Resistance is futile

• There’s an app for that.
• Google it. 
• Check Wikipedia.
• Tell me the landmark for my GPS. 
• Heard on Twitter…
• Can you give me your mobile number in case of emergencies?
• Check the forums in case someone figured out how to fix it. 
• How are the reviews?

 

How often do you hear any of the above? The interesting thing is, a lot of these are moving from being brand names / objects towards activities, verbs. Google it. Tweeted. Others are getting there.

There’s a more subtle shift happening under the surface, too. It’s not just that these are some tools / applications that are becoming popular to the point of ubiquity, indispensability. It goes even deeper. Look at the unspoken assumption that lies behind Googling something, searching for an app that can do what you want, looking up an address on a GPS, and assuming everyone is 10 digits away at any time.

It’s an assumption that there is, there in the Cloud, a repository of data, information, and knowledge that exists. Someone, somewhere in the world has had the same problem we have had, and has found an answer. That answer is out there and accessible.
I don’t need to know how to fix something, know something, as long as I can correctly identify and find the person who has.

It seems kinda obvious – that’s one core concept of the Internet, anyway – but the point I’m trying to make is, it goes deeper. Our brains are starting to operate on a Cloud paradigm. Don’t need to remember, only process. Knowledge belongs to the community.

Sounds very… Borg, doesn’t it? 

On The Turning Away Of The Face(book)

Hi Ashish,

We’re trying out a new feature to reduce the amount of email you receive from Facebook. Starting today, we are turning off most individual email notifications and instead, we’ll send you a summary only if there are popular stories you may have missed.

You can turn individual emails back on and restore all your original settings at any time.

Thanks, The Facebook Team

But with Facebook, is anything ever as easy as it seems?

Think about the implications of this for a moment. If you’re a normal facebooker, you will check in fairly regularly, and what prompts the check-in (usually) is something that gives you a feeling that something’s happened. An alert mail. Somebody commented on your post. Somebody tagged you in a photo, mentioned you in a note. Friended you. etc.

This is usually in your mail. Which can come on your mobile, your POP account…

Also look at that little sidebar that came up a few days back – there are all your alerts! It’s a very… twitter-esque interface, also in the sense of it’s impermanency… an update that gets pushed down is gone.

Psychologically? You feel cut off. You feel you don’t know what’s going on in your social world when you’re off FB, and are flooded with information, real-time, when you’re on it. Interactivity and presence is encouraged. Absenteeism is literally punished with silence – FB’s shunning you.

Result? FB is always-on, increased timespends, interactions, pageviews…

Good call, Zuck!

To or not to… work from home

The whole concept of ‘working from home’ is fraught with pitfalls, not the least of which is a highly negative connotation it’s come to acquire, at least in the Indian concept, standing as shorthand for ‘on leave without using up leaves’. However, there are positive aspects as well, and then some surprises.

Working from home becomes possible in some specific scenarios – your work doesn’t involve frequent interaction with colleagues in the same office and is independent. Writing, creative work, design, coding, accounts, or anything involve own, small business, etc – this basically needs your brain and a task at hand that doesn’t depend on anyone else. An alternative is if your interactions are limited to phone / mail only. Check.

No distractions in the home – which means no kids / aged parents / frequent visitors / nearby construction. If you can also set aside a part of the house – say, a spare room / study, or your bedroom if nobody else is using it, that works too – but both you and everyone else needs to be disciplined enough not to break that sanctity. Check.

Discipline. It’s very tempting to catch an episode you’re following, finish off a ‘few’ pages in a book you’re reading, finish a chapter in a game you’re playing, or even just surf. It’s a black hole, a bottomless pit, that. It never ends – a few minutes becomes an hour, half a day, and then you’re basically screwed.

Laziness. The biggest advantage working from home gives you is the ability to save on travel time – in my case, close to 3 hours a day – but that can also lull you into a false sense of security, where you imagine you have a lot more time to complete a task than is actually there. Trust me, you don’t want to be sitting at home and working once the family is back and the day turns into night; even if you live alone, it’s psychologically very exhausting. Just make a deadline, a schedule, and stick to it.

Independence. This is a pitfall. When your power goes out, your internet goes down, or your computer crashes, you’re on your own. Make sure you have your backups and redundant solutions available – buy a external HD, save every few minutes, get a USB internet stick, the works. Nobody listens if you don’t deliver due to things beyond your control.

If you can greenlight all of the above, go ahead; you’ll save your office some decent rental and maintenance space, and you an extra few hours a day of leisure.

The MOST critical feature for an online retailer…

…is the humble wishlist. 

I’ve used Baazee.com, eBay, Indiatimes Shopping, Rediff, Indiaplaza, and multiple other random sites for one-off purchases. But one place I keep coming back to each time, again and again, is Flipkart. And it isn’t necessarily because of the prices or the range.

Take any standard online retailer.  Assume that the other basics are taken care of – secure payment gateways, logistics, a decent range, and good searchability is in place and equivalent for all.

The one with a wishlist feature is the one that wins out. Why? Because it’s not only your wishlist, it’s also your shopping list. Every time you finish reading the book / playing the game / watching the movie you bought on the last purchase, here’s where you’ll go back to. Every time you read a good review or receive a recommendation, you’ll look it up and add it – just for future reference. A couple of weeks later, you have a list of items that you’re not very sure where they came from – but you do know that at some point of time, you wanted to buy them. And you still can.

If the wishlist is socially shareable – I’m talking pre-birthday, pre-anniversary and pre-christmas type occasions – it makes gifting so much easier, and a much more rewarding experience. Sorry, but I’m a greedy bastard.  :)

Items get added onto the wishlist after the search process, which differentiates it from any newsletter-based or deal-of-the-day type models. Those introduce you to items for the first time, after which you start the price-comparison checks. That works for totally unique items, one-offs you won’t find anywhere else. Commoditized items can’t work here.

Newsletters also have a slight trace of the snake-oil salesman; I may be paranoid, but if I see something at an amazing discount, my first reaction will be to wonder why. Nobody’s in the business of giving money away. Is it defective? Obsolete? Scratched? Pirated? etc. The wishlist, on the other hand, is above and beyond reproach, because you’ve put it together yourself. The items you added weeks ago may now be cheaper in a different listing, but what are the chances you’ll recheck before buying?

Ebay has a watchlist – but it gets purged with every relisting. will need to check the others.

Amazon has an awesome feature – the recommendations obviously, but most important, the ‘people who saw this also saw / bought’. Lets you leap from product to product, literally along a train of thought, always through things that you like, till you stumble upon the one you like enough to buy.

And for everyone else – especially the guys who hold inventory themselves – enable a wishlist. It’ll help.

And, Google+.

I’ve had this around 24 hours now, and the critical question is – can Google+ replace a Facebook?

It’s definitely miles ahead of Orkut, but that’s a given. As far as FB comparisons go, there’s one critical feature they got bang on – the issue of privacy. My biggest grouse with FB has been that there are people on it who shouldn’t necessarily know who else is on it, and what they’re doing. G+ lets you split up everyone you know into insulated groups – and everything you mention from here onwards is specifically meant for exactly who you wanted to see it. It’s like having multiple social networks on the same profile, meant for different people.

The best privacy tool is your fingers – don’t post what you don’t want people to know. But this (circles) is the next best thing – now that you’re gonna post anyway, at least keep it withing the circle that won’t blow up in your face. Advantage G+.

The other advantage that G+ has is Gmail – almost everyone I know has an account. So a readymade, ready-to-go list of people already exists on G+. You don’t need to pull them in. Even.

Same with Picasa – there’s a readymade set of images to be shared. Even.

Share links for content shares – easier for FB since they got so massively integrated. Advantage FB.

FB still has the advantage in terms of apps, games, and content – what they need to do now, really, really fast, is differentiate the one mass of friends into distinct, separate, and insulated social circles. That’s easy, and will put them back in front. Right now… it’s iffy.

Google Analytics and Concurrent Users

First of all, read this.

LoadImpact’s post explains how you do this, and it’s a very useful article – I think it deserves to be shared around some more. It basically takes your per-hour data and timespends, and estimates the average concurrent visitor numbers from that.

But while I was testing this out, 2 things occurred to me -
One – is it misleading? when you calculate a peak, you’re taking an average over an hour. The actual spike would be far higher at the point of occurrence – i.e. if your average concurrent users are 10, and you calculate a peak of, say, 50 on one day – the logical assumption is that there will be fifty people on the site together, assuming a timespend of a minute. But those 3000 people could have come 1500 together in the first minute and 25 every minute after – so the actual peak would be 1500, something that doesn’t show or get implied.
(Maybe that’s why it’s not an official feature?)

Two – Now, Google is recording a timestamp on each open. They can calculate minute-to-minute, even second-to-second usage. This is fairly important data – Google, why don’t you just add it to the layout of the basic dashboard anyway? Annual average and peak within the selected daterange would be fine.

Moral of the story – if you’re using this method for an approximation, go ahead. But it might be a little misleading on the extremely high values and also on a series of similar, seemingly identical values. Remember that pinch of salt.

Watching S M

Sorry, guys – please note the complete absence of the ‘&’ between the letters. Better luck next time!

Experimenting around over the last week about what’s the best way to track social media, as an individual. Had an epiphany a little while back when I had 10+ tabs open, on 4 browsers, different sessions for different IDs on assorted social networks… and realized I’m going to need more. That’s just ridiculous.

Most of my activity on social networks and platforms consists of watching – so I started exploring what are the ways in which I can do this more efficiently, and finally, settled on a combination of Feedburner and Google Reader. Almost any dynamic content on the web can be converted to a feed, and Reader, while taking a little getting used to, is pretty good at organizing these. I initially thought it’ll just be a tool to collate updates, but it’s turning out to be more – by a simple process of narrowing down to specific sections in a site and creating feeds of those, you’re eliminating the need for the browsing through each one separately. Some of the good sites have been very intuitive with this, enabling feeds at just the right places (LinkedIn Q&A is a case in point.) The end result is actually redefining my browsing behavior.

Even my own content is easier to manage – I have 5 blogs, not to mention assorted other output in terms of photo uploads, tweets, video, etc. There were multiple blogrolls, subscriptions, follows, lists and favorites scattered through each of these. Now I can at least get it all in one place. It also leaves me free to block a lot of unnecessary updates on FB & Twitter, restoring some sanity to my timeline.

Make sure you go through your sharing settings on Reader once and understand them – a lot of what you watch you may not want to broadcast.

I realize this probably sounds very old hat – a lot of you will have been using Reader for years now – but in terms of the current issues over privacy, time lost in social media, information overload and drowning in a deluge of infojunk, if you haven’t used Reader till now, give it a shot. I really don’t see myself discarding this anytime soon.

I’m sorry, but what the eff?

.

When I started writing this, it was supposed to be a very professional, neutral perspective. But this evening, I had a – not exactly a conversation, but more of a highly surreal experience – that’s left my brain vibrating in my skull like a tuning fork.

Cut a long story short, I posted a social media / online marketing query, addressed to the SMO agencies that are cropping up all over the place. It was meant to do a brief check of capabilities and costs. It instead opened a vision into insanity. Some brief excerpts follow -

Me: I have a website and a Facebook page, and I want to build traffic for both.

He: I don’t understand. Why are you confusing online and social media?

Me: Wha-

He: Don’t do facebook advertising. You pay money for a lead, he joins your page, he unjoins, your money is lost. Go with our ‘Organic Fanbase Building’.

Me: How does that work?

He: We have (large number) fans across all the other pages we’ve built for (frighteningly high-profile list of clients). We blast them all a message them asking them to join your page.

Me: But, but… I want to target a specific audience… say, only men. (At least that, if not age groups, locations, and preferences / interests! For God’s sake!)

He: Don’t restrict audiences in social media. Go for everyone. Everywhere. Get as many as you can.

Me: Er. Ah. Um –  my service is only available in India.

He: No problem. Just restrict page settings to be visible only in India.

Me: But haven’t you already blasted an untargeted message to everyone (literally everyone) about this page?

He: Yes.

(and nothing further. No explanation, justification, or acknowledgement that this was a bloody stupid thing to do.)

Me: Do you set up and run Google Adwords campaigns?

He: No, but it’s a ten-minute job. You can easily run it yourself.

(point of interest – I’m reading up SEM material, and even to get half of the basics for the Individual Certification for Adwords Fundamentals has taken over a dozen hours of reading. Or, in this twilight zone I’m in tonight, ten minutes.)

Me: What do you do with Twitter?

He: Tweets work only with celebs. Do you have a brand ambassador who can tweet about your product? Write something entertaining, some gossip?

Me: Er… no. I don’t have celebrity brand ambassadors.

He: Oh. Bad luck, then.

Me: Can you set up a branded twitter page / account, and manage it?

He: Of course! We create custom Twitter pages and manage it for you. Only Rs. (steep figure) per month. We take care of everything. The only thing we don’t do, is respond to followers.

Me: You do lead gen forms and processes?

He: Yes. Rs. X (koffff) for simple, Rs. 2X for email verified – but we want a guarantee from you that all your mails go 100% into user inboxes, and not into any promo folders, spam, or junk. Give us this guarantee.

Me: What about mobile verification of leads?

He: Yes.

He: Meaning, we will help you set up the mobile system.

He: Introduce you to the mobile people… operators… there’s a lot of technical stuff… we hand-hold you to let you set it up yourself.

Me: Custom facebook pages?

He: Yes, for Rs. (dear God) we do facebook ‘page beautification’.

(turns out he meant an FBML box on the wall. This, after I mentioned in my first mail to him, ‘an FBML box on the wall.’)

And the last comment – please note, after he has advised against facebook advertising (where you can target precisely by location, time, gender, age, and behaviour, at an optimized, pre-set CPC) – that yes, he does charge for every fan added via his ‘organic growth’ – untargeted, generic, spammed – Rs. (worth at least a few cigs and coffee) per user.

Let me just state – I’m not writing this to poke fun at ignorance, or assume that this is a valid representation of all agencies. (In fact, at the time of writing, I’ve also received a very sane and coherent response from a second one within minutes of asking)

This post is to highlight the unfortunately true maxim – ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ Social Media is a hot buzzword in the marketing field these days, and while a willingness to embrace new media and developments, and capitalize on new opportunities is a very laudable and praiseworthy initiative – I just have 2 pieces of advice, before you jump in.

For the marketing managers who pay for this – please understand what social media is, how it works, what tools and applications exist, and why and which ones make sense for your objectives.

For the SMO agencies who execute this – please understand what social media is, how it works, what tools and applications exist, and why and which ones make sense for your client’s objectives.

There’s a huge wealth of information out there on the web – presentations, case studies, discussions, views, reviews, and overviews, how-to’s, guides, tutorials, free trials, the works. Please read before you start to bleed. It’s not a rocket science. But it isn’t some mysterious magic either, understood and practised by a rare, select few.

Like anything else in marketing and media management, it needs a little study, a little experimentation, and a lot of thought to work. And unlike a lot marketing, if you don’t do it right, it doesn’t die with a fizzle and a whimper. The ensuing backlash can cost your organization reputation, money, time, and people. Because if you screw up and make your employer – or client – look stupid, heads will roll, and the first one will be yours.

SMO is a tremendously powerful engine, and if you don’t use it, you get left behind. But if you use it badly, without knowing it, it can rip you to pieces. And this is a race that you’re already running. Can you crack it?

Can you become a case study for success – or failure?

=========================================

Watch this space. There’s some more who haven’t written in yet.

On The Edge

Imagine a camp in the dark wilderness, fire burning brightly in the center, the surrounding wilds shrouded in shadow. Management clusters around the heart, in the brightness and the warmth; they’re the camp directors, the leaders, and they keep the journey going.

Social media is, from a corporate standpoint, always on the fringes of the empire.

It’s not mainstream – probably never will be, unlike traditional Marketing, CorpComm, PR, and the lobbying machinery. Those are themselves insulated, and further insulate the core from any unpleasant voices from without. Social media, by the very nature of it’s existence, is right there on the edge, more outside the circle of firelight than in, listening to the dark, and sending back reports that are sometimes interesting, sometimes disquieting, and usually incomprehensible. The rest of the camp doesn’t really know what ‘those guys’ are doing out there, but don’t want to risk pulling them back inside – not anymore.

The world is a strange, mysterious, and dangerous place these days. The voices in the dark have grown very powerful indeed, and command more resources than anyone inside the circle of wagons had ever dreamed possible. Today, more than ever, it’s critical to post lookouts, and be ready to leap into action at the first sign of danger. Ignore the warnings too long, and you could be overrun before you even realized what was happening, a cloud of fast, nimble detractors sweeping the camp, stealing precious brand equity, and disappearing again before you could react. All you can do then is handle the aftermath of the failure.

And out there, there are others who can sense the failure, too. It draws them like vultures, to the smell of spilled blood.

Don’t mind the rather colorful imagery – that’s what happens if you spend enough time in RPGs – but I’m dead serious on the parallels. Social media is a watchdog, and it’s the one that sees the first sign of trouble. There are sometimes arguments made that companies shouldn’t be on social media (usually after a PR disaster) to remove the outlet for negative commentary, but this is the business equivalent of hiding under the blankets hoping that the monster will go away. It won’t.

Instead, what corporations need to do – and very quickly – is to put into place a social-media-recovery process that’s more fire drill than marketing process. You need marshals, you need decentralized authority and you need people who can react, with company resources, quickly and effectively.

Nestle learnt this the heard way. When negative comments started surfacing on their Facebook page, they chose to first ignore, and then suppress / ridicule. Bad idea.
On a Facebook page, every comment is equal. And if you knock them out of the field because you’re an admin, the next thing you know, there’s another field where you aren’t.

Social media is not about control. It’s an early-warning system. Long-range radar doesn’t shoot down incoming missiles, it enables the other defences to react fast enough, to. When tweets, blogs, hashtags, comments, fan pages, and videos start going against you, it’s already too late. When they’re occasional, random, disquieting statements, that’s pretty much the only time you can react, and try to steer the conversation – but more importantly, put the machinery in place internally, to handle the storm that could well be on it’s way… and ride out the worst of the damage.

What’s the worst that could happen? That you cried wolf? Think back on how that story ended.

The opinions expressed in this blog are the author’s own personal ones, and do not reflect those of his employer in an official or unofficial capacity.

Image courtesy www.forestcamping.com

The Ubuntu Story: Prologue

This is a very, very brief prologue to what promises to be coming up soon – a comprehensive review of the Ubuntu OS from a first-timer’s point of view. But let me make a start anyway, since that’s going to take a while evaluating.

A brief background – I’ve run Windows for almost two decades, right from the prehistoric Windows 3.11. I’m not a techie or a programmer. My exposure to Unix has been, aside from a few hours in school as part of a standard systems course, more according to Scott Adams than anyone else. So why did I do this? One late night, I was bored. And a random link came along – not for an OS, but for USB drive tweaks. And one thing led to another…

Considering it takes the better part of a few hours to install a basic WinXP system from a formatted C:, creating a bootable, non-install trial cd which can actually run an entire OS was a very pleasant surprise. I was playing around with it for a while, and it felt… interesting. Different, but fun.

Looks like some interesting times ahead.