Category Archives: Business

Sprint and marathon, the two forms of running requiring very different skills. Both are challenging, both are goal-oriented and both require a whole lot of training. But it’s quite apparent that the two are as different as they can be.

Can a sprinter become a marathon runner? The challenge here is you cannot run a bunch of sprints one after the other and combine them to make a marathon run. It just doesn’t work like that. Couple of core reasons being planning and perseverance. A marathon runner has to plan and run the whole 26 miles. Train for it. Conserve the energy to finish it. Be persistent to continue at several points on the way when the common human instinct is to give up. And the most important thing, for someone who has been a sprinter, is to take the leap and give up sprinting to become a marathon runner.

The same principle of sprint vs. marathon applies to a business. Any start-up is a sprinter’s heaven. You run one sprint after the other. You release one product after the other. You put something out there, test the waters, update it and go for the next thing. A great way to run fast and try different things. But for a start-up to be a viable business, you need to be persistent. If you believe in your product, you got to stick to it to make it better everyday and go the whole way. You need to plan for it, bring the right people on board and keep the ball rolling. In other words, you got to get ready to run the marathon.

Competition is a prerequisite for Innovation. Competition motivates the leader to out innovate and stay ahead in the game. It makes the companies doing the catch-up to think outside the box to beat the leaders. A business lacking competition often stagnates because there is no need to innovate.

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.

Cellphones have had a profound impact on many things in this world. It has not only revolutionized telecom industry but has also left its mark on how many operations are conducted and industries function. I want to specifically talk about a couple of areas where cellphone is changing the dynamics of the game.

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.

Historically great effort is put in getting the right sample for market research. A few thousand set-top boxes define the rating of every television show, an exit poll of 1000 voters define who’s going to win a general election and four groups of 15 people define the positioning statement of your favorite products. When millions of people view television, vote in an election and use a particular product, the onus on these select few to collectively make a definitive statement to the general public is gigantic. And that in turn defines the importance of sampling in market research.

When we use social media for market research, one of the great luxuries and benefits is the availability of large amount of data to tap into to draw insights. But on the flip side, it also brings with itself complexity of dealing with large amount of data. Talking about sampling, couple of important things are the sample size and the recruitment process to form the sample.

The sample size for drawing insights in social media is usually much larger as compared to what traditional market research uses for the same purpose. But what is the right size? Is it a few thousands? Tens of thousands? More? This is a very interesting question, but before answering this, we should touch a bit on the recruitment process.

While traditional market research focuses more on the people participating in the research, we focus more on the information people are sharing. We use this information to find out what are their viewpoints and opinions. We also consider the people behind the opinions to account for the impact they are creating, but that is done in context to the conversation they are having. This way we make sure that the sample we have gathered is completely random, as it should be in a good market research study.

We do not define the size of sample in our study but let the study results define it. We keep collecting the data and keep analyzing it till patterns start to emerge and clusters start to appear. After doing this for considerable amount of data, the patterns get solidified, themes become clear and insights are apparent. This process of getting to insights from data is just beautiful and the insights are credible as well as actionable to help you make great business decisions.

Social media as a whole looks like total chaos. 200 million tweets flying around every day (stats as of September 2011), a billion or so Facebook posts every day and more than a trillion YouTube videos. If you think 200 emails in your inbox Monday morning is chaotic, try to comprehend this. It’s like every common person out there with a microphone allowed to speak what he or she wants to speak. In other words, chaos at its absolute best!

But just like chaos theory in mathematics, this social media chaos when deciphered using technology and looked upon by expert eyes has to do with there being great order in what looks like total randomness. And when you look closely enough at this randomness, patterns start to emerge which are nothing but absolutely beautiful.

Take for example a Presidential debate. People watch it on their televisions and use social media to express their opinions. Immense volume, contradicting opinions and complete chaos. But by using thematic analysis to extract the core themes out of the noise, we can find patterns in people’s opinions and their support towards a candidate. We can use predictive modeling to figure out what the candidate should speak or what she should not by analyzing the trends and sentiments in the conversations happening on social media.

The same technology and techniques can be applied in social media to find anything from how to spend millions on an advertising campaign to learning how a deadly disease is spreading in a country, from inferring the impact of a brand integration in a television show to understanding how a civic revolt took an entire nation to streets.

The beauty of information extracted from the chaotic social media is unparalleled to any other way of doing market research. The reason being it gives an opportunity to everyone, big and small, introverts and extroverts, book-smarts and street-smarts to express their views and make their voices heard. The data is vast and the power is immense. The debate is continuous and the reach is unmatched. All you need is the right technology and the right techniques to make sense of it and strategize your next move.

P.S. Try us at MavenMagnet to show you the beauty we are talking about!

Social media has impacted public relations in a profound way. It has made PR more real-time than ever before. Whether out of necessity or compulsion, PR needs to be managed in real-time in the world enabled by social media. A few hours of delay in managing the communication can lead a small otherwise ignorable thing to go viral on the web with the help of social media. At the same time, a real-time update containing an apology for bad customer service or a new product feature release can convert consumers into lifelong fans.

PR is now direct. Companies don’t have to go through press authorities to release a PR statement. They can now put it on their blog and spread the word through twitter and facebook.

Social media has made PR more interactive and engaging. It’s no longer a one-way street where companies can make announcements to the consumers. It’s interactive where consumers can react to the release and share their opinion with the company. In the world of social media, every individual has a “press pass” to ask questions and share opinions, whether you asked for it or not.

Social media is a  channel of communication which has provided public relation professionals will the capability to learn and understand what’s on consumers’ mind, what questions are they looking for the company to answer, what’s the perception of the consumers on different issues and how the public relation communications are impacting those perception.

It’s true that social media has made PR more real-time and interactive as far as communicating with customer is concerned, but biggest asset social media has provided PR professionals is the power to learn about their consumers and what they think about the company. PR professionals can use this knowledge and insights from the consumers’ world to better communicate with them, measure the impact and build a strong relationship with them, in turn enhancing the R in PR.