Book Giveaway

I really want to hear from people and I wanna learn things, So I decided to give two books a month for the best of the comments/guestarticles/suggestions,So people speak up,I'm all ears.

Ford's paradox

7 years before Kevin Baker wrote this article for The Industry Standard,where in kevin says Unions are the solution for the Ford's paradox,Now you might have already read about the Ford's Paradox,for those who didn't let me give a briefing about the phenomenon.

Henry ford slashed the prices of the Model-T almost by half from $825 in 1909 to $440 by 1914 by creating swift assembly lines,In those days $440 was a huge amount for a typical American.Ford realized that in a modern, mass-market economy the people who make stuff are the people who buy stuff and he took a really bold step which was perceived crazy and "distinctly utopian" and "foredoomed to failure", he doubled the daily wage of his 13,600 workers to $5,Ford said"he right price is the lowest price an article can be steadily sold for. The right wage is the highest wage the purchaser can steadily pay", he increased the disposable income of workers and reduced the working hours so that they have more time and money to spend on goods,cars in specific,this act of his increased loyalty in workers and there's no count as how many workers spent their disposable income buying Model-T cars.

Now we arrive at an important issue more specifically a paradox,In a stagnant economy no single business can dare to make the first move toward increasing wages, the market as a whole cannot raise wages,If the market as a whole does not raise wages, no single business can prosper in the long run,because people have decreasingly less disposable incomes to actually buy products,without businesses running how can an economy actually move forward.

Ashley - 17 year old entrepreneur

Yesterday I stumbled upon this article on Fastcompany,it read

Girl Power
No Rich relatives? No professional mentors? No problem.Ashley qualls,17,has built a million-dollar web site.

I had to rush back home from office so I took a printout of the article,after my heavy meal I read that article and was like surprised to learn about Ashley,a high school dropout from detroit was running Whateverlife.com all by herself.

Whateverlife is a website which provides MySpace layouts for girls,beyond Myspace and facebook and orkut loads of teenage website come and go,but Whatever life, started in 2004, now attracts 7 million individuals and 60 million page views a month and is ranked 349 ahead of Oprah.com (469) by Quantcast.

Ashley,who started her website with an initial investment of $8 from her mother, has recently been offered $1.5m+ by ValueClickMedia.

Though Ashley found her business whimsically,she actually learned things from doing things and now has built a quite an enviable business.

Ashley in her blog, "The daily Life of a simple kind of Gal"

I'm Doing what everyone says they want to do, "live like there's no tomorrow."

Favicon for my site

I host my blog on blogger and blogger doesn't accept .ico files so I uploaded it to 50megs and tried to access it and showed up an error

You do not have permission to access http://pradsfavicon.50megs.com/favicon.ico
Data files must be stored on the same site they are linked from.

then I tried freewebs and this time it worked, now I have my own Favicon shown on the blog.

Review my blog contest winners

I got 11 responses and I thank all of you guys who've done the review and the winners are Ravi Kumar and Deepa Nandan,Congrats I will mail you the books ASAP

False Uniqueness

People fool themselves with false uniqueness and everybody does that,I do it too, Most of the times it is for good, but sometimes it proves to be detrimental.

I'm talking about people's feeling that they are unique,nothing wrong will ever happen to them,that bomb blasts,road accidents,mishaps, they all belong to another alien world and they don't live in that world.People don't wear helmet's , they take for granted that person in another vehicle is gonna drive careful enought not to hit you,and you know what this is the root cause for all the mishaps,I guess.

Now sometimes mishap's happen and you are not in control of that,something like that happened in Hyderabad,two serial bomb blasts,one in Lumbini park and another one at Gokul chat,41 people died and still we( rest of us Indians) feel that nothing is gonna happen to us,we do all things normally,we feel "False Uniqueness", Yes,we do need False uniqueness and it's difficult to live without it,Coz one can't live normally with all the fear and fret, but I think one should always keep an eye on things,drive carefully and be responsible.

Hangout with people you want to be like

Yes,coz you eventually liken the friend you hangout with,If you hangout with a lousy guy you'll become lousy,you hangout with fat you'll grow fat,now this psychologically makes a lot of sense,when you hangout with somebody a lot, you'll get to know their perspective of the world and you'll adopt their perspective if you hangout enough and you already know that you are,what you think you are .

If you want to be really successful,I seriously suggest you to hangout with successful people and If you are depressed,hangout with those peppy and high spirited people, If you wanna be thin , hangout with all the thin guys/girls.

Colleges the perfect place for word of mouth marketing

Colleges have always been the best places for word of mouth marketing, young people are strongly influenced by their friend's advice and you'll find loads of those in colleges and eMarketer just reaffirmed the same.Read the article

Paris hilton at technorati

If you have a look at technorati top searches you can see paris hilton and I think I've seen her almost all the time, she is one person from whom I guess I can learn a lot about personal branding

Using content for viral marketing

Internet offers a tremendous potential for marketers,especially for the viral marketing,now you might have already seen the bride wig out video on youtube,the video was made by marketing firm Capital C to promote unilever's Sunsilk brand of hair care products,the video was so viral that it had 2.8 million views in just two weeks.

Lately companies are trying to do the same thing in India,Orbit launched a new comic Thakur Ka Inteqam based on the movie sholay and its really funny and has all the viral traits, Mentos created Mentos Helpline where in executives answer the user's queries and they also have videos of helpline executives offering funny solutions.I love this concept of creating online content for marketing coz it is completely based on viral strategy and even if the viewer isn't buying the product it doesn't restrict him from spreading the word and the best thing is it's cheap.

Big Seed attempt by Truemors

Facebook being an open platform, lately some really good facebook apps have seen exponential growth of their userbase,they had real viral marketing working for them,now as Facebook has limited the number of invites from infinity to ten,It has become little difficult for developers to spread the new apps.

Guy kawasaki is confronted with the same problem and now he is using Big seed marketing for his Truemors facebook app,He is giving away autographed copies of "Art of the start" for free,for the first 200 people who add truemor facebook app and invite 10 people and post few truemors,he's kinda doing a good thing,but what I really wonder is ,Is this gonna work? coz I find truemors not so appealing and with a very low value proposition it has I'm quite skeptical that it'd liken college humor,ilike and feedburner.I think even the seed of 200*10 is eventually gonna die off generating very less ROI on the expense he's gonna bear for the 200 book's,I donno,Let's see..

Trivia: Google pagerank for truemors.com is 0!

Liking

Liking is one thing that salesmen like Joe Girard used succesfully to make pots and pots of money,you know Liking can also be triggered by familiarity,we like things we are familiar with,and we start liking things we get familiar with,that is why you hear all the new songs played repeatedly on TV channels and Discotheques.

I never liked this sound track "khaike paan banaraswaala" from the newer version of the hindi movie DON,today morning I was watching this song and was humming it , I realised that I started liking it,this is coz MTV and Channel[V]play the track everyday in the morning and I might have heard it like 50 times, this re-demonstrated me the power of familiarity.

Harry potter marketing!

No I'm not talking about the marketing of Harry Potter series nor the movie or merchandise,I'm talking about Frédéric Dalsace's idea The Harry potter marketing, which is in the HBR list of Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 and is an unprecedented concept that all the FMCG companies can cash on. We all know that It's lot cheaper to keep a customer than to find a new one,so by targetting a product to a particular cohort than to an age group and by branding the product to that perticular group of customers, the customers will not change the brand with age but the brand matures with the customer and thus you get to keep the customer for a really long duration.

Frédéric says

Like Harry Potter, the fictional schoolboy wizard who grows older with his readers, brands that mature with their users can prove particularly durable.

Review my blog Contest

The next post is gonna be the 100th post of my blog,So I thought I should better get my blog reviewed so I'm opening this contest,all you have to do is tell me one thing that you like about my blog and one thing that you don't and atleast one suggestion as to how I can improve it,you can mail ya suggestions to me at pradeep@pradeepkumar.com,I have a copy of My start-up Life and a copy of Permission Marketing to giveaway for the best of the suggestions,the contest is open till August 23.

Big seed marketing

Lately viral marketing has become a big fad for all the marketer's and the new ventures, the idea behind viral marketing is pretty simple you pick a small number of influential people and if reproduction rate R(new infections/no. of seeds) is greater than 1,the message spreads through an exponential rate and reaches a tipping point,just like a virus in an epidemic.

The real difficulty lies in actually implementing this strategy,many people have failed to simulate the epidemic becuase it is extremely difficult to find those groups of influential people who form the base for the epidemic.There was an article in May '07 issue of Harvard Business Review,Viral marketing for the real world, where in Duncan J. Watts and Jonah Peretti talks about a new variation of viral marketing, the Big seed marketing.


Big seed marketing alleviates the difficulty in simulating the epidemic by using the conventional mass advertising to create a large initial seed(I) for the campaign and here even if the reproduction rate R<1 ,the total number of infections(I/(1-R)) is much better to using just the viral marketing.The authors pointed out that many companies have successfully implemented the big seed campaigns using an open source software called ForwardTrack.

Bill hicks on marketing

Hilarious

Is online video sustainable?

I use youtube(mostly) to watch all the free video's online,youtube's business model is purely based on ads and the ads could be the only thing through which it can survive,but how many times did you actually care to take a look at the ads published? frankly speaking, I never did.
In an interesting post on PronetAdvertising Saleem points out to this study by emarketer, emarketer found out that only 2% of the people in the survey sample showed their willingness to pay for the content while 79% are extremely unwilling,with businesses increasingly focusing on the ROI of marketing and quite obvious ineffectiveness of Interruption marketing,it'll become difficult for the online video to sustatin in the long run.