It is all about the MESSAGE!

Be it traditional marketing or social media marketing, one primary thing that cannot be and should not be compromised is the consistency of the message. There are several challenges in keeping the message aligned between the traditional and the new social media marketing channels, given that your target segment spans the need for both the marketing channels. I have tried to capture few of those challenges below, hope it will be interesting and useful. Again, these are only my observations and experiences; please put your thoughts on the comments to share yours.

Image courtesy: 66batman.com

*Audience – I agree the audiences that you want to reach on the two channels are not necessarily the same. However, that does not mean the core of the messaging needs variation; often one could diminish the brand value due to inconsistent messaging given that there is a high growth of confluence between the traditional vs. the social media audience.

*Channel partners – The issue with having too many people deal with the two different channels could lead to convolution of the message. If in case you would like to outsource your marketing needs, make sure you pick the right partners who understands both your traditional and social media marketing needs. You need not pick the same partner to drive both the efforts; however make sure all the partners involved are in line with the overall efforts.

*Internal conflicts - Promoting two different departments for notching the same target, where one department deals with the traditional and the other deals with social media could cause internal conflicts. At the end of the day, both the departments are measured based on the conversion and the retention ratios.

*Treating the customers differently – The benefits to the consumer on one channel might be different from the other, but if there is a reason to believe one is valuable over the other, often the weaker group might feel left behind. It is all about consistency in delivering on all possible accounts. [For example: When National geographic runs contests, they promote and create messaging for the same contest on both their magazine and their social channels. Sure, the way to get the eyeballs on both the magazine and the social media is different, but at the core, the message is the same.]

Image courtesy: whichboxmedia

*Social media platforms – The growing platforms in social media creates a dilemma on how to manage each platform, should we be on all or how do we decide which ones to focus? The goal should be in focusing on cross-pollinating the efforts across the available platforms. Remember that a huge segment of the social media population is out there because they are often compelled to. Understanding the influencers on each platform needs some study and due diligence in analysis. Following the right people will create the right impact and influence for your brand.  [For example: Say you are a brand logo is lemon, you do not want to follow people on pinterest.com who posts lemon pictures necessarily, unless they are in your target segment.]

*Not playing me too – As mentioned before, today’s organizations are forced into social media, as they see their counterparts jump into the space. By randomly taking shots on the social channels can often be misleading in what you are trying to convey. This may result in people turning away from your brand. 

Creating a concise strategic marketing plan that will encompass the different elements of messaging, and planning for the content ahead of time is very crucial to the overall efforts. While the social media demands to be more dynamic, the messaging has to be consistent in a way that it does not deter the core meaning of the value of the product, and the principles of the organization. 

  

Splitpen: Our first story!

blog.splitpen.com

Remembering Steve Jobs!

World has lost a great prodigy! He shaped creativity in a new angle, enhanced technical world with plenty of attractive apples, and enriched lives with his creations.

O, you wizard,
Your Apple is an experimentative wonderland;
Your brain is a creative entanglement;
Your heart is a pristine heaven;
Your soul is a divine holiness;
The world will miss you and I miss you Steve! May you rest in peace with God’s blessings!

Your admirer
- Ram

Seattle Startup Day!

I had a chance to attend the Seattle ‘startup day’ today! The overall experience was relishing, there were few good speakers and some boring ones. The most striking factor, at least for me is, every time you go to such an event, people say the same thing. The message is simple and clear and if YOU listen carefully it strikes back louder & louder! It is all about ‘YOU’; how YOU do things, how YOU handle yourselves, how YOU motivate yourselves, how YOU carry yourselves etc. It is definitely a great reinforcement for me, to continue down the path of entrepreneurship. Especially, when a 20 year old telling you about his story and success. It was Kiip’s founder Brian, who was the very first speaker and probably the youngest guy in the whole camp telling his story, that’s definitely motivating. I was totally stunned to see a kid come out and tell you what to do. I felt happy and sad at the same time, happy because I got my energy back and motivated, sad because I felt I wasted few years already.

Not surprisingly a pattern that existed among the speakers was repeating a lot of ‘Fck’ words. I get that, people don’t give a shit about others; they don’t fcking care about what others think of themselves. They just do what they want to do! They wear their attitude; they pay the tribute to their creativity!

Most of the ideas boil down to - Plan -> Build -> Ship -> Measure -> Reiterate, the whole step. The quicker you can make the whole cycle the better it is. Another important aspect of doing something is to learn if it is the right thing to do at a given time. People talked about ‘failing fast’, you better fail fast and quick rather than lingering here and there, wasting your energy and probably others’.

Life is really short, it daunts me, and I am not surprised to hear others feel the same. I think fear is good; it helps you choose which path to take. You make adjustments along your way and every step you take is a guarantee towards realizing the meaning of your life. After all, who else can change your destiny, everything is up to ‘YOU’!

Google - sponsored search & auctioning

Google’s business model is certainly enviable, especially when one realizes Google’s profit margin. Google is bestowed to continue this growth at least for the foreseen future. Here is my take on Google’s advertising model…

Google follows an auctioning model and takes advantage of the competing businesses. Imagine you are a manufacturer of hard-drives, who wants to buy Google Adwords. The common words you would choose for advertising would be ‘hard drives’, ‘storage’, ‘backup’ etc. Now imagine if you have a competitor in your industry, which is often the case who also wants to buy the same adwords from Google. As a result Google can basically auction the adwords and can serve the best interest of the firm who pays the most.

For a moment, let’s side track and talk about auctioning. In auctioning you make more money, if there are more interested parties who are ready to buy your product. Guess what, the ‘real’ market value of the product will be close to the average of what the interested parties are willing to pay. But to be a winner of the auction you have to pay more, and more than the real value of the product. This means the auctioneer is the real winner!

Ok back to where we started…

In our example, the hard-drive manufacturer, not only have to pay more for their adwords because there are competitors in their industry, but also there are competitors for those adwords outside their industry (other industry verticals). Think about the other industries who would share the common adwords like ‘storage’ in our case, the container manufacturers, the public storage firms, the safe manufacturers all wants to use the same adword for advertising. Hence not only Google takes the advantage of competitors within an industry vertical, but also they take advantage across the industry verticals who share common words in their core business. Thus when there is growth in the market, Google is assured to reap money out of it.

Stock market vs. real estate

I have been perplexed, until I found the answer for, ‘Why the home prices did not get affected in the same manner as the stock market at the time of recession?

Recently, I have come across very convincing answers to this question and I would like to share the same with you folks.

Without going into the details of demand vs. supply, in short, if a product is surplus i.e. very low demand, then the price of the product should go down to reach the clearing point where the surplus goods will be gone. However, it so happens that the stock market quickly reacts to this theory compared to real estate, which is our original question. The reasons are that stock market is standardized and has high availability of information, as opposed to real estate. For example: One can get the financial statements of a company and see the performance, however one cannot have such intricate details for the real estate. The second reason is that there is more liquidity in the stock market, hence one can easily buy and sell stocks, whereas not in the case of the real estate. The other factor with real estate is that, people have an emotional attachment and bonding to the house they are in, which blocks them from buying\selling immediately. Hope this information helps!

A retrospection about my boyhood life...

Have you ever paused for few minutes to think about how your experience in the world has turned you into a matured person? I tried to do it few (may be several) years back; although the story I have is old, I just had the time to pen down it. When I retrospect my life, as a boy growing into an adult, I could point out a couple of differences in my maturity level that helped me understanding the world, the way it is.

[For those of you, who don’t know me, I grew up in India. Hence the stories I am telling may not be relevant in your country.]

I remember, on watching a popular Indian tooth paste ad during my boyhood days, I was tempted to write to the company pointing out the mistake that had happened to be in its ad. The ad did say that it had 20 ingredients, whereas it displayed around 23 ingredients in its visual form. I also bought the paste to confirm that there were only 20 ingredients and I did win! Afterwards, I was more certain that in their visual, by mistake they had added the extra 3 ingredients. But the day never came for me to write them a letter describing, what they had missed in their ad. In my mind, I was sure; if I had written such a letter, then I would have received some gifts, as a token of appreciation. As a boy, I was happy that I was able to spot out such mistakes on a leading brand; until the knowledge of world experience, which had taught me the truth that the visual form of the ad was on purpose to show the extra 3 ingredients. Although, I could not confirm with the company about the same, I could certainly tell with my experience (now growing) that the 3 ingredients were there to make the ad watchers feel that there are much more goodness in the paste, than it is in reality. As they say, “a picture is worth, a thousand words!” I could now see, why the company decided to deliberately mislead the audience. My experience taught me that how ethics is not all that important, when it comes to capturing people’s mind. Oops…business that’s a much better word for the last couple of words in the previous sentence. I told you, I am learning…Ok let’s go to the next now.

When i was young, seeing a rickshaw man working hard; sweating every day under the hot sun was really painful to me. For my age, I was quite a down to earth boy; I didn't like the idea of people sitting on rickshaws; pulled by the rickshaw men with all their muscle power. Ok, don’t imagine the rickshaw men to be strong, when I say 'muscle power!' I remember, most of the rickshaw men were skinny that they were barely grounded to earth, by the virtue of gravity! And that was a terrible scene for me to witness, “a man much thinner than the load, (literally the passengers here…)pulling the rickshaw” It was not until, I obtained a sense of maturity in life, I realized that in order for a man to live his life, he needs to earn money and money never comes for free. So, I reinstated my thoughts that hiring rickshaws is not all that bad; in fact, it would be better to give a struggling man, some business. Certainly at a young age, I was more worried about a fellow human’s struggle in pulling the rickshaw than the importance of money to lead one’s livelihood.

Anyways, I just wanted to leave you here with my stories; I could see the world imparting me the knowledge of how things work and not, how I (we) perceive things! Certainly, this is not the end, as I know that I would be learning, every second in my life, so as you! Seldom, we stop our clocks to think about all this stuff; I am happy that I did it… Hope you enjoyed my retrospection from boyhood to adulthood. Now, it's your turn!

Is MBA important to start a company?

For the purpose of this post, I have modified the original title "Is MBA important for a programmer to start a Tech Company?" as "Is MBA important to start a company?” in my opinion "programmer and tech company" on the original topic  is irrelevant. Someone who is good at what they do should be a good audience for this post.

I have asked the title question in several forums and to others. And if I were to conclude up on the answers; it is, may be MBA is useful. But not everyone can do MBA for many different reasons that we don't care from this post point of view. So if you want something to get going and your appetite for starting something is growing day by day, then you should at the least understand what is required for you to start a company? Especially when you have no experience in business models\marketing\margins. In the previous sentence, it is with intent I mentioned "no experience"; but having knowledge of the aforementioned domains by themselves, adds a great value to what you are planning to do.

My objective of this post is to distill the ideas that were mentioned on the original post. First and foremost, understand who your customers are? You would be doing injustice to your efforts and others involved, if you do not understand for whom you are trying to solve the problems. Once you have that work done and confident about your solution, pitch the ideas to people and get non-binding agreements, as mentioned in the original post. This step inherently takes care of two things for you; firstly, you know what the customers want and secondly, you care about the end user experience. Having done the above, should put you in a better position from the start. Now to get the next leap or getting close to where you want to be from the start; I have directly picked the takeaway about business from the original post, which is as below:

"1) a product or service that people want and are willing to pay for, and 2) a way of delivering that product or service, such that the amount of money you take in, is larger than the amount of money, it costs to deliver it.

That's it. There are a lot of tangential ideas, but most of them "orbit" that one. (Marketing, sales, margins, etc.) "

Enjoy the spirit of entrepreneurship and good luck with all your efforts!


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Building prototypes

Most of us knew that prototyping is a way to communicate quickly about what is possible with a given idea; an easier method of prototyping could be done via paper prototyping. The video "paper prototyping" illustrated below is a good one to get started with, if you are thinking about creating prototypes of your own.

 

Paper prototyping is a quick and an easier way to learn:

 

1. Is your idea, effective?

 

2. what your customers might be interested?

 

3. Find gaps in your idea, or fill in the missing pieces!

 

Once you collect the feedback from your paper prototyping, it might be a good idea to do a digital (software) prototype, using several tools that are available today. If you want to target a broader audience, then paper prototyping doesn't scale up and hence it would be worthy enough to invest in a digital prototyping. Based on my experience, I would recommend MS Expression Blend 3.0; it is a quick way to build your web portals or UI designs; bounded by SQL, or static data. I have used Visual studio and Power point in the past to build proto-types, but found that Expression Studio does a better job. How is Expression Blend better than others? One major aspect of the prototyping is the layout of the UI elements, Expression studio's layout is closer to human drawing when compared to the layout that you get out of other tools. But how does human drawing does better, over a polished look, exactly? To understand the difference, here is what I am talking about:

 

 

 

As you can see, the first combo box was done using power point and it is polished; while the second is done, using Expression Blend. When we use a polished outlook, the reviewers might tend to focus more on the aesthetics aspect of the design, rather than the design itself; that's how our brains work. So having a rougher sketch will help our brains to think broader and it does not funnel our thoughts.

 

Try it and share your thoughts!

 

Happy prototyping :)

Interesting China....

15 facts about china that will blow your mind (posted 2010-2)

The 19 Must-Know Chinese Consumer Companies That Are Taking Over The World And Growing Like Crazy

A fresh start to Formula 1 - M Schumacher is back!!!

I feel like I am one of those Geico caveman...not knowing that M Schumacher, my favorite driver returned to track to my once up on a time favorite sport Formula1...

I admit how outdated I am with the news...when I happened to glance the SPDHD a HD sports channel, I heard the name Schumacher then I thought it was Ralf Schumacher...but then when I saw the driver’s name was “M Schumacher”, I could not believe my own eyes, I searched the web to know that my favorite driver is indeed back on track...

Welcome back Schumi!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1xXV1R4yVY

Dear fans of M Schumi, hope Schumi rocks again and keep our adrenaline on the rush...Enjoy!

Although my enthusiasm for the game is not as high as it used to be...I have decided to watch at least two complete Formula 1 races this year...alright I got to go back to watching the Australian race...

M Schumi @ F1 - http://www.formula1.com/teams_and_drivers/drivers/7/

PS. My buddy Muthu was the one who created the interest in me for F1

Lot more left in speech to text

As you can see in the image below (done by Google CC) - the text inside the green box, you can't stop laughing once you understand that Vint Cerf was actually trying to say "free Wi-Fi service" and not " free WIFE service". This clearly shows that we have a lot more left to innovate in technology to better understand ourselves...



May be not pure speech to text helps analyze the conversation. The engine doing the work of analyzing should be powered with some intelligence and understand who is talking, their profile, the context in which the talk is going on, the audience etc etc... I am sure there are lots of companies working on this space.

But for now; with the current state of technology...we could get more such examples to mock at...

The cloud language - What's next with the internet

This is a cool talk for the nerds. Hey watch out especially for the segment where Vint quotes a phrase that is just awesome...the phrase is as below.

"i learn less and less about more and more until practically I know nothing about anything..."

My daily digest...

I get asked as to what websites I visit frequently; more on daily basis for news, science, interesting articles etc...

Here are the websites I much on:

News
http://www.techmeme.com/

http://www.wallstreetjournal.com/

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/

http://news.ycombinator.com/

http://arstechnica.com/

http://tech.alltop.com/ -> news aggregator

http://www.technologyreview.com/

http://www.engadget.com/

http://www.wired.com/

http://techdirt.com/index.php

http://techcrunch.com/

TIPS >>

http://lifehacker.com/

http://www.howtogeek.com/

Forums

http://superuser.com/

http://stackoverflow.com/

and visit my bro's delicious @ http://delicious.com/thirumalaivelu

Pat(R)en(D)ting

Pat(R)en(D)ting - To be read as tRenD in Patenting

Google's patent on location based advertising is yet another jewel added to their crown. This is definitely a patent that others in to online advertising would crave for.

http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/03/01/google-location-ads/

I see a trend in patenting.... when an era (like touch phone, location based ad)is shaping up; more and more start ups are formed while the big companies do their part in R&D and later in to acquisition based on the investment they are going to be making in the future. Once the new era is sure to achieve greater heights, companies rush to get their work patented so as to secure a strong hold for themselves in the era and wish to be acclaimed as the champions of the era.

Although Facebook and Google may be happier with their news feed and location based ads patent recently, Apple must be thrilled with their numerous patents it has won over the multi touch interface.

Mesh networking

Intel is getting heat; not from it's processor but from NEC

NEC demo'd their new communication interface, that is powerful that the USB and the PCI express. Ofcourse Intel had something in the pipeline with their Light Peak interface, that is capable of speedups up to 10Gbps, however NEC's new interface as demo'd is capable of speeds up to 16Gbps, that means Intel has to push back on their interface? And what happens to the USB and PCI express?

http://www.pureoverclock.com/story4352.html

http://legitreviews.com/news/7410/

Windows Phone 7 series...What's in there?

For more:
http://gizmodo.com/5471805/windows-phone-7-series-everything-is-different-now

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series-hands-on-and-impressions/

C# lock, is it good to use?

Often .NET C# programmers are accustomed with writing the following code block:

lock(someObject)
{
/// code here...
}

But what happens when the compiler sees the above code? It simply emits the code below:















The above code guarantees that the lock is released i.e. the monitor is released no matter even an exception occurs within the try block. That means the data the code might be manipulating within the try block might be corrupted. And corrupted data is prone to more corruption when the program keeps proceeding further, this is really bad for the user. So it is better to use the below pattern,

Monitor.Enter()
/// your code here...
Monitor.Exit()

By doing this you are at least guaranteed that you prevent corruption of data and fail fast. Failing fast is good, you get to the root cause of the problem directly and fix it quicker.

Avoiding Lock is good not just because of the corruption of data scenario, code using "try, finally" is a perf hit. Remember try, catch, finally is an over-head unless it is used in the right place.