My story on how I started blogging and made a career in social media and HR

1. S t r a t e g y M a r k e t i n g A n a l y s i s R e s o u r c e s T e c h n o l o g y
sep-oct 12 vol 11 issue 5
India’s first world-class management magazine
www.thesmartmanager.com
UK £2.50 USA $9.50 INDIA R100
stopbeingavictim
in5easysteps
marshall goldsmithmarshall goldsmith
SudiptoGhosh,Executive
Director – Service &
Support, Lenovo India
Honing customer
service commitment.
[ PAGE-16 ]
Ankur Warikoo, CEO,
Crazeal.com
Capturing the $10bn
Indian ecommerce market.
[ PAGE-38 ]
sep-oct12
59
mgparameswaranglynatwalkellymcgonigalstevemilleranilsainani

2. iblog Ghosh
The Smart Manager Sep-Oct 2012 www.thesmartmanager.com 21
Gautam Ghosh
is an authority on business blogging
ranked by HR Examiner. He writes at
http://gautamblogs.com
t was at my first job after my MBA,
when I was working in the Knowledge
Management group at an Indian IT
services firm, that my boss asked
me how we could get more visibility in the
industry about our initiatives. For some
reason, I thought of starting an email group
(on egroups.com, which was later acquired
by Yahoo!) of practitioners in the Knowledge
Management and HR space. In 2000, I thus
began my journey in the world of online
communities and conversations. I explored
the medium further by setting up a website on
geocities.com and a Wikipage, too.
In 2002, after hanging out in some other
egroups, I heard about something called
blogging—people said it was a great personal
knowledge management tool. So I opened a
blog account and started posting the emails I
was sending to the various egroups on it. Soon,
I discovered that I was getting comments on
my blog posts—some recruiters in Canada
who were also blogging discovered my
blog, and started reading and commenting
on my thoughts. That is when I discovered
the conversational nature of blogging. I was
then reading Howard Rheingold’s book The
Virtual Community, and The Cluetrain Manifesto
by Christopher Locke, David Weinberger,
Rick Levine and David Searls, and gaining an
understanding as to how this new participatory
medium was going to redefine everything.
In 2004, my blog was voted as the third
most popular blog in India in the Indibloggies
awards, and my readership in India soared. I
read blogs about what people could do with the
medium and tried to incorporate some of these
features into my blog. I started to offer an email
newsletter version of my blog, and also signed
up on Feedburner to showcase the number of
readers. In 2006, I left my full-time corporate
role in Hyderabad and turned a full-time
‘blogging consultant,’ helping small businesses
get international visibility using blogging as a
tool to showcase expertise. Globally my blog
started to get recognition, getting ranked in the
top 25 list of HR blogs, and other lists.
With the rise of social networks and
expertise networks like Facebook, LinkedIn
and Twitter, my blog became the anchor of my
network’s growth. In fact, I was an early user of
LinkedIn, being one of the first 20,000 users to
open an account there. In 2007, I started using
Facebook, and 2008 was when I signed up for
Twitter. Currently my Facebook page (different
from a personal account) has about 1500
followers, and I have 9500 followers on Twitter.
Blogging and social media for me is all
about putting my thoughts before a community
of like-minded people, and then seeing them
improve it. It has helped me discover new
career paths for myself and have conversations
with people across the world. For an introvert
like me, social media is a great bridge to
connect with people in a much easier way,
focusing on ideas and thoughts. Meeting them
later offline is much easier then. 
With the rise of
social networks and
expertise networks
like Facebook,
LinkedIn and
Twitter, my blog
became the anchor
of my network’s
growth.
I
iBlog will bring you face to face with thought leaders and
practitioners active in the virtual world.
“For an introvert like me,
socialmedia is a great bridge
to connect with people.”