Virtual Crossroads

Do I really want whatever I want?

Well, that's another quesiton. But now you can really want stuff and make your sentiments very clear on Facebook! Facebook has been testing the Want button, that goes beyond the like and makes it one-step closer to making the statment - Social Media Works for your Business.

What this means for fellow marketers: 1. Hard Measure of Purchase Intent: That's the magic number marketers are tracing to make all their digital activities link to sales or sales intent. They WANT this. Right now, after every digital execution, a separate research is carried out to show ROMI of all the moolah that was spent. Now picture this, with every thing on Facebook, as little as posting a picture of your latest variant launch, you can measure the desirability. What do you with this desirability index?

Can you turn it into a more sophisticated CRM program?

Can you make your sampling activity go beyond XX numbers of samples distributed and make work harder?

Can you show a correlation between want & sales?

Can you convert visitor on your website one step closer to buying your product after seeing the no. of wants?

 This morning, when I logged into my Google Analytics dashboard to see how by blog is performing I was surprised to see a little music icon. Clicked, and voila, my page views are singing in a soft symphony of the sitar (or the piano)! 

     Thinking of the rationale behind it, (assuming it's not an April Fool's Joke, which it is!),  it's a pretty cool way to start off your day, if you're into digital marketing or analytics. Let the numbers sing! Haha! ;) Sit in the next room and listen to your Website Analytics. Or, better still, download the track and listen to it on the way to work! Wacky!  Enjoy the video, not brilliant, but makes the point, by a fellow blogger. 

And What's Gmail Tap and Chrome Multitask?

Gmail Tap is based on a morse code solution to help you write mails and text messages anytime, anywhere, without worrying about all the 26 letters! Watch video here. 

Chrome Multitask turns your browsing experience into a socialable event, where you and your friend can together browse on the same computer, or you can explore your ambidextrous browsing skills using two cursors. Check it out here!

Yesterday, the news was breaking that the recently acquired OMGPOP app Draw Something is no longer attracting new users. Business Insider reported: Bad news for Zynga, which just acquired Draw Something developer OMGPOP: Draw Something is no longer acquiring new daily players at the lightning-fast pace it once was, according to AppData. In fact, it's stopped growing altogether.

  As a former journalist, I feel several online content portals are desperate to create "breaking news" and "make it trend". (#ridiculous). I picked this story up when I decided to write a post about how Draw Something can actually become bigger than it is.

Draw Something is very powerful at the core of its idea. It's making friends share personal drawings with other friends. The app makes the user do a unique action. It's not  - please water my plants, send me more ammunition, send me more token etc. It's a unique, personal piece of content that is produced every time a user initiates a game. That's a big break through - it's a stream of personalized, customized, unique content! And it can become bigger by using Social By Design Principles.

Social By Design Mantra #1

MAKE PROFILES VISIBLE: Learning from Zynga games - Draw Something should allow the users to check their friends total points, total drawings and total correct guesses. When in Farmville and Cityville, users are allowed to visit their friends farms or cities, they get to know more about their friends and they even compete with them on the friends ranking leaderboard. I am playing games with my bosses, and I am very keen to know what's their success ratio! (And I do want to beat them and publish it on facebook #wickedsmile) Social By Design Mantra #2 FEEDBACK MECHANISM: Some of my friends (blessed with styluses) make awesome drawings. I want to compliment them. I want to WhatsApp them and say - Hey ! I loved this!! But can I do that - nope! Imagine, after guessing or failing to guess a drawing - you can give stars and rate it - Fabulous or Rotten Tomatoes To You - and to either compliment or poke fun at your friends - you could share it on Facebook - to drive conversations. Simple, doable, fun and FREE PR! ;)

Social By Design Mantra #3

DRAW SOMETHING GALLERIES: What the App successfully does is it shows some "popular" drawings of Lady Gaga etc. It will be great to make a gallery where users can browse, get inspiration and even share the ridiculous drawings on Facebook! If it is ridiculous it has a higher chance of getting shared and there are more ridiculous artists without styluses!

Social By Design Mantra #4

USING THE DATA TO WOW ME (and make money from me): I have 250 points on Draw Something. On an average, I have made 80-100 drawings.

Do I want to see the drawings? YEEEESSSS! Can I? Nope. 

If Draw Something told me when I reached 500 points, I can choose any 5 drawings, make a collage and get a free printed mug, would I continue to play?  YES! 

 Would I pay for the mug or gift it with all my drawings I made for my friend as a personal birthday present? YES! 

Would I like to see a cool video of my photos? YES! 

 And would I share my great "modern art" on facebook - YES!

It's an ancient Chinese belief that an invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break.

Spooky? Rings a bell with the whole "Six Degrees of Separation" Theory? (somebody says its only two degrees now!) I think it's an amazing premise to start narrating your story. The new TV Drama Touch,  starring Keifer Sutherland is about him and his son Jake, who connects everyday events with numbers, in a sort of in-between world, not talking or physically connecting with anyone else.

A scene from new TV Drama Touch

Martin Bohm is a widower and single father who is haunted by an inability to connect to his emotionally challenged 11-year-old son Jake. But when Martin discovers that Jake can predict events before they happen, everything changes. Source: IMDB 

Is it only me, or do you also think the young kid looks like a young Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network! =)

It's funny when you talk about Timeline. It is actually something which Twitter owns. The newsfeed on Twitter is what is called the Timeline. And like the name suggests, it shows the most recent stories in your follower network on the site.



Facebook Introducing Timeline



Facebook, during the F8 conference, launched its owned timeline - pretty much, borrowing the name from Twitter. And if you ask anyone today, is Timeline native to Facebook or Twitter, you can assume who will walk with the cake.

The basic idea behind Timeline is - what do I do with all the fabulous data I already have? And how can I possibly collect some more. Random Though #612: What will happen when Twitter activates the Timeline according to the Facebook definition. THREE BIG SHIFTS:

All the past tweets, those thousands of tweets you have ever shared, come to haunt you. - Possible for some brilliant data visualization - by time of the day, by most retweeted, most shared.

Big celebrity hunts: One thing is clear on Twitter - celebs are bigger than brands. And Twitter is an awesome way to speak to these celebs. If Timeline rolls out for Twitter celeb pages and Brands only, it will fun to see what the celeb tweeted when!!! (We cannot get enough of gossip, even if it is a tad bit old!)

There are a couple of things that every Facebook Page wants to do - increase likes and increase engagement. Growing their base and growing the Talking About This metric will be a sure shot way of assuming my Page is doing well and people are loving the content. The Mechanic - page managers take is Facebook advertising. An ad unit that has a social context to it is just amazing and far more convincing than any other ads. So the result is - more people click on it, your ad performs well because you get your conversions and Facebook Ads becomes more and more profitable. As it has been said time and again, when it comes to Facebook Ads or any other online ad campaigns, CTR is never the metric to look at to measure success of the campaign. (#Notetoself - perhaps should write on this one!) Now suppose, you run an ad campaign, with some flexible targeting options - your ad will perform decent. And what will be most decent - your talking about this metric. It will climb upto the total number of fans you have on your page, if not more.

Check out my Facebook Page for this experiment: www.facebook.com/readnext

It's been a month that the social Godot - Facebook announced the new emotionally engaging developments on the site - namely the Timeline and social plugins like Netflix, Spotify and the works. Several curious minds followed with changing their accounts into developer accounts after the F8 conference, the rest are still waiting. What's up with that I don't know - perhaps it will strike as lightning as Facebook often does roll-out changes. What research agencies are doing in the meantime is write about how Timeline has reduced engagement rate - well don't think I buy all of the data. But while we wait, there's already some social activity that's going on, gaining much traction. Remember the days when there were apps like the Virtual Bookshelf, where you'd stack all the books you've ever read. Plug it in on your blog, on your Facebook page, on Orkut. I know it was very popular with bloggers a few years ago - especially if these bloggers liked reviewing stuff - the fundamental theme of blogging, ain't it. Yeah, I was one of them. Though this app has died out in popularity today, what remains is the constant need to tell people - hey! I know my news. I'm updated. I read. Twitter does it, to a great great extent. But it isn't possible to post every article you've ever read on Facebook. What's more difficult is you can always retweet stuff on Twitter without ever actually reading it - but you have to go that extra mile of posting stuff on Facebook after opening the article and then using the social plugins to do the trick. ;) Social currency, we all need more of that, don't we!

In Time: Good literal visualization of the world where time is money  and really innovative implementation of dynamic tattoos that tell you how much time you have left to live. Buying, selling and stealing of time - determine it's supply in the market and it's true value - just like inflation and the stock exchange.

That's enough meat to keep you from leaving the theatre even in a plot that sinks with time!

What amazes me the most - that in a futuristic setting - where one is visualizing a world as "time-bound" as this, some common sensical things are just missing. How can people just steal by holding their hand against another without their consent, no "password protection" - when even the basic feature phones require consent before we push Bluetooth messaging to them. What's funnier - the rich who can live for centuries cannot even device something as silly as that to protect themselves!

How this idea could have been made really big and fascinating like Inception.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove - William Shakespeare

3D is fast becoming the new selling proposition for a lot of things. Movies, for instance, is the first thing that comes to mind when talking about 3D. I was reading this post about 3D movies and why they were actually made into 3D. An easy guess is the action, the climax, some rib-tingling scenes which only 3D technology could do justice to. Another interesting insight was that many of these movies had less talk and more action. Take Wall-E for instance, which is ranked at the number 1 spot of most expensive 3D movies to be made. Wall-E could have been a drag, if not for the setting and the animation, to which 3D brought an element of excitement. But in recent times, Harry Potter (with the first 20 minutes in 3D!), Despicable Me (I loved it, but was it a "3D movie"?), Street Dance 3D (Why??), were sold on the 3D ticket. A fast catching trend for some quick premium pricing. 3D has now moved to new platforms - automobiles, magazines, billboards.

Toyota Time Square Launch: While launching its new hybrid CR-Z, Toyota came up with 3D advertising, immersing passers-by in the promotional activity. Was 3D relevant in this, you would ask. Yes, it created a buzz, it broke the clutter in the busy Times Square, created scope for the statusphere. More on the launch on AdAge.

Stop and stare. It worked. Period.  An after-effect of this advertisement was that people complained the area had become accident-prone! Was the advertising removed? No way!

Who: Anna Kournikova in 3D Maxim, after Vogue, has launched its first 3D magazine with the tennis star posing in 3D. The issue is due to release in October and comes with a pair of 3D glasses for the readers. How to Use 3D

To price as premium product: Gives an immediate edge to price your product higher than competition. 

To launch an exclusive product: Like an exclusive campaign, an exclusive eyewear, accessory.

Create differentiation: Breaks through the clutter. Makes your product stand out. 

Have a limited period offer: Exclusive for a short-term period. Riding on the 3D wave, while it lasts.

The traditional ammunition is not enough. Marketers are suiting up with more science and more numbers to make their products and strategy - legendary! Marketing is defined by the basic 4Ps of Product, Place, Price and Promotion, not to mention the several others that are fighting for official recognition! Neuromarketing as a research tool is fast gaining acceptance now, and what's exciting are the two diverse applications I read about recently - in publications and FMCG.(An older post on neuromarketing here) Having been a journalist, reading about the use of science in the field of pure arts, does make one curious. Just a week ago, Newsweek had done an experiment to increase profitability, of course, and the method of research of neuromarketing.  What they did was created three sample covers for their August edition and put it through a test. They made a set of consumers go through a neuromarketing exercise - the basic agenda being which of these covers excite them the most. An electroencephalograph machine was used to measure brain waves of the subjects in the test. It then rated the results on a scale of 1 to 10, based on factors like memory activation and emotional engagement.  Any guesses which of these won? The first one.  So, what could Newsweek possibly conclude- the red lettering worked, the uncluttered single image worked, and the curiosity levels increased with the revelation of some fabric and the tag line that went with it - Has the fabric of the universe unravelled. A teaser, a bait for the readers to pick the magazine up! Result - Sales increased by 12%. Coming to FMCG, how can neuromarketing be applied here? Lays did a simple experiment last year. The objective was to increase sales of its baked chips among women. They conducted a neuromarketing study and made changes in the packaging and promotions. It is interesting to know that 50% of their consumers were actually men and they wanted to grow the pie among the female audience. What the studies revealed :

Women's brains are more developed than men's in understanding complex advertising - give them more text and they will read

Women don't want to feel guilty - give them proof of the healthy snack. Recommend it, to make her guilt-free!

Women won't jump into a pile of chips display

Basically, the conclusion Sex-and-the-City-like characters will do to do all the talking! And they came up with the following change in packaging and communication. Results: Market grew by 8% and so did the sales.

The post-recession Japanese consumer is: Spending more time in the retail outlets. Loving the Indian touch-and-feel-before-buy syndrome. Are more interested to know what a brand means than just the status of the brand. Are spending more time at home Are looking for value Are game for environment-conscious brands Came across a very interesting article in the McKinsey Quarterly.

Environmental consciousness has been emerging for some time. A survey conducted last year by the global advertising agency J. Walter Thompson found that 51 percent of Japanese consumers are somewhat or much more focused on the environment than they were a year ago; only 7 percent were less focused. A November 2009 McKinsey survey found that 84 percent of the respondents preferred to buy environmentally friendly everyday consumer products, and that preference is translating directly into business success. Consider, for example, Coca-Cola’s I LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) water, whose selling points include a reduced carbon footprint: bottles are made from 12 grams of recyclable PET3 plastic (rather than the standard 26 grams) that can be twisted and compressed when recycled. I LOHAS is also bottled locally, reducing transportation costs. Less than 12 months after launch, it has become Japan’s top-selling brand of single-serve bottled water.

The post-recession Japanese consumer is: Spending more time in the retail outlets. Loving the Indian touch-and-feel-before-buy syndrome. Are more interested to know what a brand means than just the status of the brand. Are spending more time at home Are looking for value Are game for environment-conscious brands Came across a very interesting article in the McKinsey Quarterly.

Environmental consciousness has been emerging for some time. A survey conducted last year by the global advertising agency J. Walter Thompson found that 51 percent of Japanese consumers are somewhat or much more focused on the environment than they were a year ago; only 7 percent were less focused. A November 2009 McKinsey survey found that 84 percent of the respondents preferred to buy environmentally friendly everyday consumer products, and that preference is translating directly into business success. Consider, for example, Coca-Cola’s I LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) water, whose selling points include a reduced carbon footprint: bottles are made from 12 grams of recyclable PET3 plastic (rather than the standard 26 grams) that can be twisted and compressed when recycled. I LOHAS is also bottled locally, reducing transportation costs. Less than 12 months after launch, it has become Japan’s top-selling brand of single-serve bottled water.