Category: Digital

  • Weekly Top 5

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  • 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.

  • Weekly Top 5

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  • 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. 🙂