Many hands a-tapping

As American startups struggle to monetize social media business offerings, the Indian tech industry is already making millions on their ideas — by servicing users in small, negligible ways.

Blog post comments, auto-adding hundreds of Facebook friends at a time, outsourcing your Twitter activity and even evading Google CAPTCHAS can all be done for a pittance — $2 for a thousand solved CAPTCHAS or blog comments, for example. Workers in India will pick up the slack with a willing labor force, API keys and proxies, reports the Web Guild.

And it isn't just user-side activities being outsourced; whole social media outreach efforts and online advertising campaigns are heading abroad too. Sites like Lime Exchange, Get a Freelancer and Guru make it easy to hire workers willing to contribute time and effort — even before getting paid.

All the more reason why "Anything that can be outsourced is being outsourced today in India," said VP Rajdeep Sahrawat of the National Association of Software Service Companies, an Indian software industry trade organization that monitors outsourcing trends.

The California Fair Trade Coalition confirms his anecdote, poinging out any computer-based job can be outsourced. In response, it argues US trade laws should make it more difficult for people to hire overseas contract work.

"Those countries have large and rapidly growing pools of talented people with much lower incomes than people with similar skills in the United States," asserted Director Imelda Abarca of the coalition.

But because overseas labor is accessible and cheap, a weakening economy might only raise the tide of outsourced work. "People have to understand how jobs are changing and start reinventing themselves," insisted Pervez Sikora, an ex-US newspaper exec that now serves as COO for 2AdPro Media Solutions. "No one will be able to stop this now."

According to Sikora, 2AdPro is increasingly approached by Silicon Valley companies seeking to outsource marketing work.

A recent study of online American consumers found 93% of them expect companies to have a social media presence. With figures like that, one can hardly afford not to launch a panoply of social media efforts, but the options are broad: there's YouTube to consider, and Facebook, and Twitter, and MySpace, and blogging.

The question remains whether companies can justify the expense of a highly-paid American "social media evangelist" versus a number of overseas ones — at a fraction of the cost.