Pranav Bhasin

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?