NASSCOM the premier software body of India is once again organizing the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2010. Overall a great conference, mostly attended by senior level executives of most top software companies of India, global Industry leaders,CEOs, Entrepreneurs etc.
Outlined are few of my observations related to how Indian IT Leaders are adapting to social media and traditional email :-
a. Paper Email :Its common to see most of the senior managers of these IT companies in business class of airlines browsing through files and files of printed emails which they are rapidly writing some notes on. These notes are then passed on to their secretaries who would neatly type out and reply to those emails. When I asked an ‘insider’ he told me that this is a well know practice by the ‘old school’ senior management of these companies… What do they do with the fancy blackberries and email technology which they supposedly build for others and why wast so much paper.
b. Blog PR Stunt : Case in point Indias biggest software company Infosys has a blog the most popular post has 7 comments and 5 tweets. Now a company as big as Infosys with hundreds of thousands of employees its hard to imagine that only 7 people in the entire company had anything to say about this. even after some amount of googling i could not find official blogs of most of the IT companies or ceo’s of the top IT companies.
c. Twitter : You have to see the Twitter Page of TCS to believe it. Someone in their PR department thought it was a good idea to take the entire Investor Call and past it in form of tweets… even a 10 year old can tell you how to use twitter…
d. Facebook = faceless once again i could not find much in Facebook about these companies. TCS has an official facebook page looks like the last time someone looked at it from TCS was in the last century..
e. LinkedIn = could not find a single job posting from the major Indian IT companies in Linkedin . Microsoft is advertising 59 jobs, Cisco 122, HP 47, Google 571 Jobs… however Linkedin has the highest base of Indians on its social network.
Well the point I am really trying to making is that as the world evolves to social media and technology is moving at a rapid speed. It will be encouraging to see the TOP IT companies of India adapt and change and as most of the change starts from the top I would urge CEO’s of these companies to JAAGO RE…and invest their personal time along with their senior management and not leave this to some junior PR or Marketing person who will get you a #FAIL
This is surely one SOCIAL Cause which the Indian IT Leaders should Wake UP to.
PS. There are certainly few exceptions Anand Mahindra, Ganesh Natrajan who completely get this and if you have any other names kindly add to the comments with links to their blogs/tweets etc. Similarly there are companies in the non IT space which have even worst social media plans…but the idea is atleast the IT Guys must eat their own dog food.
