Reaching-Out Online

Bangalore Bus Branding

2009-07-28T06:03:00.000-07:00

Big 10: New routes introduced by BMTC in Bangalore, with ultra new branding

The Big 10 branding is refreshing! For a change someone took the bold step of coming up with something really different. I am surprised on how the branding might have slipped through the babus in the government - whoever convinced the govt. that we should go with this did an awesome job!

Talking about branding, many buses in Bangalore have the following red 'strokes' on the sides and back- I am not sure what they signify, but at first, second and few more instances they look a bit silly to me! Definitely a bold step, but could have been done better? The bus is an insect with legs and wings, or it is an organism with red blood in its veins, signifies the chaos the buses have to go through each day - what could the inspiration have been?

Ogilvy on ROI

2009-07-27T15:59:00.000-07:00

Ogilvy said this decades ago: "When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative'. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product."

As in my earlier post, finally advertisers are catching up!

I think Ogilvy would have simply loved the online medium, with it's immense possibility of almost real-time measurement. The articles they (O&M) wrote to promote themselves (again, decades ago) were ROI oriented - here are some examples: "How to create corporate advertising that get results", "How to make your sales promotions more profitable", "How to create food advertising that sells" - could have translated very well into modern day webinars.

Moving Ads: Advertising on Train Exteriors

2009-07-26T07:19:00.001-07:00

Above is an image of Rajdhani train from Delhi to Bangalore, at Bangalore station.

The first three bogies had wall to wall advertising on the outside - of Airtel and if I remember correctly of another brand or so.

Looks impressive! and must be quite a sight for watchers as it moves through villages and towns!

Mass consumer brands should definitely go for it - phone companies, middle-class soap brands, chocolate & ice-cream brands, etc could be good candidates.

Buses and aircrafts have taken similar initiatives - let me look around :-)

Pay for Performance Mainstream Advertising?

2009-07-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

"Coke, HUL Moving To Pay-For-Performance Advertising"
http://in.reuters.com/article/paidmediaAtoms/idIN16055381620090721

Cool! Finally the advertisers are getting real and soon the competition might too!!

Would love to see the creative folks of TV and print who move around in shorts and pony tails (confession: I was like that long time ago) turn to words like ROI, sales impact, revenue share, variable payments!!

While people should not stop making coooool ads, it takes a leap of faith to realize (based on hard data) that a pure text ad can generate a higher response than a neat looking image with a celebrity.

About time that advertisers and advertising agencies (and production houses and directors and cameramen) start looking at data. Else of course they are welcome to create pieces for museums and personal collections (another confession: as I will do at some point in time :-))

Do Coaching Posters work? Would Word-of-Mouth Work Better?

2009-07-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

Ironical that there are so many coaching posters near the Allahabad university!

In any case would these posters really be working for the advertisers? For a community that is as connected as the students, I think word-of-mouth is the only thing that might be working.

To make their service different and 'remarkable', the professors or coachers could try some of the following:

Put up a blog with generic advice - e.g., how to approach an exam, how exam patterns are changing; if of value, this will get forwarded in mail
Put up at least one question each week, as a blog - something that students can crack their heads on (more word-of-mouth), and post answers as comments
Setup communities and fan pages on Orkut, Facebook - existing students will become part of this, and their friends will see this too. Focus of Facebook fan page could be to answer questions from students

Of course it would be easy for others to replicate. Good content (teaching) would definitely help!

Colleges Can Leverage Word of Mouth

2009-07-05T01:46:00.000-07:00

Recently a relative of mine was asking me about which engineering college should her son opt for. The son had got a decent all India rank (CET?), and stood a good chance of getting into a good college.

I thought a bit and amazingly I thought of the same things I was under the impression some 20 years ago! CS at REC (now NIT) Trichy is good. Suratkal is good (Chemical?). Mechanical at NIT Rourkela is good. In general computer science is good. All impressions I had formed decades ago!

Has the world really changed, or am I woefully out of tune? Well I guess both might be true!

One thing is for sure, of course – word of mouth sticks! The impressions I formed, for right or for wrong, have stuck a very long time.

I guess most colleges would love to leverage such impressions, and influence impressions in the first place.

Here is what colleges ought to do:

Create information newsletters and mailing lists, department and domain specific if possible
Create successes – journal papers, seminar participation, conduct seminars in college
Industry consulting – projects, lectures
Leverage alumni – have strong linkages with alumni through hiring, consulting, mailing lists, seminars, guest lectures, etc
Reach out to wider audiences through in-campus summer workshops thrown open to public
Create domain specific portals of general and academic interest
Participate in Top-10 kind of lists, or create one of one’s own on portals, etc

Providing something of value, to a wider audience, and creating a positive impression – the beginning of word of mouth.

Infosys: A Branding Oppotunity Lost

2009-06-26T06:44:00.000-07:00

I was recently at Infosys's training facility in Mysore to drop my niece who was joining Infosys. Having heard a lot about the world's largest training facility, and expecting warm hospitality, and a dekko around the campus for a few tips, I was rudely surprised when we had to stand outside the campus gate for about 3.5 hours in a rough line, in the rain and sun.

With so many parents who had come to drop their kids from different parts of the country, it was a big opportunity of word of mouth lost by Infosys, by not providing even the most sparse hospitality. Even more unpardonable with Indians known for their hospitality, and Infy considered an Indian company to the core!

No facility to eat or drink in the walkable and visible vicinity, no roof to hide from the rain or sun, and no loo! What else could have gone wrong with their planning?

Religeous believers and brand loyalists

2009-06-14T11:46:00.001-07:00

Religeous believers and brand loyalists are quite similar?

they hardly ever switch loyalties
both will fight for their brands
once they form an opinion, they hardly ever question it
they believe anecdotal infomation

Autorickshaws, Bidding and Google Adwords

2009-06-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

Autowallahs not going by meter, on late weekday evenings, and asking for their "bidding" is always a bit irritating. But look at it another way - if we are not irritated by Google's bidding framework on Adwords, why do autowallahs irritate us? Google charges us basis what other users could pay us, and we need to bid accordingly. Autorickshaws do the same - they ask for what they feel others could pay!

IIM Ahmedabad Website: Reflection of the Brand?

2009-01-17T23:35:00.000-08:00

Does the website of the India's best management institute - Indian Institute of Management(IIM), Ahmedabad, reflect the institute's brand value?

I think it is an emphatic NO!

If one were to go by only the website to assess the institute's brand value, I think the institue would not figure in the top 20.

Here is how I would rate the institue's website on the below parameters, on a scale of 1-10, 10 being excellent:

Overall Brand Positioning: 3
Design: 4
Usability: 3
Establishing thought leadership: 5
Marketing/traffic ready: 5
Showcases Industry Linkage: 4

I think a marketing student of IIM-A should take this as a project - what would it take to turn the website into a $100 million brand?

Unrealistic Expectations from Paid Search

2008-11-23T05:22:00.000-08:00

It is one thing that Paid Search is measurable, and another that we want to measure it in a completely incorrect manner.

Paid search (and digital marketing) is not a panacea for all of one's shortcomings
It should replace the focus on making good products/ offering good services
It does not replace good prospect management
It does not replace, in many cases, human communication (face to face, phone, personal emails, etc)
In short it does not replace anything you would do with a prospect you meet at a trade show.

Paid search is only the beginning of a relationship. Post that it can still take the same time to close a sale, as when the lead has been acquired through another channel. Of course, it is important that one benchmarks the cost of lead acquisition through different channels correctly.

Innovative targeting, and monetization of shelf space

2008-11-21T05:06:00.000-08:00

Tags on shelfs at Crossword, Indiranagar, Bangalore. If done well, not very intrusive, and quite innovative!

In-plane (aircraft) Advertisements: Step in the right direction?

2008-11-17T22:03:00.000-08:00

NDTV ads in a Kingfisher flight. Can go well with the decor!

Could Air Tickets be Free?

2007-08-12T01:44:00.000-07:00

Could an airline subsidise air ticket to almost zero cost, through in-air advertising?

In-air advertising could be on the audio-video system provided in (some) planes, or poster on the walls and roofs, or pamphlets in the back-pockets.

You think people would simply close their eyes in deep meditation to skip the advertisements? Then lets do this - they get a refund on their ticket based on a quiz they take before they deplane - the quiz tests them on the ads they saw during the flight!

But realistically, how much would advertisers pay for an in-flight ad. Or put another way, how much would one pay for a person's attention? Let go about it in a systemic manner - lets begin with how much advertisers pay for TV spots or newspaper ads. Then we can move onto calculating the attention span of a customer. More of these in later posts.

Micro-payments: Let Eveyone Make Money

2007-02-21T19:34:00.000-08:00

The great thing about Web2.0 is that everyone can participate. Everyone can add to the content. But does everyone get to make money?

Consider three scenarios:

Amazon, a commercial marketplace, with users adding reviews and ratings. Users don't get anything for adding a review, Amazon does. (Of course, users get to read other people's reviews, and make informed decisions. A bit like Pay it Forward, but I will leave the larger implications to another post.)

Another site, with a lot of user generated content, displays ads to generate revenue. Again the users get to participate in generating the content, but not in the earnings.

Yet another site, gets users to generate lots of content and eye-balls, and waits to cash out in a sale to a larger player. Again the users who generated the content in the first place lose out.

Put micro-payments into place, along with all its shortcomings (!), and let everyone participate in the earnings, including the people who put those apps up, as brokers. Of course micro-payments is not going to be a panacea, but it is worth taking the web in that direction.

Micro-payments: An Alternate to Adsense?

2007-02-21T18:26:00.000-08:00

The success of the web has been it's being predominantly free. And with web2.0 coming in, it is more free than ever before. And how can you beat a craigslist, which is almost 100% free.
But the larger question is how sustainable is it? We will revisit Craigslist in a later post, and build a case around that, too - but later.

For now I wish to tackle the problem , as i perceive, of the business model of most web2.0 companies based on sweat, free content, and adsense revenue. Generate lots of traffic, and get people to go to other sites, so that you can make money. And people probably go to other sites that are similar. And I think this model is fundamentally flawed.

So I would like to turn the whole model on it's head. I would like to make the whole content paid. Yes. All content.

The whole web would work on micro payments. Visit a site, read a page - pay $0.001 cent or some such. The amount you pay could depend on user ratings, frequently visited, etc (just the way a lot of web2.0 works).

Of course there are tonnes of problems implementing such a system - has the page been read, should children not browse the net, payment a function of time spent on the page, cost of implementing micro-payments more than the payments, what is the payment aggregator (each of this will potentially become a post) - but it is not flawed like the model of getting people to go away from your shop, if you wish to make any money.

Why Adsense is Flawed

2007-02-21T08:14:00.000-08:00

You wish to make money. Sure.

You can write. So you decide to be a journalist. You wish to write and be paid for it. That is understandable.

So you write. Publish it on the web. Popularize it, get people to come to your blog. Then you pray that they go away, so that you can make money. This is the difficult part.

Well that is how adsense works! You make money when people go away from what you have to offer!!

Now, we know Google has made tonnes of money out of this, and there are businesses that are making a lot of money purely out of this sort of thing. And every now and then I come across people whose whole business model is to depend on adsense to make money, and some of them are simply being naive.

To me, something like adsense is flawed at the roots, and would be replaced by something better in a few years. Again, to stick my neck out, adsense would go when all content is paid - but that is for a later post.

My Do's and Dont's about adsense:

If you have loyal readership, and are sure that readers will comeback, even if they go away, use adsense.
Use adsense when it is logical for users to explore further before they make a decision, or you have nothing more to offer.
Dont distract users from your main content.
Let adsense look distinctly different from the look and feel of your site (not sure, but gut-sense).

SMS Yourself to Salvation

2007-02-20T16:48:00.000-08:00

"Reach out to God! Make offering(Rs 10-Rs 150) via SMS! Sms to 64655 @ Rs4/msg. ..."

This is a message I got a couple of weeks ago. So the world has evolved from the days when pujas could be offered on the net!

Salvation is just an SMS away. What else? Marriage? "I do." Simple enough to SMS. Divorce? "Talaq. Talaq. Talaq." Not tough.

How about sex? Why not? Here is what a marketing message (sms) might look like - "Reach out to the most beautiful women in Kasauli. Choose from: Meena: Rs 500. Munni: Rs 750. Mira: Rs 1000. SMS 66666 @ Rs4/msg. Our trusted associates with have safe sex with your chosen one. It is the thought that matters."

Philosophers, seers and saints would love this. Let everything, save eating, happen from a distance. Disengage from the worldly matters. Let SMS be the way to distance yourself from reality, and lead you to salvation. Of course, marketers would love this too!

Second Life: A Marketer's and Philosopher's Delight?

2007-01-15T04:43:00.000-08:00

Attention of potential two million active users (and rapidly counting) is surely something each marketing manager would like to get a pie of. More about this another day. For now here is an interesting page to track (complete with linden $ charts, conversion rates, volume on SL, etc!):http://secondlife.reuters.com/

And here I am sitting alone, with $L 0 in my pocket:

It is always refreshing to think about the Zen philosopher's story: "Am I dreaming about the butterfly, or is it the butterfly dreaming about me?"

There is an interesting story in Mind's I, by Stanislaw Lem, touching briefly on the dichotimy between virtual and real existence:
http://www.usfca.edu/philosophy/pdf%20files/princess%20ineffabelle.pdf

Mind's I, by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, is a real good read exploring in some depth real and virtual worlds.

What ever the reality, I shudder to think that some day Ray Bradbury's "The Pedestrian" will be a reality, thanks to Second Life and the like.

Contextual Mobile Ads

2007-01-02T18:40:00.000-08:00

Each day I get a few SMS from my credit card, or my mobile service provider to spend some money and get get some cash back, or pay some cash upfront and get a few SMS free. The credit card ones get deleted the moment I see them, and the SMS ones I probably delete them half way.

Let me not even talk about voice marketing cold calls that I get on my cell.

So what could be a bit more innovative and relevant? Could contextual ads work in the mobile domain?

Idea 1: Say I am having a conversation with a friend, and we talk about a book the other person has read, and I evince interest in getting hold of the book. And the moment I get off the phone I get a message that says, to order such and such book SMS xxx to 2345, or something similar. Looks too severe? Would this be considered breach of privacy? What if the mobile company assures that no one is really listening to the conversations - it is only the intelligence of the algorithm that throws up the ad? How different would it be from traditional contextual advertising on the web?

Idea 2: Advertisers pay you to advertise. Of course. Now what if they pay you to have their marketing message as your ring tone? You use Nescafe's message as your ring tone, and you get, say, Re 1 for each full cycle of the message, to a unique listener, each day. The payment could come in the form of a credit in the monthly bill from your service provider, or some other mechanism. Part listing could entail a part payment. And of course you would carry the ringtone of the advertiser who pays the max - the highest bidder wins!

Directory of Indian Next-Gen Sites

2006-12-28T20:06:00.000-08:00

Photo
Picsquare, SnapGalaxy,

Business
Doctor-fixit, dimdim, TechMirchi, CarWale, Compare India

Gadgets
Tech2

Travel
ezeego1

Education
tutorvista

Gaming
Zapak, IndiaGames, Jump Games

Directory of Indian Web2.0 Portals

2006-12-28T18:22:00.000-08:00

Local Search Engines
Guruji

Local Classifieds
We-Exchange, Indyapage,

Vertical Search
Bixee

Music
sangeetix, dhingana

Social Networking
techTribe, humsubka, apundesi, yo4ya.com, yaari, hooeey

Travel
meratrip.com, TravelOTravel, Ok Tata Bye Bye, merasnap, Make my trip, ClearTrip, Holiday IQ

Social Bookmarks
pixrat

Very Niche
Sanskrit Voice

Reviews
Burrp, Mouthshut

Videos
KonkanTV

Jobs
CampusChai, Jobs4freshers

Web2.0: Two line reviews

2006-12-17T06:48:00.000-08:00

My two-line review of Web2.0 kind of sites. Of those web2.0 sites that appear in the first 100 sites as ranked by Alexa.

MySpace: I am surprised that it has come so far up. I have used it a bit, and found it quite clumsy, non sticky. Would be interesting to find out the number of page views per active registerd member, and compare with other such sites, say Orkut.

YouTube: Truly transformational! An aside: we all have become active producers. More production less consumption. How would this effect advertising? For a later post.

Orkut: Very clean and fresh. Quite unassuming, but fairly sticky. Would be interesting to know how else the traffic can be monetised. Apart from adsense, I mean.

Wikipedia: Lots of neat information. My wife actually uses this quite a bit, preparing for her basic electrical engineering lectures! And now the results pop up with fair regularity in the first few of Google search.

Blogger: Its no newcomer. Wonder if blogger was the first of its kind. It could do with some more templates. Changes in templates should not lose the link information, etc.

Amazon: Should I call it web2.0? Ah well let me grudge this big daddy a little cool-ness. Has defined and adopted much of web2.0. Is redefining web2.0 for the enterprise.

Megaupload: Dont know where this cropped from. Seen once, used never. Offers more space than is available on my system at any time. Guess it is a matter of perception - can the message move from amount of space (which will get commoditized) to something more valuable - ease of retrieval? adding value to data - BI? What else?

Fotolog: Dont understand this - is this a mistake? Google page rank seems to completely ignore this site. How can this feature higher than flickr?

RapidShare: Looks like we need to forget about this. It has become a paid service. They did not have the deep pockets to support the server, bandwidth costs? Shakeout in the web2.0 world?

Craiglist: It is vast! The interface can be very deceptive, but there is a lot happening under the folds. In Bangalore specifically there is not so much happening, but I think it could have a great future. For me it really is a case study of how a pure text interface can be so useful.

Flickr: Deceptively easy to use. A big leap of faith, where you can share anything with anyone.

Hi5: Frankly, I dont know how far any of these networking sites will go. Somebody has to do the next level of thinking... So much production, so little consumption.

Facebook: Ditto as above.

Xanga: Frankly, I need to get a bit deeper into this. Do stay tuned.

Friendster: Not another!

Photobucket: Looks OK. Hah, you thought you would get more, eh?

Google Answers Bids Adieu

2006-12-13T18:26:00.000-08:00

If Google Answers has gone, can Yahoo and other be far behind?

Market Research Service Focus?
Compared to the Q&A services reviewed so far on this blog (myLot and Yahoo Answers) Google Answers was really the serious kind. Could see a lot of market research kind of questions being asked on the site, and some being answered.

Here is a sampling that got answered, for $200 apiece:
"List of Professional Wine Storage Faciliites in the US for Private Collectors"
"Radio and TV stations reaching out to "hyper-connected kids" - this one needed case studies.

And here are some that did not get any formal response (again $200 apiece):
"Formula and techniques for Electro-Polishing liquid of Chrome Cobalt alloys"
"Costa Rica online gambling" - need names of the 2000 odd online gambling companies, annual revenues, employees, public traded, etc...

Not Enough Participation
Over the last four and half years, Google got the following number of posts
Category (no of posts)
Arts and entertainment (2749)
Business and money (8639)
Computer (4372)
Family and home (1172)
Health (2399)
Reference, education and news (3120)
Relationships and society (851)
Science (1624)
Sports and recreation (1096)
Miscellaneous (944)

So over four and half years they got about 27,000 posts, or less than two posts each day, for each of the catogories.

And a quick math on the turnover on the site:
The revenue figures on four random pages on the site were $185. 95, 225 and 81, which works out to be $146.5 for 25 questions. Which works out to $158k for 27k posts through the life of this site. Not much really (and Google gets only 25% of the turnover)! I dont think it is significant even if you add the adsense revenue, which must have picked up in the last couple of years.

Observations on this Model
- People are quite generous with tips! $100 on a $200 job!
- But to be fair, some of the $200 questions need a lot of work, and might have cost more in the 'outside' (or should I say 'inside') world.
- The answers are public! Private market research is not.
- Lot of info is based on online search itself. Some do pick up the phone and confirm, before posting answers. On monetizing online search, I guess this is how Google might have started this service - move to move up higher the service value chain, but could not gather enough momentum.
- Some even showcase their search practice (Googlers popularizing Google's search capabilities?)

What could have been different?
Ratings are good, but what if you dont like the answer? Can you withhold payment? Reducue payment? If a person who has a previous consistent lower payment, could that be a factor in the actual payment made? E.g., the payment amount could be value*avg rating.

Is Yahoo Answers too like myLot?

2006-12-02T21:11:00.000-08:00

Pardon me if I am a bit cynical about this answers community thing. It sure does build community, but how relevent? And is it really a serious community? With portals adding features to try and make users come back again and again, and actively participate, they seem to foster a lot of junk.

Here is an example from Yahoo Answers:

Somebody asked a question: "How much money exists in the world?"

I would imagine it to get some serious responses. But just in the first six minutes it got seven answers, and some of them are below:

"It's an infinite number"
"just a little more than i have"
"Ask Bill Gates and Ruppert Murdoch. They've got most of it."
"no, but i need more of it"
etc...

It seems people are out there just to generate activity!

What is myLot? Not much, I guess

2006-11-24T07:55:00.000-08:00

Their definition is "myLot is a growing community of individuals from around the world who enjoy sharing information, meeting new people, and helping each other out."

'Helping each other' - now, what is that, huh? Helping each other with questions such as "Do you have a car?", "Do you like muffins?" or "Do you have a car?" And they actually got 114, 8 and 27 responses as of last count!

But what ties people together is "Members of the community are rewarded for their valuable contributions through monthly earnings payouts." Is that hope or reason (thanks Venkat!)??

I don't know about web2.0, all that about building a community, which in this case is aLot of nonsense, but it surely exposes the human nature. Or maybe it is simply a reflection of life - what sense does either make :-)

Feed Readers: Good Eating?

2006-04-06T02:14:00.000-07:00

A lot of Web 2.0 is about aggregation. There’s just so much out there; users want a lot, but need to find new, more interesting, more ‘fun’ ways to sift through the mind-boggling mass of information. Search is just one aspect – you’ve got to have the information rated, perhaps tagged, then you have to facilitate sharing and recommendations.

Syndicated content is now consumed at impressive rates, and feed readers have been around for a while, saving users time and effort. Diverse sites and sources can be monitored, and the user can access almost real-time updates in one place. Free web-based readers are now multiplying like rabbits…

Speaking of 2.0 features, though, Rojo clearly stands up and takes a bow – it’s ‘Mojo’ rating feature is cool and appealing, it’s tagging is efficient, it offers a contacts feature allowing you to share information among your contacts, and it also lets you recommend feeds. Another thing about Rojo – it’s the fastest updated, beating the other services by almost half a day; and it’s very easy to see what’s hot right now on Rojo.

Features wise, Rojo and Bloglines are quite the cups that runneth over. Google Reader is the fastest off the blocks, closely followed by FeedLounge – which is the only one here that isn’t free by the way; they charge something like $5/month. If you look at Techcrunch, there’s also info about some newer players - Attensa, and Gritwire, sure to be bristling with 2.0 gizmos.

Users will soon be taking the next steps into super-selectivity, going beyond mere recommendations and community. Feedrinse is a case in point, enabling you to be much more picky about what you read. Feed readers will have to keep this in mind as the way to go.

Google Talks Money

2006-04-06T02:04:00.000-07:00

Move over Yahoo Finance? Google Finance launched last week, albeit a Beta version. They say it’s different, ‘offering an easier way to search for stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies’. The add-ons include company news and info, some good-looking flash charts that allow interactivity in changing things like timelines, and front-page Ajax for that quick market-view switcheroo.

The first reaction has, as first reactions usually go with Google initiatives, been positive, with many initial users liking the clean, simple interface, the charts and so on. The Groups section, coming up soon, is what’s really interesting: stocks will be talked about here, their relative merits dissected, with paid moderators. This is, clearly, the first time that Google will be publishing content under its own flag, on its own site. As John Battelle says on his searchblog, “This marks a rolling shift at Google - the company is getting into publishing, whether or not it wants to admit it.” ‘Portal’ behaviour this is, and one wonders if the old ‘eyeballs’ game will crop up again.

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li was clear that “most mainstream financial site users will stick with their current sources for now, primarily because it's simply a pain to have to re-enter your detailed portfolio information again.” And Google Finance is still quite a far cry from being as useful to the online stock tracker as Yahoo; more features/analytics/research will no doubt be added soon. As a service, however, Google will now be more potent for sure.

The new content-focus is what we take away most from here – and with the kind of search expertise on tap at Google, specific info-sites on just about anything could be just another launch away.

Vastly, Hugely, Web2.0

2006-03-20T01:46:00.000-08:00

It’s been a busy week. Amazon’s S3 – standing for ‘Simple Storage Service’ – launched; and it’s supposed to be a ‘scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure’. Great news for developers looking for a storage service backend – just take a look at their costs: something $15/month for 100GB of storage, and $20 for transfer!

It looks like a lot of sense for front end services who don’t want to spend too much on back end, but the question is this: will businesses, even small ones, actually want their infrastructure core (mostly apps bulging with data) to be dependent on 3rd party interfaces? The worries are obviously about pricing/service consistency and, of course, quality. A march has definitely been stolen on Google Drive, though…

ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer feels that Amazon is “building a system to sell digital goods”. A step beyond retail it is for Amazon, and it may be as Schmelzer says – “They want to be seen as a platform for Web 2.0 applications”. Now that’s a vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big thing (as Douglas Adams would have said), coming from the ‘world’s largest selection’.

Speaking of Vast, that’s another launch – this time of a search service that extracts and structures classified ads all over the web, and then (hold your breath) makes them available via an open REST API for commercial and non-commercial uses. With over 15M listings already available for cars, jobs, and personal profiles, Vast already has one of the largest databases. For more, check CEO Naval Ravikant’s blog, startupboy.com. Will it be able to give the bigger job boards a case of jelly knees? The user experience at Vast is still to be improved, apparently, if you take MikeH’s word at smashfly.com

Ether

2006-03-10T20:24:00.000-08:00

www.ether.com launched more than a week ago. There wasn’t much to herald it, but it’s seems that this new Web 2.0 gizmo can make some great connections.

A division of Ingenio, Ether enables the sale of services over the Internet by just about anyone, but one would assume that this would be useful to tech people, lawyers, psychologists/counsellors, entertainers, bloggers, and more. “Anyone with something valuable to say can earn money by talking on the phone with their audience,” so sayeth Ether. Ingenio has previously run keen.com, a similar service that has since devolved (?) to adult chats and psychic readings, so some questions are surely being asked about Ether – is it just a rehash?

Some of the usual comments come up about good ideas that fall short of expectations, but one can quite easily view this from another perspective: maybe where these good ideas end up is actually the market that works best for them (some of the services on keen.com are far far away from cheap). A similar service has existed in Germany since 2000 – www.questico.com – and it’s almost wholly focussed on the astrology/clairvoyance domain. An attempt was made to offer financial, technical and medical advice, but nothing came of it.

So, will Ether head the same way? It looks fine on the surface, and folks are understandably excited about the possibilities for certain breeds of professionals. The customer side of it seems a bit hard though – think about this: you want advice (and you usually want it now), but you have to register first and pay upfront. As a seller, you can have a delayed response/callback option which can also be a bit of a turnoff from the other side. Ratings are another issue. Interestingly, there isn’t a pay-per-minute model, as many professionals feel that that doesn’t work very well. However, it’s quick to integrate into a Web site, forum, blog, etc – definitely a plus.

It remains to be seen if Ether can indeed become an e-bay for services.

Sales & Marketing, version 2.0

2006-03-06T00:46:00.000-08:00

‘Sales and Marketing people’: more often than not, they’re lumped together like popcorn, and seen as fulfilling essentially the same role. We know that’s wrong – marketing is all about getting mindshare, and selling is all about getting the money. But given what’s happening online, this line is getting increasingly blurry.

We had recently examined behavioral targeting, and it’s clear that the options now available for B-to-C or B-to-B interactions are much more specific, configurable, and more importantly, profitable. With relevant ads showing up in the user’s browser windows, the gap between ‘marketing’ and ‘selling’ has the potential to narrow down to a fine sliver, indeed. When an ad appears on TV, consumers may not yet be ready to buy; when an ad tracks a consumer down on the Internet, based on his recent activity and behavior, he is already primed to hit the ‘add to basket’ button.

With Web 2.0 on everybody’s lips (and everybody’s marketing buzzword as well), companies that think ahead have already begun building online communities, carefully nurturing and encouraging customer ‘evangelists’ who can actually be much more effective at marketing than a huge ad campaign, per dollar spent. Or at least, that’s the assumption.

This ‘virtual sales force’ has enormous potential to create goodwill, interest, and actual purchase of your products/offerings. The sales and marketing angle here is, on the surface, related to the older definition: customer evangelists foster and spread mindshare, so calls that come in can then be handled by your sales team. But now your consumers are your marketers as well… Recognizing the possibilities with such marketing is all very well, but it’s also clear that this is far from being a sure thing. The Skype and Apple success stories may be the blips in the graph. Given the hit-or-miss angle, can this be the new paradigm?

Behavioral Targeting: The Next Steps

2006-02-23T23:59:00.000-08:00

Behavioral marketing – we’ve seen it go from a gleam in the online marketer’s eye to the buzzword for 2006. The flitting, busy, tech-savvy consumer is much more demanding, after all. Sophisticated campaigns will be necessary to just grab attention, much less call to action.

There are, of course, all the usual worries about the invasiveness and possible identity theft that can result from behavioral targeting, and buying customer trust looks like it’s going to be an issue for a while yet. In December 2005, TRUSTe announced some ‘Recommended Practices for Downloading Software on Users’ Machines’ – and this is definitely the right step forward. Notice and consent – that’s what’s needed prior to any download, and TRUSTe provides a clear set of guidelines.

Jean-Philippe Maheu, CEO of behavioral marketing company Direct Revenue, recently spoke of tracking cookies as well – “I do not believe that tracking cookies are bad for users; however, I do believe companies that use tracking cookies need to be more transparent with consumers about the fact that they do track online behavior”. He also puts the trust challenge in a nutshell – “A great deal of research exists demonstrating that, while our ability to better serve the consumer grows more and more effective, consumers are growing more and more suspicious of our efforts”.

Going ahead, it seems clear that once trust issues begin to resolve, contextual and behavioral targeting will begin working together. This sort of integration will specifically address those situations when either model doesn’t do the job well on its own. Fusion here can only mean even more sophisticated solutions for online ad campaigns.

Personalized, or behavioral search – it may be in the labs now, but it’s going to be here soon. Behavioral profiling is clearly going to be assimilated completely into SEM world. So watch this space…

Moving Pictures: The New Search

2006-02-19T21:25:00.000-08:00

If you’re a video creator/provider, there are now specialized video search engines that will pick up your content and make it available for those inveterate searchers that always want more. At a recent Search Engine Strategies Conference, three execs from video search engines - Suranga Chandratillake from blinkx, Karen Howe from Singingfish, and John Thrall from Yahoo! Search - were pretty much unified on one thing: it’s still ‘early days’ for video search, and that is good. Because now is the perfect time to create and optimize content for this nascent, burgeoning category.

All three companies are hard at work enhancing their lists of content partners, providing platforms for video bloggers, support for Media RSS (fostering openness and choice for independent video publishers interested in promoting/syndicating content), and more. The optimizing hysteria is soon to begin, of course: meta information, smart file naming, page content, audio transcripts for Google use – you’ll hear all about it soon.

It’s really interesting to think about if, or how the advertising ballgame will change with this. Right now, video is still mostly linear, which is why the interactive go-anywhere of the web is so popular. But it’s not a far leap to think of non-linear interactive video, is it? So far, we’ve all seen those uber-cool TV ads that are so well made, they just have to transcend the living room and get in our mailboxes. Like that Honda ad, for example.

As far as the corporate space is concerned, it wasn’t so long ago that video search was called ‘non mission-critical’, or that digital video capture had not yet reached ‘critical mass’ within the organization. This year, however, is clearly one where video search itself will reach that critical mass. The merging of presentation delivery tools, Webcasting, and Search technologies takes this further (see Tim Siglin’s commentary).

All of this sounds great, but here’s the usual roadblock: monetization. It seems clear that since Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords have turned web search into a money-spinner, video analytics is only a few short hops away. Advertisers, after all, have to be able to measure quality and quantity of this emerging audience.

Message Boards: all dried up?

2006-02-16T04:44:00.000-08:00

Back in 1997, John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong (McKinsley consultants), published ‘Net Gain’ – a book that tried to show how millions of dollars could be made by aggregating virtual communities. Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs and Virtual Communities), in his BBC address, is, however, frankly skeptical about online communities becoming profit-making industries for entrepreneurs. “The greatest impact of virtual communities”, he says, “will not come from advertising revenues for online chatrooms, but from the new forms of culture that will emerge from virtual communities.”

So, is growing sustainable communities around your organization laborious, time-consuming, and largely thankless? If your message boards and chatrooms are well-designed, expertly moderated, and driven by the commitment to broaden communication with all stakeholders, they can be very effective – but this is actually a cost, with no easily measurable ROI.

A look at the general BB space is largely disheartening. Most message boards devolve very quickly into trollscapes, meaninglessness, and bad behavior. Affinity groups (people with learning disabilities, cancer/sclerosis patients, scholars, etc) that show a strong need to communicate are the few exceptions. Big players like Yahoo, however, have just launched new versions of their message boards, so there’s still some kind of business model here that seems to work.

Highly specific boards with firm codes of conduct, targeted at communities that have the affinity, desire, and drive to communicate – that’s perhaps the way to go. The profit model still doesn’t look too good, though. Contextual banner ads are all very well, but when was the last time you clicked on one?

So for the online marketer, message boards should perhaps be approached from a different perspective altogether. A perspective that hinges purely on the community building aspect till value and sustainability are clearly evident: and only then exploring the possibility of profit.