India and Social Media

Social media, as I see it, is the proper orchestration of user generated content with content generated by media companies. (Content in its basic form is either text, image, audio or video)

Conventional wisdom on social media is that its all user generated content. But, have you recently looked at the top 20 video's in You Tube. Its content is all user generated, and with the exception of 3 or 4 mostly they are objectionable content and would repluse many serious advertisers. Or, take the example of digg, and so many of its clones available both outside of india and inside of india. They are just a bunch of URL referals allowing their user community to rate them. In essense we are just keeping a score on traditional media. You might then say, what about blogs?. Well with the exception of few bloggers, the vast majority are drifting without a sail or rudder in the wide open ocean.

The answer, I feel, is in orchestration. What I mean by that needs a little bit of what web 1.0 and web 2.0 is. To be honest, I dont really get this web 2.0 and web 3.0 in the works - better known as the semantic web. But, my understanding of this without a web x.x tag is that in the beginning (read as web 1.0) content in the web was given to the users by traditional media compaines. Later (read as web 2.0), due to lack of openess and interactiveness, clever entrepreneurs leveraged advancement in technology created web properties that allowed users to generate their own content and publish with ease. However, the problem was monetization and meaningful content.

In came the traditional companies who said, I have something meaningful and you have the user base so I will buy you out. Most significant of this was Fox and MySpace (which prompted me to start indiainteracts.com) and recent acquisition of You Tube by Google. Now, I feel, the success lies in the clever orchestration of these web 1.0 and web 2.0 companies should yield a more meaningful experience and hence huge revenues are to follow. Only time will tell. However, I am biased and feel its going to be a runaway success, provided they overcome the obstacles in front of them.