Social network: the justification

Posted on June 20, 2009 | 1 comment

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.

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Posted in Marketing, Technology

Iconic brands are made, not born

Posted on June 11, 2009 | 1 comment

Nike, BMW, Starbucks, Apple, Obama are the iconic brands we talk about all the time. When we develop marketing plan for our product, we leave several marketing ideas by categorizing them as the ones that work only for iconic brands. This brings about a very important question: how did these brands become iconic? Were they born iconic or the way they were marketed and developed made them iconic?

In 1964, Philip Knight, a track athlete and his coach founded a company named Blue Ribbon Sports that operated as a distributor of a Japanese Shoemaker selling shoes at track meets out of Knight’s automobile. A couple years later BRS opened its first retail outlet and few years after that launched its own line of shoes. In 1978, 14 years after first starting business, BRS renamed itself to Nike. In 1980s Nike expanded its product line through in house development and acquisitions, launched its legendary campaign “Just Do It” (1988) and gained major market share. It took more than three decades for Nike to become “Nike”, the iconic sports brand.

Nike was not born iconic, neither were BMW, Starbucks, Apple, Obama and for that matter any other company. Starbucks started with one store in Seattle’s Pike Place market, Apple was just another start-up in Silicon Valley in early 1980s and Obama was about 30 points behind Clinton days before Iowa democratic primary. But all of them worked their way through to reach to the top and become iconic. They were able to do one thing perfectly,  and that is linking an idea to the product. They were able to brand themselves as the first choice for a cult, gather a group of mavens and enter mainstream with their help.

So next time when you plan a campaign, try to go for something that can attract a group of dedicated mavens, try something that can help you define a cult around your brand. Nothing out there works only for iconic brands, but there’s a lot out there to help you make your brand iconic.

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing

The atomic world

Posted on May 19, 2009 | Comments Off on The atomic world

We live in an atomic world. We buy one song at a time from iTunes, reach to that one editorial piece out of a zillion using Google, buy one mobile application using app store and buy that one electronic accessory or a missing dinner plate in a dining set from Ebay. Apple, Google, Ebay and the likes have done a great job in dicing the world as per their customer’s demands. This piece-by-piece concept has taken over the concept of selling packaged solutions.

How one can survive and thrive in this atomic world? I believe in order to break the code of the atomic world, we need to focus on two things. First, focus on a niche. You cannot provide everything to everyone, but you can fulfill some atomic need of your niche customer set.

Second, everything you put out there should be perfect. You cannot bet on the bundle being attractive because people don’t care about the bundling any more. People choose to make there own collection by choosing one piece at a time. Similarly, when you are creating a website, you cannot just create just an attractive homepage and leave the inside pages mediocre because nine out of ten people reach to any page on your website using a search engine.

In a nutshell, for success in the atomic world, do less, but whatever you do, be the best!

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Posted in Business, Technology

Lets do it better…

Posted on May 7, 2009 | 1 comment

…with the help of social media.

Market research, product development, marketing, sales and support. Every company, non-profit, political campaign, government or for that matter any other type of organization you can think of undertake these tasks. A corporation might be selling something completely different from what a political campaign is selling, a non-profit organization might be promoting a distinct cause and a government might be organizing affairs of size varying from a city council to a country, the commonality lies in doing proper market research, developing the right product or message and selling it to their audience.

Now let’s talk how each one of these can be done better with the help of social media.

  1. Market research: Market research is basically listening to what your customers have to say about your product (or service). With the growing influence of social media, people are already talking about you. If the conversation is already happening, then what better way to do market research than continuously monitoring it? To take it a step further, organizations can create monitored communities online and link it to wide array of social networks on the web. Researchers can continuously stir the pot, attract audience to their community and analyze the results to take concrete decisions. To put it simply, think of it as an effective focus group 24/7!
  2. Development: The breakthrough product ideas are the ones that are embraced by your customers. Product development involves activities like brainstorming on ideas, finding out what’s missing, what problem you are trying to solve and so on. By creating moderated communities enhanced by an effective workflow management system, product managers can lead open discussions with their customers and amongst their customers into brilliant product ideas.
  3. Marketing: Marketing at the end boils down to talking to your audience and  gauging their needs. With the help of social media, marketeers can take marketing closer to their target base. They can create communities loaded with quick polls and analysis to stimulate two-way conversations with their customers and amongst customers. These communities can evolve marketing efforts to focus more on collaborating with the audience and less on broadcasting to them.
    Marketeers can do effective branding using the power of social media. Online communities take subtle branding to a whole new level. An organization can create a community to expand the canvas by taking on the larger cause addressed by their product. These communities can act as a support system for the people trying to solve a problem and in-turn help brand the product authoritatively and effectively.
  4. Sales: The strength of a sales force is said to be directly proportional to the passion of people in it. If that’s true, then what better way to strengthen the force than by adding the group of passionate mavens to it? An organization can create a community to provide a home base to the network of mavens and make them feel part of the organization. By entertaining this base and providing them enough resources, the organization can develop a super powerful sales force that can help them in their task, whether it is crossing the chasm or sustaining their customer base.
  5. Support: Customer service and support have become vital parts of any organization. In the world connected by social networks, how an organization handles support can make or break a brand. The effectiveness of forums and discussion boards is already visible in this area. Organizations can add more effectiveness to the online support system by effectively monitoring it and bringing issues to closure in a timely fashion, of course with the help of mavens!

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Posted in Business, Marketing, Technology

An analogy adds substance

Posted on April 25, 2009 | Comments Off on An analogy adds substance

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.

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Posted in Marketing, Technology

Close the loop

Posted on April 17, 2009 | Comments Off on Close the loop

Surveys are one of the most common ways to do mass market research. While they do a great job of asking the exact questions an organization wants to get answered, they are as good as the seriousness and credibility of the people answering the questions. Most surveys are one-time communications with rare follow-ups. People don’t know how their input is getting used and whether filling it out is worth their time. I believe the biggest concern with surveys is that they are open-ended.

How can we make surveys more interesting and effective? By providing a means to provide closure to what you are trying to find through these surveys. Researchers trying to find out information should link the surveys to an online community controlled by them. This community will have a workflow mechanism to help them show the progress of issues being asked in the questionnaire. Looking at the progress on specific questions they answered in the survey will make people more interested in filling them with sincerity because now they know that their input is really making a difference.

Linking surveys to a controlled community will fix another major issue faced by the researchers. It’s often seen that surveys are not able to attract the most insightful customers. Mavens tend to avoid filling surveys because of the nature of these surveys being pre-planned and not up for open discussions and collaboration. Researchers can put out the most interest generating topics in the survey out on their community to generate effective communications and collaborate with the customers. This will provide mavens a way to have two-way communication with the organization and researchers can effectively use these discussions to make better decisions. By implementing these decisions and communicating them to the network they will be able to excite the customers and close the loop!

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Posted in Business, Marketing, Technology

Shopping and Buying

Posted on April 8, 2009 | Comments Off on Shopping and Buying

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.

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Posted in Marketing, Technology

What’s your alibi?

Posted on April 1, 2009 | 2 comments

The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille has more than a few wow moments, but the one that astonished me the most is the presence of an alibi with the code. Alibi is the necessary element that adds power to the code. It’s the rational reasoning behind what a person does.

Run down the memory lanes, and you will find every significant decision you made had an alibi behind it. You spend hours shopping but do not buy anything because you need an alibi to continue shopping. You buy a luxury car because you have alibi in form of comfort and well, luxury. You checkout from time-to-time in search of an alibi to keep working.

Even if you have broken the code that can persuade the customer to buy your product, if you don’t have the alibi to rationalize the product’s need for the customer, it is hard to get it across. So before you take your product to the market, ask yourself this question: what’s my alibi?

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Posted in Marketing

Are you a part of your social world?

Posted on March 29, 2009 | 3 comments

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?

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Posted in Marketing, Technology

Targeted Marketing: How

Posted on March 29, 2009 | 1 comment

So you got it all, who’s your target audience, what’s your message going to be and where and when you want to reach them. The last pillar, which in a way brings it all together and at the same time is dependent on all these, is selecting the right medium that fits you the best to have the most impact.

When trying to figure out how to do targeted marketing, advertising plays a significant role. Let’s talk about advertising on traditional media like television, radio and newspaper. Targeted advertising on these mediums can be done by linking your target audience with the target audience of the medium at a given place and time and delivering your message blend in with the medium. Irrespective of targeted advertising, there’s a growing concern about the diminishing impact of advertising on traditional media with the advent of new technologies…be it TiVo on television, satellite radio and Internet music services (like Pandora) on radio and blogosphere on newspapers. Moving on to other mediums for advertising, you can do targeted message delivery on the world wide web, most effective ones being next to search results and other contextual content. Mobile devices are also evolving as a great source of targeted advertising by utilizing the location information for the audience along with other pivots like time of day and interests of the individual. Targeted advertising is gaining traction on new mediums like Internet and mobile due to the ability of marketers to nail down the appropriate individual and delivering their message to them instead of a broader segment as in case of traditional media.

But when you know who your target customer is, what impacts their buying decision and where and when to locate them, you can reach them much deeper than just by targeted advertising. You can leverage this information and latest technologies to communicate and collaborate with your customers. With the growing influence of social media on the people around the world, marketers can participate in the the social communities to interact with their customers. To add the much needed targeted component to this exercise, they can create communities to gravitate people of similar interests.

Marketers need to take a broader perspective when creating these communities. For example, if you are selling nicotine tablets to help people quit smoking, your community should be a network of people trying to stop smoking. The community should motivate people to quit, act like a support network for people and help them stop smoking. This in turn will provide you an avenue to take customer inputs on how to improve your product and will act as the best place for subtly marketing your product. These social communities when used appropriately are in fact the best way to do targeted marketing. Here you have (or can gravitate) the right audience, you can stir the communication to get the right message across and you can interact with the audience right when they are willing to and with their permission…that’s taking care of all the pillars of targeted marketing, or you can say it’s targeted marketing at its very best!

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing