Indian Social Media Landscape

Windchimes blog recently earned official badge of achievement as ‘Successful and Outstanding Blogger’. Liz Strauss describes in detail the idea behind running the successful and outstanding blogger program in detail and how you can earn it too.

She states on her blog that this badge is awarded to bloggers who “take the conversations to their readers, contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger”.

Successful and Outstanding Blogger Badge

You can view the directory of all the blogs that have been awarded the badge. As Liz says, “Good Conversation shared can only improve the blogging community”. We couldn’t agree with you more Liz!!

Manoj ‘Night’ Shyamlan when asked how does he heightens the frightful experience in his films, replied that it was about evoking the basic human emotion – fear of unknown. It’s this fear of unknown which creates panic in terror situations like the one witnessed in Mumbai. And knowledge (information in this case) is the antidote to it. It is important that while on one hand we have National Security Guards planning a detailed and thorough rescue operation, the communications wing (don’t know if anything like this exists currently) of the government provides correct and timely information to common man.

While watching the brutal and cowardly acts of the terrorists on TV and Internet, I strongly felt that social media could have been put to better use by the official agencies. It is as much important to give out news to people as it is to evict those terrorists especially when people from all over the world have been held hostage. Mind you, by giving out news, I am not even for a second hinting at giving out NSG’s operational details!!

The title is borrowed from the traditional proclamation – ‘The King is dead. Long Live the King’. What is basically meant (and I am taking this from Wikipedia) is that in certain monarchies of France and England, the transfer of sovereignty occurred instantaneously upon the moment of death of the previous monarch. In this blog post, I am using it to highlight that how a stand alone non interactive website (basically 1.0) is dead and without fail, its time for websites powered by social media (Websites 2.0) to take over!!

It is very common to see companies scrambling to get their website up. In few cases, some basic essentials of website are missing, but in most the marketers have no clear agenda on why they are building one. It’s not too surprising to see websites being made because it is a standard launch activity to do. It is more like a job in the task list at the time of product launch. The brand manager gets it executed because it was expected out of him or her.

Most number of mails that we get revolve around content for blog. It appears that most bloggers start off writing about a certain subject and then slowly lose way. That happens because they feel that there aren’t many readers on the subject they are writing!! Well, maybe that could be the case if you are writing about very specialized subjects. For most of the others there could be other problems plaguing us.

We have listed out few of them. Check out for yourself if your blog is not party to this.

·         Blogs are fairly unregulated in content. But be careful and sensitive to what you write. A lot of impressions are formed about you as a person while reading your posts. I have read many blogs that talk about ‘sex’ or ‘race and caste discrimination’ but treat the subject with so much maturity that it generates healthy debates and comments.

This is the second in series of the essentials of a blog. In the first part we spoke about content, layout and subscription features. There are sevral ways to increase visibility for your blog but right now let’s continue with highlighting some of the other features that are a must for your blog before you start promoting it.

1.    Maintain a blog roll

Blog roll is an individual’s favourite list of blog links that you have mentioned in the side bar of your blog. Most of the bloggers exchange links in order to increase their visibility and get more readers. The blogs links could be about subjects related to what you write about or could be on your other interests you pursue.