Gauravonomics Blog

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Four Indians — C K Prahalad (#1), Ram Charan (#22), Vijay Govindarajan (#23) and Rakesh Khurana (#45) — make it to the Thinkers 50 2007 list (via Times Online via Scott Adams who is at #21). Seth ‘God’ Godin also makes an appearance at #43.

I’m only 28, so I have a few years to make it to a list like that.

Quick Summary: Read about how Nike is helping customers create their own cultural currency with Nike+.

The Economics of Free

In an earlier post, I wrote about the ‘economics of free’ —

Free content -> Attention -> Free product -> Lock-in -> Paid bundled services -> $$$

The ‘Free content -> Free product -> Paid bundled services’ model is an extreme example of a trend we have been seeing for a while now — marketers bundling services with basically undifferentiated products in order to build a differentiation.

Free Content Can Convert Brands Into Cultural Currency

Take Nike as an example.

In spite of all the technology that supposedly goes inside a typical sports shoe, if you take away the logos, it’s almost impossible to differentiate between a Nike, a Reebok and an Adidas (or Puma or New Balance or…) shoe. So, Nike/ Reebok/ Adidas have instead focused on differentiating themselves by converting their brands into cultural currency. We have started talking about marketers becoming publishers and using free content to grab attention only now, but Nike/ Reebok/ Adidas have been doing it for decades. What’s more, it has worked out brilliantly for the sports shoe industry — even non-athletic types like yours truly have four pair of sports shoes — one for jogging, one for trekking, one for cross-training and one for tennis.

Quick Summary: Facebook serves desi social ad on my News Feed without cluttering it, but still needs to perfect the targeting.

I wonder what prompted this ‘Love Bollywood’ social ad to show up in my Facebook News Feed, except that I’m part of the India network. Clearly, Facebook is still perfecting the targeting for these ads. What Facebook has perfected already is the ability to serve up to two ads on the same page without compromising on the user interaction.

Facebook Social Ads allow your businesses to become part of people’s daily conversations. Ads can be displayed in the left hand Ad Space — visible to users as they browse Facebook to connect with their friends — as well as in the context of News Feed — attached to relevant social stories. (Facebook Social Ads)

I clicked on the ad out of curiosity — the ad points to a Bollywood focused website and not to a Facebook Page. I even signed up on the website to check if they have enabled Facebook Beacon.

Great ‘thinking man’ t-shirts from Dangerous Breed (via TCritic) -

T-shirts are such a great way to make a (political) statement!

Google AdWords now allows CPC (cost per click) bids for Google content network ad campaigns (Inside AdWords) –

With the launch of cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, advertisers can now choose the bidding option that best matches their needs. If the purpose of your placement-targeted campaign is to increase sales, leads, sign-ups, or other conversion-oriented metrics, you can select CPC bidding and pay when users click on your ads. If you want to maximize impressions and increase brand awareness among your target audience, you can select cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding.

I have always looked at CPM bidding as a relic from traditional media which has wriggled its way into digital media. I think yesterday’s announcement marks the beginning of the end of CPM ads.

Quick Summary: Find out three different ways to share your Google Reader feeds with your readers.

I have 489 feeds on my Google Reader, and that would classify me as a rather heavy user. Even though I don’t read all of them on a daily basis, I manage to read quite a few under my must-read tag.

Over time, I have toyed with various ways of sharing these feeds with my readers. Sometimes, I have shared my OPML file with my friends. Usually, I have satisfied myself with adding a clip of my Google Reader Shared Items on my sidebar.

Now, Google has made it easy for me to share my feeds with you by allowing me to convert my Google Reader feed subscriptions into a blogroll -

As a heavy user of Google Reader, I figured that the best way to get a blogroll would be to have Reader generate it for me, based on my subscriptions.

Head over to the “Tags” section on the settings page, make one of the tags you use for subscriptions public, and click on “add a blogroll to your site.” (Google Reader Blog)

Quick Summary: Find out if Digital Inspiration’s Facebook Flyer experiment worked.

Digital Inspiration is now advertising on Facebook. Amit’s Facebook flyer just showed up on my Facebook profile page and for a moment, I thought Amit had created a Facebook Page. However, it turned out the the flyer linked directly to Amit’s website.

It will be great to chat with Amit on what kind of traffic he is getting from the flyers. Amit?

Update: Amit just pointed me to his Facebook Flyer experiment post –

Though the above advertising campaigns on Facebook were run for a very short period, they do indicate that the click through rates for ads appearing on Facebook can be extremely low.

Dave Winer hits the bull’s eye on Twitter’s business model –

Twitter’s destiny is, imho, to be acquired by a phone company and sold as a feature that gives users a reason to use one brand of phone over another.

Imagine if Nokia offered a cell phone with Twitter built-in, a checkbox for SMS users (default on?) — “Do you want to send SMS messages to your buddy list?”

Don’t you think the kids would go for that?

I agree with Dave that contextual tag footers on Twitter will be lame. All mobile companies I meet tell me that tag footers work, but I’m far from convinced.

What do you think? About tag footers on SMSes? About tag footers on Twitter?

Quick Summary: Read about the ‘economics of free’ — Free content -> Attention -> Free product -> Lock-in -> Paid bundled services -> $$$.

Two days back, I was up till late at night, twittering about ‘marketers becoming publishers’ and the ‘economics of free’ –

Content marketing - from ‘marketers buying space from publishers’ to ‘marketers becoming publishers’. (Twitter)

What happens to publishers when marketers become publishers? (Twitter)

Chris Andersen joins the “free is more complicated than you think” debate — http://tinyurl.com/27r66p. (Twitter)

Dilbert creator Scott Adams started the debate with his WSJ column “Giving Stuff Away on the Internet” — http://tinyurl.com/29jt86. (Twitter)

The Long Tail writer Chris Andersen’s next book is called “Free” — http://tinyurl.com/29sd26 — so he may know a thing or two about the topic. (Twitter)

One of the sub-titles he is toying with — “FREE: How companies get rich by charging nothing”. (Twitter)

When marketers become publishers, they give away content for “FREE”. (Twitter)

Because the content is not the end, the content is the means to get attention. (Twitter)

Gauravonomics is now ranked #224 on the Advertising Age Top Media & Marketing Blogs list.

The top five blogs on the list are Seth’s Blog, Online Marketing Blog, ShoeMoney, Micro Persuasion and Search Engine Watch.

The blogs are ranked based on the sum of scores on four factors -

- Google PageRank (0 to 10): Google PageRank is a link-analysis algorithm that interprets web links and assigns a numerical weighting (0 to 10) to each site. High-quality sites receive a higher PageRank. The actual PageRank number was used in the Power 150 ranking algorithm.

- Bloglines Subscribers (1 to 20): Bloglines displays the number of feed subscribers. Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 20) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.

- Technorati Ranking (1 to 30): Technorati ranking analyzes the number of sites pointing to a particular blog. The more link sources referencing your blog, the higher the Technorati ranking. Similar to the Bloglines Subscribers value, Technorati ranking ranges were determined (i.e., top 9,000, top 10,000, top 20,000, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 30) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.