Walking The Talk (email to People Interactive colleagues)

Team,

 

Hope you are all well and 2010 is treating you well so far.  I am sure many of you have had the chance to learn about People Way and what it means for you and the organization.  Think of it as a behavioral roadmap for excellence.  However, it can only add value to our lives and careers if we actually take the content very seriously  and live the principles captured in People Way on a day to day basis.  Let me explain with an example -

You may have read the line 'We love the Internet' as part of our cultural definition.  However, how many of us really do?  Sure, we all use the Internet to access information, send emails, play games & network (which many of you usually do:-), book airline tickets and so on.  But, if you have to ask yourself, if the Internet is a way of life for us, many of us would come up short.  To really love the Internet, it must become a way of life for us in every way.  As an organization, everything that we do, our process, systems, workflows, etc. need to be built around the Internet.  As individuals you should be getting your news, weather, real-estate services, matrimonial connections, ringtones, gaming, and whatever else that it is you do from the Internet. 

If you don't use Facebook or Twitter actively, you are missing out on a free front row seat to the social web in the making, a truly historic and revolutionary change that will impact our lives, careers and opportunities forever.  What we are seeing today on the Internet will be 10 times more impactful than the change portals and search engines brought to our lives and businesses and if you don't try to understand it while it is happening you will have compromised your skills forever.

Besides helping you understand your jobs better, active consumption of the the Social Web can help you understand customers better.  It can help us engage with our customers in a multi-faceted way that can leave them delighted with our brands and with us as people.  Positive word-of-mouth is the holy grail as far as the Internet is concerned and together we can create an incredible impact.

A quick example - Say somebody tweets me on Twitter saying 'Makaan.com is not showing listings for Mumbai'. Before I can retweet, Saif from Makaan.com dev tweets back saying 'looking into it', after 10 minutes Aditya tweets back saying it was a minor bug but is up and running now.  I then end by retweeting, thanking the person who made us aware for the feedback.  Turns out the customer has 2000 followers and so tweets my message which eventually ends up reaching 50,000 people though the various networks associated with his networks.  This delights a handful of people and prompts them to send us suggestions to improve Makaan.com. What a wonderful virtuous cycle!  But not possible unless you love the Internet.

Think about the above and you can see where I am going.  I can give you countless ways in which we can get ahead of competition and stay there, if only we walk our talk.  So, if you are a field employee or a senior exec and you do not use push email or the mobile Internet you should be wondering if you are becoming irrelevant.  If you are in PR and you are not obsessively active on the social web you are already becoming irrelevant.  If you are in Mauj Mobile and you are not downloading a couple of applications or content a week, you are perhaps far removed from understanding our business.  If you are in Shaadi.com and you are not logging into the site regulary, you probably often find yourself coming up with ideas that are not accepted.  I could go on and on and on but you get the point.

 

To preempt what you are now thinking - when will we do our jobs if we waste our time on the Internet, that is no excuse.  You have to find time.  You  have to integrate it into your lives.  You have to substitute it for other media.  You have to fill your empty moments with it.  People many times more accomplished and busier than us are doing the same and they are doing it for a reason .... because it is the biggest change we will see in our lifetime.

 

I encourage all of you to actively use the Social Web, Smart Phones, Applications, Downloads, Vertical Searches and the like.  However, find ways of controlling it, don't let it control you.  It must complement your job, not take away from it.  I realize it will be a struggle initially but I know you will get a hold of it.  There's millions of people already doing it effectively.

 

An Internet & Mobile Fan,

-AGM