SmartCrowds Blog

This isn’t really about the product we just launched. It is a fun experiment that hopes to illustrate the core belief of SmartCrowds - how little bits of contribution from people can add up to something valuable, and how technology is powering new ways of living and working. Wiki enabled the brilliant WikiPedia. We’re tinkering with what Twitter can do.

We think Twitter is a great platform for distance learning.. We can’t say for sure about all the types of distance learning that it enables… we’re still tinkering (What do you think?)… but something that can be delivered in byte-sized chunks is ideal…. For example, something like “learn kannada in 30 days” or “learn urdu a phrase a day”… The latter is what we’re going to try. It was inspired by the love for the language of course, and not as a random experiment. That helps keep the momentum :).

While the “Urdu class” we’re starting will be asynchronous and in small daily chunks, I can easily imagine a live class being conducted on twitter. One or more “teachers” can post to “http://twitter.com/Urdu101″ on a schedule and the “students” (followers in twitter terminology) get the gyan in real time. The students can ask questions in real time by responding to a particular “140-byte lesson”, and the teacher can ReTweet it so that all the students can see it at the same time. The beauty of it is that this class can be attended later at any time, anywhere, and using a variety of delivery mechanisms. By the same account, one can imagine a teacher conducting “office hours” for students anywhere on the globe.

There’s one small technical limitation with twitter currently. Multiple teachers have to share a password to post to one twitter account. With delegated administration support on twitter, or using some other innovations that exist or may come up in the near future, we can prevent the sharing of one password. Any ideas?.

We hope you’ll head on to http://twitter.com/Urdu101, sign up as a follower to learn Urdu a phrase at a time, and post your own knowledge through responses (which I will retweet for the benefit of all followers).

Share your thoughts, ideas on how twitter can be used for distance learning.

The toughest thing to do is, communicate. In a world so tightly linked together communication demands marquee status, yet we relegate it to the unimportant. We’re constantly emailing, sms-ing, blogging, talking on our mobiles….yet one hears comments like - I have no idea what he meant.

Clarity in communications seems to be more intricate than rocket science. The path to clear communications is littered with assumptions which is made more difficult by cold mediums like sms’ and emails  which unless used effectively, can be quite detrimental.

So all the more reason for a brand to ‘talk’ to its consumers than for them to rely almost totally on getting a message out which may or may not always be spot on. When a brand ‘talks’ to its clients in a non-regulated open forum it builds a measure of trust for itself which goes a long way in ensuring that it’s perceived well both by existing and prospective consumers.

Brilliant campaign by Ford.

Assuming fiesta is of decent quality to begin with, this campaign will only help Ford get better. It keeps them on their toes to do their best for their customers (they’re in the spotlight!). No company makes products everyone is happy with, but companies that engage with their customers and listen to their honest feedback are more likely to be ahead despite product shortcomings. Hide those warts and they’re likely to remain with you forever and balloon into long term problems. Do your best to fix the warts, and open up to your customers and you’ll emerge stronger! because you’ll earn trust, tolerance, support and ideas from them.

The 25 year anniversary Maggi campaign showcased on a custom website has some very cool elements to it.

The flash app is creative and fun to use. The campaign taps into the warmth, variety and authenticity of its loyal users, by including their slogans, stories, recipes and videos into the campaign. Its users are strongly incented by the prospect of appearing on Maggi packs or on nationwide commercials. A nice win-win package.

There are a few things that could be done better. There is no transparency in the process. Imagine the disappointment of hundreds or thousands who submit their content but it doesn’t show up anywhere!. There is no community building. No one can discuss, comment, say hello to each other, etc. The massive custom effort to build the site is not reusable - its a 1-shot deal. And worse, it was seen by  very few people (just look at the alexa rank, which is a decent indicator of traffic levels to the site). There is no cross presence of the campaign or the generated content on the usual social destinations.

This campaign could have achieved much greater heights. Transparency. Greater reach. Greater buzz.  More engagement tools. More community. Long lasting dialogue with its users.

An extremely handy reference of some of the best SMM efforts

In Goafest was a fantastic opportunity for us to take our message to the who’s who of the Advertising world. April 3 & 4 were extremely well spent days in the critical phase of our company, not because it was on a pristine beach in Cavellosim with beer, water sports, dancing, and good food abounding. Almost everyone that powers the Indian Ad industry forward was there!. The knowledge & learning seminars featured five talks from key global players - Sir John Hegarty, Jean Marie Dru, Neeraj Nayar, Sean Finnigan, and Dan Wieden.

We brought along a 1-page brochure which distilled our key message to Brands, Agencies & Media Houses, and made our 30-second elevator pitch easier. One side of the page had a picture and key messages, and the other side some corroborating quotes from a paper produced by the IBM Institute for Business Value (Thanks to Manu for forwarding it). You can take a look at the front and the back of the 1-pager.  The essence of the message was “Don’t just talk. Listen”. And boy, is it gratifying to see that the #1 of the “Five new rules of Marketing” according to Simon Clift, Unilever’s CMO, is “Listening to consumers is more important than talking at them“.  See the whole article.

Its terrific to see such strong validation among influencers in the industry.  The theme of “engaging” with consumers also ran through all the talks at Goafest, particularly the ones by Neeraj Nayar and Sean Finnigan.

We hope all of this helps us bolster our case that we need to make to Marketing professionals who are faced with challenging and turbulent times.

I had the good fortune of meeting with some senior folks at one of the biggest ad agencies in India.  It was an enthralling 2+ hours. The world of Advertising & Marketing is more complex and fascinating than one might imagine. A great many of the human pursuits - Arts,  Mathematics, Psychology, Philosophy, Communication - blend together to create the output in this industry.

Learnt many insights about the industry, specifically with regard to the adoption of technology and the new medium - the web. The most important and heartening takeaway was that there is indeed hope for products like BrandAdda to add value.

Would love to make it to GoaFest 2009 - the annual advertising awards festival - to pitch our vision and learn about ways to add value to this industry.

When a startup gets a person on board to fill a “key” role, the question of a fair deal is a tricky one to answer. By key, I mean roles such as Head of Marketing or Sales, or a CEO…

Here’s a scenario some startups may face:

X has the idea, started the company, put in non-trivial amount of money, and sweat for over a year. X is a founder.

Y comes along after over a year, does not put in money, wants a salary and wants a “partner’s stake” of equity, comparable to that of X.

Is this a “fair” ask?. Or is this not a question of fairness at all, but is just purely a function of demand/supply?. What do you think?.

Personally, I think it is an unfair ask. Smells like a Low Risk/High Reward deal. Never experienced anything like it in Silicon valley. I believe that Silicon Valley has a thriving entrepreneur ecosystem because the Founders have a huge edge in equity over those who who come in later. If the founders’ incentive were to be diluted, there would be fewer founders and more people waiting to hop on the bus for a less risky deal. You know what that means to the ecosystem.

What’s your opinion?

Met an ex-coworker (founder of ReviewBag) at a TiE event last night and got reminded that I haven’t posted here for quite a while :). A lot has been going on and it would be good to post it here and hopefully get some feedback.

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve been working on development for the first public release of BrandAdda. After the beta launch, we didn’t spend a penny on Marketing, because we weren’t sure the product was ready yet. Thanks to the coverage on Pluggd.in, WATBlog, AlooTechie and a few others, we got some traffic that was instrumental in getting some feedback about the site. They came, we listened, we developed…

Our value proposition to Consumers remains the same: self-expression around products & brands. Our value proposition to Brands remains the same: interactive & high-engagement marketing. However, our focus and positioning has gone through much evolution.

The site in development has evolved quite a bit from the public site. We are not only building a site where users can come to form & join communities, we are also working on taking our tools to wherever communities are already formed. Conceptually, our solution does not run in a data-center. The solution’s platform is the entire web.

At a high level, here are the key changes we are working on:

• Simplification part 1: There are too many content publishing modules for Consumers on the current site. We brought it down to just a few that users on community sites are very familiar with: Forums, Reviews, Idea Center, Photos/Videos.
• Simplification part 2: The demarcation between what content Brands can publish and what Consumers can was quite confusing to a visitor. We’ve marked them out clearly. The content that Brands can publish: Ads, Polls, Promotions, and Blog.
• Simplification part 3: Five tabs on a Product/Brand page are now reduced to two (we call them Consumer Podium & Company Podium for now)
• Login/Registration: We’ve made it nearly effortless to register/sign-in. We support a variety of major id providers (Google, Facebook, Yahoo among them).
• Social: We’ve provided a simple way for users to message each other, using a public or private channel (similar to orkut scrapping, but simpler). We’ve added support for a rich user profile. We’ve added the ability to see Facebook friends that are on BrandAdda. We’ve added a way to invite friends using many different providers, and using the latest secure standard (oAuth) where supported.
• Buzz: Added News.
• Discovery: Added a “Related Products/Brands” view
• Taking the Tools to existing Communities: Widgets, and Social Network apps are under development.
• Other user experience improvements

If I were to summarize two key drivers behind all of this: Consumer centricity, and Business value to Brands would be it.

Looking forward to help Brands leverage the web to supplement their Marketing efforts. Jai Ho!! :).

Spread the word… Better still, if you have “connections”, do something to bring the wrong-doers to justice.
The entire city ought to protest this outrage… and the lack of protection from the law.

http://stuffireadrandomly.blogspot.com/2009/02/taliban-lives-in-india.html
http://bangalore.praja.in/blog/murali772/2009/02/17/face-goons
http://muthu-booksandbeyond.blogspot.com/