Slice, dice, abuse, recommend - Open videos is the new treat to enjoy: But beware marketers!

Now this new kid is bound to cause a revolution! The revolution is bound to impact the marketers as well as the users or who consume online platforms voraciously. How that will impact the supply side and the demand side, I will tell you in a bit. Before we deep dive, here’s a peep into what we are talking about.

This new application that is already available on Firefox 3.5 browser allows users to post comments on videos and even use tiny parts of the videos elsewhere on blogs, documents. However the video edit facility is available on a much smaller scale even now on websites like www.hulu.com and http://www.gorillasports.net.au/. But what’s most interesting is that no longer will you have to depend on a video playing format like Flash Video Player to view a video. The Firefox 3.5 browser can play videos on the HTML browser itself, using the HTML file video. Further you can interact with the video using tool available therein. Here is the DEMO (Play it only on Firefox). I must however say here that the video player is not highly robust. I will give that to the fact that it will still go through numerous rounds of enhancements and version modifications.

Now let’s come back to the possible impact that this new tool may have on the supply and the demand side.

It’s certainly a wonderful tool for the users. They move one notch up from mere viral-ing a video or Youtube link to friends to actually commenting on the videos right on the video itself. They can even slice and chop portions of the videos that they do not wish to circulate and may even add videos from other sources, relevant or not relevant to the original video. No more will a user need to use often cumbersome video editing tools (whose usage more often than not is a mystery to most users). The user can now create a video mashup, comment, spread the new produce on the websphere.

All these sound interesting and fun to do. But can you imagine the plight of the marketer.

A marketer may soon find that a new video or a television commercial or a brand speak or a brand launch or a sales event promo may have gone horribly wrong moments after it left the brand managers safe tables and landed on the websphere. And before the brand manager could know or even do anything about the situation, the new reconstructed video about his brand has reached millions. What different does a brand manager do now?

I reckon this would set a new dimension to the world of brand management. Suddenly the scope of brand management will be expanded. Brand manager not only builds the brand and manages it; he now manages the conversations on the brand, interactions and also takes care of the negative publicity and users’ negative comments not just to learn and grow but also builds counter strategies. That is the new scope of the management called brand management, something that needs now to be well brushed up long before the brand manager launches a brand (especially on the web). Sure, Public Relations agency is the brand manager’s best friend now. They work 24x7 all 365 days, hand in hand, more than they did before.

Second – we have already seen an unprecedented upsurge of marketing dollars being pumped-in for online advertising. A recent study on the UK online advertising market speaks for itself - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8280557.stm. If predictions are ripe, then soon video advertising or advertising through videos will be norm in advertising and social media forays. Even brand ads on other channels and mass media exposures will be governed by online user generated content ported through television. Hence with this new tool at the hands of the users, it’s imperative that the brand manager is really savvy in understanding the online social media stratosphere and is adept in handing the user requirements thereby not undermining their egos and preferences.

Overall, it’s a wonderful tool in the hands of the users and does a world of good to democratization of the web.

Non conflict, out-of-sector takeover @ $1.8B

A suave move to create a lateral expansion of software development business model to harness key user behavioral parameters and offer a built in service to the market - Yes, I am referring to Adobe’s acquisition of San Jose and Orem based analytics powerhouse Omniture Inc.

Since the announcement of the acquisition over a fortnight ago, there has been a lot of talk on the merits of the buy-out etched at a premium and what could be the real strategy that Adobe may be hatching to counter its competition like Microsoft in the years to come. Sure! Some of these Qs do get answered in WebAnalytics Weblogs posted here http://blog.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2009/09/thoughts-on-adobe-omniture.html

Yesterday at a networking forum, I was asked a similar Q by the APAC Managing Director of one of world’s top Internet companies. The Q had more to do with Dell, on how the acquisition could impact Dell who has been a client of Omniture for a couple of years now. My answer was as below.

Historically, Dell flourished on sales through the web medium. Today, they spend millions of dollars in integrating their online marketing vehicles via a number of tracking platforms, tagging, ad serving and the works. Further they spend another fortune to understand and dissect user behavior on Dell.com pages with critical emphasis on their store pages across all country markets. Simply put, I see a convergence of the service delivery from the unified entity to Dell. Thereby elimination some of the redundant, arduous and possibly expensive sync ups between ad delivery to actual conversion and to sharper and refined revenue tracking. The possible ability to assign each dollar earned to every dollar or part spent thereby, along with a more consorted understanding of the user behavior will be the pivot for brand and business managers at Dell to make intelligent marketing strategies in the future.

My unflinching support goes out to the two fabulous partners in the making. They are bound to set new rules to the game of superior ROI measurements.

Let’s watch these two partners closely and hope that we have a new world of better tracking of dollars spent and reduce the drain of ill targeted dollars by most brands.

Paid professional content on the web and mobile medium - courtesy Mr. Rupert Murdoch

If Mr. Rupert Murdoch has his way, the vast expanse of FREE news content on the web will soon be available at a price. BBC recently reported his plans and an extract of that story can be read @ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8186701.stm.

Let’s investigate the threats and possibilities!

Historically professional content was always been available at a price, irrespective of whether the brand paid for its broadcast or consumers paid to receive them. With the advent of new medium especially the web medium, content broadcast has been democratized and the share of voice is longer limited or localized. Well! We all are aware of that paradigm shift. Today professional content in small fragments of various sizes and shapes are available on the web on multiple locations beyond the control of creators / publishers or even the content aggregators.
They now lie on private pages and domains purely at the mercy of the user to be either exploited in whichever form or let free in pure original shape.

Now if look at the channel of content flow and the multiple hands that a professional content goes through is growing exponentially by the day. So no recipient at any time will ever know the number of twists the content may have undergone before it reached him. Surely, the veracity of a so called virgin professional content is now under big doubt. It’s like playing ‘Chinese Whisper’! There is a hell and heaven difference in the original word spoken and the actual word that the last player gets to hear from his immediate neighbor.

Hence for a revolution of that sort where News Corp’s efforts to bear fruits in terms of charging a fee can work, only if.

- The content is rich, unique, well researched and well presented. Hence it needs to rank high on the index of differentiated content
- Truth always wins over something that is preposterous or blown out of proportion
- It’s extremely necessary to ensure that first layer of subscribers are solid personalities or enterprises who help spread positive word about paid professional content on the web
- Most important is to have a solid knock back strategy to negate repulsions from the intermediary channels and its carriers

Well! Having said that, however there seems to be a strong predisposition towards Mr. Murdoch new strategy and here it is why! UK’s weekly political magazine, The Spectator has already created an iPhone app to download its news at a cost. Read the story @
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/09/the_spectator_app_paying_for_p.html

Google's own Funnel

Google’s Sidewiki has kicked up some storm recently as many users feel that it is a blatant infringement to user privacy. Some feel that the forced deep insight into user behavioral information is unwarranted and that users are caught unawares as the terms and conditions seem to be one sided. Some users feel that Google has mis-sold the product for their advantage.

However the die-hard fans of Google are split between two ends. Those who are addicted to Chrome feet that they are left out as the Chrome version is yet to be launched. While those who are willing to converse (aka Contributors) have been totally enthralled by this new wiki. While for those brands / websites who are not so social media savvy or those who are not so willing to open up their websites to unwarranted comments may feel challenged. They may even turn their backs to Google for some time but will very soon wake up to omnipresence of the wide and deep ‘black hole’ called social media which will eventually gobble them up unless they bide with it.

The push cum penetration strategy however, is a master piece, as far as Google is concerned as this provides them with hitherto unexpected flurry of conversations teeming with pure first hand user preferences and dispositions. This information will go a long way in their efforts to know the web users more and more.

Simultaneously, Google launched something called Google Caffeine. Google Caffeine is touted to be a much more refined and robust search engine with more specific user focused results, optimized, sharper and better. It’s something that all marketers look for when they pledge their money on Google. Surely, it’s another wonderful concept to rake in the Dollars for the Kings of the Search World.

The two new properties from Google seem to meet the demand and supply quite smartly in the customer delivery funnel. Google Sidewiki on the wider side and the Google Caffeine on the narrower side.

Dell India - Take your own path...

We recently launched a SMB website for India called www.takeyourownpath.in where we have tried to showcase some of the successful Indian entrepreneurs who with the help of Dell products have ventured into careers that are considered to be dangerous and futile especially in these trying global economic conditions.

Please visit, comment and contribute at various corners and in social media.

Cheers
Saurav

Mockumentary called Flutter

Here it is! A nano-sized Twitter - new app for micro-blogging! As simple as Twitter with 26 characters almost without using vowels.

Enjoy the mock up video from the stable of SlateV.

This makes Social Media Marketing look so simple and easy. Isn't it?

However do not yet fall for the iPhone application and the spiel on diode enabled mind reading. That might freak you out!

Hold your drink, Ladies and Gentlemen!!

Cheers

Twitter a threat to text messaging....

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, Twitter is undoubtedly the latest muse to court. The WWW is flush with numerous successful twitter stories. If your brand has a great story to tell, if the story is enticing enough, so that twitterers can contribute and distribute in a positive manner, then your brand is a winner. All our latest social media containers that have been successful in building brands are being picked up by media planners and their clients like hot cakes, despite most of them still grappling to identify a robust advertising strategy. Needless to say, the digital properties can clearly build a brand or destroy it!

With the advent of Twitter on the mobile (another addition to the plethora of converted apps from web to mobile), the mobile world is undergoing a world of change. Countries like Japan, Korea, Australia and Singapore are fast catching up on what I call the Twit to-mania, depleting thousands of dollars from the kitty of the mobile service providers in these countries. As a reactionary measure, many of the major mobile service providers in Singapore like SingTel, M1 and StarHub are in the process of re-jigging their service bundle tariff to accommodate the loss in texting (SMS) revenue.

I would imagine, if Twitter can be harnessed and utilized well, it’s a real boon to most marketers. It’s cheap, simple and comes with no baggage.

Look out for a line extension of Twitter...in my next post!!

Peace..

My Google strongest - at what cost?

As online marketers, most of us cannot help but idolize Google and look up to its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They have made an enormous contribution to the online world and helped many of us tread this new medium as our careers in the last 10 years odd years of its existence. While WWW was always a destination for information seeking and knowledge hungry individuals, it would have been extremely difficult for all of us to hunt the relevant and much needed information that you could be looking out for, had Brin and Page never cracked this idea of online search, one day at their university dorm. They not only revolutionized the concept of search but devised a unique and efficient way to monetize their prized and successful idea. Today Google is worth upwards of $160Bn (year 2008) and still growing. We all are a part of their growth (contributed in some form or manner), know its history and some of us (including me) aspire to crack a Google-like killer idea and rule the world….someday!!

Since its inception, the corporation has now built multiple properties that leverage the core strength - search. However, somewhere in the collage of colorful Google, shades of gray have now started to appear. The most recent revelation has been very serious and has shaken me from top to bottom.

I make most of my purchases using my credit card, be it at offline retail or for online buys. I am a complete sucker for online sweepstakes. Needless to say, all my credit cards have done the rounds across all leading global websites, be it on amazon.com, ebay.com, airline ticketing sites...the list goes on. When I read a news article today on a website which said that over 19K credit card information detail of British web surfers have been found to be available on simple Google search. I froze and shut myself up for almost 5 minutes! Yes, online privacy (and fraud) is a huge concern in today's expanding web world, despite evolution of data encryption, but if private credit card data is available on simple Google search, then it will be a serious problem for the global e-commerce industry.

It's going to be extremely tricky for Google to alter their search algorithms to ensure that credit card and other payment detail are never picked up by their crawlers on any user search.

Those who transact primarily through the web medium, exercise caution!!! Keep your eyes and senses wide open…

YouTube Copyrighted, hence pulled down? Thanks to YouTube !!

A story when your beloved cheats on you !! This video of Laura Ross was pulled down from general viewing by You Tube for reasons not known to her. Was the video copyrighted by You Tube? How can they simply pull it down?


http://www.youtube.com/v/wrMq46rbWNk&hl=en&fs=1


This video is not available for public viewing anymore hence only the link is provided (view the video till it is available on the link).

Whose tweet is it anyway !!!

Recently, tweet is becoming a big craze amongst many marketers. Marketers are actively building twittable stories as a part of their overall marketing plan, almost like the good old storyboards that we took to the clients for approvals before shooting a television commercial. Infact Twitting is like a half-brother to Facebook and a very potent tool for first hand honest customer research, testing and dip test.

Mark Cuban posted a note on his blog enquiring if Tweets are copyrighted. My simple answer to that is 'NO'. The web world is all about providing exposure, dissemination and there is no chance for control. Those of you who are aware, two years ago when someone had posted the secret encrypted code on Digg that was used to unlock copyrighted DVDs of major labels, overnight, that Digg post's rank rose to the top spot on its homepage. Users were hitting the Digg homepage like swarms of bees. Sensing the impending danger Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg had to immediately put the post on the block and pulled it down from Digg to protect his company from a certain law suit. That act created so much of an uproar that Digg was neck deep in negative comments from it's most loyal and trusted followers. Further the damage was so wide spread that before Kevin could bring the post down, the encrypted code had already multiplied across the World Wide Web. Who on earth would have thought about that impact ! It wasn’t even Digg’s fault. Kevin had no choice but to reinstate the post the very next day. Then he sat down to write a famous blog (see link below) that underlined the fact that there is no such thing as copyrighted content on WWW, no matter how much time, energy and resources legal stalwarts and CEO of corporations spend to craft one to protect themselves or / from their customers.

We have never bothered to remember the name of the person who first posted the encrypted code on Digg. Neither did he get the post copyrighted nor is he earning dollars today on the impact it had. But what we remember is only the BIG bloodbath, that followed thereafter. Surely, there is no copyrighted content or post on the WWW.

Marketers, while Tweets are your best friends, it can be your worst enemy too. Exercise caution while you build a Twittable story for your brand or organization. Ensure you have covered your a** and have an exit plan or plan B in place as well, that can be implemented smoothly and quickly to protect your interests.

Kevin's blog post after the bloodbath - http://blog.digg.com/?p=74

Fondling Sixth Sense...

Recently a young Indian PhD researcher at MIT invented a unique tool that attempts to bridge the gap between the real world and the digital world through an interface built using a maze of codes and data. It’s a tool that you can carry wherever you go just like your own mobile phone. It’s got a projector (mirror), a camera that acts like a human eye and computer vision software which has a capacity to rattle out millions of complex algorithms in seconds. The software is built to identify multi-touch freehand and iconic human gestures by users wearing photosensitive colored caps on human fingers and hands. The kit can be attached to mobile phone device connected to the Internet and BOOM!! A whole new way of browsing opens up right in front of you. You now suddenly do not need a computer monitor to surf the Internet. You can do so on any projecting surface around you.


Further the device is an intelligent contraption which has the capability to identify not just basic hand gestures but also read / recognize products or text or information using image recognition or marker technology and immediately connect you to the Internet to provide you with valuable information available there on the subject.


Isn't that fascinating?


Now although the product is still deep in research and unlikely to be available commercially very soon, it does leave us, marketers thinking of ways and means of leveraging the invention for digital savvy clients. I did a knit picking of my brain and came up with a few usages / implications...

Cost per Conversion (CPC)?: Imagine you happen to visit your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart on a Sunday morning to pick up replenishments for the week ahead. You suddenly see and fall in love with the latest range of hi-end notebooks from Dell and wish to pick up one immediately. While you compare the product through customer reviews on ZDNet, Amazon and the other reliable stalwart websites using Sixth Sense, you suddenly realize that the same notebook is available cheaper by about $100 on dell.com. And what's more, delivery in your area is guaranteed within the next 24 hours. So what's in it for you? Healthy competition between Wal-Mart and dell.com is always good for the customers - a classic case of price war between products available online as against a brick and mortar shop. What's in it for Dell? Almost no CPC, right! Real time dynamic online pricing enables volume off takes. Higher ROI, efficient targeting and more opportunities for brand building!

Geo targeting is the King's wise man: The advantage is now for both the parties. Both the marketing brand as well the king, the Customer get benefitted. So no more, mobile GPS is invasion of privacy, as the law chooses to call in some countries. Geo targeting is now mutually beneficial! King is likely to give up his privacy and open up windows to massive targeting which hitherto was restricted.

Convergence at its best: We all know that mobile communication and broadcast technology innovators around the world like NTT Docomo, Nokia, Vodafone have done tones of work in the past decade on wireless convergence. Over the years while technology became more and more superior, the human-end interface that took advantage of that technology became more and more smaller and more and more powerful. The ability of Sixth Sense to project screens on any surface is really not new as there are contraptions available dime a dozen which have that ability. Further the technology to track movement of photosensitive colored caps is in itself quite an old technique that forms a base for the study, called interaction design. But what sets Sixth Sense apart is its ability to leverage or converge all those technological innovations under one roof and build a contraption. Do we hear a distant cry of a slow and painful death of WAP enabled websites?

Does SEM on Google go beyond KWs?: Google, better shape up or ship out !!! Larry Page and Sergey Brin and their armory of experts need to do a bit of deep thinking here as Sixth Sense has the potential to wipe out their biggest share of their worth on NASDAQ. Do we see SEM on Google going beyond just KWs or even further than reverse image search that is available at http://tineye.com/. Do we see an outright buy out of the product patent in the offing? Or do we see an all new Google Earth? Only time will tell.


Click here read the blog owned by the creator himself, Pranav Mistry....http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/sixth_sense_pranav.php

My first serious blog - I start with something closest to my heart, my profession and source of my daily bread, the digital world...

While digital footprints of brand marketing is expanding rapidly all over the world, I still find myself explaining to my best clients, the merits of the medium everytime I present a thought or a brand strategy. I find myself building atleast 10-15 slides on my presentation deck purely showcasing the various case studies relevant to the point in discussion. That's kinda frustrating and annoying !!



Case in point - A client from a local market in my region who is a large global corporation in IT and electronic goods manufacturing came to me with a problem that is very common . Sure ! the client corporation name is open to speculation here. He said "I launched a website 6 months ago but people do not come to my site unless I spend thousands of dollars in promoting the website". Worst still, analysis told us that the time spent on the site was poor and the bounce rate was shooting upwards. We went down to explore the website. We found to our dismay that the content on the website has been the same as it was the day the site went live, 6 months ago. Clearly, the client failed to craft a content strategy. Besides, although there was a data capture feature but sadly, it only collected data, never to be utilised.


Sometime ago, the director of marketing of another entertainment television channel once told me that one of his competition was succesfully using Facebook to promote its new reality show that saw its rating points challenge the rating points of an ongoing popular sports series shown live on television. The director knew that he needed to explore the SNS for his next launch but did not know how.


If you happen to face some of these desparate, yet embarressed souls, do not blow your top. Alas !! that's what we are there for, to guide and direct them. After all, that's where we earn our daily bread right !!


In the next series of my blog posts, I will try to post real life stories and experiences, that should help provide possible solutions to challenges that readers may face in their markets. I would also post my understanding and take on latest discoveries, fads, craze and clicking mania. I hope to create a differentiated blog amidst the copious number of digital blogs in the WWW through real experiences and examples that I continue to encounter in my profession.

Cheers