Pranav Bhasin

Continued from the previous article here.

The second meetup was a panel on “Building social platforms for social activists” involving Jasmine Shah (@jasmine441) and Parul Gupta (@NGOPost) moderated by Gaurav Mishra ( @gauravonomics ). After a quick introduction by Keerthikiran (@keerthikiran), there was a passionate discussion between the panelists with references to how they use social media for their respective causes.

Here are some bullet points from the discussion:

• NGOPost membership jumped from 1k to 25k when they got a Google Grant for free Adwords ads
• Jasmine explained Janaagraha’s REED framework for improving urban quality of life
• Social activism platforms like NGOPost and Janaagraha can bring about much needed change wthn our country
• Why create a social platform when you can use Facebook or Twitter? Because each community has a unique soul
• How important is local language for a social platform built for social change? It’s important but not easy
• Janaagraha will build the critical mass of people who any cause can leverage
• We see google translate is a great way to localize content
• The internet is global. Why limit a platform to a country (like ngopost) or even a city (like janaagraha)? Web platforms need to build offline volunteer networks & real instituions to really bring about real change
• How important is it for corporates to support social causes? How can social platforms be designed to encourage this?
• How can social organizations shift the discussion from problems to solutions?
• How can social organizations use the internet to engage older citizens & not only the youth?
• Do overlapping web-based social initiatives dilute activism, instead of promoting it?
• Overlapping mediums if coupled well, will actually generate more buzz. at the same time, one should have a hub
• How do you use social platforms to bridge the gap b/w talk & action?

Here are a few photos from this meetup ( all pics here ):

Its been some time since I reported an event on my blog, so I thought why not start with this weekend’s Social Media Club Bangalore meetup.

The Social Media Club Bangalore was started around 2 weeks back when Vijay ( @amnigos ), Hrish ( @dhempe ), Freeman ( @freemanindia ), myself ( @amnigos ) and a few others met up at Jaaga and shared our coordinates and learnt more about each other. This week, Gaurav Mishra ( @gauravonomics ) was in town, so SMC Bangalore got a double boost and hosted two back to back social meetups.

The first meetup was a panel on “Indian web 2.0 startups targeting the global market” involving myself ( @pranavbhasin ) and Vijay ( @amnigos ), morderated by Kaushal ( @ksarda ). There was a good crowd turnout with the discussion and queries delving into very practical areas of using social media to promote a startup. Some of the bullet points from the discussion are ( in no particular order ):

• Social media is about conversations, not conversions
• Have tangible and measurable goals for your social media campaign, but do not link them directly to user acquisition
• It is possible to get trial enterprise users via email marketing, but difficult to convert them
• Indian audience behave differently than global counterparts online in giving feedback – Indians only give feedback when there is a problem whereas global audience will give feedback when they like something too
• Indian startups targeting the global market well: Zoho, Deskaway, FusionChart, Dimdim
• Indian users will pay for a physical product but will not pay for a subscription
• If you plan to start up, focus on revenues from day 1 – not every company can scale to the size of a facebook
• Tips for startups: launch quickly, test multiple designs, ask users for feedback, iterate endlessly, build in virality
• Brands should use the social media effectively. They should not spam users based on certain keywords
• Agencies need success stories from multiple markets before they recommend a new social platform to clients
• The only way for a social platform to grow cost effectively is through invites from present users
• Non-users always give positive feedback
• Figuring out a revenue model is more important than acquiring users
• Mentions on big tech blogs only result in temporary traffic peaks, not long-term users

Here are a few photos from this meetup ( all pics here ):

Since Thomas Friedman wrote “The World is Flat”, going global has an added charm to it. And while there are plenty of opportunities at home, Indian companies are increasingly looking to acquire a global footprint and establish their leadership in other countries too.

But isn’t going global really expensive? How do I know whether there is a market for my product outside? How do I find the right kind of partners to talk to? I don’t even know their language, how do I setup my team? These are just some of the questions that come to mind as soon as you start thinking about a global company.

Thankfully, social media has changed the world and provides answers to some of these questions. While there is no perfect solution, no way to completely avoid the risk, here are the 5 ways in which you can leverage social media to your advantage if you are thinking of going global:

1) Test the waters

Before you make any decisions, understand more about the market you are looking at. Find out the names of your competitors in the target countries and set up twitter search alerts for them. Identify the keywords that define your business and setup twitter alerts for them for the target country.

Listen in to conversations on these channels for a few days to understand the intricacies of the market and the key problems that the users of existing product face. This is a quick, free and easy way to see whether your product will fly in the market or not.

2) Connect with potential customers

Users on twitter are extremely candid and will typically rant about something they don’t like and praise something they like. Once you have an understanding of the market, the next step is to talk to some of the people who are reporting problems about existing products.

Assuming that your product solves the problem they are talking about, briefly suggest your solution to them and see if it interests them. If you are able to establish a conversation with someone, you may also want to ask them to try your product ( assuming it is accessible over the internet ).

This is an extremely effective way of having conversations with your potential customers and getting some real feedback about your product.

3) Network, network, network

Every market, in every country has a few people who have a great reputation – when they speak everyone listens. These are typically industry experts or domain experts. In addition, there are a lot of independent bloggers who are very influential in their sphere and are extremely well networked.

Find out people like these in your market and start talking with them. Get one of them interested in trying out your product. If they have feedback for you, listen to it carefully and go back to them after you’ve implemented their feedback. What is important here is to establish a relationship of mutual trust and respect with the other person, so that when you have something worthy of being showcased, you have someone who can spread the word for you.

Remember, there is a thin line between networking and spamming – don’t cross that line otherwise you will have them on the other side. Also note that this is a time consuming process that generally takes a few months – make it a part of your daily routine.

4) Build your channels

So far, we have talked about speaking with customers and industry experts. In addition, social media is a great way to find prospective partners. Almost every business has some identity on twitter and facebook, be it large or small and by using social media, you can get in touch with them without physically being present there.

So find your potential partners there and have conversations with them. If a mutually beneficial partnership is possible, you can even sign all legal agreements by passing around scanned documents over email. This way, you can actually start doing business in another country through a partner without spending a lot of money.

5) Build positive reputation, but don’t ignore the negative

We have already talked about listening in to what customers are saying about competition. Now that you are doing business in another country, wouldn’t you want to listen in to what customers are saying about you? Setup your social media alerts and pay attention to every conversation where you or your business is mentioned.

Its unlikely that all the conversations will be positive, so it is important to pay more attention to the negative conversations and alleviate their causes. Remember, internet has a long memory, so handle the situation gracefully, solve the problem being discussed, have a conversation with your customer about it and you will most likely have a happy ending there.

See all my photos on my lifeblob photo sharing and discovery page.

One thing I have always marveled at is the ability of watch companies to market their products. Imagine the odds in front of them:

1) The product was invented in 1800s and has reached a stage beyond innovation ( except for the ones in James Bond movies ) – can’t sell watches based on differentiators anymore.

2) Everyone already owns at least one watch – market is already saturated.

3)  New breed of devices and cellphones make it redundant – who needs a watch when you have a cellphone and are on twitter 24×7.

How much harder can it get? And yet they manage to sell watches by the dozen.

But how? Well, look at the rolex ad on the left for instance. It talks about piano, seduction, soul and what not – none of these have anything to do with a watch. But all of these are words that have been carefully chosen to connect with prospective buyer of this watch.

As I looked at a few more of these ads, one mistake that we internet marketers do often became very clear. As internet marketers, we are often too focussed on selling our product by highlighting how the features our product offers are better than the competition. While this approach works for some companies that grab the attention of sufficient early adopters, most other companies struggle and keep adding on feature after feature in hope of selling their wares.

Its time internet marketers start looking at customers and thinking about what would grab their attention about your product. This will not only make them better marketers, but may also give some brilliant insights about the target segment that would have otherwise been elusive.

See all the photos on my lifeblob photo sharing and discovery page.

The title is a copy of a recent post by Fred Wilson, but the post is not . The part that caught my attention in the post was the statement “it’s a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph”.

My personal view is that first of all, it is somewhat unfair to compare search with social since they solve vastly different problems. To me “Search equals Intent” whereas “Social equals Discovery“. When you really want to find something, the first thing you do is google for it. Yes, you may ask a few friends about it, but in most cases the expert on your question may not be in your network at all. You may post your question on twitter or facebook, but you certainly won’t wait on these channels for an answer.

The two things that social brings into the picture is “serendipity and trust“. If you are a part of a social network, you hear all kinds of things whether you want to hear them or not and in some cases, you do stumble upon some really neat stuff. Thats serendipity and since you heard about it from someone in your network, you know how much to trust the information based on the trust you have on the source of the information. To a large extent, this is a completely different way of getting information than what search has to offer, but certainly not good enough to kill search by itself.

That is why, at lifeblob, we are building a new channel for discovery of photos through your social graph, not trying to compete with google image search.

Whats your take on search vs social?

When google announced a preview of google image swirl I was compelled to check it out. After all lifeblob is also in the business of photo discovery and it is always good to know what other companies are doing in this area.

The preview is neatly built in flash and presents a very interesting visualization. This reminds me of a similiar visualization they did earlier for a “wonder wheel” view of navigating through search results. The part that I did not like though was that exploration ends very abruptly – perhaps this is because they are running on a limited data set and will not be a problem in the final version.

That brings me to the question – what is google trying to achieve through this? Is it just a ploy to counter the advances of microsoft in visual search or is there a bigger agenda behind this?

My verdict: There is a bigger agenda here. Read On.

1) Searching through images is not an easy task and given that google’s key focus is search, they would want to establish a big lead in the image search market as well. So far, google image search attempts to identify duplicate images so that they do not present duplicate results to the user. With this kind of a visualization however, google lets you explore variants of the same image so that you have more freedom to choose the one that fits your bill.

2) This is an excellent way to provide more visual detail around a searched topic. Imagine a wonder wheel kind of icon next to your regular search results, clicking on which opens up the image swirl widget and lets you see photos related to a search result.

3) Search is intent driven – you type in a few keywords and then choose a result that matches your intent. Google has used this information very effectively for its regular search to verify that the results being shown match the user intent and also to improve its data mining algos to continuously improve the results.

Images suffer from a terrible handicap that they don’t have any metadata to organize them and google typically relies on information around the images, tools like image labeler and some level of image analysis to understand what they are about. By presenting the results in a visualization like this and watching user interaction patterns, google will get excellent information about images and to improve their image search.

4) Navigating through images this way is very enjoyable and gets people to spend more time on google properties. Now, that may not necessarily align with their standard way of measuring search effectiveness ( its counterintuitive, but google wants you to spend as little time as possible on its search pages, which is their metric for measuring how good their results are ) but hey,  the more time they spend here, the more time they are off Microsoft’s visual search and thats a good thing . Plus, the metrics that apply for text based search may not apply for visual media search anyway.

What do you think about this?

Last week, we launched a couple of new features related to photo discovery on lifeblob and I decided to run a campaign on facebook to drive some traffic and see how people are responding to the new stuff.

Today, I looked at the reports and I was shocked to see the rampant click-fraud going on in facebook. And based on what I hear from others who have run similar campaigns, facebook seems to be least bothered about putting any checks on it.

Here is a report from the facebook dashboard for the campaign between 6th Nov to 14th Nov. As you can see, the total number of clicks that we got charged for are 4469.

However, my google analytics dashboard for the same campaign only accounts for 2372 visits from this campaign. Where did the rest of them go? And it is not an abberation on one of the days – the graph below will tell you that actual visits are consistently off by almost 50%.

Have you noticed similar abberations in facebook ads? Leave a note in the comments and lets come together and get facebook to do something about this.

Also, pass this link around so that if any of your friends are running campaigns on facebook, they also become aware that facebook is charging them double for what they offer.

This is the time for technology events in Bangalore. The latest one that I heard of is the Forum Nokia Developer Conference 2009 that is happening on Dec 7, in Bangalore at Hotel Taj Residency.

This year’s event promises to be very special with live demos, real-life mobile application stars who ‘wowed’ the world with their mobile applications to win fame and fortune, and much more. Also, explore how Nokia’s new Ovi Store ensures developers have easy access to publish applications and content to millions of Nokia devices through a unified publishing channel.

Get to know the dynamic technology platforms for creating truly compelling user experiences. Get to learn new skills, new connections, and new ideas to create tomorrow’s technologies. You can find more details at http://bit.ly/FNDC09 .

And last but not the lest, there is a Nokia N97 up for grabs too. So check it out!