Guess!

Click for the inset picture

In the inset picture, I have pasted the screenshot of my blog's visitors from different countries in the past one year from 26th August, 2007 to 26th August, 2008.

So can you guess how many countries have they visited from?

Please comment in the section below. Correct answers to the extent of ± 5 would be much appreciated.

Swainism # 3: Free Information, Idea Diffusion, Future of Community & Hyperconnected Customers

This post talks about my usual rants about how information which has become almost free due to one of the biggest development of human history which can change everything especially business and how it works and its subtle yet definitive repurcussions on human behavior. These are my random thoughts:

1. In a world, where information is readily available at almost zero cost (≈ free) with the advent of internet, even a small pebble can create a huge wave which can revolutionize the entire human race’s way of looking/perceiving things since we all are living in a century of “Idea Diffusion”. So modern day businesses have to be as nimble footed/flexible/agile to adapt to this ever manifesting change in the way customers act/react/perceive matter.

2. Future will look bright for those companies which will know how to accumulate those nodes of disjointed data, transform into information & capture it at one place and distribute it amongst small if not huge community of like-minded people who care about you.

3. Before pondering, why your Y-o-Y charts are shifting southwards, ask these questions – Where are your customers? Where are they spending most of their time? How are they communicating with each other? I’ll try figuring out the answers, though with a hint of warning i.e. they have shifted into the realm of ‘e’ with the world around it. Oh if you’re unable to comprehend then consider yourself to be the Tyrannosaurus Rex since I was referring to INTERNET. So you spending on them sums up to nothing since they have ignored you all this while and now it’s your turn to

Click here for the picture link

I'll talk about this model in the subsequent posts. You can say this is the very model on which "Social Media" was built upon.

How should we use Twitter: Classification & their Impact on us

Today an interesting conversation (here, here & here too) with Asfaq led me to brood over one simple question. How should Twitter be used? Now simple it is but its implications are manifold. To pen down some of my thoughts on “How we Tweet?” led me to another sort of thinking, i.e. does our tweeting ways or techniques of posting those short, succinct, terse messages (tweets) impact the way we think/perceive ideas/notions or stuff like that? I believe they do. I’ll take this post into two ways. First, will try to understand broadly how all those zillion of tweets posted per day around the world can be classified into and then how are they can impact the way we think/perceive about various things around us.

Firstly, those terse messages which we all have coined as Tweets can be broadly classified as:

1. Question/Enquiry Tweet: This category of tweets fall majorly into What, Where, When, How and all the other statements which ends with a question mark. These kinds of tweets generally take advantage of the collaborative framework of Twitter.

2. Share Tweet: This type of tweets are classified as sharing information in the form of links (mostly short & terse url), events & news or anything & everything which a person feels can be shared. This is the bread & butter for those ever-hungry bloggers looking for some extra bit of attention into their blog through some visitors.

3. Me Tweets: This category of tweets, I feel is the most significant yet abhorred ones for many since it creates clutter or noise in Twitter. This type of Tweet talks only about specific ones like I’m sleeping, I’m drinking coffee/beer, my girlfriend/boyfriend left me blah blah blah. Come one, not too many people want to listen to you. For this, I remember one very apt line: “…If you want to be boring, talk yourself; if you want to be interesting, talk everything other than yourself…” But as I said, this type helped Twitter survive because they have given us space where we can voice our opinions & life par se. So lastly no complaints there at least.

Lastly, how can those terse messages impact our thinking/perception:

A small incident happened today in the morning while I was on twitter. Moksh Juneja posted a small tweet on Airtel = Vodafone goof up which caught Twitter’s attention big time and people started forming their own opinion about Airtel & Vodafone.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong but the point I want to make is that all the money spent by companies on the brand building and portraying images about themselves get slapped every now and then since consumers are no fool nowadays. Information and connectivity is dirt cheap if not free. So holding back is not the solution anymore. You (companies) can’t hold back conversations anymore and consumers will make an impression about you and in turn influence others too. So the questions remains what are you doing about it? Get into the new system or die watching it out!

P.S. I always take business examples since it’s an easy fix to keep score.

Read More Twitter Post:

• Video: Twitter Simplified
• Fail Whale
• Revenue Models for Twitter
• Swainism #2: Random Thoughts on Twitter, Networking & Life
• My first Twitter Meetup at Mumbai

Nokia's Social Media Initiative: Blogger Review Program

Before starting off, some pep-talks on some recent happenings around me of course. I posted last on 9th August which is like many centuries back it feels like. Actually was caught up into one of those times where my mind and heart wandered along the realm of the Web which caught my fancy. But to narrow down my surreal thoughts, Asfaq (@Asfaq) helped me in figuring out (here & here) why I was wandering for the last 2 weeks. He termed it as "The Twitter Effect" (Will post on it soon)- Sounds cool but trust me when you have it, that's about it. Your whole world, inlcuding offline & online world gets affected to be precise (more on it later though).

Anyways, the reasons I had to blog was a mail from Saurabh in the morning and more precisely a small tweet in response to this one. He confided to me earlier that he got a Nokia thingy happening in this life which mostly authenticate that he's hell of a good blogger/influencer (whatever you want to say!) which he mostly ignores or he's a Dumb A** to understand (Respect). Today he mailed me in the morning to share his experience with the Nokia Blogger Review Program.

He has some interesting thoughts on Blogger Review Program which Nokia Initiated and included him along with 2 others (TwilightFairy and Ashish - He denied later though). So I have few random thoughts to share from the mail which saurabh sent me in the morning along with few other Social Media Evangelists (if I may say so!) which led to some interesting conversations via mails, comments, tweets and blog posts.

• The first question from me would be: Has Saurabh Garg lost it? Mainly because why can't he believe that he is damn good and Nokia thinks he worth all their spending which included shipping the expensive piece (I was fortunate as Saurabh showed me the piece when we met) half way across the world & back. (P.S. I hope SG takes my statement above with little bit of salt and sugar)


• Secondly, the conversations over the mails were quite interesting:

TwilightFairy wrote: "....See another effect precipitating here due to Nokia giving u a handset for review :) Now there are posts around ur post"- This is to solidify that SG has turn out to be an Influencer since we all are blogging about him.

Ashish wrote: "....And that makes me wonder - Is Saurabh @ the center of 'ecosystem' or is there an ecosystem building around saurabh?" I like this sentence since it implicitly tells us that the subtle relationship between us & the Ecosystem of intent/things/ideas is becoming blur day by day.

Also read Gaurav Mishra's post on SG's new found job as Nokia Reviewer.

• And lastly, my reasonsing for selection of SG was right. What I believe Nokia might of thought is that they want to cover the whole Indian Culture/Technology/Social Media space. And who else to think other than Ashish of PluGGd.in or TwilightFairy who is a very well known name in Twitter and in Indian Blogging scene. Yeah SG would be a doubt that his reach is not that far flung as others, but hey this guy has some interesting fan following in twitter (Follow SG and you'll know what I'm saying) and has a definite voice to speak to the modern Indian youth.

So my analogy for Nokia's selection is: Covering the whole pond with little yet definite ripples which can move the water.

• Lastly, it's a great way to reach your audience and sure enough Social Media is giving them enough leverage to attain the critical class/mass. But I would have appreciated if they would have employed few more bloggers and lastly surprise them by giving the exquisite piece as a gift (I think I just said what's in SG's heart n Mind).

So one last thought before I finish this post and my very recent blog post droughts: THANK YOU Saurabh to act as in enabler in this case.

My First Twitter Meetup at Mumbai on 09.08.08

This is one random blog post about the event where most people (mostly geeks, early adopters and people like me) meet, wine-n-dine and share their experiences about anything and everything which can excite the crowd starting from business, technology, trends and so on & so forth. (This is what I think!)

Long back, Gaurav posted this message about First Mumbai Twitter meet last year but then I was not able to make it since I was in Hyderabad. So this time around I will possibly make it to the meet. Below are the details of the event:


Event: Mumbai Twitter Meetup

When: 9th August, 2008 at 8 p.m.

Where: White, The Modern Italian Café at Goregaon (West)

How to Register: Register at this Facebook Event Page

Contact: 912228735646

Other Information: Guests are allowed to bring friends to this event.

Interesting Information: This is a sponsored meet by Alootechie.com

Keep watching this space. Will keep on posting more on my experiences from the Twitter Meet and my filtered learnings.

Musings from my saved Mobile Drafts

I've a random habit of typing down every thought, notion, idea..in total everything and anything I found interesting around me in my mobile phone in form of drafts.

Sharing here are some of the thoughts/ideas I got in the last week:

1. CHANGE is sacrosanct w.r.t. Bad customer service & Company's old school marketing philosophy of not giving away your product.

2. Needs, Wants & Habits of Urbanites: I'm trying to understand the Urban Mall/Snack-food Culture by devoting some amount of time (as of now mostly in the weekends) and study their need, want and habit pattern. In the process, I've got some interesting pointers. Will post on it later.

3. Can customer service be the new media department?: Haven't thought about it indepth but just wanted to ask you, is it possible or not? Read here from PR 2.0 since I found this post almost in tune with my thinking.

Please comment on these thoughts or you have some new idea on which we can work, feel free to write to me at sampad[dot]s[at]gmail[dot]com.

Swainism #2: Random thoughts on Twitter, Networking & Life

No particular topic in my mind but will try to pen down my thoughts (in random order). In the process will try to build some logic and some direction to my thoughts.

1. Observed a pattern in my internet usage (mostly from the way I open daily websites). This pattern is from my morning chore of opening my computer and logging into internet.

Come to my office by 8:40 am >> Sit down in my comfy chair >> Turn on the fan though AC is on >> Turn on the computer >> Open my office mail >> Then Gmail >> Google Reader >> Twitter Search (Summize) >> Twitter >> Tinyurl & so on and so forth.

2. Been on a networking spree via web as my focal point especially through LinkedIn, Twitter (Less on FrienFeed), Facebook (much less through Orkut), My Blog, My Mobile and through many more social networking tools available online.

3. Started using Flickr a lot nowadays. One of the reasons is that I started drawing a lot of models to make my blog posts more interesting (See my Flickr a/c). Also that makes me feel I’m intelligent…Psst!

4. Met Saurabh Garg (one Twitter Friend) last week. We had a great, insightful conversation on internet. Start-ups, business models etc. Key takeaway was: Internet usage can be broadly defined in 3 ways: Personal (like emails), Entertainment (like Perez Hilton) & Information. Now that is easy but thinking internet only from this model makes things easier and isn’t successful business more about making things easier (for you & your customers). E.g. Google for Search, Apple for innovation and Microsoft for “Blue Monster”.

5. Finally, last week was interesting. Another “Google Killer” got launched called CUIL but didn’t meet expectations. Found this site: http://www.trueknowledge.com/ (Read my tweet). Also this one via GapingVoid on business/brands using twitter to get the word out. You’ll be surprised to find some.

So at the end of my musings, one thing comes out to be very prominent. Twitter, Twitter & Twitter…The things I did last week to my daily winding up is mostly around twitter. So henceforth I proclaim that “Sampad Swain is a Twitter-Addict”. Ahem!

Any comments/thoughts/criticism on my self proclaimed addiction…

Screenshot of the Day (Yours Truly Quoted)

Ever since, I saw Gauravonomics posting "Yours Truly..." blog posts, I wanted to put something like that in my blog too (Apologies Gaurav for zero creativity and complete fame-freak).

So talking about it, first of all prelude to this post ....I adored/loved Wikinomics since it made me see internet, demographics,technology, culture or for that matter human race in a whole new way. It won't be wrong if I say that it helped me evolve as a far better Marketer than I was before.

So going back to my respect for this book, this time around, "YOURS TRULY" was quoted in Wikinomics blog post about one of his recent posts on certain Wikinomics theory which he tweaked to certain extent. (View Inset picture)

Click here for bigger Flickr Pic.

Revenue Models for Twitter

This post is dedicated to Twitter. Some may think I've lost it but most of you won't doubt my reasoning. Those who doubt should spend sometime in Twitter (It's a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers called Tweets) to understand why am I so nuts to dedicate a blog post to an entity who's existence lies in bits & bytes. For those who feel for twitter (including myself), even though it fails too often, one thing we can't deny is that it's very much intertwined into our lives.

Some of the reasons for its usual or supposedly (if I may say) failures is its funding part of it. So in this post, what I've tried is to work around on some of the possible Revenue Generation models on which Twitter may work on. Though one of my previous post was on Community-led Business Model Monetization for Twitter in Facebook but this one will delve somewhat deep. So here are my thoughts:

• Monetization through 3rd part Apps: First of all, 3rd party applications are those like Twhirl, TweetDeck etc. The realtime stream of all the messages in those apps are carried by the use HTTP to pull msgs from twitter. But twitter, since they use Jabber in the backend, can use something called XMPP). It is a push technology mostly. So instead of clients (say tweetdeck) requesting to twitter over a period of time, the messages gets pushed to the tweetdeck's server (which tweetdeck has to incorporate additionally - after that tweetdeck clients can either use XMPP or HTTP to connect to their own servers to get msgs) and user experiences a near real time (messages gets shown immediately) experience with tweetdeck. This can be a Premium Service by twitter. In fact they do it for free - ex. Gnip is using it in this way. So Twitter can charge 3rd party apps (like TweetDeck) on the 2 way model: One is the free one and the other being the paid one depending on parameters like no. of tweets per day etc. Even 2 cents will also do. (Thanks to Arun Vijayan for bringing this to notice and re-correcting this model)


• Twitter as Search Tool: Summize (Rechristened as search[dot]twitter[dot]com) can be used for the next level of Search Indexing where the USP may be “What are you Searching?” The answer lies in the conversations Tweople (people residing the Twitterland) are having. Relevancy will be based on Time Frame, No. of conversations on the specific topic, No. of users endorsing/conversing on the same topic.


• Monetizing for Corporate Clients: In the recent trend, lot of companies are following online conversations via twitter like Dell, Comcast, FireFox etc. Search[dot]Twitter[dot]Com can be used for corporate clients to refine/optimize their search regarding the conversations customers/client/partners are having about them. It's more on the online-offline service model to help them out in understanding, refining and optimizing tweople's conversations across twitterland.


• Twitter as News Aggregator: Recent developments in Twitter Blog says that "...Twitter is increasingly being described as a personal news-wire—shared world events like this morning's earthquake near Los Angeles support the definition." Users nowadays have started concentrating on the trending topics of twitter search (Summize) to get relevant news in the web and the best part is it's people shared and it comes faster than traditional news medium which makes it different & premium. So isn't this a new model of attracting users through which Twitter can earn revenues.

These are the broad guidelines in which Twitter can definitely monetize going forward in the future. So please contribute your own ideas, so that we can help OUR TWITTER!

Comments are most welcome...