Pranav Bhasin

Guy Kawasaki is in Bangalore and yesterday I had the opportunity to meet him in the tweetup at Nasscom Product Conclave.  He is a very friendly person and went into great detail on the strategy he uses to market AllTop over twitter.

Now, I have great respect for him as a person and as a thought leader, but there are some things that I did not like about his talk.

But before that, here are the things that I liked:

a) Insight on into how automating your tweets can save you a lot of time and effort.
b) Stats on how tweeting the same post at different times of the day can almost double your hits.
c) Emphasis on the basic twitter principle – provide value to your followers.

Things that I would have loved to hear in the talk:

a) How to build a complete marketing strategy around twitter and other social media tools?
b) How to measure the return on investment – even though twitter is free, you spend time on it and that costs money?
c) How does twitter compare with other online marketing media in terms of value for your investment?
d) How long does it take for your twitter activity to start bearing fruit?

Things that I did not like about his talk:

a) Too much self-promotion – alltop and tweetmeme appeared over hundred times in the talk.
b) The proposed strategy of using alltop content to generate tweets seems like self-fulfilling prophecy. Makes me think if the real purpose of the talk was to talk about twitter or to make everyone in the room build alltop pages.
c) His strategy would work for twitter users like him that have a very high following ( because they are a celeb, role model etc ) but what about tweeters who have not acquired that status yet?
d) His strategy is synonymous to twitter spam – I believe that sooner or later, filtering systems will be built on twitter to filter out spam and that will be the end of this strategy.

What is your opinion of the talk? Do you agree with my assessment here – do let me know! BTW, here are some shots that I took during the tweetup:

Find all the Guy Kawasaki NASSCOM photos here!

Most startups underestimate the power of business cards as a marketing tool.

The death of the traditional business card is the writing on the wall. With linkedin, twitter and other social media tools making networking so painless, who needs a business card anymore. Plus we all have phones with a few GB of memory that carry our contacts and music all in one device. Die business cards, die and save us some trees – that is how I thought till a few days back.

This was until I was looking to contact an aquaintance that I had met in a previous networking meet. I was sure I had saved her contact details in my mobile, but I just couldn’t remember well enough to locate her. Thats when I remembered her “very visually distinct” business card that she had given me and it took me no more than 10 minutes to surf through heaps of business cards I had collected over time to get the details.

And then it stuck me hard – there is something about a business card that does not exist in the electronic media. Its the visual cue, the colors, the distinctiveness, the style, things that get into the subconscious of human mind and make it memorable. A neat business card with an attractive graphic is an amazing tool to get people to remember you. Plus, people never really throw away business cards, so there is always a chance they will be able to find you when they need you. Spend a few more bucks to get a double sided business card and you have enough space to give people a message that you want them to remember about your company – a perfect branding tool.

With the NASSCOM conclave starting in Bangalore tomorrow, I got around today to designing business cards for my company in a way that they strongly advertise our photo discovery service – http://www.lifeblob.com with a memorable message around it. Do you think I did a good job – let me know?

Yesterday, I was discussing a simple feature with Vishwas when the discussion veered towards the very subjective domain of usability. After spending almost an hour in the discussion, I thought to myself if there is a way to think about usability when implementing a feature.

Let me put things in perspective here. The feature being discussed was “The ability to allow a user to select a facebook photo or upload a photo in our facebook lifeblob application ?” Vishwas already had a gallery like view for the facebook photos and needed to figure out how the upload gets integrated in the view.

Vishwas: Lets add a file chooser element and an upload button above the gallery. That way, we get both the options on the same page.
Me: Sure. What happens when the upload button is clicked?
Vishwas: The photo gets uploaded and gets added to the collage.
Me: Hey, wait a min. Isn’t that confusing? I just thought that the photo would get uploaded and show up in the gallery.
Vishwas: Why do you want the user to go through an extra click? If the user did not select a photo in the gallery, he/she obviously wants the uploaded photo to get added to the collage.
Me: Well, yes – but that’s not what the text on the button tells me. It just says “Upload”. Plus there is a gallery below which intuitively makes me feel that the photo will get shown there.
Vishwas: But thats an unnecessary extra click for the user. The user will drop off if we make him/her do that.
… and this discussion goes on and on.

Two quick observations from this discussion:
a) As developers, we tend to optimize everything. Vishwas is not trying to find out the most intuitive way for upload – he is trying to find the path that goes through the least clicks.
b) There is a fear that getting the user to do that extra click will make them drop off.

The user perspective:
A user thinks very differently. Based on initial screen, a user has an expectation set before he/she performs an action. If your implementation deviates from that expectation, you are asking for serious trouble. In simple words, if you call the button “Upload”, you should only upload the photo and show the user a message indicating whether it was successful or not. Or call the button “Upload and add to collage” in the first place and don’t set the wrong expectation by showing a gallery below it.

As for reducing clicks, everyone seems to be obsessed with it these days, but in my opinion it is not such a big deal ( of course, I assume that you are not adding extra steps that are not necessary ). As long as users understand the value of an action and have belief that your app will do what the action says, they will be happy to do not just one, but a few extra clicks. When you skip steps, you shatter this belief and in most cases, this is what causes the user to drop off.

Conclusion:
Usability is plain common sense when you look at your application dispassionately from a user perspective. When in dilemma, err on the side of giving user more information than less.

I recently came across Tac Anderson’s post “What the heck is a lifestream?” and found it very interesting that a simple question like this can spark a very interesting discussion.

With the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if pretty soon, people who do not have a lifestream are considered social outcasts. The question that comes to my mind is – How important is a lifestream to you?

Please take the poll below to share your view on this topic:

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