All that seemed to change when the Internet happened to us. All of a sudden, communication barriers were non-existent and we went from the long sweet brew of love into the age of like/poke/unfriend! The Internet made it *slightly* easier for you by allowing you to send that innocuous email, a message or a subtle “like” to start making some headway. However, randomly sending messages to people only made you out to be a “fraandship-seeker”.

The Internet also made it *slightly* tougher, you had all these people trying to friend you and you don’t know whom to trust. Facebook helped, you knew exactly who your common friends where and that made it a great way to connect and trust. Soon romance became the ping of an email, the buzz of an SMS or BBM and online chats late into the night, and the sweetest, most romantic messages were locked or saved never to be deleted by mistake :)

Romance persists, mediums change!


Reel life mimics real life in an upcoming movie by Y Films, “Mujhse Fraandship Karoge” where very similar themes will be seen of finding someone and courting them online in all its glory! Do check it out on Oct 14th!

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. We have Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge merchandise to giveaway!

Check out the fun trailer!

+ You’re Thinking: Why join Youpid? Let me introduce my single friends via email right now.
Sure, that’s the obvious thing to do isn’t it? Umm, not really. We underestimate the power of our sphere of influence and our social reach as only a social network can exploit. When you join Youpid and bring your trusted circle online, you’re causing a ripple effect by allowing your single friends to connect with singles that you know, your friends know, your friends friends know – taking it waaaayy beyond what just an email connect can achieve!

+ You’re Thinking: Youpid is like other matrimonial sites, I’ll just search for anonymous profiles, why invite anybody?
So, this one is easy. Forget matrimonial portals, internet sites and what have you. In real life, you make informed decisions and recommendations form a big part of how we decide to choose one thing over the other, this is true in any sphere of life. Sure, the decision lies with you alone, but getting a OK from a trusted source makes a HUGE difference, life is all about RECOMMENDATIONS!

So, if you’re finding a match for yourself, wouldn’t you feel better if you had a recommendation to make possibly one of the most major decisions in your life? That’s really the key point with Youpid – we harness your social network and help you find a match from singles that are KNOWN to your extended circles. Do you really want to make such a big life decision on a hunch alone?

+ You’re Thinking: Why use Youpid? I’ll use Facebook instead, why YET another social network?
This has got to be the most popular question by far! That’s because its a great question, we live in the time of Facebook and its obvious to ask this question. The answer is surprisingly simple and we find that our users often arrive at the answer themselves. It goes back to how we conduct ourselves in real life. Would you want to scream from the rooftops that you wanted to find a match? Would you randomly approach people you think are single to ask them if they were interested in marriage?

Of course you wouldn’t!

Facebook is a generic social network which makes it akin to shouting from rooftops and approaching seemingly single people for matches! This is where a dedicated matrimonial social network such as Youpid comes in and fills the void. What’s more, it integrates nicely with Facebook, so you can invite friends & family who YOU trust from Facebook to join you on Youpid. Privacy is topmost on our feature list and we would never scream from rooftops on your behalf! Pretty soon, you’ll be able to match-make your single friends right out of Facebook (how cool is that!) with our Youpid application that’s in the works!

Matrimony, as our users resoundingly concur, is a social affair but conducted within closed and trusted social circles. Traditional matrimonial classifieds / websites and social networks such as Facebook are a poor substitute for how we effectively conduct matrimonial searches in real life. Youpid is a manifestation of that social activity, but, online and ready to make matrimonial searches a breeeeeze!


Youpid makes matrimony SAFE. Don’t you want that for your friends & family? It’s about time!


Seen our new look? Check it out!

It’s hard to find someone who hasn’t used social sites like Facebook / LinkedIn these days, be it to connect with school friends or colleagues. However, when it comes to using social media for your small business/corporates/brands, most people only know about online advertising, i.e Facebook Ads/Google Adsense. Talk about using Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn to drive business and create brand awareness and people will look at you like you are a scam artist. If you are one of those, read further,this is for you (too)! :)

I firmly believe that the only way to know about Social Media is to be on Social Media and for me, this is where the #DVCamp workshops stood out. Yes, from my perspective, there were elements of “gyaan” to the sessions, presentations on why Social Media is a necessity now and such. However, for the most part, it was an interactive session where all participants got hands on experience with Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn and got to see the benefits real time. Kapil Nakra (@kapilnakra) and Bhaskar Thakur spent a good amount of time in getting people to actually use the tools. This was the key takeaway for me during my #DVCamp experience and this intersected well with my belief that to know is to use!

All the presentations/ case studies and how-to sessions were very interactive. In fact, there was even discussion around a participant’s company Facebook page, the problems it had and how it could be enriched. LinkedIn Profiles were created, how to identify hooks for your LinkedIn profile, how to go about increasing visibility and credibility on LinkedIn was discussed. Both, the technicalities of creating a Facebook Page/Ad for your brand and the challenge of creating a community for your brand were discussed. All these hands-on workshops added a very unique perspective to go with useful case studies that were presented as well.

They also have an extremely interesting format where the attendees split into groups and compete amongst themselves using Facebook as a petri-dish! Teams start off with a social media strategy session which involves a worksheet! Strange as it may seem, it was a great way to get people to focus on what are their key requirements from Social Media and to detail their engagement strategy for each medium. This was followed by creating groups on Facebook and actually going through the tasks identitified in the worksheet to drive users and engagement on the groups. I think this is a great way for people to really see what kind of questions, contests, content actually gets you more Fans/Likes/Comments/Users. Ultimately, depending on the business space you are trying to get “social” in, this entire excercise helped to identify what drivers one could track to gauge social media campaign effectiveness and what the focus points were.

The workshop I attended had an interesting mix of people with varying degrees of social media exposure, we had the complete newbies (love this tweet! http://twitter.com/amritplaha13/status/17456275411439616 ) to people with casual engagement levels with social media. However, the DV team worked with the entire group and got everyone to take to
it quickly, within the 2 days that I attended, which spoke volumes about the effectiveness of the program!

I polled some of the attendees in the group to gauge why people attended the workshop, this is what the participants had to say;

Founder of “Akar”, a packaging and containers company: “want to learn how social media can help me in the Packaging business… Want to reach out to the B2B industry through Social Media”
Anish Bajaj, Founder of “Marvel Infomedia”, publishing: “trying to understand social media as communiciation is moving rapidly through print to digital”
Amrit Plaha, Marketing, Crosswords Bookstores: “To form a social media strategy”

There were others from traditional marketing backgrounds, Airtel,Lintas, Zee (yes, the TV channel), even a pharmaceutical
company “Mission Vivacare”, that wants to use social media to explore B2C.

And their comments post the workshop;

Amrit Palaha : A must do for those unaware of how social media can be used to leverage brands!
Anish Bajaj: Great Bootcamp, a must for anyone who wants to run a relevant business in the future.

This is a very well structured workshop and the hands-on experience that the participants received with the guidance of the instructors/speakers, is definitely an excellent starting point if you are a business and just starting to get your feet wet with social media or are struggling with how to leverage SM for your business or brand!

Thanks to the DV team (Kapil, Pradeep and Bhaskar) for hosting me for the two days during the workshop!

More information about upcoming DV Camp’s can be found here. You can track SM chatter about DVCamp using #DVCamp.

[Click here for more pictures]