Author: manu prasad

  • 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 🙂

  • Facebook, Twitter, and the future Wave

    Call it coincidence, but in the last few days, I have read two detailed interviews of the founders of two of the most talked about services  these days- Facebook and Twitter. Coincidence, because my last post ended exactly there – the future of Facebook and Twitter in light of the impending Google Wave.

    Inside Facebook had an interview with Mark Zuckerberg a few days back on his plans and the direction which Facebook would want to take. It starts off with how Facebook’s profiles are based on real identities and that has been at the core of Facebook’s activities, the Newsfeed, the developer community built around the Facebook Platform, and the more recent Facebook Connect. He points out how real identities drives communication, siting examples of how mail on FB is used a lot since people need not remember someone’s mail id. He discusses the rise of content creation – specifically photo sharing. (where Facebook is speeding ahead of competition) On another front, Facebook is also testing out a payment service, which if aligned with Connect, can be useful outside FB too. While on currency, he clarified that FB aims to be cash flow positive next year.While he expects music, location based services and travel to be the main verticals, he says that gaming has been the surprise package.

    Search Engine Land’s talk with Biz Stone on Twitter was also a very interesting read, thanks to references to the repositioning of Twitter, as a sharing and discovery service, aided by the ability to form groups, a redesigned homepage. He also discusses the importance of real-time search and the ballooning of rumours that happens on Twitter. While on the subject of the recent change to the @replies sharing, he talked about creating ‘playlists’ of people that can then be shared.He also spoke about the importance of SMS and how Twitter can be made more useful to beginners – “what do you want to find out” instead of “what are you doing?”. Meanwhile, in a panel discussion in New York, Twitter exec Jack Dorsey commented that he wanted twitter to be as ubiquitous as SMS, but obviously much more advanced and useful than that. I also saw a very useful article recently that discusses the 10 ways Twitter will change US business, which include hyper local marketing, measurement of other media, replacing message boards for stock/financial discussions, democratisation of media, data mining, news alerts, micro payments, effect on telecom companies and governmental agencies, and fund raising. But there’s something about Twitter that goes beyond all this, maybe I am a bit biased, but check out this excellent read on the subject.

    Now in this context, let’s take a look at Wave. If Google is able to sync existing high profile properties like You Tube, Blogger, Picasa, News, Calendar, Latitude, Orkut and even say Knol and Reader, a lot of the advantages of Facebook that pertain to real profiles might cease to be huge advantages, since my connections on Google are usually people I already know – real people, so to speak. The other point is that all these services have quite huge crowds on their own, and sets of crowds that use combinations of these services. It remains to be seen whether Google finds it worthwhile to provide integration options on Wave, and then top it with real time conversations, and the ability to create portable waves. The consolation for FB is that so far, Google has not been able to do any breathtaking synergy exercises.

    Twitter seems to be moving towards harnessing the power of crowds to help people find what they’re looking for. Twitter’s dual strengths, IMHO, are still its simplicity, that allows it to be used for a variety of purposes, and the army of developers who create apps that actually transform these concepts into usable tools. The overlap of my Twitter crowd and Gtalk (and so possibly Wave, when that happens) is in decimal percentages, but if Wave can use its ‘openness’ to connect friends of friends..to a few degrees, that advantage might be lost sooner than later. Wave might also be able to replicate the real time advantages and the ease of use that makes twitter so useful. To be noted that twitter is working on Verified Accounts.

    I’d say that both Facebook and Twitter have to work harder and faster if they’ve to offset the effects of Wave. They will obviously not disappear overnight, but users might actually question the ‘utility’ of being on the networks. On its part, Google’s success with Wave will all depend a lot on how they manage to integrate their services, and the kind of apps that the developer community manages to bring out.

    until next time, the changing status quo? 😉

  • Wave Content

    And just when Microsoft seemed to get moving on Google, with Bing, its new search engine (in case you haven’t heard) with a $80-100 million ad budget, and bundling the real time social search engine OneRiot with IE8, Google comes right back with what could potentially be a game changer for a whole set of services, including Facebook and Twitter, in addition to the obvious mail, and search services. Last week, most of the web world were giving raves for Google Wave. In many ways it took the zing out of MS’s announcements.

    Look no further than Mashable’s Google Wave guide for details. To summarise, Google Wave combines email, chat, IM, wikis, social networking and many other potential uses. A ‘wave’ is a conversation thread that can feature one or more friends and even bots (that can source and modify information, communicate with users etc) and have documents, videos, images, maps etc, there’s drag and drop file sharing too. It can be modified by any participant, who can also add other participants and all this and can even be taken outside to say, a blog. And all this is real time, and really real time, where I can even see the other participant/s typing.  There are also gadgets (like Facebook apps) built on the OpenSocial platform. (so if someone develops a Scrabble gadget, we can play a multi user game live, and maybe add photos of our playing while at it). And there’s an API for developers to build more and more applications. To really understand what the fuss is all about, check out the video. Its way more than an email+real time communication and collaboration  tool on steroids. But with all this content, Google really needs to have a lot of storage space.

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

    Wave seems to be aiming at turning the entire concept of social networking on its head. Instead of a single service (Facebook/Twitter), a conversation could be started on anyone’s Wave interface, participants dragged in, and new content created and collaborated upon, and then taken outside. Take a few Google products, for starters – Blogger, Google News, Picasa, YouTube and imagine what one could do with real time collaboration on these. Create a post, have live comments, and then post it. Wait, maybe I won’t even bother to post it!! I am wondering what sort of privacy settings would happen here, would we able to create groups (like say, FB) and set different criteria for different sets?

    Now, look outside Google, say Twave – Twitter + wave, that uses a Tweety Google bot to display your entire Twitter feed on Wave, where you can archive it, thread conversations and so on. Imagine what this could do to say, news reporting. Live wikis, with witnesses collaborating to create authentic news stories, and the crowd being the check and balance.

    Gmail is addictive, and many users usually neglect their other ids after they become used to the functionality of GMail. If Wave does deliver all the above, then the season’s favourites – Facebook and Twitter really need to look over their shoulder, more so, because the new stream creator is not just another player, its Google. There’s another aspect I am thinking about. Mashable’s testing report states that “Central to Google Wave’s interface is search – you create specific searches based on not only keywords, but activity, history, person, and more.”  Unlike FB and Twitter, GMail users are used to ads, if Google Wave starts off with ads, the resistance to it might not be a lot, especially if they’re of the useful contextual+semantic kind. Twitter was called a protocol (Seth Godin, I think), perhaps the protocol standards have been upped.

    Meanwhile, though i think that Google Wave is a great piece of work, as always, I am also worried about Google being the beginning and end of my web experience. There’s just too much power there. 🙂

    until next time, surf the wave

  • Inside Intel

    A video that was shared yeterday on Facebook by a friend got me to check out Intel’s latest global campaign – Sponsors of Tomorrow. I then remembered that a few days back I’d seen a half jacket (a page takeover on pages 1, 2) in TOI, which talked about the same thing though it seemed a cobranded effort with TOI called Innovators of tomorrow. [Disclosure: I work for the Times Group.]

    The campaign videos on YouTube were quite interesting. In addition to the ‘Rock star’ and ‘Oops’ TVCs, there are also videos of real employees at intel (is that the same Ajay Bhatt referred to in the Rock star video?) and an interactive ‘In the future i want..‘ which featured random people interviewed at the Times Square, and billboards which displayed these ‘ideas’. I was a bit intrigued by the campaign, and a Google search took me to the press kit and the official site.

    While the tagline is ‘Sponsors of tomorrow’, the campaign’s communication strategy seems to be two pronged – one, to expand on the line, and show what happens behind the scenes and how through innovation, they aim to be the ‘sponsors of tomorrow’, and two, to promote the people behind the technology. What got me intrigued was the execution.

    The single line take outs from the videos were – “Our big ideas aren’t like your big ideas”, “Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars”. While the videos are indeed funny and convey the perspective clearly,  I wonder if those are the kind of statements, that will really inspire people to send in ideas. From the Innovators of Tomorrow effort and the website, there seems to be an agenda of interactivity, since it calls for ideas.

    On innovation and technology. Somewhere, hidden in the press release, I saw a sentence that amounted to “Its not technology, its what technology can do for them that’s important to people”. It’d have been great to see Intel expand on this and show consumers what Intel technology has made possible and what it is attempting to make possible. The global site wasn’t very impressive. “You on tomorrow” is the interactivity effort there and I promptly filled up “in the future I want__________” with “websites that load faster” and that wasn’t being frivolous. Maybe I’m reading too much science fiction, but even the 2128 Delhi video wasn’t very futuristic – holography and body scan after 19 years isn’t exactly the kind of advancement a bleeding edge  technology giant like Intel should limit its imagination to, IMHO.

    People behind the technology. Funny videos and self deprecating humour is great, the point is made. But if they wanted to showcase the people behind the efforts, this seems to be a better thing to have promoted – employee blogs. (the first comment is worth a read) And better ways using different platforms to get the people working on the technology to share how the technology they work on helps improve consumer experiences, lifestyles etc. That might generate a little more involvement than ads showing how Intel’s rock stars are different, and interactive games that deal with suiting up an engineer!! As a consumer this just made Intel geekier for me. What happens inside Intel is  definitely important, however, what it does to life outside could’ve been a more effective communication from an interactivity perspective. What do you think?

    until next time, I don’t think Intel will sponsor tomorrow’s posts 😉

    The views expressed here are solely mine, that really should go without saying. But we live in an evil world. 🙂

  • Zoozoology..and more

    The jury is still out (and perhaps permanently so) on who actually won the IPL – the fake IPL player or the Zoozoos. Both massively popular, they even have conspiracy theories built around them – the identity in case of  the former and the inspiration(cached) in case of the latter. There is even a minority who claim that actually the Deccan Chargers won, but that really isn’t relevant. 😉

    I thought the Zoozoos were adorable. The usage of Mallu food terminology in the International Roaming ad added to the fervour. I remember starting at least 2-3 conversation threads on Facebook and Twitter, the ‘people behind the zoozoos’ image i shared on Twitpic got more than 250 clicks, and I saw quite a number of online and mainstream articles on them. Yes, there were many real conversations as well across age bands. There is no doubt in my mind on the amount of buzz that was created.

    As per the afaqs article, the Vodafone brief seemed to be very clear – increase the awareness of VAS services among new acquisitions in a manner that would really stand out.  A small number of people I spoke to managed to remember the VAS services associated with each ad. I felt that the lateral interpretation of the services, or rather the rendition of that, made me try to connect before the ad ended, so it worked for me.  I even started seeing them in unrelated contexts. But a lot of people just remembered the zoozoos. Just like they remembered the pug. Now the association betweenthe Zoozoos and Vodafone would be established easily, I think, since the competition was Madhavan and Vidya Balan.

    But then, there are these little things that happen outside advertising and in the consumer experience space. Like the ‘Hutch’ that appears as the network on my phone screen. Last week, I got this call from a Vodafone customer care executive, who informed me that I could pay my bill by ECS, and that was more convenient than my current way of paying by cash. Nice, but the only snag was, I’d been using ECS for more than 3 years now. I now wonder how my billing happens smoothly.

    All of this made me think about two things. One, whether brands are thinking about segmenting their existing and potential user base, and then further evolving strategies and communication basis this. So, while the Zoozoos were extremely entertaining and informative, I really wondered about relevance. Did the Zoozoos change my perception of Vodafone? Would there have been a difference if Airtel or Reliance brought out the Zoozoos? Not just to me, who is often irritated by the Vodafone service (like many others in Bangalore) thanks to coverage and call drops, but other user segments as well.  Is this way of communication just a function of the media vehicles that are in use now, which allow very limited ways of segmentation? Will the internet and mobile really change this thinking?

    Two, from a slightly larger perspective, will buzz marketing become an end in itself? Somewhat like the trending topics on twitter, which earlier gave an indication of what the ‘happening’ conversations on Twitter were, but now are just self fulfilling memes. The Twitter reference indicates unhappiness but the original query is in all earnestness. Buzz marketing with no trackback to the brand strategy? Is this more tempting when we’re dealing with a real time way of connecting and communicating? How does this stack up against building brand equity over large timeframes? Does it matter anymore? Or is a positive history of buzz marketing sufficient? In the case of Vodafone, they succeeded in creating so much buzz that editorial space in mainstream dailies were devoting space to them. Online, there were FB groups and Twitter mentions and posts after posts. I could write about engagement and conversation in social media, but where does all that lead to? Where do the Zoozoos go from here? Do they continue to be brand mascots, or are they good enough only for a buzz? Good enough to increase TOM and therefore affect sales in a tactical way?  So, is frequent buzz marketing + good consumer experience = brand strategy? Meanwhile, if the buzz has been generated, can we put up a few more towers and spruce up the data centre?

    until next time, omnibuzz