Category: Strategy

  • Brands going places

    So, almost a year after I blogged here about Cafe Coffee Day’s potential gains from Foursquare, they have become (as far as i know) the first Indian brand to get an official page on Foursquare and have special offers for 4sq users. (Bangalore outlets). I plan to drop in soon! Meanwhile, I remember the DM conversation then, with the person handling the CCD Twitter account and touching upon the problems of scale that would arrive with a platform like Foursquare. But now we have tools that address franchise needs, so I hope that can be addressed too. Anyway, good on CCD, because it’s not easy for an organisation of that size to be an early adopter marketer. Also good on the agency for (probably) getting them to do it. 🙂

    With Foursquare and Facebook Places, I think that brands whose product/service experience is intrinsically tied to retail outlets are perhaps closest to a kind of interaction utopia I have in mind. Here’s why.

    With every platform advancement, the customised interaction potential has increased – from mass media and the static web to social web, location based services, apps and technology like Augmented Reality. But even now, given the tendency to aggregate ‘Like’s and followers, I sometimes feel that ‘social’ as it relates to friends and followers’ overrules ‘social’ as a relationship between brand and consumer. That’s a dichotomy that few brands have acknowledged or addressed. Conformation!

    And that’s why I feel retail brands on 4sq, Places etc are near to that utopia – because it allows real-time interaction and context at the place of experience. Social is only a topping, and something that the user will scale by connecting his friends/followers to the experience. The brand/platform just has to play along. Technically, you could say it is possible on FB, Twitter too, but there the Like/follower currency is way too prevalent, so it is easier for brands to get sidetracked. (If we go by a recent report, brands will eventually find that it’s not really getting them anywhere)

    Meanwhile, just like FB and Twitter, platform protocols and constraints for brands also apply to apps and location based services. And that’s why, at this level of my imagination, I can only imagine utopia (for non retail brands) as brand ‘controlled’ interactive sensors attached to each product we consume. 🙂

    These shifts would hopefully drive more brands to define their own destiny.

    until next time, CCD, may the foursquare be with you 🙂

  • Plugging In

    Since I have been on streams and brands for a while, I thought I’ll take a break and plug you in on a couple of discoveries and connections. For those reading this in Google Reader or actually anywhere else other than this site itself, kindly step outside. No, the hands can still be on the keyboard/mouse but please drop in at the site since it’s contextually relevant that you be here.

    One of the fringe benefits of writing this column for Bangalore Mirror is that I sometimes discover interesting startups that are useful to me as well. Now I am associated with two of them – one on each blog. And since we’re on discovery, and I don’t want to bore you more with semantics, allow me to introduce you to Dhiti, a content discovery engine driven by semantics. I first read about them at Pluggdin and then got a mail from  Aditya (at Dhiti) to try it out. I have, many a time, expressed my frustration about WP’s native search, the plugins I have tried to augment that, as well as the not-as-accurate-as-I’d-like YARPP plugin that I have been using so long. Dhiti arrived just in time and, from the short experience so far, has solved this to a very large extent. To see it in action, scroll away to the bottom of this post (later, after reading the post completely!!)

    The Dhiti plugin, which you can download from here, has versions for WP.com, (thanks Ranjani) Blogger or self hosted WP blogs like mine. It provides multiple ways for you to get to more, and contextually relevant content in this blog – a ‘search’ function, a ‘Topics’ section displays the topics the post covers, a ‘Concepts’ section which shows the related topics, and ‘Nuggets’ which show excerpts from posts. Words in both Topics and Concepts are clickable and when you click them, the Nuggets show the excerpts of posts in which they have appeared and highlight them, so you can quickly understand the context and navigate to the relevant post accordingly. It functions just like a browser with ‘back’ and ‘home’ functions. You can even make it a pop-out within the page if that works better for you. Do play with it and let me know your feedback. I have asked for better customisation options and am also supposed to get some analytics from them.

    So, Dhiti gives food for thought, and my new friends at the other blog give actual food. Ok, they help you find food, specifically restaurants. Zomato, formerly known as Foodiebay is now taking snippets from the restaurant reviews on my blog, and adding them to the menu and photos they already have. More than the hits that will hopefully deliver ;), I was really kicked about their Android app. If you have an Android, download the app right now from the market. It automatically detects your location, and then allows you to discover a random restaurant nearby, recommends a restaurant near you or just plain search. Pretty much all the website functionality is built into the app. There’s even a button to call! The showoff feature is the ‘Shake’ and though it doesn’t do the ‘slot machine’ like Urbanspoon, it still rocks! 🙂

    until next time, scroll below for discoveries 🙂

  • Attention everyone

    It was a strange coincidence that I watched the 62 Super Bowl ads back-to-back, (thanks to this aggregation effort by Mashable) on the same day that I read this very insightful post by Steve Rubel on “Attentionomics“. The slideshow is also embedded below. In addition to the key takeaways – the lifespan of content created on popular networks, it also suggests ways to overcome this.

    Attentionomics Captivating Attention in the Age of Content Decay

    The interesting thing was that I would have watched the Super Bowl ads without any prompting. Which makes me wonder whether the logical and scientific way proposed above to ‘game’ the attention economy is the best approach. I think my discomfort stems from the fact that this leans more towards the ‘media’ in social media and looks at the social platforms from an information dissemination perspective.

    My consumption of the ads was more out of interest. The term ‘Intention Economy‘ springs to mind immediately in this context.

    The intention economy is an approach to viewing markets and economies focusing on buyers as a scarce commodity. The consumers’ intent to buy drives the production of goods to meet their specific needs.

    The thought is whether/how this can be applied to consumption of content. If it can, then the approach would be to make the content as easy to find and accessible as possible, to ‘appear’ at the time of demand, and create different contexts to drive that consumption.

    There is another perspective too. The easiest way to  elucidate it would be with the example of Google Reader/ Twitter Lists, where I pay attention to certain content creators, because I trust and value the content they produce. As Edelman’s Trust Barometer would tell you, the ‘trust in experts’ has actually increased this year. Their appeal does not really depend on the attention metrics.

    Can’t think of any other ‘angles’, but if you do, please drop me a line, or comment.

    So perhaps like the owned-paid-earned forms of content, brands will have to work on all 3 fronts. Harness expert power (employees and others), seed efficiently, create and use contexts effectively, and be easily accessible (like the brand-stream I proposed last week)

    until next time, at ease now 🙂

    PS: New research on why consumers ‘break up’ with brands on email, FB, Twitter, could be taken as a pointer to look at   alternatives to information dissemination.

  • Brand-streams

    Last week, I got a beta invite from a new lifestreaming service called Memolane and I’ve added my blogs and quite a few services I use to it. You can check it out here. I’m quite a fan of lifestreaming – as a concept. Though I have seen quite a few web based services perish, I persist. In the meantime, I maintain my own twitterstream (though I started it 2 years after I began using Twitter) and even used Sweetcron to try out a self hosted stream sometime back. These function more as activity streams than anything else and only faintly show the connections to other people.

    When I saw my stream, I was reminded of a thought from a couple of years back – a post I had titled ‘Communities and Brandstreams‘. Though I’d referred to quite a few posts then, in this context, the two significant ones are @misentropy‘s “The future of: user generated advertising” and RWW’s “Brandstreaming: What is it and who’s doing it?”. The former is about the concept of an open source product/brand wiki and the latter is about how a couple of brands used Friendfeed and other services to stream their content.

    Now that I am revisiting this, and with last week’s thought on ‘the structure that would hold the identity of a brand together’, I’m wondering if a brand-stream might be a way to approach it. So if we mash the idea of a lifestream – connecting the individual nodes of interaction [in my case, it would be the web services like Twitter/Faceb0ok/Foursquare/Flickr/YouTube etc, but for a brand, it would not just be its web services but also apps and even ‘real world’ data collection via sensors or the Internet of Things or say a variation of  barcodes/QR codes/ stickybits] with a brand wiki we could do at least a couple of things. One, if we open it out for users/consumers to share (with the brand-stream, as well as with their own community) how they interact with these nodes we could then capture and use data by time, kind of activity, user profiles, services used, ‘reach’ of individual users and so on. The entry to the stream could be across platforms. It would  make it easier for a user to not only experience the brand through a medium he’s comfortable with, but also check out ways in which others are experiencing the brand and suggest new ways for the brand to interact with others like him. Two, on the other side, users on the enterprise side could also connect to this stream basis various contexts (brand, customer service, operations, even HR) and make the business truly ‘social’. Sounds interesting? (see this for a vague visual cue 🙂 )

    until next time, streaming out loud 🙂

    PS: On Lifestreaming, on the personal blog. Check related posts for more. 🙂

  • Next.org

    A few days back, I happened to receive some understanding on the difference between an ‘organisation’ and an ‘institution’. As is my wont, I immediately came back from the event and googled it. All the Q & A forums, however, just sent me to Wikipedia, and to be fair, it did confirm what I had understood. So, the definitions

    An institution is any structure or mechanism of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given human community. Institutions are identified with a social purpose and permanence, transcending individual human lives and intentions, and with the making and enforcing of rules governing cooperative human behavior.

    An organization is a social arrangement which pursues collective goals, controls its own performance, and has a boundary separating it from its environment. ..There are a variety of legal types of organizations, including: corporations, governments, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, armed forces, charities, not-for-profit corporations, partnerships, cooperatives, and universities.

    I think somewhere between the two lies the organisation of the future – where the collective intent of the workforce is more than the sum of the parts. I liked the ‘social purpose’ part of the institution which to me, made it superior to the organisation that has a boundary that separates it from the environment. I felt that this boundary had become an increasingly impervious wall, something that affected intent, culture and even ideas. But I’m not so sure of the ‘permanence’ of the institution.  Is it just the idea that’s permanent or the manifestations too?

    Let’s quickly bring back that ‘where is this going’ thought into a brand perspective. When i wrote about appification and multiple platforms a fortnight back, I wondered what was the structure that could hold the identity of a brand together. Logos, mission statements, and even the experience – all of which have been used to define ‘brand’ seemed unworthy. Even my favourite – ‘promise to the consumer’ seemed barely there.

    The bad news – I don’t have an answer yet. The good news – out there, (at least) a couple of razor sharp brains,  armed with much more experience and knowledge, are piecing together the principles that would guide the functioning of the enterprise. The organisation is after all, a means to an end, and the brand is one of those means. So from that, I’m sure, clarity will emerge for brands too. 🙂

    until next time, to boldly go where no enterprise has gone before 😉