Thursday, July 10, 2008

Hopping friends...

...is the in thing! Ask guys at fropper.com

A fusion of friend and hopper is what Fropper stands for. One of the pioneers in social networking in India, fropper.com is the second largest social networking site in the country. Launched in 2003 with an aim to provide people a platform to connect with friends and relatives, fropper.com today boasts of a user base of three and a half million. In the first couple of years since its inception, fropper.com had a growth of 100% and after that they have been continuously growing at the rate of 50-60% per annum.

Naveen Mittal, founder and Business Head, fropper.com is really gung-ho about the future of social networking and fropper.com. In an exclusive interview with 4Ps B&M, Naveen shares strategies that have ensured that users of fropper.com keep coming back for more.

Why has social networking suddenly become so hot?

If today you find a gold mine walking down your home, wouldn’t every body run after you? That’s the case with social networking sites. Some two and half years ago myspace.com was sold at five hundred million dollars. And when a two-three year old business sells for that amount of money, people realise that there is a lot of money in the business. In short there are three major drivers: One, people perceive that there’s a lot of money in the business; secondly, it gives true value to the user and that it’s not a fad, as people will always have a need to connect; and more importantly, the response by the audience is really overwhelming, more and more people are logging onto social networking sites.

What is the USP of fropper.com? What sets you apart?

The USP of fropper.com can be summed in two major points. Firstly, fropper.com is a site only for Indians and secondly we try to understand the end user’s perspective. These are the primary reasons why we have a far more engaging platform for users than any other social networking site in the country. Whatever services we launch, focus around these two things, the Indian context and the end user perspective.


How do you enhance the India focus at Fropper?

We are a social networking site for Indians. There are 50 or 100 odd foreigners but the larger user base is Indians. We keep in mind the Indian context while we are designing our services. For e.g.: we are not a nation which is all English speaking. Keeping that in mind, we have created a platform which de-emphathises the English language. It tells the user that simple English is not a prerequisite for expressing your feeling. In future, we have plans to make fropper.com services more regional in nature. Then there is also the authenticated group feature. Today you can login various sites with lots of commercial misuse and lot of copy paste going on and people writing whatever stuff they want because people don’t monitor that. But at Fropper, we create something we call the authenticated group. You are free to express whatever you want but you are not free to promote your business and you are not free to put in adult stuff at Fropper, as Indians are very conservative by nature.

For Complete IIPM Article, Click on IIPM Article

Source :
IIPM Editorial, 2008

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist)

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