random snippets of our lives. But, there's still a lot to be gained by going this route. The top three reasons why I believe a blog benefits professionals/entrepreneurs and small businesses:

• Personal Branding: Suppose you are an auto engineer and are interviewing at one of the top manufacturers. Imagine the impact, if you pull out your blog and show them some great design or your thoughts on transmission. The written word is way more powerful than anything you can speak, and since not many of your peers blog it shows your commitment and passion.
• Connections: This is a great way to build connections. You will interact with fellow professionals outside your workplace, you might never have met otherwise. 
• Visibility: Again, if you put yourself out there, you never know who you are reaching out to. A blog gives you visibility beyond what your Facebook and twitter updates can.

What should you blog about? Blog about what you are passionate...it might be part of your profession, a hobby or maybe a subject--like the environment--that you care about and you feel the need to share. Some simple dos for a good blog:

• Pick one topic: Random rantings on a variety of topics is not going to build you a readership. Let's face it, just a tiny fraction of writers are good enough to do that. It's better to focus on one subject, preferably micro focus and go the whole hog. Your readers know what to expect, and the keyword density helps push your rankings up with the search engines.
• K.I.S.S: Keep it simple stupid. Short sentences and paragraphs. One clear thought per blog entry. Write in an easy and engaging style...unless you blog on literature or poetry.
• Post regularly: You don't have to write long every day. I like to do one long-piece a week and then for the rest of the week post links to other articles/news items that I found interesting. This way, I ensure my blog is refreshed everyday and I'm not under pressure to deliver an article a day.
•  Make it personal: A blog is supposed to be an online diary. So share your knowledge, but also share experiences. Readers appreciate first-hand info.
• Wait: There are a billion websites and blogs competing for attention...readers are not going to come just because you have a great blog. It takes time to build a following, so be patient. Most of us set high expectations and give up when they are not met. What is the waiting time? Depends on the topic, but it could take you six months to build a reader base. 

While there's no short-cut to building up a readership, here are a few simple steps that could hasten the process:

• Push on your Social Network: Most of us have decent friends' lists on Facebook and Linkedin. Push your content to them. Your initial traffic will be from familiar sources. As they like what you write, they will viral it.
• Twitter it: Facebook and Linkedin are closed circles, in that you and your friend need to accept each other. Twitter, however, lets anyone follow you and you can do the same. You will pick up a bunch of followers by posting regularly to twitter.
• Link back: Ensure your online resume, Linkedin profile and every other online entry has a link back to the blog. Get your friends to link back to your blog and do the same for them. This will enable the search spiders to find it more often...thereby increasing your ranking.
• Submit to web and blog directories: This is a one time activity you do at the start of the blog. You need your blog to be picked up by the blog and web directories. A number of sites do this for free. I have used http://freewebsubmission.com/ and http://www.blogcatalog.com/. Pay if you want to, but its not really worth it. Eventually content will drive readership and good content will always rise to the top.
• Build a Facebook Page: You can build a page on Facebook for your blog. I haven't done this yet, as I don't have the time to maintain a blog and the Facebook page to promote it. But, I've experienced the benefits that compareindia.com derives from its Facebook page, so will eventually get around to setting it up. 
• Publish on your blog and in the media: All my entries on social media marketing appear here. I have a monthly column in Entrepreneur India and also write regularly on biztech2.com. This helps me reach a wider base and validates me as a subject expert. Getting onto a publisher is not that difficult. Figure out the right publication for you and ask the Editor. You'll be surprised by how many of them say yes.

Finally, you wonder how much time all this would take. I normally spend about an hour a day on the topic of Social Media marketing. This includes my reading, writing and whatever experiment I carry out to push this blog or compareindia.com. I do have to spend more when I write these long pieces, but I keep that for the weekends.