Gauravonomics Blog

Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!

Quick Summary: Read a soon-to-be-real scenario featuring imaginary Indian Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) company BuzzPundit to understand why SMO will be the next big business opportunity for India after BPO and KPO.

If you found it difficult to believe my assertion that social media outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India, let me present a soon-to-be-real scenario featuring imaginary Indian SMO company BuzzPundit.

Imagine a sprawling corporate campus on the outskirts of a large Indian metro (take your pick from Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Gurgaon or Pune). Imagine 10000 twenty-something Indians sitting in front of their computer screens. If you must, think of a call center. Except that these twenty-somethings are not making call after call to customers in the US; they are reading articles, posts and comments and tagging them, or responding to them.

Welcome to BuzzPundit. You are at the corporate campus of one of India’s many social media outsourcing (SMO) companies.

Quick Summary: At the Effective Consumer Engagement conference organized in Mumbai by the World Federation of Advertisers, I realized that Indian CEOs/ CMOs still don’t understand consumer engagement in a networked world.

I had great fun yesterday live-tweeting the Effective Consumer Engagement conference organized in Mumbai by the World Federation of Advertisers (tweet). I must have received 20+ reactions to my WFA conference tweets yesterday (tweet) and we would have had some great conversations if my mobile phone had tabbed browsing: one for typing tweets on Twitter, the other for tracking @gauravonomics replies on Terraminds (tweet). My friends Ashish also live-tweeted the conference, making it probably a first for a mainstream non-tech event in India (tweet).

As WFA has its Executive Committee, AGM, and Board meetings in Mumbai today, more than half the speakers and delegates at the conference were from outside India. This provided me an opportunity to experience first hand if CEOs/ CMOs in India approach consumer engagement differently from their international counterparts. It turned out that they do.

Quick Summary: In today’s attention-scarce economy, where freebies have become the cost of entry, enterprises need to strike the right balance between giving away freebies to get attention and retaining the ability to eventually monetize the attention.

This post was inspired by a thought-provoking post by Piers Fawkes on free versus paid social networks (via Valeria Maltoni). Piers compares his experiences with a not-for-profit (Likemind) and a for-profit (The Purple List) social network and concludes that –

To leverage the opportunities that digital connectivity has fueled a company should be a 50/50 corporation. 50% about being social, 50% about making profit.

In our attention-scarce economy, consumers demand freebies in exchange for their attention. Enterprises give away freebies in the form of free content, or, in some cases, even free products, in the hope that they will get their customers’ attention, build lock-in, and eventually charge for value-added services. In an earlier post, I have called this trade-off the economics of free –

Therefore, Piers’ idea of the 50/50 Enterprise itself is not new. What is new is his insight that unless you decide upfront, and let your customers know upfront, that your enterprise has both free and paid elements, you may not be able to charge for the paid elements.

Quick Summary: The social media marketing scene in India is heating up both on the demand and supply side, with digital advertising agencies, PR practitioners, and prominent bloggers offering a range of social media services.

I have been watching the social media marketing scene in India for a while now, and, suddenly, things seem to be heating up in this space. On the demand side, companies/ brands are showing willingness to engage with social media and, on the supply side, many players are offering, or planning to offer, a variety of social media services.

The Indian players offering social media marketing services can broadly be divided into three categories –

- Digital advertising agencies offering social media marketing services with a focus on virals, social network apps, social media campaigns etc.

- Public relations agencies/ practitioners offering social media services with a focus on online reputation monitoring and social media outreach etc.

- Prominent bloggers offering, basically, corporate blogging consulting services and workshops.

Let’s look at the players under each category in some detail.

- Webchutney

Location(s): Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore

Quick Summary: The Wordpress Prologue theme from Automattic may be the first step towards an open-source distributed micro-blogging platform.

Wordpress creator Automattic has launched a new theme called Prologue which can be used to create private Twitter-like micro-blogging platforms.

Basically, the Prologue theme uses the Wordpress content management system to mimic the Twitter interface. Here are three reasons why I like Prologue –

(+) The “whatcha up to?” post form integrated into the front page is nifty for posting short tweet-sized messages. It would be useful, however, to have a “title” field apart from “post” and “tags”.

(+) The theme is built to be used by multiple authors (see demo blog) and author-wise RSS feeds are useful for linking each author’s posts to their Twitter accounts, via TwitterFeed.

(+) The summary view on the front page, expandable by clicking on authors or tags, is a neat touch. The front page now shows a stream of recent updates instead of one update per user.

Quick Summary: Duncan Watts debunks The Influentials and The Tipping Point, but word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing practitioners will do well to continue to focus on the tipping point potential of influentials.

Here’s a potential game changer for word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing.

Word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing is based on the premise, best captured in bestsellers like The Influentials and The Tipping Point, that a small cadre of well-connected people can trigger, or tip, trends. Reach the influentials and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free.

Now, based on his new research, network theory scientist Duncan Watts, who is working at Yahoo! on sabbatical from Columbia University, says that this simple premise is wrong. While I’m still trying to fully understand what Watts own premise is, here is my three sentence summary of what he seems to be saying –

- Even supper-connected influentials don’t have the power to start a trend, unless the social context is anyways susceptible to the trend.

- The key, therefore, lies not in identifying influentials who will tip a trend, but in identifying trends that are ready to be tipped.

Quick Summary: Businesses based on the influence curve of an idea cluster are likely to be more robust and less risky than businesses based on the influence curve of one idea.

Ideas have a bell-shaped influence curve. Over time, ideas gain influence, reach a peak influence at a point in time and decline in influence thereafter. If your business is based on an idea, like all businesses are, your business is limited by the idea’s influence curve. To build a successful business, you would like to identify an idea early, build competence/ credibility before others during the growth phase, make money at peak influence, and exit/ diversify during the decline phase.

Different ideas have different influence curves. You can think of an influence curve in terms of height (peak influence), gradient (rate of acceptance) and width (life of idea). To build a successful business, you would like to identify an idea that has a fast rate of acceptance, a high peak influence, and a long life.

Quick Summary: Read about the five levels in the Marketing Chain of Being, and the three laws that govern how brands move between them.

In an earlier post, I had written that, like the Renaissance Chain of Being, there is also a Marketing Chain of Being.

In this post, I’ll explain the five levels in the Marketing Chain of Being, and the three laws that govern how brands move between them.

There are five levels in the Marketing Chain of Being –

1. Commodity Hell, in which brands basically focus on price and channel promotions to sell more (think groceries).
2. Differentiation, in which brands highlight product features and benefits to command a price premium (think automobiles).
3. Engagement, in which brands use service (in both its customer service and conversation meaning) to develop relationships with customers (think Dell).
4. Cultural Currency, in which brands become shared social objects and help customers define their individual and group identities (think Nike+iPod).
5. Meaning, in which brands become the tools that customers use for self-realization or restoration (think Google).

I was quoted today in a Hyderabad Times story on lifestyle entrepreneurship — entrepreneurship in the pursuit of leading a lifestyle that is a perfect balance of health, wealth and relationships –

While Gaurav Mishra, a marketer and a prominent blogger partly agrees, “I think entrepreneurship itself is nebulous in India, given our ‘good boys get a good job’ mindset, ‘lifestyle entrepreneurship’ will be even more rare. At the same time, profit is only part of the reason people become entrepreneurs. This is just taking it a bit further and deciding to be the master of one’s own destiny and one’s own time.”

I still have to figure out why I’m an expert on entrepreneurship, but all buzz is welcome. A link to my blog would have been even more welcome.

On second thoughts, I’ll probably look back at this story a few years later as a sign that helped me answer the question I have been asking myself endlessly — ‘What Should I Do With My Life?’.

Quick Summary: Read about how the long tail doesn’t only apply to culture and commerce, but also to relationships.

In my earlier post about the Long Tail of Pain, I just drew a diagram of how social media allows us to experience pain anytime, anyplace, in any form, but didn’t elaborate on the idea adequately.

In this post, I’ll explain what a long tail is and how digital media has changed it. I’ll also explain how the long tail doesn’t only apply to culture and commerce, but also to relationships, specifically pain, via the Three Laws of the Long Tail of Pain.

Let me first explain what a long tail is.

A long tail curve is a statistical distribution in which a small number of data points have disproportionately high values compared to a large number of other data points that have progressively low values. If you rank these data points and plot them in the decreasing order of their values, you get a curve that first falls very sharply (forming the almost vertical head) and then falls more slowly (forming the almost horizontal tail). The Pareto Principle (the top 20% contribute 80% of the total) is an example of a long tail curve.