Just saw this article from Avnish, Matrix Partners. Avnish, I know you are around somewhere on venturewoods, so please do participate in this friendly discussion!
A followup would be unnecessary if I agreed with this statement. However, I must say that I myself do believe that the “kids hanging out” variety of social networks are premature in India. These businesses are essentially media businesses, and reach and engagement levels are the key metrics. Besides the internet penetration being low in the country, kids are not spending hours at end on the internet — the engagement levels simply arent there as yet. The only hope for these is a strong and simple mobile addon.
And now for the exciting part — some social networks will fly in India, IMHO. I believe these will be driven by specific tangible benefits, rather than being “hangouts”. I will afford a couple of examples. The first one is referral based recruitments. The Indian e-recruitment technology is 10 years old (no, there are no company wars here! I mean this across the board.) Global sites like linkedin, simplyhired, jobster and so on have demonstrated how social networking can be tied into recruiting very effectively. The Indian model is going to be different from these, and I believe there is a significant market there.
The second example that I would afford is networks for buying services (I am yet to see a good model around product ecommerce) — services are intangible, and often very fragmented. Think of hiring a printer for printing visiting cards. These selections are essentially social in nature, and I believe translating them to the web will be productive.
I am sure there are a lot more examples — social internet is waiting to be discovered in India. And like any other business, the customer is a good place to start from.
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Websites are already taking on more meaningful missions. I happened across DostPost.com which hasn’t received much attention but was apparently on IBN/CNN. Its a very unusual site for the Indian space because there is an ostensible purpose to the social network.
Hi all,
The Indian model is going to be different from these, and I believe there is a significant market there.
You are right Alok. Hiring through referrals ( as done in Linkedin ) won’t necessarily work for India. A different softer approach ( http://www.linkedzone.com ) would be more suitable for India.
In terms of buying Indian people rely on friend’s , relatives’ recommendations a lot. Social networking can be a big hit there.
Amit, prepare to be surprised — as per Alexa (ya, I know it sucks, but I dont have better data!), Youtube is already #8 site in India… and look at all the other sites, like rapidshare, which are essentially used for media downloads…
Alok,
What you are saying makes sense. And I’ll let me try to delve into the rationale behind this. Coming as I do from a startup that is attempting to create a community for sharing presentations and slideshows, I would like to make a distinction here.
Contemporary social networks are of two genres- the first generation networks. e,g. friendster, orkut, facebook, where there is one on one direct interaction, & the second generaton networks e.g. flickr, youtube , where the socialising nucleates around an object which has a social dimension – images, videos etc.
Both these networks are likely to exist along the same continuum, with the first generation networks preceding the second and so on. This also dovetails neatly into why orkut is a bit hit currently in places like Indian & Brazil, which are much lower on their internet evolution curve whereas in the US a lot of the social networking is hovering around flickr, youtube, videos, the widgets that people drop into their myspace profiles, slide.com etc.
Add to this the fact that internet penetration in India is low and many people use the internet for material benefits (as opposed to purely its entertainmnet value).
This is what led our thinking when we conceptualised slideshare, and till now the experience seem to bear out our hunch.
rgds
Amit
Nice post Alok – I think you are right. There is clearly an opportunity in social internet waiting to be discovered. I think where Avnish is looking at it from, is the eye of an investor and I think he may have a point there. However, if you look at these networks from the eye of a marketer, there is a lot already happening there.
A customer’s purchase decisions are clearly taking into account the social media layer on a variety of categories – from movies to cars and more – as a matter of fact, we developed a chart recently to showcase this layer. Since I can’t upload the image here, you might find the story here of interest: http://www.blogworks.in/blog/blogworks/there_was_an_article_that.php
I also agree that the focus is going to shift (maybe not of the ‘kids’ hanging out on Orkut – trust me though they have come up with some compelling uses of these sites, other than dating and meeting friends) to more meaningful pursuits. I have found LinkedIn suddenly become relevant to many, after they brought about the focus on recruitment. http://www.we-exchange.com has made a small beginning towards local commerce. I also believe there is an opportunity around commerce in networks focussed on music, books and more…
Cheers.