Category: Brand

  • Trust & Context

    The Tiger Woods saga continues. And though I have had fun (like this) at his and Accenture’s expense, the entire series of events did make me wonder again on endorsements, especially after Accenture dropped Woods. The topic of endorsements is something I have written about earlier too – of how blogging/tweeting ambassadors would react to uncomfortable questions about their brands (Big B – Cadbury’s worms), and the effect of celebrity micro-bloggers even on brands they don’t endorse. But this is on a slightly different note.

    “As perhaps the world’s ultimate symbol of high performance, he serves as a metaphor for our commitment to helping companies become high-performance businesses.”, the Accenture site had said earlier. Like we discussed on Twitter, a lot of the audience are not just fans of a celebrity’s attributes, but even assume that he is equally good or flawless in every other facet of his life/character too. Its perhaps a wrong expectation, not just from the audience, but from brands too. (high performance on the course) Lack of context.

    That brings me to the subject of the connections we make on social sites, most notably Twitter, because (for me) only a small percentage of following/followers are made of people who we knew from before. The connections, while they may evolve into relationships later, are built on trust, developed over time and actions, and in my case have a contextual nature to it too. I rely on specific people for expertise on specific matters. I am guessing many others do too, many Twitter lists are a manifestation of that. The recommendation economy, consumer ambassadors, and micro ambassadors posts I have written earlier are variations of the same premise of trust.

    When I look at entities like newspapers, which were built on a trust model, I wonder how the newly formed trust relationships will shape up. Newspapers and later other platforms owned the power of dissemination..distribution. The net disrupted that. In the age of unlimited content and trust agents, the new networks start playing crucial roles in trust relationships. And that is why, the ‘url shortener’ war that is in its early stages now – Facebook, Google, bit.ly interests me.  Reach, trust and context. Who will you trust all your data with? How much of data mining can be done with the links we share and consume, and how much context can be gleaned from it? Which network gives you the maximum reach? While FB and Google can integrate with their own networks, bit.ly is Twitter’s default shortener, and for now, it is doing things to maintain its lead.

    And its not just this. These days I’m seeing more and more manifestations of power play around me – among people, organisations, communities. When Twitter plans to add ‘contributors’ to business accounts, and allow multiple users to be identified in a single handle, it means that the different people will have different levels of trust from their audience, it would also allow context. But when Marissa Mayer describes Google as “omnivorous” in its quest for indexing data, and when Facebook changes its privacy stance, I wonder whether a trust economy built among individuals and relying on networks for the reach, will get overshadowed by the networks themselves, and the way they use our data.

    Tiger Woods might have been used by advertisers out of context with his permission. With unlimited data on you and fuzzy privacy settings, will you, without your knowledge, become a micro ambassador for something you have no expertise in, and thereby erode your trustworthiness? Silicon India profiles, Facebook Ads stating X friend has used an application, random RTs…..Paranoid? perhaps, but then, we share so much online, that maybe I can justify it. 🙂

    until next time, deprived of privacy

  • #In Business

    In spite of being the gold standard in business networking, I’ve always felt that LinkedIn has been a bit slow in adapting to the needs of its audience. Quite some time back, I’d written about the ‘news’ and ‘groups’ features, and had asked for an RSS feature for groups. That feature was incorporated earlier this year, but I thought there were several other possibilities which could’ve been incorporated, specifically in company web pages – multimedia support, aggregation etc. My benchmark of comparison was Social Median (acquired by Xing, a competitor to LinkedIn). I’d also wondered if it’d make sense for LinkedIn to perhaps acquire or at least have an association with Yammer.

    Just when I was ready to give up on LinkedIn’s possibilities (completely agreed with this), they seem to have caught a new wind. First came the redesign, with significantly better navigation, a cleaner look and lesser scrolling!! And then came the sync that everyone had been waiting for. Twitter was Linked #in (or#li) with an option to selectively share tweets on LinkedIn. Good timing, I’d say, judging by a few studies. A Palo Alto Networks study stated that enterprise usage of twitter was up by 250% in 6 months. (FB at 192%) Another report (can be classified as dipstick from the number of responses) , by the 2.0 Adoption council, seemed to indicate that social computing was making its presence felt in the enterprise.

    Most importantly, LinkedIn finally opened up its platform to developers. Bring on the apps!! (no, not Link farm ville 😐 ) RWW has a good post on the good and bad news and a few possibilities. Tweetdeck, Posterous, Ribbit, JobDASH, Box.net, all have integrations happening. The wishlists have started too. As RWW mentions, a ‘people you might know from other networks’ and filtered status updates would be great. Sandeep Gautam has a ‘Follow Friday’ like mechanism and @mentions in status updates in his list.

    On that note, I wonder whether the sync would mean that the twitter system of hashtags would become popular on LinkedIn, and a status search would find a place among the current crop of searches available on LinkedIn. An open platform would indicate that LinkedIn updates could appear on outside search. Also (like FB Connect) people would be able to interact with a site using their LinkedIn account, and the content could be taken to LinkedIn.

    A few twitter tools whose LinkedIn version I’d like to see –

    • Mr.Tweet (recommendation to connect) basis current network, interests etc
    • Alerts – not just recruiter, people and events that currently exist, but more options
    • Twitturly – to track the URLs that are being talked about
    • Trends (which might initially be a subset of Twitter trends?)
    • Twitter lists + Groups – It would require identification of Twitter list members on LinkedIn and then an option to add list members – create new groups/ add to existing groups

    The two places where I hope for a lot of action are groups and Company Pages. With an open platform, an integration of delicious and friendfeed can’t be ruled out. Company (and UGC 😀 ) videos and photos via YouTube and Flickr? And while we’re at it I’d like to have LinkedIn in the Google Reader ‘Send to’ (officially) and in future the option to choose a group/page with which a particular  link can be shared.

    With the integration of twitter and an open platform, LinkedIn has the content and context to provide better interaction between the various stakeholders of the enterprise – employees, vendors, business partners and even consumers. I see a lot of potential for LinkedIn to become a key player in the social business design (a Dachis Group concept) we keep talking about these days. Let’s hope to see more updates soon. 🙂

    until next time, business tweets 🙂

  • (Non) User Generated Content

    World AIDS Day – a humble contribution

    condom

    Much to the brand’s credit, they RT ed my work, on Twitter.

    And that little stunt led to the image being viewed some 2000+ times and my 15 seconds of fame as India’s most popular twitterer for a brief few hours, thanks to more than a 100 RTs from the twitterati. I also got a Samsung Galaxy from Tata Docomo. Ok, I made that last one up. :}

    Twitterer #1

    Yes, yes, don’t worry, I’ll still be posting here :p

  • A Dunbar’s number for brands?

    Seth Godin had a very good take on the Dunbar Number recently in the context of connections made on Twitter and Facebook. (Wikipedia: Dunbar’s Number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150) Godin was of the opinion that “You might be able to stretch to 200 or 400, but no, you can’t effectively engage at a tribal level with a thousand people.”

    A few months back, I’d written a post wondering whether smaller organisations were better placed to use social media effectively. This was based on a post by Chris Brogan. Smaller organisations with a flatter structure, and a culture more open to ideas. In that post, I’d questioned whether ideas becoming products/services and then further on brands, meant that the large audiences developed by brands would dictate the kind of communication used, and if mass media one way messaging became easier then. Also, I’d wondered whether larger organisations could handle the empowerment required to work in a social media environment.

    When I read the post by Godin, I wondered if there was a Dunbar number for brands, dictated by the number of people  the brand can connect with- internally as well as externally? There are two things I read recently which added to the thought. One was the idea of the Intention Economy (via Surekha) which “grows around buyers” and is “about markets, not marketing”, and which is builts beyond transactions alone – conversations, reputation, authority, respect all of which are earned by the sellers and buyers. This is a provisional idea, the other is a report from 360i (via Mashable) which states that “that a majority of social media search listings that appear for brand-related queries are created by individuals not affiliated with the brand”, an increasing trend.

    Meanwhile, another interesting thought occured to me when I read Jeremiah’s  post on #OperationBlueWater – where he proposes sharing one’s personal goal plan with online and offline social networks to help people achieve it. I wondered if organisations could ever approach this scenario- not so much as an objective, but the openness and the willingness to share and collaborate along the journey.

    With or without Dunbar’s number, brands would have to involve either consumers or employees (ideally both) to thrive in a ‘social’ world. If its employees, it means hiring people who are passionate about the stuff they’re working with. Yes, the communication has always been that way, maybe the virtual and social forces will make it happen in reality. As for consumers, in most mass advertising, we have been seeing for sometime now, what Godin describes as “politician’s glassy-eyed gaze or the celebrity’s empty stare”

    until next time, social goal setting 🙂