Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

The Indian Premier League (IPL) 2010 has begun yet again with its Bollywood star power and deep pockets of business tycoons and is looking like a well-oiled business enterprise adept at social networking.

All teams, Kolkata KnightRiders (KKR), Deccan Chargers (DC) Rajasthan Royals (RR), Delhi Daredevils (DD), Kings XI Punjab, Chennai Superkings (CSK), Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) and Mumbai Indians (MI),l are active on Twitter.

For the first time IPL has tied up with Google and has live video streaming via the IPL YouTube channel so that the great Indian diaspora can enjoy the games from far-flung places around the globe.  In terms of channel views, the first day of IPL 2010 saw the number going up 84 per cent to 880,615 by the second half of the day from 478,057 in the first half. By Sunday, it had crossed 3.1 millions.

For now the quality of the videos being streamed remains to be analysed but there is no denying that as business ventures go, the IPL 2010 takes its online presence seriously.

Tweeting owners: Team owners like Shahrukh Khan, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shettty; captains like Shane Warne and players like Robin Uttappa and Yuvraj Singh are all busy tweeting away. IPL Chairman Lalit Modi is active on twitter as well along with PR people of each team tweeting about their respective teams. This is celebrity reputation management as well; all things IPL have celebrity status these days in India.

Mobile TV technology companies, gaming portals and online ticket booking sites are all raking in the moolah.

Being active on Twitter is crucial for team owners and more so in the case of Shahrukh Khan (SRK) whose team faced a reputation management crisis like no other – a blogger, who called himself the “fakeiplblogger” on blogspot, regularly trashed the team and its owner with surprising inside info on the workings of the team and its off-scene activity in South Africa last year. The team morale nosedived and KKR were languishing at the bottom.

This time around the buzz is great for KKR,  SRK himself is tweeting his way into people’s hearts and making sure nothing works against his team. A great example of how controversy helped create a buzz is his last movie MNIK (My name is KHAN), thanks to social networking sites and the tag “MNIK” trended worldwide on Twitter and helped the star regain some of his lost popularity.

IPL 2010 stands testimony to how important reputation management through social media is for businesses and sport like cricket these days.

Shashi Tharoor tweeted again and explained why he was quiet while the visa controversy was going on everywhere on TV and the WWW. His boss Minister of External Affairs, S M Krishna went on to say that such matters should not be discussed on a public forum like Twitter. Tharoor however tweeted so this morning…

Was travelling outof range& missed brouhaha.Now that EAM Krishnaji,whom I respect,has spoken,I hv nothing 2add.Will discuss visa issue w him.

But thanks for all the kind words over the last 24hrs. Appreciate the support!

Support he had from everywhere but the politicians of both the ruling Congress party and the opposition. Debates went on on all major news channels on Tharoor’s tweets. People were amused and felt he has every right to tweet what he feels like while his party were left explaining. The difference of opinion between the MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) and the Home Ministry was discussed at length.

For the rest of the country it was a great day – a minister telling them things like it is. There’s hope for politicians in India after all, we may yet have a new breed of leaders who dare to be different.

Shashi Tharoor, Minister of State for External Affairs is no stranger to social networking and is the highest followed person in India on Twitter. Tharoor in fact popularised Twitter in India to a great extent with his now controversial Tweets and was even named “Twitteroor” for his political gaffes as far as his political party’s stances were concerned.

The minister is intellectual, tech-savvy and popular with the masses and has 537,478 followers on Twitter when this post was written. The problem with Tharoor is that his Tweets are a source of both admiration and political uproar at the same time. Even as he endears himself to the youngsters, the geriatric members of his often sycophantic Congress party look at him as an up-start of sorts.

That Tharoor was in the initial stages a close rival to the UN Secretary-General post of Ban Ki Moon and that he has numerous books to his name all accord him a celebrity status. What I like about him the most is his constant attempts at making his countrymen laugh at themselves. Here he is back in the news for tweeting against his own government’s tightening of tourist visas to India. This is what he tweeted -

Dilemma of our age: tough visa restrictions in hope of btr (better) security or openness & (and) liberality to encourage tourism & goodwill? I prefer latter.

When asked about the economy class of Air India he famously tweeted -

“absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!”

The slang was lost on most people in India and when he added the holy cows all hell broke loose.

That he has huge plans for his country and is not afraid to speak his mind and even against his own government makes him stand apart. But then these days how the mighty fall ( Tiger Woods) and before you know it, courting controversy can finally catch up. The minister sure needs some expert reputation management for continuing his work well and to be in the good books of the old war horses in the Congress party.

Being a busy man he needs the services of an army of experts to help him with online reputation management and being a celebrity and a politician the need only magnifies manifold.

Google’s real time search integration into searches is for the time being giving its 6 minutes of fame to anyone who is active on Twitter. Go out there blog about anything topical and before you know BAM you’re in the first five on Google news searches.

The good thing about this is that you can really get a lot of people reading what you want them to read. So if you’re a Tiger Woods you should be out there with expert reputation management guys telling the world that you messed up big time, that you’re seeing a top shrink to handle your “addiction” and that you plan to be back on top of the game in 2010.

The bad thing about this real-time search integration that Google has begun is that, if you have a disgruntled customer, employee, spouse, agent, patient or fan you could be in a blitz of bad press within minutes. Scary? Definitely!

The call for reputation management has just turned into a shout. You need to have daily PR out there as defenders with positive news and content. It’s a minefield out there, more so now.

Research showing the lack of correlation between twitter hot words and Google or Yahoo zeitgeist demonstrates a key difference between the two and is important for reputation management companies to grasp.

Google zeitgeist reveals what words are being most searched for, but not which are being most discussed online. This is where Twitter is interesting: heavily tweeted and retweeted posts show that this is the real zeitgeist for the internet.

As commentators pointed out, search terms tend to be media driven. So Tiger Woods car crash is a media driven event and people want to know more. Twitter users tend to be less media driven and more discurssive in their approach to the Net.

If you want to get ahead of the trend: then follow twitter closer than you do Google.

So there has been a massive shift and chat about social network sites like facebook and twitter, but in my opinio0n they will be short lived if things don’t change soon.  I know everyone talks about them and how great they are, but like most services once word gets out and people start using it then it tends to get over crowded.

I see it now with my own little network of friends on Facebook, human nature and facebook’s set up encourages you to show that you are popular, no-one wants to be a billy no mates, unless you are one of those few people who are totally secure with themselves.  So most people start adding “friends” as quick as possible, same with Twitter, so here is where the problem begins.  When you post a comment on your facebook and you only have 10 friends, the chances are that all your friends will see your comments and vice versa you will see there’s.  When you have 100 friends, you now have a lot more people posting comments, the set up of facebook means latest news always appears at the top and pushes older comments down.  As people catch on, the only way to get a decent response is to keep posting comments all the time.  After a while out of say 200 friends you will probably find that 5 to 10 people post loads of comments and everyone else does it very very occasionally.  Over time people just don’t bother using facebook or twitter as they are generally not interested whether you are going to the toilet or getting out of a lift.

So how can you combat this?  One simple answer would be limit how many comments one person can make in a day, this way they are more likely to put quality comments in rather than gibberish just because they think they have to.  If search engines like Google and Bing are going to start spidering them, then good luck, they thought they had a spam issue on the website search wait till they start getting into the social network world….

Don’t get me wrong sites like facebook do work and can bring great business if set up correctly, you only have to look at the pages and groups section to see how effective it can become, however unless a quality control is set up it will soon become far to noisy (it already is) and people will just stop using it.  Linkedin have the right idea, it’s a lot more difficult to add people, hence reducing spam, you have to work a lot harder find relevant people and add them to your network.

I still using these sites for SEO and reputation management but to be honest I have stopped using them for all other reasons and from talking to loads of people I know I am not alone.