Who? Me??

Yesterday, I attended Startup Saturday … the theme was Social Media and how it can be leveraged by start-ups effectively.

Some of my key learning -

• Online marketing does not replace offline marketing efforts, and vice versa. If you are planning a huge effort in one media, do not ignore the other
• The best way to use these platforms is not as a broadcasting medium, but as a way of engaging with your customers
• Don’t create propaganda, create evangelists … who can propagate your name
• Social media marketing is not cheap, and it is certainly not a free alternative to traditional marketing
• In case of B2B space, marketeers can target the end-customer through social media and get the attention of their intended customer organization

Will attach the respective presentations as and when the organization committee puts them online

This is more of a recollection of my learnings than anything else, people can share their learnings and I promise to grow this space.

1. Targeted resume submissions - Find the organization you want to apply to, go find folks in your network who work for  that organization. Use their referrals to get your resume the place you want it to be.
2. Business Visibility – Professionals talking about their organizations can act as evangelists on LinkedIn. With the integration of Twitter, the value of LinkedIn as a Social Media Platform has increased a thousandfold.
3. Peer learning – People who work in the same industry can collaborate to discuss and resolve each other’s problems. Whereas this seems to be a generic utility of a community, I have seen this happen pretty well through the Q&A forum of LinkedIn. Since people who contribute to these are serious minded professionals vis-a-vis the casual replies of Orkut. All this for free unlike Experts-exchange, where the user has to fork out good money to get to the solution.
4. Showcasing – This is the most obvious one, do I need to get into this

Your comments are more than welcome on this one, since it will only add to this post.

I first came across the Hype Cycle in 2008, immediately, I posted about it here. Back then, the Web 2.0 and SOA was considered to be a market failure. Everyone who was anyone in the web development arena was claiming to create “Web 2-point-oh” applications, without knowing what that term meant. I know about an entrepreneur who pitched the idea of a Web 2.0-based e-commerce portal to a VC. In return, the VC asked one simple question – “Do you know what Web 2.0 means?”

Hype cycles are just that, they indicate the evolution of the system and its mainstream adoption with the amount of hype it is creating among the society. They also are an indication to future market leaders – companies which are poised to take off due to the right adoption of technology.

So, what do you think you should invest into now? Do you think you will buy “the Kindle"”? How about that power saving infrastructure? What to do with KM?

Kudos to Gartner for coming up with this framework.

Forgive me, this post is going to be a long one.

In the brief span of its existence, the web has evolved at such an alarming rate, that it outstrips evolution of any living organism. Even as Indian web users and web development companies are creating (and using) Web 2.0 platforms, the more developed nations are already talking about Web 3.0, the semantic web.

Not so surprisingly, I have found to my chagrin that 80% or more of the Indian populace associate Web 2.0 with client side technologies instead of a collaborative technology. People associate it with all the wrong ideas … I do not blame them. Awareness has always been the bane of comprehension. Having said that, I decided that it would do some good if we can somehow capture the evolution of the internet in these already popular phrases, and somehow manage to extrapolate what the next stage could be – so that we are prepared when it comes

Or even better, a host of Indian companies could bring in the era of Web 4.0: The Enabling Web. So what are these evolutionary milestones?

Web 1.0: The Information Superhighway

This is the internet of yore. Those were the days when people would make separate HTML pages and upload it on the net. Content was written within these pages and uploaded. It was authoritative in nature, since most of these sites were a one way communication stream. People came to different sites with the sole aim of gathering information – hence the name, the Information Superhighway.

Web 2.0: A Collaborative Medium

This is the internet that we see around us these days. The web is more social now, its a place to meet interesting people – to collaboratively create content. Content is not written within pages, content is created by the users themselves. The more the users, the more the content. What the developers create is a platform which enables this co-creation between the users. A great example of this is Wikipedia or IMDB.

Web 3.0: A sense making layer

The new era of internet is coming, this can somehow make sense out of the user’s inputs and act accordingly. So when I say “Show me a blue lotus”, the internet should show me the image of a blue car instead of a blue flower. How does it do this? It already has my preferences for cars over flowers somewhere. This is where collaborative filtering mechanisms and business intelligence algorithms are used to correctly profile the user. The internet is capable of understanding what the user is speaking. It differentiates a Gandhi from a Hitler. Some examples of this would be WolframAlpha or Amazon.

Web 4.0: The Enabling Web

So what happens when the web begins the “understand” the user. The sole question is – “What’s the point?”. If it can understand the user, it can also understand the purpose with which the user is driven to visit a particular web application. And, if that can be done, then it won’t be too difficult to understand and provide what other resources would help the user reach his outcome. The web suddenly becomes a more intertwined place with each web application talking to others, so as to provide the best experience to its user. Not only experience, but to ensure that the user is enabled with the right set of resources to get his job done. The purpose of the user is kept at the center. That’s my vision for web 4.0 akin to a more evolved Ubiquity extension of Firefox.

Dear Readers,
I am looking for enthusiastic guys who can help me beta test an application not just for the functionality of the web application, but also the concept behind it.

I have already taken the liberty of involving a few of my regular readers, but if you do wish to contribute, then please do drop me a line here.

Looking forward to a solid participation

Last year, I was vacillating between WP and Blogger as my blogging platform. You can see some of that here. With WP 2.7 coming out, I was tempted to try WordPress, finally this year I made the shift completely. As promised, here are my experiences with WP on my own hosting solution + domain.

You can also try this out on your <name>.wordpress.com blogs as well, but the real awesomeness comes out only with your own domain and hosting combination. Try it … it costs around Rs. 3000 odd, but definitely worth it!!

How to do it

Transferring from one platform to another was pretty simply. WP comes in with a very nifty import facility, wherein I could import all my Blogger posts with their comments (whew!). Then it was just a matter of changing the domain settings (this took more than a day to figure out!!).

Pros

The pros are the obvious ones -

1. Completely customizable look and feel of the blog
2. Readymade and re-usable themes and cool widgets that simply fit into your blog
3. Hassle-free
4. All plug-ins, widgets, themes and the platform itself auto-updates!! I don’t have to do any tinkering around
5. Huge, and I mean one mother of a huge community to contribute to this WP ecosystem

I could go on, but lets leave these for now. I like the platform but it does have its peeves.

Cons

1. Categories and Tags … Tags and Categories … yeah, now I have to decide on one and do both … even if just one morphology works for me … anyone have a hack for this?
2. Now I have noticed that I keep on playing around with the platform more instead of writing more!!

Any help from you guys would be appreciated

My job at Illumine is to make a career enablement platform for individuals. To ensure that users once they come on the website wont get overwhelmed by the enormity and complexity of the task at hand. To keep on coming back to the site, in order to enable their careers. No, not like a Naukri.com or a Monster.com. They have their place in their own regards, but that place is in matching the job seekers to companies, and that’s it. This is why it has to be different. The way the user will engage with the site will be different. In order to understand this “Customer Engagement” thing better, I decided to investigate further.

It is how the user engages with the idea of the portal, and all the ambience surrounding it. Yes we know that, and we also know how to measure it. Often at times great business use Customer Engagement either as a marketing tool or as a metric to measure the success of an initiative. All this gyaan was great, but it did not get me anywhere. I still had a design for the site to be made, and none of the literature around is talking about Customer Engagement as a Design driver , all of them are using it post execution to see the effects of an action/treatment. People talk about user centric design, is this similar to online CE? I am finding out!!

Today after a long discussion with our modelling team, I realized that to use CE as a design driver would mean to completely re-structure the portal that we are developing; and keeping the customer engagement at the center. I am sure that this concept is already there in all design paradigms, but then why do not I see this being practiced in real life? Great products have this built-in them – iPod, WordPress, TCP/IP, GMail, Books, I could go on. That’s why their fundamental design has not changed much. The way the user engages with the product remains constant, what changes is the technology, the look and the price . What do you think?

One of my colleagues in a presentation remarked – that the problem these days is not about lack of information, it is about visibility of that information! These days the sheer volumes of information has reached such an extent that one cannot make out the differences between relevant and irrelevant. How many times have you clicked “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google in the past month? The answer is zero for me.

The way Google has chosen to solve that problem is idiotic at best – they let you indicate the relevance of the search result for that particular term (you have to be logged in to your Google Account and search for checking this feature out). The problem with this solution is that I still have to search for the solution which is most relevant to me. Visibility of the most relevant solution is an issue. What would have been great, if Google could have taken the relevance out of my social circle (read Google Contacts) and shown my contact’s relevance to me as well!! So my social circle is defining the context of the search and they are doing the search for me; not Google.

Social search, is what I am talking about. The new paradigm now is not to show all the possible searches – nobody has time to go through 567,198 results, show me what is relevant to me. Know thy customer. Take an application like Twitter and Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck lets me set search through the Twitter community, that way, the relevance and context comes out through the users. That is the way of the future – we used to talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but now it should be Social Media Visibility (SMV).

We need the more enlightened spirits among us to come forth and guide the masses