Will a gorgeous looking girl lure me to join a new social n/w?

I donno, I don't think so,coz I didn't. I just don't understand why people are adhering to cheap tricks to lure people. Today I got an invite to my mailbox to join silicon India (www.siliconindia.com) from one padma kapadia, I got no idea who she is! But one thing is the mail shows her photograph and ostensibly she is very beautiful.

If people from silicon India are hoping to get people registered with these cheap tricks, I am afraid that might not work. With endless new social networking sites sprouting,silicon India needs to offer a really good reason why one might register with them.


I found a blog post on silicon india
http://nullpointer.debashish.com/silicon-indias-networking-ploys

Scaling, One problem I wanna have

Scaling is one problem I'd love to have sometime soon, I know that this is the one thing that every internet entrepreneur dreams of achieving. Have a look at the number of web startups adding up everyday and you will know why most of them don't get to have that problem.

If you are not having a scaling problem even after a few of months of release, chances are that
1. You are not providing enough value addition.
(or)
2. Your product is too disruptive and you don't know how to cross the chasm.
(or)
3. You haven't done the right kind of marketing.

Now you know,most of the internet startups fail for the first reason.I'd like to believe that we don't have first two problem's ,coz snizr has got enough value addition and is not disruptive,now all we need to worry about is marketing.

With snizr scheduled to release in the last week of September, we have crossed our finger's and we wanna have the scaling problem.

Maslow's hierarchy

Today I was discussing the mobile market in India with some of my colleagues, and during the discussion I told them that I really don't need a mobile phone, right now I have a I-mate JAMA and am thinking of moving to Iphone 3G the very moment it's here in India.

"Logically" speaking, I don't need a PDA and I don't need any of the features of 3G, yet I am thinking about buying Iphone,This is what makes me think and get amused of the Maslow's Hierarchy of needs and how people make wonders by making their products climb up the hierarchy.



Image: http://businessballs.com

Making social proof work for your business

I had to go to this place called munchin in Sahara Mall,gurgaon, just coz my friends were hanging out there and otherwise I'd never feel like going into places like this,it's a small food place with things on their menu ranging from sandwiches to maggie, it was freakishly small , it had only two tables and some chairs placed un-evenly.

Now I went there I didn't order anything, but I saw something on one of their walls, a collage,they've made a collection of scribbled napkin paper's, appreciating their sandwich.


Now they've done an excellent thing,I ate their sandwich and it tasted pretty good, may be it's because of the anticipation of the emotion's that the knowledge the collage provided me,I don't know.

Social proof can work miracles for your business.

Insurance plan

Quite hilarious

New age marketing

I've never seen somebody with an old age business use new age marketing so well!!,
watch this video of Blend-tec using youtube viral marketing for their blenders.

Ineffective marketing

Here's a classic example of ineffective marketing,a huge billboard hanging on one of the busiest malls of gurgaon(India),I am pretty sure it might have costed them a bomb and what would be a miracle is getting back just one dollar from this investment.



I just don't understand why companies aren't moving out of their "billboard" mindset to more effective ROI based marketing models.

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!

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.

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.

Fear of rejection

Fear of rejection is an awesome tool for marketers,atleast for the marketers of beauty products,it can do wonders for the sales if one can use the emotion correctly,the idea is simple "you dont look good, you are no good",marketers try to induce this fear into a prospect, if not already present by making the prospect realise how she/he has been a looser for not being attractive and hey marketer always gotta solution,use his product,some Imakeyouattractive cream (or whatever) and you're gonna look like Christina augilera or some other diva.


I was reading this post on ad campaign of Fair and Handsome of Emami ,Fair and Handsome made a lousy TVC and failed to use the emotion correctly,the interesting thing here is despite having a losy ad campaign,the product is worth Rs 45 crore now,this shows how powerful the "Fear of rejection" is,If you are not an Indian (South Asian) lemme tell you that people in here associate fair skin with beauty.See the chart Emami made explaining why you are a looser if you are not Fair.


P.S: Being fair here implies having a fair skin

Why do people buy?

This kind of makes a really good question for every marketer and business man,I was reading this book "How to sell yourself" by Joe Girard, he confronts us to this question,Why do people buy, do they buy to possess a thing or something else,actually no body buys a thing to possess it per se,rather people buy things coz they are influenced by their emotions to buy,people buy coz they "need" comfort or social status or to solve their problems.

Now this makes another good question,how to make people buy?

Personal Branding

Now-a-days personal branding has become so important(actually I've got to learn only recently),your email ID (mine pradeep@pradeepkumar.com) and domain name on ya name and the google search result of your name, these all have become so important for ya business and networking,I realised lately that having www.pradeepkumar.com redirected to blogspot( you can see, it shows pradsworld.blogspot.com) is a really bad thing,acually I'm not adding much to my domain name but I'm adding credibility to google,which it doesn't need.

I got my domain name registered through one of those cheap domain names webhost and I'm suffering for it, they literally offer no support.

I've been trying to make the CNAME of my domain point to ghs.google.com , as described in the blogger support pages and the reply I got from the web host was " You don't own google" !!!

Now I'm moving to another DNS host so that I can have my domain name shown for my blog, one step forward for my personal branding

Why clothes matter?

Clothes, do matter, the way you dress kindof convey's what you are and not just this, when I read this post on trizle,I thought " Oh, yes, this is true,I've noticed the same damn thing,Dressing good actually improves your performance and boosts ya confidence",

According to Harvard Medical’s Alice Domar

Although it may seem counterintuitive to slip into the skirt you save for special occasions, it helps to look in the mirror and see an energizing image — not a deflating one that confirms and reinforces your internal state.

Dressing for success will give you a big mental boost every time you catch sight of your reflection throughout the day.

Trizle's El rule of Thumb says

*If you dress sloppy, you’ll likely do sloppy work.
*If you dress kick-ass, you’ll likely do kick-ass work.

Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out

This is a youtube video I saw sometime before,Apparently shot by one of three bridesmaids, it shows a bride so unhappy with her hairstyle on her wedding day that she starts cutting it off! I was quite astonished to find out later that it's a Viral marketing video made to promote sunsilk.I should say ,its a brilliant piece of work.

iPhone Challenge: Marketing pundits unite

I read this interesting post on seth godins blogregarding the iphone,
Steve Ballmer says, "There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."
n seth says apple will sell 2m phone just in 2007,what do you think? will the steve job's magic work? Let's wait n see.