Category: Social Media

  • The next content aggregator

    There was a good ‘debate’ at the McKinsey debate zone on whether people will pay for content, in the context of newspapers. An old debate by now, and one whose conclusion is being seen around, with very few exceptions (the reasons for the relative success of the Big 3 of fee-for-content services—the FT, the Economist, and the WSJ are also dealt with), but made interesting because of its succinctness. Clay Shirky writes about the ‘high price of charging for content’, and starts with a very interesting line – “People will pay for content if it is necessary, irreplaceable, and unshareable.”

    [Before we go further, I have to share this amazing read (or listen) with you – Clay Shirky, at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. (also read the first 3 links to the commentaries on the web, the fourth is a twitter feed)]

    I’ll attempt a summary because the context is needed for the post. He talks about the temporary arrangement that had allowed accountable journalism to create an advertising based business model, and how in the internet era, specialist information sources have disrupted that model and allowed advertisers many more, and better options. He talks about how the newspapers’ way of bundling content, where readers and advertisers subsidised the content they didn’t want, doesn’t work now, and the aggregation has now moved from the ‘server-side’ to the ‘client-side’. He sees “the newspapers’ ability to produce accountability journalism shrinking”, and is convinced that “those changes are secular, monotonic, and irreversible, rather than being merely cyclic and waiting for the next go around.”  He also points out a major and adverse side effect of this disruption – the absence of newspapers as a bulwark against civic corruption. (While there are other media and their ‘sting ops’, I’d still say that the role of newspapers in this regard is still important). This is something I remember debating a few months back over at Iq’s blog, when he wrote on this issue.

    He believes that newspapers are irreplaceable in accountability journalism, and sees three kinds of experiments happening in the new media landscape – market based (commercial, the traditional advertising model of publishers), public (funded by income other than revenue – like non-profit models) and social (crowdsourced models). The internet makes the first difficult to sustain, the second easier, and the third, easiest.

    In a recent post, Umair Haque writes about the open ‘mediaconomy’, which offers tons of soda, but good wine too, and that’s the reason why most old media companies are in trouble now – ‘they’ve been for long producing generic soda, instead of distinctive kinds of wine.’ And in an economy where supply of soda far exceeds demand, how long will people continue to pay for it? As Umair points out, its not just about media, but any industry that’s doing the same.

    Now, a few days back, when I was searching for some information for a holiday, I went to my list of regular suspects – a  few Indian hotel/destination review portals and a few travel portals. I did find information, but was given a choice of hotels that I wasnt too happy with. I had opened another tab for the traveler advice on WikiTravel, and happened to come across options in the ‘Stay’ section which I hadn’t seen anywhere else. In fact it gave me more options than I’d have liked and I was forced to choose from two equally good places, whose websites had all the information I wanted.

    WikiTravel is free, created and curated by users, who take the time out to update and add information. They will obviously incur costs when doing this, and spend some time. They obviously are supported by a revenue model (personal) that allows this, a revenue model that most likely is part of the old economy (commercial, unlike public or social) And that’s what makes me worried about the transition period, the part when the old economy is too weak to support the new, and the new doesn’t have a way to support itself.

    The other point is that the content is out there, but the soda and wine are all mixed, and I’m yet to figure a model where I’m sure I’m not missing something. Yes, there is Reader, Twitter and perhaps a couple of other places, but these do have a tendency to evolve into an echo chamber every now and then. Serendipity does lose out a lot when I put systems and processes in place. Newspapers were aggregators in their time. I can customise tools to give me the news on only those categories I’m interested in. (Rarely) Sometimes people add the serendipity. In many cases, when I’m searching for specific information, the tools (search) and the humans (crowdsourcing) have failed me. I have ended up ‘discovering’ new resources – sites/tools/people and then sharing it. Its not as organised a way as I’d like, but I guess we’re still evolving.

    There is quite some work happening though. Google Reader recently added some ‘Magic’ which helps users discover interesting content faster. The new ‘Explore’ section has a generic popular items as well as recommended sources suggested basis the reader trends and web history (if opted in). Feeds can also now be sorted by ‘magic’, again basis the history of ‘like’ and ‘share’.  Twitter lists will add a new dimension to discovering users and content, and with the deals with Bing and Google, search is going to be more real time, and more importantly, involve a human filter – using the lists layer to deliver better, more relevant search results. The impact on SEO should be fun. TweetMixx is a site I came upon recently, and looks interesting in this context.

    Where will it land up? Is it possible to create an aggregator whose context is subjective preferences, but that will still bring in serendipity? (people who liked this also liked?) What kind of content aggregator will evolve that can either sustain itself without revenue, or convince me to pay for it? Or perhaps that single-entity era is over. It does make me wonder if at some point in time, everyone will be Hiro Protagonist like characters, paid for each piece of information they add into the overall system. 🙂

    until next time, infobesity

    Bonus Read: A very good read on ‘Why the great Indian media companies will fail on the internet‘

    Update: Set up Parse.ly Lets see what it delivers. 🙂

  • Brand equity in real time

    Media Post reports that Yahoo’s latest campaign caused its perception among U.S. adults to fall steeply – apparently, YouGov’s BrandIndex, which tracks daily consumer perception of brands, found that Yahoo’s buzz score had tumbled from 35.4 on Sept. 22 to 25.5 as of Monday. Acknowledging India’s growing significance, the $100 million (global) “It’s Y!ou” campaign was rolled out in India too – y!ou couldn’t have missed the “disruptive” frontpage takeover of multiple mainstream dailies or the TVCs. My views on it were expressed in <140 characters

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    Before you take me for some kind of Yahoo hater, I’m not. (Actually, I’m quite a fan of the Carol Bartz style of no-nonsense management – typified by the last few lines here) In fact my irritation with them stems from their relative disinterest towards a few tools that were original pathbreakers and that they’ve had for a long time – most importantly ‘delicious’, but I’ve written about that earlier, and some work on that service has happened since. So, anyway, Yahoo, this is not about you, you were simply a prolongued prologue, and a good example.

    A couple of weeks back, when writing about Wave, I’d wondered  “is brand equity an excuse/surrogate for thin value, and exist only in theory, or until the last good product?” This entire activity above somehow reminded me of that. Brand equity, and the lord knows there’s no shortage of definitions. (ignore the newspaper brand references)  So why did I think brand equity is now a surrogate/excuse for thin value?

    Every brand that enjoys good equity now must have provided ‘thick value’ at some point of time, to its audience. At some point though, did the ‘brand’ take over, and the focus become more on perception management, rather than as an aid to retaining/attracting customers. Is that the reason why brands in many industries cannot find a way past the disruption they’ve been facing – because they’ve been focused on creating brand equity basis communication and superficial value additions, and sticking way too close to the specifics, like competition, and not bothering about the generic fulfilment of a need?(classic example, newspapers and news delivery) Somewhere did brand and marketing communication start dominating the proceedings, at the cost of the basics – a product solving a need/a distribution that increases convenience/the factor that built the equity in the first place? And then did they shortchange consumers by putting a premium on the brand’s equity without delivering value? While trying to build the emotional connect and create a value perception beyond the commoditisation, did the means become the end?

    Take Yahoo for example. By an unfortunate coincidence, last week, GMail replaced Yahoo Mail as the most popular email service in India. I can imagine why. Like many others, I have multiple Gmail ids, and a Yahoo id too. While I open Yahoo because of a couple of e-groups, GMail is my primary communication centre. It has never been static, features and tools have been added to a point where I wonder how I worked without them. (try operating in basic HTML for a while) I checked Yahoo out again, with as fresh a perspective as i could, and didn’t find anything that could make me consider a shift. I still use Delicious a lot, and it still has a lot of equity (in my mind) going for it. Yahoo’s brand campaigns have nothing to do with it.

    Maybe the concept of brand equity had some merit when the audience didn’t talk to each other, but as WOM keeps getting bigger,  push brand communication is bound to become more meaningless. As consumption patterns change, needs change, distribution systems change, as real-time becomes the norm,  and exit barriers and costs for consumers come down, relying on a static and uni dimensional concept of brand equity is bound to be harmful. Also, with fragmenting media, fragmenting audiences, and an increasing importance for ‘my experience’, brand equity will be different things to different people at different times, and even the hazy setof objective measurements in vogue today, would be rendered ineffective. (Yes, it might have been the same before, but in an earlier era, consumers did not talk to each other, and it was easy to push the brand’s equity on to consumers). (Generalising, but) Take a look at the communication and taglines adopted by brands, their superficiality, the efforts that go into forcing the tagline’s emotion/value into the actual value provided, and thereby build/increase brand equity and you’ll see what I mean.

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    Perhaps, product equity will be the only measure that matters, and brand equity will be earned and burned real time, as consumers share feedback and rely on their trusted sources for updates, and historic performances will decrease in significance. (when the Fail Whale comes out on Twitter, evangelists become bloodhounds, or whatever..you know what I mean) And so perhaps, from a brand perspective, its about time that meaningless communication took a back seat, and we went back to the basics of brand equity, that may mean redefining the roles and responsibilities of everyone associated with ‘brand’ as a function. Because if you’re good, they’ll talk about you, and if you’re bad, they’ll talk more about you 🙂

    But you know what, I had more fun when i thought about a parallel. Thought leaders. Replace ‘brand equity’ with ‘thought leaders’ (or personal brand equity) and tell me what you think. 🙂

    UPDATE: Yahoo hires a new agency, tells Ogilvy “It’s not Y!ou”.. Damn, that was fast!!

    UPDATE 2 Meanwhile, a homepage redesign gives them 9% more page views and 20% more time spent.

    until next time, equitable solutions..

    Bonus Reads:

    Braggarts take over the web

    Almost unrelated, but an excellent read – Jerry Yang’s Advice in Interesting Times (via @mukund)

  • Social Inside

    There’s quite a funny video that has got almost 50,000 views by now on YouTube. It is titled ‘The Social Media Guru’, and in case you haven’t seen it by now, you should take a look, though you might want to keep the audio levels down thanks to the language

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKCdexz5RQ8

    While the video does generalise and could cause some heartburn among some who work on social media and do good work, the reason I found it funny was because I see around me, a lot of what is shown in there – a preoccupation with the tools/platforms in vogue, and the lack of something as basic as an objective. As always, the tools are less important than the philosophy of sharing, collaborating, and 2 way communication that’s happening not just on social media sites, but across the web, though the former, because of their inherent nature, have taken it to a different level altogether. The combination of a client who has decided his brand needs to be on twitter, thanks to some article he read somewhere (or an even more vague reason) and the social media guru whose answer to any client is a templated Facebook page + twitter account + you tube, is quite lethal – to two sets of people – the agencies/individuals who are doing/interested in some genuinely useful work on the social media platforms and the brands who decide not to take the plunge basis the results of the poorly thought through/executed programs of other brands. It doesn’t help that the medium is still in its nascent stages and everyone is still learning.

    While social media practices and practitioners might be fewer in India, as compared to the US, the challenges faced show very little such skew. I read two posts recently on the subject. Karthik wrote about ‘selling social media engagement in India‘, where, with the experience of working in a PR firm and pitching social media, he looks at the changes he’s seen in the acceptance of social media among clients over the last couple of years, and the key attributes for making the sale. He mentions how an existing communications partner has a ‘door opener’ advantage as compared to say, an exclusive social media agency, which helps them get the right  people from the client side involved in the pitch, and the need for proper articulation and simple guides which could be used by the client team to sell to their bosses.

    In another extremely interesting post, Sanjay writes about “Advertising Agencies and Social Media: The Challenges“. He notes fundamental differences in the way an advertising agency looks at communication, and how communication actually happens in social media. The observations on ‘campaign’ focus, the obsession with perfection (copy), the mechanics of how communication is rolled out, are all spot on, and something that I too have experienced several times while dealing with creative agencies. He ends by mentioning that in the current scenario, agencies keep treating these platforms as broadcast media. That last thought is something I keep deploring regularly here, so I completely agree.

    Now the thing is, while these are all perfectly valid points, I was looking at it from a different perspective. I wonder if, in the entire spiel, social media’s proximity to marketing/communication/brand as a function completely overshadows the cultural transition required by the client organisation. Does it get discussed at all? Even in my post rant some time back, I had only emphasised the usage of social media in the PR, research, advertising disciplines and the different stages of the product life cycle – including sales, customer care etc, and barely mentioned the culture change.

    The subject of a shift in culture is something I have written about in several contexts – from basic thoughts on transparency in organisations and controlling employee communication internally and with the outside world, to the need for organisations to understand themselves and the value they provide before going overboard with listening and acting on consumer feedback, to whether the size and scale of the organisation dictates its culture and its internal and external communication processes,  and the necessity to tackle business problems and look at it as something that needs to be addressed at an enterprise level too and not just at a brand level. The Dachis Group presentation – ‘Social Business by Design‘ illustrates this extremely well.

    I examined it further in the framework of the Awesomeness manifesto, which i regard as an excellent set of fundamentals for organisations, if they want to operate profitably in the evolving business scenario, and in all four of its pillars, I could see the need for a more holistic approach to social media. Its obviously easier said than done. It involves a vision, the zeal and guts to translate that into internal and external business practices- from environment to employee friendliness, training of personnel, readjustment of business goals, hiring people who understand this new design – like say, P&G’s technopologist, who can operate across functions to evangelise it and help apply it in different contexts. And that’s just a few things. Look at an application of this across your organisation, and you’ll see how massive an endeavor it is. Maybe only a few organisations are thinking about it now, but I think it might become an imperative very soon, decided by external forces beyond the organisation’s control. Whether this is spearheaded by the organisations themselves or an external agency would be a decision based on several subjective parameters. Maybe then, organisations will be able to figure out the ‘gurus’ better. 🙂

    So while, it is good to see great social media efforts from brands, I wonder whether more needs to be done to integrate it more fundamentally within the organisation.

    until next time, social nirvana 🙂

    Bonus Reads:

    Customer Twervice by Social Media Explorer (10 examples of companies using social media for customer service)

    Social Media Policy Database (Via Six Pixels of Separation)

    Why its time to do away with the Brand Manager 🙂

  • Wavering

    My twitter stream over the last weekend and to a certain extent this week too, was dominated by Wave. People asking for invites, writing about their first impressions, cracking one liners and so on. The entire activity reminded me of how brand custodians try to create ‘virals’. From making ‘viral’ a part of the strategy, to announcing on the day of the release that they have ‘launched’ a viral, there are stories and stories. For me ‘Wave’ was a viral. Google has done this before with GMail. This time too, there was hardly any advertising. It was banking on the brand and product equity of Google, and the (potential) awesomeness of the product. It made me think on both fronts.

    Google’s brand identity has been dominated by search. For most people, it is their starting point on the web. But its not just that. From the iconic, simplistic, patented home page and the doodles it exhibits there, to its attempts to disrupt the real time conversation domain that is dominated by Facebook and Twitter with Wave, Google is many things. GMail, Orkut, Picasa, Blogger, YouTube, Maps, all operating on different domains, and brands in their own right. And they only make up one part of what Google is today. (link to an informative analysis of Google) Currently valued at $100 billion, and rising. Though wary of it, the brand has my respect, and for me, Google has been awesome.

    Awesomeness. Umair Haque had an extremely interesting post about awesomeness recently. He wrote that innovation is passe, that it is ‘what is commercially novel’, doesn’t create anything fundamentally new, and that awesomeness is the new innovation. He lists ethical production, insanely great stuff, love, and thick value as the four pillars of awesomeness. Arguable, right from a semantics/ new buzzword premise. But I tend to agree, especially when I see the stuff being passed around as innovation.

    Now, some of you might be aware of this, but for those who don’t, Google has a ten point corporate philosophy. An extremely interesting set of things, which you must take a look at.#10, I thought, was related to awesomeness. It goes “Great just isn’t good enough.” Google believes that great is just a starting point, and their “constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.”

    They obviously felt that the entire domain of real time communication, search, sharing and collaborating could do with some disruption, that would explain Wave. And from the time I saw the video, I’ve thought that it would be a game changer, and wrote as much. But the feedback so far has been less than encouraging. From productivity killer to RSS, The sequel, it has been called quite a few things. The opinions are from guys who know what they’re talking about.From the little I have tried it out, I’ve to admit it can totally knock off productivity, but then again so can Twitter. Its less fun if there aren’t many around. Twitter in 2007, for me. Most are still learning, because it IS quite different. Seth Godin called Twitter a protocol (yes I keep saying that because its absolutely apt), I still figure that Wave has the potential that it showed in the video, the potential to create its own protocol. After all, there must be a reason why they call it a preview.

    But it did make me wonder about Google and awesomeness. Is Wave awesome, as opposed to an innovation? What if the idea is too advanced/difficult to provide ‘thick value’ now, does it still deserve to fail? Does that mean that sometimes innovation is better than awesomeness? How does ‘failure’ feature in the awesomeness manifesto? What does this do to the overall brand equity of Google? Or is brand equity an excuse/surrogate for thin value, and exist only in theory, or until the last good product?  But maybe Mitch is right when he says that we’re killing it before it begins. More after I play more with it.

    until next time, a wave new world

    PS: a few of my Wave tweets below 😉

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  • Brand Chats – Google & Godin

    Last week, Seth Godin’s company Squidoo launched “Brands in Public” (BIP from now), a  service which creates pages -‘public-facing dashboards’ that aggregate conversations about brands on Twitter, YouTube and blogs, in addition to news, videos, images etc. BIP will create the pages anyway, but for a fee, brands can develop this page. Brands then get control of the left column on the page, and can respond to the content, highlight certain content, run contests etc. (example) In Seth Godin’s own words, brands “can respond, lead and organize.”As Godin himself states, there are many monitoring tools online (found an excellent wiki by Ken Burbary) which can be used to ‘listen’ to the conversation, but this service allows brands to respond publicly.

    I saw a couple of posts which asked an interesting question – whether by creating pages ‘anyway’, Godin was brandjacking. Godin had clarified that if a brand requested him to take a page off, he would do so. And in a later update (to clear the air) he took off the 200 sample pages that had been put up. Bravo! Not that there was anything technically wrong with it – after all, like one of the articles states, Google does something similar- sell ads next to contextually relevant others- generated content (search, ad sense on sites), but the non-paid for brand pages just didn’t sound right.

    But it made me wonder again about the location of brand-consumer conversations. Before we get to that, another interesting news item in context, albeit a bit tangentially. Last week, Google launched Sidewiki, “which allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.” The entries which are shown, are selected not by recency, but an algorithm that has among other things – the contributor’s previous entries and the feedback on the entry. Moreover the entry will also be used on sites with the same content. Users will have to be logged into Google for leaving comments and rating.

    As Jason Falls notes in his post about Sidewiki, this adds another layer for brands to keep in touch with, because users may not even have to search for information about the website (or the product/service sold there). If they have the toolbar downloaded, they can see the information as they browse the site. He also rightly remarks (IMO) that we should expect ads (even that of competitors) in the wiki soon. Meanwhile, like any good social product, there is no control that a brand can exert on this content, as it exists on Google’s servers. Jeremiah Owyang  also has a post on the same subject, which offers several great insights and advice. Apparently, the comments a user leaves will also be displayed on his Google profile. The web as one giant social network, he’s right, that’s what Google’s after. There is also the option of sharing it on Facebook/Twitter. It’d be interesting to see a Facebook version of this whenever it happens – a play with Facebook Connect, the website, and perhaps, Facebook fan pages. The Facebook newsfeed means that it can bring the conversation back to Facebook. That’s something Google can’t do..yet.

    Now, back to the location. Attempts are being made to aggregate these conversations, and in BIP’s case make it a conversation involving the brand itself. My problem was not with brandjacking, the conversations are happening anyway, and brands are free to create their own ways of aggregation and response, I was more concerned with two other things. One, the creation of a destination point , a ‘middle man’ whose only context connecting its users was the brand itself. Like a subject popping up while chatting over coffee vs a focus group – they both have their uses, but for me, the former is more social media, simply because of the difference in intent. To be fair, I’ve always thought aggregation was inevitable, but Chris Brogan wrote recently about ‘Feeling the Community‘, where he talks about how “we don’t join communities because we  happen to like a product or service. We gather around people who feel what we feel, and we share passion for things that bring us some sense of pleasure or joy, or even healing.” I can completely relate to that, it is the reason I’m not a fan of many things on FB, and was/am not an active member of the groups I’d joined. Now, I talk about all these things (whose group/fan page I am part of) on Twitter. I follow blogs and use these as conversation points there, on Twitter and offline, whenever I feel there is a context, and whenever I can identify with what’s being said on the subject.  What I’m trying to say is that the objects (brands) or even the platforms are not the important context, the people are. Even though the brand has an identity and a personality, different people associate to the same brand differently, and my conversations happen with people who I feel can relate to what I’m saying. Also, the aggregation may not really show the context in which a comment was made. (esp. Twitter). For that, the brand has to be present on Twitter. I’m not sure whether an aggregation point would have the same effect. Woods, trees, and mistakes.

    The second issue I have is whether such destination points would tend to become band-aid fixes for a larger problem. Would brands approach the issues with a short term tactical mindset – highlight the issues that they’re able to solve, gloss over the ones they can’t? In essence, see this a point where they can control the conversations? Shouldn’t the greater priority for organisations be changing their internal processes and structures to adapt to social media, than having a dashboard responding to comments? I’m just not very sure it can work in parallel.

    So, conversations on the brand website, on its side, and on some other site..actually everywhere. At some point, all data would have to become portable, and depending on context (and perhaps other parameters) I would choose the platform/service/location for interaction. For now, world wild web indeed. 🙂

    until next time, a website with a sidekick 😉