The future is Purple

We recently took a phone interview with Mishu Rahman, Editor, Purple Magazine, the increasingly popular Bangladeshi monthly. Please listen to the phonecast and read the supporting transcript below. You can join the Purple group in Facebook here.

1.What is the vision of Purple Magazine? Why do you think Purple is different?

PURPLE was started with a dire need to represent Bangladesh positively to a global audience in an exciting way. Most Magazines in Bangladesh are catalogues of lifestyle shopping and those which offer good reads are presented in a boring format, or else involves stale ideas and people repeating the same things across various media platforms.
PURPLE dared to take a non-political, social research based trend tracking approach which we call tracking “the Pulse of Bangladesh” The presentation in world class, language is international magazine standards and interaction with readers happen at state of the art platforms. PURPLE gives ample space to new and fresh ideas, avoids commercialization of issues and creates excitement about Bangladeshis and Bangladesh to a global audience. The vision is to bring in international recognition of PURPLE as a platform to initiate conversation on things affecting Bangladesh and the region. Already PURPLE has been distributed at a Cambridge Leadership summit as a Pre-reading for a session on Global environment to 110 young global leaders and our Agriculture Issue last November was distributed to all international dignitaries who joined the World Food Summit in Rome as a complete perspective of work being done on Agriculture in Bangladesh. These are small steps but we are getting there with each step.

2. How do you classify yourself i.e. lifestyle magazine, leisure, entertainment?
PURPLE’s mission is to enlighten, entertain, enrich inspire and interact and initiate. It celebrates the Bangladeshi Spirit. We call ourselves a Contemporary issues magazine and we have various segments catering to business, entertainment, lifestyle, culture and politics.

3. Who is your target audience? why do you target them? how do you target them?
Our target audience is anyone in Bangladesh who feel the need to be engaged with the times – and we believe everyone needs to be, so that we our cumulative contribution to the development of our country can be that much greater. We have seen that various cover stories of PURPLE appeal to different segments of the society. For example one cover two years ago on the brash lives of urban school and college students from wealthy backgrounds got a lot of urban parents writing to us asking for more details. On the other hand our issue on Agriculture generated interest of a lot researchers and analysts from across the region. Even Hugh Brammer from London who has worked in Bangladesh for over 35 years in agricultural development emailed us a writeup as a follow-up of that issue. Another Cover story on Looking at Bangladesh 30 years from now created a phenomenal participation of University students who will be middle aged citizens of Bangladesh after 3 decades to get together in workshops and send us their dreams and aspirations. Our Initiative in raising funds for the social victims raised a lot of interest among celebrities, artists and development workers. So through various features we try to engage with different parts of society which gives PURPLE an element of freshness and excitement

4. What is your opinion on the English publishing sector in Bangladesh and how PURPLE fits in there?
The English Publishing sector suffers from a dearth of readers. However, with a rising involvement of various institutions and Corporate houses, Universities and even the government in promoting the familiarity with the language, the scenario may not be the same 5 / 6 years down the line. Today we as editors suffer from a huge crisis of good writers/ reporters in English. And thus most magazines who look to become ‘English’ language magazines get away with mediocre articles, downloaded plegiarised materials and no one is the wiser.
On the brighter side, English publications with insightful articles and engaging presentations can attract a global conversation and has a wider appeal. PURPLE intends to lead in this arena over time. It has been in Publication only since July 2007, so this has been so far experimental learning. We are ready to take on bigger challenges in 2010.

5. Do you make use of internet, mobile phones, social media to promote, inform, communicate and mobilize your readers? How?
What are we today without social media? PURPLE’s facebook group gets a lot of our message across. The online version is a large platform for non-resident Bangladeshis to experience PURPLE. We are aware that as more Bangladeshis go online and use internet enabled phones, online and mobile versions will become more popular. However, the print version will never really go extinct. If this was to be, then when TV came in, the newspaper would have gone out of print!

Status Renting, Status Bites and a range of status categories

Many status conscious Dhakaiyas think that if you manage to reside in the Bermuda triangle of Dhaka city i.e. Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara, you possess a 'higher' status than the rest who live outside, or even on the periphery. However Facebook, the most popular social networking site in Bangladesh too, is poised to make this status vanity blurred, as apparently, everybody and anybody has a ‘status’, as long they are registered with Facebook, or with Twitter as a matter of fact. This certainly implies that these status-savvy digital netizens of Bangladesh have acquired the power of being micro-publishers for free, to start influencing their smaller sphere of acquaintances, through their frequent updates about own situation, feelings, news, etc. From my observation, I could categorize the status-mongers in Facebook according to the following categories. See if you want to add some more and think how each of these could be mobilized to spread the word-of-mouth regarding you, your business, brand. (read more)


1. Stato-holics
This group of people are status addicts, they prefer to update their status as frequently as possible. Most interestingly, even if they are ‘busy’, they somehow manage to get the time out of their busy schedule to update their status as ‘Abdul is busy’ or ‘Abdul is buzzzeeeee’ etc. making others wonder whether that person is busy with work or busy Facebooking!

Tip:
This category of users may be good brand mouth-pieces for your product/service. Riding on their urge to frequent status updates, they need to be equipped with enough information and right incentives to help spread the word-of-mouse for your brand.

2. Status-stalkers
You might be having 500+ friends in your friend list but in reality you might be interacting actually with not more than 50 through personal messages, wall posts and seeing each other’s status updates. Then what happened to the rest of your colourful and long friend list? Have they suddenly turned their face off Facebook? I reckon not. This category of people prefer not to update their own status but prefer to have sneak peaks on what others are doing. Partially it could be because they don’t want their ‘friends’ to know what their own secrets plans are for job, holidays etc. lest their friends exploit this information and race ahead. So they prefer to keep a check on everybody else’s status regularly and remain themselves in a hidden mode. That’s what friends are for huh? In many case’s some stalk a handful of people genuinely to acquire more knowledge, contacts etc. They are Facebook introverts.

Tip:
Good type for market research may be, who keep a check on what other people are upto, or may be saying about your brand, business or even you…and then reports back to you.

3. Stat-vertizers
My favourite type. Those who can happily rent out their status space as a micro-bill board to advertise about your business, either for free or for fee for a certain duration of time may be. I have been investigating with this lately and am keen to get in touch with Facebook to figure out if the idea of ‘Status Renting’ could be made a reality. So if I could convince say 10 of my target Facebook friends to update their status about my custom-made-status ready information on my business/product, then it would be made visible to their own friends, with whom I might not be connected. The audience of your audience is my audience that I am trying to reach here through status messages. Its short, crispy, share-able and more importantly you would be more influenced about anything if you read it in your friends’ status updates rather than hearing it from any unsocilited ad campaign, or from me. In exchange, if its possible to track the clicks from each ‘rented status space’, it would be used to may be pay the interested stat-vertizers for their favour.

Tip:
--Friends and family might be bullied for a while to behave like stat-vertizers for a while but not for long, as there are no binding agreements. But if contextual status renting becomes a reality, it would be interesting to see how this works for businesses in a social media environment.

--Don’t let money ruin friendship.

4. Stat-wasters or Stat-blankers
This type of users are not always sure why they should use their status updates for. So sometimes they publish statuses such as ‘Abdul is …’. I really never understand the meaning of this ‘…’. To me, it’s a complete waste of space. Rather stay quiet and stalk other people than saying three dots. Also, some ignore the basic principle of brevity in status messages and opt for writing long epics in their status messages which certainly gets ignored for a skim-through status surfer.

Tip:
Wish them happiness and wish them well.

5. True socialite
They are bit of a mixed bag. They actually share nearly each of their conceivable feeling/emotion i.e. ‘Abdul is happy, sad, sick, tired, sleeping, eating, walking, thinking etc.’. They talk about food, movies, politics, life, love, pretty much everything being social requires and enjoys status messages just because they themselves are genuinely like that. They also send each other virtual gifts, play games etc.

Tip:
If a true socialite could be converted to a part time stat-vertizer, then it would be bthe est combination for your business/brand word spread. As people tend to rely more on the candid opinion of a True socialite than on the dry and monotonous updates from a stat-vertizer.

Other than ‘status-renting’ I am also researching with a concept I coined as ‘status-bites’. Inspired by what soundbites do, I think status-bites are the next best thing to educate your audience on your business/product on a slow and scheduled status release format. I am applying this specifically for reports that other teams produce for public consumption at my present workplace. It is argued that in times of information economy, attention is the currency, which no one wants to spend too much. So not many people have the time or interest or the access to go through a full report of 30-40 pages. But they would not mind to have a surface level idea, gist of the actual content in small chewable chunks, right through their status feeds so that they can be informed about the key aspects of the issue at hand through the screens of their smart phones or desktop screen. Think about it, is there anything about your business/brand, which can be released through status messages in a planned way over a period of time? May be a week or so?

Lastly, something I call ‘status-serials’. Can you tell a story about your brand/business in 10 status messages in a serial fashion? So that I have the urge to see what your next update is? Can it keep me interested in your sticky status for a week or so? However, none of these terms are in Google yet.

That it, time to update my status about this post now.

সাহিত্যিকদের পৃষ্ঠপোষকতায় Corporate Company

অনেকদিন ধরেই বিষয়টি মাথায় ঘুরপাক খাচ্ছিল। বিষয়টি সেদিন আমার প্রান প্রিষ নন্ধুটিকে বললাম। ও পরামর্শ দিলো,বিষয়টি তুমি Bangladesh Corporate Blogs-এ লিখলে ভাল হবে। ওর সেই ভাবনা থেকেই বিষয়টি Bangladesh Corporate Blogs-এ তুলে ধরলাম।
আমাদের দেশে পৃষ্ঠপোষকতার বড় অভাব। আর সেই অভাবের মাত্রাটা সাহিত্য অঙ্গনে একটু প্রকট ভাবেই পরিলক্ষিত হয়। সাহিত্যিকরা যে পৃষ্ঠপোষকতা পাচ্ছে না তা নয়। পাচ্ছে, তবে তা কিঞ্চিত পরিমানে। আর যাওবা পাচ্ছে তা শুধু প্রতিষ্ঠিত সাহিত্যিকরাই। আর এক্ষেত্রে শুধুমাত্র এগিয়ে আসছে প্রকাশকরাই। সাহিত্যিকদের পৃষ্ঠপোষকতা করার দায়-দায়িত্ব কি শুধুমাত্র প্রকাশকদেরই, আর কারো নয়?
এই সাহিত্যিকরাই তো জাতিকে উজ্জিবিত করে, জাতির বিবেককে জাগিয়ে তোলে, দেশকে মুক্তির পথ দেখায়, আলোর পথ দেখায়। আমরা কী ভুলে গেছি আমাদের অতীতের কথা? আশা করি ভুলিনি। দেশের বিগত বিভিন্ন গণআন্দোলনে যেখানে সাহিত্যিকরাই ছিলো অগ্রগণ্য। অথচ আজ সেই সাহিত্য সমাজই অবহেলিত।
আর এই অবহেলিত সাহিত্য সমাজকে পৃষ্ঠপোষকতার দায়-দায়িত্ব প্রকাশকদের পাশাপাশি দেশের Corporate company গুলো কি নিতে পারে না? Corpoarte company গুলোতো আজকাল অনেক চলচ্চিত্র, টিভি নাটক, মিউজিক এ্যালবাম ইত্যাদি বের করছে। তাহলে কেন একটি বই বের করতে পৃস্ঠপোষকতা করতে পারবে না corporate company-গুলো? একটি বই প্রকাশ করতে যদি কোন corporate company পৃস্ঠপোষতা করে, তবে এর দ্বারা তো তাদের Brand image -ও বেড়ে যাচ্ছে। কারণ,তাদের কোম্পানীর নাম বইয়ে যাবে। তারপর company গুলো যদি তাদের লগ্নীকৃত অর্থের দিকটা চিন্তা করেন, তবে সেক্ষেত্রে কোম্পানীগুলো তাদের প্রকাশিত বইটি কোন প্রকাশকের কাছে বিক্রি করে দিতে পারে বা বইটি বিক্রির জন্য মিডিয়ায় প্রচারনা চালাতে পারে ইত্যাদি। তাই আমার মনে হয়না এই পৃস্ঠপোষতার কারনে খুব একটা ক্ষতির সম্মখীন হবে corporate company গুলো। মাঝখানে সাহিত্যিকরা কিছুটা উপকৃত হবে। তাছাড়া এটা কোম্পানীগুলোর Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) এর মাঝেই পরে। আর এই পৃষ্ঠাপোষতার ছোঁয়ায় আমাদের রুগ্ন সাহিত্য সমাজ আবার ফুলে-ফেঁপে উঠতে পারবে বলে আমার বিশ্বাস। তখন সাহিত্যকে পেশা হিসেবে বেছে নিতে এগিয়ে আসবে নতুনরা বা অপেশাদারীরা। আর এক্ষেত্রে পৃস্ঠপোষতার জন্য প্রথম প্রথম এগিয়ে আসতে হবে কিছু Recognized corporate company কে।
আমার এই লেখাটি পড়ে যদি কোন corporate company সাহিত্যিকদের পৃস্ঠপোষতায় এগিয়ে আসে, তবেই আমার এ লেখাটি স্বার্থক হয়েছে বলে মনে করব।
The author can be reached at: jahirmasum@gmail.com