Tag: seth godin

  • Branded trends

    Last week, Karthik had a post titled “Twitter, Twitter on the wall.. Who’s the trendiest hashtag of them all” that resonated much with me. In fact, it was a sentiment I had expressed just a few days before –

    We live in an era of instant gratification – from a consumer perspective. I’m not sure about the origins here – whether technology (from pagers/mobiles to social networking) came first or the behaviour did – and that prompted technology to evolve rapidly, but delayed rewards seem to have little or no meaning for today’s users.

    It’s a difficult behaviour to ignore, though building and evolving a brand’s DNA is a story that requires a much larger timeframe, IMO. And that’s where I remember Godin’s post titled Twitch – “the social internet is emphasizing twitch more than ever before. All that smart phone checking and checking in and name checking and instant rejoindering is amplifying the work of those that are just a little quicker than everyone else.” Godin himself states later that “While twitch may pay off in any ten minute cycle, I’m not sure if it gets you very far in the long run, where the long run might be as short as two weeks.“

    While it is possible to argue that individuals, even the personal brands, could scale quite some way on this, I’m not sure whether brands can. And that’s why I, despite being a practitioner of ‘social’, find the rise of the twitch tendency in brands, disturbing. Twitch is probably the brand’s rendition of ‘instant gratification’. What’s worse is that it’s not even the idea of social that’s the twitch here, but individual platforms and devices, (such as hashtags) which seem to have become drivers, sometimes displacing a well thought through strategy.

    A brand (even before the social era) consists of many parts. There’s no taking away from the fact that social has probably been the biggest disruption that brand frameworks have seen, but it still is only a part of the larger story. It needs to be woven into the larger brand framework, and then a decision should be taken on its role – lead or otherwise. Until brand managers take cognizance of that, twitch, will unfortunately prevail.

    until next time, a twitch in time….

  • IMO

    image via @SherlokSH on twitter

    #UnfollowSachin – that was the trending reaction on Twitter to Tendulkar’s Rajya Sabha nomination. (and acceptance) It reminded me of a couple of excellent related posts I had read recently.

    First, Seth Godin’s post post. Could also be titled “Why I have comments disabled”. Ok, that was just jest. I’d rather he focus on writing these than fighting trolls too. 🙂 He uses two simple parameters to disqualify a person from being listened to – lack of standing, and no credibility.

    The other post, which in many ways could be seen as quite complementary to Godin’s post is from what’s quickly becoming one of my favourite sites for some daily makes-you-think posts. I’ve not completely watched the video here, but the quote that connects is “Stuart Firestein’s insight on the importance of ignorance in exploration and growth”

    In our culture, not to know is to be at fault socially… People pretend to know lots of things they don’t know. Because the worst thing to do is appear to be uninformed about something, to not have an opinion… We should know the limits of our knowledge and understand what we don’t know, and be willing to explore things we don’t know without feeling embarrassed of not knowing about them.

    A fallout of not adhering to this is opinions on everything. Self publishing has made this almost a norm. (Is that an opinion right there?) Godin’s framework works well for brand management. But social platforms and brands’ nervousness towards it make the implementation difficult. Theoretically it should work well in organisational decision making as well. But it doesn’t, probably because organisational decision making is rarely objective. It leads me to my earlier post on empowerment. Between the noisy crowd and organisational hierarchy, what’s a brand custodian to do?

    until next time, any opinions? 🙂

  • Clear Blue Oceans

    The last week, I encountered a few ‘brand response scenarios’ – two of them in which I was directly involved, and one where I was just an onlooker. Since this is an area where I also spend considerable time, as part of my job, I thought I’d share some perspectives too.

    The first one involved a hotel booking. After reading excellent reviews on TripAdvisor and skimming through a well made website, I decided to send them a mail. For 2 days I received no response. I noticed that they were on twitter, and send them an @ message. No response from there too, though they continued to update with promos and news shares. In the meanwhile, I also sent a mail to an alternative id given on the site. After more than a week, I got a response, by which time, I had already booked another place, which responded in less than 24 hours. A deal of about Rs.25000.

    We bought a new television from a retail chain after seeing an offer in the newspaper. As the regular story goes, they delayed (from their committed time) by more than 48 hours and (uncharacteristically and quite reluctantly) I made a huge scene at their outlet. In the meanwhile, I also posted on their FB wall (as a response to the image of the ad which had lured me) and sent them an @message on Twitter. The FB response took more than 48 hours and asked me to send a mail to a certain id. The product had been delivered by then, and I told them that. The next day, a tweet response followed, asking me what the problem was. 😐 No deal lost, but no love lost either.

    In ‘Who Cares?‘, Godin talks about exactly these kind of scenarios, and from there I quote, “Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money.” The third scenario is an excellent example of this at work.

    Much has been written about it already, so you can read the posts, linked to below, to understand what the Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm ‘controversy’ was all about. This isn’t the first time I have regarded Cleartrip’s approach with admiration, and for good reason. This time, not only did they thank @jackerhack who pointed them to a blog post that trashed the new initiative, they also responded to that post and wrote a post of their own clarifying what they were trying to do, not just on the post itself, but also in the comments section where many people raised questions. Cleartrip has set such high benchmarks in this regard that all of the above are now standard fare expected from them, and I probably wouldn’t have written a post. 🙂 But once again, they went further. A week after this incident, a new post announced a redesigned feature that not only solved the problem the users had with it, but made it even better with more information. The result? An update on the very post that had complained in the first place. #win

    Cleartrip was listening, but then so are a lot of other companies. The difference here is caring enough to respond (externally) and creating an organisational will (internally) that works on a user problem and solves it. Not one time, but as a process.

    until next time, know response…

  • But what do I know?

    Unlike in my other blog, Seth Godin is rarely referenced here. But when I read this post (rant, he says) from him titled “Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so“, I sensed some vague connection with something I’d written a while back.

    Unlike other posts of Godin, whose blog I religiously follow for its ‘food for thought’, I found a smugness to this post – perhaps the rant provides the liberty. But as always, he manages to make a point. However, for a second, I wondered about the irony of this post coming from someone who does not allow comments on his blog. And thus this post.

    It is to be noted that he did not switch off comments just like that, he has valid reasons. Even if one just looks at the scale (1858 people retweeted and 2373 ‘Like’s) and considers  only a certain % commenting, it would tend towards chaotic. But whatever the reasons, he has chosen not to use comments as a channel.

    Ok, lets move on to me now. 🙂 I don’t read business books, however I follow several blogs in my line of work and otherwise. I rely on my Twitter, Reader and (occasionally) Facebook connections to point me to interesting reads. I also use Wikipedia extensively, despite the accusation that crowdsourced content can only be so trustworthy. From all this consumption, I have ‘superficial’ information on a lot of subjects, which make good conversation. This is also because I have way too many interests, and I’m forever in awe of things I don’t easily understand. My interest sometimes wears off after I’m able to bring a subject to my horizons of understanding. Sometimes, a more knowledgeable person corrects me/points me to things he/she thinks might interest me further and whenever I need/want to know more about a subject, I try and use the web’s sources to the fullest.

    But here’s the thing. Once upon a time, I could remember websites in context and add to discussions (offline), but increasingly I rely on delicious, among other things. I’m forced to prioritise my memory thanks to the ton of information out there that I process daily. Ok, that, and age.  🙂 And this is not a problem that will end soon, and its something I keep bringing up here. (Read)

    Time is the new currency, and I increasingly feel that people now react mercilessly to an “I don’t know”. Is that an excuse for people to claim knowledge of things they know nothing about? Maybe not, but perhaps like many other things, it is one of the ways for them to feel accepted and have a sense of belonging. So yes, it might be easy to label it as being deliberately uninformed, but in judging people so, without context and more understanding, we might be falling into the same trap ourselves – about people this time, as opposed to subjects.

    until next time, judge mental capabilities?

  • Culture Bridges

    There was much excitement when I saw that much talked about presentation that somehow seemed connected to Google Me and Google’s approach to social. But the sounds made recently by Darth Scmidt don’t really give cause for delight.

    While it doesn’t make sense to talk ill of something even before launch, the ‘social layer’ does sound underwhelming. It doesn’t help that Mark Zuck recently hinted that ‘social is not a layer you can add’. ( What is interesting though is he also said in the interview “We’re trying to build a social layer for everything”) He should know about what works in ‘social’, because whether you love or hate Facebook, it is definitely a creation (and creator) that demands respect, on various parameters.

    Somewhere towards the end of his post titled ‘The Forever Recession‘, Seth Godin, while talking of the ‘recession of an industrial age with its imperfect market communication’ paraphrases Clay Shirky and states that ‘every revolution destroys the last thing before it turns a profit on a new thing’.

    I thought about this statement in the context of Google and Facebook, and also remembered an earlier post at GigaOm which showed the difference  between the way Facebook and Google work. And that prompted me to wonder whether every age has a unique organisational and workforce culture that best fits it, and the entity that grasps it, succeeds.

    This is not just a Google-Facebook question, but one that I’d consider across domains and categories. The leader in an earlier era would try to capture that culture mojo and would most likely fail because it tries to add to what it has been doing so far, where a start from scratch is what is warranted. The interesting part is also that the time between ‘revolutions’ seems to be consistently decreasing, so how do brands and organisations carry their success across?

    until next time, a revulsion for revolutions?