Happy Diwali

On Occasion of Diwali I would like to wish all the readers of the blog a very happy Diwali. Due to the holiday season I am not putting any new post and trying to enjoy this festive season. However I am missing the most important person in my life this Diwali. I am sure the feeling would be mutual.

however for readers who are not aware about Diwali here is some information about Diwali from Wikipedia:-

Deepavali, or Divali is a major Indian festival, and a significant festival in Hinduism, Sikhism and Jainism. Many legends are associated with Diwali. Today it is celebrated by Hindus, Jains and Sikhs across the globe as the "Festival of Lights," where the lights or lamps signify victory of good over the evil within every human being. The festival is also celebrated by Buddhists of Nepal, particularly the Newar Buddhists.

In many parts of India, it is the homecoming of King Rama of Ayodhya after a 14-year exile in the forest.^[4] The people of Ayodhya (the capital of his kingdom) welcomed Rama by lighting rows (avali) of lamps (deepa), thus its name, Deepavali. This word, in due course, became Diwali in Hindi. But, in South Indian languages, the word did not undergo any change, and hence the festival is called Deepavali in southern India. South India celebrates it as Light of Lamps that fills the dark New Moon day(Deepavoli: Deepam=Lamp, Oli=Light(Tamil)). It is also marked in parts of Southern India as the day Lord Krishna defeated the demon Narakasura.

Diwali is celebrated on the first day of the lunar Kartika month, which comes in the month of October or November.

In Jainism it marks the nirvana of Lord Mahavira, which occurred on October 15, 527 BCE. The Sikhs celebrate Diwali for a different reason; on this day, the Sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind Ji, was freed from imprisonment along with 52 Hindu Kings (political prisoners) whom he had arranged to be released as well. After his release he went to Darbar Sahib (golden temple) in the holy city of Amritsar. There, he was greeted by Sikhs and many other people. In happiness they lit candles and diyas to greet the Guru. In India, Diwali is now considered to be a national festival, and the aesthetic aspect of the festival is enjoyed by most Indians regardless of faith.

To read more about this festival of light click here

Business Blogging - Technorati’s latest numbers

Barry Hurd at 123 Social Media took a nice task to build a metrics about Business Blogging. I agree with Barry that the latest number on blogging are hard to find sometime, so this is a quick post to Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere” report released this week. The very nice part about this report is that it pulls data from several other sources and really allows for businesses to understand how wide the marketplace is. He has pulled some bullet points from Technorati for the readers to skim over, but suggest to browse the original article for more details.

comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)

• Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
• Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million
• Total internet audience 188.9 million

eMarketer (May 2008)

• 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
• 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)

Universal McCann (March 2008)

• 184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US
• 346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US

77% of active Internet users read blogs

• Brands Permeate the Blogopshere - Whether or not a brand has launched a social media strategy, more likely than not, it’s already present in the Blogosphere. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate).

The following idea chart detailed a GREAT point about blogging for business:

Blogging has opened up unique opportunities.

Blogging has brought many unique opportunities to these bloggers that otherwise would not have been available. One in four have been invited to participate in an event as a result of their blog, one in five have contributed to a print publication as a result of their blog, and almost as many have found themselves on TV and/or on the radio.

If you look at the chart above- it highlights something that many business bloggers fail to leverage: blogging leads to additional exposure opportunities. It may be an chance for radio, print, television, or public speaking. All of those opportunities tie back into the “social media” aspects of blogging, and if done correctly the material created in radio, print, television, and speaking can all cycle back into a growing social media campaign.

Strategic Entrepreneurism

Though I am waiting to get my hands on the book Strategic Entrepreneurism in which Jon B. Fisher discuss about key issues for startups in the New Economy, but just noticed this article reprinted from the book on Sandhill. This is a small representation (though good to read) where Jon seems to have made an honest attempt to touch the American Education system which is state of crisis.

I would like to agree with Jon here as I truly believe that education is an important tool that helps you to broaden your worldview. Mahatma Gandhi once said “There will have to be rigid and iron discipline before we achieve anything great and enduring, and that discipline will not come by mere academic argument and appeal to reason and logic. Discipline is learnt in the school of adversity.” Further he opined “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Hence it’s of key imperative for education system worldwide to ensure sustainability as it is the benchmark for any fundamentally strong economy or country, and we cannot make an error to derail this. As the repercussions of this error could be strong and lets all face it’s an error creeping into the American Society. “An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” – Mahatma Gandhi.

So now not going much into the details or more quotes here is Jon’s article:-

It used to be that the state of the American education system was something you could often hear lamented in the teachers' lounge, but not very often in the board room.

Who could blame entrepreneurs for placing education low on their hierarchy of concerns? From Gates to Zuckerberg, the list seemed only to be growing longer with names of impressive people who had proven education irrelevant to their successful quest to change the world. That is, until now.

Entrepreneurs have recently started to stand up and take notice of a new era upon us, an era in which the next great commercial successes will be in industries like energy and power. Here the breakthroughs will be highly technical in nature and will be attained only by people with genuinely superior expertise and ingenuity in their fields.

There certainly won't be any shortcuts in this new model. To be sure, the days aren't gone in which a dropout can change the future of business with a line of computer code. But increasingly the success of American industry--and indeed, the fate of the world’s future--depends upon training and educating people who have the skills to crack substantially more complex codes of science and engineering, such as how to harness nuclear energy, how to deliver clean energy and how to desalinize water, to name just a few.

In other words, the rules for success in industry are changing to depend far more heavily on our education system, which was once the finest in the world, but is today on the brink of collapse.

We must restore our American universities to world leadership, as they participate in the battleground for our industrial preeminence in the 21st century and beyond.

Marketing Technology in Recession

As the US economy slows down, Indian companies face diminishing workload and lowering margins. Seeing certain withdrawal symptoms, rupee & stock market furiously fluctuating, it might be time for us to make the most of it by channelizing marketing in the right direction. I wish I could have said that this is not a time for worry; but I would further add that it’s a time for some strategizing.

As the US market slackens, Indian firms fear a danger; no matter what sector we are talking about. Of suffering lesser work, lesser profits and even the fear is sinking of having work taken away from them. However even the fact that we are going through turbulent times panic wouldn’t help us, rather we need to prepare ourselves well for what is to come. Organizations that had worked or are currently working to shape their marketing strategy for the downturn will emerge stronger when economic growth returns.

That is the trick. To make the most of what marketing costs offer you in a slump. As the economy slows down, this is the time you can leverage yourself to the utmost by investing in your image. If you present your strengths at the time of a slowdown, it puts you at an edge around your client. If you show results and enthusiasm at a time when all is not well, you are bound to reap benefits in the long run.

Instead of worrying over the US economic slowdown, it is a time of cost saving for most Indian companies. However pure cost saving would not lead you nowhere; hence we need to systematically think about rerouting our marketing dollar to get closer to our customer(s). That is the only way you can recover from loosing profit margins. When you concentrate on confidence building with clients at this point, you are bound to make a stronger statement that will stay with them much after the slowdown has recovered. You can focus on some image building, find newer clients during the slump, and who knows, you might win a whole new set of friends. This is the time where we need to dive deeper into our existing clients building stronger and longer ties.

It is up to the Indian industry to make the most of the situation now. If everyone’s cutting costs in the US, which is where most of India’s business comes from (it is Indian software industry's largest market with a whooping 61 per cent share), there are all the more chances that more varied work will flow into countries like India. However it does gives us the opportunity to explore opportunities of doing more central software or knowledge development instead of cloning processes that have simply been passed on by our Western counterparts.

So far we are primarily providing back-office services. There are little chances of doing premium work like coding and engineering management. So this might be a good time for Indian techies to learn the intricacies of the technology market as it works across the globe. This again requires us to undertake serious marketing so we are able to garner more work out of currently confused companies abroad that are not sure how they want to go about maneuvering the economic recession.

The flipside, once again to India’s advantage, is that companies don’t cut down on processes that are mandatory to day-to-day processes. They may instead cut down on more nonobligatory jobs like consulting. This gives an advantage to Indian companies that undertake tasks indispensable to routine needs of an organization. In an interview HCL chairman Shiv Nadar said, “Our work is the core of the client's business processes.” He says the company primarily focuses on technology services, which don’t impact their business in such a slowdown.

Innovation. That is another key to successfully rise out of the slowdown. Invest smart, get business that will impact you lesser and provide unique services at a good cost to new clients and old. This will boost your business now to propel outsourced work later. Indian technology firms can also look at exploring newer markets where they have not reached so far. With low costs, extended services and newer offerings, they can lure clients.

Technology for India is an area of excellence and it is time for us to invest and use global best practices for India’s benefit. If we provide the right services at agreeable terms, invest into the image building and infrastructure for the industry, we are likely to benefit in the long term.

Another Important aspect of the India IT is to create or develop or acquire the “Intellectual Property”. Any downturn or upturn we need to build and/or revise the IP as per the changing dynamism and a look into the future. According to Dale Wolf (http://www.perfectcem.com/) creating Intellectual property is a universal truth, whether a country is in a recessionary or in a growth mode ... that it is our intellectual property that enables us to better satisfied customers. An “IP” is what a company can differentiate itself from its friends known as Competition. The ability to create uniqueness in one’s process, delivery, implementation, etc. can provide the competitive advantage that is require to tied over any downturn(s). McDonald’s targeted service time for a burger is 7 minutes delivery, no matter which part of the globe you are.

Social Media is another innovative way to market your product & service. Worldwide, social media phenomena are catching at a fast pace than expected. No matter if you are college going student or a vice president of the company you are hooked into some or the other social networking sites. So can I safely say that you target audience is out on the social web, though the key attribute for you would be to identify these social media subsets where your prospects or target audience are networking. The phenomena and its strength is great however like every place or post I write about social media, I always like to provide a word of caution. It is not cheap and can easily derail your brand image if not done in a correct or effective manner. Simple tools like Twitter to listen about your product or organization to interacting with your target audience over Linkedin, or through blogging; the power of Social Media is enormous.

When in peace prepare for war. And that is what we ought to do. Utilize the time to strategize the marketing efforts/resources for reaping benefits in medium to long term.

Marketers, get ready for the social networks?

Marketers are continually hopping onto social media marketing as a perfectly productive means of reaching out to more and more people. Even if they are not able to measure the numbers yet, they are keen on using this tool as an effective means of creating the right buzz about themselves.

With enormous statistics produced by Facebook as an example, the Social Media space is one aspect that marketers, globally cannot afford to miss. In an innovative big to promote itself, Aquafina created a contest on video networking website MySpace for users to create a winning video. The reward was a trip to none-other-than the Sundance Film Festival. The brand has profiled itself on MySpace since 2006, filling in with podcasts and film festival updates. This was one of their most innovative and effective ways to reach out to the film community. The influence that social media marketing of this kind provides cannot be met with a single line ad.

Closer home, even Bollywood [s1] films are now are getting promoted on Facebook, YouTube and Orkut. Hence the films are getting popular even before it is released and the reader profile perfectly complimented the audience the film required.

Social media marketing can be a tricky game. If your existence on the web is simply a platform for your company, you might want to get involved with B2B media marketing that allows you to access the communities you specifically want to target. You can access this on networks like ITtoolbox or LinkedIn.

On the other hand, you can involve more publicly by hosting podcasts, webcasts and blogs for your brand on the numerous social networking websites with their readership of anything like a million. Since people are talking about you anyway, you might as well don the discussion hat and play along. It will only benefit your brand. Even companies to for better reach are making a series of online educational & promotional videos, podcasts and screencasts, available on the social media sites YouTube, Ning and Facebook. The famous bollywood actor Amitab Bachan, Aamir Khan and other are hooked to blogging. Marketing experts like Dale Wolf runs the perfect customer experience management (www.perfectcem.com) blog, Steve Kayser’s Expert Access newsletter has managed to achieve a phenomenal global subscription base of nearly 141,000 subscribers. These examples truly accentuate the importance of these next generation tools for marketers.

Twitter is another tool that companies all across are extensively using to connect with their customer, partners & son on.  My small research on companies & big names on Twitter could be accessed here. Additionally Peter’s enormous task showcase the companies that have embrace the Social Media could be accessed here and my take on it here

For those who have still not recognized the perfectly simple and productive marketing tool that social media provides, it is time to wake up and smell the coffee. There is no challenging the tremendous traffic that a good posting can attract. These will be people who can add to your business and a lot of them will be ones who will keep coming back to your website.

Thanks to Web 2.0 you can use this master of a marketer to attract more links to your website or the company. The idea is to create a posting or an advertisement that connects to the user on the website you are choosing to harness. Added to this is the low cost advantage that all of us are eventually happy to employ. Search engines also pick up websites that receive natural links from known domain names. These are some first hand advantages of social media marketing that many of us are meaning to ignore so very far into its development.

It’s easy to assume that most of the traffic generated thus will not be productive. But a trend that has been noticed is that while initially you might see a spurt of visitors, the numbers will stabilize soon after. And this will be the number to reckon with. It could be clients, customers, partners, potential partners, All of whom need to be on your list. It is also not presumptuous to say that a lot of the secondary traffic that visits your website could be people interested in what you provide.

Simply advertising on Web 2.0 is an efficient means of attracting traffic to your website. Because the number of users is so high on this case, it adds to the traffic you will eventually attract. Again, the only trick is to make it available to your target audience because the click, as we all know, is only a flick of a second.

While the profits of such marketing do not add up immediately or even evidently, it will generate a linkage on the web that will support your business through mentions, connects and recommendations. Social media marketing perfectly compliments your other forms of marketing. It can even be a support system for you as this is one means of communication that has no time span or recurring costs involved.

Another term touted with as much ease as social media marketing these days is ‘social media optimization’. With this, brands aim to alter their website such that it makes it easily searchable and receives more mention on blogs and podcasts etc. Adding a blog to your own website is a greater way of going about it. If your website is static, it will get more dynamic with regular updates and with several links connecting to anything that you post.

Social media marketing can therefore be a great means to promote your site through social media networks as well as within 3D worlds like Second Life and There.com.

Instead of randomly rushing through this sea of information, marketers prefer to build on a specific idea for brand awareness and then encourage brand attention and feedback with increased albeit more casual visibility. What cautions them is the user feedback that can also be negative. But one cannot forget that users in this case also become contributors and when the product is good, gladly act as ambassadors. As more threads are attached to your name, viral marketing picks up at an unprecedented pace. And this is where the crux of the game lies.

Marketers are therefore now busy fine tuning themselves to the new needs of this growing media that cannot be ignored. Social media marketing is far removed from traditional concepts of marketing. This makes it a more challenging medium but one that can be most effective in the medium to long run.

Intellectuals are still pondering over measurements that most correctly define the reach of this new media. There are four broad measures identified so far—audience, content tracking, online media analysis and online market research. Whatever the measurements and whatever its reach, opinion is unanimous for social media marketing. There seems to be nothing like it in the near future.

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[s1]The Indian Film Industry like Hollywood

The ROI of Social Computing

Today while digging for my daily dose of articles, I came across this one by Matthew Hodgson on Social Computing Magazine. It was interesting to identify some of key highlight from his article. The most prominent for me was that the activities companies (unfortunately) investing in social media without clear objective, and with high expectation of quick returns. The underlying attribute of any new age marketing is fundamentally similar to the traditional marketing which is of defining your goals & objectives. The element that even with the so called new age marketing and social media marketing you require is of being “persistently patience” . However it seems to be the missing link in companies investing in activities like social media marketing. Hence you can see much prominent companies starting things like twitting, blogging, & so on, however never had the patience to reap benefits over a period a time.  Another somewhat similar attribute that I noticed among the traditional and new age marketing is lack of clarity in its ROI. Even the fact that we have best know analytics supporting the web marketing which can definitely support our decision however cannot provide us with accurate ROI in case of social media.    

I agree with Matthew argument on investment by companies in social computing tools is paying off however as mentioned you have to be persistently patience with this initiative. It is no longer forcing people (even internal employee) to make it a part of their daily life, rather it is about community building and management. Give them what they like and where they feel a part of.

Not going much in details here is Mathew’s article:

The rise of blogs, lifestreaming, and social media in business has put a focus on the overall return on investment. What is the real value in social computing? It turns out, quite a bit.

I made a presentation just recently in Sydney to local government on intranets and how I think they're dead.

Around 10 years ago, we held great hopes for our intranets. For our investment [1] we expected the technology would deliver cost savings, working efficiencies, collaboration and best-practice knowledge management. By 1998, we'd spent about $10.9 billion USD [2] on corporate intranets, yet our ideals about collaboration remained relatively unrealised with COIs ignoring the strategic value and assuming that an intranet's only purpose was to serve as an information repository. After spending billions of dollars we'd received little more than an electronic filing cabinet.

Part of the failure to realise the value of intranets was our misplaced trust that the newly emerging Web technology would somehow deliver something that is essentially a people process, because collaboration and knowledge management is about people, not technology. The other failure is in our management practices and a missunderstanding about how people work --; that information is somehow a product, a Word document for example, that, like an engine in a car factory, is produced by the end of a hard days work.

There's no return on investment to be had in this paradigm. As my AppGap colleague Jon Husband writes in his article The Design of Knowledge Work, it reflects a very Tayloristic view of the world, where efficiency is to be had by motivating workers to behave in more efficient ways, rather than to think smarter. Certainly, you can offer better tools like large intranet repositories with a wealth of information inside, but the synthesis of information into knowledge is a difficult task when the person who created a piece of information, or a similarly empowered individual, is not there to help you know where to look, understand what you find, and then assimilate it.

The truth of most modern work is that we analyse data and information and reach out to our networks in order to gain access to knowledge. We collaborate on ideas and then have a burst of work that reflects the sharing of ideas. And, of course, once we have produced something, we then tend to socialise it again within our networks in order to refine the ideas we've produced. This is knowledge work in action and people are at the centre of it.

Of course, when I say collaborate I mean individuals engage in a range of activities, from using the telephone or meeting face-to-face, to using Twitter or engaging others through blogs, in order to reach out to people (not technology like traditional intranets), in order to socialise ideas, create new thinking, help refine old ideas and make them better.

This is where modern organisations find their investment in social computing tools is paying off. Tools, like Twitter, give employees instant access to their trusted network of colleagues, friends and experts. Blogs allow people to have access to other people's thoughts in a storytelling style that communicates in a much more personal and effective way than a clinical report ever can. And then, of course, individuals can comment and ask the author a direct question and have a discussion that leads into the use of other social computing tools.

Its this access to people that the investment in social computing tools brings. When considering closing down the walls to applications like Facebook or Twitter, consider the impact on workers inability to access the experts in their professional networks. When considering bringing social computing tools into the organisation look at how they will support and strengthen communication within your internal communities of practice. This is the ROI for social computing and when used as part of an array of tools that help connect people, facilitate communication and collaboration, then it can rejuvenate your intranet and make it live!

Searching for Social Networking’s Enterprise Groove

Another recommended read by Louis Columbus at the PerfectCEM blog. I must admit that PerfectCEM started by my ex-colleague Dale Wolf was one of the catalyst for me to start blogging.

So here is the article.

Despite how quickly integrated social networking is becoming in enterprises, it still isn’t scaling to meet the most complex problems faced today.  The well-known success stories of customer service being made more accountable and responsive are emanating out of how @ComCastCares, @JetBlue, @SouthWestAir and other companies are using Twitter as a means to better solve customer problems.  Before social networking, these customers would be relegated to workflows that treated customers more like cattle than people who made paychecks possible.  Twitter, like other social networking sites, has an instantaneous level of accountability to it, and is cutting through processes that got in the way of serving customers, creating a catalyst for process change. 

Making Social Networking Pay By Simplifying Quoting and Ordering Workflows

Getting ready to present at the SAP Configuration Work Group Conference last week on the topic of Web 2.0 and its impact on sell-side processes and development tools and applications, the point of how far social networking needs to go became clear. The SAP CWG Conference is attended by developers, system engineers, managers and enterprise-level geeks.

Instead of giving them a Social Networking 101 presentation, I decided to take the more challenging route and attempt to explain how social networking’s customer information could revolutionize sell-side processes, and how this also changing application development. Of the two points, the one of how social networking is changing app development resonated with this audience. 

With the audience being SAP-centric, the focus on how transaction pipelines, specifically how their Internet Pricing & Configurator (IPC) and Variant Configurator-based workflows could be made more relevant to customers by the infusion of customer insight from social networking apps was presented. Making online ordering capable of anticipating the preferences and needs of customers through the analysis of social networking data, defining service and support plans that are as unique as each customer, and tailoring product customization strategies based on insights gained are all potential areas that could benefit.  These workflows are beyond reliance on APIs and even XML.

Social Networking’s’ Impact on App Development

The more I worked through these process areas of transaction pipelines, online ordering, and stock-balancing service requests from resellers for example, the more it became clear that enterprise-based form development relying on AJAX had the potential to bring customer insights from social networking apps. Imagine being able to have an enterprise form that had all relevant transaction data complete with real-time updates from Twitter, Facebook or any other social networking app regarding conversations with the customer?  Or being able to see who cross-shopped and then purchased a customized product and what they had been promised in terms of delivery date?  This is beyond a CRM system or an order management system; it is the ability to see how an enterprise makes and keeps commitments to customers and the real-time results of being accountable and transparent.

Despite this appearing to be futuristic, I did find examples of enterprise working diligently to integrate social networking data into these process areas.  Toyota has done this on their hybrid new product development and introduction (NPDI) process workflows, in addition to another auto manufacturer working to resolve dealer complaints due to parts outages by using social networking feedback. 

Key Take-Aways

From the conversations with the audience after the presentation last week, the following take-aways emerged.  It’s interesting to note that many SAP customers had sent their development and programming engineers there to learn more about using IPC and Variant configurators to support new selling strategies.  Their insights are provided below:

• The majority spoken with are relying on J2EE-based programming approaches with ABAP integration to support new selling strategies. A few had worked with AJAX for complex online forms.  AJAX, even in this enterprise-centric audience, had lots of interest.
• SAP’s enterprise focus is to bring what they are calling harmonization to ERP data so that sales quotes can be produced directly from that system, previously CRM data had been used.  Harmonization sounded a lot like integration, and it was great to see SAP product managers speak about social networking as a part of their future direction and their use of Wikis and other socnets internally.
• Customers’ perceptions of delivery performance and order accuracy as measured through social networking queries (Twitter) are getting attention by SAP developers.  On this topic I found a dichotomy in this developer community.  There are those developers who see social networking as necessary for bring greater accuracy, accountability and immediacy to customer feedback and those that see existing e-mail systems as sufficient. Between the two groups, one developer on his own had attempted to build out an app that would give real-time customer satisfaction ratings with delivered products over time.  This was a reverse-grading application that had the customer rate his company with every shipment that arrived.  It’s a great idea, using social networking to quantify every order delivered to every customer.

Summary
Personally, I like hanging out with developers and programmers at a conference like this.  I learned quite a bit and also found that social networking’s influence on application development, from tools and apps to code being written, is growing.  The bottom line is that social networking has the potential to greatly impact these complex, ugly and often chaotic processes companies rely on.  The lag time will be the development of app tools that give these developers the opportunity to architect entirely new approaches to solving these problems.