• Change is here, hard cash?

    The question I posed on the Digital Marketing India group in LinkedIn, on whether advertisers would consider Facebook a better place to spend than Twitter, post the FB redesign, yielded a good discussion. Inevitably, the discussion entered the territory of whether the redesign would alter the status of the differentiated audience that each provides, and therefore the monetisation opportunities that both could develop.

    My post last week dealt more with my usage patterns on both services. I think that usage patterns would drive the kind of conversations and the context, and therefore be a major factor in deciding revenue streams. While on Facebook, we start with known friends, and then add layers to the relationship, the opposite happens on Twitter – you discover people with common interests and then the conversations evolve. It makes me wonder what really is the magic of Twitter – real time interactions, the discovery of people, or the ability to have conversations without revealing a lot of one’s profile. While most of the Facebook redesign conversation is happening around real time, and upgraded fan pages, the upgraded privacy settings which allow ‘follow’ without friending could be the feature that  gives FB the most commonality with Twitter.

    Mark Zuck had this to say about real time  – “the pace of updates accelerates. This creates a continuous stream of information that delivers a deeper understanding for everyone participating in it. As this happens, people will no longer come to Facebook to consume a particular piece or type of content, but to consume and participate in the stream itself.” Facebook might be trying to equalise Twitter’s advantages, and as per Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch. “Facebook doesn’t want Twitter to become the way large companies and public figures connect to fans.”. (via Adage)

    But I have a few concerns on this. Will the crowd be able to handle the deluge of items on their newsfeed, even with the filters being provided? In Twitter, the stream is everyone’s base (it differs based on the people one is following, but there is a public stream too) When conversations happen simultaneously in various ‘crowds’, they are connected by devices such as hashtags and RTs. In Facebook, the individual’s profile/home page is the base, so how does the connection of conversations happen? On the fan page, but there seem to be a few issues there? Groups could help in providing this base for a lot of conversations, but there are no updates as far as groups go. Lastly, as a user of both networks, I wonder if I can have the impromptu conversations that I have on Twitter, on Facebook. The third party clients that have been developed for Twitter have made sure that users have a wide array of options for their interface. Is that a major factor in boosting these conversations. Perhaps. (via Sampad)

    During the discussion, Sanjay pointed out that Facebook provides multiple engagement spots , and with the redesign, it could integrate the large user profile it already has with the real time stream to offer more accurate brands/ads placement. I’d like to add one more data component in this mix- Facebook Connect. According  to TechCrunch, work is already happening on the “Facebook ads + Facebook Connect = Social Ad Network” concept.

    Facebook has, as part of the new design also brought in location and language based targeting capabilities for advertisers. RWW also notes that, thanks to the Facebook Connect integration with Brightkite (a mobile social networking service), there are possibilities of hyperlocal targeting in the near future. The other market that would open up in the future could be based on the language versions. (Facebook is working on five Indian languages, for example) While Facebook has been making changes, basis features from Twitter and Friendfeed, it might also be to their benefit to look at an old adversary – MySpace. Though, at 236 million users, Facebook is rapidly leaving MySpace behind, the latter seems to have pipped Facebook as far as time spent on the site goes. It needs to be seen whether the new design will change that statistic too. Mashable has a post on the challenges and opportunities that the Facebook redesign throws up for brands. A consolidation, like streamlining the search function to aid easy tracking of conversations, might have to be done soon, to enable brands to utilise the service’s redesign better.

    In the discussion at LinkedIn, I had also brought up Stuart’s very interesting post on Twitter emerging as a personal advertising medium, which led me to wonder if large brands would gravitate towards Facebook, since they give a more structured way of interaction and small brands/individuals would use Twitter for promotions/advertising. But as Sanjay pointed out, Twitter would then, still have a revenue problem. 🙂

    Twitter is growing..and fast. Going forward, Twitter would need to watch Facebook carefully and choose a course that uses a different set of parameters for clustering users, and so deliver a differentiated audience, by usage or some other criterion, to create revenue streams. This could mean buying out a few services that complement the simple proposition that Twitter offers or helps measure brands’ activity on the service. Though I had mentioned that the big brands might want to look at Facebook because of the more structured approach,there are several brands already active on twitter. Like I said earlier, different user behaviour and contexts might mean that brands have different uses for Facebook and Twitter. While on the subject, check out Mashable’s cool sociable ads concept, and the debate about paying to be in the list of  suggested accounts to follow. (a list of 100 provided by Twitter to new users to start them off on the service)  It opens up a new line of thought. What if Twitter could find a way to serve real time contextual tweets on blogs, websites etc, perhaps as a (Twitter combination version of Google Search + Sponsored ads- if a brand wishes to be seen in a particular keyword context, for starters) widget. Let me think a bit more on that.

    Meanwhile, what brands should think about, is that in all this real time information overload on various services, they should not lose focus of what they are, and what their objectives are. Like I’ve said earlier, tools cannot replace strategy.

    until next time, some real time comments? 🙂

    PS. Must Read: A great Twitter FAQ list from Jeremiah

  • Breathless in Bombay

    Murzban F Shroff

    Breathless in Bombay is Mumbai..completely, teeming with characters that gives Mumbai its current character. Shroff uses characters from many walks of life and across age bands to describe the lives that make up the city. And these are not just the Mumbaikars, but also those who come from different parts of the country and end up being absorbed by the city and its machinations for love, money, power and everything else that makes it tick. With 14 stories, each of which showcases different Mumbais/Bombays – from dhobighat to Bollywood and from victoriawallas to Page 3 socialites, it shows the struggle of humanity, the aspirations that give the city its rhythm, the ability of its citizens to pick up the pieces and move on, and their eternal elixir – hope.
    I’d loved Pinki Virani’s ‘Once was Bombay’ for showing the transition of a city brilliantly, and I’d put Shroff’s work at the same level, for bringing out so well, the dynamics of Mumbai.

  • ClayPot

    The Thippasandra version of this restaurant has been around for sometime now. But we’ve never managed to go there. So, when we saw an ad that announced the opening of a Thavarekere version, we didn’t waste much time in checking it out.

    When coming from Dairy Circle, take a right turn on to Thavarekere Main Road (this is the road opposite Prestige Acropolis -Dairy Circle side/diagonally opposite the Dairy Circle entrance of Forum/right next to the SKC outlet). Keep going down this road, soon you’ll find Prestige St.John’s Woods on your left, and after about 200 m, you’ll find a fork in the road. Take the one towards the left, and then take the first left turn, and you’ll find Claypot on the left. Yes, like a lot of Mallu things, this one is quite left oriented. 🙂

    ClayPot is the typical ‘no frills’ Mallu neighbourhood restaurant, though it serves North Indian, Chinese and Kerala cuisine. The first two are what we call Mallu versions of these cuisines, which would include things like Dall fry, Shreaded chicken with capscum, baiging chicken (sic sic sic), but then if you’re looking for perfection in such matters, you shouldn’t be here. This is the place to be when you want to gorge on Mallu stuff.

    We ordered a Malabar style Chicken Fry, a ClayPot special chicken curry, a Karimeen Pollichathu and to go with all of that, an appam, a couple of mutta appams (egg appams), and a Kerala Porotta. The Malabar chicken fry is cooked in the best cooking oil in the world (for us mallus) – yep, coconut oil, and comes adorned with crisply fried onion. There are three pieces in one portion and is quite non spicy, that, I’m guessing is a rarity here, though to be fair, they do mark the spicy stuff with a chilli icon. The ClayPot special chicken curry is a white gravy with boneless chicken in a coconut milk base and is garnished with a full boiled egg. It looks harmless but is quite spicy, and the portion is more than sufficient for two people. Karimeen (Pearl Spot) Pollichathu is fried fish with a thick masala coating which is tomato and onion based with a strong Kokum (Kodum Puli) flavor. This one is delicious, but super spicy. The appams as well as the porotta turned out good too. We wanted to try some mussel dishes, but they’d run out of the stuff.  They did have some quail dishes, but I’m sure that if we tried to squeeze that in too, it’d be our stomachs which would be quailing!!

    All of the above cost us just over Rs.350. That would tell you the story. You come here to have some excellent Mallu food without burning a hole in your pocket. While they have some North indian/Chinese veg options, I’d recommend this place only to hard core non veggies who can handle spicy stuff. There are many many more options that they offer in the Mallu cuisine part, and we’ll definitely go back for more.

    ClayPot, #1/1, 1st Cross, Thavarekere, BTM Layout. Ph: 42190344/55, 9632227355

    Update: Heard this one’s now closed

  • The lift

    He’d never tried it. But circumstances were such that he really had no alternative. He was stuck at a party that was ending, and he didn’t have a cab. He didn’t know the hosts well enough. Hers was the last car to leave. He would attempt a pick up line, just so he’d get dropped.

    until next time, careening character

  • A rocky future ?

    The video that marked the end of Rocky Mountain News, a daily newspaper in Denver, would have a sobering effect on anyone who’s worked in the industry. The newspaper printed its final edition on Feb 27th, 55 days short of its 150th birthday. And there’s no succour when The Business Insider points out a list of 9 newspapers that are likely to fold. Newspapers in the US are still in shock at how an industry that was once really profitable seems to be on the path of extinction. Gawker is a good place to keep track. The reasons for decline are many – the rapid technological advances, changing consumption habits, newspapers not reacting early enough – to name a few. That’s a track we have walked several times, so I shall move on.

    What are newspapers doing to survive? A few examples. The Hearst Corporation, which publishes the Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Albany Times Union, and has interests in an additional 43 daily and 72 non-daily newspapers, is going to charge for some of its online content. The New York Times fights on, bringing out something new on a regular basis, the latest being the version 2 of their popular iPhone app, which offers extensive support for offline reading. (via RWW) It is also starting a neighbourhood blog project, which will have content from editors as well as citizen journalists, and they are planning to target local businesses for ads. (via TechCrunch) Across the pond, FT reports that the UK’s top regional newspaper groups have banded together to negotiate with the government as they seek urgent help to save further titles from closure.  Meanwhile, The Guardian has announced its Open Platform, which will allow developers to use its content (from 1999)  in myriad ways. The more interesting part is what it states  on the Partner Program page “You can display your own ads and keep your own revenue. We will require that you join our ad network in the future.”A very innovative approach!!

    Even content reccomendation services, like Loomia, used on sites such as WSJ, are looking to get revenues for their publishers. Meanwhile, advice is pouring in, from all quarters. Social Media Explorer has an excellent post on how journalists can leverage social media. This Mashable post shows “10 ways newspapers are using social media to save the industry”. This not only includes suggestions, but also tools that are available for free. I know at least a couple of journalists here who also use Twitter for story ideas, opinions etc.

    Debates still rage on the role that newspapers play in the community, and whether its loss is something much beyond that of just a source of news. One view is that society is losing a watchdog, and that stories are reported because of full time journalists, and that in a world, where all content is free, no news gathering will happen, because there is a price to it. But there are those who think otherwise. This is a good read, on that counter view. Some recent studies would support the latter. In fact, it raises a good point about revenue, which we’ll come to in a while. But both agree that to survive, newspapers have to quickly figure out how to factor the net into their business model, whether it is too late, only time can tell.

    As this article points out, the two revenue sources of newspapers – circulation and advertising, are linked. When content becomes free (the net has forced that) people are no longer interested in paying for it offline, which essentially means that advertisers don’t get the reach that they used to, from newspapers. And projections suggest that its not just offline ad revenues that are in a free fall, online newspaper ad revenues will continue to decline in 2009. Whether the state of the online component is a function of recession, is debatable. After all, when it comes to advertising on the net, even the biggest of newspapers have a formidable foe – Google. Google, which is now putting ads in Google  News, when you search for a particular topic. Remember that Google news is only an aggregator, and as of now, there are no updates of revenue sharing arrangement with the news sources.

    Newspapers are still producing content that people want. Only, there are other sources too now.  More than the assets required to generate the content (editorial staff and related infrastructure expenses), it is the delivery platform (press, newsprint, and even the distribution) that is costing the newspaper. Now consider this, with rapid technological advances, it is becoming easier for newspapers to generate the same content, and perhaps at a lesser cost (fewer reporters combined with crowd sourcing, for example) There is still some cost involved in this, and so, it is debatable whether all the content generated should be given free online. If some thought can be applied to utilising other delivery platforms which are cheaper, a revenue model scalable with costs incurred could be achieved. In any case, newspapers never made money out of content directly. They built audiences around the content they provided, and then leveraged that audience to create a revenue model in which advertisers paid to reach that audience. Maybe it is time to rekindle that relationship with the customers and give him more options than the ‘one size fits all’ newspaper.

    The time is ripe for Indian newspapers (especially the English dailies) to do some experimenting.  I wonder if its a good idea to treat the newspaper’s web presence as a separate business unit. Rather than blindly putting all the news available in the physical paper online for free,  start from scratch on the web, have a separate news gathering process (or attribute a part of the overall cost to this unit), start figuring out the requirements of consumers, allow some customisation,  (the net allows a lot already, but its still worth a shot in India) play around with local/sub local content, (they’ve to work fast on this one, since Twitter is also working on local news updates)  work on the digital delivery platforms, deliver more targeted consumers to advertisers with customised solutions rather than broadcast style ads, and maybe a fate similar to the US counterparts can be averted.

    until next time, newspaper