Category: Brand

  • Facebook Groupie

    What kind of a blog would this be if we didn’t discuss Facebook’s new announcements. At a simplistic level, it would seem that Facebook learned a lot from that Google study. (via a conversation with Mahendra)

    Though i can’t access it yet, I’m very happy with the backup option, and hope that its a step towards portability. The new chat availability ‘visualisation’ seems slightly better than the old one. I can’t see the app dashboard yet.  But the other big announcement was the revamping of groups. I’d been categorising friends using lists for a while, but didn’t actually utilise them for anything specific. Though its easy to see this as a wall within a wall, from initial usage, I think the new Groups allow that one layer that needed to be added to generic ‘friendships’ – context, not to mention better control over who sees what. And from what I see, I don’t even have to be friends with a person to share things and have a great conversation on a topic both of us like. There are other advantages too. Of course, there are a a few issues, and as always, Facebook kept everything as public as possible (as default) but changes in this version is as inevitable as the waves of outrage that follows all Facebook announcements.

    I’m still debating whether I’d like the Groups to be integrated better in the newsfeed (with ways to filter as per importance) or whether its current location (sidebar) is a better approach. From a signal-noise perspective, perhaps it should stay the way it is. I’m not very convinced about looking at Groups as ‘Friendfeed going mainstream‘ or even Wave. But that does make me wonder whether the next version will also have a feed aggregator, directly, or indirectly – allowing apps like Networked Blogs. That might actually get RSS to go mainstream. 🙂 If that happens, I am also wondering about the implications on Google Reader, and actually any other network which serves as a content distribution/consumption channel.

    Groups can be made ‘Secret’, and I’m still not sure how ‘Open’ and ‘Closed’ groups will show up in Facebook Search. Also, since I still don’t have access to Places, I can only wonder whether ‘Location’ can also be made a group feature. I’m seeing both the above from a brand perspective. Would a brand, for example, be able to highlight a location specific group on their Page, as part of a local promo? Even if the brands do not get information about the groups, Facebook would still have it, and that would definitely help target ads better.

    Groups are not really a silver bullet, but I don’t think Facebook is aiming for that now either. Its just that they’ve not missed the starting gun, to slice and dice my social graph – that’s useful for me, as well as advertisers.

    until next time, group on 😉

  • Social Scaling

    The subject of this post has been visited before, thanks to an earlier note by Tac Anderson on the ‘3 types of social media strategy‘, and David Cushman’s excellent presentation the same topic.

    What made me revisit this are Tac Anderson’s post last week titled ‘Dam your social media strategy‘, which used an excellent analogy to present a 2 step approach to changing business strategy , and my own experiences in the last few months. In my first post that referred to the 3 types of social media strategy, I’d wondered whether it was possible to move from strategy 2 (optimising social media  for business) to strategy 3 (optimising business for social media), but my experiences later made me feel that it was perhaps (generalising) an inevitable approach, and this view has only been strengthened since then.

    However, the biggest roadblock I sense is in convincing an organisation and its internal stakeholders to look at the tools from beyond a ‘push communication’ marketing perspective especially after we start out on optimising social media. It is all the more difficult because this perspective is something they can identify with – just another channel, and one that’s ‘free’.  A twisted view that ‘Conversations are markets’. Just another place to sell your wares. 😐

    The challenge is to shift the focus from ‘media’ to ‘social, and from a purely brand centric view to one that encompasses the organisation’s internal stakeholders and consumers, and has a more holistic view of ROI. I wonder then, if it is actually better to start with something like ‘customer care’ or ‘operations’ and include ‘brand’ only at a much later stage in optimisation. Debatable. 🙂

    until next time, ambushing marketing on the brand team.

  • Culture Bridges

    There was much excitement when I saw that much talked about presentation that somehow seemed connected to Google Me and Google’s approach to social. But the sounds made recently by Darth Scmidt don’t really give cause for delight.

    While it doesn’t make sense to talk ill of something even before launch, the ‘social layer’ does sound underwhelming. It doesn’t help that Mark Zuck recently hinted that ‘social is not a layer you can add’. ( What is interesting though is he also said in the interview “We’re trying to build a social layer for everything”) He should know about what works in ‘social’, because whether you love or hate Facebook, it is definitely a creation (and creator) that demands respect, on various parameters.

    Somewhere towards the end of his post titled ‘The Forever Recession‘, Seth Godin, while talking of the ‘recession of an industrial age with its imperfect market communication’ paraphrases Clay Shirky and states that ‘every revolution destroys the last thing before it turns a profit on a new thing’.

    I thought about this statement in the context of Google and Facebook, and also remembered an earlier post at GigaOm which showed the difference  between the way Facebook and Google work. And that prompted me to wonder whether every age has a unique organisational and workforce culture that best fits it, and the entity that grasps it, succeeds.

    This is not just a Google-Facebook question, but one that I’d consider across domains and categories. The leader in an earlier era would try to capture that culture mojo and would most likely fail because it tries to add to what it has been doing so far, where a start from scratch is what is warranted. The interesting part is also that the time between ‘revolutions’ seems to be consistently decreasing, so how do brands and organisations carry their success across?

    until next time, a revulsion for revolutions?

  • Group Pwn

    I’ve never gotten around to trying group buying/deal sites until once recently, though I always thought that they were fulfilling a need for businesses and consumers. But when I read this ‘peculiar’ story titled Groupon’s Success Disaster, I found myself identifying with it (from a consumer perspective, we’ll get to that in a bit) and since the number of group buying sites in India is only a few numbers lesser than the number of social media consultants, I thought it made sense to spare a few thoughts on it.

    The (linked above) story is of a small business owner, who, after 3 months of using Groupon, discovered that the deals were hurting the business financially and then had to take $8000 out of savings to cover payroll. Considering that, I thought the Groupon reply has quite a cruel title – ‘Too much of a good thing‘, but it is well drafted.

    The win-win for business-consumer in this is because it gives the former a chance to spread the word on the service and probably get some feedback on it and the latter mostly gets a good deal. Like I mentioned, I used a site recently for what seemed like a good deal. Though the deal process was painless, I ended up spending more money than what I normally would, thanks to a mis-communication (and some carelessness on my part). It means that I won’t be a repeat customer. It ends up as a lose-lose. Now this is probably the exception to how it usually happens, but…

    It did make me think whether the business owners get into deals with a strategy in place. Not just in terms of finance, but also in terms of their expectations of buzz, their delivery capability as well as how they’d manage to make the customer return. When it is kept in mind that social platforms and deal sites are mostly interwoven, I think it’d make sense for the business to use their service delivery (assumed good) and connect it to their social presence. A “We hope you liked it. Here’s an x% discount for your next visit and we would really appreciate it if you could leave your comments on FB/Twitter” approach. Facebook would especially help the business to spread the word beyond the usual early adopter set. While on retail, its difficult not to mention Foursquare. Though I’d love it if Foursquare aggregated the deals themselves, the businesses definitely can get active on Foursquare and push their deals to users nearby.

    With the (limited) examples I’ve seen, I doubt whether this is being done. So it reminds me of a lot of advertising,  and most social media efforts. The former because the message and the product/service are rarely (generalising) in sync, and the latter because of the lack of strategy and the herd mentality.

    until next time, regroup!

  • Internet and People States

    The Economist has an excellent read titled ‘The Future of the Internet‘, where it details the possibility of a Balkanisation of the internet, by forces such as Network Operators, countries, and closed platforms. Quite an irony, as they point out, since the internet was supposed to be a great unifier.

    I realised that so far we had been dealing with entities that had a geographical constraint – all forms of media, languages, culture etc. When brands entered alien markets, they adapted to suit the needs of the local population – sometimes in terms of communication, sometimes in terms of the product/service itself.  So I guess, it would be futile to expect that we would solve a challenge of this magnitude soon, considering that the internet has been around for only a relatively short amount of time. (cool infographic)

    But what struck me was that though the factors mentioned above are indeed distinct and relevant ones, what about users? Thanks to the long tail of content, people are able to get content tailor-made to their requirement, more often that not. They are also able to create content and share it with specific people. When I see e-groups, closed blogs, newsletters, and increasing privacy options on existing networks, I wonder how much of Balkanisation already exists thanks to users, who control a lot of the where, what and to whom content is shared. I connect with different people on different networks and share different relationships with them basis different contexts and interests, and except for minor overlaps b/w Facebook – Twitter and Twitter – Foursquare, they are all almost separate worlds. And its not just the where and the what, its also the when – I have Orkut friends discovering Facebook, Facebook and LinkedIn friends/connections discovering Twitter, Twitter followers discovering Foursquare, GReader friends discovering Quora, when my usage and behaviour on these networks would be completely different from theirs thanks to relatively early adoption.

    The other question is how would brands be affected by a Balkanised internet. Would all their users exist in the same place and time? How does it affect communication? Product, or service, how many brands can be like Apple, who are the nearest to being a ‘state’ in themselves? How many can actually build and sustain that? How much of it depends on the nature of the product and how much of it on the people connections (or social gestures)? Would integration and consistency of communication matter then?

    But then I realise that despite the user Balkanisation, we have our means of communication and transportation open. When push comes to shove, perhaps it will be too unprofitable for any entity to remain Balkanised, irrespective of their own vested interests? We live in hope. 🙂

    until next time, 800th post at the other blog 🙂