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

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”.

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

Its not really fancy like Joomla or Mambo, and doesn’t even have a whole lot of whistles like these two things have, but I’ll still stick with Drupal.

Reason ? I fully believe that I can do an amazing job of creating anything from basic websites to mind-blowing portals to super integrated communities using Drupal. A huge amount of modules, community support and other things go a long way to making this the best CMS of all for me.

I power all my portals and most of my websites using Drupal. 2 mins to install, 10 mins to setup various modules and plugs, 3 hours to integrate them so that dumb error mesgs don’t happen, 3 hours to put up a nice custom theme,  and voila i’m done … I seriously think the world should use Drupal.

Go take a look at it… http://drupal.org…