Why do trends matter? Because as soon as you hit the trending topic list, your #hashtag gets exposed to a lot of people who are keeping watch on the trending topic list and visibility increases manifold.

Now here is the problem as I see it. The Twitter trending topic is defined by Twitter as …’topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the hottest emerging topics of discussion on Twitter.’ I often check the trending topic list to see popular conversations happening in the twitter-sphere.

So when someone throws a contest, it might not be necessarily something that becomes popular naturally, but made popular by offering a bait to Twitter users. A popular topic often can be superseded by a commercially led topic. Given the increasing number of brands throwing contests and promotions on Twitter, very soon the trending topic might be full of branded keywords.

Isn’t that actually a danger of the trending topic becoming redundant?

A sponsored hashtag or sponsored tweet is okay as people know they are sponsored. Just that the problem is people today don’t know many trending topics are sort of sponsored.

Of course Twitter contest rules today doesn’t forbid having contests, and so throwing a Twitter contest is the easiest thing to do. Facebook used to be easy like Twitter once upon a time and brands used to throw out questions out in dozens and ask  people to like or comment with their answers. Then Facebook realizes that all these affect the way how it ranks pages and came out with strict guidelines.

Watch out Twitter might just follow suit with more stricter rules soon.

1.You check out platforms like Tumblr, Blogger and Wordpress, which give you a hang of how these platforms work and what others are doing there.

2.You will pretty soon enough want to have your own domain like www.miketyson.com instead of something www.miketyson201.wordpress.com and so you will search online for domain registrars. You will try to see which one offers you the best or the cheapest. Then when you try to book yourself one domain, buy webspace, set up a MySQL account, do the ftp transfers; believe me there is enough knowledge learnt for a start.

3.Then the whole process of setting up your blog on your new domain. If you are installing Wordpress, you are probably going to read up the whole Wordpress documentation multiple times before you can figure correctly how to do it.

4.Your blog needs to look good, right? Check out templates and themes. You will pretty much realise many themes are broken and you have spoilt your Wordpress setup beyond repair. Try again.

5.Customising the themes you finally decide on…color change, width, something in the theme that you want to change; you now need to learn html. There are good programmes lessons available online if you just search. There, you have become a newbie web designer.

6.Ok you have started writing and want to improve yourself? Start reading blogs like Copyblogger, Problogger, etc.

7.How do you get more traffic? Aha, lots of ebooks on SEO, tools and tips available online. Integrating your Facebook and Twitter with your blog….

8.Plugins…thousands of them…you will probably spend nights without sleep playing with them.

9.You want comments and want to get your blog seen? You start commenting on other blogs and start inviting people to your blog. Connections happens. People start seeing you. You have already started creating your own brand.

Ok so what have you learnt so far, basically many many things. Got the point?

Key findings from the study include:

• 81% of top Asian companies have a branded corporate social media presence, over double the figure for 2010 and in line with the 84% of Fortune global 100 firms
• 31% of companies use at least three social media channels, up from 3% in 2010
• 19% of companies still have no official corporate social media presence
• 30% of companies use social networks for corporate marketing and communications, up from 20% in 2010
• 28% of companies use micro-blogs for corporate marketing and communications, up from 18% in 2010
• 62% of social media channels surveyed were inactive, and the same percentage of companies do not promote their social media channels on their homepages

Regarding India, my colleague, Salil Jayakar from Mumbai writes in the report : Indian companies’ preferred channel is social networks, with almost 60% of companies using Facebook, as well as Google’s Orkut, as opposed to some 30% using Twitter. Only 10% of companies surveyed are using online video in any way for corporate marketing or communications.

Here is the study:

Just managed to take out some time finally and create a mashup the feeds of around 26 auto blogs in India on my Google Reader. You can take a look here (http://bit.ly/IndiaAuto).

Check it out. Thoughts welcome.

Tweet Sheet Template

So when I ran into one such person recently, the conversation took on an interesting  turn when I gave an example of the torrent communities.  In these communities/ sites where you can share and access various multimedia, you will see that there are seeders and leechers.  Seeders are those who are sharing files from their systems and thus actively contributing to the community while leechers are those who are just downloading. If there are more leechers than seeders, the community wouldn’t be fun anymore.

Likewise in the social media space, can we dare ask ourselves? Are we seeders or leechers?

But is mobile exciting enough? That was our next conversation. For sure we have the short codes SMS and some interesting IVR stuff. We can also probably create WAP sites and some banner ads. Not engaging enough still.

So imagine my delight when I bumped into some nice people from RockeTalk, one of the leading mobile phone social networking service, at the recent India Social Summit at Delhi.

Here are some salient features that you might not know about mobile social networking:

1. There are a lot of users. Rocketalk has around 5mn. That’s almost on par or more than some well known global and Indian social networking sites. Check out this Jan 2010 blog post from Rocketalk.

2. These sites are targeted towards the young population in Tier II and small towns who don’t have a laptop/PC but who have mobile phones with data connection. 60-80%% of users are from small towns.

3. We normally are on Facebook to connect with old friends. Generally many users on mobile social networking sites use the service to find new friends. In fact, you can specify age, gender, location, etc. and search for new people as soon as you create your profile on the site. Users from small towns often say their friends are right next door in their neighborhoods – why spend money on the data connection to connect with them when you can just visit their houses any day.

4. Users do a lot of fun stuff like play a virtual antakshari game or send virtual gifts to total strangers even if buying those gifts costs anywhere starting from Rs. 10-20 each. They also upload pictures and videos.

Also Rocketalk just opened up an API recently so we might see some nice applications in this space. Rocketalk is not the only player. We also have Mig33, which I suppose is promising and interesting equally. Here’s an interview of Mohit from Mig33. Will connect more and try to do more posts around this in the future.

What I’m interested to see now is how these sites gear themselves up for brands and corporates. When Facebook opened up itself to brands and created Facebook pages, it did make a very smart move. Now we see every brand on Facebook doing their own thing and ultimately all that is making Facebook a very fun place to be at for everyone.

Less than half of Asian companies listed has a corporate social media presence. Of those corporate brands that do have a presence, more than 55% of social media profiles are inactive. Only 18% of surveyed companies integrate their social media profiles into their corporate websites. See the press release here.

Here is a summary of how Indian corporates are using social media:

At 6.9% , internet penetration in India remains relatively low, ever greater numbers of people are using social media to network and voice their opinions.

Facebook and Orkut are the most popular social networks. India is a major engine of growth for LinkedIn. Meantime, Twitter’s embrace by politicians, celebrities, film stars and sportsmen has given the microblog massive publicity.

On the whole, Indian companies have moved fast in response to the opportunities afforded by social media. Many top Indian corporates surveyed are either experimenting or already have active accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

Hardly surprisingly, India’s top technology companies are proactively using social media of all types, for both corporate and consumer outreach.

Yet companies in other sectors are also jumping on the social media bandwagon, including FMCG companies, whose product brands are generally active in the social media space, and financial services companies such as ICICI and HDFC banks. The latter are mostly focused on providing customer service support and product promotions.

It is not all Facebook and Twitter. Corporate blogs are seen as a good way for Indian companies to communicate with their many stakeholders, both domestically as well as in other English language markets. Corporate blogs are also seen as a useful means of getting your message direct to the audience, rather than having to communicate through intermediaries such as journalists.

Partly given their international focus, Indian technology giants such as Infosys and Wipro are actively blogging. Infosys has a wide range of blogs, mostly focused on its products, categories and partnerships, but also highlighting and analysing trends around innovation and leadership. Wipro’s blog discusses technology trends and the firm’s sustainability initiatives, amongst other topics.

Using video to tell the corporate story is also gaining ground in India. Here, companies are using YouTube (and increasingly Facebook) to host interviews and speeches by senior management and promote events, in addition to supporting broader marketing campaigns.

Indian companies still put great emphasis on their websites. But only a small minority has sought to integrate their websites and activities on third party social media platforms. While Indian companies appear relatively comfortable with corporate blogs, most companies are still experimenting with Facebook and are not yet ready to join together their various online channels at the hip.

See the full report here.

However, some do provide good comparisons and a few offer their services without you having to enter your personal details.

Site   -  Unique Visitors per month (according to Google Ad Planner data)
ApnaPaisa.com – 130000
BimaDeals.com – 32000
ChildInsurance.in – NA
Click2Insure.in – NA
CompareInsurance.co.in – NA
GetMeInsure.com – NA
IndiaBima.com – NA
InsuranceMall.in -   NA
InsurancePandit.com – 11000
iTrust.in – 63000
InvestmentYogi.com – 9400
PaisaWaisa.com – 64000
Personalfn.com – 36000
PolicyBazaar.com -  350000
RateKhoj.com – 27000

I like ApnaPaisa among the lot as I can do a quick comparison whenever I want. But you want to drill deeper, then it also  starts asking your personal details. One thing they lack – recommending which is the est product of the lot – can be found at PolicyBazaar.com. However, here you have to submit all your personal details before doing any search or comparison. Personalfn is good to read up on financial topics but they are limited beyond a point. InvestmentYogi is a new site and they are trying hard and it would be good to see how they fare int he coming months.