Nikhil's Notebook

Storify is a social network service that lets the user create stories or timelines using social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. In this post, I would depict the information structure of a storify on Data BootCamp which was organized in September this year. Here is the link to Storify - https://storify.com/sanatsinha/dbootcampdelhi

Below is the information tree-

1) Starts with the problem encountered and the event was organized as a solution to it.

2) It also gives an option to people to see a more interactive or a text only version of the storified event before they actually scroll down through whole story.

3) Then it provides information about the partners and participants through the tweets shared. It also highlights the post event tweets.

4) It zeroed down to the mentors and speakers, and provided links to their twitter profile rather than putting up their detailed descriptions.

5) The links to tools categorized by their use were put up to help the people who could not attend the event.

6) Then it moves ahead by highlighting each session one by one backed up links to personal twitter handles, linkedin accounts and the organizations the mentors/ speakers represented.

7) It beautifully described the 10 projects submitted by the participants in team of six tagged along with their linkedin profiles.

8) It discussed about the certificate distribution and ends up with giving credits to people and organizations that helped the event to happen.

9) It gives a link to the facebook photos of the event.

Twitter is by far the most powerful social media tool I have ever seen. One can follow any person of interest on Twitter (of course if that person has a Twitter account) and interact. Below is the list of some accounts that are special to me.

1) Marc Andreessen: He was the founder of Netscape and currently the general partner at Andressen Horowitz, a venture capital firm. What makes his tweets interesting is the usage of branched tweeting. Whenever there is an information that he has to share and suppose it excceds 140 character limit, he switches to branched tweeting mode. For eg. he would write an interesting opening and end it with say (1/5) - which indicates there are 4 more tweets to follow the same.

2) Elon Musk: He is the co-founder of PayPal and world famous for his belief in battery operated cars at Tesla and interest in space at SpaceX. His tweets are mostly short and crisp and he retweets a lots of humorous tweets on business, science, environment and technology. 

Once we are done with Consumer Profiling and Journey, it becomes much more clear to plan and work on content strategy.

Content Strategy for Digital Media and especially Social Media could be broken down into 3 categories, which are -

1) Reactive: content is one which is drived by the emotions of the target audience. It may even help to get more new customers, likes etc. For e.g., it could be posts on a cricket match, or festival wishes etc.

2) Campaign: content is one that a company creates to engage more and more customers and usually is run twice or thrice a year depeding on company.

3) Pro-active: content is one that a company generates to engage its existing customers on a daily basis.

In this blog, I will discuss only Pro-active content strategy for Facebook page of a company. Pro-active content has to be planned out in such a way that gives an insight about a product/ company, touches upon its strength and importance along with proper endorsement and validation of the same.

I have discussed how to plan the same in the presentation embedded below:

In last post we discussed about consumer profiling and research which you could find here for your reference.

Once the consumer profile is charted out, one gets clear with needs and aspirations of its target consumers.

It also makes it clear for the brand to design a unique journey for a consumer, covering all touch points to make it smooth and memorable journey for an ideal customer.

The mapping of consumer journey is very important as it gives you a reflection of approach a company has to follow, the marketing tools and verticals that need to be in place and especially the identification of hit points.

Consumer Profiling is very important for any brand or company to streamline its online marketing and sales strategy.

I took up this task to profile a customer base for a virtual real estate company coming up in Rajasthan. As there is a surge in number of people moving in Rajasthan, it is a great opportunity for real estate to tap and attract this pool.

Here I have taken a hypothetical case of a potential consumer and broken down his behavioral profile to understand his needs and aspirations better. This process would eventually help to locate and reach out to consumer better.

With lot of data flowing online, many tools have been made public to help users extract information from these data. Here, I would discuss some of these tool and their uses:

1) Twiangulate: Helps to find influential tweeters, common followers, twitter reach and in interest based search.

2) WeFollow: It helps users to follow people based on their interests.

3)TweetReach: It helps users to find the reach of their tweets - like impressions, engagements, contributors etc. It also offers comprehensive analytics for both Instagram and Tumblr.

4) TrendsMap: It enables one to see the real time local twitter trends. 

5) SnapBird: It helps one search beyond one's Twitter profile, scouting even the old tweets.

LinkedIn has recently put off its one of the most amazing visualizing tool InMap that enabled users to create a network visualization. Though we do not have tools that are exactly similar to it but there some tools that are worth a try.

1) SociLab: allows users to visualize, analyze, and download data on their LinkedIn network using methods derived from social-scientific research. It is a free visualization tool.

2) Gephi: is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.

Twitter analytic enables one to keep a track on their tweets, followers and running ad campaigns.

It also shows you the top interests of one's followers categorized as:

1) Top 10 interests: It shows the top 10 interests of your followers on Twitter.

Nikhil is an ardent proponent of employing ethnographic research and radical innovation in the development of both for-profit and not-for-profit ventures. He spent the past 4 years implementing user-centered design strategies to increase the adoption of new products and services in development sector.

He started his career with a grassroots NGO and worked on a project (funded by World Bank) to develop a value chain of products from the Babool plant. Here he researched nutrient feed development, collaborated with local entrepreneurs, and worked on tech transfer.

Nikhil has focused primarily on water issues, working on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) projects, funded by European Union, and Wells for India. By collecting case studies and interviews, he lead the research team to design information content, educational tools, and games that helped increase the adoption of water harvesting techniques and the adoption of good sanitary practices in villages.

An empathizer with excellent interpersonal skills, Nikhil has a unique capability to get down straight to the nerve of problem and find solutions mutually acceptable to both providers and clients. He has also worked at WELLO, a US based startup, managing its India operations and working on the launch and validation of WaterWheel, their flagship product, conducting user research and product demonstrations, designing novel interaction activities to trigger the involvement of rural folks, and selling WaterWheels.

Working at the bottom of pyramid has helped him understand the problems at ground level first-hand. He had also conducted impact surveys at village level, analyzed gaps, and synthesized recommendations on the implementation of JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) funded Biodiversity projects in Rajasthan. Lately, Nikhil has been a consultant to startups in the agriculture, travel, and real estate domains, helping them with their design research and operations strategies.

Nikhil also been an entrepreneur, launching a venture called Cattle Mettle to provide low cost animal feed to cattle owners. Cattle Mettle was a runner up at ISB Hyderabad’s Social Entrepreneurship Competition called “iDiya”. His idea at scale could save the lives of thousands of cattle that die due to lack of nutrition and could generate numerous jobs for rural women in raw material collection and processing of Babool pods.

Nikhil holds an engineering degree in Biotechnology from VIT University where he founded and operated Center for Social Entrepreneurship and Development. He is currently a Vihara Innovation Fellow at Bihar Innovation Lab, funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and working on his startup idea in healthcare while he helps fellow scholars in design research, brainstorming, and prototyping.

DocSend is used to track your documents which are in pdf format.

Docsend helps you track your pdf documents. In addition to the location and other details, it also let you know how much time the reader spends on each and every page of your document. Isn't it exciting? That now you have the insight that how much the receiver is interested in your document, you could modify your pitch accordingly.

App Annie is a business intelligence and analytics company. It operates various business intelligence tools and creates market reports for the apps and digital goods industry.

It converts app download, revenue and ranking data into simple and crisp visualizations. It also provides options to customize the app data visualizations country wise, date wise and as per the platform it was downloaded from.

It also provide market estimations and advertising options too.

Managing and tracking emails is important of all working professionals. Many a times we see that there is no reply to our emails for weeks and we assume that the person on the other end is not interested in our emails. But it may not be the case.

For such confusions, we have a great tool Yesware. Yesware is a powerful tool that could track the location, operating system and the device from which the email is opened. How cool is it to track your emails when your are applying to potential customers, employers etc. It operates on domain level tracking of emails.

Fusion tables are similar to spreadsheets in one sense as they can be used to record data sets and visualize them in graphs but its different in the sense that the visualizations made here are 1) Interactive and 2) and could be embedded online.

Here is an example how Fusion Tables were used to analyze the demographic data of class which was then visualized in form of Pie Chart. Please hover your cursor on different pie-chunks and see how it interacts.

Here is the other example where Fusion Tables were used to analyze and visualize the change overtime in the percentages of students.

Things to keep in mind:

1.Select right kind of graph to make your visualization look logical.

2.Function like aggregation and others should be explored well to play and produce productive visualizations.

Loopholes to watch out:

1. Check out if ROWS and COLUMNS need transposition to make the visualization look logical.

CKS is India’s leading research, design and innovation consulting firm that employs user-centered research and design methodologies to help organizations create better products, services and systems. 

CKS has worked in an array of sectors including Healthcare, Telecom, Financial Services, Home Décor and Appliances, Aviation, and Automobile Design.

Over the last ten years, CKS has worked with various partners and multinational firms like Gates Foundation, Nokia, Asian Paints and others across different emerging economies worldwide including India, South Africa, China, Nigeria, Philippines, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

CKS regularly organizes Design Public that enables people to share information and insights with one another on topics related to Design, Innovation, Governance, Planning, Public Interest and so on.