Davos, socially speaking

It is amazing how much I learnt in two days of following the Twitter feed from World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. Queen Rania al Abdullah, the uber cool and super enchanting Queen of Jordan, was tweeting (“Rethink. Redesign. Rebuild. My theme for WEF: Education. Education. Education. Are our themes synonymous?”) about her fav subject — Education = Opportunity.

Her belief that education provides an opportunity to escape poverty is also the theme of her personal website. And the top links on her site are to her Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Flickr channels.

South African president Jacob Zuma defended his polygamy before the crowd of business and political elite at Davos (“We must respect the culture of others and polygamy is my culture and I treat my wives totally equally”). Amongst many others, the prime minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, too, was busy tweeting from Davos. The world is truly getting savvy about social media.

Perhaps there is a lesson in this for our IT czars, government officials and the local administration in Bangalore, the IT capital of India?

There was live streaming of images, video, text messages and blog posts on critical matters ranging from the disaster at Haiti (“We need to help Haiti build the country they want to become, not rebuild what they used to be. They can rise from the ashes.” — Clinton); the average salaries of CEOs in 2008 ($11 million, with CEO: labour pay ratio changing from 60:1 in pre-war days to 300:1 today) and the need to rethink compensation; the relationship between infrastructure development and urbanisation; the need for solar and wind to be at the very heart of the new energy economy and how “civil society should urge governments to stop oil subsidies because stopping them makes economic and environmental sense.” The live chatter of simple 140 character messages from Davos managed to not just educate but also gently crystallise opinion. Those who wanted to go beyond the words and pictures could participate in conversations by quizzing panelists and posting questions at press conferences on subjects ranging from Environmental Performance Index to financial regulations. You could’ve done it from Basavangudi, while taking a stroll in Lalbagh, over Twitter.

Davos and the WEF were available in practically every format you could think of: YouTube, Livestream, Qik, Facebook, MySpace, Ning, Linkedin, Twitter, FriendFeed, Netvibes, Forumblog, Flickr, Scribd and even marked out on Google Earth. World leaders and business giants, respected academics and sportsmen are embracing social media. Where are our business leaders, ministers, MLAs and public servants? Surely, Bangalore could boast of more than a few who adopt social media and use it to create higher levels of accountability, transparency and keep their wards informed of their activities?

At just about the same time that Davos was spewing much-needed global wisdom in 140 characters over Twitter, back home, actor and IPL team owner Preity Zinta was describing her escapades from a Delhi airport toilet where she was locked in by accident: “Spent 10 minutes stuck in the toilet at the airport…Finally had to climb the wall and jump over.” In another day and age, the tweet would’ve been dismissed as a trivial waste of time. Today, it is beating glossy movie magazines at reporting the same event by a good month. The media landscape is changing. In fact, the WEF, which delves into heavy-duty subjects like low carbon growth, piracy and philanthropy, had a special session on social media, recognising that social networks and blogs were ahead of personal e-mail in terms of online activity, accounting for almost 10% of time spent on the Internet. But do you really need to go to Davos to appreciate this? 

According to a Forrester report released earlier this month, called Introducing the New Social Technographics, a third of adults post at least once a week to social sites such as Facebook and Twitter; a quarter of adults publish a blog and upload video/audio they created; nearly 60% maintain a profile on a social networking site; 70% read blogs, tweets and watch user generated video. Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s movie, 3 Idiots, has 26 video promos on YouTube. Last we checked, just one of them had 386,879 views. For sure, there’s an audience out there. You just have to go and hook it.
But our politicians will want to tweet in Kannada, our IT czars will want a study done with a measurement matrix in place and a couple of MBAs tracking ROI on each tweet. Our political representatives will dismiss this as an urban phenomenon, citing that India lives beyond Twitter coverage. As if studying the drainage system in Paris or the transport system in London is not ‘urban’ in nature. But have they ever refused such a ‘study’ our?