Category: Brand

  • Brand Privacy

    The implications of Facebook’s recent moves are still gobbling up most of the virtual column space available. From discussions happening in my own set of connections, it does seem to have gotten a larger crowd (than the usual suspects) interested.

    Jeff Jarvis’ post raises quite a few good points – the different levels of ‘public’, sharing vs publishing, to name a couple. The issue here is that Facebook is controlling where information we share on the network goes, we seem to have no choice in the matter. Mark Zuckerberg is unfortunately seen as pushing us to be public to ‘Everyone’ (a superb visual representation). But that’s where (and this is just an opinion) we might have reached anyway, given a little time. In any case, there are enough tools which allow me to create a network of my own and share it, without involving Facebook. My blogs worked that way, until I connected them with FB. Yes, it could cost me some reach, but there are ways to compensate that too, though yes, Facebook is really big.

    Like I tweeted sometime back, I think we just want the networks to be more ‘open’, so that we can decide who we can be ‘closed’ to. Right now, we don’t get to decide that much, and while I’m not defending FB here, this is something Google has been guilty of for a longer time. But that’s a different topic.

    I was, as usual, intrigued by how this affects brands online. Like I’ve said before, I wonder if there is a kind of hypocrisy involved when we desire privacy for ourselves, but expect brands to be more open on the social web, because it is of use to us as consumers. Many facets of this, so perhaps another post. But all this hullabaloo about privacy means that consumers will be more careful about their interaction with brands, and which ones they want to be associated with, at least online. So now, brands will require to do more to gain their trust and/or provide enough value to convince consumers, who might be otherwise reluctant to associate with a brand . Or will the casual ‘like’ become a commodity? From their own perspective, brands will now have to get used to more attention as the dynamics of Pages/Groups etc change.

    Meanwhile, on another front, another trend that has been creeping up on us is the segregation of crowds on the web. Like this article notes, the web allows us tools to create a ‘people like me’ bubble around us. This is linked to the kind of ‘privacy’ we are talking about – select groups with whom we can share specific things in specific contexts? It remains to be seen how many bubbles overlap and in what way. This trend, I believe will not die out soon, and the ‘groups’ will become even more careful about who is let in. How does a brand balance itself among different groups of people who now agglomerate themselves and are choosy about who they associate with online? Is this an opportunity to finally manifest the idea of being different things to different people, according to their finely split needs?

    until next time, its ‘like’ complicated 🙂

    Bonus Read: How Facebook’s Community Pages and Privacy changes impact Brands by Jeremiah Owyang

  • Converse

    A few days back, I read on RWW that Google Wave has released Wave Elements, which allow waves to be embedded on any website. Despite what might seem a ‘never took off’ status, I still thought Wave had potential. Buzz did confuse me in this context, and I wondered about Google’s strategy – whether they’re simultaneously developing the two products for consumer/enterprise users, or using one as a stepping stone for the other etc. My usage of Google Wave was limited to the first few weeks and Buzz faded out in a few days.

    My primary issue with Buzz was that rather than new conversations, my contacts mostly had feed imports from Reader, Twitter etc, with little value addition. Buzz never gave me the option of removing specific feeds of users. Also, I couldn’t export the conversation which happened inside Buzz to the blog. The latitude-buzz based ideas remain complicated. All this, in addition to all the criticism that came their way right after the launch. It just made a mess of all my contexts.

    But when I implemented the Facebook ‘Like’ button last week, I wondered whether I should implement the ‘Buzz’ button too. Like I’ve said before, I think most offices can’t afford to block GMail, so Buzz might help in the sharing better. 😉 Still thinking about it. Meanwhile, what I did try, is to add Facebook Insights to this domain. I stopped at six ‘Bad Request’ responses. Now, if I have shared my blogs with FB, I can’t see why they can’t make it easier for me to add Insights. They seem to be prompting me for a dozen other things these days!! With all the other plugins, this could really help.

    I had hopes on a similar line for Buzz too. Simplistically put, if i shared my blogs with Buzz as a publisher, could they automatically assign a shortened goo.gl url to it, and notify me when it was shared? While at it, also tie it to my Analytics, for even more details.

    The thought is pretty simple. Someone ‘likes’ this post, shares it on FB/Buzz, a discussion happens around it, and a reader here might not even know about it. Hell, I might not even know about it, if I haven’t implemented a few tools.  Can that be rectified? Also, can FB/Buzz help export the conversations from there and (also) show it on my blog,  because it provides the reader an easy way to know different perspectives on the matter, even though discussions have been happening on other platforms, and perhaps even discover people with similar interests. (There is at least one FB comments plugin that pulls comments from Notes, but I was looking at something that would identify the url irrespective of who shared it)  I’d say the same for Twitter too, except I don’t think they even have threaded conversations completely right.

    until next time, scaling walls

    PS. I don’t think Disqus is there.. yet

  • Early Bird Rewards

    At least two major virtual happenings, one that has massive implications on the future of the web, and the other, slightly more subdued, but not lacking in potential. The latter – Twitter Annotations, announced at Chirp, allowing developers to “add any arbitrary metadata to any tweet in the system.” You can take a look at the various possibilities here, here and here. The former – Facebook’s  Open Graph, unveiled at the f8 conference, and aimed at making itself the centre of everything that happens on the www. A  combination of  plugins, developer tools, new markups which can make the user experience on any site that plays along increasingly personal, social, semantic, from plain hyperlinks to layered information. Already, one small manifestation can  be seen at the bottom of this post – a Facebook ‘Like’ button, which will carry your liking of this post into your activity stream on Facebook. More and more data, not just what you do on FB, but outside as well, across the web. From what I read, smells like Google, perhaps worse, because the flow of information seems possible only through the Facebook conduit. A good round up of implications here.

    When I returned from he break, and read up on these developments, my first thought, which i also tweeted was

    1

    And that’s the point of the post. During the break, the only network I was hooked on to was Foursquare. One of the things that happened, thanks to long waiting times in the Kolkata airport was that I became mayor of the neat CCD outlet just outside the airport complex.

    CCD has completed the re-branding at this outlet (unlike the one inside the airport) and has done a decent job at establishing ‘conversations’ as the prime focus area, in terms of in-store design. The feedback posters, ‘snippets’ at each table and the ‘quotes’ design on the roof were nice touches. When I got back, I found a CCD account following me on Twitter. Seemed like a more synergistic effort after the earlier snafu.

    It made me think once again about how alert brands need to be in such a dynamic scenario. If CCD were an early adopter, would they have braved the earlier storm better? What if they become active on Foursquare now, experiment with the new services being built on top of it – friendticker, snacksquare etc, still in their nascent stages. Or at least acknowledge their outlets on Foursquare and engaging the users. “@xyz congrats on becoming the mayor of our abc outlet”, and then build on top of that relationship. Won’t that help them gain some crucial evangelists in a new medium? If not evangelists, at least someone who will listen to their side of the story when something nasty happens? Wouldn’t they get a headstart on ‘authority’ by being an early bird?

    Even the era of quick responses being a reasonable expectation seems to be blurring by fast. Perhaps brands are now required to have an advance scout mechanism, to test out new services, features, changes, understand the implications and see whether/how business and objectives needs to be realigned. Page Rank, Social Platforms at consumer and enterprise level, Social CRM, Location based services, tools and platforms keep shifting. Early adoption and balancing objectives with diverse ways and platforms of engagement may become an imperative. Multiple options, two way communication manifestos, its all changing real time. Hold on tight.

    until next time, service level disagreements

  • Endurance Models

    I’d ended last week’s post wondering about the role of durability in the design of communication and organisational structures. Dina has continued the discussion on her blog, adding on some very pertinent questions. Do visit and add on to this very interesting thought flow.

    I got myself three threads of thought in her post. One, the dependency (of one product on another’s durability) factor, highlighted by the classic example of Twitter, where app developers have been flummoxed by recent events. (Twitter buying out Atebits and making Tweetie a free app for iPhone). Two, brands needing to create enduring, sustainable relationships, and being agile and flexible, because neither consumers nor their relationships are ‘static’. And therefore, three, durability is morphing.

    Before we dig into all of them, a small point of view. While one one hand, Twitter buying out services/competing with them could be seen as very Google like, and something that kills innovation in my book, I do have faith in Twitter and believe it won’t go the way Google has. (Simplistically) Unlike Google, which practically kills (eg. Dodgeball, jaiku), Twitter has just removed one entry barrier (paying for the service) for Tweetie’s adoption. As for Fred Wilson’s post, i can only remind you (again) of Godin’s description of Twitter – a protocol, and that’s why I completely buy the argument in the post on creating something entirely new on top of Twitter. (a contra view on Twitter being a protocol, informative read)

    This, you would notice, is a thought that continues from Dina’s point on dependency. But there’s a link to the second point as well – creating enduring, sustaining relationships and being flexible. The services which (to quote Fred Wilson) were ‘filling holes’ were (IMO) way too dependent on twitter. They were only providing a value, which Twitter had not deemed as a priority at a particular point in time. Not sustainable.

    Now, social gaming is one of the opportunities that Fred Wilson notes. So, look at Zynga. Their creations acquired massive adoption because of Facebook. They keep making more games, running them on Facebook, but simultaneously, also made farmville.com, with integrated FB Connect, and offers them more flexibility to provide more value. More importantly, the genre is perhaps not something FB is likely to get its hands dirty in anytime soon. Slightly more sustainable. Look at Foursquare. Standalone, but with Twitter and Facebook integrated very well. A level higher on sustainability. So the point is, the durability would be a function of how these platforms are used, dependency is proportional to the value provided.

    Morphing. Though the usage of social media by organisations is a subject that is discussed often (including on this blog), I thought this post by Tac Anderson articulated it extremely well. He discusses three strategies used by the enterprise – the one off approach that isn’t integrated with any existing system/process; optimising social media for business – with clear resources, roles and responsibilities; optimising business for social media. The first and second areas are where most companies operate. The third is a business organisation optimised for social media (technology and culture). He points out that Netflix, Google, Amazon have built businesses optimised for the web, and doesn’t see a business that has successfully implemented it wrt social media. He does say that it may not make sense for a company to throw out an existing strategy and build another around social media, but the ones with the third approach will be the next Google/Amazon. Another good read on the subject is Tom Fishburne’s ‘The new product waterfall‘.

    It is debatable whether an organisation can move from approach 2 towards 3.  But I do think that the morphed versions of durability will emerge from business structures that are built to be comfortable with and are therefore in a position to take advantage of the tools and platforms of social media. That is most likely the way to create enduring, sustainable relationships in a scenario of changing consumer and communication dynamics.

    until next time, the durability of this thread on the blog ends here 🙂

    PS: Won’t have to endure a post next week. Back in a fortnight 😉

  • In duress

    A few days back, when I met Balu and Conall, we happened to talk about the lifecycles of services (Twitter and Foursquare was the context) and then discuss whether product lifecycles were being compressed too. It is interesting because let’s say an organisation has invested in a new technology and brought out a product. If they price it high, adoption will be slow, and it may never become mainstream. If they subsidise and price it low, they may lose out if a better technology arrives before they  break even. Mobile phones (feature compatibility and obsolescence), content storage devices (VHS to Blu-Ray) were some of the examples discussed.

    Dina wrote a couple of good posts (Part One, Two) recently on durability,and whether it is losing its power as a consumer driver. The plethora of brands advertising in the youth category would seem to agree (best expressed in Fastrack’s ‘Move On’ campaign), but as pointed out by Goutam Jain in the post, in many cases it would be intrinsic to the brand’s value. The rise of ‘good enough’ in the real time era is not helping the durability cause either. We could go from fidelity in devices to that in human relationships and the cause/effects in consumption, but maybe we should get Dina to do it later. 🙂

    The second post is also a great read and is based on the comments on the first, and introduces some excellent dimensions to the original thought.  Convenience + cost of exit, opportunity cost of not entering the next ‘upgrade’ are things that I’d like to add to that.

    Brand equity is something that falls naturally into the scope of this discussion. But what i was more interested in its impact on the content that brands create, including their communication. Look at say, print ads, whose physical durability is perhaps one day (equity created might probably last longer), or radio jingles and television commercials., with a slightly larger shelf life. On the internet, it can exist ‘forever’. But there are costs involved in all of these, and in terms of durability, they might not really deliver in this era of content abundance, fleeting attention spans, and the constant search for the next ‘wow’. Also, on a smaller scale, what happens when you design say, applications for a particular platform/device like a Facebook/ iPad, and it doesn’t prove to be durable? It is many ways, a gamble.

    So, when I read Clay Shirky’s amazing post ‘The collapse of complex business models‘, I sensed a tangential connection. To broadly summarise, the post uses Joseph Tainter’s ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’, in the context of TV content producers’ inability to cut expenses below revenues, and explains how at some point, the level of complexity added to a system fails to add to the output, and becomes just a cost, because the different levels extract more value than the total output. Also, by this time, the system is too large and too interlocked for it to adapt quickly and change. Then ‘collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.’

    The post throws light on what is most likely the ‘tripping point’ for contemporary media. With increased connectivity between individuals thanks to various platforms, more ideas are being formed and honed. As new products and services arise, consumption patterns change, new needs are discovered and a disruption (which is perhaps another way of  describing simplification) always seems around the corner. I see this as a message to brands, many of whom have evolved their organisations, products and services on the basis of older ways of communication. How much has durability of products been a factor in the design and structure of communication and organisational processes? Or was it a result?  As durability ceases to be a major factor, is the new imperative flexibility?

    until next time, we still call it consumer durables 🙂