Tata Docomo's launch

Tata Docomo's GSM service is being launched in a very Web 2.0 way, with a Twitter page ,Youtube Channel , and a very 'social' website with user comments, page ratings, share links for facebook etc. I see a very strong brand in the making - one that could challenge Vodafone. The pricing innovation of having a 1 second pulse rate is also a first. Of course, the actual network coverage and customer service will be the final decider, but all the preceding steps have been executed quite well.

Incidentally, Docomo has a strong R&D focus in Japan, which makes it the only player that is creating new technologies as opposed to just using existing ones. That's a fantastic source of long term competitive advantage in the face of 'commoditization' of telephony.

Bing Review: Microsoft’s first web winner

For a change Microsoft gets it right with Bing. Bing clearly wins over Google on the following counts:

1. Visual Appeal- reminiscent of Ask.com’s earlier avatar.
2. Speed – it’s just as fast as google.
3. Clean categorization of ‘Related searches’, using Powerset’s technology (I presume)
4. A preview feature that helps you read content from the target site before clicking.
5. An overall philosophy focused on getting as much of the information you need from the search engine itself before actually clicking and going to a site, thereby making it a decision engine.
6. A spectacularly clean integration of Travel and Shopping into the search engine in a manner never seen before, including the special Bing Cashback discounts that you can avail by clicking through and buying products via Bing search results. (This feature is available on the US version of the site.)
7. Finally, Bing looks like it was designed for ‘real’ users, while in retrospect Google looks like it was designed more for geeks than regular users.

In short, Microsoft has surprisingly achieved the next frontier in search. Google may well outdo it in the future, but Microsoft has set the agenda for sure.

Social Graphs and Vanilla Networks

Jyri Engestrom has an extremely interesting post on where social networks are headed. In this post, he points out Brad Fitzpatrick's views on how the social graph (the map of how users are connected to each other) should be made universal.

Brad's solution is to create a service where people go to aggregate all their networks into a master network, and then let other services check against that to automate friend discovery. The outcome to the user who signs up to a new service should be "These 8 friends of yours are already users here, would you like to share your books / music / pictures / trips / etc. with them?"

I'm not so convinced due to the following reasons:

1. Firstly, 'friends' is a nebulous concept and it varies from network to network (my Linkedin friends may not be the same as my Orkut friends), thereby making the whole idea of having a universal social graph quite impractical.

2. Secondly, Brad assumes that all the competing services will actually cooperate with each other to share their respective social graphs. I doubt that will happen. If it did, then it would be equivalent to voluntarily reducing exit barriers for its users.

But it looks like the problem that Brad is addressing is one of singular identity (say a Google Account or a Hotmail Passport) that uniquely maps people across applications. That's a separate problem in itself. Anyway, here is what I think will be the future of social graphs and networks.

Where I see this heading
I forsee that in the future there will be two kinds of 'social network' services:
1. A plain vanilla social network with the usual friend of friend and profile features.
2. Satellite social applications like say a photo sharing service, a book sharing service etc.

My guess is that there would be about 3-4 major plain vanilla networks. The satellite services would then sit on top of these networks and share their social graphs. So say I signup on Facebook (the plain vanilla network), and then I feel like signing up at Shelfari.com to share books with friends. I would just activate Shelfari inside Facebook. The Shelfari-Facebook tieup would not be exclusive. Shelfari could go and signup with all the other vanilla providers too. Facebook has already moved in this direction by allowing 'applications' by independent developers to hook into Facebook. The next level is for all these 'applications' to have their separate identity in the world outside Facebook, thereby allowing users of other vanilla networks to use them too. The following image should help clarify what I'm trying to say.

Thus, the vanilla networks would serve the purpose of being repositories of social graphs that independent developers of services can tap into.




An arrangement like this would be very useful for all web applications with a social dimension to them. The major vanilla networks house the social graphs, and the independent guys hook in as satellites and share revenues with the parent network.

The PS3 Song - a Web 2.0 rant

Interesting Web 2.0 approach to telling a brand that it sucks. Check it out!

Web 2.0 marketing

Former India cricketer Krishnamachari Srikkanth seems to believe in the networked marketplace. He is promoting his cricket website Krish Cricket on an Orkut community. He has an Orkut profile too, and is glad to add friends! His website targets cricket fans through mobile games, and other interactive content. What better place to find young people than Orkut?

What's more Srikkanth is also promoting Google's cricket blogging contest, and has his own blog too.

Interactive Brands - featured in The Hindu Business Line

Today, The Hindu Business Line's Brand Line supplement carried this article written by me. Link to website: Interactive Brands

Full text follows:

Today's young adult spends significant amounts of her time using the Internet. The Internet has become the dominant medium of keeping in touch, networking, sharing views with people all over the world, researching and getting work done (if you are a knowledge worker). The membership figures of prominent social networking sites such as Orkut and Facebook is indicative of this undeniable trend.

The young adult of today's world is hyper-networked, interlinked to many more people than before, and part of many more conversations than ever before. Marketers who are today selling their brands to a spectrum of target groups of which such hyper-networked individuals constitute a small but significant chunk will realise (as these individuals age) over the next 10 years that the entire marketplace has turned hyper-networked.

Are brick-and-mortar companies prepared for this change? I doubt it. The difficulty of `selling' to such hyper-networked individuals is that they are highly sceptical of advertising, branding gimmicks and PR spiel. This group tends to form and create opinions through n-way conversations that take place on the Internet through blogs, social networking sites and e-mail. Such communication is not just text-based - it could even take place through videos (YouTube), images (Flickr) and voice (podcasts).

The important feature of these conversations is that the information they contain is viewed with much more trust, primarily because such conversations do not have a hidden profit motive. The equivalent to this global conversation is the `word of mouth' benefits that brands earlier enjoyed in the brick-and-mortar era.

Join the conversation

The solution that one foresees in such a scenario is for brands to turn interactive, and actually join the conversation. Interactive brands would be those that effectively conduct two-way conversations with their defined marketplace. The earlier era was one of uni-directional communication, which involved running advertisements and other branding initiatives on one-way communication media such as the television, radio and billboards. Potential customers were expected to passively absorb messages from such media, and consume the advertised product or service. Occasionally positive word-of-mouth contributed to brand choice in addition to the creative message. However, with the emergence of the Internet, word of mouth assumes a much more significant and globe-spanning role in brand choice.

Corporate blogs

How then do brands engage in two-way interactions with their defined marketplace? One effective way to do this is a corporate blog, which incidentally finds itself in Bain Company's list of top 25 management tools of 2007. A key benefit of a corporate blog is that it enables an organisation to communicate in an honest, human voice to the world at large.

This honest voice would involve such former taboos as publicly acknowledging mistakes as and when they occur, honest promises on customer service levels, transparent communication on future product launches and internal thought processes. In addition to this, customers can use this forum to openly talk to the company, and about their experiences with the company's offering. A static corporate Web site can never create the kind of interactivity and richness that a corporate blog can offer.

Community of users

Another way for brands to get involved in the conversation is to create communities of users. Two examples come to mind - The Royal Enfield owners club of the UK, and closer to home, Sunsilk's `Gang of Girls' Web site. Such communities allow customers to interact with other users of a product or service, and have conversations that have the incidental benefit of providing inputs to product development initiatives. Additionally, they would also help companies observe the evolution of their customers, and respond much faster than ever before.

It appears that brands will have no choice but to be part of the conversation between users, or risk being left out completely. This is not to say that traditional brand building approaches are no longer valid. They still have a role to play, but that role is more likely to help in reinforcing the brand's message, rather than creating it from scratch. Additionally, smart brands will no longer view people as `target groups' but start viewing them as people whom they can best understand through conversations.

Iconic brands tend to tap into a customer's self-actualisation needs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. People get emotionally involved with brands when they can relate to the brand in a manner that goes beyond mere price or quality. It is equally important for brands to get emotionally involved with their users by joining the conversation, or risk commoditisation. The choice is clear!

(The writer, an alumnus of XLRI, is with a multinational financial services firm.)

Some of my previously published articles.

• The spiritual organization
• The networked marketplace
• Decision making in groups
• Free riding and social loafing

Corporate blogging - my thoughts

Over at Abhilasha's blog I found some interesting questions raised by her on corporate blogging. In this post I attempt to answer a few of them:

1. Why should my organization blog?
For starters, if you are a consumer facing company (B2C), it helps to have an open conversation with your customer. Customers love to know what their favourite companies are upto. This is more so in the case of products that early adopters love (tech products, gadgets etc). A corporate blog can also become a very human touch point for customers, when compared to a boring website or even worse, a call center!

2. What realistic expectations can my organization have about the benefits of blogging, and what
obvious pitfalls or shortcomings should we be wary of?
A great, engaging blog does a lot more PR than a press release ever will. A great corporate blog can also help develop a loyal community of users around a product. Human beings love to be connnected to causes - sometimes, merely promoting a great product (like the I-pod) can be a cause. A blog can help create such a cause.

3. Who in the organization should blog?
I would say, the most important decision makers should. That way promises made on the blog will carry much more credibility.

4. What role does PR/ Corporate Communications have in this?
None! Blogs are the new age response to that tiring, sugar coated thing called the press relase.

5. What guidelines/policy should govern corporates bloggers?
Preferably none. However office bitching could be avoided!! A broad guideline coule be - say anything you want, as long as it is something that the customer is interested in knowing.

6. How can my organization measure the impact effectiveness of corporate blogging?
There is no need to really measure effectiveness. Think of it this way - what is the impact of a CEO talking one to one with millions of customers everyday? Its difficult to put a number to that. That's because the revenue you earn from a corporate blog is goodwill.

Technorati Tags: corporate blogs, blogging, cluetrain

Kawasaki on market adoption

The top ten stupid ways to hinder market adoption

Guy includes one of my pet peeves - enforced immediate registration - as one of the barriers. Couldn't agree with him more. I don't understand what the additional value 'registration' brings in in an Internet scenario, where identities can easily be faked. I'd rather have a million anonymous users than 100 users about whom I know everything, and whom I can later target for promotional offers.

Corporate blogs

What kind of companies should start blogs to communicate with their customers? My thoughts:

1. Smallish startups that don't have marketing budgets
2. Companies that have very few product lines, or even better just one product. That way the conversation can be 1 to N. N to N conversations are just noise!
3. Companies whose brands directly touch individual customers. I wouldn't recommend a steel maker to start a blog for instance. I would certainly like to see, say, a winemaker with a blog (like this one). People would like to talk to or listen to brands that they directly relate to.
4. Large organizations that have people who are mini-celebrities in their own right - Steve Jobs, Robert Scoble etc.

At the end of the day, a blog is just a medium. The message is always more important than the medium. So, unless you have something compelling to say to your customer don't start a blog!

Networked marketplace

An instance of how brands will suffer if they ignore the emerging networked marketplace.
Looks like Air Deccan will need to do some serious brand rebuilding.

Missed flight, delayed flights and Air Deccan

I think an interesting thing for Air Deccan to try would be to setup a corporate blog, and start an honest conversation with its customers, acknowledge where they are going wrong, and tell us what they are doing to fix things.

The networked marketplace [featured in The Hindu Business Line]

Today's Hindu Business Line carries the following article written by me. Link to the article on the Business Line website: The networked marketplace

Full text of the article follows:

"A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter — and getting smarter faster than most companies." — The Cluetrain Manifesto

The implications are clear. Modern organisations need to be more nimble, more clued into what is happening in the external world — in the real world. They need to `talk' to their customers, not `talk down' to their customers through flashy corporate ads. They need to project a voice that is authentic and not sugar coated in marketing spiel. Companies need to start appearing genuine, human, humane and vulnerable if need be. This is the message of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a pathbreaking book, which in the true spirit of the Internet is available freely on the Web.

Very few companies, if any, have woken up to the reality of the networked world. So, one sees companies that do the market research, decide the product and brand attributes, launch the product and wonder what went wrong. What is likely to have gone wrong is that your customers have been talking to each other and spreading the `word' faster than your `advertisements'. Be it film reviews, music reviews, product and gadget reviews, people are talking, and talking like never before. Products get trashed before the first ad comes out.

Here is an insight that organisations need to pay attention to: Customers trust human voices. This explains why nothing beats word-of-mouth publicity, and today the biggest word of mouth movement is happening on the Internet.

Building Relationships

After all, every purchase made by a customer is a new relationship created with the company whose product the customer has bought. When I receive my monthly phone bill, I notice that it bears a `relationship code'. Yet companies do little to nurture a customer relationship the way a human relationship is nurtured. Strong brands like Google actively engage their customer in the `conversation'. The Google Blog for instance, is a place where customers can see what the guys at Google are up to . It's about time brick-and-mortar companies too embrace this new form of conversation. And as the manifesto says, "Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed."

Employees of organisations are also part of this new form of conversation. People are actively and virtually networking with each other to find out more about each other's organisations. Employer brands are being created and destroyed in this brand new market place as fast as thought and the strokes of a keyboard. Secondly, markets too want to talk to employees. They want the inside track on what really goes into their products. Companies need to let go and let this conversation happen freely. Robert Scoble (Microsoft' erstwhile star blogger) did more to humanise Microsoft than any ad campaign ever would have.

The way forward

As I see it, the way forward would be for companies to view `advertising' as one of the ways of talking to customers, and not the only way. All kinds of organisations need to embrace the power of the Internet as the new global market place where brands will be created and destroyed — where your multi-crore ad spend will be thrown into the bin when your customers rant about your call centre service on their blogs. The future is a world where mere brand logos and taglines wont suffice. It will be a place where brand voice (how your brand talks to your customers) will assume more significance. Brands would need to be `humble' and not mighty; brands will have to understand, rather than be understood; brands will have to listen and not talk.

It's a brand new era that is unfolding (and, indeed has been unfolding over the last few years). Blogs, social networking, Web 2.0 and so on are all going to fundamentally realign the way society is structured, and people will be netizens of the marketplace first and then citizens. The future looks exciting, and archaic institutions will need to embrace this change for their own good.