Economy of Social - Social Media Tips, Marketing and Business

This was my team's entry in Prayaas 2009, a case study competition on child labor by Bhavishya. Bhavishya represents the united voice of the students of IIM Lucknow against the strains in our social fabric. Bhavishya is active in the domains of education, unemployment and health and women empowerment. It leverages the technical and managerial competency of students and the faculty to aid NGOs and the government. The other two musketeers studying the case along with me were Joshin and Mayank. Although we did not win the competition, I'd like to share the three cases we studied. Below are the cases along with our suggestions Case 1 – Mohit – aged 12 – sells ice cream. We met Mohit at Kapoorthala, Lucknow. He was selling ice-cream. To break the ice, and to get to conversation mode, we approached him and bought an ice cream. Conversing with him we got to know his story. Facts about Mohit: • He is 12 years old. • Lives near Aliganj, Thana. • Has never gone to school, although he des...

These days I've been spending some time doing a survey finding out the buying habits of females online.My objective was to find the buying online buying habits of females below 25 years of age. To my surprise, very few access access internet and those who do have a lot of apprehensions about buying online. Their apprehensions are justified considering spam mails that overflow the mail boxes every day. Pop up ads were a strict no-no. Out of 25 people I surveyed, only 2 said that they would click on pop up ads. They had doubts on the trustworthiness of the websites because of bad first experiences. My personal experience of buying sunglasses from a popular website wasn't very good too. In my opinion, these websites have created a mistrust of the apprehensive online buyer on genuine online sellers. The reinforcement theory states that behavior is a function of consequences. Hence the first-timer with a bad experience is bound to show a negative online buying behavior. TV still ...

I'm not happy because I've had a fight and now I have to deliver a presentation to a valuable client who can give my organization some good business. What do I do ? Wipe of the anger on my face and give the presentation. Just Fake it! Now comes the dilemma. Do I fake the emotions required by my job or do I genuinely feel it. Research has shown that deeply acting and internalizing the feelings leads to less amount of stress due to conflicting emotions(Emotional Dissonance). Check out the presentation below. Emotional Labour View more presentations from Sushant Kumar .

Old people always advice you to be honest and modest. But are both possible ? OK lets start it this way. Modesty gives you options and honesty leaves you with none. The new set of high fliers, I've interacted with have loads of modesty. The kind of modesty that'll make you feel that Mount Everest was left on ground floor. The new bunch of high fliers, although have options. Now I debated about it with a friend of mine and he justified modesty. You underplay your thing. As a listener to a modest individual you would believe him. If say Mr Sham said that his project is still going at snails pace (although it ain't) he is modest. Now you've gone to mr Sham to check your project status with his project. He is honest in this case because pace is subjective term. Snails pace to Mr Sham might be lightning fast for me. Now rather than the above statement, Mr Sham said my project has still not got over the planning stage, although it has reached the final stage, it would again ...

I always felt the difference while I sat in an interesting class that prompted me to do the assignments to a boring class, which was like taking sleeping pills and fighting the enemy on border. Anyways Peter principle elaborated it. Just going through the first chapter of "Why Things Go Wrong" gave me a sense of why mostly people crib about their jobs, work place and then go for a higher degree ( like an MBA,M-Tech,Msc etc. or diploma) to get into a job that would probably satisfy them (finally). But does it satisfy them? That's another debatable topic. Coming to mediocrity, chapter one of "Why Things go wrong" made me bump into a quote by William Arthur Ward and I am splitting and spilling it below. The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. Inspiration to perform and outdo is what drives out the pending sleep and lethargy to make us perform. The same goes for work. But whatif a mediocre...

I attended a seminar by Ashish (of Minnesota State University) who showed his findings on Email overload and how we could curb it. The astonishing part was the figures that had come out of his research. $588 bn annually were being lost in the form of unproductive man hours because of continuous email checking by managers/corporates. On an average his findings showed that a person who continuously checks emails for the whole days wastes 28 minutes of productive work. Slotting your email send/receive time slots actually saves productive time since the switch between emailing and work is less frequent. Continuous check means a lot of switches, which adds up to unproductive man hours. This further increases if the work we are doing is long and complex. Severity of the switch decreases with decrease in complexity and longevity. Hence an organizational email etiquette and schedule can seriously improve productivity.

When in doubt... Our mind usually works with intuition. It signals us to laugh when a joke (and yes not the sad type) is cracked, since it has been programmed that way. But sometimes a situation that comes up is new and we are out of our comfort territory. Now what ? This is what my first management class taught me. A simple matrix can be drawn after analyzing the constraints and criteria first and then applying the set of criteria to our options. Thinking about various options is still upto how far we can think, but in a complex situation with close set of options available,the matrix is often useful. Using it few times (or maybe more) will definitely tune the mind to work accordingly to make quick complex decisions. Options O1 O2 O3 My Constraints C1 (Highest priority) 5 3 2 C2 2 4 1 C3 (lowest priority) 1.5 3 5 01 - 8.5 02 - 10 03 - 8 Looking at the solutions, the first option (o1) might ha...