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!

I just came across a week old article by Stephen Waddington about how lifestreaming is dumbass and blogging is kickass. Well, I think he missed the point.

I’m no big fan of twitter or friendfeed and have been a significantly late adopter of these services, but what I do see there is a really strong value add in real-time information discovery. The way twitter has been on top of breaking news lately, I don’t see how someone can ignore this channel anymore.

Now coming to thought leadership, twitter not only forces you to speak your mind concisely, it also gets you instant reactions from people listening to you thereby engaging in a discussion – isn’t a discussion the best way to show your thought leadership?

Is twitter or friendfeed the beginning and end of lifestreaming? Certainly not. My personal belief is that lifestreaming is evolving and eventually there will be solutions that satisfy different people in different ways.

Stephen, you think your photo stream is boring as hell – try putting it in a lifeblob timeline and see how engaging it can be with relations around it.  There is a lot of innovation that needs to happen and while all the lifestreaming solutions may not hold relevance for Robert Scoble or Steve Rubel, they would certainly gain prominence as all these services get better at organizing and visualizing this vast resource of information.