Tag Archives: Web 2.0

The social media opportunity in India (1)

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My investor and business clients are increasingly interested in investing in India. While many of the conversations are about the less glamorous sectors, the chatter about social media is unavoidable.

A quick Google search on the ‘social media opportunity in India’ brings up over 0.5 million articles, in English alone. This suggests a considerable degree of interest in the topic. This interest is evident in conversations with some investors in London too. Understanding the opportunity however needs more than interest. It needs clear analysis.

Although things are changing for the better and the more efficient, setting up a business in India remains quite challenging for most. Two sets of problems come up instantly – corruption and infrastructure.

The former’s many facets need no explanation. In Transparency International’s 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index report, India has an unflattering 85th position. The legendary ‘Mr Fix-It’, admitted by many executives as being essential to success in India, has recently had his own cover story in a recent issue of Wired magazine, titled The Godfather of Bangalore.

Infrastructure in India is a multi-headed Ladon ‘guarding’ the golden apples of the Indian market. Investors admit to their first-time-in-India shock rather candidly but truly getting over bumpy roads, snarly traffic, unreliable telephony infrastructure and rolling power cuts (although I find it hard to imagine The Taj ever has one) takes a thicker skin and a very deep commitment to cracking the Indian market.

(c) Encyclopedia Mythica at www.pantheon.org

(c) Encyclopedia Mythica at www.pantheon.org

Social media businesses bypass both these bottlenecks with relative ease. An internet-based social media business can be set up with minimal permissions. If the business can find a reliable bandwidth and storage provider, of which there is no paucity in India now, we are in business. Prima facie, the social media scene in India does seem to offer an attractive investment proposition.

In the next post, I shall write about some of the most popular social media businesses in India and what investment opportunities may be around.

Four For Friday (4)

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This occasional series appears when the week’s readings have been good and should be shared. The themes are strategy, technology, investment and regulation, but sometimes they just cannot be separated. Sometimes the readings have been so good that I have a hard time picking just four. That is why this issue appears on Saturday this week instead of Friday. This week’s readings are also focused on social media conversations and the changing role of the customer. 

Albert Einstein reportedly said ““If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. This week Dina Mehta presents an apparently simple, but quietly powerful, model for measuring the value of social media conversations. 

JP Rangaswamy’s reflective post on customer participation in business innovation, titled Faster Horses in the Age of Co-creation, generated so much conversation that he followed up with a post that identifies the trends all innovative businesses would do well to heed. This second post is titled Whoa! Reining in the Faster Horses. Both resonated with me because I am involved with a couple of clients at the moment who are doing this right. I get to test the learnings, so to speak. 

Fred Wilson shares his views on Adeo Ressi’s criticisms of the Venture Capital model, and then revisits an old and clear lesson on what makes some VCs greater than others. Both good reads. 

Over at GigaOm, a post that combines technology, innovation and regulation and offers a strategic puzzle: Will 4G networks get sidetracked by patent problems?

It's when you deliver that counts…

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The title of this post is a snowclone of the title of a book on investing, published in the late 1990s. Writing before the dot-com crash, the author talked about the importance of, not buying, but selling stocks at the right time, at the right price, so as to realise profits. Amid the dot-com frenzy, he delivered a sanguine message that if you did not sell in time to appropriate the cash, it did not matter how high the stock price went.

Back to the post.

Communities and conversations are at the core of Web 2.0. Profitable businesses are harder to come by. When they do, they do so using principles, which can best be described as Web 1.0 or even pre-Web.

Pre-web, my first post-MBA job was in a cosmetics firm in India. In the summer when I began, the company launched a product, India’s first one to be sold as a ‘sunscreen’. Our competitor, Hindustan Lever, had a similar product, but it was sold as a ‘fairness’ cream. The ‘sunscreen’ position in the consumer’s mind was ours for the taking. The print and TV advertisements were aspirational and sophisticated. The demand sky-rocketed. I was a sales trainee with the unfortunate job of booking wholesale and retail orders week after week. Why unfortunate? Because we could not fulfil those orders! We didn’t have enough product, thanks to a production glitch, resulting from several factors including unanticipated demand and inadequate supplier management; yet the TV ads continued.

That was the most distressing summer of my life. Our wholesalers and retailers weren’t the only ones upset; my friends and family were upset too because they could not get the product. Meanwhile I continued using my supply of Oil of Olay, hoarded in the previous summer as a summer trainee at P&G.

The lesson?

If you want and indeed strive to create a demand, make sure you deliver. A consumer ‘primed’ to purchase a product is easy to lose, and difficult to regain.

But do these old-fashioned things still apply? Very much so.

Pat Phelan writes about how Bank of Ireland’s has failed to close the loop with their marketing partners O2 and CarphoneWarehouse. This has led to not just a lost customer for O2, but also a lost young savers account for Bank Of Ireland and lost commission for Carphone Warehouse. He describes them all as ‘muppets’, a description with which I find hard to disagree.

The lesson?

If you have a complicated product concept, make sure all the parties can deliver. A disappointed, irritated consumer is very difficult to woo back, especially in a competitive market where others are willing and eager to serve him.

Which brings me to Chris Brogan’s post, on promoting one’s book online. Chris writes about how Seth Godin just launched his new book ‘Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us’, using a whole slew of innovative marketing tricks. He gave free copies to some bloggers to give away; he made available a 0.99c audiobook on iTunes; and he built a social community, called Triiibes, ahead of the launch. Readers of his blog were invited to send him the electronic receipts of their advance orders and their snail-mail addresses. A certain number were then invited to register ahead of others on Triiibes. So far, so ideal.

The book was launched on October the 8th. As I write this post, on October the 20th, Amazon-UK tells me I won’t receive my ‘advance-ordered’ copy before November the 6th. I am not alone. Others who ordered with Amazon-UK are also waiting. So much for participating in the conversation about the book on Triiibes and for the advance-ordering hoopla.

Not just that – and I write this to complete the argument – our snail mail addresses were required as something special was to be sent to advance purchasers in October. May be, I am jumping the gun. May be, something will arrive in the next 10 days remaining in October. But when the book itself hasn’t arrived, I wouldn’t be holding my breath for anything else.

The lesson?

If your supplier screws up, it is unlikely you will benefit from the advance community building and promotion. A disappointed customer will not forget the experience.

Not very much unlike my first employer’s fiasco with the sunscreen, is this? Before ‘Tribes’, I had never bought any of Seth Godin’s books. The trend looks set to continue, unless a copy of Tribes somehow arrives, before I give up and cancel my pre-order.

It does not matter how many cycles of awareness-interest-desire-action you take your customer through or how many communities you create. The conversation just won’t start until the customer’s demand – whether of his own realisation of a ‘need’, or a latent need articulated through clever marketing – is fulfilled. Delivering the promises of marketing requires operational excellence. Whatever version of the Web we are at, and however creative our marketing, human expectations don’t change. They get more demanding, not less so.

In other words: it’s when you deliver the promised product/ service that counts.

What are your experiences of good service delivery and bad ones in the Web 2.0 world? Do use the comments link to share your stories.

Interesting reading:

Universal-McCann’s report ‘When did we start trusting strangers?‘

Authority on the web: Être et Avoir

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This is what the Oxford English Dictionary says about the word ‘authority’:

noun 1 the power or right to give orders and enforce obedience. 2 a person or organization having official power. 3 recognized knowledge or expertise. 4 an authoritative person or book.

ORIGIN Old French autorite, from Latin auctor ‘originator’

In a BBC interview, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the-web-as-we-know-it, expressed concern over how the web was being used to spread disinformation. Not an untimely concern, especially in the week after the Large Hadron Collider was fired and despite CERN’s attempts to communicate clearly about the experiment, fear-mongering was rampant. Sir Tim announced the formation of the World Wide Web Foundation which, amongst its goals to make the web truly global and open, also aims to find ways to help people determine the trustworthiness and reliability of information on websites.

The preceding means that Chris Brogan’s post on how the web defines authority is well-timed. He starts with a reference to the familiar adage about how on the web, nobody knows you are a dog. He then sets out a working definition of authority as “a blog or website or even an individual person and their credibility, knowledge, and reputation on the Web” and presents an overview of some of the tools that can be used to determine a person’s authority on the web. These include, amongst others, Google, Technorati, Alexa and a great new tool called Website Grader. These may also include social networks on websites such as Twitter and LinkedIn. He then asks some pertinent questions about if this is a numbers game, how organisations may begin checking on who’s who on the web and more importantly, if you would trust someone you knew solely from the web.

All good questions indeed.

‘Authority’ on the web is difficult to establish – and even more difficult to maintain – for several reasons.

One needs to be consistently authoritative in one’s views; this suggests that it is, über alles, a game of ‘content‘ or ‘substance‘.

One needs not just to be substantive but regularly substantive; one needs to be not a passive observer and a reporter, but a participant-observer who is not afraid to share knowledge, raise questions, initiate and promote debate, and do all of this gracefully. One’s opinions need to demonstrate one’s ability to ask questions, make connections, dig data and substantiate one’s points of view. This takes up a lot of time and if someone is consistently investing the time, then it can be seen as a proxy measure of that person’s commitment and potentially, his or her authority. This is the ‘être’ aspect of authority.

Further, authority is nothing without a “fan following”, which means that it is also a ‘numbers‘ or ‘marketing/ PR‘ game – but with an additional qualification. This is the ‘avoir’ aspect of authority.

Being present and being active on the web are preconditions to creating this “fan following” and it does not come easily or swiftly. This numbers game can get tricky because it spawns some odd behaviour, which an anthropologist would find interesting. For instance, not too long ago, some people on Twitter referred to themselves as “weblebrities” which tickles my ironic sense of humour but may put clients off. Earlier in the summer, Twitter had a problem and the cries of ‘Dude, where are my followers?’ from otherwise perfectly reasonable people was a tad embarrassing.

The additional qualification is the ‘quality‘ of the interaction, which is trickier to judge for a casual observer. One needs to set one’s own criteria to assess. For instance, I recently culled my ‘following’ list on Twitter to retain only those people who meet at least two of these four criteria: ‘informative’, ‘interesting’, ‘dialectical’, ‘original’. The list rapidly went down but each person is now meaningful for my professional purposes. Such personalisation of preferences on the web also means that Sir Tim’s Foundation will have a hard task setting widely-agreed guidelines for determining reliability.

The ‘numbers’ game is trickier, if one is paying attention to the quality of it. The open dialogue that is possible in the web’s 2.0 avatar means that things chop and change quickly, and even if broad criteria remain the same, quality content may come from unexpected quarters. Remaining engaged, and remaining fluid and flexible are both crucial.

In the end, however, it does not matter how much of an authority one is, nobody likes to deal with an arschloch. Mean streaks are really difficult to hide especially if one participates copiously on the web. On the other hand, it is possible to be perfectly nice and be seen as an ‘authority’ of which Dharmesh Shah (of OnStartups and Website Grader) and Guy Kawasaki are brilliant examples.

So what does all this mean?

Well, like all else, we begin with the end in mind. The eventual goal of being seen as an authority is to be able to help shape discourses in customers, companies and communities. Much life goes on not on the web, but off the web, in the real world. My view is that the real world and the virtual world of the web are not as separate as we like to imagine, and that the statuses of a person in the two worlds should be conflated, not disparate.

Achieving this unity of ‘positioning’, not as an authority but as a person and a professional is a harder trick to master amid the deafening noise on the web. In the end, clients deal with persons, not with personas.

After all, on the web, one could be a dog and remain a dog, but in the real world, one does get found out!

Related reading:

Trust in the internet God, but…

So, what's the big deal with Twitter?

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Someone asked this question at LinkedIn recently. My answer was so long that I thought it could be a post.

So, what is the big deal with Twitter?

I am a recent user of Twitter. Sometimes I update several times a day; sometimes I do not even log in. Yet I recognise that Twitter has the potential to be useful. I am no proselytiser but here is some information which you may find useful.

Twitter’s home page asks: “What are you doing?”. It is that simple. It is a micro-blogging service that allows you to share details of your life. Of course, you choose what, when (moment-by-moment or less frequent) and with whom (you can protect your tweets and allow followers only on request) to share, just like in blogging.

Twitter status updates, called ‘tweets’, are short by design. At 140 characters, a tweet is shorter than an SMS. The shortness means one can make more ‘real time’ updates on Twitter than on Facebook, GoogleTalk or Linkedin.

So is Twitter useful for anything? Yes. Here are some examples.

1. Crowd-sourcing: I recently answered many questions for a New York based VC whose daughter was facing some problems in Edinburgh. One can have a direct messaging (DM) based conversation or post all replies as tweets. The said VC visited Edinburgh and continued to share his experiences on Twitter.

I have also noticed journalists seeking expert recommendations for forthcoming articles. A woman asked her ‘followers’ for their opinion on what she should order, as she sat in a restaurant! I have also sourced information on Twitter from time to time and my efforts at ‘crowd-sourcing’ are better rewarded than my sole attempt here.

The option of mobile-Twittering extends the possibilities. A mobile tweet from JP Rangaswami told Alice that he and I were stuck on the same Heathrow runway waiting for Dubya to leave.

Frequent updates mean that the community is constantly engaged, in an ‘always-on’ rather than ‘batch-processing’ mode.

Caveat emptor applies as elsewhere in life.

2. Promotion and discussion: Several Twitter members promote their recent blog posts, media appearances and other projects etc to other Twitter members (who are following them).

Others have been discussing their experiences with testing products, and issues such as ‘why Sania Mirza wore a track suit while in the Indian pageant at the Olympics opening ceremony’.

3. Possible networking: This can come from being smart about one’s tweets in content and frequency. One can ask smart questions and engage in intelligent conversations with influencers or indeed be influential in driving a conversation. It takes a lot of creativity to say meaningful things in 140 characters without text-speak.

People announce their advance travel plans and set up formal or informal meetings. Others actively seek companions for cinema or hiking or other activities.

A possible problem is that stream-of-consciousness micro-blogging can sometimes damage one’s carefully cultivated public persona! Blogger Jackie Danicki (via Alice, because I do not follow Jackie Danicki’s tweets, which are protected) is of the view that it is best not to follow one’s “heroes” on Twitter.

In other words, like all tools, Twitter needs to be used with care.

What are the possible negatives?

1. Realisable value: For a user to realise the value in the network, the nodes, or people with shared interests, need to be valuable. It is not always easy to locate these nodes. Twitter’s search function is quite limited, some people use creative handles for micro-blogging and some, such as I, may forget to fill their profiles in a meaningful way. Summize, Twitter’s latest acquisition now enabling search, is trying to make searching easy. I am yet to be convinced.

2. Spam: Spammers could start following you and then you find your tweets all over the place. I had a Japanese spammer following me for a while. It is not nice, especially when you have no idea what he or she is saying on his or her own micro-blog! A fix may be to protect your updates but that is a bit extreme in my view.

You can also ‘block’ selectively. After a spat over the Swastika, TechCrunch’s Arrington blocked me. I have no idea if he has unblocked me since because I haven’t bothered to check. I prefer GigaOm for valley news, hah!

3. Time-wastage: Twitter can be a big time-waster. But can you name something on the internet that does not have the time-wasting potential already?

A bad workman blames his tools; a good workman knows he has only himself to blame. Twitter is a tool. One can use it or abuse it.

4. Rubbish content: Just as the blogosphere is full of rubbish blogs, poorly researched and badly written, with legions of ‘readers’ praising terrible writers as the “best-writers-ever”, Twitter-ville too has a lot of rubbish.

If one starts to follow any of the rubbishy ones, and realisation dawns slowly, it is easy to un-follow them. It is not very different from the blogosphere where one can stop following certain blogs.

And rubbish is subjective anyway. I follow foodie tweeple, which may not interest you just as bhangra-pop is unlikely to push my buttons.

Hopefully so far there is something to explain the ‘big deal with Twitter’. Now, for the bit that I find hilarious and dubious.

Like most relationships, one can expect to get what one puts in. Mostly. In my view, “big egos” appear more evident on Twitter than in the blogosphere. This could be because terse tweets, in the absence of a context, can come across as extremely self-indulgent.

There can also be a game – for some who are minded that way – to increase one’s “follower” numbers. Recently Twitter had a problem with their software and for a while, both the followers and the followed vanished from many profiles. The number of tweets from grown men and pillars of their business communities of the “dude, where have my followers gone?” variety were scarily numerous and hilarious, and also reminiscent of Jackie Danicki’s observation about following one’s heroes on Twitter.

Of course, if one is curious about the big deal with anything, perhaps it is best to find it out for oneself. So go on, tweet if you will.

And let me know what you think the big deal is, or is not, and why.

On Twitter, I follow, amongst 84:

Paul Kedrosky

Om Malik

JP Rangaswami

Guy Kawasaki

Additional reading (late addition):

Jeff Pulver calls Twitter “the Ham Radio of the Internet”

Update on August 13th:

Brought my ‘following’ list down from 88 to 50. How? Well, I cleaned it up.

Now I retain only those who are at least two of these: ‘informative’, ‘interesting’, ‘dialectical’, ‘original’.