Month: June 2009

  • A Small detail

    This post is special and the devil is in the details. Just as it is in the logo, according to some. Anyway, the details are simple – this happens to be the 666th post. Sau, what better time than this to coin an evil ‘pachpun’ – since this is also the blog’s 100th 55 word post? 😉

    until next time, a devil-may-care post

  • Its trending, trending..gone

    Much of last week’s discussions online revolved around some interesting news about, well, Twitter 🙂 . From the Twitpocaypse scare (“it will happen because the unique identifier –a signed integer, associated with each tweet will exceed 2,147,483,647 which is the limit of signed integers. At this point many of the third party clients for Twitter could either malfunction or crash if they are not coded to handle this problem”), which has been averted, to the Harvard study that brought out, among other things, the fact that 10% users contribute to 90% of tweets, Twitter, as is it is prone to these days, has been in the thick of the action. Facebook did have its own share of the spotlight thanks to the vanity url, but let’s save that discussion for another day. 🙂

    But among all this, the news that interested me was that Twitter’s rate of growth – that has been giving graph watchers neck cricks so far, thanks to stellar growth, seems to have flattened drastically at 1.47%, even as Facebook continues to grow at a healthy 8.54%. Though I did expect this to happen at some point, the timing was quite surprising, especially since Twitter has been getting a lot of mainstream attention these days, and even brands (most recently Pepsi) have been promoting it. I wonder if I could correlate this with the recent usage of Twitter (self fulfilling trends and ‘Spymaster’, for example) which has contributed to the reduction of my usage considerably. Back to that in a while.

    When i read that statistic, I couldn’t help but remember the article I had come across a few days back titled “Why Things become unpopular“. “According to the results, the quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies. This pattern occurs because people believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, leading them to avoid these items, thus causing these items to die out.”  I have to wonder if this applies to Twitter, Facebook and the other similar services. Now, for this result to not apply, there has to be obviously some utility that makes it go beyond a fad.

    Facebook seems to be in quite a good growth phase (even excluding the high growth coming from its international success). Does this have anything to do with the relative non-anonymity inherent in the service and the relatively limited number of uses that a majority of its users care to indulge in. In other words, is the Twitter user’s relative anonymity (which might be dealt with soon with Verified accounts) and lack of a specific purpose proving to be a disadvantage for the service? The trends, aimless banter could thus be a manifestation of the latter? Of course, all this would be irrelevant if this is just a minor glitch in its growth story. But meanwhile, if users were signing on, not finding the service to be of value, and then conveying this in discussions (WOM), wouldn’t it result in such dismal growth? Also remember that a recent study pegged the non returning users at some 60%. I, for one am still a Twitter user, but my ‘conversion’ rate is a dismal 1 in 10. And in the remaining 9, at least 6 are fairly active on FB. Ok, maybe its just me. 🙂

    Moving further, I also wonder about the impact of this finding on brands and their strategies. Is it fair to assume that, earlier, in a relatively less connected world,  trends and fads took more time to be formed, and therefore had lasting power. In today’s hyper connected world, a viral phenomenon reaches the peak of its popularity in no time. So what does this imply for brands, keeping in mind the perspective that Twitter, FB, You Tube etc are great platforms for virals. I would also like to question the ‘inherent value’ of a fad in earlier times, compared to now. Is it lesser? Say, a particular hairstyle vs a viral video on You Tube? Apples and pineapples, but still..? Meanwhile, assuming brands provide a great value proposition, do they make themselves hotbeds of trends, or do they look for longer lasting cycles? Is a balance possible? Given the frantic pace of technological advancement and its impact on lifestyles, would the audience really care about trends stretched over a long time, so is maximum reach in minimum time the way to go? From a business as well as brand objective point of view? Would that signal the end of organic communities? This decision could have implications on brands’ communication strategy, if not anything else.

    until next time, trend setter or follower?

  • Coastaal Express

    Hmm, while you could be pardoned for thinking about a special coastal train with piped music, its actually a restaurant and judging from the piped music, I don’t think a love for music had anything to do with that being the name. I’m guessing numerology.Don’t even think Ekkspress, evil soul!! :p

    So, this place is a bit away from  our regular haunts but since we had to go to that part of town for some other purpose, we thought we might as well drop in at Shivananda Circle, especially since my previous experience there was wonderfully fishy 🙂 . Here’s the map, and if that is confusing, lets make it simple. MG Road- Raj Bhavan Road-Race Course Road (Taj West End), take a right when you see Petals on your right, as soon as you turn, you’ll see the Solitaire Hotel on your left. Keep going straight and you’ll hit Shivananda Circle (its the next traffic signal) and see Coastaal Express on your left, but the other side of the road. So, don’t take a left turn at the junction, just go straight and turn left at the next bylane and another left, where you can park. Then just walk up the road, and you’ll have the place on the left. (Why do I get this feeling that these directions turned out more confusing, just like the erm, Left?) The first floor has the a/c section, and that’s where we went.

    The ambience is quite good – they have this quaint display of old cooking utensils as soon as you enter, and the  seating is quite comfortable. We reached there around 8.15 and quite surprisingly, found only one table occupied, though by the time we feft an hour later, most of the tables were full. The menu starts with coastal food, but I also found an extensive Chinese section, complete with about 8 veg and non veg soups each, and a huge selection of starters and main course dishes. Ditto for the North Indian section (without the soups though) While you might wonder about the intelligence of this, i have seen enough people eating chow mein and dal makhani at such places for its presence to be justified. No, not that combination, thank God.

    In the sea food section, there are different versions of squid, prawn and crab, even chinese and tandoor versions. Choices of fish too – anjal, kane, pomfret, silverfish, bangda. Mussels are not available, you could try a marvai sukka though. And to go with that – kori roti, moode, appam, pundi (rice balls) or if you’re a larger group, a coastal basket which has all these. And there are quite a few veg dishes too. There are thali options for lunch – veg, fish and chicken at Rs. 55, 80, 85 respectively.

    We started with an anjal (king fish) masala fry – a single piece, we thought would be enough, a half portion of chicken ghee roast, and to go along with that, a plate each of moode and appam (2). Serving time will be at least 30 mins, the menu says. Bingo, and when the food got to us – we asked for it to be brought together, we realised that we would need one more plate of appam and also ordered a kane rava fry. The anjal fry would’ve been great if not for the all pervasiveness of salt, ditto for the chicken, in which you have six pieces with a pasty ‘gravy’. It went well enough with the appam and moode. The kane rava fry was excellent though – crisp and crunchy. The appam was made very well, and so was the moode. Moode tastes similar to sannas, but is  smaller and more cylindrical.

    One word of caution here – the kane and anjal are priced according to size, so you might want to ask the price beforehand. We actually didn’t bother, and realised that one anjal piece cost us Rs.180, which was really not worth it. The kane rava fry (2 pieces) cost us Rs.160, over priced, we felt, but was at least worth it.

    The dessert section had the usual suspects, from fruit sald and ice cream to gajar ka halwa and gulab jamun and caramel custard. For those who are wondering, they serve liquor too.

    The total bill came to just over Rs.700. I’d say Something Fishy is a much better bet.

    Coastaal Express, 6/4, Shivananda Complex, Sivananda Circle, Ph: 22355094/95

    Menu at Zomato

  • Power play

    He felt it was below his dignity to ask his team member for the solution. After all he was the manager.
    The team member, who had just gotten the solution, froze as he felt a hand on his shoulder, but relaxed when the manager asked, “Level 7, huh? But how did you cross Level 6?

    until next time, bench warm up games..

  • Ad Hawks

    I made a mental note not to write back to back to back posts about tools, but I have allowed myself this exemption because though the post is about Digg and Twitter, its equally about advertising/revenue models.

    Last week, Digg announced Digg Ads, their new advertising platform, to be released as a pilot in a few months. Sponsored ads, marked so, will appear as part of the stream, and the twist is that the more the ad is dugg, the lesser the advertiser will have to pay. The idea, of course, is that the more relevant/interesting/entertaining the ads are to the audience, the more it can be seen as content, and the lesser the advertiser pays. I am not a Digg user, though I do have an account, but it does remind me of the thumbs up/down concept on Facebook. I have to wonder if Facebook will now release contextual ads in the stream, and use the same mechanism. And then perhaps move to the ‘everyone gets paid’ mechanism that I had mentioned in an earlier post on recommendations.

    Meanwhile, on to twitter, the two business models that i read about a few days back were Sponsored Tweets from Izea, (via RWW), to be launched in a month or so; and Super Chirp (via Tech Crunch) that’s already live. Versions of these concepts already exist in the market – Magpie and Twitpub respectively. As per the Adweek article, “Sponsored Tweets .. will offer Twitter users the option of sending their followers messages about brands and products. Twitterers will get paid based either on the number of clicks they receive or on a flat fee per Tweet.” Izea plans to capitalise on the “built in viral appeal” of Twitter and the sponsored tweets will carry a #spon hashtag. #spon is bound to spawn spam and let’s just say I expect to see #spon trending 😉 Super Chirp is a totally different  concept. As per the site, the mechanism is fairly simple – Super Chirp allows you to “chirp” via direct message to people who pay to “subscribe” to you. If you are a publisher, you can make use of your existing Twitter account, you set the monthly price for your content, users subscribe to your content on the Super Chirp website, pay via Paypal, and then get the messages via DM. Super Chirp keeps 30% and you keep the rest. Its obviously a concept worth checking out for celebrities, and those who can give timely, essential info like say, stock tips. Judging by the way people pay for the Rs.30/month VAS items on mobile, I’m sure this can be put to good use. And while the micropayment concept for news has been dissed, I wonder if some news service provider would experiment with this. And why just news providers,  if i were live tweeting from events – ranging from WWDC to the Mumbai blasts, this could at least pay for coffee 🙂

    Sponsored Tweets is ‘push’, but the publisher uses his pull among the crowd. Interesting that an advertiser might get negative vibes because of the publisher’s greed. Digg Ads is ‘push’ but rewarding the advertiser if he makes a favourable impression on the crowd.  Super Chirp is ‘pull’ and it’ll be interesting to see how the publishers fare. Of the three, Sponsored Tweets is closest to the advertising we see in traditional media today.  Digg Ads lend some democracy and forces advertisers to be interesting and non intrusive. A step ahead of the Google Ad Sense model, I’d venture. Super Chirp is more publisher driven, it is like starting from scratch, building an audience based on absolute value delivered – I like the content, I pay for it. Though i hope they have some system for preventing RTs (which would render the subscription model useless) I like the path, like Umair Haque says in this awesome post, “Today, viral economies pass links and messages from person to person. What will they pass tomorrow — cars, jobs, houses?”

    In all of this, even Sponsored Tweets because I trust the system to correct ‘evil’, what made me take notice and be a bit happy was that we were moving away from an inventory based advertising set up of fixed time/ad space – pushing advertising, towards creating more value for everyone concerned by involving the end consumer in the process. In many views, I see them as different versions of content marketing. Whether we are seeing a new advertising model, is something time will answer. No, not the magazine silly!! 😉

    until next time, add sense 🙂