- Image by bharatte via Flickr
Follow Friday: Karthik Srinivasan
A perfect example of a cross-channel communicator is Karthik Srinivasan. I first came across his writing when I was logging in to LinkedIn to quit a social media group that had become a little too spammy for me. I navigated to the group to turn it off and noticed a headline that wasn’t spam. It was an honest request for information that also gave some great insights into a social media and communication issue. Intrigued, I went to his blog and found an entire pile of great content.
Karthik is the Head of Digital Strategy (India) for Edelman and writes from an Indian perspective. As a result his examples are fresh to those of us steeped in the US-based case studies.
Getting this additional global perspective helps to identify which social media traits and habits are more inherently human vs those which are based on a specific culture–sort of a nature vs nurture thing maybe. Anyway, I find his perspective valuable for cross-checking any assumptions or insights I might gather in my work.
In addition, Karthik is incredibly easy to read. His thinking is clear and direct. He has a sense of humor in his writing that doesn’t get in the way of the point he’s making. His deep and tangible understanding of branding mixed with his experience in technology is potent.
He’s tackling the problems that all of us in web strategy are facing each day, but from his specific market background and perspective. For example, his post today on using Facebook URLs in advertising is relevant to a number of the projects I’m working on at the moment–how much control will organizations hand over to Facebook anyway?
I also like that he’s a connoisseur of Indian pop music. His personal blog is a collection of plagiarism in Indian music. This is super geeky and since I’m involved in music and also very interested in intellectual property stuff, I get a kick out of his blog. Your mileage may vary.
How to get the most out of Karthik Srinivasan
I get the most out of reading his blog, focused on communications and social media from an Indian perspective: Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
His personal blog, focused on plagiarism in Indian music is: ITwoFS
And, of course, you could follow him on Twitter.
I think this a phenom idea. As a relatively new twitter user (new in any meaningful sense), I was having a hard time with #ff. I like to know a bit about a person before I care about his 140 or less – not the other way around.
I am sure some folks prefer it the other way, but for folks like me, this is the meaningful, yet succinct information I am looking for. @beastoftraal has a new follower.
Awesome idea, G. When I post for follow friday I tend to include one name and a brief description of why, but there’s always more to the story.
April: Glad this helps. I think for the new Twitter user this format can be really helpful. Though, as you note, some will prefer the quick list. And that’s ok. For them. 😉
Scott: Thanks for stopping, buddy. The #FF’s that have a description are always the best and were the seed for breaking #FF out of Twitter. In this case, with Karthik S, his blog is super valuable to me, probably much more than his Twitter. So finding the right content from the right author just takes more than 140chars.
Plus since I have several different audiences (real estate people like April, tech/dev/webhead people like yourself, augmented reality people, general #BTVers and so on) I figured it’d be worth letting everyone know really why I think they should cross-polinate and follow someone new.
Or something.
Thanks for stopping by both of you!
g