Social Media & BlogCamp for Delhi’s blogging enthusiasts

I attended the Delhi Social Media & BlogCamp meetup at the gorgeous IndiaTimes office in Gurgaon today. This was organised by the Delhi Bloggers Bloc, a four year old group for bloggers in Delhi/NCR. Based on the un-conference format, this was the first meetup this group was organising. And I really enjoyed being there… kudos to Priyanka Sachar (aka Twilight Fairy) for putting this together. The event was sponsored by Indiatimes, Tyroo, IBM & Wordpress. Snaps below….

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The day started with Madhavan N, a senior journalist with HT speaking about the taxanomy of blogs (I loved this talk). This was followed by sessions on the Travel 2.0 space by Nirat Bhatnagar, founder of chahiye.info; an excellent case study on social media influencing (or failing to influence) a personal purchase experience by Rajesh Lalwani of Blogworks.in; an inside view of the CNN-IBN participatory media experience by Shyam Somanadh, Principal Architect, Network18 (Web18); a talk on Twitter by Sanjukta Basu; a thought provoking critique of the new media by Prashant Singh. I could not attend the other sessions as I had to leave early, but the ones I did were quite appealing.

The event was testimony to how social media is now an omnipresent buzzword that gets competitive juices flowing all around. The participants included internet companies, national TV channels & mainstream newspapers; and they all seem to be gearing up for the changing media landscape. Consider this :

- Indian English TV channels now have daily prime-news shows reporting the blogosphere’s take on the days’s news
- I heard about this initiative from a large media website (name withheld) to syndicate content from bloggers (on a paid basis) on a VERY LARGE scale
- Every corporate worth its salt wants to build a ‘Sunsilk Gang of Girls‘ kinda community
- The international internet biggies are eyeing the pie as well as is evinced by Wordpress being one of the event sponsors
- LiveJournal (which recently was acquired by a Russian owner from SixApart) is planning an Indian outreach as well.

While organisations may not exactly be clear what social media can deliver to them, nobody wants to miss the bus. And the role of the marketers & ad-agencies in whipping up this compulsive frenzy is not to be missed. (While on this subject, I cannot help but share this simply awesome slide deck that was uploaded to slideshare sometime back; it is a parady of the corporate blogging meme, fanned as it is by the marketing folks). Enjoy this deck - this is from a German marketing blog called the Kaiser Edition).

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Something that struck me at the event was the absolute comfort level of the participants with the un-conference format. Unconferences started with geeks & techies, but now (2 years since we had the first one in India), lots of people (including corporate folks) have heard/read about it and take to it without any fuss. Just shows that people generally respond positively to the lack of complexity; and un-conferences are all about that.

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On a different note - Are you wondering how this Delhi bloggers meet was corelated to another Blogcamp that happened at the Microsoft office in Delhi just a couple of weeks back? Well, that event was organised by another bunch of bloggers who originally were part of the same group (as this one), but fell out due to some differences!!! ???? Folks, I have a request - please lets keep the politics out of such events in Delhi. It’s just not worth anybody’s time.