Category: Social Media

  • Purposeful

    Last week, my co-conspirator on the ‘culture’ discussions on twitter- Harish – shared a Forbes article on why top talent leave organisations. This was a distilled version of another article that had 10 reasons! So, “Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring.” As the author notes, the 10 reasons in the earlier article could be roughly divided into managerial and systemic reasons. My 2 cents is that bad managers exist because the system allows them, and sometimes even rewards them. When good professionals see ‘wrong’ behaviour rewarded, they realise it’s time to leave.

    The second of two pieces of advice that the author gives firms involves purpose and culture. Though it would seem that the former drives the latter, culture is capable of working towards or subverting an organisation’s purpose.

    As is becoming a regular occurrence, I had an article waiting for me on Reader – Umair Haque’s “Overthrow Yourself“, in which he draws out the fine nuances between an organisation’s vision and its ambition. The former is an egoistical version towards which resources toil, and the latter is a portrait of the human consequences that your enterprise (not just your “company”, but your ideas, effort, time, ingenuity) creates. Semantics, you might say, but I think ambition also acknowledges the sense of purpose of the individuals involved.

    To add to last week’s post, good professionals love to be empowered, and when they are, they love to be held accountable for the decisions they make, decisions that drive them towards achieving a purpose they can identify with. Probably every startup begins that way, but sometimes the vision takes over, just as in the case of social platforms.

    until next time, purpose.ly

  • Pinning it down

    Though it’s almost been 2 years since it launched, the buzz on Pinterest has grown stronger in the last few months. This infographic should help you get a quick update. The ‘experts’ are polarised on this, and I have seen some digs on my twitter timeline, which remind me of the things I used to hear about Twitter on Facebook. 🙂 Will Pinterest grow that big? I don’t know, but it always helps to build one’s own perspective.

    This is one of those social networks which have not been easy for me to adopt. As the text-only posts here would indicate, I am not an ‘image’ person. 🙂 This was probably why delicious worked for me very well. But I did manage to find my own applications of Pinterest, most significantly, my infographics board, which is now nearing a 100 pins, and others that I enjoy – Angry Birds, Star Farce, and so on. One apprehension I have is whether it will go the way of all social platforms when they go more mainstream – from pinning ‘what I like’ to ‘what I think you want to see’ or ‘what I want you to see’. An extension of the carefully crafted persona.

    But meanwhile, over at Myntra, we have created an account and have been busy pinning and ‘boarding’. We’re in the process of experimenting with the platform, and as part of that, have also integrated it on our fashion blog. We have already found quite a few use cases for it, and I plan to consolidate that before moving further on boards.

    One of the most interesting stats in the infographic I shared earlier is that Pinterest has now beaten twitter as a source for referral traffic. From a brand perspective, this is indeed turning out to be an interesting tool, especially if the brand is related to e-com or fashion. Many fashion brands are already there. In fact, JustFabulous is even doing an extremely interesting Scrabble based contest there. I’d think that food, travel, and other visually appealing domains would also do well here. In fact there are over 100 brands across categories already on Pinterest.

    So, should you believe the hype? Not necessarily, but as a brand marketer or a social web practitioner, I think it’s probably a good time to take a long look at Pinterest and see if it can deliver value to your brand. It could be traffic generation, relationship building, or thought leadership, and these are just a few use cases. Unless you play, you won’t know. 🙂

    until next time, you could fancy this too 😉

  • Human Brands

    Trendwatching’s trend for March 2012 is quite an interesting one – ‘Flawsome‘, driven by brands becoming more ‘human’ and the fast rise of transparency. It’s quite an irony – this ‘fall out’ of the era in which people are trying to be brands and making sure that (even) their Facebook Timeline (in addition to LI, Twitter etc) showcase them at their best/ a perfect life. Yes, I’m generalising.

    I think, more than anything else, this trend is forced on brands by the sheer volume of conversations that are generated in/by social media. Even the best, most conversational and favourite brands/organisations – from Coke to Google to Twitter to Apple etc have their flaws. These cause different challenges for different brands eg. web centric companies generate conversations because of their ‘location’  and more is expected of them because they are digital natives; ‘offline’ brands are forced to engage and include this in their brand DNA. Since bad experiences are expressed more than good ones, ‘flawsome’ is an inevitability.

    The excellent opportunity in this, if brands get the communication right, is to not just being able to involve consumers in correcting the flaws, but in also evolving a league of customers who will actively speak for the brand, because of a sense of ownership they can be made to develop. The other opportunity is to target better and build a set of consumers who can identify with the brands’s attitude and philosophy. This would not just have an effect on communication, but also on vision and processes across the board – product design, customer care, hiring and so on. ‘One size fits no one’ is something that brands could take more seriously now.

    As a brand marketer, and one who is active on social media, I’d love the freedom to say ‘Damn, that was a #fail. But hey, we tried” 🙂

    until next time, winsome brands

  • On the first death of Facebook Commerce…

    Towards the middle of last year, I’d written a column at afaqs on how social and commerce were in a relationship. A few months later, I revisited the premise on a tangent and wrote an article for Kuliza titled “Social + e-commerce ≠ Social Commerce“. (pg 25)

    All through last week, after the Bloomberg report, in which a Forrester analyst phrased it as “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar“, I’ve been reading post after post proclaiming the demise of what has been called f-com. (Facebook Commerce) It finally made me tweet this

    I realised later that a similar statement had already been made – “Opening a storefront does not mean you have a social commerce strategy…” ~ Justin Yoshimura. In fact, f-com itself should only be one part of a brand’s larger Facebook strategy. The advice being given to brands, along with the news of the demise, is that they should make their own e-com sites more social. Fair enough, but what I don’t get is the mutual exclusivity. Indeed, if brands have adopted an f-com strategy that basically allows users to buy the same things available at their e- store, I wonder why they thought users would flock there. Yes, it does give the brand visibility, proximity to the customer, use of the social graph (like, recommend, share) etc but to the user, there’s really no value. In fact, f-com checkouts are apparently much slower.

    Examples of ‘inherently social businesses’ (entertainment, music, games) are being taken as exceptions to the closure trend. IMO, every business (arguably) is inherently social, the trick (actually the hard work) is in finding the social context. Many brands have created value through fan-exclusives, (Heinz) CRM initiatives (Starbucks) free sampling (Pantene) etc. I can understand that coffee is probably social, but shampoo and ketchup?

    Part of the fault is to do with the astronomical predictions on the kind of sales these Facebook storefronts were going to generate, part of it is to do with the trigger-happiness that unfortunately shadows most of everything on social platforms.  If brands learned to also pay attention to interest graphs on the network, and create scenarios that use the inherent (and phenomenal) social graph and new features like friction-less sharing better, Facebook can play an excellent role in the overall e-com strategy. As always, the answer is in focusing on user behaviour and experience and not allowing technology and fads to create a myopic vision. The old adage holds – Fail fast. Learn fast. Fix fast.

    until next time, f-c’mon

  • Brand Timelines

    So it looks like Facebook will start releasing the Timeline feature to brands very soon. Though it is still unknown how this will turn out, there are already what-to pieces across the web. As a page admin, I’ve already given the brief for a cover photo. 🙂

    It’s something I’m looking forward to, since, if I have to go by the options the feature has given to individual users, there might be some interesting opportunities for brands. This is not just to do with my interest in brandstreams or the potential for collaboration that I hope FB would unleash some day, but also because it allows brands a new storytelling avenue, especially through apps like say, Pinterest.

    This is despite not knowing how apps will feature in the new Pages, and in spite of (sometimes damaging) consumer voices floating in between the rosy picture the brand might paint, thought the latter is something most page admins are now used to since the official Reviews, Discussions tabs disappeared.

    But these changes also offer a cautionary note to not brands be too dependent on any single platform. As consumer data becomes more of a discussion point and individuals take their identity and information more seriously, this is a good time for a brand to start thinking about setting up a direct line with its consumers and their information.

    until next time, information timelines