Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
Back in 2015, Nestle’s Maggi faced online what we can, in hindsight, call the first big social media storm of India. Armed with the news that Maggi contained MSG, assorted people took to social media to question a brand that they all…
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently wished the Dalai Lama recently on the latter’s 86th birthday, on July 6, 2021. This is of course entirely normal. Modi wishes a lot of international and Indian dignitaries on their birthdays and I’m sure he…
I have very fond memories of growing up as a kid in Srirangam, a small, temple-town right next to Trichy (which itself was a small town back then) in the mid-80s. It was a magical period – of our first TV (Solidaire),…
I first remember reading about Indian-born writer Amitava Kumar‘s rules for his students in his 2015 book, ‘Lunch With a Bigot: The Writer in the World’. He repeats the same set of rules in his 2020 book, ‘Every Day I Write the…
One of the many nuances I dwell upon in great detail in my corporate workshops on personal branding is something seemingly small and insignificant that most people don’t even give it enough thought – how and when to reply to someone on…
The usual starting point in any kind of communication is that there is an audience that is interested in that communication. We use this for every kind of communication – whether a simple tweet or a WhatsApp message, or an advertisement or…
I had written about BigBasket’s cease & desist letter to Coimbatore-based DailyBasket and how the latter fought back publicly through a show-and-tell website that almost decimated the former’s points and showcased some of BigBasket’s points in bad faith. Since I write every…