facebook, twitter and a pair of shoes

Facebook, Twitter& A Pair Of Shoes

Facebook, Twitter& A Pair Of Shoes

G Sankaranarayanan

First Edition: September 2014Book Prize: INR 350

Copyright © 2014 by G Sankaranarayanan

All rights reserverd. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Published 2014 by

Boardroom Bytes(A publishing division of Younomy)6, Pugazhendhi RoadCotton MarketRajapalayam 626117

[email protected] www.younomy.com

I dedicate this book to Mr S Viswanathan, Editor & Publisher, Industrial Economist,

who gave me my first job in business journalism.

Contents

Foreword ix Preface xi

CHAPTER 1 Humanize 1 I Am in The Army of Lord 3 One Status Update and One Lakh Likes 8 Om Shanti Om 12 How Do You Ask Matters 17 Cause to Paws, the Pet Store 21

CHAPTER 2 Socialize 25 I Am Lion, I Am Lion, I Am Lion 27 Her First Date 36 Where Do I Find Tigers? 43 I Want Happiness 48 Facebook, Twitter And A Pair Of Shoes 55

CHAPTER 3 Democratize 61 Ribhu And His Disciple 63 A Conference Of Scientists With God As Chief Guest 67 Do You Know Who My Son Is? 70 The X Newspaper 75 An Artist And A Cobbler 80 A Monk And The Floating Blanket 89 What Ganesh Chaturthi Festival Can Teach Business? 94

INDEX 101

ForewordBy Prof M S Swaminathan

Chairman, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation

This book by Shri Sankaranarayanan is a timely one since the role of social media in both information dissemination and shaping public opinion and policy is growing.

The value of social media comes from its interactive potential. Instead of monologue, it promotes meaningful dialogues. This book uses stories and humour to explain social business con-cepts. It also introduces many stimulating concepts such as hu-mannovation (innovation with human face), social funnel (why brands need to convert their social followers ultimately into co-creators), total value matrix (the four types of value a business creates – and how each type of value can be co-created using social media) and customer identify matrix (types of identities customers have – and how brands can nurture them for strategic reasons).

I hope this book will be widely read since it will add a new dimension to our understanding of social problems and social thinking. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Sankaranarayanan for his labour of love in the field of social communication. Prof M S Swaminathan Chennai September 4, 2014

ix

PrefaceStories are great tools of communication. This book uses some familiar ones to present new concepts in social business. The recurring theme of the stories is this: “Social business is not just about technology. It is a new - and a great - way of doing business”.

In social media, brands want more likes. There is a race. Brands even buy fans. But having a big following in social platforms is not an end in itself. There should be a business goal and a strategy.

The goal of a business is well known. It is to make profits. The end of social business too is profit but its means are based on the philosopies of humanization, socialization and democratization.

These terms may sound like jargons. But they simply empha-size that companies should be of, for and by people. We need to make brands more likeable. We need to make the process of value creation open for the participation of customers. These are not feel good aspects but business imperatives.

Technology is ready. It can enable producer and consumer join hands. The question is how prepared our brands are. I hope this book does its bit to broaden the conversations we have on social media and social business.

xi

Acknowledgements

This book is the collection of weekly newsletters I sent to 2,000-odd subscribers. It is the positive feedback and valuable com-ments of my subscribers that encouraged me to work on this book. I thank my subscribers for hitting the reply button when they receive the newsletter and share their thoughts.

I thank the legendary scientist Prof M S Swaminathan for his foreword. I also thank him for being a subscriber to the newslet-ter. Initially it was difficult for me to believe that someone of his stature would read mails coming from a little-known writer on a topic unrelated to agriculture or policy making. But leaders are learners. They have no intellectual boundaries.

I thank Prof Michael Schrage for his ‘praise for the book’. The management world knows him as a gifted thinker and author. He is also a great mentor. Despite his busy schedule, he finds time to write a quick note of appreciation or suggestion for my articles. I am grateful to both of them for their appreciation.

I thank my Facebook friends (especially, Ms Vidhya Satagopan Srinivasan and Ms Sharmila Raja). They gave many wonderful suggestions for the cover design.

I thank my friend Saravanan for helping me publish this book. I thank my designer, Govind Alagar, who was patient with me and my frequent revisions.

I thank the authors and publishers of news articles, interviews, and web content quoted in this book.

G SankaranarayananRajapalayam

xii

CHAPTER 1

Humanize

1“I Am in The

Army of Lord”

Once there was a pastor in a small town. He was known for his boring sermons. Hence, many people stopped listening to him.

But the pastor was enterprising - he made home visits to get people back to the church. One day, he met a certain rich man and appealed to him: “My son, as a true Chris-tian, I think you should join the Army of the Lord. Jesus wants you to be at His table.”

The man replied: “But, I am already in the Army of the Lord!” The pastor wondered: “Then, how come I never get to see you?!”

The rich man looked around, as if to make sure that nobody is watching, and whispered: “Because I am in the secret service.

‘

,

The Message:

If you are not interesting in social platforms, your audience will continue to be in “the secret service”.

In a way, social media has “past-forwarded” business. The nature of producer-consumer relations is getting personal, once again. With social technology, we are getting back to the time of pre-industrialization. Producers and consumers can know each other and create value together. The difference is that the engagement this time is digital.

Social media as a technology is here to stay. Not a week goes without a launch of a social platform to address yet an-other un-met socializing need of people.

But, from the point of “ownership”, social media platforms belong to two groups: people and brands.

The likes of Facebook and Twitter are “owned” by people - No one decides who talks about what, and how. The public social sphere is wild - call it Wild Social.

In contrast, the official pages of brands in Facebook or Twit-ter (and social websites) are private. They resemble ‘gardens’ because brands can control or influence conversations in these platforms. A brand can allow a conversation thread to take root, grow, and blossom in its page. Or it can decide not to.

In Wild Social, conversations are not directed. But at Social Gar-dens, they happen “by design”, and “for design”.

I Am in The Army of Lord 4

“If you want to be wildly successful in social media, then you have to play for the long-term. That means acting like a farmer, instead of a hunter.”

- Brad Smith, Founder, FixCourse

Engagement by design:

In a social platform like Equal Choice (www.equalchoice.com.au), engagement happens by design. Owned by Equal, the sweet-ener brand, this social platform engages customers on its own terms, so to say.

On Equal Choice, conversations take place on select topics. They range from fashion, environment and pop culture. Equal designed the social portal to converse with women in Australia on various choices they make in life.

Participants cannot create new topics on their own. They can converse only on topics supplied by the brand (Box Item 1).

Engagement for design:

In MyStarbucksIdea and NikeID, engagement happens “for design” (Box Item 2).

MyStarbucksIdea is social portal where customers submit their ideas for Starbucks. NikeID is a product configurator. These

Facebook, Twitter & A Pair Of Shoes5

platforms help brands engage with customers and “design” a product feature or a new product. That’s engagement for design.

Social Gardens can help companies capture “voice of customer” and better their offerings. Brands should be present in both these two types of social sphere and engage with customers for strategic reasons.

Box Item 1: Equal Choice

Created by Equal sweetener, Equal Choice is a social website dedicated to “digging into the choices” that people of Australia make: “the frivolous, the serious and the seriously confounding”. Equal Choice is like what would happen if you combined an internet forum with an either/or poll.

With help from a panel of experts, the website uncovers topi-cal issues and then lets its target audience tell “where you stand on them, either with a simple vote or by duking it out in the comments”. The company tracks the results live as people vote, so they can always see if their side is “winning” the debate. The panel of experts selects topics for discussion and debate. Then it’s up to the visitor to choose a topic, a side and vote. The com-pany also updates topics regularly so that there’s always a reason for people to come back.

Box Item 2: MyStarbucksIdeahttp://mystarbucksidea.force.com/

Mystarbucksidea is a crowd-sourcing platform, promoted by Starbucks coffee company. The site sources suggestions, ideas from customers and others to better its offerings. The social site lists the ideas submitted under different categories like Food, Tea, and Coffee & Espresso Drinks. It also lists the ideas under review, ideas that are reviewed, ideas in the works, and ideas that are implemented.

I Am in The Army of Lord 6

NikeID

NikeID is a social configurator that lets customers to customize shoes and accessories. Customers “can create the boot the game demands with custom traction options and bold colors…get them made exactly the way you want to match your performance and style demands”.


2“One Status Update and

One Lakh Likes”

It was a single Facebook post, from United Parcel Service (UPS). Published in August 2013, the post received about 95,000 likes. There were over 22,000 shares, and 4,600 comments. No doubt, it could be the most popular corpo-rate Facebook post of its kind in recent years.

What was it all about? Here is the backgrounder: Mr Gavin Crowsley, a UPS staff, was driving his delivery van on a highway. He spotted a dog on a side of the highway. He pulled over to find the dog on a short chain with no food, no water, no shelter.

“I knew if that dog - a Great Dane - didn’t die from starva-tion, he was going to die from the weather,” Gavin thought. He didn’t want to have a confrontation, but he just couldn’t leave him there. He called an animal welfare organization, and the rescue took place within an hour.

After a few months of rehabilitation, Phoenix (the dog’s new name) recovered, gaining weight. On the day of his

‘

rescue, the dog weighed less than 70 lbs, but after rehabili-tation, it was close to 160 lbs. Phoenix now knows how to sit, stay and shake. He has become quite the superstar with his own Facebook page called Phoenix Fighters.

The social team of UPS waited for months for the dog to recover. When the team told the full story, they also posted a picture of Phoenix with the driver, who helped save him. The element of love and the timing of the post gave a huge reach for the brand.

Likes, shares, and comments poured in thousands. A fan’s comment exclaimed: “UPS drivers are the eyes and ears of their communities!” And the comment itself received over 800 likes!


,

The Message:

Virtue is the key ingredient of a “viral” content in social media. Not that kind acts are rare in work life. But how many compa-nies do have people to listen to everyday experiences of their frontline staff ? How many could catch such simple acts of love that have the potential to go viral? How many do have the talent to convert acts of corporate compassion into corporate commu-nication without giving the message a stretch?

In the case of Phoenix, the rescue happened in January, 2013. UPS made the post in August. It waited for seven months for the dog to recover - and the story to develop.

“We wanted the first photo you see of Phoenix to be this sweet boy reunited with the UPS driver who helped save his life,” explained UPS to its fans.

In traditional corporate communication, it was all about press releases. The challenge for a brand then was to find newsworthy content. In corporate social communication, it is about cause worthy content. There should be some human touch of intel-ligence, emotion, creativity, and care in our content.

Social media releases are not press releases. They do not have to be formal, serious. There is no need for big ticket announce-ments. The size or scale does not matter. The depth of the hu-man touch does.

An YouTube video could be about how your product or service touches the lives of people. A blog could be about the efforts you take to conserve water. A Facebook status update could be a survey, trivia, seasonal greetings.

One Status Update and One Lakh Likes 10

“PR is about positioning, and social media is about becoming, being and improving.”

— Mr Chris Brogan

Social content comes in all hues and colours. The ideas that go into filling your ‘content bucket’ should come from the entire team. Social content is team content - not a CEO content.

Brands should set communication indicators especially for social media. The indicators could be thoughts and deeds on corporate values, and vision. The social team can explore the possibility of developing content in appropriate formats.

Leading social brands - like Intel, Dell and Starbucks conduct training programs for employees on social media. The trainings help everyone to act like a brand journalist and contribute to the social narration.

Getting the buy-in of the top management is important for budget allocation. But that of employees across ranks is inevi-table to not let social communication go out of steam for want of interesting content.


3“Om Shanti Om”

Coca Cola announced that it is suspending all ad-vertisements in all media channels in Philippines from No-vember 10, 2013. It is for an indefinite period. The company would use the ad budget to do relief work in this island country, devastated by Typhoon Haiyan cyclone.

This news of Coke suspending ads for the relief work got the admiration even from its strongest critics. So much so that industry observers reported that the word of mouth on the suspension of Coke ads did a better job than the ads otherwise would have done for the brand. (Box Item 1)

‘,

“You can only win if you create a huge brand that has nothing to do with advertising.”

— Mr Wally Olins

The Message:

Earned media - “refers to publicity gained through promotional efforts other than advertising” - wins hands down.

Mr Wally Olins, founder, Saffron Brand Consultants once said: “You can only win if you create a huge brand that has nothing to do with advertising.” If there is a quote that every brand man-ager should read, as soon as they wake up, it should be this.

In future, you can build a brand only with earned me-dia. And you will earn media not by throwing money at newspapers, but by winning

people’s attention in social channels. Attention creates brands. But here comes the next question: Why would people pay attention to a company and helps it build brands.

Samuel J Palmisano, former Chairman of the Board, IBM, an-swers. In one of his annual letters at IBM, he wrote: “Today, as in the past, when people turn to our company, I believe they are looking for how IBMers approach problems, as well as for the types of problems we choose to approach.” (Box Item 2)

Of course, he was speaking for IBM, but doesn’t it hold true for any company? Your’s and mine? To “create a huge brand without advertising” you should be choosing problems worth solving. And your problem solving approaches should be like-able too.

Behind all viral content is the message of “human touch”. It is about the difference a corporate act (or thought) make in peo-ple’s lives. Not just innovation, but “humannovation”. Brands


need to be creative to remain humane. An inscrutable entity or ruthless system does not win people’s admiration.

But humannovation could be about simple friendly acts. Re-cently, Finnair brought out a booklet on how it touches lives of its customers. One anecdote was about a Finnair flight attendant personally picking up passengers on her way to work. And a viral video of Finnair showed the whole cabin crew dancing to the tunes of a Bollywood film song: “Om shanti om”. It was India’s Republic Day. The crew on board a flight from Delhi to Helsinki greeted Indian passengers by singing and dancing for this song.

Finnair’s video of the crew’s humannovation had gone viral with over 5, 250,000 views in YouTube. So, if you do not have budget for ad, that’s cool. “Put your hands up and say, om shanti om”, because you can humannovate and earn media. Box Item 1:Coke Suspends Ad Campaign For Best Reason You Could ImagineSource: Huffington Post

Posted: 11/25/2013

Even while Coke sales are declining, the soft drink giant is still putting its advertising on hold to focus on a more important cause.

Coca-Cola announced last week that the company is suspending its brand advertising in the Philippines so that it can donate its entire ad budget to typhoon relief efforts. The company has so far donated more than $2.5 million in cash and in-kind contribu-tions. “We wish to express our heartfelt solidarity to all Filipinos in these difficult times,” Carlos Salazar Lomelín, Chief Execu-

Om Shanti Om 14

tive Officer of Coca-Cola FEMSA, the bottling company of the Philippines, said in a press release. “It is in times like these when the Philippines sets an example of resilience and good spirit, and where our values of supporting ourselves as a team come at its best.”

The death count for Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest storms on record, has surpassed 5,000. Still, 1,611 remain missing. Experts say that rebuilding houses, schools, roads and bridges in the ravaged areas of the Philippines could hit $5.8 bil-lion, Reuters reported.

While many supporters have lauded Coke’s efforts in helping typhoon victims, some have questioned whether suspending ads is a marketing ploy in and of itself.

“It is still an advertising move,” one Reddit user pointed out. “People will find out what they did, think they are a better com-pany because of it, and buy their product to support it. As great as it is it still gives them advertising.”

Box Item 2: A letter from Samuel J. PalmisanoSource: IBM website

For more than a century, when people have sought a relationship with IBM—whether as a client, employee, partner or neighbor—what have they been seeking?

Perhaps it was deep expertise in science and technology. Or a partner with broad understanding of their industry or sector of society. It might have been long-standing presence in their market, their community or around the world. Or perhaps they hoped to learn from a company that itself had undergone con-tinual change.There are, however, certain kinds of aspirations that can’t be achieved through organizational capabilities, global reach or


technology—or by applying the lessons of the past. To cap-ture the biggest economic opportunities or to tackle society’s most daunting problems—to imagine what the world might be, and actually to build it—people have sought something more fundamental: a unique ability to conceptualize opportunities, to analyze developments, to tackle and overcome grand challenges.

In my view, the defining value that IBM has provided over the years has been the way we think. Today, as in the past, when people turn to our company, I believe they are looking for how IBMers approach problems, as well as for the types of problems we choose to approach. They seek a kind of relationship, in ad-dition to the outcomes of that relationship. And they are drawn to a set of values that reflect their own.

Most companies aim to satisfy their customers. Some go farther, dedicating themselves to their clients’ success. A few define success as bringing to the world innovations that make a lasting difference. A handful build trusted, long-term relationships with their owners, employees, partners, neighbors and the world at large.

For more than a century, IBM has chosen to live at the intersec-tion of these values. This choice has enabled our company to prosper, to create value for our clients and owners, to provide rewarding careers for millions of people, and to be a progressive force in the societies in which we do our work.

Om Shanti Om 16

4“How Do You Ask Matters”

Two friends wanted to learn meditation from a fa-mous Zen Master. But they had a problem - they both were passionate smokers and would never give up smoking for anything.

They decided to explain their problem to the Master. The first one went to the Master and hesitantly asked him: “Master, can I smoke when I meditate?” Instantly, the Master gave him one tight slap, and sent him out.

However, this did not deter the second one from trying his luck. Having watched what happened, our man gave a different spin to the question. He asked: “Dear Master, can I meditate when I smoke?” The Master patted him on his back, and exclaimed, “Why not?!”

‘

,

The Message:

Coming to social media, a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) of marketers is: “Can I use social media for marketing?” The answer can wait.

The success of Ms Estée Lauder, founder of Estée Lauder Company, can serve as the context. Ms Lauder founded her cosmetics company in 1946 in the US. She then had four or five products. But Lauder decided to sell them only through upscale department stores.

It took two years before Ms Lauder could find an upmarket store that would be willing to give order for her products. Today, the company has an unrivaled portfolio of 27 brands that are sold in more than 150 countries. Ms Lauder is duly credited with changing the face of the beauty business in the US.

What’s Ms Lauder’s secret of success? She herself explained: “I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard.” There has always been a personal “high touch” in her marketing. She believed that “in order to make a sale, you must touch the customer”.

She became a persuasive traveling salesperson, making in-store presence in every fine department store in the US. There, she spent a great deal of time advising customers and teaching beauty advisors. She relied on this personal high touch for her marketing.

One of Estée Lauder’s favorite quotes was “Tell-A-Phone, Tell-A-Graph, Tell-A-Woman”. It was her conviction that once a woman tried her product, she would “like it” and then “share it” with her friends.

How Do You Ask Matters 18

“Focus on how to be social, not on how to do social.”

— Jay Baer

But, social media was yet born then. Had Ms Lauder lived to see the explosion of the new media today, she would have exhorted her staff: “Tell-A-Phone, Tell-A-Graph, Tweet-A-Woman”. Ms Marisa Thalberg, VP Global Digital Marketing at Estée Lauder, in an interview, observed: “Interestingly, you can see social media as the modern extension of how Mrs. Estée Lauder founded our company, on the principle of being ‘high-touch’. She pioneered the woman-to-woman selling model, in the way she connected so directly with women, on the floors of depart-ment stores. Rather than digital representing the opposite of this in moving us to the virtual world, I think social media is in fact proving to be the way we are able to scale that behavior glob-ally.” (Box Item)

Marisa believes that social media gives an unique opportunity for her brand to have a continuous relationship with the consumer and enable fellow brand enthusiasts to have a relationship with each other.

Coming back to the FAQ, a big “No” to social media market-ing, and a resounding “Yes” to the social way of marketing. It is about personal, high touch.

Box Item:Luxury Brand Cause Marketing with Marisa Thalberg, The Estée Lauder CompaniesSource: Experience Management Blog at Sprinklr.com

A few months ago, we sat down with Marisa Thalberg, VP Global Digital Marketing at The Estée Lauder Companies, to discuss the Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign she and her team help globally execute annually. The interview was originally published in the Social Business Journal, and affirms that mar-keters can no longer afford to look at social and digital market-ing as segregated entities from traditional marketing – digital


marketing is even more easily tied back to marketing success metrics (in this case, reach and awareness). Excerpts from the interview:

Can you tell us a little bit about the role that social campaigns play for brands in today’s prestige beauty market?

We look at social now as a key layer of integrated brand cam-paigns, and it is also of course a unique opportunity to have a continuous relationship with the consumer (and enable fellow brand enthusiasts to have a relationship with each other). In-terestingly, you can see social media as the modern extension of how Mrs. Estée Lauder founded our company, on the principle of being ‘high-touch.’ She pioneered the woman-to-woman sell-ing model, in the way she connected so directly with women, on the floors of department stores. Rather than digital representing the opposite of this in moving us to the virtual world, I think social media is in fact proving to be the way we are able to scale that behavior globally.

What are your goals in executing campaigns across the global Estée Lauder corporation?

We have a large portfolio of brands – close to 30 – so I would be hard-pressed to give one answer as our goals in digital mar-keting are generally no different than goals for our marketing in general, tied to each brand’s specific business objectives. A goal might be awareness, or keeping the consumer engaged with and learning more about a brand, or considering it differently.

We also always want to offer our consumers great experiences. As marketing matures we’re all getting a little bit more sophisti-cated about understanding that digital and social marketing ismarketing.

How Do You Ask Matters 20

5“Cause to Paws, the Pet Store”

This one is a real story of a pet store – named, Cause to Paws – located in Coolidge Corner, a Brookline neighborhood in Boston, US. A resident, Ms Terry Meyers founded this store.

Once, a thoughtful friend gifted Terry a dog. Terry named the pet Kanji. Soon, Kanji became a big part of her life. Terry bought lot of toys, special pet foods, clothes, even furniture for Kanji. But the shopping experience was not that pleasant.

Terry realized that Coolidge Corner needed a new pet store that is more sociable. She started one on her own. Her store, Cause to Paws, sells all sorts of “functional and frivolous” pet products. And also offers many benevolent services.

Terry opened an official page at Facebook to connect with her customers. If you were a pet owner living in Coolidge Corner, you would find following Cause to Paws on Face-book valuable.

‘

You will get personalized news. There will be tips to pro-tect your pets in different seasons. Details of a missing pet - so that you know who to alert when you find a pet stranded somewhere.

You will get invites to birthday parties of pets living in your neighborhood. Events like Yappy Hours, a socializing event for pets. Free talks by pet trainers or Howl-o-ween parties (that’s, Halloween for pets). Farewell parties for pets and pet owners who are moving out of Coolidge Cor-ner. Or the visits of pet owners to senior citizens.

Be it online or offline, Cause to Paws has become the place to go in Coolidge Corner for “two-legged friends” who have “four-legged friends”.

Cause to Paws, the Pet Store 22

,

The message

One gets a feeling that Terry runs the store true to its name - that is, more out of compassion for pets than passion for profit. This one-woman store has a big message for large organizations: put compassion over commerce.

Your people should be for a cause other than that of your busi-ness. To put it another way, you have to share the compassion of your customers towards their cause. It could be about caring for pets or healthy living or investing for future.

Brands can sell - of course, Cause to Paws has commercial in-terests. But it is the common interest that it has with customers that helped it win friends. Cause to Paws has over 400 Facebook friends - which is impressive for a pet store in a neighborhood with just about 31,000 people.

If all what a company has is just commercial interest, it may close a sale but may not open a relationship. Big brands spend a lot of money in digital and social media to attract more friends. They are so sociable that they even “buy” friends.

But it is time businesses understood how-to-be friendly as a company. If they can become “companies of friends” first, they can get “friends for companies”. The question is this: “Am I just a company or a company of friends?


“You don’t close a sale, you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise.”

- Patricia Fripp

CHAPTER 2

Socialize

6“I Am Lion, I Am Lion,

I Am Lion”

Lion attacks became frequent in a small African town. The news created panic and affected local tourism. The local forest officials could not find the elusive animal. Hence, the Mayor of the town sought help from experts in foreign countries.

Officers from UK stepped in to help. The team spent many days in the forest but they were not able to find a single lion. They returned empty handed. Then officers from the US arrived. They used all modern gadgets and combed the forest. But even they could not find any evidence of lions.

Now, it was the turn of Indian police. Clad in khaki uni-forms, they appeared with simple wooden sticks. Looking at them, the African Mayor lost hope. But the Indian police was quite confident. After all, they had a home grown strategy.

‘

The police went to the forest. They found a jackal. That’s more than enough. They handcuffed it and lathicharged the poor chap to make it “confess” that it was lion. After custodial treatment, the police produced the jackal in front of the Mayor. The jackal testified that it was lion and it was behind the attacks.

I Am Lion, I Am Lion, I Am Lion

,28

The Message

By labeling social media as a marketing tool, consultants do to social media what the Indian policemen did to the bear. People use social platforms for socializing, and not to shop.

Custora, a predictive analytics com-pany, studied over 250 e-commerce sites. They analysed four years of data. Their aim was to find what contributions Facebook and Twitter

made in new customer acquisitions. They found that Facebook contributed less than one quarter of 1 percent of new custom-ers. And Twitter just one hundredth of 1 percent. (Box Item 1).

Social is not made for existing business functions - leave alone, marketing. There is a business function that big businesses have long forgotten to carry out. It is the function of conversing with customers. Social is best suited for bringing conversation back to business.

Let us take India’s retail scenario, where competition is getting intense between the big and the small. Talking about retail in-dustry, Mr Nadir Burjorji Godrej of Godrej Industries, made an interesting observation.

He said that the biggest competition for India’s organized stores comes from ‘kirana’ stores. Kirana stores are the mom and pop stores run by neighborhood entrepreneurs. The Indian retail-ers do not have to lose their sleep so much over the entry of Walmarts of the world.

What makes the kirana stores so competitive? After all, they do not have any bargaining power or clout with manufacturers. It is true that they are not big but they thrive with the following busi-ness strategies:


“Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers.”

- Ross Perot

1) Credit: The kirana shops cater to the needs of local house-holders they know well. They let their customers maintain “accounts”. Customers make just-in-time purchases, every day. But they can settle the bill once a week or month, depending on when their bread winner gets paid.

2) Customization: The stores sell products in small quantities. Customers don’t have to buy a full coconut. They can buy one or two pieces of it, if that’s what all they need for that day’s recipe. They shop edible oils and other grocery items in required quantities and combinations.

3) Conversations: Kirana stores are places of witty and personal conversations taking place between both parties. Shopping becomes a socializing experience for shoppers. In contrast, large format stores doe not have space for conversations.

But social media allows big retailers act like kirana stores. They can engage customers before, during and after transactions in conversations.

Conversations are not standalone functions. Brands can intro-duce them to every aspect of business. Philips, for instance, has embarked on what it calls “people research”. People research is nothing but market research based on conversations. In market research, brands ask consumers questions. In people research, brands let consumers converse. Then they glean product or busi-ness insights from listening to conversations.

Philips hosted a social platform and let women converse on their kitchen dilemmas. It listened to their conversations, and de-signed a new cooker itself. (Box Item 2). Proof that conversations can give a firm a competitive edge.

I Am Lion, I Am Lion, I Am Lion 30

Box Item 1: Email Is Crushing Twitter, Facebook for Selling Stuff OnlineSource: Wired.com issue of July, 2013

In 2013, no company can expect to be taken seriously if it’s not on Facebook or Twitter. An endless stream (no pun intended) of advice from marketing consultants warns businesses that they need to “get” social or risk becoming like companies a century ago that didn’t think they needed telephones.

Despite the hype that inevitably clings to the newfangled, however, it’s relatively antique tech that appears to be far more important for selling stuff online. A new report from marketing data outfit Custora found that over the past four years, online retailers have quadrupled the rate of customers acquired through email to nearly 7 percent.

Facebook over that same period barely registers as a way to make a sale, and the tiny percentage of people who do con-nect and buy over Facebook has stayed flat. Twitter, meanwhile, doesn’t register at all. By far the most popular way to get cus-tomers was “organic search,” according to the report, followed by “cost per click” ads (in both cases, read: Google).Custora came up with its figures by analyzing data from 72 million customers shopping on 86 different retailer sites. They tracked where customers were clicking from (email, Twitter, Google, etc.) and what and how much they bought, not just on that visit but for the next two years.

Over those two years, Custora found that customers who came to retailers from search were more than 50 percent more valu-able than average. In other words, they were more likely to shop more and spend more. Email customers were nearly 11 percent more valuable than average. Facebook customers were just about average. Twitter customers, meanwhile, were 23 percent


less valuable than average during the two years following that first click. “I wouldn’t necessarily say Twitter is inherently a bad way to do (online marketing), but we haven’t seen a lot of good Twitter strategies right now,” says Aaron Goodman, Custora’s lead data scientist. He says Twitter marketing campaigns right now tend to rely on the chancy likelihood that someone will run across a deal when they dip into their feed. Even if they do see it, within seconds it disappears.

Email, on the other hand, has a certain unfair advantage in that shoppers getting the emails have already given up their addresses to a site, suggesting they already have some prior relationship with that retailer. Still, despite the avalanche of spam we all get, it’s easy to see how the staying power and greater potential for personalization of a medium without a 140-character limit gives email distinct advantages.

Custora’s findings don’t bode especially well for social media business models, especially Twitter. Of course, ads on Facebook and Twitter don’t have to lead to immediate clicks to have an im-pact. They still have the potential to raise ambient awareness. Yet Custora found that Google’s ads, by contrast, do lead not only to clicks but to purchases—the holy grail of “conversion.”

To be fair, Google had a roughly 10-year head start to turn search into sales. It’s hard to imagine that in a decade that social media won’t be a more important channel for selling stuff. Al-ready its “product cards” provide a very direct way for Twitter to act as a storefront. Businesses probably shouldn’t abandon social just yet. But if they had to pick, that old-timey mailing list may trump tweets for a long time to come.


Box Item 2: Menu Menu - Creating an online dialogueSource: Philips Design’s website (Published on 10 January 2012)

While the use of social media in marketing is quite well-estab-lished, it is less so in research. The recent Menu Menu project within Philips Design was set up to explore social media as a re-search tool, to gain a better understanding of people’s behavior. Social media enabled the People Research team to take in-sight generation and co-creation with consumers to a new level of en-gagement and gain knowledge in areas strategic for the business.

The research team moved away from the more traditional meth-ods of identifying needs and developing solutions. “We wanted to gain an in-depth understanding of our target audience with respect to food and cooking, and how they approach dilem-mas and issues in the kitchen,” explains Jon Rodriguez, Senior Research Consultant and Creative Lead for the Menu Menu project. “Our target group were people who enjoyed cooking, had children and also worked during the week.”

From passive to proactive

In order to glean a new level of information from participants, the project involved them in a dialogue rather than just asking them questions in the traditional style of research. Generative techniques used the creativity of people to become aware of and express their own experiences.

The project tested out three more proactive approaches: Moving from questions to dialogue – having a conversation about cook-ing; Moving from observations to provocations – participants were set challenges and creative exercises to stimulate more innovative ideas; Moving from the idea of individual users to community – so that people would trigger each other.The Philips Design People Research created a website to recruit


participants, and this was then became the main forum for keep-ing them engaged and having fun with the project.

The initial focus was on Spain and Germany, where a small number of participants were identified in each (30 in total). The project ran for a specific period of just two weeks, during which 10 days of challenges were set. When participants signed up to be involved they were sent a box containing information and materials relating to some of the challenges, as well as some surprise envelopes. The challenges were all food related, with the aim of gaining more information about context and rituals.

“Provoking a dialogue helped inspire innovative ideas that we could explore with the whole group, as well as giving us deeper insights,” explains Rodriguez. “For example, we asked people to invite their best friend for dinner who would then interview them. (We provided the questions on a place mat.) We also asked participants to make a 360 degree video of their kitchen, and asked which were their 5 favorite kitchen tools and their 5 for-gotten tools. Fortunately people love to talk about food, and fun was also a key element, so it had wide appeal and the participants actually enjoyed it.”

At the end, the results and priorities were presented back to the communities for further feedback and dialogue. The participants were very engaged in the project and the methodology elicited a lot more ‘real’ information that was set in daily context. This participatory approach, leveraging online platforms, made it much easier to observe the latent needs that people had, that may not have been expressed in a more traditional research exercise. “This project was very authentic, we were completely immersed in it and everything was shared between participants as well,” says Rodriguez.


Overall there is benefit to be had in mixing different methods to complement each other. For example, anecdotes expressed in a generative session can elucidate the understanding of a field visit observation. Participatory methods, such as Menu Menu, are in-valuable in understanding latent needs and co-creating solutions with consumers.


7“Her First Date”

It was her first date. The girl was curious to know about her crush.

But she realized that the guy was a bragger. He was bab-bling on and on about his hobbies, pet peeves, his driving techniques. He even explained the standards he used to select his barber.

The girl already showed the patience of a saint. She thought she could not bear it any more. Just then, the guy came up for air. “Enough about me,” he paused, before adding: “Now tell me, what do you think of me?

‘,

The Message:

In social channels, brands blow their own trumpet non-stop. The talk would usually be on product features and work culture. Or their vision for entire humanity.

But brands can go beyond “nar-cissism/advertising complex” - to borrow the words of Scott Anthony of Innosight. They can instead talk about their custom-ers or better let customers talk.

My company (Younomy) did a study on social campaigns of some of India’s top retail brands. (Excerpts at Box Item) We found that brands improved their engagement rate when they encour-age customers express their identities.

Customers are individuals. They have many identities about themselves. Their core identity could be I am ‘a single working mother’ or ‘a health-conscious parent’, ‘a loving brother’...

They jump at the chance to express who they are. They look for networking with people who have similar identities. Smart brands like Barista, Colgate, Globus, and Trent seem to under-stand this.

They make use of ‘identity celebrations’ - special occasions like Father’s Day. Brands launch campaigns to get their customers live out their identities. In the process, brands build their own identities. The study found two things:

1) Customers are their own brands. Like corporate brands, they have their own brand identities.


“The key thing in social media is not how you relate to your audience, it’s how those people who make up the audiences relate to their connec-tions,” — Walter Pike, The Digital Academy

2) In social media, brands can build their identities by letting customers build theirs.

Box Item:Customer Identities and Corporate Campaigns in Social Media

Clue Train Manifesto is a set of 95 famous theses related to mar-keting. The first thesis states: “Markets are conversations”.

Though published in 1999, the Manifesto is relevant to the social era. After all, social media is a new market made of nothing but conversations.

The conversations of people are passionate. At a deeper level, people want to express ‘who they are’. We call them ‘identities’. They may belong to personal, familial, professional or social categories.

If they can nurture their identities by taking part in conversa-tions, they take part. This is good news for brands looking for boosting engagement rate.

Brands have tasted success. Occasions like Teachers Day, Raksha Bandhan and Father’s Day are never to miss opportunities for them to promote customer engagement.

There is another business benefit. Social conversations also result in sales conversions. A customer liking, commenting, shar-ing branded-content on Father’s Day, is more likely to buy – or influence his/her friends to buy – gifts.

Following are examples of how select Indian retail created con-versations around peoples’’s identities.

Her First Date 38

Personal Identities

As it is often observed by contemporary marketers, people are their own celebrities. They do have a view, a distinct voice, and a personality. So why not offer customers the status of a celebrity? Many brands generate content by encouraging audience to share their profiles and photos.

Cafe Coffee Day

Cafe Coffee Day promotes profiles of its customers through its Coffee Mate of the Month feature. Its Facebook page and internal magazine carry profiles of coffee mates. The magazine is circulated in its 1000-odd branches.

Colgate

Colgate encourages its Facebook fans to share their pictures of “dazzling white smile”. Its Facebook app lets customers to upload and share across their smiles. One of its recent social campaigns gave a chance for customers to get featured in a lead-ing magazine with Hindi actor, Sonam Kapoor.

Globus

Globus, an upmarket fashion and retail chain, promotes Face-book engagement in a novel way. It puts a standing banner at all its stores. It asks customers to get a snap of themselves in front of it and upload them at its official Facebook page.

The most ‘liked’ photos stand a chance to win Globus gift vouchers worth Rs.5000. This incentivises a participant to get her Facebook friends to visit Globus’s Facebook page and like her photo.


Familial Identities

Familial identities relate to the roles people play in families. When tapped, they help brands elicit an overwhelming response to their campaigns. Samples:

Tanishq

Tanishq, a jewelry brand, conducted a social media contest on the eve of Raksha Bandhan. It is a Hindu festival that celebrates the love between brothers and sisters. Targeting its female fans, Tanishq asked them to “remind your brother how much you love him”.

The fans shared their funny little moments with their brothers in Twitter. They should embed the #TweetaRakhi tag or tweet to @TanishqJewelry. Tanishq awarded lucky winners with gift vouchers.

Trent

On the occasion of Father’s Day, Trent, a retail store chain, gave its customers a chance to gift their fathers a special magnet. The magnet would be a personalized one with dedication to fathers.

Trent asked its customers to rewrite their Twitter bio starting with #MyDadIs and tweet to @WestsideStores. Trent printed the tweet messages of select customers on magnets and deliv-ered them to the parents.

BigBazaar

BigBazaar attracted active participation for its #SiblingsConnect contest during Raksha Bandhan. It asked its fans to create beauti-ful rakhis, ‘ties or knots of protection’. It promoted tweets of fans who recalled fond sibling-memories.

Her First Date 40

Big Bazaar also had run a social media campaign on Parents’ Day, asking its fans to express their feelings for their parents.

Cafe CoffeeDay

One of Cafe Coffee Day’s campaigns sought its fans to come up with the funniest #FriendshipWeek meme for their friends. The coffee retailer featured creative and funny memes in its exclusive web section http://www.cafecoffeeday.com/friendshipday

Titan

Titan came up with “Celebrate Fathers Day with Titan” cam-paign. It presented best Father’s Day gift ideas for its customers. Titan asked its customers to like Titan’s official Facebook page to receive Father’s Day ideas.

Social Identities

Social identities are what people use to engage with the society at different levels. They could stem from affiliations with a caste, class, religion, political party or interests.

BigBazaar

Big Bazaar sought entries - creative ideas, views, greeting mes-sages or photos - from its fans on Ganesh Chaturthi, a popular Hindu festival.

Its #GanpatiBappaMorya contest awarded winners with a gift voucher worth Rs. 2000, redeemable at the nearest Big Bazaar outlet.

BigBazaar crowdsourced pictures on the occasion of Pooka-lam. It is a festival of Kerala. People make pookalam or flower arrangement during the harvest festival of Onam. BigBazaar


published best Pookalam pictures sent by Keralite fans in its Facebook page.

Barista

Barista encouraged its customers to make their teachers feel special on #HappyTeachersDay. Customers have to invite their favorite teachers for a coffee at Barista.

Conclusion: While creating content, campaigns and com-munities online, brands could begin with identifying and appeal-ing to customer identities that are strategic to business. When brands promote identities of customers, they generate more participation. This in turn promotes corporate identities.

Red Bull, an energy drinks brand, presents an interesting case of nurturing customer identity to build coporate identity. In its so-cial channels Red Bull promotes content that show high energy actions from a wide mix of sports. It could be from motorcycle racing to hang gliding to bungee jumping.

Much of its content are crowd sourced from people. The crowd-sourced photos and videos show people involved in their own little acts of adrenaline rush.

Red Bull’s social platforms help participants build a brand for themselves as adventurers. Its Facebook page has a whooping 44 million plus followers. Fans consume and contribute content, and connect with other adventurers.

Her First Date 42

8“Where Do I Find Tigers?”

A wildlife photographer wanted to take close-up shots of tigers. He headed to a forest. At the foothills, he met a tribal man. The photographer thought he might get some useful information from him.

“Tigers? Not a big deal, sir. You can spot a lot of them in this forest,” the tribesman assured, “I saw a couple of them yesterday, when I was collecting honey”.

The excited photographer grew impatient: “Wow! Where did you find them? How will I go there?”

The man started giving directions this way: “Head south, sir. Soon, you would find a group of monkeys. Turn left and walk for some more time, until you find a few grazing deer. Continue further, then you would encounter a lonely bison. Don’t worry. You can hide yourself behind a rock or tree. Once the bison leaves, climb up a slope. Continue till you find a couple of bears playing with their cub. Then…”

The tribesman continued, even as he wondered why the photographer is looking dejected now.

‘

,

The Message:

The information that the photographer got was 24 hours old. It was not going to help him. Sometimes, people in business take decisions with obsolete data. The customer data they have may belong to customers who do not exist anymore.

For instance, our airline industry continues to manufacture seats that fit customers of 1950s. They do not design seats for today’s customers. A Study (Box item 1) finds that the standard width of seats in the economy class is 17 inches. It was perfect for passen-gers of the 1950s. Over the years, the Body Mass Index of aver-age people has increased, owing to food and lifestyle changes.

Today’s customers need an 18-inch seat width to fit in and catch some sleep on a long-haul flight. Will Boeings of the world meet the seating requirements of the today’s customers?

There is another case in Indian retail. A multinational company was stitching men’s wear for Indians with measurements of Britons. There was a newspaper report (Box Item 2) on Marks & Spencer, a UK based retailer of food and apparels. This retail chain has been trailing behind other formal-wear brands in India. The reason, among others, was the size of its fashion products. According to the report, the company stitched clothes keeping measurements of Britons in mind. Now it is “reworking the size by introducing smaller apparel sizes suitable for Indians”.

How do companies get obsolete data? Maybe, the limitations of traditional market research channels are to blame. But social media is real time. The “likes”, “comment”, “updates” can show what people are thinking now. It can tell what are the current needs of customers.

Where Do I Find Tigers? 44

“Making snap business deci-sions based on social data is, in part, what it means to be a social business,”

— Shel Holtz, Principal, Holtz Communication + Technology

Brands can make use of social analytics tools. Dell has done a great job in this regard. It developed a social analytics tool on its own. Christened, Social Net Advocacy (SNA), the software tells Dell who are raving and ranting its products now and why. Dell acts on the social data and converts rants into raves.

That’s the power of social media listening. When you want to meet existing customers, as they are, turn to the right source.

Box Item 1:Wider airline seat can boost sleep: studyRelaxnewsOct 29, 2013

For long-haul travellers who squeeze themselves into economy seats, a new study finds that a tiny bit more wiggle room could make a substantial impact as to whether or not they’ll get quality sleep on board.

Aircraft manufacturer Airbus announced Monday that even as much as an extra inch of room can boost the quality of your on-flight slumber, and the organization is calling on airlines to set a minimum seat width of 18 inch (45.72 cm) for long-haul travel.

Research conducted by the London Sleep Centre that measured brainwaves and eye, abdominal, chest, hip and leg movement of 1,500 airline passengers found that a seat width of 18 inches improved their sleep quality by 53% when compared to a 17-inch-wide seat, which was the standard set back in the 1950s (when waistlines were smaller and long-distance travellers fewer). The study involved participants recruited at four international airports -- Singapore, Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt, and Amster-dam.

“The difference was significant,” said researcher Dr. Irshaad Ebrahim in a press release. “All passengers experienced a deeper,


less disturbed and longer night’s sleep in the 18-inch seat.”

“The 17-inch seat is what we call the crusher seat,” said Kevin Keniston, Airbus’s head of passenger comfort. “It is the seat that prevents you from movement; it prevents you from getting comfortable during the flight.”“Our research reveals that not only does seat width make a dra-matic impact on passenger comfort, there is a growing cohort of discerning economy passengers who are not prepared to accept 17-inch seats and will instead choose airlines that offer better seat comfort,” he added.

“We are encouraging all airlines to look at our research and con-sider increasing the size of their seats because one inch makes all the difference.”

Box Item 2: M&S aims to double store count by 2016Source: The Hindu Business Line news reportMumbai, Nov. 11, 2013:

International food and fashion retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) has put India on high-priority list, pushing back China. The UK retailer plans to more than double its store count from 36 at present to 80 by 2016, making it the largest number outside the UK.

The company’s aggressive plans for India come at a time when several other local retailers and brands are reeling under the slowdown pressure, besides growing competition from the on-line retailers.

M&S, which operates in India through a joint venture partner-ship with Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Retail, also plans to venture into smaller towns such as Surat and Kanpur, without compromising much on quality or pricing. It will also have a uniform catalogue of styling across the country.

Where Do I Find Tigers? 46

Marc Bolland, Chief Executive, M&S, said, “We changed our priority market to India from China two and a half years ago. In the last eight years, we have achieved exactly what we had planned in terms of store count and sales. Last year, we had 28 per cent growth in revenue and double-digit same-store sales growth.”

Bolland was addressing the media at the official opening of its new high-street store in uptown Bandra. He, however, refused to divulge any other financial details on investments and sales forecast.

The British retailer, which entered as a formal-wear brand, is now focusing on the youth by experimenting with colour. The company is reworking the size by introducing smaller apparel sizes suitable for Indians. It entered the Indian market much before Spanish fashion brand Zara but is still trailing behind.

However, given the size of stores the company is planning, it will be tad difficult for the company to make profits, retail experts said. M&S plans to open larger stores of 50,000 sq ft. Globally, M&S derives about 60 per cent of its revenue from food retail, said India chief Venu Nair. He also said that at the moment the company has no plans to bring that segment to India.

Meanwhile, retail consultant Technopak Advisory in a report said that international brands are now changing sourcing strat-egies and are opting for local procurement channels to gain competitive advantage, in order to be the preferred brand among Indian consumers.


9“I Want Happiness”

Three friends met a guru to seek his blessings. The first one was a sanyasin (the one who renounced the world). He asked the guru: “I want happiness”. Guru replied: “Forget about ‘I’ and ‘want’, what is left is ‘happi-ness’!” The second person was a grahastha (a householder). He too had the same question. Guru advised, “Remove ‘want’ and ‘happiness’ from your question, focus on I.Do your duty as per your roles: ‘I as husband’, ‘I as father’, ‘I as son’, and so on. You will be fine.” The third one was a businessman. To him the Guru sug-gested, “Do away with ‘I’ and ‘happiness’. Just create “wants” for householders, you will earn more and be happy.”

‘

,

The Message:

The job of a business is about finding - and or creating - “wants” of people. A business first identifies what people want. Then look at their purchasing power. And design a product

or service, making right tradeoffs in terms of functionalities, quality and cost - a widely used approach to segmenting market and creating value.

But Harvard’s Prof Clayton Christensen offered a new frame-work for market segmentation. He called it “jobs-to-do” frame-work. (Box Item 1). The premise is that people have jobs to do. Businesses can segment market going by the types of jobs people want to do.

What is left unsaid is that people create to-do lists to fulfill their roles: as a father, engineer, social activist. This means there is yet another way to segment a market. It could be based on roles. Brands use information/variables related to demography (age groups or purchasing power). They think of behaviour (purchas-ing pattern, for instance) of customers. They also use informa-tion on interests-activities-opinions of customers (“psycho-graphic segmentation”). (Box Item 2). Now social media introduces yet another dimension to customer data. Brands can know the roles and identities of customers by what they like, share, and comment. This is psychography with a social touch - call it ‘likeography’

Grant Thornton consulting firm asked over 100 senior US ex-ecutives what they use social media for. The firm found that one of the three most important use of social media was customerprofiling or identification.


“Smart organizations will use (social) technologies to empower customers to self-segment.”

— Michael Schrage, Author, Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?

It is only half the story. To quote Michael Schrage of MIT, “Smart organizations will use these (social) technologies not just to better identify and ‘segment’ their customers but also to empower customers to ‘self-segment’.(Excerpts of his interview to Younomy at Box Item 3)

Schrage is the author of the bestseller, Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? He thinks that social networks like Facebook give visibility to different identities of people. “This (visibility) will make marketing and targeted customization/innovation more agile and cost effective. Anything that transforms the eco-nomics of customer identification, selection and segmentation should be good for a business - and industry,” he says.

In social media, one of the first activities that customers do is to create their profiles. They provide information on their current jobs, their future career aspirations. They enrich their profiles with their ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ in the context of movies, books, songs, political views, causes. They make their profiles compre-hensive in order to increase their social reach.

As Schrage said social participants are already telling you who they are. They are ‘self-segmenting’. It is upto brands to listen to what customers say who they are. Infer what their wants are. Make more business and be happy.

Box Item 1: Jobs-to-be-DoneSource: www.christenseninstitute.org

The jobs-to-be-done framework emerged as a helpful way to look at customer needs and motivations in business settings. Conventional marketing techniques teach us to frame customers by attributes – using age ranges, race, marital status, and other categories that ultimately create products and entire categories too focused on what companies want to sell, rather than on what customers actually need.

I Want Happiness 50

The jobs-to-be-done framework is a tool for evaluating the circumstances that arise in customers’ lives. Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the “average” customer in their category may do — but they often buy things because they find themselves with a problem that they need to solve. With an understanding of the “job” for which customers find themselves “hiring” a product or service, companies can more accurately develop and market products well-tailored to what customers are already trying to do.

In both education and health care, understanding the jobs that students, patients, parents, administrators, practitioners, pay-ors, and other decision-makers need to get done has shed great light on improving the quality and accessibility of products and services.

Box Item 2: PsychographySource: Wikipedia

Psychographics is the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. Because this area of research focuses on interests, attitudes, and opinions, psychographic factors are also called IAO variables. Psychographic studies of individu-als or communities can be valuable in the fields of marketing, demographics, opinion research, futuring, and social research in general. They can be contrasted with demographic variables (such as age and gender), behavioral variables (such as usage rate or loyalty), and organizational demographics variables (some-times called firmographic variables), such as industry, number of employees, and functional area.

Psychographics should not be confused with demographics, for example, historical generations may be defined both by demographics, such as the years in which a particular generation


I Want Happiness 52

is born or even the fertility rates of that generation’s parents, but also by psychographic variables like attitudes, personality formation, and cultural touchstones. For example, the traditional approaches to defining the Baby Boom Generation or Genera-tion X or Millennials have relied on both demographic variables (classifying individuals based on birth years) and psychographic variables (such as beliefs, attitudes, values and behaviors).

Box Item 3:“We are co-evolving with the new capabilities of social media networks and devices”Mr Michael Schrage, MIT

Michael Schrage is a Research Fellow, MIT Center for Digital Business. He is a Visiting Fellow at Imperial College Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

His book, ‘Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?’ has turned the direction of innovation - from designing new prod-ucts to designing new customers.

Michael has been a contributor to publications like Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He writes about innovation. His blog talks about innovation in en-terprise social platforms.

Excerpts from an interview he gave to Younomy: If the business impact of machines is industrialization, what do you think is that of social media?

The biggest - and most important - impact of so-called ‘social media’ will be the ability of talented people to quickly ‘organize to improvise’ to solve problems, explore opportunities and/or create value. Social media encourage and facilitate ‘emergent

behaviors’ - that is, unanticipated, unplanned and undesigned responses to unexpected or unusual circumstances. In a business world of standardization and routinization, these behaviors are very useful; in a business world of volatility, competitive innova-tion and chaotic customers, they become essential.

You observe that one of the potential uses of social media lies in self-organization. How can business benefit from letting its people and business divisions use this potential?

I do observe that. But the question leaves out an important word: power. Organizations - especially more traditional organi-zations based on hierarchies and ranks - have to understand that ‘exchanging information’ is not the same as ‘empowerment.’

Does an organization encourage people from different depart-ments to coordinate to respond to a customer request for a new feature or function? Are internal ‘experts’ allowed to share in-formation to run an experiment without waiting a week for top management approval? Are there ‘budgets’ or ‘permissions’ that make it easy for individuals and small teams to take the initiative to explore a new market opportunity? My observation and expe-rience suggests that most organizations have only begun to ask these questions. Traditional leaders seem very ambivalent about using social media to better empower their people rather than simply give them greater ‘situational awareness.’

For people who still believe that ‘information is power,’ they’re being silly. If you can’t take advantage of or actually do mean-ingful things with that information, you don’t have power - you have frustration.

People now can do “self organizations” and do their jobs. They can get the support of their social connections. However, what makes people (or even organizations) successful in creating and using self organizations?


I Want Happiness 54

I think the question is even simpler than that: Can our willing-ness and ability to organize in this way really solve a problem or address an opportunity? That is a judgement about capability and risk. To make a vulgar analogy, we know how to get from one part of the world to another. Does it make more sense to get on a plane? Or make a phone call? Or do a videoconference? We need to learn what we need to learn about the economic value of self-organization. This will be a real challenge and some individuals and teams will develop ‘best practices’ worthy of emulation and imitation. Let’s not forget that we are co-evolving with the new capabilities of social media networks and devices.

Do you think helping customers feel and become co-creators an ultimate milestone or goal for organizations that are evolving social business strate-gies?

Yes..yes…yes! And I wrote books on this very issue over 20 years ago. The technologies have more than caught up. But the attitudes of designing ‘with’ customers instead of ‘for’ them is sill a cultural and organizational obstacle. That said, it is no longer an ‘economic’ or ‘technical’ obstacle.

Social networks like Facebook give visibility to multiple identities or interests people have. Do you think this visibility can help an organization choose the types of identities customers have and provide them platforms to nurture certain identities that are strategic to its business?

This is an excellent question. My view is that smart organiza-tions will use these technologies not just to better identify and ‘segment’ their customers but also to empower customers to ‘self-segment’. This will make marketing and targeted customi-zation/innovation more agile and cost effective. Anything that transforms the economics of customer identification, selection and segmentation should be good for a business - and industry.

10“Facebook, Twitter And

A Pair Of Shoes”

Two handsome American boys find a beautiful Indian girl on Facebook. They both tried their chance at winning her. The first one chats with the girl every day. He sends her flowers and gifts. Then one day, he flies down to India and meets the girl. Kneeling down with a rose in his hand, he proposes to her.

The second one was smart. He too chats with the girl every day. But, knowing how marriages work in India, he social-izes also with the girl’s parents. He calls them often; sends them birthday gifts and shows them photos and videos of US life.

Then one day he flies down to India and meets the elders. Touching their feet to show his respect, he asks them to marry their daughter to him.

Haven’t you already guessed who had the last laugh? Of course, it was the second guy. Because this guy identified the real ‘influencers’, and did ‘influencer marketing’.

‘

,

The Message

One of the powerful applications of social media is analytics. It can help us identify influencers and connectors. No other tech-nology can give us this visibility to how word-of-mouth works.

But wait, what happens when influencers are not users of social media? A report from a business daily on how a truck company engaged with its influencers in real world (Box Item).

The company in news was Ashok Leyland, a leading automobile manufacturer in India. It was about to launch a new truck. It knows that drivers are one of the key influ-encer groups. Hence, the Managing Director of the company, Mr Vinod Dasari, took the new model to a quarry and had the drivers test drive it. What did the drivers say? Here’s a passage from the report:

“When Dasari asked the truck driver what he liked the most about the vehicle, he was expecting him to gush over the “beauty of the cab”. But the driver said emphatically: “A 6-CD changer is nice but all I want is a USB port to listen to Tamil music. Often, the CD does not work with the dust. A DVD player is a distraction while I drive. And no need for a radio – in a mine, there is no radio signal.” He also said a “large luminous” light on top was useful to read a newspaper or magazine as he waited inside the dark quarry.”

Ashok Leyland sourced ideas not by mining social conversa-tions. It went to mines where drivers work and engaged them in conversations.When our influencers are not online, it is time we wore shoes and stepped out for real social engagement. Shoes too can be social tools.

“My view of social media is that it is a set of tools, not a religion.”

- Bill Keller

Facebook, Twitter And A Pair Of Shoes 56

Box Item:Slowdown’s not a fire to look for the exit: Ashok Leyland MDSource: The Hindu BusinessLine newspaper Chennai, June 24, 2013:

While test driving the N-truck, a code name for its yet-to-be-launched medium and heavy commercial vehicle, at a quarry in Keerapakkam, Tamil Nadu, Ashok Leyland’s Managing Director, Vinod Dasari, learnt a simple truth. One may pack the vehicle with fancy gizmos, but the user may not want any of the “un-necessary frills”.

When Dasari asked the truck driver what he liked the most about the vehicle, he was expecting him to gush over the “beauty of the cab”. But the driver said emphatically: “A 6-CD changer is nice but all I want is a USB port to listen to Tamil music. Often, the CD does not work with the dust. A DVD player is a distraction while I drive. And no need for a radio – in a mine, there is no radio signal.” He also said the “large luminous” light on top was useful to read a newspaper or magazine as he waited inside the dark quarry.

Ashok Leyland is eager to pack in a lot of such learning, as it gears up for the launch of its N-truck, a 16-to-49 tonnes ready-to-go vehicle with a factory-built cab, made at its factory in Pantnagar, Uttarakhand. This will come later this year, after the Boss, an 8-15 tonnes intermediate commercial vehicle scheduled for launch next month.

Made in Pantnagar as well, the Boss (which Ashok Leyland sells in Europe as Avia) vehicles have clocked five lakh km of test-ing (including running on two left tyres as vehicles sometimes swerve off roads with a narrow tarmac).In the Boss (“our vehicles’ names are following a pattern, Dost, Partner, Boss..” he says), Ashok Leyland has installed an au-


Facebook, Twitter And A Pair Of Shoes 58

tomated manual transmission, developed in association with Wabco. Unlike auto transmission, in this, a sensor on top of the manual transmission box chooses the gear based on engine RPM, pedal position and load condition. Dasari talks excitedly about the lady owner of a large fleet who drove this vehicle and was totally taken in by it. Leyland, he says, bagged an order for 150 trucks with this system.

Rust-proof warranty

The Boss also promises a three-year rust-proof warranty, bum-per to bumper. The company will pay up if the vehicle rusts, insists Dasari.

The company hopes the Boss will plug in the gaps in the 7.5-15 tonnes segment. Historically, Ashok Leyland has had only a 2-3 per cent market share in this segment. With the upgrades to its Ecomet vehicle, it gained share to 11 per cent last year, albeit on a small base.

At the lower range, Ashok Leyland has the Dost (with a payload of 1.25 tonnes), in a joint venture with Nissan, which gave a respectable boost to Leyland’s volumes last year.

The company is also launching its Neptune engine this year which offers higher horse power and will be available on multi-axle vehicles. Its LCV joint venture with Nissan will launch the Partner and Stile, apart from Dost variants.

The slowdown has seen Ashok Leyland’s 5,000-odd executives taking a five per cent pay cut this year. The company has also scaled back investments in capacity addition. But no cutting back on investments on new products, says Dasari.

“We can either cry about the market or offer the right things to the customer so that he chooses you and rewards you. Last year,

the total industry volume fell 25 per cent; we gained a market share of 3 per cent. We can’t do anything about industry volume falling,” he explains.

The idea is to be “future-ready”, reiterates Dasari. “This is not a fire where we are running towards the exit. In times like these, the customer is watching if you are really serious. There will be no slowdown on tooling and employee development pro-grammes that enhance the quality of the company.”


CHAPTER 3

Democratize

11“Ribhu And His Disciple”

You and I are one and the same” tells an Enlight-ened Master, Ribhu to his disciple, Nidhaga. (He was talking about a Hindu philosophy called Advaitha or non-duality.) But Nidhaga finds it difficult to understand. The Guru knows it.

Out of compassion, one day the Guru goes to Nidhaga’s village. He finds his disciple watching a royal procession. The guru is in the guise of a rustic. He asks Nidhaga: “Young man, what are you looking at?” The disciple re-plies: “Can’t you see? I am watching the king’s visit. Look, the king is there…on the elephant!”

And thus starts the conversation between the two: “I can see the two, but who is the king and who is the elephant?”

“What a stupid question! The one who is above is the king and the one that is below is the elephant?”

“Oh I see. But what is above and what is below?”

‘

“Aren’t you kidding? Now bend down (the master obliges and the disciple gets on top of him)…now I am above and you are below? Got it?”

“That’s a great way of teaching. I got it. Now I know the difference between king and elephant. I know the differ-ence between above and below. But can you please teach me what is “you” and what is “I”?”

The question jolted Nidhaga - for it is not an ordinary question, from the spiritual perspective. He prostates in front of the rustic, saying: “Who else can ask this question to me, other than my guru? Teach me the ultimate truth of non-duality.”

The teachings are known as Ribhu Gita (Box Item -1).

Ribhu And His Disciple

,

64

The Message:

Forget ‘non-duality’ in the context of philosophy. But the business version of it is now emerging. The line between the producer and

consumer is getting blurred, thanks to a large extent to social technologies.

In 1980, futurologist Alvin Toffler predicted what is happening today. He coined the word, ‘prosumer’. He envisaged the coming together of “producer” and “customer” to create value together (Box Item – 2).

A few quick examples here:

A “customer” designs a T-shirt with her computer. She uploads it to Threadless.com, a “producer” of t-shirts. Threadless puts the design on its ‘social’ website and asks visitors to rate. If the design elicits good response, Threadless produces it on a mass scale. The “customer” who made the design buys it. She also receives a share from the sales of her design. Here, who is the “producer”, and who is the “customer”?

A “customer” draws a car model. He submits it to Local Motors, a “producer” of automobiles. The engineers at Local Motors have a look at the design. They enhance its feasibility and manu-facture a custom car. Here, who is the “producer” and who is the “customer”?

At the restaurant of a Disney cruise, a “customer” doodles on a plain paper. She was waiting for the food. A crew member collects the paper. And even as the food comes to table, a short animated film appears on the restaurant screen. What a surprise, the film features an animation character made from the sketches of the customer! Here, who is the “producer” and who is the “customer”?


“The role of producers and consumers would begin to blur and merge,”

— Alvin Toffler

Today, the customer has the same information and computing power the producer has. The enterprise and engineering applica-tions have gone social. They can now involve customers in prod-uct development. Like Threadless, Local Motors and Disney, you can be a prosumer. Or, to borrow the language of spirituality, a transcendental manufacturer.

Box Item -1: Ribhu Gita

The Ribhu Gita is an acclaimed advaita, monist and/or nondual song at the heart of this Purana. The Ribhu Gita forms the sixth part of Siva Rahasya Purana. It details in about two thousand verses the dialogue on the Self and Brahman between Sage Ribhu and Sage Nidagha on the slopes of the Mount Kedara in the Himalayas.

Box Item -2: ProsumerSource: Wikipedia

Prosumer is a portmanteau originally formed by contracting pro-ducer with the word consumer. In a commercial environment, it describes a market segment between professional and con-sumer. For example, a prosumer grade digital camera is a “cross” between consumer grade and professional grade.

Ribhu And His Disciple 66

12“A Conference Of Scientists With

God As Chief Guest”

Once, scientists from different disciplines orga-nized a global conference. They invited God to be the chief guest. God gladly accepted the invite.

Scientists presented to God the advances they made in their fields. The biologist said, “In fact, we can create a new life itself.” A physicist said, “We can create a new sun itself.” A computer scientist said, “My robo can think better than a man.” Thus, the presentations went on for the whole day.

At the end of the conference, many scientists had a genu-ine question: “Okay, now what is the role of God? Is there something that He can do that we cannot do?” God laughed out loud. He gently challenged: “Can you create a strand of hair?” One scientist raised his hand. “Give me five minutes”…thus saying he bent down to take a fistful of sand. God swiftly caught his hand, “No, without using my product!

‘

,

The Message:

All creations are co-creations. The creation of an economic val-ue is no exception. Business has always benefited from outside inputs. They check whether customers like a product idea before they produce. Post launch, they seek feedback from users.

But social media enables an organization to collaborate with customers throughout a product development life cycle.

Today, brands go overboard about the quantity of following they have in social channels. More following is a great news. But it is of no use if brands do not know how to make use of the creativity of followers for innovation or marketing.

‘Social Funnel’ presents a new conversion road map. It supposes that a brand can get four types of participation from its com-munity for its social media activity such as an idea contest or a developer challenge.

A Conference Of Scientists With God As Chief Guest 68

The Funnel gives four labels for contributors: followers, evange-lists, disciples, and creators.

Followers are curious to know what a brand is up to. They would remain sub-scribed to a brand’s chan-nels of communication: newsletters, feeds, social pages.

Evangelists are more than followers. They like what a brand does. Hence, they promote it. Evangelists amplify a brand’s reach by sharing it’s content. They create a positive word of mouth.

Disciples are converts. They would spend what it takes to com-plete a brand task. They would submit ideas for idea contests. Take time for surveys or polls. They review prototypes. Disciples add value.

Creators do what brands do. They configure, customize or co-create products. They answer queries of newbie users in fo-rums - offering customer support, which is doing a brand’s job. Creators create value.

These labels are of course generic. And no member remains with one category forever. A follower of a brand can become a creator or the other way round.

Conversion gets a new meaning in social business. It is different from the conversion of a potential customer into customer. The key challenge for social brands is to convert followers as evange-lists. Evangelists into disciples; and disciples into creators. It may sound simple. But it is about making content and prod-ucts engaging.


“Engagement marketing is premised upon: transparency - interactivity - im-mediacy - facilitation - engagement - co-creation - collaboration - experience and trust, these words define the migration from mass media to social media,”

- Alan Moore, Co-Author, Communities Dominate Brands

13“Do You Know Who

My Son Is?”

Three Catholic women and an older Jewish lady were having coffee. The first Catholic woman tells her friends “My son is a priest. When he walks into a room, everyone calls him ‘Father’.”

The second woman chirps, “My son is a bishop. Whenever he walks into a room, people call him ‘Your Grace’.”

The third woman says, “My son is a cardinal. Whenever he walks into a room, he’s called ‘Your Eminence’.”

As the old Jewish lady sips her coffee in silence, the first three give her this subtle “Well...?” look, so she says: “My son is 6’2”; he has broad, square shoulders, lean hips and is muscular; he’s terribly handsome, has beautiful hair, dresses well and always smells wonderful. Whenever he walks into a room, women say ‘Oh, my God...’.”

‘

,

The Message:

The ultimate recognition one can get is that of a creator.

In a social community, not all fans/followers are made equal. Brands seek participation of its fans. They crowdsource ideas.

On average only one percent of a community are creators. They are “one percenters”. Over 90% of the members remain pas-sive. And the rest of them amplify a brand’s reach.

Knowing who makes what contributions is important for com-munity building. Brands should know who are creators and rec-ognize them so that it motivates others to become one. Brands should give their members different types of bragging rights. In social media, the practice is to offer participants ‘badges’.

Social badges are powerful motivators for people to contribute. Because badges give members more visibility in the community. The contributing members, thus, can become popular. They can build their own following within the community.

One best example of a brand using ‘social badges’ for customer engagement is Huffington Post. This online news portal offers different social ‘badges’ such as Networker, Superuser, Modera-tor, and Politics Pundit. Huffington Post awards the badges - nay it lets readers to award the badges - to contributors based on the types of their contributions. (Box Item).

The badges help new readers know influential writers, and fol-low them. Badges give visibility to contributors and help them build their own following.


“All of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be a head marketer for the brand called You.”

- Tom Peters

There are no one who does not like social recognition. Those who don’t are already in caves, renouncing the world. Brands that want to build social communities could have a social badge plan. When they do a good job of recognising members, they build a community of community builders.

Box Item:Introducing HuffPost Badges: Taking Our Community to the Next LevelSource: Huffington PostBlog by Arianna Huffington; posted on 29th April, 2010

From the beginning, HuffPost has been blessed with a very passionate and engaged community. And, over the years, we’ve tried to deepen the ways you can engage with the site and with each other. It’s why we launched HuffPost Social News last summer -- so you can easily connect with your friends from Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Google Buzz, sharing stories and having conversations about the ideas, issues, and buzz-worthy items you care about.

Today we are taking that to the next level, with a redesign of our comment section and the introduction of HuffPost Badges -- a fun new way of recognizing and empowering our community.

To start with, we are recognizing our top users in three key areas of activity on HuffPost: connecting with others, engaging with our content, and moderating comments.

If you’ve attracted lots of fans and followers, you receive a “Networker” badge. If you share a lot of stories via Facebook and Twitter, and have been busy commenting on HuffPost, you receive a “Superuser” badge.

And if you’ve flagged a number of inappropriate comments that we ended up deleting, you receive a “Moderator” badge. (For

Do You Know Who My Son Is? 72

more details on each of these, and on how to earn one of these badges, see our HuffPost Badges FAQ.)

This last badge is part of something we’ve prioritized from day one. We’ve always wanted HuffPost to be home to conversations in which people connect, discuss, share ideas, and have lively debates about the issues -- while remaining civil. To this end, we’ve used a combination of human moderation, tech tools, and the input of our community members to flag inappropriate and objectionable comments.

The Moderator badge allows you to more actively participate in this process. If you are a Level 1 Moderator (earned by flag-ging at least 20 comments that we deleted, with a high ratio of good flags to mistaken ones), your flags now carry five times the weight of a standard flag. Level 2 Moderators (those who have flagged 100 comments that we deleted) are trusted to delete comments directly. We’ve seen how engaged you are in making sure the conversations on HuffPost remain interesting and pro-ductive, and are excited to have you become even more involved in helping maintain a non-toxic atmosphere.

We’re also excited about a new feature that allows HuffPost commenters who are on Twitter to easily attract more followers. A reader just has to click on the Twitter icon under your user-name and they instantly are added to your followers.

And this is just the beginning. We have plans to add more badges and more features that will make being a part of the HuffPost community even more dynamic and rewarding.

Of course, if you don’t want to participate in HuffPost Badges, you can easily opt-out by sending an email to [email protected]. Be sure to send your email from the email address you used to register your HuffPost account, and include your username.


So far, people seem to like the new design. Yesterday, when we quietly rolled it out, we received the most comments we’ve ever gotten in a single day -- over 100,000. Our community members are now leaving over 2.3 million comments a month.

As always, we want to hear your feedback. Let us know what you think -- either in the comment section or by emailing [email protected]. And be sure to keep adding friends and fans, posting comments, sharing stories, and flagging inappropri-ate comments -- so you can earn a badge or level up the ones you already have.

(Note: Since the launch of the Badges programme, the Huffington Post has been updating its Badges policy. What you read here gives you only the initial thoughts behind the badges program. Refer their site to know how badges work now.)

Do You Know Who My Son Is? 74

14“The X Newspaper”

Many centuries ago, a printer started a newspaper. He called it “The X Newspaper”. It employed a bunch of people, called journalists. It also employed another set of people, called distributors. The journalists wrote news. The printer put the news on paper, and with the help of distrib-utors, offered people something to read.

After many decades, a digital technologist took over The X Newspaper. He still employed journalists for writing but he fired distributors. He put the content on Internet for people to read using their computers.

After a few years, a lady became the CEO of The X News-paper. She employed no journalists. She let people to write their own news/views and comment on the ones published by others. Her only job is to distribute what people wrote. (Doesn’t sound like Huffington Post?)

And then, a college kid took over The X Newspaper. He transformed the epaper from a ‘news’ to a ‘networking’ platform. That means, he let people not only write their

‘

own content but also share (“distribute”) them to their own friends.

Now people are actively “writing, publishing, and distrib-uting” news for The X Newspaper. And The X Newspaper (a.k.a Facebook) has become the “world’s best personal-ized newspaper” (Box Item).

The X Newspaper

,76

The Message:

The story of The X Newspaper is fictional but it is based on real world business models in media. The story has relevance for your business. It should set you thinking of ways that would make you the new face (or Facebook) of your own industry.

The illustration in the next page captures the key impacts different technolo-gies had on business. The impact of social media

technology is the democratization of business.

In our context, democratization is about letting stakeholders take part in value creation. The challenge for business is to treat every customer as a potential co-creator.

In many mainstream business conversations, consumers still rep-resent numbers: some demographic data. Customers are there to bargain and buy. But this attitude is changing with the adoption of social media in product development.

Social technology is making collaboration with customers pos-sible, effective, desirable. And even, a business imperative. Companies that treat customers as co-creators can use social media in the right way. List what you do, and ask why can’t you do it with your customers. You will end up democratizing your business, while making your customers happy.


“We are seeing the emergence of an economy of the people, by the people, for the people.”

- Prof C K Prahalad

The X Newspaper 78

Box Item: Facebook Is Making The World’s ‘Best Personalized Newspaper’

Mar 7, 2013, 11.43 PM Source: Business Insider.com

Facebook is making a major News Feed announcement today.The changes will be the biggest in News Feed’s 7-year history. They’ll make News Feed easier to sort through and more per-sonalized.But one of the points Zuckerberg has been hammering home today seems to be a swipe at Flipboard, a social iPad news reader.Zuckerberg told the crowd: “We want to give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper in the world.”


15“An Artist And A Cobbler”

An artist was giving finishing touches to a painting. It was a king’s portrait. Just then the artist saw a cobbler passing by his studio. The artist called the cobbler.

He asked him to look at his painting. “Do you think the shoes in the painting appears real?” he asked. The cobbler was happy that the artist sought his opinion. He paid close attention to the shoes. “I think you have to dim the shining a bit, sir,” he suggested.

The artist immediately agreed. He thanked the cobbler with a small gift. Next day, there was a knock on the door. The artist opened the door. The same cobbler was wait-ing outside. The cobbler said: “I have a suggestion for the king’s crown, sir.”

But the artist was not pleased. He replied: “Thank you for volunteering, but limit yourself to shoes.”

‘

,

The Message:

There are areas where crowd-sourcing is not desirable. It takes individual genius to design iPad, write a Harry Porter novel or deliver a “I-have-a-dream” speech.

But, crowdsourcing is applied in unthinkable ways. A political outfit in India, Aam Admi Party (AAP), has crowdsourced its manifesto itself.

It is a party of unfamiliar faces (aam admi in Hindi means “common man”). Still it had swept the Delhi

Assembly Election in 2014. It was a victory of not just a politi-cal party. The mandate was an endorsement to the participatory approach in politics.

AAP was hell bent on crowdsourcing. It took every decision af-ter consulting with people. It sought the opinion of public when it had to decide whether to accept the invitation to form a gov-ernment with the support of a rival party. AAP conducted town hall meetings and polls to engage people directly. (Box Item 1).

Social media came handy for AAP. The party used Facebook and Twitter for crowdsourcing ideas from the public. A business can follow suit in the adoption of social media for crowdsourcing.

The illustration in the next page (Areas of Engagement) high-lights the values a business can co-create with social media. The scope is vast but we can group them in the following four ‘chambers’:

Relationship: Organizations like Huffington Post, Intuit, and Threadless are case studies in community building.


“The multitudes have answers to ques-tions which have not yet been posed,”

— John Berger, British writer

Marketing and Innovation: Dell involves customers at the fuzzy front end of design. In its dedicated social portal (www.ideastorm.com), customers can submit new product ideas.

Execution: Barclays runs a credit card in the US. The card com-pany manages its entire business with the help of the commu-nity. It lets the cardholders to decide on the annual service fee, and late fee charges. The cardholders decide how the company allocates its CSR budget.

Food major, Nestle crowd sources definitions of key perfor-mance indicators (KPIs) that it can use to measure its business performance.

Vision: Organizations like HCL Technologies, IBM, and NEC Japan crowd source ideas (albeit from employees) for future business.

An Artist And A Cobbler 82

Usually, brands start their social journey from the top - from relationship. For many brands, customer relations and public relations are the starting points. Then they explore opportunities to engage customers in product development.

Very few organizations involve customers in the business of a boardroom. That is, crowdsourcing of strategy and vision.

But co-creation is possible in all zones of business: from shop floor to boardroom. Social is so versatile. It can host ordinary conversations as well as support extensive collaborations of product development.

Talking about social media and co-creation, Mr Ric Dragon, author, Social Marketology, says: “C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ra-maswamy wrote their book on co-creation back in 2004 - before social media was really taking off. Yet they described the scenario in which customers and brands were going to work together to create value - then, boom! Social media came about, and it was a natural fit.” (Box Item 2)

Box Item 1: AAP and Participatory PoliticsSource: Younomy’s Blog

The stunning show of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the recent Delhi Assembly Polls has become a subject of case study for political parties as well as business. Many have already written what brands can learn from AAP in the areas of setting vision, evolving strategy and execution.

But it seems the key lesson that AAP can teach is how business can connect with aam admi (“common man” or equivalent of “the Average Joe”) and build a participatory brand and products.

AAP has been successful in crowd-sourcing key functions of its


business: 1) vision, 2) manifesto, and 3) to some extent, delivery of government services.

AAP itself was formed after a poll, conducted using social channels, seeking opinions of volunteers of ‘India Against Corruption’ on forming a political party. With the vision of a “corruption-free India”, the party promises to see through the passing of Citizen’s Ombudsman Bill (Jan Lokpal), an anti-cor-ruption bill, into law. Jan Lokpal Bill is drafted and drawn up by civil society activists with inputs provided by “ordinary citizens” through “an activist-driven, non-governmental public consulta-tion”.

And AAP “kick-started” its election campaign with crowd-funds (or crowd-donations). Now, it says it formed a government only after ensuring that the crowd (voters of Delhi) approved its deci-sion to get the support of another political party.

The political victory of a participatory approach can open eyes of people who occupy corner rooms as to how powerful the idea of crowd-sourcing and co-creation can be, and why the time to act is, probably, now.


Box Item 2

Younomy’s interview with Ric Dragon:

Mr Ric Dragon, CEO and co-founder of DragonSearch, has more than 20 years of experience in graphic design, informa-tion architecture, web development and digital marketing. He is a sought-after speaker, having spoken at many marketing and technology conferences. Ric is also a regular guest columnist for Marketing Land, and Social Media Monthly.

His book, Social Marketology, was published by McGraw-Hill in June 2012. Following are excerpts of his interview to Younomy:

With social media brands can engage with customers on an individual basis. But, how practical it is for large brands to engage with individuals at a one to one level?

I definitely think they can. Now, with that said, there are a lot of different categories, countless brands, and a world of chal-lenges that are different for each. From a customer care stand-point, there are brands that make a point of answering each and every mention of their brand. Discover Card is a great example, there. Other brands are focused on pushing content out to their audience segments, but never respond. While we “social media experts” might tsk-tsk those brands, some are successful - al-though they tend to be what I call “love brands” - those brands that have extremely high customer loyalty, such as Harley or Red Bull.

You talk of co-creation of value. How do you associate co-creation with social media?

C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy wrote their book on co-creation back in 2004 - before social media was really taking off - yet they described the scenario in which customers and brands


were going to work together to create value - then, boom! Social media came about, and it was a natural fit. Later, those same au-thors saw the connection, and wrote extensively about it in HBR - so naturally, its executives have been exposed to the concept early on.

We’ve also had some great case studies of co-creation through social - like the My Starbucks Idea, which generated some prod-uct enhancements that were successful. When brands open up the conversation so that customers’ voices can be heard, they often get both the value of the innovation, and the good will created by listening.

How do brands use social media engagement to trigger word-of-mouth or capture voice-of-customers?

I think the focus shouldn’t be on creating more WOM - that’s a nice benefit - but if brands are focused on engaging in order to create customer value - fulfilling customers needs whether those needs are explicit or hidden - they’ll receive the WOM and voice-of-customer.

But, there’s the answer - focus on customer value. We have the precedent in the Lean Manufacturing revolution in which everything we do much create value for the customer, otherwise it’s waste. We also need to have a deep understanding of psy-chology. Humans have a strong need to be acknowledged - to be heard. Just this morning, a co-worker tweeted out to Amtrak that the QR code on their tickets didn’t work. Immediately, an Amtrak community manager responded - turns out the QR code is just for the train conductor - not for customers. Kind of stupid, and a little annoying - and yet the person forgave Amtrak because they responded quickly.


You have been an advocate of processes. How different is social-media-as-a-project and social-media-as-a-process?

Well, a project infers a closed system - we’re setting out to do something, like build a house. At some point, we’ll finish build-ing the house, and we’ll move on to the next project. You might very well have projects within your social media, but they’re likely to be small parts of a larger process.

The Agile programming concept of sprints can be very use-ful here. If you can break down your efforts into small time-periods, you can iterate quickly - or to adopt the contemporary mantra, “fail quickly” - and move on to the next iteration. The technology and even cultural aspects of this is all changing so quickly - every day is a rush of new information.

With that said, it’s extremely valuable to use project manage-ment in your work - particularly in strategy building. There are tasks that should be done that are dependent on other tasks, all culminating in the strategic plan arriving to its execution. But even there, from an execution viewpoint, you might look to John Boyd’s ideas of OODA Loops (Observe, orient, decide, act) - so that while the overall desired outcomes are in view, how you arrive there may need to change at any given moment.

How can companies use social data (the likes, shares, comments and other social activities) for customer segmentation?

All of this information is incredibly valuable. You have to be a bit of an ethnographer and observe what’s going on, and then a psychologist to interpret the meaning of the various actions. Then you will want to do a backwards look at the participants, and any demographic, psychographic, or behavioral patterns that can be sussed-out from the data available.Every industry is different - whether you’re in B2B or CPG’s - how you can use this data, or whether there is sufficient data - is


going to be different. And then, you have to apply a marketer’s insights into the meaning of the data. For instance, you might have a non-traditional micro-segment becoming excited about certain things - yet it’s an aspirational audience -and thus you don’t necessarily want to address them head on. Marketers have to become hyper aware of the information they have and sometimes use it in ways that are not apparent to the audience. Target’s use of big data is a great example. You might know that a customer is pregnant - yet you must sandwich the baby products ads between lawn care products, so that the customer doesn’t know they’re being understood so well!

You talk of customers projecting their personality on brands. How social media enables this?

Yes - we know that people DO project personality onto brands. If the project is off-course for you, you’d want to try to modify how you’re being perceived. In social - particularly in those fla-vors of social where a brand is truly engaging with customers (as opposed to just broadcasting) - every utterance can have a voice. Are you friendly? Are you cold? Are you intelligent?

It requires a great deal of discipline - understanding and training of community managers - to have a consistent brand personality and voice. At the end of the day, though, it can build on itself and be a powerful component of branding. In branding - we need that consistency. If one day you’re off-voice, it can destroy a lot of work!


16“A Monk And

The Floating Blanket”

Once an ascetic, living in the Himalayas, saw a woollen blanket floating down the Ganges. A woollen blanket can be one of the few most valued thing there.

So, as soon as he saw it, the ascetic plunged into the river and reached the floating blanket in few strokes. Others on the banks blamed their ill-luck for not spotting the blanket themselves first. But, the ascetic in the river started screaming for help, as he went with the flow of the river, catching hold of the blanket. “You fool, your life is precious than the blanket. If you can’t drag it, leave it and come back,” those on the banks shouted.

The ascetic in danger cried out: “No, I can’t. First it is not a blanket but a bear. Second, I am not holding it, it is hold-ing me.”

‘

,

The Message:

On average eight out of ten new products fail in the market. Companies have two options to boost the success rate. The first option is to hire a genius like Steve Jobs, and the second is to tap the wisdom of crowds.

The first option is risky – the problem of mis-hire is so common. As the fate of the poor ascetic can show, you will never know who you are after, until it is too late.

But the second option is safe. Countless organizations are tap-ping the wisdom of crowds and reaping rich dividends. A case in point is Threadless that sells over 7 million t-shirts a year. But it reports “zero product failure”.

According to an Inc Magazine report, titled “The Customer is the Company”, every single t-shirt design of Threadless is a hit in the market.

When about 80% of new product launches bite the dust in many consumer markets, how this t-shirt maker manages to enjoy a 100% success rate?

The reason: all t-shirt designs are crowd sourced. It is the “crowd” again that votes what design goes to production. When a company co-creates with customers, zero-product failure is possible. Customers cannot be wrong.

Customers are already the stakeholders in the life cycle of a product. They buy, consume/use, change, mix, resell, recycle. But companies now have the opportunity to make customers as the stakeholders of the product development cycle.

A Monk And The Floating Blanket 90

“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

– Bill Joy, Cofounder Sun Microsystems

To do that we simply have to decide two things: 1) What products (/services) can be opened up for customer participation? 2) Which is the most appropriate method of customer engage-ment?

The Total Value Matrix:

This requires us to think of types of business value. A business may have any number of products. But going by how strategic and profitable they are to the business, we can group them in one of the following four categories: flagship, fill gap, future, and free.

Flagship product is a core product that is driving a company’s growth. They bring in maximum profit and are strategic to a business. They represent a company’s core competency.


Fill-gap product is not strategic. But it can be profitable. Fill-gap products complement flagship products. Take a bank, its flagship product is a deposit or loan product. But it can sell a mutual fund and fill the gap in its financial services portfolio.

Future product is a lab product - only a small segment of the market will need it today. But the product could grow to be a mainstream product in future. In short, a future product is stra-tegic but may not be profitable yet.

Free product is a product that is neither strategic nor profitable. These are good will or charity products that a business creates to discharge its corporate social responsibility.

Value Types versus Engagement Methods

A Monk And The Floating Blanket 92

For each type of value, the method of tapping the wisdom of crowds may differ. The following table matches the method of engagement with the type of value.

A flagship product is well established and accepted. Hence, a business might need customer innovation only at the fag end of the product development. It could get customers to customize the product. So, a product configurator is a best bet.

Whereas in the case of a future product, it makes perfect sense to get customers involved in the fuzzy front end. Companies can try crowdsourcing of product ideas.

With customers as stakeholders of product development, a busi-ness can better its existing product or innovate a new one. In the process, it can enhance the experience of customers.


17“What Ganesh Chaturthi Festival

Can Teach Business?”

According to the Hindu mythology, Goddess Parvati created Lord Ganesh using sandalwood paste. Her husband Lord Shiva was not at home then. Parvati asked Ganesh not to allow anyone to enter the house, while she was taking bath.

Ganesh was obedient. He was on guard in front of the house. Shiva returned from his work and found a cute little boy guarding the house. He asked Ganesh to let him in. But Ganesh gave no permission.

Enraged, Shiva threw his trident at Ganesh. The weapon cut the boy`s head. Parvati was shocked to know what hap-pened. She explained to Shiva that the little boy was her child and the boy was just carrying out her orders.

Realising his mistake, Shiva promised to bring back Ganesh to life. He ordered his men to go and find a head of any living being. The men brought the head of an elephant. Shiva fixed it with the boy’s body and infused life.

‘

,

“The most creative thing a person will do...is to be creative cusumer”

— Robert H Anderson,RAND Corportation

The Message:

Even gods are customized and cocreated. In India people cel-ebrate the birthday of Lord Ganesh – known as Ganesh Chatur-

thi, in a grand manner. Devotees would re-imagine Lord Ganesh in unthinkable, modern avatars: as a social activist, a soldier, a cricketer, to name a few.

In a way the Chaturthi is a function of mass customization of the god. It can teach a key lesson on customer engagement and open innovation to business.

In functions like Ganesh Chaturthi, devotees are free to create or customize their favorite divine forms, albeit within a ‘frame-work’ offered by the particular religious school of thought.

God performs three basic functions: creation, protection, and destruction (of the evil). It’s the religious idea of god. Devotees give different ‘weightage’ to these attributes and create ‘special-purpose’ gods. India is a factory of gods. There is a god to protect water reservoirs. One to bless women with children. One to protect livestock. One to remove stumbling blocks in life, and so on.

In short, the religion treats its customers as creators. If business wants to unlock customer value to the core, it has to treat its customers as creators as well. With web 2.0, every website can be a factory – a social factory at that. Customers can configure or create new products using “innovation blocks”.

An example: Zoho Creator, a software platform for software development. Zoho offers innovation blocks of software – ‘pre-built codes’. Customers drag and drop the blocks to create their own software. They create necessary software modules: input


forms, data views, business logic, and reports. There is no limita-tion to what the end product could be: ERP, CRM or a simple ‘courier management software’.

Zoho is making use of Web 2.0’s collaborative potential. “If there was ever a poster child for the Web 2.0 world, this is it!” wrote Mark Gibbs, contributing editor at Network World. Zoho is also tapping the co-creative potential of the social web.

We can have Zoho Creator-equivalents for every imaginable product or solution space. It is technically possible. But it calls for a change of mindset. Businesses has to treat social as a manufacturing platform, and customer as creator.

So far, business remained at the centre of value creation. The rules are changing. With social media, customers create value. Customers are the new Original Equipment Manufacturers. They are open innovators. The job of a business is just to help customers innovate. Instead of creating a product, the business can offer ‘innovation blocks’ to the customers. So that custom-ers can use the innovation blocks to create a product of their own imagination.

The first innovation block ever invented was perhaps a hollow brick. This physical block let people build whatever they wanted. But the idea of innovation block has not caught the imagination of other industries. Why not innovation blocks in automobiles, smart phones, computers, consumer electronics? Why not such innovation blocks offered to customers online? Why not cus-tomers create their own automobiles, smart phones, computers, consumer electronics?

Or even club products and create a new industry. Customers don’t respect industry boundaries as much as industries do. They do not have vested interest in keeping legacy thinking alive. They can driver convergence better than a industry. An industry has to

What Ganesh Chaturthi Festival Can Teach Business? 96

address a variety of business concerns before it could innovate. Customer’s don’t have to.

If a brand can realize that Web 2.0/social is a cocreative plat-form, it can tap the cocreative potential of its customers. This is the only way to become a participatory brand and a real social business.

Religion is a rigid institution. When it does not have any qualms in allowing its ‘customers’ to create, why should a business hesi-tate?


AAam Admi Party , 81, 83, 84Alan Moore, 69Airbus, 45, 46 Alvin Toffler, 65Areas of Engagement, 81, 84Ashok Leyland, 56, 57, 58

BBarclays, 82Barista, 37, 42Brad Smith, 4Big Bazaar, 40 Bill Joy, 90Bill Keller, 56

CC K Prahalad, 83Café Coffee Day , 39, 41Cause to Paws, 22, 23Chris Brogan, 10Clayton Christensen, 49 Clue Train Manifesto, 38 Coca Cola, 12, 14, 15Colgate, 37, 39 Customer Identities, 37Custora, 29, 31, 32

DDell, 11, 45, 81Disney, 65, 66

EEqual, 5,6Estée Lauder Company, 18

Estée Lauder, 18, 19

FFacebook, 4,8, 10, 29, 31, 72, 76, 77, 79Finnair, 14

GGanesh Chaturthi, 95Globus, 37, 39Godrej Industries, 29Google, 31, 32Google Buzz, 72Grant Thornton, 49

HHumannovation, 13, 14Huffington Post, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 81

IIBM, 13, 15, 82Inc Magazine, 90Innosight, 37Intel, 11Intuit, 81

JJay Baer, 18Jobs-to-be-done, 50 John Berger, 81

LLocal Motors, 65, 66Likeography, 49

INDEX 102

MMarisa Thalberg, 19Marks & Spencer,44, 46, 47Michael Schrage, 50, 52

NNEC Japan, 82Nadir Burjorji Godrej, 29 Nestle, 82Nike, 5,7,10

OOpen Innovation Blocks, 95, 96

PPatricia Fripp, 23Philips, 30, 33, 34Prahalad C.K, 77Prosumer, 65, 66Psychography, 51

RRed Bull, 42Ribhu Gita, 64, 66Ric Dragon, 83Robert H Anderson, 95Ross Perot, 30

SSam Palmisano, 13, 15, 16Saffron Brand Consultants, 13Scott Anthony, 37Shel Holtz, 44Social Badges, 71, 72

Social Funnel, 68, 69Social Gardens, 4,6Starbucks, 5,6,11

TTanishq, 40Threadless, 65, 66, 81, 90Titan, 41Tom Peters, 71Total Value Matrix, 91Trent, 37, 40 Twitter, 4, 29, 31, 32, 72

UUPS, 8,9,10

VVenkat Ramaswamy, 83Vinod Dasari, 56, 57, 58, 59

WWally Olins, 13Walter Pike, 37Wild Social, 4

YYahoo!, 72Younomy, 37, 52YouTube, 10, 14

ZZoho, 95, 96

INDEX103