Where Are Big Ideas - NASSCOM

NASSCOM is one the leading names in India with India's biggest names attached to it. Recently NASSCOM came up with 10,000 Start-Ups - an initiative to help the new ventures in India.

I am personally an ardent follower of 10k start-ups. Couple of days back I came across an interesting post on their Facebook Fan Page which made me think a lot

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Post by NASSCOM for Start-ups.

Every person is different from the other and so are their opinions, still everyone says 'One who thinks differently wins'. Of course we all do think differently, then why all dont win ?
Remember what Mr Shiv Khera also said - 'Winners Don't Do Different Things, They Do Things Differently'
Perception Is What Matters. 

The above facebook post talks about NASSCOM's perception as follows:

• Obvious But Hard - People dont think differently, they can think only what they see around - hence its hard to catch those fish
• Easy And Over Crowded - If the idea is easy, many would have thought of the same idea, hence it becomes over crwoded - making competion tough
• Not Obvious And Hard - Once you dive deeper, its obvious that you wont find many there and here you can catch some fish, which overall makes the process hard
• Big Ideas Are Where Few Go Fishing - here NASSCOM talks about Schlep Blindness (ideas which are right under our nose but we cant see it because we are blinded by what's easy, or easier

Coming back to what I said a little earlier - Perception is what matters, and to add to it I would say - irrespective of where you go fishing, whether crowded or few, you would catch fish if you 'fish differently'

I will try to illustrate with few examples:

A Glass Half Filled.

A common expression used widely to simple determine an individual's perception.
You are optimistic if you see the glass 'half filled' and you are a pessimist if you see the glass 'half empty'. There's a 3rd perception which is not explained here- Opportunist. 

This is how I see it - the glass is 'only half filled' and/or 'still half empty'  Its all about perception, you can win if you think differently. According to me, if you are not able to see "only" and "still" in the above idiom then you are schlep blinded, if you are able to see then you would immediately start thinking how to fill the other half.

eCommerce:

Flipkart is the leader in eCommerce industry in India, that does not mean that Myntra or Jabong or other followers like Shopclues, Snapdeal, Fashionara, Yebhi, LensKart, FirstCry, Urban Touch, etc etc are not successful.

The founders of these portals went fishing where Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal were already fishing, didn't dive deep enough and still hold a good market share.

Social Networking:

MIRC, technically was the 1st online socializing, followed by Yahoo and then many followed. hi5 took over the market share and maximum popularity as the new gen social networking site, Orkut took over it and then Facebook took over Orkut.

Mobiles:

Nokia was the world leader, then Apple took the world by storm. Then Samsung took over a major market share from all leading manufactures. Now, in India, Micromax is a very big name. Of course, there's no denying that we are only familiar with the name Steve Jobs and not other leaders from the other handset manufactures, but that is no reason to say Samsung or Micromax is not successful, infact Samsung is selling from mobiles than any one else in the world.

I would not go fishing where only few go. I cant start an Infosys or Apple and neither would I want to, cos my area of expertise and interest is different, and that's where I would go fishing.

And I Know That I WILL Catch Fish...

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Google Display Planner

Good news for Search Engine Marketers

On September 3rd, 2013, Google is officially transitioning Google Ad Planner to the recently launched Google Display Planner, a free research and planning tool in AdWords that delivers targeting ideas and estimates to help you build better display campaigns. 
Based on data you enter, the tool suggests places to run ads on the Google Display Network along with key related details including impression and cookie ranges for inventory, age and gender breakdowns, and historical cost-per-click information. 
You can find Display Planner under the Tools and Analysis tab in your AdWords account. You can also view this information for your own site if you’re using AdSense on your pages.


Next Steps


1. Export and save your existing Ad Planner Media Plans and Site Lists before September 3rd, 2013


2. Log in to AdWords and familiarize yourself with Display Planner to start taking advantage of these new features.


For more information on transitioning to Display Planner please visit the AdWords help center https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3278806

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Facebook Algorithm

Facebook releases its new algorithm which is a must to know, understand and follow for all marketers. This is going to change the way Facebook marketers have been tapping their targeted audience.

The News Feed algorithm responds to signals from you, including, for example:

• How often you interact with the friend, Page, or public figure (like an actor or journalist) who posted
• The number of likes, shares and comments a post receives from the world at large and from your friends in particular
• How much you have interacted with this type of post in the past
• Whether or not you and other people across Facebook are hiding or reporting a given post

Story Bumping:

Say a friend, but not a close friend, had an awesome post at 8 a.m., but it didn’t show up on your News Feed when you checked at that time, because it was too far down. With Story Bumping, Facebook is borrowing from NBC with the idea of, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!” That post you missed from a friend at 8 a.m. is eligible to be bumped back up toward the top of your News Feed when you check again an hour or two later.

This gives a second chance for posts from users and pages who didn’t have their content shown shortly after posting.

Lars Backstrom, Facebook’s Engineering Manager for News Feed Ranking, discussed Story Bumping with reporters:

What can we do to make it so people aren’t missing these important stories? Maybe the position 1 and position 2 stories were a little bit better, but that story that was just below the fold, we really would’ve preferred to see that rather than (another story) … which just happened to be the newest thing. So we had this idea, “Let’s change the model slightly.” Before, I said, whenever you come to feed, we’re going to take all the stories that are new since your last visit and put those at the top. Let’s just tweak that a little bit, and instead of taking all the new stories, we’ll take all the stories that are new to you.

Facebook has already tested this among 7,000 daily active users in July. With Story Bumping in place for these users, there was a five percent increase in stories seen from friends, an 8 percent increase in stories seen from pages, and a jump from 57 to 70 percent in overall stories read. Facebook also tested the Story Bumping change with 80 percent of its own employees, and Backstrom said that there was only one complaint. Right now, Story Bumping is in effect for roughly 99 percent of desktop News Feed users, but the team is still tweaking it on mobile.

Last Actor:

Another change Facebook announced Tuesday is Last Actor, which takes into account the last 50 interactions a user has done, such as liking a page’s post or writing on a friend’s timeline. This information is wrapped into the News Feed ranking system, so people with whom you’ve engaged most recently will be given more weight. For instance, if you’ve been liking and commenting statuses from your new coworker or best friend (or sharing posts from your favorite restaurant’s Facebook page), Facebook will push those posts up higher in News Feed.

When Last Actor was tested among Facebook employees as well as select users, Backstrom noted that there was a bit of a bump in engagement and positive reaction, but more modest than Story Bumping:

This change was less impactful than (Story Bumping), but still a nice change for feed relevance. So how does this work? Essentially what we wanted to do was try and capture your current state of mind as you’re consuming News Feed and using Facebook. A lot of the important symbols that we have in feed ranking are kind of long-term things: what’s my relationship to my friends and that kind of thing. We wanted to make this more real time, “What am I consuming right now?” So we built this new signal where we take into account the most recent interactions that they’ve had.

Facebook also tested something it called Chronological By Actor, where there’s more chronologically-ordered posts from people users have engaged with most recently, but Backstrom said that this led to less engagement from users in tests, so Facebook is still playing with this.

Backstrom noted what many users have been saying, that people still want to see things in chronological order. However, Chris Cox, Facebook’s Vice President of Product said that there’s a vital difference in operation between Facebook and Twitter.

Conclusion:

Its very important and critical for each Facebook marketers to know who are their influencers and who can be. People with more number of friends and who are more active on facebook ( by not posting but by liking/sharing/commenting on others's posts) can be the biggest assets in achieving a wider reach.

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Chennai Express Game Preview

Chennai Express - Game Preview - released for Android and iOS

SRK launches 'Chennai Express' game, challenges Rohit Shetty - this has been the talk of the town today, since morning and no wonder that in its 1st day itself this game has been downloaded by more than 10k users in android alone with a user rating of 4.7

Chennai Express is an upcoming movie of Shah Rukh Khan and this game is one of their marketing strategies to promote the movie. It isn't the 1st time that a Bollywood movie promo has take the 'gamification' road. In the past there have been few other movies as well who have gone the same way.

This inspiration / strategy has been picked by many industry leaders and trend followers who have seen major brands in US tasting great success by building android/iOS apps to promote their brands/products by engaging users to play their favorite game.

The point to ponder:
It has always been that whenever a brand wants to promote their products/brand or a launch and take the gamification route, they always pick one of the most popular games in the market and copy the same game with a complete make-over.

Chennai Express game is a copy of Subway Surfers (one of the most popular games on android) with more than 50 million downloads in its 1st month itself and a star rating of 4.7

Inference:
Did SRK and Rohit Shetty did the right thing in picking the game to copy and leveraging the gaming platform to promote their movie ? The answer is Yes.
Shouldn't many other brands too think on similar lines ? The answer is Yes.

This leaves us with a question to debate on.
If all would want to go the gamification way, this could bring in a flood of games on android platform (in India). Would this bog the users, could this back fire?
Lets think....

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