LinkedIn’s acquisition of Slideshare: A submissive approach by Slideshare??

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Anandan

Acquisitions are very common in technology businesses, specially for those located in Silicon Valley and we have seen many of them in the past. An acquisition is easily explainable when a company is going through rough phase and has no other options left but to sell it out. However, when a well performing company with a decent pool of customers and impressive product / service basket in place gets acquired, it raises eyebrows of many out there. The recent acquisition of Slideshare by LinkedIn is one such event which spurred debate across the world. It would be wrong to generalize, however based on the conversations I observed on Twitter and various blogs, I found majority of them were happy for this acquisition and felt Slideshare made a right decision.

However, since the moment I heard this news yesterday morning, I just couldn’t explain if there was really “a need” for Slideshare to agree for this acquisition. Rashmi, co-founder of Slideshare in her blogpost regarding acquisition expressed that her team believed they could grow faster with LinkedIn, which to me didn’t sound convincing enough. I always felt and still believe Slideshare could have done better on their own and could have held patience for some more time.

A guest blogpost by Sanjay Mehta, Jt. CEO, SocialWavelength featured on Lighthouse Insights, a prominent blog in Indian social media arena.  This blogpost when was shared by Lighthouse Insights on their Facebook page, an interesting conversation took place between me, Sanjay, Lighthouse Insights and Hardik. I hereby share this conversation as it would be self-explanatory of my viewpoints regarding this acquisition saga.

So, in short I am extremely disappointed with this acquisition, as I feel:

  • Slideshare had built a valuable platform and needed just some more patience rather than just giving up so early.
  • The price they have got is extremely low. They could have easily got atleast 3 to 4 times more, than what they have agreed to.
  • I still see LinkedIn gaining edge over various aspects, rather than Slideshare and it won’t be surprising if in few years, Slideshare brand in itself becomes extinct.
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Can ‘Talking About This’ be greater than No. of fans on a Facebook page?

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Anandan

Brand owners / managers are often concerned about the right metric to assess how effective is engagement on their Facebook page. Facebook does provide a range of exhaustive metrics as part of Facebook Insights, but one of the key metric which is visible to every fan nowadays is ‘Talking about this’. This basically provides figure of number of unique people who have interacted with the page / post in any of following manners – liked the post / commented on post / shared the post / liked the page / posted to a page’s wall / answered a question / RSVPed to an event / checked in at a place / mentioned the page etc. Its debatable in industry whether this metric should be considered as a yardstick of engagament. But, it certainly does have some meaning, else why would Facebook provide it on homepage of every Page and also make it visible to every fan with approx one month history!

I recently had a debate with a brand owner about how much should Talking About This (TAT) be with reference to the number of fans (NoF) on a page. During discussion at one point of time, I put forth my view that, TAT could exceed NoF. The brand owner questioned me on my logic and I explained them that if the content of post is very interesting, fans might not only like and comment the post, but also share the post on their wall, and this would facilitate the virality of post, which would essentially increase the potential reach of post multiple folds. But alas! as usual brand owners hardly understand  and respect these engagement parameters, but are just concerned about NoF, as if a shepherd is concerned about his cattle count, and therefore my point was ignored.

I decided to probe this question further what other social media practitioners had in their mind. Here, are the few responses I received from few of them, who have experience of managing brands.

So, the takeaway for brand owners / managers is that its possible to get TAT more than your NoF in following conditions:

  1. The content is interesting and has enough heat in it to go viral.
  2. The size of overall fan base is not very large

I would conclude that achieving TAT higher than NoF might not be an easy task, however its also not impossible for brands in their initial stages of Facebook journey. They could always try and achieve this. Also, they could consider this milestone as an ideal measure to see how interesting their content is, and what kind of content they should create for continuing higher engagement even after the fan base has increased.

Posted in Facebook, social media | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

TEDxConnaughtPlace: Review & Experience

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Anandan

TEDx talks have always impressed me and I often enjoy viewing them. I always wanted to attend a live TEDx event and experience the thrilling environment. Finally, I had an opportunity to attend one at Delhi on 11th February. TEDxConnaughtPlace was organized by Youth Ki Awaaz at American Center, New Delhi. There were 8 speakers from varied background and areas in which they have made remarkable impact. TEDx talks are usually meant to share one’s experience of how they have made a difference to the society around them by their existence. It is expected that atleast few would get motivated by listening to the speakers and there would germinate a new breed of changemakers in the society.

I am not an established public speaker. However, as an audience I invested Rs.500 for the show, sat through full 5 hours of event (from 4pm to 9pm) and it took me 1.5 hours on each side to reach venue from Gurgaon. If I look back at the monetary and time investment, I feel it would be fair on my part to evaluate and provide feedback to all eight speakers through this blogpost. I identified four major criteria on which I could map the speakers. Here are they:

1) Content: Given an opportunity, everyone has a tendency to speak endlessly about one’s achievements. However, given the time restrictions it matters a lot what content one decides to share to express one’s ideas and insights effectively.

2) Deliberation: In such live events, I understand no matter how experienced a person its always a shivering feeling to stand in front of 150 odd people and present one’s ideas with confidence. Therefore, the manner in which speakers express their thoughts become critical.

3) Engagement: On a Saturday evening when most of your audience is busy making plans on how to spend their Saturday night and Sunday, its a sheer tough job for speakers to not only hold audience attention but also to keep them engaged with the ongoing proceedings.

4) Impact: As I mentioned earlier, TEDx talks are largely meant to leave an impact, or at least a thought to ponder upon once a person leaves the auditorium. Though speakers are carefully chosen after due diligence, after all its the audience who has the right to decide whether the speaker really made an impact or not.

In the following section I have tried to rate each speaker on above points based on their talk and also to find how many of really made my experience worthful !

Piyush Tewari  Founder and President of SaveLife Foundation was the first speaker. He drew attention to thousands of deaths that occur on Indian streets due to road accidents. His organization works for a noble cause of providing first aid measures to people who get injured due to road accidents. He shared his journey of how difficult was it to convince various stakeholders – policemen, volunteers etc to believe in his dream. He also made a point that most of road accidents in India occurred due to bad road planning. Though he has started travelling towards a much needed goal for the betterment of society, I found many challenges ahead for him to scale it further.

My ratings for him are: Content – 8, Deliberation – 7, Engagement – 7 & Impact – 7

Ishita Khanna a social entrepreneur who sowed seeds of Ecosphere in a beautiful Spiti valley of Himalayas was the second speaker of the evening. She had some beautiful images of Spiti valley and she shared how her team was working tirelessly to make life of Spiti residents better. She made a very strong statement “We can’t always be an audience. To change the world, you first need to change yourself. If we can’t change everyone, at least we can change ourselves.” On listening her presentation, I could recall a book, which I enjoyed reading, 3 Cups of Tea.

My ratings for her are: Content – 8, Deliberation – 7, Engagement – 6 & Impact – 7

Ajay Chaturvedi a CNN/IBN Youth icon for the year 2011 and founder of HarVa was the third speaker of the event. HarVa stands for Harnessing Rural Value of India. He shared his experience of having quit Citi bank and devoting his life  to uplift the well being of women in rural areas / villages of India. His organization educates rural women, trains them on computers and provides employment in rural BPOs. They have made a difference to the way women are looked upon even in conservative villages of Haryana. In order to create such an impact he was proud to have made a decision to bypass the regular bureaucratic route and rather focused on winning hearts of end beneficiaries. I didn’t find any new in his model because I had heard of a similar organization, Desicrew 5 years back! Desicrew was incubated at IIT-Chennai under the guidance of Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwaala.

My ratings for him are: Content – 8, Deliberation – 7, Engagement – 8 & Impact – 7

Tania James a Visual and Environmental Studies graduate from Harvard University and author of ‘Atlas of Unknowns’ was the fourth speaker. The first thing that disgusted me was that she carried ‘script’ to the stage. Now, that was super annoying me and also to many as I noticed in tweets. She read an excerpt of her work which was probably to be developed into a book in future. To be frank, I couldn’t follow anything and she completely ignored the audience. I wonder if anyone in the audience could make out what was her message for the evening.

My ratings for her are: Content – 5, Deliberation – 3, Engagement – 1 & Impact – 1

After a 20 minutes refreshment break, Pramada Menon feminist and founder member, CREA took stage as fifth speaker and she awakened the audience in the very first few minutes of her presence. She talked about issues related to sexuality and feminism in our country. She was very confident and hinted to major issues in a humorous manner, which she accepted in the question & answer session that “In India  you cant do much but crack humour, if you don’t fit norms”. She emphasized that any human being should be given right to choose one’s identity and should not be expected to project an identity that society deemed to be reasonable. Her comment, “Life is just not about black and white but also about the grey and rainbow” sent across a strong message.

My ratings for her are: Content – 10, Deliberation – 10, Engagement – 10 & Impact – 10

Swati Sahni Senior Consultant to MHRD sixth speaker of the event, highlighted the poor education infrastructure of this country. She shared her experiences of having interacted with thousands of teachers, students and parents from remote places in India. Her main message was that teachers in rural areas should be provided proper training and more attention should be given to students who were weak in studies than the intelligent students often found to be sitting in the 1st row! Despite being useful, it wasn’t clear at least to me, why she was raising these issues / providing suggestions at a common man’s forum like TEDx instead of suggesting them to Government being a consultant to them!

My ratings for her are: Content – 8, Deliberation – 6, Engagement – 6 & Impact – 6

Anoj Viswanathan co-founder of Milaap and a graduate from National University of Singapore was the seventh speaker. He spoke on the hardships he went through in communicating his idea of crowd funding to his friends and how he collected corpus which was later lent to needy people in rural villages of India. Inspite of being the 2nd last speaker of the day when most of the people had their eyes on their watch, the youngest speaker won hearts of all with his humorous and engaging talk and yet putting across a strong point. His statement “We don’t need charity, we need philanthropy” was very well appreciated by the audience. He conveyed an effective message that “In India demand is never an issue, while supply is!”

My ratings for him are:  Content – 10, Deliberation – 9, Engagement – 8 & Impact – 9

Osama Manzar founder of Digital Empowerment Foundation took stage as last speaker and gathered a round of applause for his witty opening comment that Americans out here might be worried that Osama is on stage! He started his talk by sharing all hardships he had to face in his early life and how he established his career in the digital technology space. He explained about how his organization was striving to abolish information barrier between the rural India and the developed cities of the country. He made a lasting impact in his statement, “We are sitting on a wealth of information. But, information is not being converted into knowledge and knowledge isn’t being converted into something we can sell”.

My ratings for him are: Content – 10, Deliberation – 9, Engagement – 10 & Impact – 9

I truly enjoyed my first ever presence at a TEDx event and I was even more satisfied to know that I contributed 3rd highest (just after event’s organizer and venue partner) reach of TEDx tweets through my live-tweeting! Here is an evidence of it.

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Improving Customer Perception of Brands by Active Listening on Twitter

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Anandan

Many a times, customers wonder how they could interact with brands on social media channels. Further, they wonder if there is any worth in interacting with brands. Twitter is one of the best conversation channels if one had to interact with brands. Moreover, its also important on part of brands to continuously monitor interactions related to their brand on these social media channels and try to leverage them for the benefit of brand. Recently, I had an interaction with Apollo Munich Insurance on Twitter and won couple movie tickets! Read on, to know how my perception towards Apollo shifted from negative to neutral (if not positive!), as they found my tweets in right time and engaged with me.

On 19th January, as part of usual practice I visited Times of India website and there awaited an irritating ad from Apollo Munich. The moment one reached the ToI website the homepage revolved and became upside down for few seconds before becoming normal. It was around 7.50 am and one could imagine the frustration if one has to face such ads. Apparently the campaign they were running had the message “Turning Health Insurance Upside Down” and hence probably they went for this creative strategy, but totally ignored the customer perception. I immediately vented out my frustration on Twitter, without tagging Apollo Munich (though I was very well aware of their Twitter handle). I wanted to check if they have robust listening mechanism and if they at all care about people who are talking about their brand on social media.

At last they replied in the evening and apologized for the inconvenience caused due to ad, which I think, was a gentle gesture. Though I may not be the prospective customer for their brand, and I may not be the influential personality in insurance space, yet the brand made diligent effort to apologize for the same. Further, they made sure this negative image is subsided by inviting me to participate in the contest.

It was a simple contest with an objective to spread their message  in which  I had to retweet their message. I assume, as I have decent number of followers (around 690) they would have thought that their campaign reach would increase by few more numbers. How much did it cost me to retweet their message?? Absolutely, negligible amount of time, but I had a faint hope that I might be one of those lucky ones to win the contest.

Guess what! After 4 days, I received this tweet and soon the tickets were delivered to me by courier.

Now, reflecting back one can realize that effort I took to give my feedback was rewarded! One might argue that they would have given me tickets just to pacify my anger and I don’t spread further any other negative word of mouth. But, the take away one needs to concentrate here is that brands need to keep their ears open on web, if they desire to build their brand image amongst today’s networked set of people.

Learning for individual Twitter user:

  • Technology now facilitates to interact with brands at ease and almost at free of cost.
  • We all have freedom to express our speech, why not exercise this right?
  • Be straightforward and express true feelings on social media channels.

Learning for Brands:

  • Irrespective of whether you have presence on social media channels or not, your stakeholders are talking about you 24 x 7!
  • Even if you have established your presence, brand should make diligent efforts to scan conversations across web and try to use them in their stride
  • Any person expressing his / her views about any action taken by brand should be acknowledged at the earliest. This becomes even more important if the views are negative in nature.
  • Sweepstakes always work, but don’t necessarily make customers buy the product!

 

Posted in social media, Twitter | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

How leading management institutes in India are using Facebook

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Anandan

Kalpana Chauhan and I recently presented a research paper at International Conference in Marketing organized by IIM – Lucknow. The focus of paper was to understand content strategy on Facebook pages of some of the leading management institutions in India. We analyzed firm generated content of four institutions’ Facebook pages – IMT Ghaziabad, IIM-Calcutta, MDI-Gurgaon & XLRI-Jamshedpur. We basically tried to answer three simple questions:

1)   What was the context of content shared by these management institutes on their   Facebook pages?

2)   In what form was content shared?

3)   What was the frequency at which content was shared?

We took a three month period of 2011, with the assumption that data would represent content strategy followed by brands for 25% of entire year. During the time period April – June, 2011 IIM-C made 10 posts, IMT –Ghaziabad made 42 posts, MDI-Gurgaon made 19 posts and XLRI-Jamshedpur made 83 posts. We did content analysis of these updates and answered above three questions. The results are as follows:

Content Context

  • 3 out of four institutions updated content about institution and current students’ achievements.
  • XLRI was the only institution which updated content about management education domain that was informative and insightful in nature.

Content Agility (During Day)

  • The content on XLRI and MDI’s pages were updated at odd hours of the day, either in early morning or during late night.
  • IMT & IIM-C updated majority of their content from 8 am to 8 pm, which seems to be a reasonable time period.

Content Agility (During Week)

  • Majority of content was shared during midweek, i.e. from Wednesday – Friday
  • IIMC completely refrained from updating content on weekends.

 Content Form

  • IIMC followed a Text + Weblink format for 80% of content, which is an effective manner where a brief about content shared is given in text form along with the link for further reference of fans.
  • As MDI shared more internal news, they made use of images along with text that described the image.
  • IMT made use of images but 21.4% of time they had no introductory text about the image, which is not an advisable way to share content.
  • XLRI had even worse content sharing style; they just attached weblink and had no introductory text to the weblink. Moreover, these contents were shared through third party application, which clearly revealed lack of enthusiasm they had in sharing content with their fans.

 The analysis reveals that management institutes in India are using Facebook in a diverse manner. The difference in number of posts shows that some are not very consistent in their approach, while others are. Also the automated posting of links (especially in case of XLRI) shows that there is no separate strategy behind use of Facebook, which doesn’t seem very effective communication /marketing practice. The results show the scope of improvement in the ways institutes use social media.

Some major content topics that we couldn’t find on any of the four Facebook page are:

  • The focus has always been on their flagship program i.e. PGDBM. We rarely found content about other programs offered by these institutions. This could be a serious setback as stakeholders from other programs might feel left out.
  • Employer branding aspect was completely missing in all pages. We rarely found any posts related to their faculty achievement. Given the fact that all these are large institutions, its hard to believe that none of the faculty from any of the college made an achievement over a period of 3 months!
  • There was hardly any content for the administrative staff. Aren’t they part of the organization? We would like to know why any content about them wasn’t posted on the Facebook page.
  • These organizations could also update about their collaborators.
  • Management institutions are known for the intellectual property they create. The intellectual property in these institutions is generally created by either faculties or doctoral students. We noticed no such updates were made by any of the institution.
  • There could be some information dissemination about the training and development programs aimed at external publics.
  • Management institutes could also share knowledge created through consulting assignments handled by their faculty members.
  • The integration between various social media channels should be leveraged effectively.
Posted in Facebook, social media, social media case studies | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Evaluating Peers in Knowledge Intensive Businesses

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Anandan

Since beginning of my career, I have been associated with some leading knowledge organizations of the country. The inclination I have towards knowledge domain always spurs in me varied concerns about the knowledge industry. Last year, I attempted a blog on ‘Rewarding Knowledge Workers’, which was very well received.   After about 9 months a related question has bothered me for sometime – How do you evaluate your peers in a knowledge domain? My last year’s post was from an organization’s perspective, however in this post I am focused on how peers evaluate each other when they are working in a team. My urge for this blogpost strengthened when I noticed this Facebook update by my friend @Davenderbisht. Though his update mentions ‘subordinates’ which technically means evaluating a person lower in hierarchy, its no different from evaluating your peers who are on same level, in fact its tougher in latter case.

Teamwork has always been emphasized in the management field as a key success factor for success. A step ahead many a times it has been precisely emphasized that the team should consist of members with complementary skills for the overall success. However, something that is often neglected during discussion is evaluation of peers in a team.  In a well-structured organization the evaluation part could be taken care of by the HR manager or the team leader. The situation is complex in case of small firms or especially with entrepreneurial firms where couple of colleagues get together and start a venture.

In such small firm setup its happy-go situation until everything goes well for the organization, but the blame-game starts once organization faces some tough situations. Well, the evaluation of peers for firms involved in selling products could be still convenient, but let me add another level of complexity to the discussion. In today’s globalized environment we often notice knowledge oriented firms sprouting in various domains. In these firms there’s hardly any tangible output that could differentiate the performance of team members. For instance, a consulting boutique consists of team members with complementary knowledge skills. In such situations its more complex to attribute reasons for a project failure, because ‘knowledge’ is an abstract phenomenon. Now, how do you judge your peers when you are offering knowledge oriented services?

Davender hinted at few factors – performance, attitude, dedication, discipline. I believe in a knowledge oriented business all the four metrics are abstract and its hard to quantify them. Would you consider performance by number of hours a team member contributes? or number of ideas one comes up? or number of hours within which a project is completed? Unlike product oriented or service transaction oriented businesses, measuring performance in a knowledge business is much more complex and debatable.

The other three factors are pretty interesting – attitude, dedication and discipline. When knowledge workers get together these factors are presumed to be at a required levels in each one of them. They are never reviewed and even if reviewed and found to be missing by few notches in a particular peer, it is taken for granted till situations are good for the organization. The moment something bad occurs to the organization these three factors are  questioned and in worse situations even ‘doubted’. This would hurt the individual to a great extent. Now does that mean there are no factors on which peers could be evaluated in a knowledge business? No, the factors need not be tangible however should be identified and tracked over a period of time.

I believe knowledge workers would hardly underperform in a deliberate manner . When a product manufactured through a scientific procedure get result into a defected product, how can’t a knowledge worker’s ideas not result  into unconvincing results? In my experience or with my intuition, I don’t think any knowledge worker would say I would not think ‘x’ times better for a project due to some reasons. Every knowledge worker tries to contribute his best possible efforts, it might do wonders or fail depending on the context. It doesn’t mean the attitude, commitment, dedication of discipline of the person should be questioned. When a person is questioned for one fault, the entire premise of holding him so long in the team gets void.

Hence, I believe its the trust between the peers and among the knowledge workers which matters a lot. I would like to end this post with the same quote with which I ended my ‘Rewarding Knowledge Workers’ post.

“Entire knowledge economy is built on the trust that employees and their employers have in each other; there really is nothing else. It is only this relationship- the one between employees and the organization – that keeps a company going” 

~ Vineet Nayar   Vice Chairman & CEO, HCL Technologies

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2011 – Most eventful year of my life

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Anandan

I have always wondered and questioned myself in the past, ‘what did I achieve in my life?’. This question has always bothered me. Even after completing engineering, post graduation, attaining job, I was always skeptical about the contributions I have made to my life. Though, there were one or two instances in the past made me happy, it was 2011 that brought me many such eventful instances that I would relive and cherish throughout my life. Some of them were from professional life, while there was one big personal event that made me joyful, when I became father of a baby boy on 12th August.

My grandfather was a Tamil poet and had authored numerous books. I was always inspired by him and had a dream of writing a book. This dream came true in 2011, when my co-authored book, Social Media Simplified hit stands to be specific online book retailing websites. It was an enthralling experience to author a book on such a recent topic. Many people did comment that such books are useless in long term as this field is evolving fast. But, we both thought that it was more of an eye-opener activity for community at large, who were still unaware about the prospects of social media. Without a formal book launch function and any offline marketing activities, book sold close to 1,000 copies, which was a satisfying experience. Moreover, I dedicated this book to my grandfather which reaped me utmost satisfaction.

This book gave me three opportunities to be a guest speaker on varied topics related to social media. First, opportunity came from the home grounds, i.e. Management Development Institute, from where I am pursuing my doctoral program. This session was for executive MBA students who had an average work experience of about 6.5 years. The purpose was to enlighten them about the usage of social media for varied purposes of business management activities. I delivered a talk on the topic, ‘Demystifying Social Media’.

Demystifying Social Media

Second, opportunity arrived when my ex-colleague at IIMA, Nivedita Sharma invited me for a guest session for her Brand Management course that she taught at Symbiosis Institute of International Business. The students had experienced community building exercise for a month where student groups created community and built engagement on them for about a month. So, my task was to review their activities and share insights on building brand community via social media.

Building Brand Community via Social Media

I received third opportunity from another friend, Kalpana Chauhan who invited me for a guest session for her CRM course that she taught at Fortune Institute of International Business. The students had experienced community building exercise for a month where student groups created community and built engagement on them for about a month. So, my task was to review their activities and share insights on building brand community via social media. My role here was to educate students about Social CRM.

Social CRM: A Function or a Business Strategy

Well, doctoral students have an inherent pressure to publish in peer-reviewed research journals as part of their program. I could manage to get following publications this year, for which all hard work was done in 2010:

I have authored in past about 17 case studies on various management topics, but all were based on secondary data sources . The OSSCube case study listed above was my first case study written on primary data. The 2nd case study on primary data, Social Media Content Strategy at Ayojak was adjudged fourth best case study in the ISB Case Study competition, 2011.

After completing doctoral program, candidates are generally expected to join academics and get involved in teaching profession. Though, I have hardly taught in the past, I was invited as guest speaker to address 1st year PG-HR students about Qualitative Research. Though, I was nervous in the beginning, the session went well and I learnt a lot about teaching.Demystifying qualitative research

The most relieving feeling arrived on 5th August when my thesis proposal was approved. Its one of the key hurdles in a doctoral program, which most of my doctoral program friends would easily relate to.
The very next week, i.e. on 12th August arrived the moment of my life, when we were blessed with a baby boy.
It was an indeed action packed year, when I look back. Hope, 2012 brings at least similar fun, if not more.
Happy New Year!
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Pricing anomaly by online book retailers in India

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Anandan

Last night when I was going through my Twitter timeline a tweet praised about the book “Get to the Top” by Suhel Seth. I admit, I never heard of this book, until I read this tweet. My loyalty towards Flipkart (have purchased 4 books from them so far!), made me first visit their website to check the book’s availability. After noticing the price (Rs. 175) on Flipkart, I just thought to compare their price 2nd website that was at top of my mind, Indiaplaza and I found it to be Rs. 163. Now, this made me greedy and I then landed on Infibeam website, where the prices were Rs.150!!!

Wow! Now this was amazing three closely competing online book retailers having such price variations that too with hardly any difference in services. The research inquisitiveness in me, propelled to just try out a few more websites and the results were pretty interesting, you could see them in the following images!.

I compared the book price on 6 online book retailers. The lowest price was Rs. 150, on Infibeam and the highest Rs.225 on Bookshopofindia.com. Now, that is a huge price variation for a commodity (hope you agree to this classification!), with hardly any difference in value proposition offered by retailers. One could argue I didn’t compare certain invisible parameters like deliver time period, convenience and reliability of payment gateways, customer support services or regular updates by mail / phone about the shipment.

The major firm oriented reasons for such huge price difference could be because of variations in any of the following:

  • Procurement cost from book publisher.
  • Operational costs (technology + manpower + stock keeping + delivery + etc.) of the respective players.
  • Branding costs.
  • Profit making philosophy of the firm.

However, in today’s Internet prone world, especially considering the target audience for such books, the question to be asked is whether those online book retailers could afford to have such huge price difference? More importantly, if they do have valid value propositions to justify the premium charges, how is it conveyed to the first time user? To be very frank, I being a decent Internet user and with reasonable knowledge about online services, couldn’t make out any justifiable difference on websites that were charging higher than the lowest charging website.

Now, lets analyze the situation from a customer’s perspective. Even if the user is not aware of these many online book retailers, a generic search would definitely guide the user to retailers. With the basic human intent of minimizing cost, I don’t think an average Internet savvy user would mind spending 5 more minutes to find a better bargain. As, it took me hardly 5 minutes to compare prices on 6 websites. So, once a user does a basic search when he/she finds such dissimilarity, on what basis do these online retailers expect the customer to make a decision? Especially, if I am a first time customer, how would I know that how bad the service would be from the lowest charging website or how exceptional would be the service from the highest charging website? In the context of this product category, even if a customer is a repeat buyer, I don’t see a reason why he/she shouldn’t try out a new service provider for a better bargain. This is a very rational decision situation for an utilitarian product with no emotions involved.

If you were at my place, which website would have you chosen?

 

 

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Google scrambles for Gmail users through Email Intervention campaign: Is it to build substantial user base for Google Plus?

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Anandan

After some forgettable bitter experiences in the past, Google once again dared to try its luck in social product space. As soon as it launched Google Plus, tremendous amount of hype was created in the social media space, as it was available on a invitation basis only. Google Plus was available to only Gmail users, unlike other social media platforms where a user had a luxury to create account with any email id. This made me wonder, if it was the right strategy adopted by Google. I felt that it could be a strategy of making Gmail users feel privileged and probably if Google Plus succeeded, Google would have expected that it would further fuel other email users to shift to Gmail. However, it seems that Google soon has realized that this strategy might not work. I had my conjectures satisfied, when I saw this below message on Gmail homepage.

This message clearly disappointed me, and made me wonder how can such a successful company with huge number of products in its basket, strategize in such an immature manner. Yes, Google has probably now realized that with just 250 million odd Gmail users it would be tough for it to realize its dreams of becoming a successful social product against giants like Facebook who already have more than 750 million users. Let’s take a break and ponder why couldn’t Gmail attract more users, even after availing its product for any user since February 2007. I feel, Gmail should have thought about this much earlier even before launching Google Plus. Now, the giant innovative company looks desperate to gather Gmail users and probably hopes that these new users would soon hop on to Google Plus. This also gives an indication that probably Google has no plans (at least in near future) to make Google Plus available with open ID facility.

Google has termed this Gmail user acquisition strategy as “Email Intervention”, www.emailintervention.com. When you reach this website, you could see a video wherein Dr. Richard Muscat, Intervention Specialist details with the objective of this Intervention campaign. He advocates Gmail users to convince a particular non-Gmail adopted in one’s personal network to shift to Gmail (however, he doesn’t provide convincing reasons for a user to switch). The message is very aggressive in nature, with no real basis for a user to switch. Though Google is adopting such a blatant defensive strategy, the message in video has been made sure to be as aggressive as possible.

I went through the entire process of this and captured some screenshots of the same. Once you decided to invite some of your non-Gmail user colleague to Gmail, and clicked on the link, it would take you to the below page.

Now, the beauty lies in how the campaign offers three different kinds of messages a user could choose to convince the non-Gmail user – 1) A helping friend, 2) A worried friend, 3) An embarrassed friend. The text of these messages are in the following three images.

Message 1: I’m here to help

Message 2: I’m worried about you

Message 3: You’re embarrassing me

After you choose one of the above messages, you could preview your message, which looks similar to that of below image.

You could edit the message further, or you could send it and you would receive the notification as below.

This is a classic case wherein two online products are dependent on each other. It would be a wise strategy to link both products if you have real huge number of users on one product. But, if Google thought that it could take on giants like Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn with just 250 million odd users in its army, it clearly missed the bus and now desperately making up for it. It would be interesting to see till when Google persists with its current strategy of providing access to Google Plus for only Gmail users.

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My First Social Media Talk

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Anandan

I started using social networking websites since 2007. Since, then I have been following the domain as a researcher and always wondered how this new media could be used for the business purpose benefitting both marketers and customers at large. My curiosity to understand the domain increased day by day and that’s how I chose this domain for my PhD thesis. After moving to Gurgaon for my PhD program, I had couple of opportunities to attend social media conferences, tweetups and bootcamps, which helped me further understand this domain. Then arrived the most fascinating moment of my life, when I alongwith Vijayendra Haryal penned down first social media book from India, Social Media Simplified. This book, provided me the first opportunity to deliver a talk on social media.

I delivered this talk (last month, yes this is a much delayed post!!!) to about 20 National Management Programme participants of Management Development Institute. The participants had work experience around 6 – 7 years and were from some of the leading companies like Cognizant, Infosys, HAL, Lehman Brothers, TCS and Arvind Ltd etc. The participants were eager to know the importance of social media for business and professional purposes. The talk majorly covered following topics:
• Media Evolution
• Social Media Facts: Indian Context
• Consumer Buying Process in Social Media Era
• Common Myths about Social Media
• Case Studies



The case studies focused on varied business areas like –
• Distribution channel management – Hippo
• Crowdsourcing – SheepStop & Teesort
• Recruitment – Shell Careers & Capgemini India Careers
• F-Commerce – Farm2Kitchen, Tide & Gillette, PVR Cinemas

After the talk I could sense that still the understanding of social media is restricted to creating a presence on social networks rather than creating engagement with the stakeholders. Moreover, enormous potential of social media (beyond marketing) to enable varied business activities is unknown amongst many people.

It was my first talk, truly enjoyed it and made a few new friends!

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