In all these discussions, conversation has always veered towards how privacy rights will be advocated in the future. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about privacy, but turns out many people do.

I heard a very insightful comment from my 12 yr. old cousin the other day. His generation has grown up with Orkut and now Facebook and I have known him to play with computer user interfaces and get the hang of things in 2-3 attempts – in contrast to my parents who still struggle with common website UI.

Turns out he was gifted a mobile phone recently (looks like 12yr olds these days are really lucky!) and for him this was like taking a step backward in technology. He called me within an hour of owning the phone and told me that he had stored my number in his contacts and I couldn’t do anything about it – I realised that he was referring to the social networking philosophy of managing contacts where everything has to be approved and can be given various information access levels, aka privacy rights.

It’s amazing how today’s generation of pre-teens are growing up with the notion of privacy in-built into their systems without even thinking twice about it. They expect to be able to block access to information and assign individual access rights.

Here are some more things I have come to know since:

• He was appalled by the fact that he couldn’t put a password to his SMS inbox.
• He thinks calling at 50p ~min is expensive – I don’t think he knows these are one of the cheapest cellular tariffs he’ll pay in the world.
• Surprisingly, he doesn’t SMS, says it’s too costly and will rather call friends and ask them to call other friends.
• He uses the phone mainly as a camera – he will take snaps of anything dead or alive. Consequently, his Facebook gallery has become more grainy and yet ‘richer’. That said, since I get to see loads of trees and pebbles and other such arty snaps, I suspect am on a limited access list on his Facebook profile and he has more snaps with friends hidden away.
• Does not have Internet on his phone.

I am just truly fascinated by today’s kids and their thoughts on technology. I remember a comment my mom made to me a few years ago when I was playing on the computer – “When I was your age, I thought the adults in my house were all stupid. They didn’t know how to operate the telephone either. Now when I look at you on the computer, I feel life has come full circle“.

I wonder what my kids will do. Scoff at the explanation that we had to pick a device and place it to our ear to make a call – maybe? Whatever the case may be, privacy rights will become the trump card for services that become more and more integrated with each other.

My interest was piqued when ShareThis posted a social bookmarking study on its blog which explores the social engagement value of sharing and I have mentioned my thoughts below.

The ShareThis study breaks down the stages of interaction into share, clicks, and engage.

From the graphic above, you can see that email is still the most popular way to share content on the internet.

Its interesting to see that while most people will share content via email, a lot of the recipients dont respond by clicking on the article link in the email. On the other hand, those on other social networks like Twitter and Facebook have come to accept links and readily click on them.

What Twitter and Facebook Users Are More Likely to Click

According to a user sample released earlier this year by Chitika, Twitter users most frequently clicked links directing to information about current events and news.

• Current events and news: 28.49% of referrals
• Movie-related sites: 22.56%
• Technology sites followed with 13.39%
• Medical sites: 7.98%
• Video games: 4.64%
• Celebrity: 3.94%
• How-to: 2.88%

Facebook users, however, click differently:

• Technology sites: 30%
• Lifestyle: 18.29%
• News: 18.25%
• How-to: 4.55%
• Movies: 2.96%
• Medical: 2.62%

The ShareThis study also found that visitors to your website from Twitter are the least engaging and visit an average of 1.66 pages per visit. In contrast to this, when you have managed to gain a visitor via email, they are likely to visit 2.95 pages per visit.

In all of this data, one thing that stands out is the performance of other social networks apart from the big three – twitter, facebook and email – and to put it bluntly, its abysmal. If you fancy bookmarklets, its best to keep them to a bare minimum with email, facebook and twitter.

The way forward for the Social Bookmarking industry would be to provide analytics for shared articles via every active button. Apart from that, it would also help to see which layout of buttons works best. The icing on the cake however would be to see all this data integrated with Google Analytics.

1. Bookmarking Chicklets are Useless
2. The UTVi Group jumps onto the Social Media Bandwagon

I have been using Bit.ly to shorten hyperlinks of articles that I find interesting for a while now and the service has evolved into a very robust tool over time. The biggest advantage of using Bit.ly is that it provides analytics support for short URLs in a way that leaves competition far behind.

I was looking at a month’s data fro November 2009 from my Bit.ly account’s Click Summary and noticed some interesting stats and figures!

The figures above just show that twitter is a great platform to use if you want to spread info quickly and to a large number of people.

For me, it was interesting to see that most clicks don’t originate out of India. That could be attributed due to the fact that the Android and E71 accounts update mostly during the night in India and therefore visibility on those accounts is low in the region. Also, the Registered Applications column under Referrers Detail refers to the Seesmic and Tweetdeck twitter clients.

Its brilliant to see this kind of analytics support from a free tool like Bit.ly, lets hope the new year brings more goodies along the way!

Much love,
- Asfaq

1. The UTVi Group jumps onto the Social Media Bandwagon

Someone else’s tweets make our RTs look cool. I had this epiphany here.

This is also exactly why am gonna stick to the old way of retweeting for the time being.

by Aalap Deboor

by Alisha Coelho

Citizens’ wall beautification project plastered with posters of Bollywood’s upcoming releases just hours after they were painted

Angry artists and tweeters ripped apart film promoters on cyberspace yesterday, accusing them of ruining their attempts to beautify the city.

The second phase of The Wall Project (see box) took place on Sunday. To the artists’ horror, it took less than 24 hours for their work to be covered with posters of movies like Aladin, Gair and London Dreams.

Said Tweeter Salil Deshpande (26), an associate producer with a media firm, “I got up at 6.30 am on a Sunday and spent four hours trying to do my bit for the city and this is what I saw in less than a day.

“It’s horrible. We’re planning a tweet up (Twitter lingo for meet up) on Friday or Saturday to manually pull down the posters if they have-n’t been removed by then.”

Mumbai Central resident Asfaq Tapia (25), said, “I was there from 11 am to 5 pm.
It’s so easy to put up a poster, but people don’t realise that a painting is a place where people either pour out old memories or make new ones. Film producers really need to educate promoters about where to put up posters.”

Wall-To-Wall: The second phase of The Wall Project at Senapati Bapat Marg took place on Sunday. In less than 24 hours, the art work was covered with posters of movies like Aladin (in the picture), Gair and London Dreams.

Boycott?
Twitter was also filled with messages directed towards Aladin star Riteish Deshmukh and director Sujoy Ghosh and London Dreams actor Asin Thottumkal.
The tweeters warned that they would boycott the movies if they weren’t taken down. Meanwhile, BMC Joint Commissioner R A Rajeev said, “The posters are illegal. We’ll take action against them.”

The Other Side
Aladin director Sujoy Ghosh seemed extremely sorry about his film’s posters being put up on Senpati Bapat Marg.

He said, “I cannot apologise enough. Pls send us the location we’ll have it removed asap. Really really sorry”.
This was followed by, “Totally agree and this is not to save my a**. Wall posters should be banned or put up only in authorised spots. Never again a wall poster. Promise”.

Actor Riteish Deshmukh  too offered apologies on cyberspace. “Sincere apologies for the ALADIN poster that been put on the wall. Insensitive n incorrect. Will look into it asap. Sorry guys,” he tweeted.

The Wall Project
In an attempt to beautify Senapati Bapat Marg, over 200 artists painted a 1.5-km stretch between Mahim and Matunga station in August.
The second phase took place on Sunday. The project is a citizens’ initiative supported by the BMC.

First there were trackbacks, then came bookmarking chicklets, and now Tweetbacks and retweet buttons! Aren’t we going overboard?

What I fail to understand is why will anyone share your content? Unless you write VERY well all the time, there is no reason to believe that someone will share your post on a different platform. I firmly believe that the onus of sharing your content lies squarely on your shoulders. While you should tweet, digg, bookmark and share your content, don’t expect others to do so for you, because honestly, no one will.

Another thing I have noticed is the bookmarklets themselves. People tend to go overboard with these bookmarking chicklets.

The above is an actual screenshot taken a very popular website. Do we REALLY need so many sharing options? I’d also like some science behind this, for instance:

• How many bookmarklets should one ideally have?
• What order should they be placed in?
• Is it better to have the icons placed inside the ShareThis button or outside individually?
• What about click-rates on the buttons themselves to check if anyone’s actually clicking on them or not?

The other thing that I believe is that those who regularly share content on Digg, Delicious, Google Reader, etc. already have those bookmarklets on their browser toolbars and don’t normally need the ones you provide.

What do you think? Has the time come to do away with bookmarking chicklets? Or you think many of your readers actually use these and you have seen a traffic spike since you have started using them?

1. ShareThis Social Bookmarking study suggests Email is still the best Social sharing medium

I think most people get carried away when talking about Social Media. The problem I have seen regularly is that most online advertising planners will not go the social media route because they don’t have a metric in place to show numbers. Its good to say that ‘x’ number of users followed you this month but how can you quantify impact for the same?

Apart from this, another factor that plagues Social Media is its unpredictability. When speaking of advertising on the web, the SEM models are fairly refined now – to the point that we can predict what the outcome will be for every dollar and rupee spent. That however is not the case with Social Media. We still cant accurate predict what the overall result will be.

With all due respect to the cluetrain manifesto, while I am terribly excited about Social Media, I share a sense of ‘cautious optimism’ and tend to not go overboard about its merits. However, videos like the one below do get me excited from time to time!

1. The UTVi Group jumps onto the Social Media Bandwagon
2. BookMyShow.com Premiers Social Media Plan to Packed Houses

Shopcorn.in is arguably India’s first ‘Social Shopping Community’, where sellers can post their bargains and users will vote for them. Voting these bargains up and down is the site’s cornerstone function, respectively called a pick and kick. The site is being exclusively promoted via Social Media Marketing only.

We caught up with Vishwalok Nath, Co-founder of ShopCorn to talk about how they plan to use Social Media to promote their product:

1. How did the @peppysophia account on Twitter begin? Is this an online identity you created or a real person?

Peppy Sophia is the name of the mascot for Shopcorn.in.  It started with uploading presentations on Slideshare. After that, we took up a Twitter account to drive visitors to the slideshows.  However, after joining Twitter, we realised that it’s more than just inviting visitors to your website, you can create an identity for your company on Twitter and start replying to questions and feedback from your target audience in real-time. 

2. What is your rationale for choosing Twitter as a marketing medium for ShopCorn.in?

Since Twitter gives instant access to your target audience, you can communicate live and take feedback for your product from users in real-time.  Twitter can act as a company’s mouthpiece to the world. In fact, we have received a few partnership leads via Twitter from a travel search engine, a shopping website and a custom gifts company!

3. While you interact with the community, we have noticed that most of your strategy revolves around gifting prizes, gifts and other material benefits to increase the amount of buzz you create for your clients. Do you see any other way of doing this apart from giving out gifts and prizes?

As Shopcorn is a unique concept, our first goal was to create awareness & entice users to try out the product.  Hence, we adopted this strategy of holding contests and gifting prizes to get visitors to test our product. Going forward, they would get benefited by simply being there in terms of great deals, reward points, free gifts etc.

4. What is your strategy on Twitter?

We would like to use Twitter as our mouthpiece to the users.  While looking for relevant contacts for building alliances for Shopcorn, we felt that it takes a lot of time to reach out to the concerned person in most of the online portals.  But with an active twitter account your customers, prospective partners etc. can easily reach you.

5. Do you have a Social Media presence on other websites such as FaceBook, etc? If yes, what is your overall Social Media strategy and where does Twitter fit into the scheme of things?

We have presence on Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, and Orkut.  We are most active on Twitter as it gives instant results.  We are also planning a Twitter App of our portal

We are believe that Shopcorn used Slideshare very innovatively to drive traffic to their website! They do tend to generate a lot of buzz within a small section of the Twitter community. We will be watching them…

1. BookMyShow.com Premiers Social Media Plan to Packed Houses
2. The UTVi Group jumps onto the Social Media Bandwagon

The UTVi Group has a presence on FaceBook, YouTube, FriendFeed and Twitter. I wanted to ask them why they jumped onto the Social Media bandwagon and what have they learnt so far. So without further ado, here goes:

1. How did the @UTVi_News account begin? How did you convince the decision making authorities to go in favour?

UTVi.com was gaining popularity with the business and investing world. However, we wanted to get others to visit the website as well, as UTVi.com has a lot more to offer than just financial news. In order to do so, we realised that a presence in the social media space was important. Twitter is just a part of our entire social media initiative. Hence, there was no question of having to convince anyone about getting on to Twitter. It was always a part of the plan.

2. You mentioned UTVi has a ‘Social Media initiative’. Could you explain that a little?

UTVi’s social media initiative is part of UTV Group’s recognition of the growing power of the community. UTVi has consciously decided to empower the people who are active in the social media space with timely news updates on India’s business and market activities. Currently, we are present on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Our strategy is fairly simple. We want to give relevant news, information and views so that the community. We use Google Analytics to measure our success in terms of traffic, time spent and unique visitors.

Note: Personally, I don’t see how they can use Google analytics to measure traffic, time spent and unique visitors on their Social Media properties. Maybe they meant those who come to their site from these properties.

3. On Twitter, you guys clearly have a policy of not replying or retweeting any news source. Why is that so?

We are using Twitter as a platform to give out news present on our website. It is strictly a news stream and hence we have restricted ourselves to tweeting the latest headlines and breaking news on the website and our channel. However, we do reply to direct messages sent to us.

4. What metrics do you have in place to measure the success of your account?

As mentioned earlier, we use Google Analytics. It also tells us how many people are coming on to UTVi.com through our Twitter posts. Though it is early days, the numbers are encouraging.

5. I notice you exclusively use bit.ly to promote your stories. What interesting data can you share with me on that?

Bit.ly is an interesting tool that we use. News related to jobs and job cuts, etc. receive maximum hits from the US while any news on education gets the maximum hits from India.

Market news gets equal attention from both India and the US. However, our Stocks Editor – Rahul Arora’s morning predictions are followed keenly by readers in the US!

6. Do you have a plan in place to get anchors of UTVi etc on Twitter?

Our anchors are already on Twitter and we are training them to use Twitter more effectively to connect and interact with other tweeters. All our anchors and journalists have their Twitter accounts now and have been tweeting regularly.

To be perfectly honest, we feel that the FriendFeed property is really not being used correctly by UTVi. Its just a profile that imports their Twitter RSS feed. What do you think could make it better?

Much love,
- Asfaq

1. BookMyShow.com Premiers Social Media Plan to Packed Houses
2. ShareThis Social Bookmarking study suggests Email is still the best Social sharing medium