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?

Sit down. Take a deep breath. Know that this is not the end of the world. You will not lose your job over this. Another deep breath please.
It’s official – most of your branded online communities are doomed.

According to a recent Deloitte study that I read about here, ’35% of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members despite the fact that close to 6% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects.’

Now before you scroll right down to comments and begin to stab at your keys, let me assure you that I am not against online communities. Now, who in their right mind would be!

But I do have an issue with brands deciding to just ‘create’ an online community in the hope of building a loyal fan base. It’s like they think online community’s their jackpot. As if those 100 people in their community are like zombies waiting to watch every piece of advertising they send out.

1. Add value
If you’re a client and your brief to your digital agency is ‘i want an online community for young ambitious SEC A males’ then let me assure you that you’re not going to get anywhere with this social-media-thing.
Any community must add value. Must provide info/entertainment that the person actually needs.
No, wallpapers and screensavers of your latest canned juice don’t help. No ambitious-SEC-A-male wants to stare at wallpapers of your often not-so-cool product.
And adding a ‘send to friend’ link cannot help your cause if that’s all you intend to offer.

2. Know ‘why’
It’s really important to figure out why you’re asking for an online community anyway.
Is it because
- You want to do something with this social-media-thing
- You believe that people who join your community will just go nuts about your product
- Gang of Girls did it (personally i could write a book about why GoG isn’t a great case study, but whatever!)
- You just want one and that’s that!

If you want a community because your aim is to just spread the magical powers of your brand around, think again. Communities that are created without any clear value-add don’t really go anywhere. And if your community starts and ends with your brand then your entire process is oriented around how many more people can you attract, instead of what you’re giving to all those people who are already a part of your community.

Communities grow when people who are already in them decide that it’s a damn good place to be in and call-in their friends.

Couple of things you may want to do
1. Be specific. What kind of people do you want in your community. It’s great to want millions in your fanbase, but then often a handful of strong believers are better than hordes of drifters.

2. Or else just use existing communities to peddle your goods. Why create another facebook when it already exists. You don’t always have to start from scratch. Don’t reinvent the wheel as Manish always says.

And no, you cannot blame your digital agency if your community doesn’t pick up.
We’ll just re-direct you to this post!

To state the cliche yet again – man is a social animal.
While the digital medium allows for easy sharing and networking, in the offline world it seems to put people in silos.

The mp3 player or the mobile phone allowed people to keep to themselves (which they often wanted) and yet be entertained (which hadn’t happened since books).

Ever since we came up with the earphone (not the headphone), people discovered a way to share what is essentially an individual sport. I call this ‘twinning’.

Twinning: The act of sharing an ear phone with another person so that you can share content.

For youngsters in crowded places, it’s the perfect ‘personal hangout’. Sharing music, videos and chit-chatting, it provides the ultimate in personal social networking in a crowded place.

Increasingly friends are seen giggling at a video, humming a tune in unison with an ear phone plugged in one ear.

So it’s true, you can give people the digital ‘individual’ space, but at some point they’re going to want to share that too; perhaps as a sign of their friendship, their boredom at being on their own, their courtesy towards a friend who isn’t carrying her mp3 player, or just as the ‘provider’ or entertainment that makes one ever-popular. Who knows!

There’s something to this twinning, which quite interests me. For the life of me, I just can’t seem to put my finger on it.

Too many articles and opinions have been doing the rounds about how online social networking is killing real life relationships.

Sure, people are spending a lot of time scrapping each other or hanging-out on gtalk, but that’s hardly enough reason to bad-mouth the net as a ‘social-life killer’.

With e-networking I can have a word with Bill Gates if I like, so what if I haven’t a clue about my neighbour.

How can this kill your social skills when all it’s doing is giving wings to those who never had any? It’s letting me say hello and wish people on their birthdays when otherwise I probably wouldn’t bother.

Yes MMOGs and heavy gaming is killing people’s ability to interact and relate with other human beings. But that’s hardly digital’s fault. Isn’t it the same with any form of addiction? Doesn’t it consume you, especially if it’s an addiction that only involves the individual and not the entire community.

In fact, even if people are becoming more and more withdrawn, they are finding relationships in a different dimension. Why, only some time back a woman tried to attempt suicide and was saved by a joint effort by her online group to locate her.

With busy-bee lives, old-world socializing is dying. No need to see red. Change is inevitable.

Online Social networking isn’t all that bad.

God knows, without it I’d be living in my head and talking to myself!