Author: manu prasad

  • Brands & Media Metrics

    Rajesh Lalwani raised an interesting point in his post a few days back, on how the performance of a social media campaign should not be judged solely by the buzz it generates, since a lot of conversations flow ‘below the surface’ i.e. emails, telecons and face-to-face. I’d also add Chat (the GTalk type) and DM.

    My reply consisted of several parts, and some of it got me thinking on the concept of ‘measurement’.  Among other things,  I felt that, relatively speaking, it is more convenient to measure buzz (a social media search or even a Google search) than the ‘below the surface’ versions. You really can’t track what I speak with someone else on GTalk. But more importantly I felt that this love for measurement stems from a need for control.

    So I looked back at the brand campaigns around, the media used and the measurement. Following is a rant.(and is quite India specific) Though its extremely relevant, I shall, for now, ignore brands’ following a ‘campaign strategy’ at the cost of brand strategy. Generally, the campaign would consist of Outdoor (billboards), Print, Television, Radio and *new* Internet. So, lets see the measurement criteria for these. Outdoor – you can’t go wrong with one on Brigade Road- Residency Road (that’s Bangalore) junction, everyone goes there. Print – XYZ has circulation and readership of …. Television – XYZ channel and the TRPs it delivers. Radio – say RAM and listenership. While there are numbers and numbers, there is really no way to figure out exactly how many people saw/heard the ad and responded (not even if you put call centre numbers/email ids/call ins).  The sales spike that happens on the day the ad is released is the indicator of its success in print. If ‘people’ saw/heard it, TV/Outdoor/Radio has worked. Yes, I’m generalising, and I do know what value market research can offer. And so Internet. Now the internet obviously needs to match up to the awesome quantitative measurement options that the other media provide. 😐

    And so the brand guys waited for the net to show some real numbers. And it did, as it was bound to. Depending on who you ask, this number could now vary anywhere over 28 million users. ComScore puts India’s net population at 32 million, and within that, the social networking population at 19 million, Orkut firmly leading with 12.8 million. The figure reminded me of the leading English daily’s readership – as per IRS R2 2008, it was 13.3 million. 🙂

    And while the numbers rose, the digital sellers walked in with the stats and taught the brand guys CTR, CPC, CPM (no, that’s not political)  and to use banners and site takeovers and microsites on the net. The measurement criteria was made up of numbers. So, the internet with the amazing CPT (cost per thousand) it provides, is no longer an afterthought in a media plan (Thanks to R, who gave me her valuable thoughts on media planning). Pay for Performance was the mantra and its pillars were leads and clicks.Is that a problem? Not by itself, but when you consider the potential the medium offers, and how it can be used for measurable branding, its not a problem, its an injustice. To quote from this wonderful article on the subject

    In fact it is precisely this cult of accountability that is getting in the way of the digital community progressing from clever marketing handymen to the architects of brand success….So long as the digital community clings to its obsession with accountability over effectiveness it will remain in the unedifying position of creating engaging brand fluff on the one hand and highly measurable but largely pointless direct response advertising on the other.

    All these are not unknown issues. WATBlog’s panel discussion in Delhi covered much of this. And with all this playing in the background, arrives social media. And it won’t make sense because brands only use media on a campaign to campaign basis, and social media is about the brand’s strategy and a consistent presence- building an audience, listening to them, asking their views, collecting insights, making better products, and so on. It is not about statistics and definitely not a get in-bombard with ads- collect leads-get out deal. Besides, measurements are more qualitative!! The criteria that mass media provides for measurement are almost irrelevant here, and rightly so!! Because in social media, the crowd responds, they talk to each other, and if you don’t participate, and attempt to treat it like a broadcast medium (the way the measurement based web is being treated), someone is likely to have fun, most likely at your expense. And in social media, what a brand says is less important than what the brand’s consumers say.

    Like the general web before it, it is only a matter of time  before the social web  reaches a scale which forces brands to use it. I hope they don’t use it like broadcast media, and instead learn to use it – not as a templated solution, but as a subjective, evolving mechanism.

    until next time, cast away

    Note: i have nothing against mass media. It has its uses. I have a problem with this social media measurement obsession, without the correct metrices and by involving it only from a communication perspective and not the other parts of the brand’s life cycle, and finally stating that it’s just fun and doesn’t work for brands.

  • Product Life Cycle and Consumer Life Cycles

    One of the social web’s by products er, products, are “shiny new objects”. (new services that launch and send us enthusiasts into a tizzy. All the web 2.0 greats were shiny new objects at some point in time)  There were a couple of wonderful posts I read in this context. The first is Rex Hammock’s excellent post on how we obsess over these for sometime, and then move on. Yes, I know you know that, but its the next part that’s interesting.

    Then one day about three years later, you notice people who aren’t obsessed with shiny new objects are talking about something four-or-five shiny new objects ago and you wonder: Why is everyone obsessed with this?

    This happens to me occasionally, the latest example being a few guys tweeting about the Baba Ramdev- Chrome ad that was circulated around quite a few months back.

    The second post was great, right from the title – The Loneliness of the Early Adopter, and when i shared it on Friendfeed, at least a couple of guys liked it. I confess I’m more at the borderline of early majority and early adopter, (refer this ) but I could empathise with a lot of that post.

    Now, a long way back, Jeremiah had an awesome post on Applying a social computing strategy to the entire product lifecycle. As the title suggests, its about listening to consumers, collaborating on product development, filtering out the right consumers, learning from them and supporting them and in essence, utilising the social web in all parts of the PLC. Here’s another great post in Social Media Explorer on the same theme.

    Twitter and more so Friendfeed (as this Mashable article explains) and Facebook (commenting on status and other elements of the newsfeed, the ‘Like’ feature) are great examples of how the product/service is evolving with the consumer and his preferences. Increasingly consumers are ‘creating’ a use or finding a way to fulfill a need gap from a basic service.

    The question is, who is the consumer? I’m trying to juxtapose the Product life cycle with a consumer life cycle. Are the tastes and preferences of the early adopters markedly different from that of the late majority? As the adoption of various social media services rapidly increases, who would a service target, and will it be at the cost of another segment? Different consumers, located at different points on the Roger’s bell curve will use the service at the same time. How can these possibly different sets of expectations be met? Will there be variations of the same service for different categories of users? I don’t see the issue being addressed a lot now, that possibly explains why a lot of people leave say, Twitter after a few tweets/days since they can’t figure out what’s happening? Would a ‘nOOb version’ have helped? Social media is about customisation too, and this might be something that needs to be answered soon, as these services become mass.

    until next time, handling a cycle on a curve 🙂

  • Paper Money

    There was a wonderful post in the Edelman Digital blog titled ‘The Last Newspaper‘. An insightful, well balanced and objective take on stories and content which perhaps captures the newspaper and web relationship best. From the post

    Stories are personal and transformational. Stories have definition and character. Stories are history personified.

    But content is cold, distant. Content is a commodity – a finite consumable of fleeting value. Content is artificial intelligence.

    Quite a paradox for brands that handle stories, when we consider that brands that tell the most interesting stories are loved by consumers. Taking it to a not-so-appealing premise was this question that was asked on Friendfeed recently, by Adam Lasnik.

    “I’m becoming increasingly concerned about the growing sensationalism in online “journalism.” Will the pursuit of pageviews ultimately trump integrity and thoughtfulness? I’m seriously worried.”

    When news becomes a commodity, publishers have to find a way to make theirs look more appealing than someone else’s. This is an unfortunate but inevitable by product.

    Publishers. On one side, we have Kindle 2, and its competitors (via @chupchap) work on an alternate platform for news delivery, and on the other, we have The Printed Blog rolling out a printed newspaper. Meanwhile, we  have Japanese newspapers collaborating for an iphone app. We also have an entity like NYT, which carries an op-ed article stating that perhaps non-profit, endowment based system is the way forward for newspapers, but is still the world’s best newspaper website,  taking radical steps to figure out ways to evolve, basis the understanding that newspapers are perhaps not the preferred means of delivery anymore – an API which offers developers access to 2.8 million articles from NYT, and another that gives developers data on the sharing and reading habits of Times People’s registered users. In essence, from a newspaper or even a news website, it transforms itself into a platform on which users and developers can use this mound of information for various purposes, and the possibility of linking it all together semantically. In context, an article from over 2 years back, still relevant.

    Closer to home, the top Indian newspapers are still grappling with the issue of how to handle themselves on the web. That’s not to say that some publications aren’t trying. HT, for example, has started blogs recently. Now you could turn around and say that’s basic, but that’s the state of Indian print media for you. Future revenue models are not even being thought of in most places. From their three main sources of revenue – subscription, stand sales and advertising, the first two are at best on plateaus and the last is suffering, largely due to recession. Recently, there was even a delegation of publication owners that approached the government for help!! Maybe they should be doing this instead – collaborative link journalism by Publish2. Vernacular papers are in better shape. But for English newspapers, i really don’t know what’s a better time to start thinking about future revenue.

    In that context, this post correctly states that micropayments for news (here’s a rebuttal too)  is not an option. Some revenue could be possible by making some parts of the content paid for, as the NYT is planning, but that still cannot be the main source of revenue. I am wondering how well a subscription model based on a different platform (mobile) could work. The news alerts on SMS are only the tip. While GPRS penetration is not exactly astounding, it is bound to grow especially in the segment that the English newspapers operate in, so perhaps it is a path to be explored. Locality based, contextual advertising could be fun.

    Newspapers, especially in India, would do well to heed a great piece of advice that I got from this post on brands, and the need for evolution. (via Gabriel Rossi)

    “Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” William Pollard

    Its not merely a change in delivery platform or an API that makes the move by NYT so radical. Its the mindset change, and until Indian newspapers realise that, no efforts will make long term sense. For now, they are smug in treating only other newspapers as competition, not even considering the possibility of an entire army of vertical-specialised content providers who now have digital media which gives them advantages like never before, to generate and distribute content.

    until next time, paper tigers…

    PS. This – Google buying a paper mill and converting it into a data centre, I thought, was very symbolic.

  • More than fizz and froth

    While the recession hits the economies worldwide, the cola giants have been trying their bubbly best to get the fizz back into the lives of their target audience, through hope and optimism campaigns.

    Pepsi began proceedings with its new logo, accompanied by a tagline “Every generation refreshes the world”. You can catch an entire set of creatives in this New Year video. On an aside, the (yet to be proved conclusively) brief for this campaign has caused much amusement. You really have to take a look – it is bizarre and includes everything from gravitational pull and thr relativity of space-time to Mona Lisa and the Bible!! (via psfk) Meanwhile, Coke rolled out its ‘Open Happiness’ campaign a few weeks later, complete with a massive campaign and 2 new Super Bowl spots, prompting the question “Who smiled first“. The answer turned out to be Obama, but Pepsi claimed that finally Coke was following them. Coke pointed out that it had started using smiley logos six months back.

    Critics have been skeptical about Coke moving away from the ‘Coke side of life’. Pepsi, they say, having always been a youthful brand has been able to bring out a more buoyant and less laboured campaign. In India, they’ve decided to be totally Youngistan, with SRK no longer a brand ambassador, leaving us stuck with Ranbir Kapoor’s adventures. Some respite recently from Dhoni and gang, with the baap connection.

    Meanwhile, these campaigns also made me wonder whether typical mass media communication and feel good campaigns are indeed the way to connect during such troubled times,  more so when I read this article by Tom Martin in AdAge. It talks about “the simple human need to connect to others.”

    And that brings me to a brilliant campaign I’ve seen (virtually) – froth brand this time, instead of fizz- Starbucks’ “I’m In” campaign, (in association with ‘Hands On Network’) “ an initiative to make it easy to participate in the President-elect’s call for national service.” The campaign allows a person to pledge five hours or more of community service toward a local volunteer opportunity of choice. It rewards the person with a free coffee. The goal is to raise pledges in excess of one million hours of service from all over the country. You can catch the results here. This is what is correctly described as ‘marketing with meaning‘ – which includes several facets – social, personal, storytelling, disruptive, responsible, each of which gives individuals different sets of incentives to be part of the campaign. Starbucks timed the campaign brilliantly – Obama’s inauguration week, and got itself an Oprah Effect. It has all the ingredients required to make a consumer want to be associated with the campaign, and has used the social web very well.

    Now I’m not sure of Coke/Pepsi in the US have tangible renditions of the happiness theme on ground, but I know several campaigns in India which have paid lip service to excellent themes/ideas and have ended up looking superficial. In the times and circumstances we live in, there are excellent opportunities for brands to genuinely do good to society within the sphere of their category, and thereby increase their equity in the consumer’s mind.  (Jaago re is a great example) I wonder how many brands will see this.

    until next time, a lot can happen over coffee 🙂

    PS. While on fizzy stuff, did you hear about the RSS launching cow’s urine as a soft drink? Called gau-jal, its undergoing laboratory tests and would be launched “very soon, maybe by the end of this year”. Sumant suggests Mo (rarji) Desai in low riding jeans, basketball jersey and bling, as brand ambassador, and I suggested the tagline Pee yo! Wonder if Coke and Pepsi are pissed 😉

  • For a few dollars more…

    This won’t be the first time I’ve written about Twitter’s revenue model, and I suspect it won’t be the last. In fact, the last time I wrote about it, it was in the context of the deal that almost happened between Facebook and Twitter. Its been a couple of months, so I thought its a good time to check what both have been upto on the subject of revenues.

    There was a scare recently on how Facebook is going to make money by selling users’ data, but that turned out just to be misinterpreted statements, based on a demo that they did at Davos to show real time crowd insights, and had nothing to do with the Engagement Advertising model. Facebook has been growing very fast, (stats) and though this is claimed to be a demo, real time insights (permission based) from the exact target audience could indeed add a lot of value to brands, and any other entity that could be interested in data. Market research firms should actually be working with Facebook and starting to develop pools specific to their client’s audiences. With Facebook implementing the Friendfeed style ‘Like’ feature, the tools are becoming as simple as possible.

    Meanwhile, I also wonder about the data that could come from the sites that have been tied through Facebook Connect, especially since there are some big names in their respective fields. This could reveal a lot more about the individual’s interests – basis his interaction with the other sites, and that data would be easier to handle since in many cases the site’s content would dictate the context, unlike the generic data that could be picked up on Facebook itself. This would be an interesting space to watch, and that’s an understatement.

    A simple yet possibly history making story of how Twitter was made. And in another simple yet profound statement, Seth Godin described it as a protocol. And yet another good one which describes it as a social experiment. Which then raises the question of how a revenue model can be made for this protocol or experiment. As someone once said, “Twitter is what you make it to be”. There are pains too. Twitter’s humble origins and the scale envisioned may not have made a vision mandatory then, and there is also talk that Twitter could ‘go for years’ without earning, but to survive in the long term, Twitter does need a vision, one that’d then give some direction for its revenue model.

    There have been many entities trying to use the stream for transmitting ads, adCause and TwitterHawk, being the latest, but honestly, it does seem like a force fit. But I’ll admit that the location+context based approach of TwitterHawk does seem very interesting. In fact, there have been many apps built around Twitter, some of which require the user to give the Twitter password to use the service, and there have been security problems thanks to that too. Hopefully that’ll get sorted out once OAuth is implemented, perhaps we’ll see a new generation of mashups too, leading Twitter towards a revenue model. Here are some very interesting thoughts on Twitter, including searching conversations based on category, and a marketplace around conversations and real products. Its interesting to note that brands have already begun experimenting with Twitter, and with tangible expectations, as the recent Dell promo of exclusive deals shows.  More likely to follow that model with the launch of TwtQpon. In this context, check out CheapTweet too. Meanwhile, here’s a good set of thoughts for Twitter revenue.

    Twitter Contest-Denuology Entry94 Update

     

    With enterprise versions (Yammer)and even college versions (Wiggio), Twitter needs to hurry, if it does not want to lose out segments altogether. This story about Twitter thinking about charging brands is turning out to be true. I can imagine those social media evangelists within organisations groaning already!! But all the best, and we await the Business Product Manager. 🙂

    While Twitter scores on the real time aspect (my opinion since I use both) Facebook offers a lot more easily available data on an individual’s demographics, interests etc. The other parameter is that while Facebook is being adopted by the masses easily, Twitter does require a bit of getting used to. Facebook might have to sweat a bit to crack real time, and Twitter would have to do many things – consider scaling up groups to other regions, have better ways of segregating conversations and data mining.  But in the end, it all does seem to boil down to using real time information of potential/existing consumers, with precise demographics and interests based targeting.

    We keep saying that social media and its tools are all about the human touch, and the personalisation. And brands utilising these platforms should understand that. I wonder if the same applies to revenue models too, and whether this extreme customisation will mean that both these networks will find it difficult to conceptualise and then implement, revenue templates, that will fit all.

    until next time, money makes the social world go around 😐