Category Archives: Marketing

When a playing field is young and growing, there are always many players trying to play in it. Every industry at the beginning attracts lots of companies. That is something that makes the industry interesting. You got to stay on your toes to keep innovating and be in the race. At the same time, that pollutes the industry a lot. It becomes very difficult for a company to differentiate from the others in this industry and for a customer to identify who is going to be around in the long run.

I believe three things determine if a company will be able to sustain and be successful in a new technology space. First is persistence. Persistence is the most important factor in determining how long can you stay in that industry. Do you have the horsepower and team that will stick together and keep out innovating competition? Second is differentiation. Differentiation is important because if you are one out of a dozen, then you are a commodity. Are you adding any real value to your customers out there? Then there is customer captivity. How easy is it for your customers to replace you with something else? Or in other words, will your customers miss you if you are no longer around tomorrow?

Products like Excel, PowerPoint and Word have been around in the market for decades because they have a captive customer base. They have a cycle of innovation where they keep bringing new features which help them differentiate from their competition. And to look back at the humble beginnings in late 1980s, they managed to be persistent in front of competition from a dozen or so other companies trying to develop products in the same space.

Persistence, differentiation and customer captivity are the three most important thing that can help a business make or break in any technology industry. If a company is able to persist, differentiate and innovate to keep meeting customer’s need, it will be able to standout in the short run and preempt new competitors in the long run.

Every other week you will see a list of top 50 most followed people in social media. The list normally consists of celebrities, sports stars, politicians and brands. The real question is are these most followed people on the social media the top influencers out there? There are two big issues which make the number of followers not map directly to the measure of influence.

First one is who influences you as an individual? When you are making a purchasing decision, deciding who to vote for or choosing a movie to watch you don’t necessary look out for what the top followed people on social networks are suggesting. More often you look for advice from your circle of friends whom you trust to make the right suggestion or whom you believe have the same taste and interests as you do. These are the people who influence you more in making a decision than anyone else.

Second point to note is what’s the domain? Not everyone is credible enough to  have influence in every domain. For example, if you are a fashion icon, you will have significant influence when it comes to fashion space. Your fans and followers will give value to what you got to say when it comes to fashion trends. But just having a million followers doesn’t make you influential in the topics you have no expertise or credibility. In fact in many cases, attempt to make influence in the areas you have no expertise makes you lose value in your area as well.

Having lots of followers maybe a status symbol in some ways. It does mean that there are people who are interested in listening to what you have to say. But it is a bit over-rated when it comes to measuring the influence. It matters more if you have a few followers who value your word and trust you in your area of expertise.

Back in 1990s there was a time when websites started becoming essential part of the online identity of companies. Any company irrespective of the industry it operates in got to have a website. A website acts more like the face of the company on the Internet. In early 2000s, this was followed by the blogs. Blogs became a great way for companies to interact with consumers, answer questions in an understandable and easy to navigate format.

With the advent of social media and with more people spending time on social networks, brand pages are becoming synonymous with presence of companies  in social media. Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter provide companies with a platform and make it very easy to create and maintain their brand pages. Just like websites and blog in case of Internet, brand pages have become an anchor for brands in social media.

I wonder what is the role of a brand page when it comes to a company’s presence in social media. Does having a cool brand page and good analytical system behind it sufficient for a brand to leverage the social media? We draw parallels between brand pages and websites & blogs to put things into perspective. If we do an Internet search for a company, there will be thousands of results associated with it. You do get the website of the company and link to its blog but along with it there are a slew of other results that provide a whole lot of information about the company. The reason being people mention their thoughts on a company at different news avenues, trade publications, forums and so on. A company’s website is not the singular place for information on Internet, though one thing that is true is that it is the authoritative source of information on Internet.

Same is the case in social media. In fact in social media, this thing reaches new levels because everyone has their own space to share thoughts comments and views. What an individual is doing on social media is knowingly or unknowingly building his or her social capital. You talk more with people you know. You make recommendations and promote a cause  so that it reaches people whom you have an impact on. Brand pages are definitely a great place for companies to have as a source of information and base for interaction on social media, but it is not enough for them to leverage social media.

To a large extent, brand pages is an over-hyped phenomenon in social world. I am not saying that you should not have brand pages. I believe they are a must have on social networks. But an average social media user likes (or follow or adds – use the term for your favorite network) more than two pages every month. They don’t interact on tens of brand pages on a regular basis. In order to leverage social media optimally, you got to learn and understand what people are talking about you. What are they liking, what are they hating and why is there a certain perception about you out there. We focus on providing you true insights which come from conversations beyond your brand pages. You can use these insights to strategize how you want to appear in front of your consumers, how you want to interact and how you want to adapt in social media and beyond.

Power and fame are two irresistible attractions for most humans. It’s unusual to have a community without powerful voices or a gathering without organizers. The same is true in the online world webbed together by social networks. The concepts like followers, subscribers and friends has led people to look up to and aspire to be powerful voices and leaders in the social world. This in turn has led to defining the influence level of individuals in the social world.

Broadly speaking, a person with large number of followers on Twitter, subscribers on Facebook, and similar things in other networks is considered to be influential in social media. That’s generally true when you are talking about very general things, things with universal appeal and mass interest, or in cases when you look at social media as a black-box. But there are two important points that we consider while calculating social influence.

First is contextual experts. The growth of social media networks has changed how we get news and information, how we voice our opinion and how we interact with each other. Not everyone is interested in everything. If you look closely at social world, there are clusters out there, just like in the “real” world out there. People are experts of a specific topic. They are interviewed on specific subjects. If you are trying to find out about protests in certain part of the world, you listen to different people, if you are trying to find out about the next best thing in space aviation, you pay attention to others and if you are interested in a highly anticipated movie, you listen to yet another set of experts. That’s where context come in picture. When we look at social media influence index, we make sure to take contextual experts into account because without context, it is just not possible to gauge the impact levels and reach to the right insights.

Second thing is relevant mavens. How relevant individuals are in their own social circles on a certain topics? In other words, in what area are you the maven for your friends. In most general communications on social networks, you listen to your friends or the people you know. When you write something about a particular topic, there is a lot of interest from your friends on it. Your social circle pays attention to it because they consider you as someone important and relevant to discuss that topic. On certain topics people ask for your opinion. So when we calculate social index, we do it for a particular area of research  and take into account mavens in these individual circles to add weight to their opinion.

There is a level of overlap in the first and second case, but there is a considerable difference as well. The difference is that of the personal touch. In the case of contextual experts, the communication is happening on a broader platform. People are expressing themselves or listening to others without any personal connection. It’s more similar to media of mass communication with a touch of interactivity. In the case of mavens, the communication is happening in small groups. It’s where you have personal affinity to the people you are communicating with and in more cases, that is more influential than anything else. It’s where you see the real impact of the social world.

In a nutshell, what we are doing is converting that black-box based influence calculator into a sophisticated process to account for context and relevance while calculating the influence of every post in the social world. That’s the real social influence that plays a critical role in trending opinions, creating perceptions and extracting real insights.

One of the best examples of how social media can turn a small incident into a monstrous thing is United Breaks Guitars by Dave Carroll. Just to set the premise, Dave Carroll, a musician, was flying from Halifax, Canada to Omaha, Nebraska via Chicago on United Airlines flights. He checked in his guitar and when he got down at Omaha he found his guitar was broken. He approached United Airlines to pay for fixing the guitar. United was pretty indifferent to his requests with many excuses to not fix it. Being a musician he did what he does best, i.e. wrote a song titled United Breaks Guitars and posted it on YouTube. Within first 4 days, the video got 1.5 million views on YouTube. On Day 5 it was covered by every major news channel  causing a long lasting damage to United’s brand image. It is also worthy to note that United stock plunged 10% during this week (I am not claiming the reason for stock value plunge being this, but many analysts have drawn relationship between the PR disaster and stock price).

What was United Breaks Guitars? It was basically a creative person lodging a complaint about a bad experience with the service. But what areas has it affected? Everything ranging from public relations and corporate communications to branding and customer service. This is all courtesy of social media.

The amplification of the impact of United Breaks Guitars was instantaneous and widespread because of the creative and talented complainer Dave Carroll. But social media has the power to take any normal complaint or customer outburst and turn it into wildfire, sometimes slowly and other times rapidly. The reason being the complaint here is not lodged privately to the company. It is public, where a customer’s network of friends and family, other customers who have had similar experiences and general people can join in the conversation, add their own 2 cents as well as keep the incident in mind while making their next buying decision.

What is important for companies is to prioritize the complaints and  make sure every customer complaint on social media is addressed proactively. The volume on social media is immense. With intelligent data mining techniques, companies can learn about the priority of customer conversation and make sure that the most pressing issues are addressed immediately and eventually they reach to every issue before it becomes another case study like United Breaks Guitars.