I recently participated in an interesting panel discussion on “Can Twitter Change The Way India works?” organised by IndiaTC. The panelists were Abhijit Dasgupta, Subrata Sen, Abhishek Rungta, Aniruddha Chatterjee and Arun Agrawal (yours sincerely) 😛 It was very efficiently compered by Simarprit Singh.
We had a hotly debated discussion with Abhijit and Subrata pretty much disillusioned by the young generation who would endlessly tweet (as in chat) but not take up a serious stand on the really important things that matter to the ‘India cause‘. Add to this the fact that there are less than 20000 Twitter users in India out of a total population of more than a billion. Looks like a really uphill battle.
On the other hand, Abhishek, Abhijit and I felt that we are definitely making small impact to the society by sharing our notes on Cricket, Politics and Movies (CPM – a term coined by Simar) and by acting as whistleblowers on corruption by tweeting when we find a deficiency in someone’s service or attitude.
Can we make a difference to the way India works? If you are talking about being able to change the way India works or the way India works, well no. But as one audience member put it – we are definitely making a small impact. And if we can change just one thing, we can consider repeating that performance over and over and soon, we will find people taking note and changing. This is the way big revolutions were started.
My message to you is – when you see something nice, appreciate. When you see something bad, complain – loudly. Share with your friends and Twitter followers. Some will take notice and you will be causing an impact – however small. And you will be pleased you did.
Yes i agree with the excellent thoughts and it really make sense if people are doing such things to make people aware to change the India. Now its in our choice how we move further. Whether we opt twitter as a medium or other . India Must Change to catch the pace and empowerment.
Thank you Arun for such a nice summary. Sometimes,a small step can create big changes. Twitter has given a way to express loud and to create debates. When the debates will come to an end their outcomes will play a major role in decision making.
Twitter is just an additional ‘more accessible’ platform to voice our thoughts and views. If our ideas and thoughts are convincing then we may be able to influence the way others think, make a few more friends or may be crack a few business deals. As on date, we can very well live without Twitter. It is not a necessity. To think that Twitter will ever be able to change the way India works is way too ambitious.
But I totally agree with your message – ‘when you see something nice, appreciate. When you see something bad, complain – loudly. Share with your friends and Twitter followers. Some will take notice and you will be causing an impact – however small. And you will be pleased you did.’
What I see in India is that people are not using it beyond a CPM ( Cricket,Politics,Movies ) …whereas I have Seen live impact in US ..Ramon De Leon …http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7W0GEEDKxE uses Twitter to create Loyal Customer base …There are other examples …
I see Twitter as an excellent marketing tool to create a successful strategy to brand and get popular, that’s where you’ll find the true potential of Twitter. As Tweets and re-tweets spread through the Twitter network with ripples that can direct a lot of interested traffic back to your site. You won’t see this groundswell of traffic when you first start out, but give it time and it will occur…..You can also use Twitter to better brand your business or products online. Building up a brand recognition is vital to the success of any business, even in such high profile brands as Starbucks, CNN, Nike or Dell who all have branding campaigns on Twitter. However, Twitter doesn’t require you to be a fortune five hundred company to create a brand name. …
So unless a stickiness is created beyond just a time pass … We will see people fizz out of the same after a while…..