Social Samosa Turns One!

Congratulations everyone! Your favorite social media portal is celebrating its first birthday today! :-)

This post is about me sharing my journey with Social Samosa in the last one year. And, let me tell you right in the beginning that this is going to be a very candid post.

My journey with Social Samosa has been in 3 phases: As a reader, as an author and as the Content Head.

When I first heard about Social Samosa in December last year, the first thought that came to my mind was the same that you probably had when you first heard about it: 'Social Samosa?? SOCIAL SAMOSA?? Quirky name!" (Thanks Snigdha Manchanda for this!)

The name surely got me interested and the first post Social Samosa post I ever read was the one about Social Communities by Ramya Pandyan.

From that day on, I became a reader of Social Samosa. No I wasn't a regular reader back then... I am still not a regular reader of any blog. It was around mid-January when Arif RT'ed a tweet from Ankita; she was looking for writers for Social Samosa. I thought it was a good opportunity to build visibility and offered to write guest posts. I had no intentions of becoming a paid author and earning at all.

My first post, which talked about spotting a fake social media marketer was received nicely. Then I went on to write a couple of posts on Twitter and Google+. Then one day I received a call from Ankita and she asked me to become a regular/committed contributor. I decided to take it up as I had resigned from my first job and needed money.

After writing several articles and interviewing a few brands, Ankita calls me up, this is June we are talking about now.. She appreciated how awesomely I write, how Superman-like my abilities are and her preference for working with people who are fans of Lord of The Rings. And she offered me to join the Social Samosa team as the Content Head. I accepted.

Ankita's note: The above paragraph may not be entirely true. Especially the Lord of the Rings bit.

Well, that is when all hell broke lose!

My life has been a roller coaster since then. Before I could realize, I was taken off from the nice beautiful city of Vadodara and found myself in Mumbai local trains pushing, shoving, punching and uttering Maa-Bhen ki gaalis.

From then till now, we have grown quite a lot. We had two awesome in-house Content Managers joining us: Nirali and Dhwani. Young and spirited and really really fun to work with. We are now pushing 5 articles every day. We have 700 posts in total & this is the 701st !

But the best part of being with Social Samosa is working at our office, Skype chats. Whether it's me cracking PJs after PJs or Aditya asking us to take 'lite' or Ankita urging us to 'chalo work guys', anyone who reads our Skype chat will wonder if at all we work or not.

And yes, most of us have met just once, after months of working together. We also had a riotous person in our team whose enthusiasm can be matched by only a few people. Her identity shall stay secret. You can call her Batwoman though.

At Social Samosa, we are all a big family. We all have fun together, pull each other's legs and do some serious work too if time permits. There's nothing like employer-employee here. Nope. Just one big team.

The Road Ahead

Our goal is clear. We want to move ahead from the usual social marketing stuff. We are bored writing about '5 Facebook Marketing Tips', but hey, we've got some college kids looking up for those too. We want to lead the Indian Social Media Ecosystem into a direction... away from photo upload contests and spampaigns.

So, hoping to deliver more kickass content from our end, we will be covering advanced social media topics in the future. And, we are also coming up with some really exciting additions to our website which will benefit you tremendously, I believe. Stay with us and I assure you your journey will be awesome to say the least.

A Big Thanks:

Our readers: You are the reason we are still going strong. Thanks for reading our articles/checkin' us out with interest and sharing them across your network. We love you from the bottom of our heart.

Our authors: Thanks for adding value to our website. We respect your efforts and our endless love goes out to you. A little less endless love to that one person whose articles used to take me 2 hours to edit. And some special love from my side to the girl who wrote so awesomely. I haz a crush on you gal!

Our Editors: Thank you so much for making sure that the content here is top notch.

Our advertisers: Thanks for advertising with us. We love you very much (and your money too).

Our team members (old and present): You rock guys! You simply raaaack!

And now, free beer and Samosas for all. Cheers!

Ankita's note: Really? O_0

Image by Chocolate Geek