Empowered Customers

If you can read what is written in the inset picture, then the idea of empowered customers would be easier to understand.

The old proverb says "Pen is mightier than sword" and I believe the maxim is most true in case of irritated, disgusted and frustrated customers who wants to pay back hard to those nosy service companies.

Read this post & also this one too, then you will get a bigger picture where we as customer stand and how can we turn our dissatisfaction into something which these companies will take seriously for their lousy and lame services.

This is what Joseph Jaffe did i.e. made a group of dissatisfied customers and tried to unified their voices into one and give it back to the service companies.

I guess, in the web 2.0 era, we as customers can be more proactive in protesting bad customer service.

So in today's world, if your business model's vision & mission considers customers as core to their processes then be sure to consider them as core and not someone from whom you generate just revenues. Or else once in a while customers will rise from their slumber and knock you down. Ask Dell and many more.

India's Most Trusted Brands of 2008 (A Goofy Analysis)

The report is out. Economic Times' Brand Equity has published the list of India's Most Trusted Brands Survey.

The top ten brands are :-

1. Nokia
2. Colgate
3. Tata Salt
4. Pepsodent
5. Ponds
6. Lux
7. Britannia
8. Dettol
9. Lifebuoy
10. Vicks

The top ten service brands are

1. LIC
2. Airtel
3. State Bank of India
4. Reliance Mobile
5. BSNL
6. Tata Indicom
7. Indian Oil
8. Hutch/Vodafone
9. ICICI Bank
10. Bank of India

Ok. We have reached to this point. Now what? As in what can we infer from this survey results. I somehow see some pattern/trend in the results. First, most of the top ten trusted brands are those which belong to FMCG category. Second, most of them slap those irritating "please buy me ads" on our face every where we go, so recall would be high for them. Third, remember recent IPL (Indian Premier League) where Nokia co-authored the Kolkata Knight Riders story along with endorser Shah Rukh Khan. So visibility is high.

So is there any correlation between ads slapped onto our face and brand recall. Now one suggestion would be please go back to their balance sheets and see how many of these brands are making profits to that extent since quantitatively speaking they should make huge profits since they are most trusted ones amongst consumers.

So last question is do they truly reflect our true trust on these brands remembering the fact that No.1 trusted brand Nokia was in middle of a much heated debate about "Overheating of Battery". So the old marketing adage "Under-promise & Over-Deliver" doesn't work in this context. What a co-incidence?

Anyway congrats from my part to figure in such a list (pun intended!).

Slidepost: Endless Innovation's Trends

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The slides gives a brief overview of 4 major trends that are creating new opportunities in business. Some of these trends are a synthesis of existing developments and ideas, while others are so brand new, they haven't even been named yet.

The slide broadly speaks out about 4 trends:

(1) Social Data

(2) Micro-Payments for Online Social Experiences

(3) Content Mashups

(4) "Live" experiences (that really aren't "live")

Related Posts:

• Slidepost: Branding 2.0 & Social Media
• Slidepost: Innovate to Differentiate
• Slidepost: Global State of Social Media

Social Media Simplified: CommonCraft does it again

Sachi and Lee LeFever of CommonCraft does it again with "Social Media in Plain English".

Oh, by the way, if your are still thinking what the hell is Social Media and why is media and people like us from the blogging fraternity are going bonkers (if I may say so), then definitely this 3:44 minute brilliant piece from CommonCraft will help you.



So go ahead, give yourself and your customers a chance to do something different because "EXPERIENCE IS THE NEW REALITY" and sure social media and its various tools (or I should say cheap yet effective) will come handy.

Till then enjoy this one and full marks to CommonCraft.

Related Posts:

• Video: Twitter Simplified
• RSS Simplified- How *RSS* can make your life easier

Interesting Consumer Behavior Insights (A Study)

It seems like my work schedule has a deep repercussion on my blog posts. Still trying to manage it :-)

Now getting back to this post, found an interesting study from the field of academics. Erik Ottoson from Uppsala University has some interesting insights on consumer behavior. The topic being "Seeking One's Own: On Encounters Between Individuals and Objects" (Download the pdf here).

The ongoing study broadly talks about :

....individuals search for objects. It follows people through flea markets, refuse skips, shopping streets and malls. The aim of the thesis is to study the search for things and how it influences individuals and their relations to objects and the places in which they search.

The thesis focuses on what is termed "SERENDIPITOUS SEARCHING"– i.e. an activity of open browsing for anything that awakens the person’s interest. That means that the people in the study are not just looking for certain things – they are also seeking to come to terms with what they are actually looking for. Ideals of what is beautiful, useful and reasonable materialise in conjunction with the experience of what is available and what is absent or out of reach. It is suggested that this mode of looking for goods is not only about purchase deliberations, but more importantly is a specific way of interacting with the world and making places meaningful. It can be viewed as a way of creating and moderating anticipation, and thereby cultivating affect. Searching for things thus becomes an experiential horizon.

Part I: “Searching and Space” deals with how searching for something becomes a specific way of engaging with the physical surroundings. The landscape becomes a taskscape, i.e. an array of physical structures linked together by a set of related activities.

Part II, “Discoveries and Rubbish” explores how the activities of searching charges objects with qualities. Through two different environments, searching is analysed as a way of elevating things from the status of rubbish to one of discovery.

Part III: “From the Horizon of Finding” focuses on how the searchers’ aims are transformed when they encounter the objects that really exist.

Less Blogging this Week

This week will be more of packing and travelling since I'll be moving to Mumbai to join my new employer "Godrej". So this has direct repurcussions on my blogging. That means blogging will be dry this week. But promise to come back next week, pronto!

Oh, by the way, my joining is on 5th june and I also promise to post certain inputs from whatever on the track experience I'll gather. So that means, new & interesting posts for sure.

So hope you have made yourself comfortable in my blog site and to my blogging topics and style. And please keep your criticism and appreciation flow through your comments.

And last but not least, need all your wishes and best of luck for this new journey :-)

Social Media Experiment: How online behavior can reduce Twitter noise

This week I thought I will use my blog not only to post marketing or technology related info but use it for some real-time data analysis. One of the primary reasons I took the opportunity of using my blog is to satiate my innate desires to understand any issue from 3 important aspects: Logic Building, Asking the right question and last but not least intuitive analysis.

So you may ask why so? In the beginning of this week, Robert Scoble discussed about Twitter noise referring to unnecessary monologues on “What are you doing”. So I thought what better way than discussing the same topic/issue with Tweople (referring to inhabitants of Twitter) themselves. So I asked a simple question to most of my followers in Twitter and they responded back. Thanks a ton fellas!

The question: Why u *FOLLOW* or *Un-FOLLOW* someone in Twitter?

Methodology: Launched a survey on 19th May via tweets asking the same question. Till date got about 32 responses off 310/203 i.e. “Following/Followers” in my Twitter profile through Twitter replies, direct messages (DM’s), emails and additional few responses came from other sources anonymously.

Who responded:

1. Afzal Khan (http://toprankseo.blogspot.com)
2. Chris Brogan (http://chrisbrogan.com/)
3. Daksh (http://themarketingblog.wordpress.com/)
4. Netra Parikh
5. ideasmithy (http://www.theideasmithy.com/)
6. Subatomic (http://www.yeskarthi.wordpress.com/),
7. Franticnews (http://franticindustries.com)
8. labsji (http://labsji.wordpress.com/)
9. garimadhiman
10. gsharma (http://www.gsharma.com/)
11. seanpaune (http://www.seanpaune.com/)
12. watblog - Thanks for the link (http://watblog.com)
13. cruisemaniac (http://thecruisemaniac.com/)
14. mokshjuneja (http://mokshjuneja.com/)
15. hiway (http://www.harshadsharma.name/)
16. juancarlosarzol (http://www.juancarlosarzola.com/)
17. Damiano (http://www.nitmesh.com/)
18. Ravages (http://www.selectiveamnesia.org/)
19. shirleyjohn (http://livingthelifeofmydreams.blogspot.com/)
20. dhudiburg (http://www.dailymarketingace.com/)
21. ronakshah (http://www.richdollarblog.com/)
22. vimoh (http://www.vmohanty.com/)
23. shankargan (http://www.shankarganesh.com/)
24. montrealseo
25. palinn (http://advocable.com)
26. DDeeps (http://deeplydeeps.blogspot.com/)

And many more who responded anonymously via other sources, So thanks to them also!

What did the statistics say?

The analysis is primarily divided into two types of graphs i.e. “Why we Follow in Twitter” and consequently “Why we Un-Follow in Twitter”. The graphs below show such:
The micro-survey results shows that 5 reasons come out to be more influential i.e. Follow those whose tweets are interesting & usable information, follow thought leaders and role models, Follow friends, Follow back those who follows you and last but not least latest tweet from users. Clearly, it seems that interesting & Usable info guides more twitter users to follow.On the hindsight, the survey portrays a clear and definitive response to why they un-follow in twitter. Spammy tweets is the clear winner and following it are less benefits from tweets, one-sided or monologues by Tweople, Un-follow them who doesn’t follow you and last but not least high SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) puts off users from following someone in Twitter.

Findings & Conclusion

There is no doubt that there is a lot of noise in twitter due to spam messages, blog links, self-glorifying updates, blog marketing and many more ways. But from the figures above, it is very much clear that usable information will get Tweople following you whereas spam messages will put Tweople off.

According to DoshDosh, the Twitter community has grown more aware of these ’spammers’ and many tools like the Twitter Blacklist and Twerpscan have been developed to help Twitter users weed out people who try to follow many users in order to build a large audience. Still, a portion of Twitter users (perhaps the new ones) tend to add anyone who befriends them.

Still my take from the data I have gathered is that most users want Twitter to be a much filtered source of information and social tool (thanks Afzal). And once Tweople understand and start applying this, it’s not far from the fact that signal/noise ratio will drastically improve since it’s still early days for twitter for all of us.

One more interesting thing that I noticed is that Twitter is more for extrovert ones since at the end of it all you just type “What are you doing” and if you follow those two graphs up above, you will surely find some amount of coherence in our offline behavior as well as online i.e. we all want to read about what our mentors are doing, brand ourselves, let others know what we am interested in. So it won’t be wrong if I say that all of us want some amount of limelight.

This is one of my many analysis that I will put forward in times to come. Hope you will participate in the near future to make it better and more indepth.

Lastly, if you want a piece of me, follow me here in Twitter or Subscribe to my Blog RSS Feed.

Links for 2008-05-22

• TechCrunch│Analysis of Microsoft "Live Search Cashback" - Today Microsoft took a bold move in search adverising space with "Live Search Cashback" product that shifts search advertising from cost-per-click (CPC) to cost-per-action (CPA) and give a lot of the revenue back to users. The TechCrunch analysis gives a indepth preview into what is brewing as "Search Wars" between the major players like Google & Microsoft. (Tags: Microsoft, Google, Search Advertising, Live Search Cashback, CPC, CPA)


• Adage│Lifestyle Matters Everywhere: The articles clears it up for why in today's world, marketers need to stop targeting consumers by country and instead target based on habits, likes, dislikes. (Tags: Marketing, Demographics, Targeting, Social Marketing, Global Consumer, Segmentation)


• Mack Collier│Twitter goes down, no one tells us why... : More often than not, Twitter has been acting crazy and putting off people including me. Mark here talks about certain interesting points towards & against Twitter and its unusual hiccups. (Tags: Twitter, Micro-blogging, Marketing, Social Media, Mark Collier)


• Church of the customer│7 questions with Josh Bernoff: Jackie Huba questions Josh Bernoff about his book "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies" (co-authored with Charlene Li) about social media (or social technologies, as Forrester calls it). (Tags: Jackie Huba, Josh Bernoff, Charlene Li, Social Media, Groundswell, Book, Forrester)


• This is an interesting site which tells if Twitter is working or not. Just type it (http://istwitterdown.com/) (Tags: Twitter,micr0blogging)

Social Media Strategy for B2B companies - Insights from Lena West

Few days back, got this mail as part of my MarketingProfs newsletter. The topic was "Getting Results with Social Media: Q&A with Lena West". Though every now & then, we all marketing and social media enthusiats get emails like this but this one somehow struck some chord which prompted me to include a part of the interview into my blog. I found the Q&A quite insightful, interesting and most importantly clears up the ground level realities of Social Media acceptance in B2B companies as they have begun to launch Social Media efforts and incorporate Social Media tools into their marketing campaigns. But with the new tools comes the inevitable learning curve, and many organizations are finding that their initial wade into the social media water isn't yielding the results they were hoping for or expecting.

Here, she shares some insights for B2B players looking to hone their social media strategy.

[Q] It seems that in the last couple of years, companies have been looking to learn all they could about blogs and social networks. Are these still the hot spots for companies wanting to start using social media, or are other areas emerging?

[Ans] Blogs and social networking are still very "hot." Gosh, I don't like saying that because it makes anything new media related sound like a fad - which it decidedly is NOT.

Online communities and engagement are emerging areas for brand investment. Companies that are active in social media are finally getting the blogosphere memo that it's not just about being part of the community and listening, but facilitating dialogue as well.

There was a report released recently that showed that with the economic downturn, many brands are taking a good chunk of their traditional marketing spend and allocating it to social media engagement. Not to mention that there is still a huge learning and adoption curve for social media on the corporate front. The best is far from being over and we haven't even reached the peak yet.

[Q] What do you think is the biggest misconception that companies have about using social media tools?

[Ans] That legal "won't let them" or that people will say negative things about their brands. Newsflash: people in your market are already saying both good and bad things about brands. Why stick your head in the sand, when you can find out what's being said, address it and develop relationships?

As for legal? Their job is to protect the firms they're hired to protect. It's our jobs as consultants, social media evangelists, marketers and PR professionals to present a plan that mitigates risk while still being open, honest and direct. If you're not doing your job, don't dare blame it all on legal.

[Q]There’s a growing emphasis on establishing the right metrics to measure social media programs. What’s hard about correctly tracking and measuring the effectiveness of social media efforts?

[Ans] Because when [companies] started their social media initiative(s), they didn't determine what the end goal was and as a result they don't know which metric to measure to keep tabs on that goal. It’s really that simple. There are HUNDREDS of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you can track, but if you don't know what you should be tracking and how that indicator relates to your goal… you might as well go watch Project Runway. This is why it's so important for brands to get help implementing social media. If I've seen it once, I've seen it a hundred times. It's seemingly minor things, like selecting the appropriate metric(s), that can cripple otherwise healthy social media programs.

[Q] Is blogging a good fit for every company?

[Ans] Blogs do seem to get the most attention, but that's because everyone can type. You see, people mistakenly think they have to be some uber-orator in order to have a successful podcast. Or, with a video blog, they think they have to be the next Ed Bradley or Barbara Walters. And, even with online communities, they feel it's a lot to manage, but a blog…? Heck, anyone can type. That's the thought process.

No, blogs are not a good fit for every company. Different social media tools produce different results. For example, if you know your audience is on-the-go, you might want to consider a podcast because audio offers a different means of portability than text.

Companies can tell they should start blogging when they feel that they want something more from their marketing than demis and data. Many people get older and they think, "There has to be more than this," and they go on a search for their passion in the Burmese mountainside. Companies get the same fire in their breastbones. They think - and correctly so - there has to be more than numbers and email addresses. They start thinking about how to start a movement in their industry. They start thinking bigger about their brands. THOSE are the companies that are ripe for engaging in social media -- blogging or otherwise. It starts as a yearning to be part of the big picture.

Price of being a Spectator

There are primarily 3 kinds of marketing moves that decides your future standing.

1. Marketing steps which are taken only after your competitors have taken which somehow makes you feel that it provides you the cushioning.
2. Marketing moves which make things happen; makes you remarkable.
3. Marketing steps which are taken only after wondering what happened.

Now in a dynamic world, the saying is true – “It’s not the big who swallow the small but the fast who swallow the slow”. That’s why timing of your marketing campaign is so important.

Now the question is - You want to wait till it’s done or you want to be a doer than a mere spectator! The choice is yours...