One of our first studies for the So.Me. Case Studies project is up (link) ! Its based on an interview with Jim Cahill the “Chief Blogger” at Emerson Process Management.

Since blogging in itself is a process of co-creation, I would really appreciate your comments, criticism and suggestions on the project. We (the AweSoMe team ) hope to publish the second study by this weekend.

Lastly, if you think you have an interesting Web2.0/SoMe story to share, do contact us on twitter or email at s…@g…l.com.

It’s not about who shall win. It’s not about who has the better UI, it’s about going mainstream. But before that, it’s time to get inspired from a movie from ancient history -

In 1998 You’ve Got Mail represented the fact that email had gone mainstream. The story was not about the novelty of email but about two people unlikely to give each other a chance in real life, falling in love courtesy of email mediation. Email in 2001 was mainstream, Buzz is something that can take social streaming mainstream.

This struck me yesterday when one of my slightly tech agnostic friend was telling me how she found that one of her long lost ex-boyfriend was now “following” her on “Gmail”, so she sent him an email and they have been catching up over email for the last two days ! I asked her if she knew that it was Buzz that had automatically connected them – she had no clue.

If we fall back on the groundswell Social Techno graphics profiles – my friend would probably be a joiner. (I forced her to open a twitter account, which she might have opened once after that.) That in itself is the most interesting part of the whole Buzz story. In one snap, Google automatically matched up and more importantly introduced 150MM people to social streaming and real-time updates. Meanwhile facebook and twitter have been spending the last few years to woo the “critics” and “collectors” to join in their ranks. The whooping 150MM number contains the large mass of “joiners”, “spectators” and “inactive” (considering Gmail is not considered a social network). This is the event that could make real-time updates the new normal, i.e. taken for granted. In other words, if all goes as the Google-do-gooders plan, social networks would no longer be a novelty by themselves, instead the activity/content on them would reach a scale not imagined before. Meg Ryan’s tweets to Tom Hanks would be more important than twitter. That’s a hint to all marketers – we better brush our graph theory!

On a side note, buzz finally has given me a reason to open the Gmail window otherwise I was very happy with my apple mail. But for how long? When is the next Tweetdeck update?  And just for the record, the verb though shall forever be “tweet” it might never become “buzz”, and rightfully so.

While Exploring the Harley Owners Group (HOG) in the Brand Asset Management class at school the discussion moved towards the creation of communities around brands,with communities being defined as dynamic socially-structured groups sharing:

• An ethos and set of values
• A moral responsibility and obligation to the group
• Hierarchies of membership with understood advancement processes
• Rules and behavioral norms with sanctions and rewards
• Common language, rites, rituals & symbols
• Agreement about who the group “are not” as well as who they “are”

In the case of Harley Owners Group, the particular use of Posse Rides was being explored. The point being that there is a brand persona associated with Harley which is reinforced by the Posse Rides, creating a group of die-hard influences, free PR and above all a sense of hierarchy in the HOG community where participation in the Posse Ride is the right of passage into the riding elite.

The picture looks just so perfect right now.

The discussion then moved on to the next point: pondering that technology had nothing to do with community creation.  Hence all the noise we keep hearing that online social media is not what makes communities. This part didn’t sit well with me.

Lets look at the HOG, their bikes and the posse ride.Why are they a community? What makes someone aspire to be a member?

The HOG community is based one a basic “aspirational promise”: that once you join us you can share the persona of a rebel, an outlaw, the forever-free, macho biker. In order to have that aspiration though, a consumer needs to have been exposed to Harley’s outlaw history inspired by the likes of the Hells Angels.  The Posse ride and similar events act as tools for the same. ( edit: as pointed by @brigzay the bikes themselves are the tools/media for community interaction. see comments)

There are a few problems here:
Firstly, the Harley riding macho outlaw persona is not an aspirational persona for the millennial generation.The demographics of current Harley users are blatantly obvious, with a clear trend in the wrong direction.  Secondly, the Hell’s Angels are ancient
history.  The youth might like the outlaw persona but they probably associate it more with “hackers” who broke into Twitter than with Harley riders.

What can technology and the Social Web do for Harley?

Technology can create new tools for participating in the HOG culture and can introduce a whole new generation to the outlaw culture.  One of the many things that Harley could try is to be engaged in MMO games. That is where the youth lives and where they express their rebellion.  Why not act as the agent in that safe expression of rebellion?  MMO games share characteristics with real-world communities.  Just like a Posse ride is a tool for keeping the aspirational outlaws among the baby boomers and Gen X, engaged with the Harley Brand, the MMO game (or any social-network-based rebellious activity) can act as a tool to engage Gen Y or the millennial generation.

MMO games are just one of the many possible places that could happen …

disclaimer: Brand Asset Management is probably the second best marketing class I have attended at Kelley, the best would be Marketing Strategy .

Valentine’s day special; not for the weak hearted.

The universe & other large ink-stains were going along smoothly; by pure mischance a relational being called love got created. In certain well documented sections of the universe and other ink stains, It has been widely regarded as a bad move.

The Encyclopedia Galactica defines love as:
origins unknown :
a warm fuzzy relational feeling, insignificant by galactic standards

I am currently on the planet earth, named so by mistake; the original intent was “gingerbread”. The quasi-evolved beings on this planet celebrate love’s birthday as a “Valentine’s day”. This day every-being, sentient or positronic, is expected to introspect and evaluate their relational love with other beings, objects or even concepts.

btw. I just stopped eating fries today.

Since it is Friday, the official day of rest, I have been contemplating on my relational object of love. It turns out that I seem to have fallen for the momentary contraption called the internet. I believe these hidden feelings started between us even when she was well protected by daddy DARPA. But that is all speculation. I was a teenager when I first really saw her through the telnet window, it was probably the on 26th sight that I felt the love between us. I asked her out on a date on my second job when I got to be with her daily, creating new ways of interacting with her. We have since been going along really well, with me having a chance to mold her in intranets, applications and even on that poster on my wall that says “DON’T PANIC- the internet is here”.

Recently our relationship took a new turn, she has picked up a new interest in connecting people instead of just text that she used to do earlier. Some call her social media, others Web2.0, for me she is still the lovely internet. Not that I am jealous, I too have grown to understand the good that she wants to bring to this planet’s beings. I spend my days these days trying to understand what effect it has on these sentient beings and what next can she do. Building new stuff with her is always so much fun.

I have heard that once you fall in love the universe and other ink stains conspire to make it happen. Its my urgent request to the bureaucrats from the 3rd ink stain that please, please never separate us, please keep giving me the opportunities to plan, build and market contraptions for my loved internet.

So, “what about the large fries ?“, you may ask. I just mentioned them because they just taste good; it has also been noticed that beings who have experienced low quantities of love, consume large quantities of them fries.

WARNING: Just thinking out aloud here, nothing groundbreaking-

Twitter really leveraged the concept of an Asymmetric follow . i.e. I can find people I’m interested in, irrespective of our relationship, and learn from what they have to share. Similarly, Others can include me in their lists. It mimics real life, i.e. there are asymmetric levels of interest in all our relationships.
It also mimics real life since friendship grows with complete strangers over time only by communicating with them. In fact, through Twitter’s wonderful system of @ messages I find myself having conversations with complete strangers so many times. Most humans react positivley to attention, so we follow our @ messages more faithfully than our actual twitter streams.

Now comes the thinking aloud part:
Since the users have been warming up to the concept of lists, could twitter (or any network app) as a next step allow users to send directed messages ? For example: I have two very distinct set of followers on twitter 1) People in Bloomington 2) Techy/geeky friends from all over. The B-ton folks might like what I have to say about B-ton and everything else, but my techy/geeky friends from everywhere else might not be interested in what is happening at b-tons @bluebird bar tonight. Since there are specific lists that I follow, for example the really well curated list of Bloomington tweeple , I could plausibly @message the list & it would only show up in the twitter streams of my followers from that list . Or, since twitter already allows users to mention their location, I could @~ or @# a location ( e.g. @~bloomington or @#bloomington,IN ) when I tweet.

There could be many more interesting ways of using this, without making it into a twitter-HTML . Facebook already tries to do the same in very confusing and inefficient ways (my opinion). I hope Google buzz would have something on these lines. (This chain of thought started when I heard that google buzz, which mysteriously has not yet (1am,feb 10) shown up in my account, had mimicked twitter’s asymmetric follow.)

There is something wrong here! These MBA’s seem to have forgotten the very basics  of their capitalistic existence:

“never do anything without a reason, or better still without an adjusted NPV.”

This is exactly the kind of probabilistic anomaly what might fuel the Infinite improbability drive. Kelley MBA’s in a dance flash-mob ! ~ to add to the improbability the cool dude who joins them at 1:09 is the MBA chair roped in a few minutes before the mob.

Btw this is one of the sample conversations from last week trying to convince some recruits:

“Hey, we are trying to do a dance flash-mob at the b-school. Would you be interested ?”
“Sounds Cool. So what are we doing it for?”
“nothing, just fun; its just a flashmob !”
“hmm- there must be a reason for the flashmob ?”
“none. ”
“But there must be a one ?”
“Sorry, none.”…………….
…………….. after about 5 minutes … OK. I am in.

Those last words made me believe that we humans would really not end up as the Vogons. (I cant say about the finance majors though ooops !)  The best part of the mob was that most dancers were self taught via video: http://vimeo.com/9096337

Hoping for some more randomness soon !

If everything goes as planned this is going to be my last semester as an MBA student. My friend Umair Qayyum and I were planning to cap it off with something interesting and representative of our passion for Social Media in Business. (Social Media = SoMe)

The plan is to propose a hypothesis connecting social media with business objectives. This process will involve documenting campaigns/initiatives by a wide variety of businesses.

This is the initial pictorial cause & effect diagram, which will serve as the basis for mapping the case studies:

For example: if a company is passively monitoring social chatter, it is able to react and minimize the negative impact of a conversation that might be harmful to the brand. This would be mapped as follows:

The current plan is to document these case studies in a blog format, keeping true to our SoMe theme. We have started work with an initial set of 5 companies, which range from a local non-profit media provider to a $25B B2B manufacturing conglomerate. You would hearing more about them soon!

If you or your company is open to participate in this project, please feel free to contact me at Gmail: UrbanTurbanGuy or Twitter: UrbanTurbanGuy. The burden-time would not be more than one hour.

- Gagan & Umair

Ok. I give in. I wanted to resist the temptation of writing something about the iPad. But hey, here goes nothing. I am not going to touch the design and naming issues here. I am accepting what most of the world has: it has a great UI, lovable form factor & fans ready to buy it. In other words:

ipad= the best media “consumption” experience

Many have observed that the iPad is much more like a big iPod Touch than a tablet computer per se.  The app-centricity, the OS, etc.  But the deeper, more fundamental distinction is that the iPad, like the iPod and the iPhone before it, is geared primarily toward the consumption, not the creation, of content.  The iPad will force consumers to continue to pull high-margin apps through Apple’s system.  A tablet version of the MacBook would do no such thing.

After watching the apple presentation , a few thing are glaringly apparent :

1) A big move towards the app based system rather than a file based system
You don’t browse files as you do on your MAC but rather work through apps like you did on the iphone. There seems to be no way to access the file system anywhere. All this is geared to promote consumption through apps rather than content creation that we traditionally associate computers with.

2) Missing flash support, once again
One who owns the doors to the best “media consumption” tool, makes the most dough. Flash has 70% of the worlds games & 75% of video, but apple has controversially not being supporting it, because it will open he flod gates of free content that people could access through safari.  Just for the record, there is no access to any of the flash content on Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate, etc. Apple would rather prefer that they create an app., go through the app. store and give them a cut on any sale. Which might be good for a struggling media industry, but I am not here to take sides.

3) Most of the presentation time was spent promoting games, news apps,  ibook, video & audio playback . ( yes iworks was presented  & brushes was talked about. But lets try to follow my story here. )
Some numbers make this observation even more clear (quoting from Apple’s 10K)  :

Net sales of other music related products and services increased $844 million or 34% during 2008 compared to 2007, due primarily to significantly increased net sales from the iTunes Store in each of the Company’s geographic segments.

Again from their 10K – notice the Jump in Return on Sales :

Well,  that is because apple is moving from a hardware business model which traditionally has lower gross margin ( apples 33% numbers were way above normal to begin with )  to a software business model where  gross margins of 70-80% are not unheard of. This 5% jump in Gross margin can in a large part attributed to a 21% increase in the sales made through itunes, when compared to a 14% increase in overall net sales. The sales through itunes are now roughly 10% Apple’s total sales.

So the restrictions Apple has on iPad make much more business sense than usability sense.  They have created a device which promotes media consumption on their terms. Will it get sales figures comparable to the ipods & iphone’s , only time will tell.
As far as the name goes “No Comments !”.

Update: - Apple’s initial iPad demos showed flash component on websites now they demo videos have been modified to show placeholder lego blocks. more at venturbeat.com

If I can take the liberty of assuming that both design and business consulting are “problem solving” approaches. I have a case to plead for the design approach to problem solving:
• It recognizes ambiguity and explores multiple incomplete solutions
• Proposed solutions change with the process, as exploring them uncovers relevant issues and reduces ambiguity
• It is a forward looking qualitative approach as against a quantitative data driven approach to problem solving (Quantitative data may be used to come up with proposed solutions, but not for critical decision making).

This is an attempt map the creative process to the business process of problem solving:

( This post was buried in my other website; since I merged both of them, it seemed a good idea to post it here.)

I came across a few rants about “Clay Shirky’s rant about women” . He needs more women to say “I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,” even if they have no experience in that work.
I will not go into the correctness or morality of that assertion, a lot of discussion has already taken place on that.

I want to touch upon a different slant of the same paradigm. When I came to study in the US, the first thing I realized was that we South Asians lack the skill of self-assertion. I used to joke with my American friends that once you touch an airplane, you can claim to be from the aerospace industry ! While us South Asians would even cast doubts on our hard skills, even if we had had them for years.

Looking at it from a recruiter’s perspective: they are faced by an information asymmetry of the bad lemon form. A typical resume/interviewee is expected to amp-up his/her achievements. So most of the stuff an interviewee puts out there would be given a hair-cut, by a certain BS factor, which might vary by interviewer. This puts someone who is shy by nature in a bad spot. This is one of the reasons, I believe, that you find a lot of South Asians in finance & operations careers after their MBA. Its easier to showcase quantifiable skills. We feel more secure in tangible territory.

My solution to this problem. Truth be told-
- lets get out of our comfort zone: Even if it is culturally unacceptable to go out there and sell ourselves, we have to find our own ways of doing it. If “I” have taken the decision to move to the US , I have to get used to use the word “I” more in a week than I would use it in a year back home.
- Be Findable : Its inevitable that people who are more google search friendly have a better chance of getting the phone call from Steve Jobs . But that does not mean we put out laundry lists of our work history everywhere. Tell a story that people want to hear. Dont spin , but know the right side of the coin to present .