On social media, it’s not who follows you that matters. It’s who follows who follows you that matters,” says Sreenath ‘Sree’ Sreenivasan, newly appointed Chief Digital Officer of New York City. Sree, as he is popularly known, is on a multi-city India tour before he starts his new assignment in October. On Friday, he interacted with media students at Sophia Polytechnic in Mumbai.
His position at New York City comes after a much-publicised digital crowd-sourcing campaign in which Sree posted a form on Facebook asking for suggestions on his next career move after he stepped down as the chief digital officer of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sree, 45, has been a sort of technology evangelist all his career, and has worked across media platforms – print, television, radio, and the internet.
His “Digital ABC”, he says, is “Always Be Charging” (your phone), “Always Be Connecting” (with people), and “Always Be Collecting”.
“Don’t be an ‘ask’ on social media. Think about connecting with people before you need them,” he says. He highlights the importance of annotating, particularly in the digital age where people need to make sense of their access to information overload: “Use your phones as collecting devices. The notes in your notebook are really important, but the notes on your phone are also really important. The more notes you take in life, the more sense you make of life.”
Sree says social media is a great way to find new ideas, trends, and sources, and users find ways to connect with audiences in newer and deeper ways. “I think we’re moving forward in cycles. You needed a website, and then you made apps that were better; and now we’re saying that we don’t need an app, you need mobile web.”
He has advice for tradtional media players: “It is imperative that news organisations continuously update their websites and make them more mobile friendly.” Even the Pope, Sree jokes, has a great digital strategy, referring to the Pope’s offer of reduced time in purgatory to his Twitter followers!
Senior American journalist Damon Kiesow once observed that despite the American media’s obsession with millennials, they haven’t really found a way to communicate with them. Sree agrees: “While much of journalism produced by legacy news organisations is of value to younger readers, it does not entirely speak their language nor fully reflect their lives.”
Sree laments that newspapers will write extensively about television programmes that have millions of viewers, but YouTubers with a million subscribers will escape their attention. “Think about how the world has changed even since 2013. If someone buying a computer for the first time today encounters a computer and has no idea that USB ports are something that can be on a computer, they look at you guys and think that you’re so old, you think that computers should have a USB port.”
The writer is a student of Social Communications Media at Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai
‘Social media are a great way to find new ideas, trends, and sources, and users find ways to connect with audiences’
