The picture above says it all; about management, marketing, sales, design, all new social media or SEO etc. By & large, every facet of modern day business can be explained with this model. Drawing inspiration from the human anatomy, it is interesting to watch that every part works in tandem to bring coherence to our development & continued survival. So is business different from the above model? One part is organizations talk about multi-million dollar budgets for their marketing & advertising campaigns whereas overlooking nicher yet multi-faceted dimensions of involving customers through measures of Social Media or Web Development etc. Hence coherence is necessary among different divisions and dimensions of business like all the small parts combine together to form a perfect human body. Image courtesy: Ryan Karpeles
This week has been quite hectic and the week is not over yet. Yikes..!! So "less blogging is the outcome". So won't be able to post that much. Meanwhile I stumbled-upon this Facebook group which is named "This has got to stop".
The group description says: "I DON'T WANT TO BE A VAMPIRE I DON'T WANT TO BE A PIRATE LEAVE ME ALONE
POINTLESS FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS ARE RUINING FACEBOOK"
This group was created by 16 year old guy, Evan Poteet of Hamilton Southeastern High School, class of '09. Infact the group has more than half a million members (503,005 members on 30th January, 08). This proves that "pointless mini-apps are ruining Facebook, if not Social Media".
By the way, I am a proud member of this group and as they say "The rest is History".
But interestingly local search engines are doing very well w.r.t. their western counterparts, considering the fact that they don't use Roman alphabet.
Now the question is, shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language? Yes it should, in a world where people are logical and not exposed to any sort of media. But humans are influenced by all sorts of media and their thinking & rationality is somewhat bounded around its contours. So these figures tell a different story about human "online search" behavior. Marketing and to some extent culture is playing a big role in selecting an online search medium (unless it's Google).
Some of major reasons are:
Better content: Search engine fragmentation and that too localised search engines are providing better and relevant content than others.
The long tail becoming fatter: The long tail of search engines have started to grow longer & fatter. Think how many search engines we were exposed to a year back and how many now. More to that, better marketing of these niche yet mostly relevant sites is providing traction for them too.
The old population thing: Asian counterparts are generating increase in online users; e.g. China can boast highest online users as their base population is huge. So marketing along with whole culture is working for these sites.
The elephant is rising from the slumber. India is innovating ways to deliver content through mobile phones. This month, one of Bollywood’s biggest film names is releasing the first ever serial for the mobile phone in India.
Infact, reports say that Indian digital technology has grown to an extent of Rs 44,000-crore ($11 billion) entertainment industry. Catching with this growing trend entrepreneur Rajat Barjatya, the scion of one of Bollywood's biggest film banners, is read to tap the opportunity in a big way.
The delivery format has shifted from the traditional norms to more contemporary ways with the likes of handheld devices and also releasing movies online and movie theaters simultaneously. In this case, they are releasing “90-episode series, with three minutes per episode in the humour genre.” Some of the reasons for this growing trend has been three major factors:
Mobile phone users are currently estimated at close to 234 million and still growing.
Secondly, internet penetration is estimated at 46 million and has an active base of over 32 million in India.
Thirdly, India is world's largest movie making industry.
So summing up these pieces provides a very congenial opportunity for digital content production and distribution.
The trend has been quite clear for us. 2005 was for blogs, 2006 was for Youtube, 2007 was for Facebook (if I may say so) and 2008...keep guessing. Though I have my money on it. The point here I want to talk about is what blogging has been doing in the business circle. Yeah, it has been making headlines, starting from India to US but is it adding value to the traditional business models. Nowadays, newspaper journalists are observing this space for getting relevant insider information or more importantly a different perspective but what about business. The word is advice. Bloggers give a lot of ideas to businesses. But that's where traditional organizations miss the whole point. People have talked a lot about engagement, conversations blah blah but big organizations are too awry to embrace it since they have too many rules, too many guidelines. Forget about being nimble or flexible. Basically a set of rigid rules they have been following all these years while their own customers have started ignoring them to an extent where they don't care at all.
It's so amazing that still companies see that they need to have 30 seconds limelight through advertisements; have a boss who knows it all...blah blah. Rigidity has been the mantra whereas modern successful companies are playing a whole different ball game by passing the ball into customer's court and playing the game in their terms.
Now the sorry state is that most prolific bloggers are sitting on those top notch positions of companies who make the very decisions. Most of them are either from marketing or PR field and still they keep writing about new and novel ideas which at the end of the day are being followed. It's sad.
This statement of Copyblogger perfectly exemplifies it:
"...It depends on your audience, your goals, your resources, and what works… right? And if we listen to these time warp pundits, how would we ever create anything remarkable when we’re all cookie-cutter blogging?" So continuing with Brian Clark, where do you think blogging is going?
The video is about "Curiosity". Now that's a very cool word, not only because it gives you a shot at new stuff around but modern day marketers have realized the fact that whom they want to target i.e. early adopters & innovators who are in the fringes and they do the idea-spreading thing. It's curiosity which attracts them to try out new things and if they like it, they tell their friends. And then the word-of-mouth cycle starts. The short video was shot by Nic Askew. By the way, if you are in good mood, then you should read some of the comments in Seth's post. My fav one is this one called "Insatiable Curiosity" by Hjörtur Smárason (Thank god he won't ask me to pronounce it). Now you know why I posted this video. Yes, I fall into that curious category :) and that's why I like Marketing because it gives me the space to think beyond (If I may say so).
Nowadays, India-Australia cricket test match series is going on. Barring from the fact that the test series has been surrounded by many controversies, still we can't deny the fact that role of umpires on the field is of utmost importance.
But why the hell am I writing it in a marketing blog, u may ask? It's the silent nature of umpires and then delivering the judgment which fascinates me so much. The whole game surrounds around their call. They just keep quiet and observe the game like an avid onlooker. Now that's where a marketer comes into play. Few days back CK wrote a nice little post on how "Shutting up is such a great strategy for marketers".
I too agree that for any marketer, be it offline or online; B2B or B2C or whatever, listening is one skill which marketers need to develop. Why?
"Your customers can teach you a lot if you give heed to those subtle messages from them". Coke forgot with New Coke, Ford with Edsel and many more like that.
One point which may work in favor of marketers is the advent of "Intelligent Internet" i.e. Social Media which can be used not only to see how their target customers are behaving but also it can be used listen carefully the next trend that can or may follow.
Our world is changing. Now that's very cliched, you may say. But if you look around a bit, then our way of information gathering to idea spreading has changed over time. Much due to the advent of internet. Internet is shaping our culture in way which we wanted to. Web 1.0 era is over as we have seen much discussion about it and the new world order of Web 2.0 is here. And with the introduction of Web 2.0, came the concept of Social Media. And this very revolution has changed a lot of things: For us and the business models of the world. You can frame it largely as we are in "SPECS Economy" i.e. Sharing, Peering, Engaging, Collaborating and Socializing culture. In the world where we are using tools like Twitter, Facebook etc to connect people across the boundaries, so why can't we use these mass collaboration tools to help each other prevent some of the worst feared catastrophes which have more often than not paralyzed the entire human race. On this regard, Google has taken a new initiative to save the world via the internet. They (Google.Org) are funding a non-profit group called "InSTEDD". The idea is to alert citizens of the world against disease outbreaks & natural disasters and coordinate relief efforts in the event of disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina andTsunami etc.
"We want everyone to benefit from tools & technologies to save our lives. We want those technologies to work anywhere, anytime, and under the harshest conditions. We can collaborate with technology developers, researchers and experts to develop better methods to improve early disease protection & disaster response."
But there is higher concern than just the idea of mass collaboration to warn people of such catastrophe. The concern is about how few bad apples can mess-up the whole bunch of good apples. So till the technologies can come up with solutions to such problems, the system will be looked upon with some amount of skepticism. So till then, Trust is the only thing among us which will move this system for the betterment of human race.
These slides (Link) are the step by step coverage of Apple in "Macworld 2008: Steve Jobs Keynote". I have tried to put the event in a slide in form of pictures of the key developments in "Macworld 2008".
As stated in one of my earlier posts about Tata Nano and its similarity with Apple's iPhone, now it will be more than clear that the amount of enthusiasm and euphoria surrounding this event is immense. Modern day marketing is going through a phase of metamorphosis where PR is acting as a catalyst to modern marketing.
So before even talking about Apple's latest "MacBook Air" being successful or not, it has raised the aspiration of customers to an exalted state. So Well done again Mr Jobs. Good show!
I have been blogging from last year. One of my many observations is the increasing number of hits to my blog from different companies like Google, Cisco, Microsoft, BP, Shell, Bell Labs, O&M etc through searches (E.g. Vodafone, Portugal in the inset picture). Interestingly, many bloggers gave the same feedback that there is a dramatic shift in the number of viewers from different companies of the world.
Interestingly, Mark Collier raises an important question regarding companies being vigilant on blogosphere i.e. How many companies monitoring blogosphere take further action when something good/bad is being talked about?
Staying with that topic, I'm quite unsure I have seen too many Indian companies coming to my site. Apart from me, talking to many bloggers have revealed the same state i.e. not too many Indian companies are watching their audience talking or writing about them. Some of the many reasons Indian companies are still lagging behind Blogosphere or indolent about taking any action are:
#1. Unsure to respond: I'm quite sure that most of the viewers are average employees who just want to check what's been talked about their company in the blogosphere (Agreed to Mark). #2. Complacent Boss not taking any action: If they find anything positive being talked about, then they simply ignore, thinking nothing much to do there whereas they should foster that kind of PR conversation.
#3. Ignoring negative vibes: This is simply done to excuse themselves from taking any sort of further responsibility. Whereas it can hurt them more by not taking any further action for such negative publicity. Dell knows it.
The point is few unsatisfied customers can do more damage because of technology and information proliferation than many satisfied ones. So now you choose...!!!
The picture above says it all; about management, marketing, sales, design, all new social media or SEO etc. By & large, every facet of modern day business can be explained with this model. Drawing inspiration from the human anatomy, it is interesting to watch that every part works in tandem to bring coherence to our development & continued survival. So is business different from the above model? One part is organizations talk about multi-million dollar budgets for their marketing & advertising campaigns whereas overlooking nicher yet multi-faceted dimensions of involving customers through measures of Social Media or Web Development etc. Hence coherence is necessary among different divisions and dimensions of business like all the small parts combine together to form a perfect human body. Image courtesy: Ryan Karpeles
This week has been quite hectic and the week is not over yet. Yikes..!! So "less blogging is the outcome". So won't be able to post that much. Meanwhile I stumbled-upon this Facebook group which is named "This has got to stop".
The group description says: "I DON'T WANT TO BE A VAMPIRE I DON'T WANT TO BE A PIRATE LEAVE ME ALONE
POINTLESS FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS ARE RUINING FACEBOOK"
This group was created by 16 year old guy, Evan Poteet of Hamilton Southeastern High School, class of '09. Infact the group has more than half a million members (503,005 members on 30th January, 08). This proves that "pointless mini-apps are ruining Facebook, if not Social Media".
By the way, I am a proud member of this group and as they say "The rest is History".
But interestingly local search engines are doing very well w.r.t. their western counterparts, considering the fact that they don't use Roman alphabet.
Now the question is, shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language? Yes it should, in a world where people are logical and not exposed to any sort of media. But humans are influenced by all sorts of media and their thinking & rationality is somewhat bounded around its contours. So these figures tell a different story about human "online search" behavior. Marketing and to some extent culture is playing a big role in selecting an online search medium (unless it's Google).
Some of major reasons are:
Better content: Search engine fragmentation and that too localised search engines are providing better and relevant content than others.
The long tail becoming fatter: The long tail of search engines have started to grow longer & fatter. Think how many search engines we were exposed to a year back and how many now. More to that, better marketing of these niche yet mostly relevant sites is providing traction for them too.
The old population thing: Asian counterparts are generating increase in online users; e.g. China can boast highest online users as their base population is huge. So marketing along with whole culture is working for these sites.
The elephant is rising from the slumber. India is innovating ways to deliver content through mobile phones. This month, one of Bollywood’s biggest film names is releasing the first ever serial for the mobile phone in India.
Infact, reports say that Indian digital technology has grown to an extent of Rs 44,000-crore ($11 billion) entertainment industry. Catching with this growing trend entrepreneur Rajat Barjatya, the scion of one of Bollywood's biggest film banners, is read to tap the opportunity in a big way.
The delivery format has shifted from the traditional norms to more contemporary ways with the likes of handheld devices and also releasing movies online and movie theaters simultaneously. In this case, they are releasing “90-episode series, with three minutes per episode in the humour genre.” Some of the reasons for this growing trend has been three major factors:
Mobile phone users are currently estimated at close to 234 million and still growing.
Secondly, internet penetration is estimated at 46 million and has an active base of over 32 million in India.
Thirdly, India is world's largest movie making industry.
So summing up these pieces provides a very congenial opportunity for digital content production and distribution.
The trend has been quite clear for us. 2005 was for blogs, 2006 was for Youtube, 2007 was for Facebook (if I may say so) and 2008...keep guessing. Though I have my money on it. The point here I want to talk about is what blogging has been doing in the business circle. Yeah, it has been making headlines, starting from India to US but is it adding value to the traditional business models. Nowadays, newspaper journalists are observing this space for getting relevant insider information or more importantly a different perspective but what about business. The word is advice. Bloggers give a lot of ideas to businesses. But that's where traditional organizations miss the whole point. People have talked a lot about engagement, conversations blah blah but big organizations are too awry to embrace it since they have too many rules, too many guidelines. Forget about being nimble or flexible. Basically a set of rigid rules they have been following all these years while their own customers have started ignoring them to an extent where they don't care at all.
It's so amazing that still companies see that they need to have 30 seconds limelight through advertisements; have a boss who knows it all...blah blah. Rigidity has been the mantra whereas modern successful companies are playing a whole different ball game by passing the ball into customer's court and playing the game in their terms.
Now the sorry state is that most prolific bloggers are sitting on those top notch positions of companies who make the very decisions. Most of them are either from marketing or PR field and still they keep writing about new and novel ideas which at the end of the day are being followed. It's sad.
This statement of Copyblogger perfectly exemplifies it:
"...It depends on your audience, your goals, your resources, and what works… right? And if we listen to these time warp pundits, how would we ever create anything remarkable when we’re all cookie-cutter blogging?" So continuing with Brian Clark, where do you think blogging is going?
The video is about "Curiosity". Now that's a very cool word, not only because it gives you a shot at new stuff around but modern day marketers have realized the fact that whom they want to target i.e. early adopters & innovators who are in the fringes and they do the idea-spreading thing. It's curiosity which attracts them to try out new things and if they like it, they tell their friends. And then the word-of-mouth cycle starts. The short video was shot by Nic Askew. By the way, if you are in good mood, then you should read some of the comments in Seth's post. My fav one is this one called "Insatiable Curiosity" by Hjörtur Smárason (Thank god he won't ask me to pronounce it). Now you know why I posted this video. Yes, I fall into that curious category :) and that's why I like Marketing because it gives me the space to think beyond (If I may say so).
Nowadays, India-Australia cricket test match series is going on. Barring from the fact that the test series has been surrounded by many controversies, still we can't deny the fact that role of umpires on the field is of utmost importance.
But why the hell am I writing it in a marketing blog, u may ask? It's the silent nature of umpires and then delivering the judgment which fascinates me so much. The whole game surrounds around their call. They just keep quiet and observe the game like an avid onlooker. Now that's where a marketer comes into play. Few days back CK wrote a nice little post on how "Shutting up is such a great strategy for marketers".
I too agree that for any marketer, be it offline or online; B2B or B2C or whatever, listening is one skill which marketers need to develop. Why?
"Your customers can teach you a lot if you give heed to those subtle messages from them". Coke forgot with New Coke, Ford with Edsel and many more like that.
One point which may work in favor of marketers is the advent of "Intelligent Internet" i.e. Social Media which can be used not only to see how their target customers are behaving but also it can be used listen carefully the next trend that can or may follow.
Our world is changing. Now that's very cliched, you may say. But if you look around a bit, then our way of information gathering to idea spreading has changed over time. Much due to the advent of internet. Internet is shaping our culture in way which we wanted to. Web 1.0 era is over as we have seen much discussion about it and the new world order of Web 2.0 is here. And with the introduction of Web 2.0, came the concept of Social Media. And this very revolution has changed a lot of things: For us and the business models of the world. You can frame it largely as we are in "SPECS Economy" i.e. Sharing, Peering, Engaging, Collaborating and Socializing culture. In the world where we are using tools like Twitter, Facebook etc to connect people across the boundaries, so why can't we use these mass collaboration tools to help each other prevent some of the worst feared catastrophes which have more often than not paralyzed the entire human race. On this regard, Google has taken a new initiative to save the world via the internet. They (Google.Org) are funding a non-profit group called "InSTEDD". The idea is to alert citizens of the world against disease outbreaks & natural disasters and coordinate relief efforts in the event of disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina andTsunami etc.
"We want everyone to benefit from tools & technologies to save our lives. We want those technologies to work anywhere, anytime, and under the harshest conditions. We can collaborate with technology developers, researchers and experts to develop better methods to improve early disease protection & disaster response."
But there is higher concern than just the idea of mass collaboration to warn people of such catastrophe. The concern is about how few bad apples can mess-up the whole bunch of good apples. So till the technologies can come up with solutions to such problems, the system will be looked upon with some amount of skepticism. So till then, Trust is the only thing among us which will move this system for the betterment of human race.
These slides (Link) are the step by step coverage of Apple in "Macworld 2008: Steve Jobs Keynote". I have tried to put the event in a slide in form of pictures of the key developments in "Macworld 2008".
As stated in one of my earlier posts about Tata Nano and its similarity with Apple's iPhone, now it will be more than clear that the amount of enthusiasm and euphoria surrounding this event is immense. Modern day marketing is going through a phase of metamorphosis where PR is acting as a catalyst to modern marketing.
So before even talking about Apple's latest "MacBook Air" being successful or not, it has raised the aspiration of customers to an exalted state. So Well done again Mr Jobs. Good show!
I have been blogging from last year. One of my many observations is the increasing number of hits to my blog from different companies like Google, Cisco, Microsoft, BP, Shell, Bell Labs, O&M etc through searches (E.g. Vodafone, Portugal in the inset picture). Interestingly, many bloggers gave the same feedback that there is a dramatic shift in the number of viewers from different companies of the world.
Interestingly, Mark Collier raises an important question regarding companies being vigilant on blogosphere i.e. How many companies monitoring blogosphere take further action when something good/bad is being talked about?
Staying with that topic, I'm quite unsure I have seen too many Indian companies coming to my site. Apart from me, talking to many bloggers have revealed the same state i.e. not too many Indian companies are watching their audience talking or writing about them. Some of the many reasons Indian companies are still lagging behind Blogosphere or indolent about taking any action are:
#1. Unsure to respond: I'm quite sure that most of the viewers are average employees who just want to check what's been talked about their company in the blogosphere (Agreed to Mark). #2. Complacent Boss not taking any action: If they find anything positive being talked about, then they simply ignore, thinking nothing much to do there whereas they should foster that kind of PR conversation.
#3. Ignoring negative vibes: This is simply done to excuse themselves from taking any sort of further responsibility. Whereas it can hurt them more by not taking any further action for such negative publicity. Dell knows it.
The point is few unsatisfied customers can do more damage because of technology and information proliferation than many satisfied ones. So now you choose...!!!
The picture above says it all; about management, marketing, sales, design, all new social media or SEO etc. By & large, every facet of modern day business can be explained with this model. Drawing inspiration from the human anatomy, it is interesting to watch that every part works in tandem to bring coherence to our development & continued survival. So is business different from the above model? One part is organizations talk about multi-million dollar budgets for their marketing & advertising campaigns whereas overlooking nicher yet multi-faceted dimensions of involving customers through measures of Social Media or Web Development etc. Hence coherence is necessary among different divisions and dimensions of business like all the small parts combine together to form a perfect human body. Image courtesy: Ryan Karpeles
This week has been quite hectic and the week is not over yet. Yikes..!! So "less blogging is the outcome". So won't be able to post that much. Meanwhile I stumbled-upon this Facebook group which is named "This has got to stop".
The group description says: "I DON'T WANT TO BE A VAMPIRE I DON'T WANT TO BE A PIRATE LEAVE ME ALONE
POINTLESS FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS ARE RUINING FACEBOOK"
This group was created by 16 year old guy, Evan Poteet of Hamilton Southeastern High School, class of '09. Infact the group has more than half a million members (503,005 members on 30th January, 08). This proves that "pointless mini-apps are ruining Facebook, if not Social Media".
By the way, I am a proud member of this group and as they say "The rest is History".
But interestingly local search engines are doing very well w.r.t. their western counterparts, considering the fact that they don't use Roman alphabet.
Now the question is, shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language? Yes it should, in a world where people are logical and not exposed to any sort of media. But humans are influenced by all sorts of media and their thinking & rationality is somewhat bounded around its contours. So these figures tell a different story about human "online search" behavior. Marketing and to some extent culture is playing a big role in selecting an online search medium (unless it's Google).
Some of major reasons are:
Better content: Search engine fragmentation and that too localised search engines are providing better and relevant content than others.
The long tail becoming fatter: The long tail of search engines have started to grow longer & fatter. Think how many search engines we were exposed to a year back and how many now. More to that, better marketing of these niche yet mostly relevant sites is providing traction for them too.
The old population thing: Asian counterparts are generating increase in online users; e.g. China can boast highest online users as their base population is huge. So marketing along with whole culture is working for these sites.
The elephant is rising from the slumber. India is innovating ways to deliver content through mobile phones. This month, one of Bollywood’s biggest film names is releasing the first ever serial for the mobile phone in India.
Infact, reports say that Indian digital technology has grown to an extent of Rs 44,000-crore ($11 billion) entertainment industry. Catching with this growing trend entrepreneur Rajat Barjatya, the scion of one of Bollywood's biggest film banners, is read to tap the opportunity in a big way.
The delivery format has shifted from the traditional norms to more contemporary ways with the likes of handheld devices and also releasing movies online and movie theaters simultaneously. In this case, they are releasing “90-episode series, with three minutes per episode in the humour genre.” Some of the reasons for this growing trend has been three major factors:
Mobile phone users are currently estimated at close to 234 million and still growing.
Secondly, internet penetration is estimated at 46 million and has an active base of over 32 million in India.
Thirdly, India is world's largest movie making industry.
So summing up these pieces provides a very congenial opportunity for digital content production and distribution.
The trend has been quite clear for us. 2005 was for blogs, 2006 was for Youtube, 2007 was for Facebook (if I may say so) and 2008...keep guessing. Though I have my money on it. The point here I want to talk about is what blogging has been doing in the business circle. Yeah, it has been making headlines, starting from India to US but is it adding value to the traditional business models. Nowadays, newspaper journalists are observing this space for getting relevant insider information or more importantly a different perspective but what about business. The word is advice. Bloggers give a lot of ideas to businesses. But that's where traditional organizations miss the whole point. People have talked a lot about engagement, conversations blah blah but big organizations are too awry to embrace it since they have too many rules, too many guidelines. Forget about being nimble or flexible. Basically a set of rigid rules they have been following all these years while their own customers have started ignoring them to an extent where they don't care at all.
It's so amazing that still companies see that they need to have 30 seconds limelight through advertisements; have a boss who knows it all...blah blah. Rigidity has been the mantra whereas modern successful companies are playing a whole different ball game by passing the ball into customer's court and playing the game in their terms.
Now the sorry state is that most prolific bloggers are sitting on those top notch positions of companies who make the very decisions. Most of them are either from marketing or PR field and still they keep writing about new and novel ideas which at the end of the day are being followed. It's sad.
This statement of Copyblogger perfectly exemplifies it:
"...It depends on your audience, your goals, your resources, and what works… right? And if we listen to these time warp pundits, how would we ever create anything remarkable when we’re all cookie-cutter blogging?" So continuing with Brian Clark, where do you think blogging is going?
The video is about "Curiosity". Now that's a very cool word, not only because it gives you a shot at new stuff around but modern day marketers have realized the fact that whom they want to target i.e. early adopters & innovators who are in the fringes and they do the idea-spreading thing. It's curiosity which attracts them to try out new things and if they like it, they tell their friends. And then the word-of-mouth cycle starts. The short video was shot by Nic Askew. By the way, if you are in good mood, then you should read some of the comments in Seth's post. My fav one is this one called "Insatiable Curiosity" by Hjörtur Smárason (Thank god he won't ask me to pronounce it). Now you know why I posted this video. Yes, I fall into that curious category :) and that's why I like Marketing because it gives me the space to think beyond (If I may say so).
Nowadays, India-Australia cricket test match series is going on. Barring from the fact that the test series has been surrounded by many controversies, still we can't deny the fact that role of umpires on the field is of utmost importance.
But why the hell am I writing it in a marketing blog, u may ask? It's the silent nature of umpires and then delivering the judgment which fascinates me so much. The whole game surrounds around their call. They just keep quiet and observe the game like an avid onlooker. Now that's where a marketer comes into play. Few days back CK wrote a nice little post on how "Shutting up is such a great strategy for marketers".
I too agree that for any marketer, be it offline or online; B2B or B2C or whatever, listening is one skill which marketers need to develop. Why?
"Your customers can teach you a lot if you give heed to those subtle messages from them". Coke forgot with New Coke, Ford with Edsel and many more like that.
One point which may work in favor of marketers is the advent of "Intelligent Internet" i.e. Social Media which can be used not only to see how their target customers are behaving but also it can be used listen carefully the next trend that can or may follow.
Our world is changing. Now that's very cliched, you may say. But if you look around a bit, then our way of information gathering to idea spreading has changed over time. Much due to the advent of internet. Internet is shaping our culture in way which we wanted to. Web 1.0 era is over as we have seen much discussion about it and the new world order of Web 2.0 is here. And with the introduction of Web 2.0, came the concept of Social Media. And this very revolution has changed a lot of things: For us and the business models of the world. You can frame it largely as we are in "SPECS Economy" i.e. Sharing, Peering, Engaging, Collaborating and Socializing culture. In the world where we are using tools like Twitter, Facebook etc to connect people across the boundaries, so why can't we use these mass collaboration tools to help each other prevent some of the worst feared catastrophes which have more often than not paralyzed the entire human race. On this regard, Google has taken a new initiative to save the world via the internet. They (Google.Org) are funding a non-profit group called "InSTEDD". The idea is to alert citizens of the world against disease outbreaks & natural disasters and coordinate relief efforts in the event of disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina andTsunami etc.
"We want everyone to benefit from tools & technologies to save our lives. We want those technologies to work anywhere, anytime, and under the harshest conditions. We can collaborate with technology developers, researchers and experts to develop better methods to improve early disease protection & disaster response."
But there is higher concern than just the idea of mass collaboration to warn people of such catastrophe. The concern is about how few bad apples can mess-up the whole bunch of good apples. So till the technologies can come up with solutions to such problems, the system will be looked upon with some amount of skepticism. So till then, Trust is the only thing among us which will move this system for the betterment of human race.
These slides (Link) are the step by step coverage of Apple in "Macworld 2008: Steve Jobs Keynote". I have tried to put the event in a slide in form of pictures of the key developments in "Macworld 2008".
As stated in one of my earlier posts about Tata Nano and its similarity with Apple's iPhone, now it will be more than clear that the amount of enthusiasm and euphoria surrounding this event is immense. Modern day marketing is going through a phase of metamorphosis where PR is acting as a catalyst to modern marketing.
So before even talking about Apple's latest "MacBook Air" being successful or not, it has raised the aspiration of customers to an exalted state. So Well done again Mr Jobs. Good show!
I have been blogging from last year. One of my many observations is the increasing number of hits to my blog from different companies like Google, Cisco, Microsoft, BP, Shell, Bell Labs, O&M etc through searches (E.g. Vodafone, Portugal in the inset picture). Interestingly, many bloggers gave the same feedback that there is a dramatic shift in the number of viewers from different companies of the world.
Interestingly, Mark Collier raises an important question regarding companies being vigilant on blogosphere i.e. How many companies monitoring blogosphere take further action when something good/bad is being talked about?
Staying with that topic, I'm quite unsure I have seen too many Indian companies coming to my site. Apart from me, talking to many bloggers have revealed the same state i.e. not too many Indian companies are watching their audience talking or writing about them. Some of the many reasons Indian companies are still lagging behind Blogosphere or indolent about taking any action are:
#1. Unsure to respond: I'm quite sure that most of the viewers are average employees who just want to check what's been talked about their company in the blogosphere (Agreed to Mark). #2. Complacent Boss not taking any action: If they find anything positive being talked about, then they simply ignore, thinking nothing much to do there whereas they should foster that kind of PR conversation.
#3. Ignoring negative vibes: This is simply done to excuse themselves from taking any sort of further responsibility. Whereas it can hurt them more by not taking any further action for such negative publicity. Dell knows it.
The point is few unsatisfied customers can do more damage because of technology and information proliferation than many satisfied ones. So now you choose...!!!
The picture above says it all; about management, marketing, sales, design, all new social media or SEO etc. By & large, every facet of modern day business can be explained with this model. 
