May 16, 2010

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Life in 140 characters

The 140 Character Confer-ence was held in New Yorkon 20-21 April. It hadmore than 140 characters,of course; participation

has been growing fast. “More than170 people shared the stage and over1,000 people shared the experience,”says Jeff Pulver, Internet entrepre-neur, technology evangelist and con-ference organiser. He was hoping foran online audience of 140,000. But itfell a bit short. His other gambit –reducing the participation fee from$1,000 plus to $140 – worked.

140CC has also been spreadingfaster than a Shashi Tharoor tweet. In2009, there were four conferences.This year, three cities have alreadybeen covered and five more have beenslotted for the rest of 2010. There willalso be several smaller ‘meetups’. NewYork was all about the soul and socialmedia, Pulver told Business India.That’s apt. You can write reams on

both, but fail to define them.Why is everything so 140-centric?

It’s the number of characters you canput in a tweet – the text message onthe Twitter platform that has madeIndian Premier League (IPL) commis-sioner Lalit K. Modi and minister ofstate for external affairs Tharoor sofamous. Their exchange of tweetsended up in both losing their jobs.

Twitter is the latest star of the socialmedia or Web 2.0. Nobody quite com-prehends what that means or whatshape it will finally take. “I think thereis very little real understanding of thesocial media space,” says SandeepGoyal, chairman of Dentsu India. Butno one doubts it is becoming impor-tant. “The power of social networkingis increasing by the day and variouslevels of social interactions are emerg-ing,” says K. Pandia Rajan, managingdirector of integrated HR servicesprovider Ma Foi. “It is becoming amedium for people to keep in touch,

stay abreast of developments, andcommunicate one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many. Today, it’s driving many vital decisions ofindividuals and organisations.”

“Counter-intuitively my take isthat the digital social media hasimproved depth through width –more perspectives exchanged due tomore connections,” says S. Sivaku-mar, chief executive of ITC’s agri-busi-ness division and the creator ofeChoupal. “Also, while Twitter is 140characters, it helps channel followersto longer blogs. Many friends joinedme virtually through Facebook as Itravelled in rural China; the collectivejourney added so much value to me.My live tweets from various confer-ences bring in comments from follow-ers with such diverse perspectives thatmy learning quotient will never bethe same again.”

Social media and networking cantoday be defined only by example.

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B U S I N E S S I N D I A u May 16, 2010 Cover Feature

The Twitter Generation

Life in 140 characters

The Twitter Generation

And while Twitter is making waves,others like Facebook, LinkedIn andOrkut are also claiming their place inthe sun. These are basically sharingplatforms where you get togetherwith your friends – virtual or real-life.You share and often share too much –inappropriate pictures or a rantagainst your boss, for instance.

Twitter is more a sophisticatedmessaging service – a microblog –where you have ‘followers’, who areautomatically sent all your tweets. USPresident Barack Obama has 3.77 mil-lion followers, Oprah Winfrey 3.44million and The New York Times 2.41million. Twitter is for the unknownworld. With every tweet, you shoot anarrow into the air. It falls to earth youknow not where. Facebook and its ilkare for the known world. Your follow-ers are friends and family, people youhave probably physically met. Twitteris interactive too. You can have real-time ‘conversations’. But these days, a

lot of the conversation is like two oldcrones on the telephone, exchangingnotes on what they had for breakfastand bed.

The entire social networking clanhas been making headlines in April.140CC was followed by Chirp, thefirst-ever Twitter developers’ confer-ence. It gave a peek at the officialTwitter numbers. The service has 105million registered users and 300,000new users sign up per day. There are600 million search queries on Twitterdaily. Incidentally, with an estimated2 million users, Twitter in India nowhas the third highest number of activeusers after the US and Germany.

While impressive, there is stillsome catching up to do. Facebook has400 million users. It would not be fairto compare the global numbers forOrkut, owned by Google, as it has amajor presence mainly in India andBrazil. It leads Facebook in India (seechart: The top sites for Indians). Tocounter, Facebook is opening its firstoffice in India in Hyderabad.

A perilous moveAt Chirp, Twitter announced plans tomonetise advertising, its first attemptat creating a revenue model. It proba-bly won’t work; on the Net, the transi-tion from free to paid is always veryperilous. Twitter’s ‘promoted tweets’will find it difficult to gain acceptabil-ity. Goyal of Dentsu says that if Twitterwere to charge companies for the logos that accompany their tweets, 90 per cent would run away.

But Chirp was still feeling chirpy.The revenue models were beingexplored by others too. Search adver-tising pioneer Bill Gross has justlaunched TweetUp and declared thereis a goldmine waiting to be tapped inTwitter. Besides, the company haswon the first round in the 140 wars.Facebook has withdrawn FacebookLite, a Twitter challenger it hadlaunched in September 2009.

Where in all this is the Twitter Gen-eration? Truth to tell, it’s in the middleof a heated argument. Blogger and free-lance writer Dann Zinke has a problemwith the concept. “We are not theTwitter Generation,” he postedrecently. “You cannot take a free Inter-net service that came out less than twoyears ago and use it to label a genera-tion that lived for 28 years before it. Weare not the Facebook Generation, theMySpace Generation, or even (heavenforbid) the Xanga Generation. All ofour formative years came before thattime. The Twitter Generation isn’teven old enough to read.”

Zinke has a point. But if you look atthe Twitter users profile, you will findthat growth is coming from unex-pected places. Modi and Tharoor maybe squabbling like school kids, butthey are both on the wrong side of 45.“When the site became popular inearly 2007, the majority of its visitorswere 18-to-24-year-olds,” says Timemagazine. “Today the site’s largest agedemographic is 35-to-44-year-olds.”Adds a study by Morgan Stanley,“Teens don’t tweet.”

B U S I N E S S I N D I A u May 16, 2010 Cover Feature

Rank Domain name Unique users/month (million)

1 google.co.in 32.20

2 google.com 29.40

3 yahoo.com 26.10

4 orkut.co.in 14.90

5 facebook.com 12.60

6 youtube.com 11.60

7 rediff.com 10.80

8 orkut.com 10.70

The top sites for indians Unique users/Company month (million)

Microsoft 8.58

IRCTC (railway ticketing) 4.90

HDFC Bank 4.00

ICICI Bank (icicibank.com) 3.85

ICICI Bank (icicibank.co.in) 3.00

Citibank (Citibank.co.in) 2.12

State Bank 2.07

Airtel 1.85

LIC 1.46

Tata Indicom 1.31

Corporate leaders

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“The Twitter Generation is a state ofmind,” blogger Zinke told BusinessIndia. “I have yet to nail down justwhat kind of mindset it is. Twitter isstill in flux, moving from what wasoriginally glorified navel-gazing intowhat we might be able to call the great-est mobile mass organisation tool onthe planet. It is in organising groups ofpeople in a very short time that I thinkTwitter is most useful, not in telling theworld what you had for lunch.”

Yet, inane messages seem to be therule, rather than the exception (seebox: Cat got their tongue). According toa survey by Pear Analytics, 41 per centof all tweets are pointless babble, 38per cent are conversational, 9 per centare passing along value and 6 per centare self-promotion. Spam and newsare 4 per cent apiece. (The numbershave been rounded off and thus don’tadd up to 100.) Another survey bySysomos, a company that providesbusiness information for the socialmedia, has found that 24 per cent oftweets are created by bots (Webrobots). This could be automatednewsfeeds too. Fans of Twitter

counter that one man’s news isanother man’s babble. It depends onwho is doing the judging. Goyal ofDentsu adds another point, “To me,Twitter is like a poor man’s blog. Howmany of us have the time to sit downand write a blog?”

D. Shivakumar, Nokia India’s vicepresident and country manager, seesit as a far richer experience. “Twitterhas become a phenomenon in reach-ing out to one’s community, peersand friends in an instant and realtime,” he says. “Some consider it forsnacking content, while some treat itas a tool to create news moments.”

Twitter GenerationThe problem of understanding theconcept of the Twitter Generation isthat it is not just Twitter. Other socialmedia have to be included, of course.But contributing significantly areYouTube, iPod, Kindle and other e-readers, blogs, SMS and other parapher-nalia of the Internet and technology.

It is easier to approach it from theother side. What are the hallmarks ofthe Twitter Generation? It’s about life

in 140 characters. “I feel that perspec-tive in general has shortened in humanlife,” says Milind Sarwate, chief(finance, HR & strategy) at fast-movingconsumer goods (FMCG) companyMarico Ltd. “Such perspective could bewith reference to the length of rela-tionships, or commitment to an organ-isation or political party or a brand.Short-termism is now the key philoso-phy. Perhaps this has been broughtabout by the sudden and numerouschanges around us, driven by hugestrides in technology – both comput-ing and telecommunication – furtheraccelerated by the convergence of sev-eral technologies. It is almost as if peo-ple are being bombarded by newthings just as they are about to settle inwith the existing things.”

It all starts with information overload, a cliché but true. The

Short cuts

Northcote C. Parkinson first pro-pounded his eponymous law –

“Work expands so as to fill the timeavailable for its completion” – in anessay in The Economist in 1955. If Parkin-son had been alive today, he wouldprobably have updated his law – “Timecontracts so as to fill the attention spanavailable.”

According to Ted Selker at CarnegieMellon University, “The addictive natureof Web browsing can leave you with theattention span of a goldfish.” That’s allof nine seconds. Incidentally, accordingto Urban Dictionary, a twit is a pregnantgoldfish. The folks at Twitter must havebeen deep thinkers to come up with thename. The reality, of course, is that Twitter was named after the twitteringof birds.

There are a whole host of productsand services today that are catering tothe goldfish generation. Among them:

T20: The most obvious is the IndianPremier League’s Twenty20. There wasa time when cricket was a gentleman’sgame and played over five days. Now itlasts just a few hours. The less said aboutthe gentlemen the better.

Five-second spots: Ads on televisionused to be 30 seconds or even longer.To counter the zap-the-ad generation,

Below 15 15- 24 25-35 36-44 45-60 Above 60

How they compare

Figures are for February 2010. Note: orkut.com and orkut.co.in have almost identical user profiles. Source: Vizisense

Age of users

Orkut Facebook Twitter Orkut Facebook Twitter

FemaleMale

Sex

7880 79

54 44 41

27

1295 6 641 1 1

2728

813 13

2220 21

(%) (%)

B U S I N E S S I N D I A u May 16, 2010 Cover Feature

“The Twitter Generation is a state of mind...what kind of mindset it is. Twitter is still in flux,

moving from what was originally glorified navel-gazing into what we might be able to call

the greatest mobile mass organisation tool on the planet.”

DANN ZINKEBlogger and freelance writer

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hyperlinked World Wide Web(WWW) did most of the damage.Search engines and directories – withtheir cached content and links –added to it. In a seminal article titled‘Is Google making us stupid?’ in theAtlantic Magazine, Nicholas Carrwrote in 2008, “Immersing myself in abook or a lengthy article used to beeasy. My mind would get caught up inthe narrative or the turns of the argu-ment, and I’d spend hours strollingthrough long stretches of prose.That’s rarely the case anymore. Nowmy concentration often starts to driftafter two or three pages.” The Net haschanged the way we read – and think.Content snacking has come to stay.

Amazon’s Kindle will furtherchange the way we read. When down-loading books or parts of them reachesaffordable levels, people will read

differently. You start, perhaps, withthe recent Peter Robinson’s Friend ofthe Devil, which your book club (a stillsurviving dinosaur) has recom-mended. A stray reference (and a link)to the Yorkshire Ripper sends you toWicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for theYorkshire Ripper. A passage there con-trasting the scenic charms of Yorkshireto the horrors of the Ripper gets youthinking of your next holiday. A linkin the book takes you to The HiddenPlaces of Yorkshire: Including The Dales,Moors and Coast. (On List It – an Inter-net application for the Twitter Genera-tion – you make a note of threesuggested holiday spots.) A look at the

‘recently visited’ draws you back toPeter Robinson. But a stray memory ofcollege-days favourite Mrs Robinsonsends you hunting for Simon and Gar-funkel: The Definitive Biography. (“Andhere’s to you, Mrs Robinson, Jesusloves you more than you will know”.)Jesus! Jesus? And you are off on yourtravels again, perhaps to Dan Brown’sThe Da Vinci Code and the trail of Jesus’descendants. You have contentsnacked a very diverse library in a fewhours. In the future, no one can besure if the reader will start a book fromchapter one or chapter six or, indeed,the last page.

All this is possible (assuming

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B U S I N E S S I N D I A u May 16, 2010 Cover Feature

many advertisers have taken to shorten-ing them to five seconds; it’s over beforeyou can press the remote button. This isalso true of the Internet, where you canget rid of the ad with a quick mouse click.

Ten Word Wiki: It calls itself the ency-clopaedia for the ADD (attention deficitdisorder) generation. Where Wikipedianeeds hundreds of words, Ten Word Wikidoes it in 10. Example:

India: People. Colors. Fun. Religion.Discover true self in Crowd.

Julius Caesar: Roman emperor. Hangsabout with the wrong crowd. DislikesMarch.

Microgames: “Sometimes playingTetris feels like reading War and Peace,”says Wired magazine. Many HOGs, RPGsand FPSs (don’t bother about the expan-sion; they are all categories of games)today come with minigames inside them.Check out WarioWare. It has microgamesthat are less than five seconds long.

Speed dating: Says Wikipedia, “Menand women are rotated to meet eachother over a series of short ‘dates’, usuallylasting from three to eight minutesdepending on the organisation runningthe event. At the end of each interval, theorganiser rings a bell or clinks a glass tosignal the participants to move on to thenext date. At the end of the event, partici-pants submit to the organisers a list ofwho they would like to provide their

contact information to.”Two minute Times: The Times of India

can be a quickie. Says the Website of thisonline edition: “(It) is your quick meal ofnews, if you are hungry for news butpressed for time. On a single page, it givesyou a snapshot of important events inIndia and the world. Research shows thatin two minutes, an average person cancomfortably read 400 to 500 words.Hence, this attempt to condense 12 sto-ries in less than 500 words and presentthem to you on one page.”

The Five Minute Wrapup: A free dailye-letter from Equitymaster to introduceyou to the “the world of intelligent invest-ing”. It provides a quick buffet forwannabe Buffets.

The One Second Film: This has to be ajoke. But it isn’t. It’s a non-profit collabo-rative art project. The film is built aroundone second of animation (made of 12large collaborative paintings), and is

followed by one hour of credits, listingeveryone who participates.

Filminute: An international one-minute film festival dedicated to pre-senting, promoting and awarding theworld’s best one-minute films. It startedin September 2006 and is still goingstrong. Don’t think its trivia. The BBC hasregularly organised contests for the 60-second Shakespeare, an educationalproject. It’s been suspended since 2006.That, as it happens, is the year Twitterwas created.

Incidentally, Shakespeare has beenadapted for Twitter too. You can sign upand experience it.

The Taming of the Shrew: Who woo’din haste and means to wed at leisure.

The Twitter of the Shrew: Who woo’d inhaste + means 2 wed @ leisure

Even in Shakespeare’s day, they sometimes woo’d in haste, perhaps evenin a jiffy.

digital versions of the books are avail-able) today. But e-readers give youease of use. Try it out with your net-book or laptop. If you take them tobed with you, things get too hot – lit-erally. It is like having too much vari-ety at the harem; inwindow-shopping, we lay waste ourhours – and our powers.

Goyal of Dentsu says you can’tblame the WWW or Google for this. “IfI draw a parallel, this is like saying noone fully reads what is on a Websitebecause it is full of hyperlinks,” he says.“It is purely dependent on what theconsumer at that particular pointwants to do; it is giving you the choicesthat didn’t exist earlier.” But choices ina Twitter age lead more to distractionthan desired discovery. Goyal addsthat SMS will probably have a morelasting effect on reading habits.

S. Sadagopan, director of the Ban-galore-based Indian Institute of Infor-mation Technology (IIIT), also saysthat how you read and communicateis not Google’s problem. “Googledemocratises information,” he says.

“You read in small chunks, butyou read more. Whatis important to noteis whether we arebrowsing more orreading more.”

The flitting from hyperlink tohyperlink means that the TwitterGeneration inevitably suffers fromreduced attention spans, technicallyattention deficit disorder (ADD). “Thisis on the rise,” says Mumbai-basedpsychotherapist and psychiatristZirak Marker. There is a physicaldimension too. “We are seeing severalchanges in the mainstream popula-tion in terms of deficiencies in Vita-min B, lack of physical activities,social introversions, etc,” says Marker.“There are huge setbacks that ourmainstream population, especiallychildren, are facing as a result of social

networks. The entire world hasbecome virtual and they (the childrenand even adults) don’t want to makean effort to socialise.”

E.M. Forster had predicted this inthe dystopian The Machine Stops a cen-tury ago. (“Beneath those corridors ofshining tiles were rooms, tier belowtier, reaching far into the earth, and ineach room there sat a human being,eating, or sleeping, or producingideas… The room, though it con-tained nothing, was in touch with allthat she cared for in the world…There was the button that producedliterature, and there were of course

B U S I N E S S I N D I A u May 16, 2010 Cover Feature

When the Net was young, perhapsthe only form of simultaneous

multi-user social communication was thechatroom. Folks who participated inthese interactions will remember thegaudy avatars, the ‘handles’ (nicknames)like ManitobaMadonna and theanonymity. It was a many-to-manymedium. Of course, you could get awayto a private room if somebody sent you aPM (private message) and invited youthere. But most of the time there weredozens of people talking to each other,breaking into conversations, going in andout of the room with an apologeticGTG2TBR (Got To Go to The Bathroom).

In the middle of the nineties, they fellvictim to new technologies. Yahoo! andMSN closed down a large number of theirchatrooms amid fears that anonymouslurkers were using them to target chil-dren: Madonna from Manitoba couldwell be Murugan from Machilipatnam in cyberspace drag. Plus, the bots (Web robots) had taken over; by one esti-mate, 60-70 per cent of the chatroomparticipants were bots.

The similarity between the chatroomand Twitter lies in ease of entry andanonymous participation. On social net-working sites such as Facebook and Orkut– and professional versions such asLinkedIn – the key is in building networksof meatspace people (real humanbeings). In Twitter, a large number of thepersons you follow could be fakes.

Actor Preity Zinta had a surpriserecently when she discovered that

someone had jumped her claim with anaccount styled realprietyzinta. Zintastarted realpreityzinta (note the correctspelling of her name). The original site was not even a fake because of the spelling, though you could call itpassing off.

It can cause a lot of confusion. Imag-ine a fake Shashi Tharoor, former ministerof state for external affairs, hurling broad-sides at Indian Premium League (IPL)commissioner Lalit Modi. While the realShashi Tharoor (ShashiTharoor) is goingstrong, Twitter already has a ShahsiTha-roor (recent tweet: “Now at lively meet-ing in Kochi of UDF allies. Talk is of BPL

not IPL); a ShashTharoor; aTharoor_Shashi (“I’m Becca the Cat”);and even a No Tharoor.

The brass at Twitter has realised thatfakes could take the entire edifice down.They have recently come up with a ‘Veri-fied Account’ feature. This will tell youwhether the tweets are from the realMcCoy or not.

For the CEOs and the high-profile,Twitter may not be important today. Butsome may be losing out on valuableInternet real estate. Besides, if you thinksocial media is the coming thing, youneed to register a presence. “Currently,presence is more important than relevance,” says Sandeep Goyal, chairman of Dentsu India. “Just beingpresent on Facebook or Twitter carriesbadge value.”

The Tatas, in particular, should knowabout the dangers of not being proactive.

Cat got their tongue

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“I feel that perspectivein general has

shortened in humanlife. Such perspective

could be with referenceto the length ofrelationships, or

commitment to anorganisation or

political party or abrand. Short-termism

is now the keyphilosophy.”MILIND SARWATE

Chief (finance, HR & strategy)Marico

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the buttons by which she communi-cated with her friends.)

“I am also seeing a lot of sexualdeviance in children,” continuesMarker. “They are exposed at a veryyoung age to porn and drugs. Inadults, social media has resulted inincreased discordance in family life.So much access is bound to impactfamily life.”

Others have documented theseeffects too. Lady Greenfield, professorof synaptic pharmacology at Oxford’sLincoln College, told the UK House ofLords last year that social networkswere infantilising the mind, leaving it

characterised by short attentionspans, sensationalism, inability toempathise and a shaky sense of iden-tity. “iPod health warning,” screamsThe Sun of London.

Pass with timeEvery new technology or societalchange will have its quota of sceptics.It is true that some will suffer, but youcannot extrapolate that to the entirepopulation. This too will pass.Sadagopan of IIIT expects social networks to stabilise in 5-10 years.

But there are some places wherethe Twitter Generation will introduce

long-lasting change. Leading the listis media. “Twitter has evolved as areal-time news platform and at times, has even broken news beforemainstream media outlets,” says Shivakumar of Nokia.

The print media is anyway on thethreatened list. Many publishers don’trealise that it is the content they areselling, not the format. The dead-treeedition is anyway dead for other rea-sons. In a couple of decades, newsprintmade by cutting trees will be treatedthe same way as animal skins. The treehuggers may be laughed at today, butthey will eventually win.

B U S I N E S S I N D I A u May 16, 2010 Cover Feature

The group has been fighting court battlesfor a long time with squatters who hadusurped their domain names such as tata-sons.com and ratantata.com. The cyber-squatters had put up pornography on

some of these sites. Twitter account tatamotors, in the name of Ratan Tata,has only one rather objectionable tweet.Ratan Tata himself may not have taken totweets and hasn’t come across it.

But what about his large battery of communications people?

Is Twitter – and all this bed, breakfastand airport gossip – for real? As a CEO,would you join this crowd?

ANAND MAHINDRAMahindra &Mahindra GroupFollowers(people whoautomaticallyreceive your

tweets): 45,542Following (people whosetweets you automaticallyreceive): 31Recent tweet: I’ve beenappointed on the AI board, assome of u r aware... Traveledback from Delhi on kingfishersince AI didn’t hv a flt at thttime. Feltstrange,guilty&treasonous fornot being on AI!

VIJAY MALLYAUB GroupFollowers:20,309Following: 29Recent tweet: IPL

divided by politics-united by

kingfisher ! Love it. Thanks !

ANIL AMBANIReliance ADAG

Followers: 525Following: 19No tweets as yet.

SANTANU GHOSHSymantec GroupFollowers: 199Following: 22Recent tweet: Flight delay =Passengers with anger mgmtproblems... VIP in the city =flight delays. Mumbai flightwill get here 45 mins late

KRIS GOPALAKRISHNANInfosysFollowers: 434Following: 0Recent tweet: Schools closingfor summer holidays. And IPL

competition heating up.Annual results by companiesnext 4 weeks

SHAH RUKH KHANActorFollowers:295,581Following: 39Recent tweet:normally dont

do breakfast...today did inkolkata with kids. fried chips &milkshake..so much for thehealthy resolution last nite.

MEERA SANYALRoyal Bank of ScotlandFollowers: 430Following: 19Recent tweet: Make aninformed decision when youvote on Thursday. Now youcan question Meera Sanyal.SMS MS <space><yourquestion> e.g. MS Why Vote?(Sanyal has no posts after 28April, two days before theelections in her Maharashtraconstituency got over.)

SHASHI THAROORPoliticianFollowers:737,696Following: 32Recent tweet: I’vehad enough.

(Tharoor no longer follows Lalit Modi.)

LALIT MODIIPL commissionerFollowers:85,094Following: 25Recent tweet:welcome all

investigation(Lalit Modi follows Tharoor and, among others, Vijay Mallya, Sushmita Sen, Celina Jaitley, SameeraReddy, Shilpa Shetty and Preity Zinta.)

PREITY ZINTAActorFollowers:152,648Following: 44Recent Tweet:

For the record! I am SINGLE &not dating any one from myteam

PRIETY ZINTAFraudFollowers: 3,471Following: 19Recent tweet: Do you think Iam real.

It is difficult to find too many Indian CEO types onTwitter. Even with other high-profile people, youdon’t always know where you stand. Of the listbelow, Twitter has verified only Anand Mahindra,Shah Rukh Khan, Shashi Tharoor, Lalit Modi andthe real Zinta:

Revolution won’t come overnight.In the interim, print will carry on –particularly in countries like Indiaand in regional languages. And themedia needs to take interim steps tothe final transition. To put all printpublications in the digital baskettoday is like buying baby clothes evenbefore you have conceived.

“Organisations that are comfort-able with fast adaptation and innova-tion will succeed,” says GirishAgarwal, director of the DainikBhaskar group, which has several lead-ing language publications and theEnglish morninger DNA (Daily News &Analysis). But adaptation is not theonly way; the Bhaskar group intendsto become far more proactive.

“Information consumption pat-terns are changing,” says the group’svice president – marketing, SanjeevKotnala. “Bold changes are visible inpersonal and community informationsharing. This accentuates the need toknow early.” He says the group hasbeen going in for localisation to matchthe needs for different niches. But for amass-market product like a newspa-per, there is a limit to how far you cango down that route. Twitter (like sev-

eral publishing portals onthe Net) can be individu-

alised and per-sonalised; youget tweets onlyfrom specific

people or in

specific languages. Shivakumar ofNokia says that Twitter is now avail-able in languages like French, Spanishand Italian. “We might be tweeting inHindi, Bengali or Kannada in thefuture,” he says. Incidentally, moneti-sation – which might bring inunwanted tweets – could well harmTwitter without delivering much rev-enue. What would you do with a tweetin Traditional Chinese?

Trust in tweetsThe danger with unknown tweets isthat you don’t know how much totrust them, assuming you can readthem in the first place. If Reuters saysthe IPL boss is sacked, you’ll probablybelieve that. But if the tweet comesfrom a Routers in Ranchi, you wouldbe mad if you accepted that at face value.

Because Twitter is immediate, itneeds greater circumspection. ButFacebook and family can have credi-bility problems too. Recently, StarIndia CEO Uday Shankar posted onFacebook, “Star India, a wholly ownedsubsidiary of STAR Hong Kong, is

exploring the possibilities of gettinginto the print media business inIndia.” As journalists scurried and edi-tors worried, it turned out that it was afake; Shankar didn’t have a Facebookaccount at all. Experts say that credi-bility will decide the future of publish-ing. You expect unsubstantiatedgossip from Twitter; it is the digitalequivalent of the water cooler. You areprepared to put up with some of itfrom TV. However, as the currentdebate shows, the shrill voices on thedifferent news channels are destroyingthe very edifice of their medium. Butfor long shelf-life products like maga-zines, you just cannot get your factswrong. Credibility is proportional toshelf-life, both in terms of the natureof the product and the future of theorganisation. The other conclusion:media houses need to be across thespectrum. They need to tweet too.

Media is a segment. What cutsacross is the brand. “In many ways,what has happened to cricket andwhat cricket has been able to cascadeas a mindset amongst some 780 million cricket viewers in this country

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B U S I N E S S I N D I A u May 16, 2010 Cover Feature

In good company

If a company is known by the men itkeeps on projects such as social media,

India Inc rates very poorly. According toDaksh Sharma, co-founder and deliveryhead of Iffort Consulting, a start-up in theWeb strategy and social media consultingspace, very few Indian companies are onTwitter or Facebook. Many of theones that are have simply auto-mated the processand outsourced themaintenance. “Theproblem is that

Indian business owners are not exposedto successful case studies of the benefitsof Twitter and social media,” saysSharma. “They have started Twitter andFacebook accounts just because theircompetitors have done so.”

“Indian companies are yet to wake upto the revolution happening in e-space,”

says K. Pandia Rajan, managing direc-tor of integrated HR services

provider Ma Foi. Adds HarishBijoor, brand strategy specialist

and CEO of HarishBijoor Consults Inc,“Marketers in India

Note: A conversation is one in which the tweets are participating in two-way traffic as different from one-way promotional messages. Re-tweets are those forwarded to others. Source: Indian companies on Twitter, Iffort

The bestcompanies

Most active account: MSN India (38,857 tweets)

Most followed brand: MTV India (56,560 followers)

Most conversational brand: ICICI Bank (98.32% tweets)

Most Re-tweeted brand: Tatadocomo (31% tweets)

Oldest brand: Bookmyshow.com (active since October 2007)

“Social networks areinfantilising the mind,

leaving itcharacterised by short

attention spans,sensationalism,

inability to empathiseand a shaky sense of

identity.”LADY GREENFIELDProfessor of synaptic

pharmacology at Oxford’s LincolnCollege

(the mindset of impatience), typifiescurrent consumer sentiment,” saysHarish Bijoor, brand strategy special-ist and CEO of Harish Bijoor ConsultsInc. “The idea is a simple one. Wehave very little time. Let’s get a lotdone in it. We don’t have time to daw-dle. The thought pattern in the mindsof consumers is simple as well: Whenyou can be impatient, why be patient?

“When consumers have shorterlifecycles of interest and shorterpatience platforms, brands are them-selves threatened. Do remember thata brand in the old days meant loyalty.This very brand loyalty morphs intobrand promiscuity in the new mind-set. This means that brand users willwant to move from brand to brandfaster. Brand switchers and brandfence sitters will form a large portionof the market, much larger than brandloyalists. Marketers need to preparefor this. Be prepared for the death ofabsolute brand loyalty, and be pre-pared to harvest profits from temporalbrand loyalty that might last withyour brand for less than 18 months.”

As a corollary, companies will have

to develop multiple brands and multi-ple positioning platforms for them.This is somewhat like the traditionalflanking strategy. If a consumer has toswitch, let him do so to a same-housebrand. But that has implications forumbrella branding and corporate reputation building.

The Twitter Generation will notstand still. It expects that others willnot do so too. “Brand loyalty can nowbe maintained only through constantchange and innovation,” says

Sarwate. “Even in our products wherewe have had sustained high marketshare, such sustenance has beenachieved through constant new offerings to the consumer.”

A similar churn in thinking is goingon in another across-the-spectrumarea – the workplace. Some changesare already visible. Recruitment meth-ods and channels no longer rely onsnail mail. The appointment ad hasdisappeared from print media, exceptin places where it is used to bolster

B U S I N E S S I N D I A u May 16, 2010 Cover Feature

are still reading the tea leaves. Not manyhave reacted as yet.”

Iffort Consulting has just completed astudy titled Indian Companies on Twitter: AUsage Study. It looked at companies innine verticals – information technology(IT)/IT-enabled services, telecom, fast-moving consumer goods, healthcare,Internet, finance, logistics, media andautomobiles. The cut-off was brands witha minimum 100 followers and 50 tweets.(To put that in perspective, globally Nokiahas 20,735 followers and 230 tweets;Ford Motor has 29,572 and 4,555.)

The key findings of the Iffort study are:Many of the active brands are using

Twitter as a broadcasting platform. Butseveral are focussed on the ‘conversa-tional’ aspects with emphasis on customer service.

News brands make the most tweets.That’s expected; they have somethingnew to say.

Twitter can be a wonderful tool for res-olution of customer problems. Happy cus-tomers communicate to other Tweeters.

Organisations have started adapting

Twitter to showcase their latest offerings,promote product launches, offer dis-counts and announce contests. There arespecific campaigns around Twitter.

Some in the IT industry like MicrosoftIndia (it has a team of 5-6 people),Hewlett-Packard India and Capgemini areTwitter-friendly. Their accounts are activeand managed by real people. Most IndianIT companies, however, have taken theeasy way out by automating the process.The result: No ‘conversation’.

But the bottomline is that “Twitter’spenetration in organisations will continueto increase on both sides of the spectrum.Conversations between users and brandswhich are managed by humans with anemotional quotient will continue tothrive. The focus will lessen on one-waybroadcasts where Twitter accounts simplytranslate into monotonous RSS (ReallySimple Syndication) feeds. More compa-nies will start using Twitter for marketresearch, listening to users and keepingtrack of competition.”

“What consumers appreciate the mostis ‘being heard’ and brands that are

responsive,” says D. Shivakumar, NokiaIndia VP and country manager. “That’s agreat way of telling your customer thatyou care. Twitter has worked for brandssuch as Comcast, Dell, Starbucks andNokia because it is real time, transparent,honest and open minded.”

On a global level, companies are allo-cating approximately 3-4 per cent of theirmarketing budgets to social media. “InIndia, no such figures are available,” says Sharma of Iffort. But it would be significantly less.

Figures of a different sort are available,however. And they explain what corpo-rate India is more concerned about.According to a study by the AssociatedChambers of Commerce and Industry(ASSOCHAM), close to 12.5 per cent of theproductivity of human resources in thecorporate sector is “misappropriatedeach day”... the average employeespends an hour, “gluing to various socialnetworking sites such as Orkut, Facebook,MySpace, LinkedIn, etc for romancing orotherwise... (sic)”.

Romancing? That’s strictly for the birds.

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corporate image. LinkedIn is a site forprofessionals, so job-hunting is a pri-ority here. But there are more than 100Twitter accounts and applications tohelp you find a job.

“The word of mouth or letter ofrecommendation is now slowly beingreplaced by online credentials,” saysPandia Rajan of Ma Foi. “Networkingsites are fast becoming a medium forheadhunting and reference checks.Online social presence and participa-tion is being considered very impor-tant by many professionals forelevating their professional status.Online networking is fast replacingthe old-world methods of social clubs,which played a very important role inprofessional networking.”

What you gain on the round-abouts, you lose on the swings. Thespeed of locating and hiring talent isjust as applicable to your competitiontoo. “Information about the markettravels faster than expected,” saysPandia Rajan. And industry attritionrates are higher than expected.

Deeper dimensionThese are the nuts and bolts of thebusiness. There is a deeper dimension.“The biggest manifestation of thischange is that the youth no longerview employment as a contract, but asa transaction. Unlike their parentswho viewed employment as a lifelongrelationship, they view it as a taxicabrelationship,” says Manish Sabhar-wal, co-founder and chairman ofstaffing services firm TeamLease.

A member of the taxicab genera-tion goes on short trips. If one cab isnot available, he will find another. Hehas more opportunity. He has less loy-alty. He becomes easily bored with aparticular job. He can easily go walka-bout; he has the confidence (at leastin India) that jobs will be easy to find.

Sabharwal sees other changes. “Theyouthification of corporate India –also the global workforce, given that25 per cent of the world’s new workersin the next five years will be Indians –has interesting implications for organ-isations and managers,” he says.“Younger people increasingly valuehigher takehome salaries thandeferred compensation and benefits.If they must have benefits, they prefer

backpack benefits that they can carrywith them, rather than benefits linkedto employers, which are not portable.Organisations are getting flatter, butthe youth expect to move up quicklyand this tension will have to be han-dled creatively and carefully.Employer brands will matter morebecause of snap evaluations; compa-nies will not get a second chance tomake an impression on valuable tal-ent. So corporate communicationskills will increasingly become a differ-entiator in a world driven by sound-bites, summaries and messaging.”

A recent survey by global profes-sional services company Towers Wat-son says that a ‘new deal’ has arrivedin employee-employer relations. Its2010 Global Workforce Study findsthis more balanced. Because the dicehas always been loaded against work-ers, the change is in theirfavour. TheTwitter Gener-ation in thew o r k p l a c e

needs personalised attention. It needskid-glove handling. “Business as usualon the people front is not an optionbecause there is no business as usualany more,” says Towers Watson.

“The old saying that nothing ispermanent but change has turned outto be true more than ever before,” saysSarwate of Marico. “But rather thanlooking at this as movement towardsshortening perspective, we can look atit as an accelerating change process. Ithink most of the media is still domi-nated by people in the ‘old’ age groupand they are somewhat uncomfort-able with this. If you look at theyounger generation, they are used tochange much more than they are usedto stability. One of the measures wehave taken to sustain growth is toaddress the younger crowd far morethan the older crowd.” Given thatTwitter is getting older – in more waysthan one – marketers have to addressboth the boy who is half a man andthe man who is half a boy.

The Twitter Generation is evolv-ing; shorter attention spans meanthat they will flit from Twitter too.Remember Geocities, which wasincredibly popular until Yahoo!bought it in 1999 for $3.57 billion andwound up last year. Or Tripod, whichwas also partly closed down last year.The next big thing is likely to begeosocial networking. Waiting in thewings are the likes of Foursquare andGowalla, location-based social net-working Websites with bells andwhistles thrown in. You will readabout them soon – on Twitter.

u PARTHASARATHI SWAMI and HIRAL SHETH

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“When consumershave shorter lifecyclesof interest and shorterpatience platforms,

brands are themselvesthreatened.”

HARISH BIJOORBrand strategy specialist and CEO

of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

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