My wife and I were driving towards work when this really beautiful girl, around 6 years, came towards our car dancing. She was selling roses! I have stopped giving money to kids at traffic crossings, wary about feeding the vicious circle of child trafficking. On the other hand I have always been an admirer of how savvy the little 'salesmen/ salesgirls' are.

I sometimes get upset when I see a kid trying to 'sell', but pleading like a beggar - "either you beg, or you sell! If you are not begging, then why is your tone that of a beggar? If you have CHOSEN not to beg, then important that you don't. Don't disrespect your work and yourself by 'begging' the customer to 'buy'. Sell with dignity!"

This one was smiling, dancing, trying to sell her flowers to us...except I wasn't in a mood to buy -"the flowers may not be clean," a thought crossed. Wife said let's give her something maybe? I handed over a Rs. 10 note to her - she took the note, dropped a bunch of flowers in the car...danced away...laughing. My wife and I looked at each-other and smiled - what a lovely reminder...

Merry Christmas to you all - share joy with all around.

Blogworks completes 3 years officially on 26 December ( though I did my first Blogworks workshop in October 2006). There will be a post on 28th, as soon as we get back to work post the much deserved Christmas break :)

Photograph courtesy Sankarshan.

This is a year-end ritual that I find valuable. Here are the four trends I thought would play out in 2009.

Please let me know whether they actually did - do take a minute to read the pieces to see my perspective.

1. 2009 Trend # 1 - Bloggers Make Money, Via Mainstream Media.
2. 2009 Trend # 2 -Brand Stalker Cometh, this year.
3. 2009 Trend #3 -Blogs become second skin, for mainstream media.
4. 2009 Trend # 4 - Social Media for Marketing, focus on RoI

Coming up, Trends 2010 - this time, my colleagues are joining in and a joint post is in the making.

It's been a few months in the making, when in the course of a discussion we realised that while there is a lot of great work happening on the social media scene in India, it is dispersed - it needed to be aggregated, showcased. Also, with the revolution well set in, the space needed to evolve - sharing, learning and collaboration were tasks at hand.

Intuitively I wanted to call it IndiaSocial, nothing else seemed to fit = my colleagues loved it too - so we went and acquired the domain name at a premium. Several rounds of discussions later, we agreed to that IndiaSocial will:

...aim to bring together stakeholders in the Indian social media eco-system for engagement, sharing, learning and collaboration in a vibrant space - physical and virtual.

There were elaborate discussions on concepts like 'bringing together under an umbrella' versus 'open-ness' and we agreed that the promise of IndiaSocial was going to be 'Social Media Open' with open embodying openness - embracing all stakeholders; open discussions; akin to a sport field 'open' showcases team spirit and a level play field.

To begin with there are 3-4 initiatives that are planned:

1. Case-study Series: Will share, on an ongoing basis, the best Indian case-studies of social media usage and impact across sectors - government and policy, not-for-profits, media, enterprise, human resource and marketing.

   
   We are keen to put together a panel of credible leaders from the space, with a reputation for transparency, to help us structure guidelines for what should make it on the IndiaSocial Case-study series. I have spoken with a few friends and will be speaking with more...

   If you have a case with real impact, please share it here

2. IndiaSocial Wiki : Will aim to dynamically capture the social media journey and resources from an India perspective. We're hoping to tie-up with institutions and individuals to ensure that accurate content and learnings are shared. If you are interested in contributing, write to us at open@indiasocial.in
3. IndiaSocial-2010: We are planning a large format social media event, in 2010, to showcase the social media landscape and opportunities in India. In the interim, we expect to bring some other events in collaboration - will keep you informed about that soon.

We have also been speaking with a few others to come on board as 'Friends and Supporters' and will be adding a few shortly.

Our approach to building IndiaSocial is clear. We want to adopt what I like to call the 'Restaurant approach' - soft launch, work on issues, take feedback into account, better-better- better, word-of-mouth to build the brand - against a 'Pub Night Club approach' - goes up quickly, comes down soon enough.

If you'd like to collaborate, do reach with your thoughts.

1. Follow IndiaSocial on Twitter: http://twitter.com/indiasocial or add @indiasocial
2. Follow IndiaSocial on Facebook :http://facebook.com/indiasocial

My friend Devdutt Pattnaik has written about rituals impacting beliefs.

Set in a changed context, beliefs around a ritual also change.

The act of being frisked has been frowned upon by all of us, a violation of personal space - our mind yelling "You don't trust me?". Security barricades and frisking at luxury hotels, or similar spaces, would be a complete no-no, a discourtesy, just a couple of years ago. However, in a changed context post 26/11, Mumbai (not that these were the first terrorist attacks, but the first impacting the elite), frisking, coupled with enhanced security and scanning devices, has come to be seen as an assurance - the mind giving a comforting "I think I can trust you!" signal.

This is perhaps how, over a period in time, culture is shaped.

Manpreet and I conducted a session yesterday on "Leveraging Social Technologies in Learning Solutions - setting the context" for a team of over 20 senior learning professionals, from one of the largest global corporations, respected for the quality of their coaching and learning processes.

So far, there has been selective adoption of social technologies in the Enterprise environment in India. However, Social Technologies are beginning to find a willing ear (and more mainstream adoption) within the Enterprise - a few factors have contributed:

1. Need to connect teams separated by geography
2. Familiar is favourable: wide adoption of social media, particularly social networking, has made a large working population very comfortable with the connected environment
3. The success of social media in marketing has given organisations confidence, and insights, to tread forward on the Social Enterprise journey.

A clear sign of how far we have moved ahead on the Web 2.0 journey is the fact that most concepts of collaboration, convenience, multiple formats, democracy seem so yesterday that we take them for granted. Hot and new are:

1. Mobility; coupled with
2. Device convergence
3. Real time; coupled with
4. Location
5. Storytelling - even adoption of gaming and comics by brands and the Enterprise
6. An open network


The session covered:

1. Power of the networks and the opportunity within the Enterprise
2. Social Technology interventions at each stage in the employee life-cycle: On-boarding; ongoing; Off-boarding
3. Impact on learning and the evolving role of the 'trainer', to 'learning guide' and facilitator
4. The power of connecting people with content; people with people
5. Insights about the impact of doing this
6. Issues and the need to focus on 'why' and the objectives, rather than focus on tools
7. Getting started

One of the questions that came our way was, naturally, about challenges on measuring performance of the learner (or the learning guide), in context of connected learning - a couple of interesting parameters that could become 'currency' emerged from the discussion.

The response to my 'Let's talk about Sex', shared in context of importance of story-telling and conversational tone continues to amaze me.

We wish there was more time, for the discussion was intense and fun. A few topics could not be covered, but then the opportunity is just opening up.