Interview : Greenpeace India’s social media officer Akshey Kalra talks about the NGO’s online engagement strategy

Recently I have started realizing how fragile our environment is – courtesy, one of my consulting assignments with a weather service company in India. While helping my client to maintain a website, I am spending time juggling between weather reports, global warming data and report related to water problems across the country; thus continuously realizing how fragile the earth is becoming day by day. Within our cocoon of life between office, home and friends on social media we fail to take notice of the dying world around us. In fact a recent report shows how people living in UK, US and Europe discuss about weather and climate related issues on social media much more than Indians.

Hence when I got a chance to interact about Greenpeace India’s Social Media Officer Akshey Kalra on how they intend to involve Indians through social media, I was more than eager. Greenpeace had been fighting for the cause of environment in India for a few years now. However their strategies in India had been particularly different from how they operated in rest of the world. That is exactly what makes Akshey and his team’s job challenging and exciting. Though Indians are continuously getting vocal in both online and offline space, but the overall attention of the nation is revolved around issues like corruption, fight for justice, cricket and politics. If it ever transcends that boundary then we have poverty, child labour and hundreds of other social behavioral problems to discuss about. There are multiple NGOs and organizations vying to raise awareness and funds in every field, fighting for the same share of audience attention.

Hence it made perfect sense when Greenpeace India decided to launch an innovative facebook application to promote and gather participation around their latest ongoing campaign called ‘Junglistan’. Akshey talks about the facebook application called Jungle Hero and the overall social media strategy of Greenpeace India. Read More…

When SiliconIndia.com stole content from a blog

Fareed Zakaria is not the only one in midst of plagiarism controversy at the moment. On the pre-independence eve an Indian website named SiliconIndia who claims to be the largest community of Indian professionals found themselves in midst of plagiarism controversy. It all started when Pune based entrepreneur and blogger Prasant Naidu realized that one of his recently done interviews was not only existing in his blog but also been lying on SiliconIndia.com with no attribution given to him. Prasant, being a social media enthusiast, quickly picked up twitter for communicating with SiliconIndia and expressing his grievance over the issue. After working with online media platform for years and managing loads of user generated content, I know this is not a unique case. There are times when some of your junior editorial member will goof up with the rule and forget to run the content through copyscape. In most cases you humbly apologize and take preventive action. In recent past we have seen Zomato.com accusing their competitor Burrp.com of content theft. However this particular incident takes an odd turn when SiliconIndia allegedly replies back saying “We are a news site, hence we can copy paste” – a reply that can be termed as childish, immature and everything else but professional.  Read More…

Flipkart kills Letsbuy.com after takeover – who gets hurt most?

‘Sure it won’t close down, na?’ -  not exactly the question you would like to hear from your father when you tell him about your first job. But I had to because after all the education I was joining a non-descriptive startup company. Being born in a regular Indian family I cannot blame my parents for nurturing a common dream of their son being having a successful career and working for a startup maybe a lot more things, but never carry the social acceptance of being a ‘success’. It will be an understatement to say that I was concerned – I was troubled about my future, worried to infinity about whether venturing into an unsecured arena will be a right thing to do at the start of career. But something urged me take the leap and years later I have no regrets. Rather being fortunate to have worked with startup and the so called ‘brand names’, I will any day choose a startup as a working environment for the sheer challenges, learning and job satisfaction they provide in everyday work life. The credit equally goes to the passionate entrepreneurs who started, owned and managed those startups. But not everybody is as lucky, at least that’s what I felt when I heard Letsbuy.com – a prominent name in the Indian e-commerce closed down last week. Read More…

A court order that blocked websites but fails to control online piracy

While the giants of the industry lobbied hard and pushed back the SOPA in US, Indian court didn’t leave any room for debate before passing ordinance to block websites and prevent the interest of content owners. In separate rulings Calcutta High Court, and Delhi High Court have asked or allowed Indian Internet Service Providers (ISP) to block more than hundred notorious sites. And rightly so – with India ranking among the top countries to download pirated content, Indians haven’t shown much of social maturity to have a moral right to debate about the decision.However orders by different Indian Courts to block different websites that host pirated content are very short sighted and ineffective. Read More…

Right to Offend: Parenting becomes so difficult in digital age

Internet is creating a whole new breed of impolite and insensitive human beings and we have no law in place to control it. Instead at various levels of the society we are advocating for a right that would allow us to be more insensitive and enjoy the freedom of hurting others. Read More…

Kapil Sibal may be wrong but does that make us right?

A lot has been said and discussed about Kapil Sibal’s antics over the internet policies in India and how Indian democracy stands to suffer because of them. Many people have argued that given Mr. Sibal to have his way, Indian democracy will be strangled to death, at least on internet. It will vest immense power to the ruling government to pull down any content from the internet at any point of time and thereby kill any room for satire, counter views and dissent against government policies. Sounds very autocratic and anybody will join the brigade against the law. The fact that the current ruling government has maligned their image of being an honest and truthful bunch of politicians – makes the ‘aam junta’ worry more. Read More…

Online Entrepreneurs are not Savitabhabhi; Govt. should stop treating them alike

Back in 2009, one of the greatest success stories scripted in the online industry within a short span of time is savitabhabhi.com – a toon porn site depicting an Indian housewife’s romping sex life. Just when savitabhabhi was entering into the league of most visited Indian website, the Indian government played moral police and blocked its access for Indian audience. Since ‘porn’ as a matter doesn’t bring a glory to be associated with personally or professionally, not many voices were found against government’s otherwise autocratic decision. For similar reason I won’t get into the debate over the decision but let’s try to find out the basic outcome. Apparently, there was none. Within few days savitabhabi returned back on a different domain name to woo her fan base and even after 3 years of the incidence 90 lakh Indians including our ministers continue to watch porn on internet from home and assembly.  So what did we learn? Do not jump into execution of a plan out of your personal conviction and whim before you understand the ecosystem and have a plan befitting it. Otherwise there are high chances that the desired affect will elude you. The proposal of taxing angel investments will deter growth of entrepreneurship in online industry; but our senior citizen ministers fail to understand once more. Read More…

User Generated content – we dread what we fail to control

A recent headline in a country’s leading newspaper recently caught my eyes – a blogger in China fined $7000 for calling a certain brand of noodles as ‘too salty’. For those of who dismissed the event as another Chinese autocracy, a look into the history is advisable. Bloggers being fined or user-generated-content being condemned is not a very uncommon thing even in the West. Not very long ago, Amazon was under severe criticism for supposedly carrying book reviews by people who have never read the books. Another US site Yelp was accused of carrying negative reviews about businesses that turned down offers to advertise with the website. While in both cases the websites defended themselves behind the veil of ‘it’s from the users’ – but the credibility had been questioned, and that probably is damage enough. So how do we deal with user generated content? Read More…

Social Media – A new beast on prowl

If the online space saw the advent of something bigger than Facebook and Twitter in the last decade, then it is probably the term ‘Social Media’. And then all of a sudden, the entire traditional media found themselves on a sticky ground that was nothing less than synonymous to ‘unsocial’. Ad revenue earned from the corporate houses seemed to be under threat as self declared professionals mushroomed across offering innovative and cost effective social media marketing tactics.
The danger seemed even more threatening since the opponent was a totally undefined territory. Nobody could define what social media is. Even Wikipedia starts the article on social media with a dubious line – “Social media marketing is a recent addition to organizations’ integrated marketing communications plans” without properly defining what it is.  So what actually makes them social is an answer that continued staying elusive for the media giants. Read More…

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