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The Experience Ecosystem

Companies are beginning to realize that their brand is now realized on the Social Web, in conversations between strangers, who amplify, quash, or otherwise reshape each others’ opinion on the product or service, often based on first-hand experiences. These messages play off against marketing messages pushed by advertising agencies in the mind of the customer, and increasingly, customers are listening to their peers, instead of marketing messages.

The Social Web exposes any misalignment between implicit or explicit expectations set by the CMO in marketing messages and the actual experience delivered by the organization run by the COO. It is therefore critical that the CMO and COO be in absolute alignment, so that the organization (over-)delivers on what the brand has promised, leading to customer delight, loyalty and advocacy.

At the core of this approach is the idea that conversations are driven by experiences. If you want to drive positive conversations about your brands, you should start by creating an experience that is worth talking about.

Rajiv Dingra at WATBlog has a great recap of the social networking space in India in 2008.

The highlight, for me, is the war for the #1 spot between Facebook and Orkut. Orkut introduced the OpenSocial applications platform and replicated several Facebook features, offered themes, and provided regional language and mobile support. Facebook also added key features like chat that are likely to become popular in India. As I showed in my analysis of search trends for social networking sites in India, interest in Orkut is stagnant, while interest in Facebook is growing, even though the gap between the two is still significant.

The other social networking sites in India positioned themselves on content, instead of social networking features. BigAdda and Ibibo focused on entertainment and positioned themselves as quasi blogging platforms by getting celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan and Ravi Shastri to blog for them. However, as I showed in my analysis of search trends for blogging platforms in India, unlike blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger/ Blogspot, which have shown slow but consistent growth, the interest in Ibibo and BigAdda has fluctuated significantly, probably based on whether they were running big ad campaigns at the time.

What is OpenSocial?

TechCrunch revealed today that, instead of launching a new social networking platform, Google will launch OpenSocial, a set of three common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any hosts, social networks, that choose to participate. These APIs give developers access to the data needed to build social applications: access to a user’s profile, their friends, and the ability to let their friends know that activities have taken place. The initial lineup of hosts, or participating social networks, include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle (update: MySpace, Bebo and SixApart have also joined OpenSocial). The initial lineup of developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

You can also see a press release on the subject posted on John Battelle’s Searchblog.

What is my overall impression of OpenSocial?

In my opinion, Google gets three on three for not calling it Maka-Maka, for not falling into the Orkut vs. Facebook trap –

While a lot of bloggers are looking at ‘Maka-Maka’ in a Orkut vs. Facebook context, I think Google will be short-selling itself if it looked at the opportunity in such a limited way.