self.machine

Must ask ! Are you “technically randy” ?

I definitely am , i just figured out that i must come out in the open for a change [as if the blog name is not a good indicator]. I love technology and apply it anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity. Though this obviously has its pitfalls, well being randy has its pitfalls. Lets see some of the obvious ones [feel free to comment and fill in the non-obvious ones]

• Depending on what makes your day, you will end up spending up more time than the average joe on simple things ! I would call it the law of diminishing efficiency of the technically randy.
• Your boss for one will call you as the office hero, but your co-workers will call you the office pain in the arse. Get ready to be abused and bitched about !
• Mines and deep bore wells are your friends ! I mean it in the dual way, you will fall deep into pits of darkness only to emerge with solutions that could have been searched or massaged out of our friendly neighborhood search engines.
• You will want a pet ! Or let me rephrase it, you need a pet. Its not a reflection of anything negative, its and overt exploitation of man’s best friend after all. All the time spent in technology, will proportionally reflect in the relationship randiness … you my friend need error correction

Now that was a lot of fun ! Point is can the social and the nerd exist …. I think it can exist [well, no harm in trying], hopefully my nerd side will post something technically relevant. Until next time.

It has been something that has been going on in my head for a significant amount of time and I believe that it is the right time for politicians and famous individuals to take their online reputation management as seriously as the offline one. Here, i will outline a very basic strategy that i believe will equip celebrities and politicians to strengthen their brands.

So lets start with some assumptions that will make our lives easier as the post goes on.

• Paid advertising stand-alone is not an effective way of reaching out.
• A holistic or integrated approach towards internet marketing is what will allow long-term gains.
• Like most blog posts, this is highly subjective. Feel free to improve, argue, debate any points.

So with this initial setup we can charge into how a politician X can become an online brand.

Goals

To plan for the next coming elections, which means that it has to be a sustained campaign over the next 2-3 years to make a meaningful impact.

It also has to ensure that he remains at a peak during his election times, and is able to sustain public interaction at a locality level.

Mechanisms available

We all seem to assume that social media, by default is the internet. In a country with nearly 430 million wireless connections, a strategy also needs to address the offline, but mobile populace.

So here is a list of potential ways of reaching the user using social media

• Internet – Blogs / content
• Mobile (SMS, MMS or GPRS)
• Internet – Social networks
• and many more …

The list can go on, but it is all dependant on the target audience which may be some remote district in West Bengal (India).
Why ? Why not ?

“One does not fit all”, and that is the reality. I would love to use social media to create and enhance everybody’s reputation. For an example, an MLA from a remote bihar village has no use for social media in his political career (unless of course he has national / state level ambitions).

Cosmopolitan cities like kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore have all shown that the internet may emerge as a potentially important mechanism for party propaganda as well as reputation management.

So if you guys want to have a chat with me discussing this further, do comment or email me at me@dipankar.name.

Stimulating Innovation, Resource & Entreprise (STIR-e) is a Not-for-Profit Organization, which aims to promote social entrepreneurship and inspire entrepreneurial minds to bring economic transformation and measurable social impact by integrating innovation with pattern-breaking ideas and focused mentoring. STIR-e aims to become a niche strategic advisory for social enterprises that create innovative, market based solutions to poverty, environment and sustainable development. STIR-e integrates the challenges of access to appropriate resources, investments and investment risk mitigation with a robust social entrepreneurship model adaptable to multiple texts and sub-texts of the market economy.

STIR-e seeks to build unique opportunities for the market, environment and social agendas to come together and address concerns of poverty, livelihood and balanced development processes. Our aim is creation of horizontal, community based markets appropriately suited for the multi-bottom line focus of social enterprises. STIR-e plans to raise and deploy a Youth Social Venture Fund aimed at establishing a culture of entrepreneurial solutions to social challenges amongst the youth. We seek to motivate/ equip institutions with appropriate strategic planning & implementation knowledge and skills to bring about a holistic change.

STIR-e holds a deep commitment to the creation of a new, informed, and passionate world of investing that strategically moves more capital to social good.

Do read more about us at http://www.stir-e.org

It gives me immensure pleasure to announce that Electrosocial is starting a six week internship program from the end of this month. The program is aimed at sharing the fundamentals of Social Media and imparting working knowledge with various tools and services of relevance. The internship would be completely online so that anyone from any part of the world can join it. The internship program would consist of (but not limited to) the following:

• Emergence of Social Media
• Social Media Fundamentals
• Social Media Tools
• Social Media Values/Ethics
• Scope of Social Media in Marketing, Customer Service, Activism etc
• Social Media Metrics
• Legal Aspect of Social Media

The internship progam is completely free for all and the interns will also get certificates for the same at the end of internship. Since it’s an internship program, the interns will also get to work hands on Electrosocial’s and its clients projects. This experience will be crucial in understanding how Social Media campaigns work, how tools are used, how reporting is done and more.

Electrosocial is looking for interns(preferably freshers or college students). So if you are a web junkie and find the idea of doing an internship in Social Media exciting send us an email at: internship@electrosocial.com.

Mosambe is a one-stop shop to find the right jobs and the right talent. It is a platform for you to network with your colleagues, gain greater visibility and find new opportunities. For companies- setting up a branded account, posting a job and finding the right talent is simple, easy, effective and hassle free.

Mosambe(http://mosambe.com) is the creation of Kaasu info ventures private limited, a small team based out of Hyderabad. It is by far the most social and nice looking professional networking site in India, and clearly has the potential to challenge the biggies in the India online job market. The coolest parts and in some ways the differentiators are

• My own cool professional homepage After registering on the site, I was able to get http://dipankar.mosambe.com . Out of all the professional sites on the internet, none have focused on creating the right kind of professional homepages.
  

  Dipankar Mosambe Profile

• Support for employers, the system has built in work flows which are meant to help the employers / HR consultants find the right kind of jobs. The primary job is to manage the various list of selected people and also being able to search the right kind of people.
• Great search, like most job sites it has a great search which works great for both the employers and the employees. The intelligent search also sends automatic mailers when people keep getting you as a search result, all we want is a perfect fit for the employee and the employer in this tough market condition.
  

  Kaasu mosambe search

• LinkedIn importer So you already have a linkedin profile, too lazy to fill in a new one. Try out the mosambe linkedin importer which will crawl your linkedin profile and fill up the missing blanks in your cool professional homepage.
• Awesome support The mosambe guys love to enable people and have made it real easy to send in feedback about the site and any problems you face. It has been built for “your” specific needs and the people decide how to make it bigger, faster and better.
• Social jobbing Mosambe has always believed that professional does not mean “asocial” , we can all be friends and still gain off each other. Message each other, add them as friends, ask them for testimonials and more …. Its the new age of social jobbing.
• Ethical Mosambe does not intend to spam people and it comes out in the site manifesto. I have been a part of many job sites and feel that these guys spam rather unecessarily. This is pretty much the DNA of a good internet portal in my view.

Mosambe clearly has a lot difference in terms of what it offers to the India job market (which seems to be stuck in the naukri.com era and refuses to come out to web 2.0), only time will tell how this will pan out.

Feel free to email me at me@dipankar.name for an invite to this amazing service.