This is the sound of inevitability. On 30th December, 2009, bridges will appear across mobile service providers. Bridges, that for a princely toll fee of Rs. 19, allow you to transition from one mobile service provider to another.

And if all happens as planned, this is one of the most disruptive events that would have ever happened to the Indian Telecom sector since the Mobile Boom. The Indian Mobile Market spaces would be free of monopoly from service providers, who hold you to ransom over prices and schemes for the very simple reason that you cannot move away from them without losing your mobile number.

I personally have been a very, very early adopter of Mobile Services. And ever since I picked up a number, I have been with a single co, that has changed its business avatar as Orange, HutchMax, Vodafone and so on. A single mobile number has been printed on hundreds of thousands of visiting cards, websites, contact forms, proposals etc, and has been unleashed across industries, sectors, people, domains where I ply or intended to ply, or intend to ply, my business. In a good number of cases, it has paid off. Calls made to potential customers 3 years ago, have resulted in orders even last week.

I have stuck on to a single service provider, whatever be the cost, worries, joys, encumbrances, headaches, promises not met, commitments over-fulfilled and so on.

I am now happy, that this enforced “stickiness” will be done away with, leaving me with the choice, at an extremely affordable rate of Rs. 19 per change too, of shifting to another provider who offers better pricing, quality of service, higher level of customer responsiveness, and so on.

I am finally a number free, not bound. 30th Sept, shall set me free.

Sanjeev Sarma

ps. As I write this, my numb brain explores various vistas and avenues of changes this could mean to market places and spaces. Hope I’m not too lazy to document them.

And by a whopping mandate it has declared the 100+ year old Congress party as capabale enough to manage this great country for the next 5 years. It has done so without ambiguity, and has left no room for shakiness at the centre in the form of volatile driven-by-need coaltions or by power hungry time serving politicians.

The country has also voted succinctly and clearly against the left and has left them stumbling and incapable, even in their own bastions of Kerala and West Bengal. Not to be left behind, the bourses, when they opened on Monday, lauded this decision by two successive upper circuit breakers as the index spiralled up to glory, leaving no one in doubt about their decision to vote.

For me however, this brings in a huge diaspora of mixed emotions. The happy ones have been listed above, as I shared people sentiments of a stable govt, and market sentiments of faith leading to rises in indices. The ones that really irk me as of now are:

1) I see that we are heading back towards a regime where ruling party reins are handed down in the family, irrespective of capability or qualifications. Takes me back to eras where maharajah’s were elected at birth.

2) I see a weak opposition now, a much needed facet of any democracy that prides itself on being driven by mandate. An opposition that risks the danger of standing leaderless, and probably missionless too.

I have also spent the past 3 days skimming over regions, people who won, margins they won by and so on, and I have these points that hit my face when I look at an inch below the surface of this victory.

1) That the Congress has won on a purely minority vote aggregation. Sounds ridiculous ? Check out their strong bastions as of now : Kerala, TN, Andhra, where Xtian conversion activities are gathering force daily, and plague the very fibre of a really ancient culture. Check out UP and other bastions, where the Muslims have voted en masse for the Congress.

How can I really call a party that has focused on pure divisive strategies to polarize communities and win, secular? Just because they keep their minority forces satisfied and leave the rest of the country to its own devices?

2) Hindu (the majority) votes have been divided and dispersed by regional parties, star power, etc, to the point of being absolutely miniscule and unaccountable.

The bastions that remain with the BJP today in the form of states are ones that firmly protect culture by keeping away minority appeasement policies and by keeping conversions at bay. Staunchly, firmly Hindu with no move or trend to garner those “minority votes” through appeasement. (Many may of course choose to view this as “communal.”) But this is the stark reality that stands out today.

That Varun Gandhi would win, I had no doubt of. That he would win by such a whopping margin surprises me, given especially that he made “communal” speeches.

While I welcome this Govt and the immediate sense of stability it brin’gs to the country, I am worried about the long run. Especially given the ruling party’s leanings towards minority appeasement in various forms. And by its approach to define leadership of both the party and country in terms of Family.

I think its time I joined the BJP. If of course, it changes its fence sitting stand and decides to go and proudly label itself a Hindu party without being communal.

I for one would love to live in an India thats HINDU. A country where all religions from time immemorial have been tolerated and encouraged in terms of practice (not in terms of rsions, mind you). A country where I can go to a temple with my head held high, and not be labeled “communal.” A country whose culture I protect by not permitting conversions or allowing appeasements that lead to nothing but polarization.

Sanjeev

I can’t resist blogging competition. Gives me another excuse to spout a ton of Gibberish in this, my own space.

So when I was invited by @peppysophia to write about this Online Social Shopping Experience, I was quite excited. The reasons for this are two fold

1) The Social Shopping space excites me. It’s very close to me, especially since I dabble in a concept called sCRM (Social CRM) and love mining a huge amount of feeds to trend and track conversations around a brand and a product.

2) This is a darned contest And I’ve not won one so far, and Sophia Amma promised me that chances are darned bright and whatever I fell for this.

Now for the crux. The contest involves blogging about the ShopCorn “Social Shopping Site”.

I went through the presentation here, and was frankly, not a weee bit excited by what they had to throw at me. Not that the site or concept is tacky, but that I am too steeped in dreams and aspirations of things “social” to see any value in what they bonked at me in the presentation.

They spoke about various things to do online together, like Live Reviews, Browsing Deals, etc etc that didn’t really appeal to me. For me, most good shopping sites already do these things.

I couldn’t see the “social” bit in this entire blasted exercise.

The site is done well. But then, that in itself ain’t Social. Social means much much more than what this site offers.

For me, I would say that it would make darned good sense for a site like this to start off as a simple FB or Twitter app, and then scale up to a full site.

Concept? Good. Implementation? Damp Squib

Sanjeev Sarma

http://recnut.com Our FREE Recruitment Management System is ready to go live tomorrow, Friday the 3rd of April 2009.

So what is recnut?

Recnut is a software aimed at recruiters. Its not a job site (not yet) and its not a submission zone for candidates to come and post their resumes (not yet, too). Its simply, shortly and sweetly put, a FREE recruitment management system.

Recnut makes operations more structured and organized for recruiters.

It allows them to manage and track all the requirements, candidates, resumes, clients they are working with, to provide for an “at-a-glance” understanding of where they stand, and what they have to do next.

Its meant for recruiters to avoid getting into maintaining cumbersome multi-format excel sheets, and aggregates operations into a single style of documenting and reporting, thereby bringing all on par, operationally.

We have miles to go before we really can call it the “best” system. But we’ll get there soon, and we’ll work with recruiters to help us develop this into an ASTOUNDING application over time

This Wikipedia article, and Wikipedia is MY fav for getting definitions, has this to say about Social Web. “The Social Web is currently used to describe how people socialize or interact with each other throughout the World Wide Web.”

I don’t think a huge number of people would disagree to the first line of this article. There are people who have told me over time, that Social means “interaction” and has nothing to do with software or the web. I agree with them in toto. Yet, a “Social CRM” did not come into the picture till Social Web got firmly rooted in minds and actions around the world, as a part of people’s lives.

With the Social Web, came a new level of interaction and interactivity between people. They discovered that this was a brilliant way to work and share their lives continually with a range of people, known and unknown. As part of sharing lives, trials and triumphs, discoveries and doubts, cusses and praises, started flowing across the internet stream.

People discovered, that somewhere here, was an influencing trend that needed to be tapped.

CRM,  or Customer relationship management (CRM),  as Wikipedia says in this article, “consists of the processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective customers.”

CRM (the software) has been around for a huge while now. It has moved from a cumbersome book-keeping process to a finely tuned piece of automation, that does allow companies to service their customers better.

The prime functions of a CRM are typically

1. Prospecting & Lead Generation
2. Continued touch-point with customers towards need fulfilling, trending & forecasting, and a higher level of structured engagement.
3. Complaint redressal and churn forecasting

A structured CRM process is a brilliant source of secondary data for marketing research services of an organization. And thats just the tip of a blasted huge ice-berg. Companies have fine-tuned CRM processes and systems to work in tandem for huge boost in efficiencies.

So why sCRM now?

As mentioned earlier, sCRM or Social CRM was born to tap a growing Social Web as a key point of continued interation, that served as a phenomenal pipeline of prospective customers.

Not only prospective customers, sCRM also looked to mine “influencer” patterns to decide what makes or mars a product or a service. Without really knowing it, this continued mining of various media online started revealing trends, patterns, structures, and bodies that probably at some time could be linked to a sale or lack of.

Where was sCRM actually born?

I would probably look upon Google’s context sensitive ad serving, as a FIRST in sCRM. Google actually understood that levels of interactivity and communication exchange would always be an exponential parameter to keep tapping, and introduced Adsense to address this constant interaction.

It monitored what you’re searching for, what you’re talking about, what you have discussed, and linked advertisers contextually to you. Thus, it provided much needed basis for monitoring HOW MANY PEOPLE ACTUALLY DISCUSSED A PRODUCT AND SERVICE OF YOU AND AROUND YOU.

And how was this addressed? Simple. Your communication just got displayed more than others depending on how many people shared a universe around you.

Now this was not really DIRECT, was it? It had to move into higher levels of commercialization (or keyword bidding, ad slot bidding etc).

Which meant that if you were in the, a domain, and ran a campaign to tap this universe that used your domain, you also had to contend with peripheral “chance” units that tried to eat into your domain. Finally things were always about buying keywords, related or unrelated, and displaying your communication on the off chance that it might result into a positive zap for you.

sCRM in todays era?

It’s all about monitoring social interactions on social sites. Its all about monitoring content and possibly, “adjectives” within content. For eg, I think PRODUCT X is NOT GOOD. It revolves around knowing spheres of influence that such innocuous statements can spread to. It revolves around knowing residual or “spread” points of such spheres of influences and influencers.

IMO, and I really haven’t evaluated any “sCRM” a brilliant sCRM should do all the above. And since it’s really the “S” that’s the hey here, some of the key matrices should include an emotional engine, an expression engine, and an adjective engine.

Finally, finally, finally. Till we actually figure out WHERE this has impacted a topline or a bottomline, we are just doing what my dear friend Bob Thompson calls  “Stalking”

In the next article, I’d like to discuss a really interesting debate I’ve been having with myself, and with some others on Twitter and other forums “Whether Recruiting on Social Web can be managed by an sCRM”.

One of the key things that came across is that there now seem to be a lot of entities who feel that brands can be made or marred online, via threads starting out from a simple 140 char string that goes “Product X is bad service, ppl, don’t touch it, #fail” or something like that. The people I met / interacted with over the last week all seem single-minded in terms of focusing on measuring the impact of such statements, and if possible, curbing or enhancing the impact that a negative or positive statement may have.

The key issue I keep wondering about is that of “monitoring” the impact of such statements. The tech aspects of collating or mining keywords related to a product / brand / service is not something that confounds me; anyone with half a grey cell can do it. What I really fail to understand is HOW such a statement and its impact on actual market spaces are measured. I can follow the threads of connect or discord around a product or service, but how do I actually check whether it has resulted in a SALE or LACK OF ONE.

One of the key posts that I HAVE to mention here in terms of its utter lucidity of thought and expression is Prem Kumars blog post on Social CRM. There seems to be a good thought stream out there, in terms of attempts to define spaces, approaches and potential outcomes.

Sugar CRM, the big daddy of all open source CRMs, in one of the versions I last checked, allowed you to run and track a (mailer or ad-serving) campaign online, as part of its offering. Now, while this cannot really be called “social CRM”, it does indicate a larger capability for a user to PUBLISH content to what goes collectively and even “loosely” under the garb of Social Media. Oracle, with their Social CRM App Suite seem to be prime, aggressive movers in this domain. As of now, it seems to be more of Sales prospecting and lead generation function.

So why has this become important?

It is kind of more or less accepted that 6 people out of 10 who spend at least 8 hours in front of a machine, are connected to a group / circle / network through a “social networking” site.

To most people, such sites serve as a connectivity platform, a “solidarity definition engine” or “recommendation engine” (I am buying X product, do you think I should go ahead?), a “Catharssis engine” (I HATE X or Y  services / person / product, and I think you guys should NOT use them).  And such innocuous posts sometimes show tendencies to spread, as the thread that permeates through venn diagrams that support inclusions or exclusions of people respond to it with myriad expressions of connect or disconnect.

Brilliant to do trending and checking.

But then, (as asked earlier) how do you actually monitor whether this has DONE  a sale or DENIED a sale ?

Social CRM and Reputation Engine Evangelists have their work cut out for them. The High Road for these people is not the trending and tracking, nor is it the mining of data and presenting an output.

Its the ACTUAL conversion to dollar matrices that are going to decide the KEY movers and FIRST players in the market that is BEGGING to be robbed.

Sanjeev Sarma

ps. I am currently exploring thoughts and concepts what SOCIAL CRM means to India and how Indian networks currently work in the digital space. I’ll share them soon as I’ve arrived at some gibberish I can pass off as intelligent.

“S K Sinha, joint secretary in the ministry for education, giving a demonstration of the device which is smaller than the normal laptop, said that it will need some more fine-tuning. He said the laptop is expected to reach the market in about six months.”

The laptop has 2 GB onboard memory with wireless Internet connectivity. To make it useful for the students, especially in the rural areas, the scientists have made it low power consuming gadget.

Darned Thrilling, Interesting and so on.

But hey, thats a ruddy Rs. 500.

So let me add “shocking” to the above adjectives.

I get a measly scientific calculator or a pen drive today for that price. So is a combo like that on offer? A scientific cal with higher processing capabilities? And say, maybe adding some text, sporting some images on standard VGA and so on?

I’ll be waiting to know more, see more, read more and hear more.

And if this 10$ episode happens, really and truly, I’ll sponsor 100 laptops for a municipal school

Hats off anyways to a team and people that dared dream and convert it into reality.

I have been seeing a HUGE number of tweets, reports, mails etc from all over the place, where more and more cos, especially media are registering themselves on twitter to feed their stories online.

I wonder whether this is another domain name like boom about to happen?

Twitter recently gained popularity for taking on “reporting” of the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. Thousands of people fed their bits into twitter, and were read by thousands more.

Post that, there seems to have been a serious BOOM in terms of people rushing in to create IDs with their brands and so on.

Probably, the fact that twitter cannot and will not ever be a “Sole Service” provider, will dampen HUGE investments. Identi.ca is already started doing pretty well, and so is Plurk.

Whee !! Demographics going to play a role again here?

The Mind Boggles ! And more n more thoughts come tumbling out.

Sanjeev Sarma

Five months back, when I commissioned myself to do an application from scratch, I was shocked. The urge to get back into opensource driven codebases was huge, and staying away caused withdrawal symptoms. That’s when I realized that I have unwittingly let myself walk away from the path of innovation and breaking tech, by pandering to my business needs and utilizing opensource to beat competition, and so on.

Opensource is easy to use, easy to customize, easy to find support for, and easy to maintain. Small wonder then that it has emerged as a “perfect” solutions for businesses here, who get FREE codebases to service their markets.

But in this process, and from the larger perspective of taking India to the front of the Intellect Ranges of the world, are we really moving?

I wonder how many of us here in India, really do path-breaking tech creations from ground up. In the recent past, most of the really high traffic pullers have not happened here. They have happened (with, in all probability, Indian teams) abroad. Talk twitter, tinyURL, etc. None oh none has happened here at all.

Are we, Indian developers, programmers, evangelists and so on, all about creating applications out of opensource? And that too, what apps ? We create a “Delhi” portal out of Drupal, and claim funding and top notch returns. We create a “Food Bloggers Community” outta, say, a MU-WP, and claim funds?

Duh !!!

I’d like to see a radical concept come from here. One that attracts and enthuses people across verticals, functions, walks of life, ages, genders and so on, use it … I for sure wouldn’t want to live in the “age of clones”, where I use localization or indigenization as a parameter for picking up a software and calling it “apt” (like the millions of YouTube clones, etc !!!)

So http:/shuttervarsity.com is on the prowl to organize what could probably be India’s FIRST Photography BarCamp … *visit the wiki by clicking on the following image*

Actually not the first, we have heard of such things happening elsewhere. But hey … we’re FOCUSSED on PHOTOGRAPHY. And what’s more, we are Focussed on FREE PHOTOGRAPHY EDUCATION.

May the Shutter be with us

Cheers

Sanjeev Sarma