Gautam Ghosh - Website

My learnings about Social Business Strategy

Gautam — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:32:40 +0000

In November I opted for a radical shift in my career from HR, OD and Training – to the new emergent field of Social Business Strategy, becoming a Social Business Strategy Consultant with a start-up called 2020 Social in India.

During these months – I have been thinking and blogging about how business can leverage and utilize social technologies internally to build internal employee communities – to build an open and transparent organization.

Primarily I look what what are the cultural constructs within an organization that build collaboration, and what are the Leadership imperatives that would support such an organization. In fact, at 2020 Social we believe in eating our own dog food.

Social technologies help people to connect – so it’s not a surprise that one of the main focus of my research is also how Social Media can help organizations with Recruiting – and thoughts about Social Employee Relationship Management.

My personal take is that these trends would continue increasing – as organizations build internal networks to resemble Facebook, and as Twitter became the top trend in US jobs in 2009.

Check out our definition of Social Business Strategy – Business Strategy Plus Technology Plus Sociology and our Position Paper

Posted in DesiPundit, india, innovation, online, personal, social media Tagged: learning, reflections, social media

Social Media Club Delhi 2nd Meet this Saturday

Gautam — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:14:53 +0000

The Social Media Club is an organization which was formed to bring people interested in the social aspect of media:

We imagine that the activities of the community will include both for profit and not for profit endeavours – you never know what will happen when bringing smart, creative and open minded people together. We can’t really imagine what this will look like a year from now – all we know is that by coming together we can be more effective than we can be alone. Cooperation and collaboration are the order of the day – not just across departments within your organization, but across organizations and particularly across traditional disciplines. So as we explained with the temporary home page, we want Social Media Club to be:

“A loosely joined association for open conversations on the future of media for: Artists, Students, Educators, Tool Makers, Media Creators, Citizen Journalist, Professional Journalists, Communications Professionals, Open Minded Collaborators.”

So some interested people helped us launch Social Media Clubs across the cities in India The list includes number of cities including Delhi (Facebook, Twitter), Mumbai (Blog) (Twitter), Bengaluru (Twitter), Chennai (Twitter), Kolkata (Twitter), Hyderabad (Twitter), and Pune (Twitter)

The second meeting of the Social Media Club in Delhi is this Saturday where Mayank Dhingra and Dipankar Sarkar, who started micro-blogging platform Kwippy, will lead the discussion on ‘the challenges of building a social platform in India’ at the 2nd meetup of Delhi Social Media Club. Do come to the following address:

Kunzum Gallery, T-49, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi

If you want to attend, RSVP here on Facebook, Linkedin or Twtvite

Posted in DesiPundit, networking, social media

Great post by @BillIves re @2020Social a

Gautam — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 21:10:45 +0000

Great post by @BillIves re @2020Social and #SocialBusiness. http://budurl.com/BillIves

Posted in blogging

Facebook in the Factory: Manufacturers W

Gautam — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 11:30:33 +0000

Facebook in the Factory: Manufacturers Want Social Software, Too article on RWW http://ow.ly/UuGR

Posted in blogging

A Year In Review: 2009 Social Marketing

Gautam — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 09:18:31 +0000

A Year In Review: 2009 Social Marketing Trends http://ow.ly/UuGk by @jowyang

Posted in blogging

Lists on Twitter – India Related Lists

Gautam — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:32:12 +0000

Ever since Twitter introduced the lists feature (if you don’t know what Twitter lists are check more about it here) opening up the ability for every user to curate and publish lists, there has been a explosion in the number of lists that people have made.

This post is on some of the twitter lists I have encountered that focus on Indians on Twitter.

If you know more such lists – feel free to add them in the comments:

http://twitter.com/tinucherian/indiantweeps

http://twitter.com/goodlists/india – following 496 people

http://twitter.com/mustafashakeel/indias-top-twitters

http://twitter.com/labnol/friends-in-india

http://twitter.com/saketjha/indian-celebs

http://twitter.com/adithya_arjpvc/twibes-india

http://twitter.com/tlists/india

http://twitter.com/SoulSoup/india-connection

http://twitter.com/clickonf5/indian-techies

http://twitter.com/amarsrivastava/twibes-india – following 475 people

http://twitter.com/sarinsuares/ncr – follows 493 people

http://twitter.com/denharsh/indian-bloggers

http://twitter.com/denharsh/indian-twitterbox

http://twitter.com/amreekandesi/desibloggers

http://twitter.com/navetspot/india-top-twitters

http://twitter.com/yehtech/india

Posted in DesiPundit, india, online, social media Tagged: twitter, twitterati

Craigslist Job – A Twinterview :-)

Gautam — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 06:37:36 +0000

This was sent to me by @MadhukarShukla

Posted via email from Miscellanous

Posted in blogging

End of the road for Insightory.com

Gautam — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:36:12 +0000

Got this email from Insightory.com founder Avneet Jolly – too bad that Insightory has decided to shut shop

I blogged about Insightory.com in the early days – hoping that it would become a knowledge sharing site for management related content.

As Avneet shares, it clearly was not enough to drive the traffic to monetizable levels.

What should it have done?

It's always easy to get wisdom and comment in hindsight, but here goes.

I personally think that if Insightory had incentivised the creation of a social network around the larger social object of knowledge and encouraged communities to form – and focused on the creators rather than the documents – repeat visits would have been higher. Otherwise it merely was playing catchup to larger document sharing sites like scribd and the 800 pound gorilla Slideshare which moved away from only slides to documents too.

Of course, as I said, that is wisdom in hindsight.

Here's Avneet's mail :

Hi all,

I wanted to let you all know that we have decided to shut down Insightory.com.

Insightory was an experiment in aggregating management-focused content that soon became more-than-a-hobby-but-less-than-a-business. The site itself has grown a lot since we started 2 years ago. We regularly featured content from the best-known business authors, professors, firms and even senior corporate executives. It gave me a huge thrill to host the insights of people whose books I used to read in b-school – Tom Peters, David Maister, Andrew Sobel, Graef Crystal etc. It was also gratifying to help leading global firms like Booz & Co, Watson Wyatt, Nielsen etc – as well as hundreds of smaller firms – promote their thought leadership through Insightory. The range of topics also kept growing – we covered everything from business strategy to generational issues, and from social media to business statistics! This probably sounds immodest, but there aren’t that many sites that give access to such a wide range of quality management content for free.

We logged well over 1,000 page views per day last month. Since the traffic kept growing and the content kept coming in without too much effort from us – we let the site coast for almost a year. Unfortunately, we could never settle on a business model that would let us invest in the technology or content partnerships that could take us to the next level. Every model we looked at seemed to require exponentially more traffic and users than we had – or could reasonably expect in the next few years. The sharp decline in online ad rates didn’t help either.

For a while, we even believed that we could let the site run without any revenue generation at all. But the cost and time required to run such a site with any level of quality & professionalism is not insignificant. At the same time, my other work (I also run a consulting firm) kept growing and taking up an every-increasing % of my time. It has now reached a point where I need to (gasp!) make a significant investment in office space and staff! The writing was on the wall for several months, but I guess it took the end-of-year clarity of vision (should that be hindsight??) to really see it.

We will terminate our hosting contract shortly. The site will no longer be hosted after Jan 31, 2010. That should give you enough time to review your account and migrate your documents to another document/ presentation sharing site. If you need support with your documents after that date, please let me know and I will try to help you as best as I can. Rest assured – your documents, profile and contact information will NEVER be shared with anyone else.

THANK YOU for helping us build the site to this point. You contributed by sharing your documents (even if in response to repeated entreaties from Laurie Smith, Selene Cong, Donna Sacks or me!), commenting on others’ documents and sharing ideas for features and functions that the site should have. I sincerely hope you got something positive out of that experience, and will continue to share your insights on other platforms as well.

It was wonderful getting to know many of you – even if only by email or phone. I hope you will stay in touch.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Wishing you a great holiday, and a happy & healthy 2010.
Best regards,
Avneet Jolly

avneet.jolly@insightory.com

www.insightory.com

Posted via email from Miscellanous

Posted in blogging

The @2020social and @2020media party pics

Gautam — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:43:15 +0000

More pics coming up soon – in these pictures Hardeep, Ankur, Divya, Param and Freddie pose for my cameraphone.

Param is moving so fast like the Flash that he gets really blurry in one of the pics J !

See and download the full gallery on posterous

More pics at the 2020 Social fun page

Posted in work

The awesome part of working in a Social Business Strategy firm

Gautam — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 07:35:57 +0000

Quite a few folks ask me about my transition from HR and HR consulting to the new emergent field of Social Business Strategy – and ask me “How is this stuff different than a regular job?”

So here are my top few non-serious responses that I give them:

· It’s a workplace where if I say I love “RSS” I won’t be mistaken for a Sangh parivar member J

· Browsing the internet actually does count as work

· Updating your Twitter account 24 times in 8 hours gets classified as “building a pipeline”

· Writing a blog post on http://2020social.com/category/blog is a KRA

· We have a room full of cushions and bolsters – which is bathed in sunlight – called an ideation room. We’re still waiting for an idea that can be monetized, however

· The whiteboards are covered with cartoons and doodles – and actually facilitate brainstorming

· We work alternate Saturdays – and get compensated for that with some great beer and wine along with a free lunch (which is hotly debated over for 2 hours!)

· Our CEO is India’s best business blogger and our Consulting Director is the author of a bestselling book on Social Media and a ClickZ columnist! When we’re not pulling their leg or they pulling ours – we actually end up learning tonnes of exciting things

So are you jealous?

You should be!

D’you want to be here ?

Go here then

Gautam Ghosh

Consultant, 2020 Social

Phone: +91 9873141236

Facebook | Twitter | Blog |

Posted in blogging