Stick to the basics. As claimed by the creators of the show, Seinfeld was a show about nothing. That was the core of the show. No extraordinary event, no great happenings…pretty much nothing. Just your normal everyday things that anyone and everyone can relate to because you have experienced it one time or the other in your life. Everyone has waited in a restaurant to get a table while being damn hungry, everyone has parked a car in a big parking lot and had no idea where it was and everyone has been to a random party with disaster written all over it. It is an awesome achievement to carry this on for 180 odd episodes. There are two great lessons here. First, know what you are good at. What people look up to you for. What is that thing that is getting you captive customers. And second, stick to it. Unnecessary diversions and extensions will not help you. Stick to your niche, stay close to your basics and be awesome in that.

You do it when you are 100% sure you got it right. Creators of Seinfeld mentioned time and again how they wrote the complete show, shot parts and pieces of it, then realized that it’s not as funny as they expected and went on to do it all over again. You cannot be the best till you believe you cannot be any better. Lesson: In the big things in your business, or for that matter in your life, you get one great shot. Get it right. Don’t rush into making decisions. Don’t be scared to cut the losses. Coming out with a product when you know it is the best it can be at that point in time. On the flip side, don’t wait for ever. Take the plunge, you will know when you are there.

Rituals are important. Cast of Seinfeld recalled some rituals that just became too important not to be done. Whether it was the huddle they formed before every show, the few minutes of stand-up Jerry Seinfeld did to warm up the audience or the 2am dinner they have after wrapping a show. Lesson: Rituals give a sense of continuity. They make you think of the origins and look forward to something. They make you remember how it all started and gives you energy and self belief to persevere and be successful in your endeavors.

In order to find the best way to deliver the message, you got to know your consumer. What your consumer likes? What are their interests? How they spend time? What are the issues they care about? What kind of messaging worked for them in the past and what didn’t? In other words you need to understand the ethnography of your consumers.

The basic idea behind ethnographic research is to make sure your message is formulated in the right way so that it has the maximum appeal on the target consumer. But this has an added advantage too. It is not always possible to define a target group of consumers by demographic profile. Many times the target consumer group spans across standard demos. So when you reach out to the consumer based on their psychographic profiles, you make sure it appeals to the taste and interests of your consumers.

One of the best ways to do ethnographic research is on the internet. Human beings are social in nature. They talk. They share information and knowledge. They emote their values and concerns. Internet has provided them the best place to do so effortlessly. Social networks have now become the natural place for people to discuss everything from interest and activities to likes and dislikes.

At MavenMagnet we have developed capabilities to listen and understand this information at a macro level without violating privacy of individuals or interfering in their conversations. Our proprietary technology is smart and sophisticated to identify your target consumer group and sketch their psychographic profile.

Advertising involves a lot of creativity. I believe creative people are geniuses. They have the power to add life and excitement to anything from a bar of soap to a bottle of water. Our goal is to empower them with just a bit more critical information about the consumer so that they can channel that message to have a much greater and profound impact.

There are several examples where competition has led to innovation and lack of competition has led to stagnation in the same industry. The best one that comes to mind is the web browser industry. In mid 90s, the browser industry had fierce competition between Netscape, Microsoft and a few other players. Between 1995 and 2001, both Netscape and Microsoft came out with six versions of their browsers out-innovating each other over and over again with new releases every few months. Eventually Netscape became less relevant and IE captured about 90% of the market. For the next five years starting 2001, there was literally no innovation in the web browser industry till new browsers like Mozilla, Firefox and later Chrome started becoming relevant. It took Microsoft five years to come up with IE7 in 2006. And since then, competition has fueled innovation for the three big players coming out with new features in the browser every few months.

The same dynamics is visible in many spaces, be it video games, cell phones, hybrid cars or social media. There are always lot of other factors in play like macro-economic conditions, state of the broader industry etc., but competition is the driver when it comes to innovation.

As a company (or an individual) you need to have a vibrant social media presence. You need to be part of your social world. You cannot decide to come one day after the damage is done and try to do damage control using social media. It is very important to understand that you cannot control your brand on social media. Social media has not only leveled the playing field but has also provided a gigantic opportunity to anyone and everyone be creative and make themselves heard. All you can do is be present there and address issue as soon as possible, possibly before it becomes a big cause of concern.

This brings us to the second prerequisite. Listening is the most important thing when it comes to damage control. You cannot act till you are aware of what is happening. With all the buzz on social media and the growing volume in there, the biggest issue is for you to identify the  real epicenter of the damage, the reason behind the damage and then strategize how to address it promptly.

Technology can help in deciphering the noise and listening what you need to focus on. People won’t talk to you all the time. If they hate you (or for that matter if they love you), they will tell their friends and followers about it. It is not possible for you to humanly keep track of everything. You need to understand what is the overall vibe, what are the actionable steps that can be taken and what are the changes that can be made to do the damage control.

Social media can be your best friend or your biggest enemy when it comes to damage control. The deciding factor becomes how well are you prepared to be a part of it. If you have the right technology and strategy to listen and understand the issues and address them, you can leverage social media to defuse a fire before it becomes wild.

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.

For the first time, the brands did more public campaigns to gear up to the Super Bowl than any time before. Whether it was in form of contests to make audience vote for the best of the commercials or post teasers online to what to expect this year at Super Bowl. For example Chevy ran a Super Bowl ad contest. The 40 finalist ad spots were viewed on YouTube more than 35 million times and people voted and discussed them for a month. Doritos on the other hand asked people to make ads and submit in their contest. The prize being the winning entry getting airtime during the bowl. Volkswagen building up on the last year’s Darth Vader success dropped a teaser of their this year’s ad titled the Bark Side. It got about 10 million views before the game day.

The entire phenomenon of Super Bowl advertising is taken to another level this year and in many ways, the $3.5 million that advertisers shelled out for 30 seconds had much more impact this year than ever before. Social media enabled the 30 second spot to be a month-long advertising campaign.

But then there was Chrysler’s Halftime in America. No one saw it before, no one heard about it. So when the voice of Clint Eastwood came at the halftime mark, people paid attention to the ad like the good old times. The social media impact here: the official copy of the ad posted by Chrysler was watched more than 10 million times on YouTube within a week of its airing during the Super Bowl!

Art has a lot more value when it is targeted. You cannot be a successful artist if you are not reaching your core audience. That’s where science comes in picture. There is enough data available in this world to develop rich correlations between distinct things and make you reach your target audience. You can end up being much more effective if the only people who notice you are the people who really matter.

This principle is very apparent in the advertising industry. The right advertisement shown to the right audience at the right time is what really adds value. How do you determine that right audience and the right time? Well embracing computation science to figure that out is a great complement to your gut. One great thing about science is it evolves really fast. Something which was determined using a few hundred data points a decade back can now be much more definitive by leveraging tens of thousands of data points. You got to embrace the explosive power of computation combined with the growth in available information. Add to that techniques like machine learning and artificial intelligence and improve your findings with time.

The biggest challenge for an art driven organization in embracing science is the ability to adapt as fast as science evolves. The longer you manage to last in the state of denial in embracing this evolution, the greater is your ability to make your art less compelling and attractive to the world out there. Art and science are great complements to each other. What art brings to science is the same thing that science brings to art. It’s the effectiveness and the value which otherwise goes untapped.

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.

I am a big believer in science. Numbers are awesome (though subject to interpretation) overall they prove something. When you do data analysis based on large sets of information, applying scientific algorithms can do wonders. It can generate patterns and extract information that is not even visible by naked eyes. That is specifically evident when you work with social media information. The data is overwhelming and algorithmic processes do an awesome job identifying the hidden knowledge.

But when you try to sell this science, you need something that is beautiful, appealing and presentable to people who are going to use it. That’s the role of art in a science heavy world. No matter how sophisticated software programs you write to extract information or how well you can process data to gain rich knowledge, till you can communicate that in an easy to consume manner, it is of no use. Add a pinch of art to your scientific prowess. Think who your customer is. What do they need? What language they understand? Then put your scientific findings in a way that is appealing to them. That will make them empowered by knowledge and take action on it. That will make your work really matter and make the science in the background worth more than anything else.

The essence of defining demographic profile is breaking the consumers into segments. But more often than not, it is found that consumer taste or preferences span across demographic segments. People of different age groups have similar interests. People like to watch certain television shows irrespective of their gender or social class. They like to use same products independent of which segments they are bracketed in through demographic profiling.

Look it from the opposite angle. Movie studios aspire their movies to appeal to all audience. Political candidates want their base to consist of everyone from young professionals to baby boomers. Same is true for many (though not all) television networks and consumer products. In very general terms, businesses want their appeal to span across a specific demographic segment.

We at MavenMagnet believe demographic profiling all by itself leaves several gaps in understanding consumers. In order to attract consumers beyond a specific demographic segment, you need to identify the commonalities between the consumers across segments. These commonalities are defined using psychographic traits  of the consumers. We do that by focusing on factors like their activities, opinions, beliefs and preferences. And what better place to find this information than social media where people express themselves, share their thoughts and engage in the community around them. In a nutshell, we focus on the behavioral elements that help us sketch a consumer profile in our market research.

Many businesses fear losing focus or diluting the appeal to their core consumer base while reaching out to new segments. Our approach to consumer profiling can help you fend that from happening. The idea is to add perspective to the demographic profile of your target group using psychographic traits of your consumers. This will help you add the capabilities of expanding your reach and appeal beyond your primary target group without alienating your core consumer base.

Whether it is the promotion of Lady Gaga’s new album, Arthur Christmas the movie, or the HTC tablet, the campaign around shuttle S stands out and grabs your attention. The campaign is designed to encompass the tunnel between the Grand Central entrance and the train along with wrapping the entire train inside out with the theme of the campaign.

In today’s world, this campaign stands out from the rest due to a couple of reasons. First is the campaign placement. Take the fast pace of NYC and the power of smartphone in every hand. The campaign mitigates both these distractions. If you are going from Grand Central to Times Square or vice versa, the five minutes that you spend in this transit, any where you look the themed advertisements are there. So no matter in what kind of rush you are, you cannot escape the campaign all around you. Another genius of the campaign is that it is in the subway and being in the subway, the smartphone signal is not there. Though you can still play games and dig in the archive of your emails, the probability of you looking away from your phone is much higher than anywhere else. Plus add to it the duration of the ride being too short for you to pay real attention to anything else, be it your smartphone or the kindle.

Second stand out feature of this campaign is the theme. It’s not just banners all around you. These campaigns are designed with a very thorough theme and flow to grab attention and make you look around at other nuggets of the campaign if you happen to look at a part of it.

This combination of great design and thoughtful placement gives the campaign relatively undivided attention of the consumer for at least a few minutes every day for 21 days. Now that’s a campaign done right!

First is market research. A big part of traditional market research is polls and surveys. Cold calls are made to people to ask questions. With more and more people carrying cellphones, it is harder for pollsters to get the complete attention of the survey taker. A person on the go is less inclined to waste time and money (cellphone minutes) speaking to a pollsters. You may argue that there are still a large number of landline phone connections out there to be sufficient for pollsters to meet their targets and form a decent sample. That may be true today, but it comes with a big caveat. Numbers show that a growing number of households with all members carrying a cellphone are opting out of getting a landline. This brings the sample down to households with a stay at home member who still values a landline. Add to it the bulk of people putting their (cell)phone numbers on the no call list and you get the complete picture. In short, traditional market research has had a big negative impact due to the advent of cellphones.

Second area I want to talk about here is social media. Cellphone has raised the amount of activities on social media dramatically. With a growing number of people carrying a cellphone with data connection, people are constantly connected to their favorite social network. They post their views, share recommendations and post pictures on social networks. This is live as it happens and is off the cuff without premeditated state of mind. You may argue that it is mostly coming from the younger generation, but the fact being average age of a person active on social media touching 40, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In other words, social media is having a big positive impact due to the growing use of cellphones.

Now bring these two areas together and you get what MavenMagnet is trying to leverage. We use social media as a base for our market research. We do not believe that traditional market research is to go anywhere anytime soon, but the kind of insights we can drive off social media can provide a more truthful and real perspective on concerned issues. These insights are derived without bothering the people by calling them or asking them questions, making cellphones a big asset for MavenMagnet market research.

Coca-Cola connection with the Santa Claus goes back about 80 odd years. It was in 1931 when Coca-Cola first released the campaigns with the man in red suit drinking the cola.  Over the years, Santa become more famous and got closer to Christmas.

It’s a known fact that the obsession Indians have with cricket is unmatched in the world. Cricket is religion in India and the top cricketer is nothing short of God. If you want to send a message to more than a billion people, the best language used is that of cricket. Pepsi adopted this language and the connection they drew was to the uniform of the cricket team. Pepsi became the official cola sponsor of the team and launched a campaign called “Men in Blue”. Over the years, Men is Blue became the alternate name for the Indian cricket team.

In more recent years, similar happened with the K’naan’s hit Wavin’ Flag. Coca-Cola picked the song to be the promotional anthem for 2010 FIFA World Cup. The song became incredibly famous and eventually became promotional anthem of every team sport out there.

Whether it’s a jolly old fellow becoming the mascot to bring joy and happiness to kids around the world or a fancy name becoming permanently attached to a sports team or a promotional anthem becoming a celebration song for every team sport, if you look back it all became a grand thing partly because an advertising campaign took charge.

Interestingly, none of these were created by the advertising campaign. Santa Claus was a character created much before Coca-Cola created its own version. But eventually Coca-Cola version took over. Indian cricket team wore a blue uniform for the shorter format of the game ever since colored uniform came to the game. But they started to be popularly known as Men in Blue after Pepsi ran the infamous campaign.  Wavin’ flag song was a Canadian hit much before Coca-Cola picked it for the FIFA world cup. But it became a global phenomenon after the Coca-Cola’s advertising campaign.

All these appear so awesome in retrospect but were definitely not planned to become social phenomenon. Advertising brains planned an outstanding campaign. Consumers adopted it and gave it a much bigger purpose than just an advertisement for the brand and the advertisers went along. The beauty is, after a while the audience emotional attachment with the brand is reversed. A seven-year old sees Santa drinking coke and draws a connection with coke. An Indian  cricket fan sees their favorite cricket team wearing Pepsi blue (even though Pepsi changed its color to match the cricket team’s) and gets attracted towards the cola. Talk about ROI, it’s just immeasurable. It’s working for years and it will be reaped by generations to come.

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.

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.