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.

We are mighty thrilled to report that Mukund Mohan of BuzzGain has joined our Advisory Board. You just have to meet him for a few minutes to realize his positive, dynamic, can-do aura, and his penchant for ideas. Besides, he brings in a wealth of Marketing experience that is crucial for SmartCrowds to forge ahead and thrive.

Welcome Mukund!!

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.

A major milestone in our company’s history was just crossed!. Sumita Chakrabarty joined us to head Marketing & Business Development. She brings with her a valuable educational background and work experience in Canada & India.

She has a number of degrees - including English & American Literature, Writing for Film & Television, and Marketing & Communications, from Utkal University (India), Vancouver Film School (Canada), and York University (Canada) respectively.

Her work experience includes stints at Mudra, O&M, McCann, Euro RSCG, Spencer Francey Peters (Canada), CIBC (canada)  etc, in a variety of roles including Copyrighting, Creative, Communication & Business Strategy. Just the right experience that can help propel our business forward!!.

More from her as she continues to blog here…. (she’s started already!).

We’re extremely excited to have her on board.

The concept of adda over coffee is something that we’re all familiar with. It’s a relaxed, let-your-hair down kind of environment where you can exchange ideas about everything from picnics to Pushkin. That’s the BrandAdda story. Simply put, it’s a place where your product/service and consumers interact with each other.

As a marketeer you need to reach out and feel the pulse of your consumer. Let him/her tell you what’s unique or not-so-unique about it. And as you build your brand consumer by consumer, you’ll realize that these conversations are making the foundations stronger and hence, there’s better brand reach.

Some wise soul once said, consumers don’t abandon brands, it’s brands that fail them. Marketing history is littered with such failed brands. So get talking with BrandAdda. Your consumers are waiting to share their thoughts.

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.

The beta version we released on Nov 21 last year got lots of feedback. We evolved the product quite a bit over the last few months and have shipped it for the world to see. Here’s a summary of the changes in the new release of BrandAdda (a bit of a repeat from a previous post):

• 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.
• Friend invitations: We’ve made it easy to invite friends in Yahoo/Gmail/MSN address books or friends on facebook
• 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: E.g. An action-oriented menu bar, and an action oriented dashboard on every brand content page, Visual indicators to aid quick cognition of content, etc

Here’s a fun & informative post by our very own Anirudh about the launch: its here, here and here.