Category Archives: Technology

In this connected world, every company is required to have a social presence. A great way to do that is by creating a social network, but an important thing to ask is what is the social network for? There should be a clear strategy behind creating a social network. This in-turn will help you justify the investment in nurturing the network, developing a success matrix and calculating the return on investment. The vast array of issues that can be addressed by a social network makes the resource allocation a more intriguing task.

There’s no magic formula for making a successful social network, but here are some points we should keep in mind to increase the chances of success:

1. Connection to your core business: The social network should have a clear connection to your core business. The easiest way to make sure you get this right is by making sure the customers of your product or service are the customers of the social network. Even if you are not talking about the product directly, by having this crucial link you can make sure that the social network is subtly marketing the product to the target audience.
2. Scope of the network: It is very important to answer a simple question: why will anyone come to our network? And even more important, why will anyone come again to our network? This question leads to defining the right scope for the network. While defining a social network, an organization should try and expand the canvas. There are very few products out there about which people are passionate enough to spend time on a social network, but there are way too many issues and topics of interest that can pull people to your network. It is better to talk about quit smoking than nicotine tablets, travel and tourism than luggage, and running and hiking than shoes.
3. Drive to closure: The importance of usefulness of social network is comparable to the importance of having a social presence. The best way to make a social network useful is by having closure for the discussions. Driving issues to closure and making important decisions based on discussions at the network will encourage customers to participate in the discussions  and develop brand loyalty.
4. Alignment to support the network: It is important for all relevant parts of the company ranging from product development to customer support and advertising to align in order to support the network. The social network is one of the most direct ways for an organization to get in touch with its customers. By aligning these different divisions, an organization can make the most out of  the social network.

The network should have the magnet required to attract customers and the glue required to make them stick to it. A network for the sake of it will never work, but a network that adds some value to your customers will do wonders for your brand.

The other day I was listening to Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose where he drew great analogies between a digital camera on cellphone and e-book reader on cellphone followed by an even more interesting one between cloud computing and electricity. The first one was to compare how an e-book reader on cell phone will affect Kindle’s market. Bezos compared e-book reading to photography. His argument was that people won’t trade a feature-rich digital camera specifically for photography with a simple digital camera on mobile phone, but they still like to have a camera on their mobile to take some pictures at places they don’t carry their digital camera. Similarly, they won’t trade a Kindle with e-book reader on cellphone, but would love to have some reading device on their cellphone for quick catch-up reading. This argument make so much more sense, and speaks volumes about Kindle’s market positioning, with the help of a comparison with something that is already happening out there today.

Another analogy he drew was while explaining the future of cloud computing. Bezos explained it by drawing a straight comparison between cloud computing and electricity. About a century back companies had their own electricity generator plants but as electric grids matured they abandoned their own electricity generation with pay-as-you-use model on electric grid. This helped them save costs and focus on their core expertise and service to their customers without worrying about how to get electricity to support their plants. Similarly letting companies that are expert in running data centers take care of your computing infrastructure and let you focus on your core expertise is what cloud computing’s selling proposition. A simple analogy from a century ago to explain the future!

I believe nothing adds more substance to an argument than a properly drawn analogy. It is like a proof to an argument which makes your pitch more believable and give people an authentic reason (or can we say, an alibi) to buy your argument.

Any “shopkeeper” (retailer) will be more than happy if we do no shopping at her store but do all the buying over there. That’s the basic difference between these two terms: shopping and buying.

Shopping is an experience. Speaking in terms of the culture code, the experience of reconnecting with the world. People love shopping. We often attach terms like doing research and evaluating options when we talk about shopping. On the other hand, buying is a task. There’s nothing fancy about it. It is something we do because we have to do it. Buying is in fact the end of shopping.

The advent of the World Wide Web has added a new element to the shopping and buying experience. Often times we do shopping on the web and buying at a store and vice versa. Several elements come into play in shopping and making the buying decision. While we go shopping where it’s most convenient for us, we buy from a store we trust. We look forward to enjoying the shopping experience and paying economically while buying.

Consider cars for example. When shopping for a car, online is a great place to start. We can find a lot about a car on various websites and evaluate our options even before physically seeing the car. Then of course (most of) us go to a dealership, take a test drive, haggle over price based on the online research and make a final decision. The shopping experience that starts online continues at a physical store and the buying is done at a physical store.

While there are cases when it is complete opposite, i.e. we start shopping in a physical store, continue it online and buy the product online. Electronic items and books fit this bill most of the time. But then there are somethings like grocery and airline tickets for which we do both shopping and buying at the same place (in case of grocery and airline tickets physical stores and online respectively).

To be a successful retailer, it is necessary to create a great shopping experience, but at the same time focus equally hard on being trustworthy and economical to make buying as easy and comfortable as possible.

Blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Orkut and Facebook …the list goes on and on for the elements of social phenomenon on the Internet. These networks have provided individuals a means to connect and speak their brains out. They are permanently shifting the dynamics of how a buying decision is made and how a word is spread in the world today.

Consider this case as an example of the effect of social networks: a few gadget enthusiasts love a new cellphone, and all their friends know about it through blogs and twitter. Their friends tell their own network of friends and soon a domino effect gives that cellphone the cool gadget status and breakthrough in sales, something that would have been possible a few years back (maybe) through a multi-million dollar marketing campaign. Now consider the flip side. The same group of individuals didn’t like a gadget, and they start spreading the word. People start to agree with them and soon there’s a big negative campaign against that gadget leading to irreversible damages. Well people connect, they express themselves and the word spread, sometimes leading to the tipping point.

The rise of use of social technologies is affecting every company and product out there. It is not possible for you, as a business, to escape the phenomenon. It is no longer a question whether you are getting affected by the social media or not. Your social world is forming. The question is whether you are a part of it or not?