Parsing Thoughts

Recently upgraded my Ubuntu installation to the latest release 11.10 i.e. Oneiric Ocelot. Though this version has a lot of improvements (most notable are Software Manager & Unity Dash), the network manager is really buggy.

Whenever your network connection, especially a DSL connection, drops on its own, the network manager stops showing any available network profiles in its drop-down menu. Basically there's no connection you can connect to even though your network cable is plugged in.

Though I even went to the extent of installing an alternate network manager (wicd), I found a simple workaround for this problem - just restart the Network Manager. How to do this:

1. Open the Terminal using Alt+F2 or from dash
2. Paste this command: sudo service network-manager restart

And you're done! Once you issue the command, the network manager will restart in 2-3 sec and automatically connect to your default DSL network profile.

As I've mentioned before, I am really getting into the world of Infographics. An infographic can be a really powerful tool to get quick insights from large amounts of data. Mint, one of the top business newspapers in India, has been very good at publishing a lot of well-made full-page infographics. One such infographic I recently came across is on the online behaviour of Indian consumers. It's based on a global study done by TNS.

India currently has around 100 million internet users and many studies predict it to go up to 300 million by 2014. That's a lot of growth! And fast! No wonder the e-commerce space in India is really heating up. This study further corroborates the potential for e-commerce in India.

Coming back to our topic, here are some take-aways from this infographic:

People's attitude & behavior

An Indian consumer interacts much more with brands online than his/her global counterparts. However, the percentage of total advertising spend by Indian brands on online advertising is still quite low. Considering the shrinking ad budgets of most FMCG, Auto, Electronics companies etc, they can really start focusing online. And it seems they are slowly realizing this.

The mobile e-shopping in India is yet quite new. This is mostly because of the low penetration of smartphones in India. I believe there's lot of scope for entrepreneurs to come up with jugaad solutions here.

The role of consumer voice

Whether it's India or anywhere else, people do trust their friends' reviews. Interestingly in India, we equally trust a stranger's review as well. As the same TNS study says even one bad review can make people re-think their assessment of a product/brand. But does this mean your brand should play it safe online? The answer is: No. Only about 10% of the online consumer voice is 'complaints'; so there's 90% positive content out there as well.

Most popular Activities

Note that all the three top online activities of Indian consumers have to do with Videos. Considering that a good video can get you a lot 'Up' in Google search results (as SEO experts will tell you), this is definitely a medium Indian brands can focus on. Even for small companies - why not create an ad video that has lot of potential to go 'viral' on YouTube - much better ROI.

The path to buying

Notice how long the bars are for Online and Consumer Voice in almost every product category as compared to Offline and Brand Voice! The takeway - create communities (or Tribes as Seth Godin likes to call them) around your brand. And with the zero cost Pages social networks such as Facebook and Google+ offer, this has become quite simple. But the team maintaining the page must be engaged enough and your content should be helpful. Additionally, such online brand Pages can give you a treasure trove of consumer data.

Here's a video containing interesting tidbits from the TNS study:

Between the time I got the idea of writing a blog-post on the above subject and actually typing out the matter, I spent almost half an hour making Posterous load the 'New post by web' page. Only when I had almost given up, the page somehow loaded and here I am, typing the post. 

This just goes on to show how much we are begining to crave for stuff that just works. At least I am. Why:

 -- Out of every 5 ads I watch on Indian TV channels, 3 are life/health insurance ads. Have you ever looked at the sign up form for an insurance policy? It just plain sucks. Why can't they make an insurance form that's easy enough to understand. (Didn't Google simplify their privacy policy?)

-- The remaining two ads are by telecom companies (I am a bit exaggerating here, but you get my point). You have to, absolutely have to, type in 15 digits before the call even connects to their customer care!

-- I don't even want to talk about software.

My point: We have thousands of products claiming to do thousands of things; but very few actually doing what they claim. Only imagine what the world would be like if products stood true to the one claim they make. No marketing mumbo-jumbo needed.

In fact, there are many companies which have made billion-dollar valuations because they do just the one thing they claim. They just work:

1. Dropbox -- Online back-up. Plain and simple. And their tagline actually is 'It just works!'

2. Spotify -- Listening songs over the internet without ever buffering. And millions of song on offer. Spotify just works.

3. Zappos --  A shoe company built around customer service. And it delivers.

4. Virgin -- The company that enters established industrues. And then changes the landscape.

You can't retain a customer for long by sales/marketing gimmicks if your product doesn't deliver what it's meant to deliver - properly. The sad thing right now is, in so many sectors, almost all companies have equally bad product/service offerings. Need a Branson to shake up some things here! Anyone listening?

P.S. : Obviously I am gonna chuck Posterous in a few days. @a4agarwal: Are you listening?

Bestvendor has surveyed about 550 startups and come out with this awesome infographic on the tools that they most commonly use - ranging from emailing to accounting to collaboration. Do give it a look.

P.S. > This is my post after a brief hiatus. Plan to post regularly now on.

P.P.S. > Hooked on to the concept of Infographics right now. Check out http://www.informationisbeautiful.net and http://dd.dynamicdiagrams.com to get started.

That sounds absurd, right? But creativity is indeed subtraction.

Art is not just something that you put into it, but it's also what you leave out.

A book is not just what's written in it, but what is written 'between the lines'...or what is left out for the reader to infer.

A consummate artist knows that in a symphony the white spaces of silence between the notes are just as important as the sound itself.

This applies to individuals and brands alike. An individual can become successful only when he passionately pursues that one thing and leaves out everything else. A brand becomes well known if it sticks to just one core message and communicates it well.

Think over it...

P.S. Check out this wonderful post by Austin Kleon which inspired the above article.

Listening to these songs a lot these days...thought I should share them with you.

Many a time in our quest to create an awesome product/service/whatever, we forget to take care of the simplest of things. And this mistake is committed by even the most technologically advanced, creatively revered brands too. The recently heated up browser war is an excellent example of this.

Mozilla recently came out with its Firefox 4 browser. While the browser is functionally amazing, there are many small interface annoyances. They have left a lot of vertical screen space unused with just the Firefox menu button occupying that part; and this look doesn't change even in the maximized-window mode. Small thing...but lot of people are complaining about it. (In fact, Lifehacker already has a post on fixing these annoyances!)

Microsoft has also come out with IE9 (and let me assure you this is the best Internet Explorer so far!). IE9 actually has a very neat interface unlike its predecessors and it loads fast. But if you are the kind of person who has tons of tabs open and toggles between them a lot, you are at a loss. While IE9 supports the ctrl+tab shortcut, it doesn't support the ctrl+pgup/pgdown shortcuts supported by every other browser. Again small thing...but such small things may make your customers switch to your rival product.

There's an old video on TED in which NYT Technology columnist David Pogue illustrates the same point in his amazing style. Do check this out.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/david_pogue_says_simplicity_sells.html

Let’s admit it. We all want content to be free. Every blogger has written about it at least once. Every self-proclaimed business guru is telling how it's a FREE economy (Heck, they've even invented a term called Freeconomics for it...I figure Chris Anderson is behind it all.) And every audiophile downloaded Radiohead's last album when they released it for free on internet.

But this has really turned the days into nightmares for all the C-suite executives in Industries like News, Media, Publishing and Music. WSJ, NYT are all experimenting with pricing their online content; but many a blogger has already posted workarounds for that. Sometimes I wonder why they are even trying to SELL music cassettes and CDs in India when all the songs you want are just a click away on certain Pakistani sites. Chris Anderson really suggested some good ways for the authors/musicians to make some money in such economy. But are there any lessons in all this for the traditional companies in these industries?

The answer lies in what this 26-year old did. Amanda Hocking is the bestselling 'indie' writer on Amazon's Kindle store. According to her own blog, she has sold over 900,000 copies of her nine different books since April 2010 and at the prices she is charging that works out to be millions in dollars. The secret of her success is two-fold:

1. She charges $3 for many of her books and as low as $0.99 for some (you can buy 1 song in iTunes store at that price!)

2. She taps into her social networks, comprising mostly of book-bloggers, to generate buzz around her offerings

Essentially, she's keeping her costs low (both publishing and marketing), using modern channels to get her message across and creating a tribe. Is your company ready to do that?

P.S: I figure this post would give more motivation to indie artists than traditional companies. But that's good too.

(The inspiration for this article came after reading what Seth Godin wrote on his blog today.)

Brand Resonance is that Holy Grail for a marketeer or a brand manager where his brand starts connecting so well with its customers that it creates an identity for itself in their minds. The concept was first put forth by David Aaker and is widely accepted in marketing culture. Well, here’s a great example where the Brand Resonance was so high that customers fought between themselves for the superiority of the brand close to their heart.

Earlier this week, DC Comics had to shut down completely the commenting on its blog. The reason: Things turned really ugly on a thread about a question dearest to the comic book readers – Who runs faster? Superman or Flash!

Superman, Batman, Flash and so many superheroes resonate so much with us today that we imagine them in blood and flesh. And fight for their superiority. Well…their lies the secret behind success of DC Comics and Marvel. I believe if a company had one brand which can create this, it’s enough. And the examples are aplenty…we just have to learn from them.

When Microsoft recently launched the $150 add-on to Xbox called Kinect, its original aim was to push its gaming device into the league of next-gen motion sensing consoles esp. Nintendo Wii. However nowhere in their dreams the folks at Microsoft had imagined that Kinect would be used to do things like these:

(The Minority Report interface)

(A virtual piano)

(Browsing internet with hand gestures)

And these are just some example which looked cool to me. If you go to YouTube and search for Kinect, you can find tons of videos where users have hacked into Kinect to CREATE SOMETHING THEY WANT.

Gone are the days when the consumer was happy being just that...a consumer. Now he wants to be a creator. Don’t give him a product that you think is legit or complete or cool. Instead follow the v0.1 philosophy which Paul Graham highlights in his insightful article. Give your consumers a crude v0.1 informally and then iterate. What’s the benefit?

If you deliver solutions informally, you (a) save all the effort you would have had to expend to make them look impressive, and (b) avoid the danger of fooling yourself as well as your audience. And if you release a crude version 1 then iterate, your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own.

Google does this all the time. First they release something basic in their labs (manytimes just an idea), then they generate a buzz around it in the blogosphere and as suggestions or hacks start pouring in they go on improving the product, push it in beta and finally release it. Google Trends, News Timeline, Docs et al are all the results of this philosophy. There’s a whole community of web-surfers called Greasemonkey dedicated to modding the websites they want improved through userscripts.

So next time you want to ship out a new product, do not wait till YOU think the product looks sleek but let CONSUMERS be your creators and let them direct the development starting  v0.1

P.S.: Doesn’t this go one step further than the ‘Marketing Concept’ they teach in B-schools which entails understanding what consumers really want? So go beyond that, give them a base and let the product take shape in the hands of the consumers only. I mean what can be a better branding connect than that!