Dr Shashi Tharoor to keynote at Socialathon India 2015
The countdown for the Indian edition of Socialathon India 2015 has begun. This year, over 250 entries are competing for the India leg of the awards, a sharp increase from the 75 entries that were entered from India in 2014.
The Socialathon shortlist will be announced on July 30 and exemplary works in the field of social media marketing will be awarded on August 7, 2015 in New Delhi. The awards will be preceded by three insightful sessions which will highlight the attributes of social media scenario in India.
Dr Shashi Tharoor will be delivering the keynote address at the event on ‘The Social World: Transforming The Way A Nation Connects & Consumes Media’.
Socialathon is foraying into its second edition with the tagline ‘Making the Connection Count’.
Speaking about the importance of social media, Dr Tharoor said, “Social media represents an opportunity and a challenge to Indian brands — an obvious opportunity because of the potential for reaching a large audience and a challenge because of the evident limitations of the medium in targeting the consumers who aren’t aware of you already. Since your messaging largely reaches ‘followers’, how do you create a message that people will want to disseminate to others, and that will attract strangers to your brand? Creativity is essential, not just technology.”
Dr Tharoor is the bestselling author of fifteen previous books, both fiction and non-fiction, including, most recently, India Shastra: Reflections on the Nation in our Time, besides being a noted critic and columnist, a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. He served 29 years at the United Nations, culminating as Under-Secretary General under Kofi Annan’s leadership of the organization. As India’s official candidate to succeed Annan as UN Secretary-General, he emerged a strong second (to Ban Ki-Moon) out of seven contenders. On returning to India he contested the 2009 elections on behalf of the Indian National Congress, and was elected to Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram. Re-elected in 2014, he chairs Parliament’s External Affairs Committee.
Dr Tharoor’s books include the path-breaking satire The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997) and the visionary PaxIndica: India and the World of the 21st Century (2012), besides India Shastra (2015). He has won numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, was honoured as ‘New Age Politician of the Year’ in 2010, and pioneered among Indian politicians the use of Twitter, where he has three million followers as of 2015.
Dr Tharoor earned his Ph.D. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at the age of 22, and was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1998 as a ‘Global Leader of Tomorrow’. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India’s highest honour for overseas Indians.
