In the first part, I talk about being a Yahoo! Fellow and teaching a course on social media at Georgetown University.

Towards the end of the interview, in response to a question on what excites me most about social media, I talk about social media analytics. I believe that social media analytics is almost like a black hole today. Most business, civil society and government organizations don’t know what to track and measure on social media and how to tie it back to their strategic and tactical metrics. Even if they know what to measure, they find it almost impossible to measure it accurately and extract meaning from it. There is a big open space for someone to establish best practices on social media analytics and then execute it well using a combination of machine and human input.

Thank you, Barton, for doing the interview.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

If you have been reading my blog, you must already be tired of hearing about Vote Report India, but if you have missed all my blog posts about it, here’s a brief description and here’s the story behind the project.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

I think it is a great idea and I was delighted when the Grassroutes team asked me to speak to their first batch of fellows on how to use social media for social change.

Here’s the twenty minute video I made for the Grassroutes fellows. In the talk, I focus on the importance of trying to use as many of the 4Cs of social media — user generated content, distributed collaboration, self organizing communities and the cumulative value of web 2.0 tools — to help change makers achieve their objectives of getting endorsement, creating engagement, raisin funds or mobilizing offline action for their cause –

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I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

Howard B. Schaffer has spent much of his 36-year career dealing with U.S. relations with South Asia, including a stint as ambassador to Bangladesh. He has recently finished writing a book on America’s role in Kashmir, titled ‘The Limits of Influence’, which will be published by the Brookings Institute early next year. He is now the Deputy Director at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.

In a 23 minute interview, we spoke about the history of America’s role in the Indian sub-continent and how it is likely to change in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack.

Ambassador Schaffer believes that we will have a replay of the escalation in tension between India and Pakistan we saw in 2002 after the attack on the Indian parliament and international pressure will mount on Pakistan to take definitive action against Lashkar-e-Taiba. However, given the transitional government in United States, a weak government in Pakistan, and an end of term government in India, no decisive action is likely to be taken by any of the three governments.

Here is the video version of the interview –

Here is a lighter audio version of the interview –

As a background, here are two recent articles by Howard B. Schaffer on America’s interests in the India-Pakistan relations –The Washington Times and Council on Foreign Affairs.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

Many of you may know that I record and upload my vidcasts exclusively from my Nokia E71 smartphone. I also use my E71 almost exclusively for reading my e-mail and 150 feeds, and accessing the only four social networks I am really active on — YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. If you add to that my compulsive calendering and my total reliance on GPS even to navigate two blocks, you can imagine how big a role my E71 is playing in my life right now. In fact, I would say that the E71 has been my main computer for the last two weeks. For the most part, it has been great and I totally love it.

However, a phone is as good as the app ecosystem around it and there is no app ecosystem around the Nokia E71. It comes with half a dozen pre-installed apps and apart from the mainstream web services like GMail/ GoogleReader/ GoogleMaps/ YouTube/ Yahoo/ Flickr/ Twitter/ Facebook, pretty much nothing else works on it. As much as I love the E71, I can’t see it getting traction against the iPhone unless Nokia gets developers to write apps for it.

Increasingly, that’s true not only for mobile phones, but also for almost all digital product or service offerings. By building an app ecosystem, a company can focus on its core offereing and allow partners to use its API to build layers of functionality on top of it. Facebook, Twitter and iPhone are all great examples of this thinking.

While most companies are beginning to acknowledge the importance of a robust app ecosystem, many have found it difficult to build one. The question, then, is — why are some companies better than others at partnering with developers for building an app ecosystem?

Also See: What can we learn about the iPhone app ecosystem from the Facebook app ecosystem? by Fred Wilson, Facebook’s Booming App Ecosystem by Mark Evans, O’Reilly Radar Report–The Facebook Application Ecosystem: Why Some Thrive–and Most Don’t, The application ecosystem: ten lessons learned by Henry Morris.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

As many of you know, I am in month six of my year long off consumption experiment. The experiment involves buying only the bare necessities, and nothing but the necessities, for an entire year, with the intent of immersing myself into the subculture of people who have chosen to define their identities by means other than buying or owning things.

As many of you know, I have been recording my experiences during the year in a blog called ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’, because, well, I am the marketer who went off consumption.

I have decided now that it’s time to say goodbye to the marketer who went off consumption and focus on other stories, on other people who have stepped off the work-watch-spend treadmill, or asked themselves difficult questions about identity, or chosen to define themselves by means other than buying or owning things.

So, I’ll continue to write the blog, and I’ll continue to tell my own stories, but the blog won’t be about me anymore. The focus of the blog will shift away from reality TV mode to immersive journalism or ethnography mode.

If you have already subscribed to the blog, you’ll be seeing even more interesting posts soon. If you haven’t subscribed to the blog yet, now is a good time to subscribe.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

Seth Godin recently described the dead zone of slick –

I have no patience for the stuff in the dead zone, the items that are too slick to be real, but not slick enough to be a marvel.

Seth Godin’s advice is that if you can’t make it really slick, you should make it really simple.

My advice is that even if you can make it really slick, you should make it really simple.

First, let me say that I agree with Seth Godin — it only works if it’s really slick or really simple; all the in-between stuff is mostly mediocre. So, yes, if you can’t make it really slick, you should make it really simple.

However, it takes more time and effort to make things really slick than to make them really simple, and if both really simple and really slick have the same effectiveness, why not go with really simple?

I am a big believer in this thinking and you will notice that both my website template and my daily vidcast are so simple that they are perhaps too simple.

Of course, it’s useful to remember that making things really simple isn’t really all that simple.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

My young friend Harshil Karia — who has recently started social media agency Foxymoron — recently asked me if there is too much content out there, if we have become so focused on creating (often duplicate) content that we have forgotten how to listen.

Well, I’m someone who believe that there can never be too much content. It’s a god things that so many of us are creating so much content, and here are three reasons why –

- The Wisdom of Crowds: The more people link to, vote on, tag, or share a piece of content, the more visible it becomes. When we engage with content online, we endorse it, make it easier for others to discover it. So, in fact, every click does count.

- The Value of Mashups: There is as much value in creating connections between existing pieces of content, mashing them up, as in creating totally original content. When we create mashups, we reveal underlying layers of understanding that were not visible before.

- The Personalization of News Feeds: Since we can’t read or watch all the content available in the world, we learn to filter out most of it and pay our attention to only what is truly relevant to us. As a result, instead of superficial “awareness” about everything that’s going on, we learn to build deep “knowledge” in areas that are of interest to us.

What do you think? Is there too much content out there? Can there ever be too much content? Is too much content a bad thing? Do let me know.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

I recently announced that I’ll be spending some serious time this year working on MobiChange, a social entrepreneurship venture that will leverage mobile social networking for mobilizing social change.

I have been doing some research on how to use social media for social change and I believe that a truly powerful social 2.0 initiative needs to be –

1. Mobile, because most of the developing world still doesn’t have access to computers.
2. Scalable, because standalone events/ initiatives can only have limited localized impact.
3. Self-sustainable, because it won’t last unless it pays for itself.

Coming up over the weekend: two lists on my top ten social 2.0 resources and my top ten social 2.0 initiatives.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

People often ask me why I am so passionate about social media.

I became interested in social media because of my need to reconcile the two halves I was split into —

As an individual, I was tired of being targeted by commercial messages from the brands-media-retail triumvirate. As a marketer, I loved the art and science of marketing, adored brands, and was hardwired into the idea of capitalist free markets driven by consumerism.

My endeavor to reconcile these two parts… led to my interest in social media, because, at its best, social media allows brands and consumers to connect as equals, even as people (and brands are people too).

– but that’s not the full story.

At its best, social media enables us to transform ourselves as individuals, transform marketplaces and transform society.

Social media gives us the tools to create meaning (via both content and relationships) in ways that was not possible before, allows us to realize our full potential both as creative individuals and social beings.

Social media also enables brands and consumers to engage as equals, even connect as people (because, as I have said before, brands are people too).

Finally, social media allows citizens to organize in a bottom-up manner around important issues, organize in a manner that can change society.

If you are reading my blog, you are probably interested in social media too. So, let me ask you — why are you so passionate a bout social media?

(Another nudge to my Indian social media consultant friends Rajesh, Dina, Chhavi, Rajiv and Kiruba.)

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.