The Fourth Estate and the Indian Blogosphere: Marketing in India, Part III

I recently had the opportunity to travel through India and spend some time with our colleagues in the Mumbai office of Ogilvy PR.  We had a great discussion about digital influence and more broadly about the role of online tactics in supporting traditional public relations activities.  As I was discussing the role of blogs with a colleague visiting from our Bangalore office, we also discussed the new blogging report on India that MSN recently released.  The report, titled "Blogging India: A Windows Live Report" shares many interesting findings, including:

1. The countrys blogosphere is largely driven by youth with a large majority of online users reading blogs to stay on top of world events and subjects like Technology and Education.
2. Many blogs are driven by a passion for self improvement and entertainment – with nearly 50% of all blogs being written for entertainment purposes.
3. Of the respondents, bloggers were heavily male (76%) and 86% were under 34 years old (32% under 25 years old).
4. Though only 14 percent of the country’s online population is involved in active blogging, 39 percent were aware of blogging.
5. Business leaders and politicians are leading the way, with half the country’s online population preferring to read blogs written by these groups.

A main finding of the survey says that blogging could become a new "fourth estate" – with nearly half the respondents putting as much faith in blog content as much as traditional media.  Though the results of this survey should not be taken as exhaustive (see the press release about the survey, conducted across Asia, for more details), the most interesting conclusion to this is the growing influence of blogs in the media landscape in India.  A quick look at India’s leading blog portal – Blogstreet, has a useful collection of some of these blogs, as does the Indian Blogger Directory Wiki sponsored by DesiPundit (a site I have shared content with in the past).  In an effort to help catalog this growing "fourth estate" of media, we will be collaborating with our colleagues from India to launch an all new Blogfeed of Indian marketing and PR blogs we are reading in the region.

Note: This post was originally published on the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence blog and has been republished as the third and final part of the Marketing in India series published on the Influential Interactive Marketing Blog.  The other two posts are linked below:

1. The Plight of the Puppetmaster
2. Word of Mouth and the Churi Wala