Maps of India Awards – Your Vote Matters

Demonitization in Tourist Season

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Team Compare Infobase has been working on creating generic India-centric content for almost five years now. We created “My India”, a site within a site, and all of its content goes to a short URL, http://myindia.in. Project MyIndia is not related to maps directly, but it attempts to be a snapshot of the India that it is today and the India that is evolving on a daily basis. We try to connect all the articles and information with maps either as mash-ups or as reference points. Today, MyIndia has some 5,000 articles and each one of them is especially commissioned and paid for. They have been written by more than 100 writers, bloggers and journalists. These articles are broadly categorised into the following:

1. Business
2. Travel
3. Education
4. Events
5. Government
6. History
7. Politics
8. Food
9. Reviews
10. Sports
11. Technology

A few years ago, we initiated a non-map centric users’ opinion poll to understand our users’ responsiveness towards different categories and individuals dominating them. In 2016, we formalised the awards and gave it a short URL, http://moiawards.in. Moiawards.in has quite a few categories in which MyIndia operates; it also focusses on segments where it attracts tens of thousands of daily users. For the project we opted for following categories:

1. Best Politician
2. Best Indian Movie
3. Best Actor
4. Best Actress
5. Best Singer – Male
6. Best Singer – Female
7. Best Indian City
8. Worst Indian City
9. Best City to do Business in India
10. Best Sci-tech Centres in India
11. Best Indian Director
12. Best Sports Personality

For each category, we did seeding with four researched nominations and soon opened it for user participation. User nominations were open for ten days and the final nominations stand like this:

1. Best Politician – 11 nominees
2. Best Indian Movie – 12 nominees
3. Best Actor – 15 nominees
4. Best Actress – 9 nominees
5. Best Singer – Male – 5 nominees
6. Best Singer – Female – 7 nominees
7. Best Indian City – 19 nominees
8. Worst Indian City – 7 nominees
9. Best City to Do Business in India – 19 nominees
10. Best Sci-tech Centres in India – 4 nominees (This is the only category in which there were no user-proposed nominations.)

11. Best Indian Director – 8 nominees
12. Best Sports Personality – 8 nominees

This has given us an interesting direction and a peep into the outlook of Mapsofindia (MOI) users. Nominations were open to only those users who belong to Mapsofindia’s million-plus Facebook community. As a result, they were in sync with what MOI stands for and delivers. The whole process, until the stage of closing of nominations, was documented step by step and cross validated to ensure that there was no hacking or jacking up of any nominees or the number. Further, IP validations, User ID validations, Machine Identification validations and, for a section, we even did the ‘captcha’ code verification!

Click to Participate in MOI Awards 2016 Now!

All these nominations will show up at different places in MapsofIndia.com in the New Year 2017. We will ensure that each nominee has their biography page on MOI and that MyIndia section gets a snapshot on each of the nominee. We will also do a closing post on MyIndia for each category, which we expect to become the opening post for our users’ choice polls in December 2017. A few of us suggested and it was cross validated that from next year onwards, MOI Awards need to be rebranded as “MyIndia Awards” to evolve into one of the most credible community awards in the country.

It was an easy choice for us to opt for a standard popular award format available on the Internet, but we consciously invested in creating our own format which is as unique as our MOI and MyIndia projects. We are expecting this project to garner at least 1,00,000 votes by January 10, 2017, and each category to have a minimum of 4,000 votes. In the forthcoming year, we are looking at million votes under MyIndia Awards, with each category having a minimum of 40,000 user votes. We are sure that at that level there are going to be many categories which will get over 50 nominations and that minimum nomination per category would be over 20.

As we move closer to 2017, there is a sense of satisfaction that Team Compare has been able to mature and evolve more and more, something which is going to continue year after year. For MOI, which has completed 18 years now, it is very important that it focusses only on projects that have the potential to last another 18 years, and beyond. MOI Awards (which is to be rebranded as MyIndia Awards in the coming year) amply demonstrate that potential.

This project is a mobile-first project and released in English only. We are confident of taking this project on vernacular mode like MOI and MyIndia. To get this project to where it is today, six teams of Compare Infobase, that is, Technology, Content, Creative, Social Media, Search Engine Marketing and Finance, brought their best together. We really wanted our revenue team to play an active role as well, but it looks like it will be only next year that this project would go through different stages of monetization. Quality comes from Compare’s commitment to the 3Cs – ‘Current, Credible and Consistent’ at every stage. All teams brought in the 3Cs factor to the best of their abilities.

As 2016 draws to a close, so does the last date of voting for your favourite nominees named in the MOI Awards this year. So, dear readers, go ahead and cast your votes! Let us know what you think and provide us your valuable feedback. We are still very proud of the first feedback which we got for MOI in 1998 and we know we would not have been MapsofIndia.com if your feedback had not been there. Best wishes for the New Year. Cheers!

Click to Participate in MOI Awards 2016 Now!