The rush to create a personal brand online is leading us to define ourselves in black and white.  The internet has given us so many places to voice our opinion that often we have the means but no opinion and force ourselves to have one.

Are you with Kolaveri or are you against it? Do you think that was a flashmob or not?

Slot. Slot. Slot.

Clearly you can’t say you’re a musician and then go on twitter and not have an opinion on every piece of music being shared. You may not even have an opinion on A R Rahman’s new piece but to build your brand, you must.

God forbid you have mixed feelings about anything. God forbid that you should want to comment on a post without sounding like an extremist. With 140 character profile descriptions and your life laid bare online, there is an urgent need need to define your brand.

Comments, likes, posts, tweets and status updates seduce you into giving an opinion. Any opinion. And Quickly.

No wonder then that all you see online on forums, sites, social networks are angry, pissed-off people who either rush to embrace the next new thing or shred to pieces anything that they don’t instantly love.

Read this disrespectful comment on someone’s post – ‘You are either joking or your ideological-obsessiveness has made you stupid.’  Or just look at the unprovoked nasty messages Chetan Bhagat gets on twitter.

And it doesn’t matter that the extremists have no real reason for hating anything.

Why? Because online you either love it or you hate it. There is no in between. No one wants to engage with a moderate voice.

Moderation makes not a good brand, I suppose.

I’ve had many discussions with people on whether our online world is the real world. People who breathe facebook and twitter will look at you with contempt if you bring this up. Surely you aren’t insinuating that spending all their time on FB is fake!

The debate of what’s your real life and what’s just ‘timepass’ is not about to die anytime soon. There are enough social media experts (there’s one behind every twitter ID) who’ll scoff at the very suggestion that the virtual isn’t real.

I frankly don’t care about that debate too much. Everything’s real if that’s how you feel about it.

However one thing does bother me. And it’s been written about plenty but this is my blog so I’m allowed to repeat it

It bothers me that we aren’t who we really are online. To be precise, we aren’t who we really are on social networking sites. I’ve had the most real conversations on chat or any such medium where it was a one on one or where my closest circle had access. However what makes a social networking site like FB so unreal is that it doesn’t have the circles of trust that help us define our social circle.

I admit that I don’t know all the options and settings available on FB so you’ll have to overlook that.

Here’s what I think. In real life (or offline if you will), we are joined at the hip with some people, hold some at an arm’s length, others we politely nod a hello to and some we just don’t know. I am willing to tell the first and the last in that list about my latest heartbreak because the first will care and help me and the latter will be faceless and allow for an emotional outburst with little or no consequences. It’s the ones in the middle that I’ll have to be careful about.

When a status message/picture of an intensely personal nature finds itself in the facebook stream of all your friends, I wonder if it’s been put there because of what you want to project about yourself and your life or whether you are truly that close to the 498 friends on FB that you want them to know everything about you.

Let’s face it. Unlike the young people today, we weren’t born breathing the internet. We adapted to it and made it our own. So perhaps we still struggle with define our circles online.

Your real friends know who you are. They know where you went for new yr’s eve. They may not know what you wore, so it’s fair to show them your pictures. But why does that old classmate from class 4 who you haven’t met since need to know that you wore a black halter? And why does it excite you to see all your friends rave about how hot you look, as you reply with ‘thank you’s at lightening speed. You were waiting with baited breath to watch people admire your lifestyle no? Waiting to be told how awesome you are?  You knew you looked hot in that picture else it would have never made it on facebook. I’ve seen enough photo-sessions that end with ‘don’t you dare put that on facebook!’

So when so much of what we do on facebook is to project a happy and happening image of ours does that make it real? Are we that happy and happening?

During my research at MICA on the 1984 Sikh riots, the most obvious property of a crowd kept popping up. The fact that crowds amplify sentiments. It’s only natural after all.

If one wants to be a part of the crowd or be heard in one, you have to be more extreme than them all. 

The result is that your group turns into a group of extremists, really. All raging to out-do the other and yet show loyalty to the group’s thought and cause.

The online world isn’t much different if you ask me. These rules of the crowd apply just as much.

People tend to react in extremes in the online world. They either love you or they hate you. This may be common in today’s world but it’s accentuated by the fact that online you’re competing for popularity, page views, subscribers, followers with only your words to stand for you. And since CAPS is considered bad manners, you’ve only got biting words at your disposal.

A dislike for a brand’s campaign can suddenly spiral into a I-hate-brand-X campaign with bloggers sporting buttons and hacking you down on twitter. After all, the stronger my point of view, the more peopel are bound to take me seriously. Plus the stronger my words, the more likely you are to read on.

Reacting vs Responding

With such little time left for reflection

with 20 tweets a minute

with 10 feeds updates an hour

you really have such little time to process information you read. And the constant need to be a part of the conversation and be one with th group means we’re all often reacting rather than responding.  (Amazon Fail)

Notice the sudden outrage at the Amazon story #AmazonFail

This is especially worrisome if you agree that  ”If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states” (Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values, scientists warn)

This reaction is often exaggerated by social media socialites and turns outrage into a true blue e-riot.

Show-you-your-place syndrome

Now this is where the power gets to your head. The 66 odd subscribers I have and how I can use them to show this person/company/brand that I can ‘screw their happiness’.

Outrage is more justice seeking and serves as a good warning (in my humble opinion). While the second one is plain vindictive.

Coke did this campaign with bloggers some time back where they asked them

 to give some of their home page to their new brand i9. In return they sent

 them a cool usb-fridge. To say thank you ofcourse.

Now outrage would be saying coke shouldn’t have done this. why buy bloggers off. unfair. boo.

But what really happened is plain vindictive -

Bloggers who were not a aprt of the campaign starting trashing coke left right and centre. Perhaps they were jealous. Perhaps they hated the idea of bloggers being bought. But then they weren’t being bought, right? so why all the fuss?

‘Bad, server. no donut for you’ or something like that is what you get when orkut screws up. Or ‘oops…’ when gmail acts up.

I love a company with a sense of humour so here are a few examples I came across that I’d wanna share…

Mable’s shows you this when the page’s not found. Quite cute.

Sample this. Dilmah tea has it’s CEO picture and a line that says “one CEO who makes his own tea”

Any others I don’t know about yet?

Khyati showed me a site that runs a contest for the best short story. The only catch is that the story needs to be really short. 140 characters to be precise. A typical SMS limit.

My first thought was that it’s interesting, but I wondered if it would be any good.

So I visited their winners page and am now eating my words

Sample this!

‘The baby’s fine,’ the midwife says, touching her hand. ‘Bit of a scare there, but he’s a little fighter. Have you decided on a name yet, Mrs Hitler?’

‘I love you,’ she says just before he places the pillow over her face and presses down, hard. As her cancer-gaunt body stills, he feels his heart break.

‘Aren’t you the musical one son’ said Dad. ‘Don’t know where you get it from.’ Mum’s blush rose as the postman passed the window, whistling tunefully.

‘I’m home’ I yelled, entering the house. No response. In the kitchen my wife sobbed and hugged our son. ‘Daddy’s dead’ she whispered, looking through me.

Visit the site for more.

I propose a short story contest on my blog. Lemme invite a judge. Who knows, there may be prizes

I must confess I love tag clouds. I think they’re an amazing way to visually compare factors. They show the importance of one factor by making it bigger than the other words and often even changing the colour of less important factors.

Wikipedia says: “ A tag cloud is a visual depiction of the word content of a site. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color.[1] Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.”

Brand Tags

Recently I was introduced to Brand Tags. Yes, I know it’s been around forever and most of you use it already… blah blah
For those who don’t know brandtags read on.
It’s a cool little site (experiment) which asks visitors to type in one word that they associate with a particular brand name. So if Colgate pops up you type in one word that you most relate to the brand (I said white).

You can also go through the brand list and see what people have to say about a brand. And it’s all shown to you in the form of a cool tag cloud like this one for casio ———————————->>>

There is an option for you to add your brand to the list to see what people have to say about it.

Wordle

I found wordle through Gautam and I think it’s very cool.

All you need to do it type out words and the ones that occur most in your write-up will be showcased prominently in your tag cloud. It’s fun and looks very cool.

It’s great for client presentations when you want to show brand perception findings. For example I can put the findings of a recent FGD done for a hospital to showcase what people generally think of hospitals-

PS: this is a wordle of this post

For as long as I can remember people have bemoaned the negative influence of the western world.

From asking the kids to leave the room when ‘the bold and the beautiful’ is on, to giving teenagers the stare when they’re watch Phoebe give birth to the children of her brother

Yes, western culture has influenced us. No, we’re not delivering our brothers’ babies.

Substituting punctuation with ‘like’ or whatever-ing ever unhandled-able situation; we are pretty American in our talk.

But just last night while watching Jimmy Kimmel Live on Star World I saw two videos which were picked right out of India.

Video 1: Dadagiri slap video

This is the one where a rather moronic TV host slaps a contestant, only to be slapped right back.

Video 2: Indian dance video

I’m sure plenty of American shows have picked up stuff that’s Indian and this isn’t the first time, but I still thought it was cool.

While I may not care for that awesome soap produced out of Taiwan, I am still open to watching something interesting on youtube irrespective of where it comes from.

Youtube’s influence on TV programming

So in a way, the internet is opening up a lot of cultures to the world and thereby perhaps influencing even TV programming and making it more open. (by ‘culture’ of course I don’t mean values and snake charmers, but simply a way of living)

So while a Texan farmer may not surf youtube; through his TV he might just get to watch programming inspired by the world. He might just gain a perspective that goes beyond ‘y’all’ and double negatives.

Everyone talks about a global culture, but what’s interesting is that it really does have a ripple effect that lasts beyond just the web. Making it a true ‘culture’ and not just a passing fad.

PS: i get that the dadagiri video is too silly to help me prove my point. Hoping you will overlook that

There are very few companies that seem to be making a concerted effort towards engaging with their online audience… perhaps it’s easier for companies whose business exists in the online space.

I’ve been pretty impressed with zappos.com. It started in 1999 (wikipedia) with zero sales and is today the largest footwear selling business online.

So here are a couple of things they’ve done online (and done well I might add)

• They have a blog.

• They also do cute and crazy videos called Zappos TV on youtube. Their video on ‘why do ppl work at zappos‘ is a fun way to impress potential employees.

• Their CEO is also on twitter and sends out regular tweets. This is a video of him asking an employee to slap him

• They also ran a contest recently where people had to make videos about what’s the craziest thing you can do with a shoe. They received some 17 video responses. It’s not much, but the energy around the brand is just so cool and fun.

The company of course is hugely popular because of their free shipping policy and some 365 day return policy. I haven’t bought anything from them since they don’t ship to India (bummer). But I sure do love the brand.