…reflecting on the past year…

About a year ago my roommate introduced me to Epicurean Hedonism. It seemed very different from what my perception of the word ‘Hedonism’ was. I realized that for a fact only after I spent this last year working at a startup and inescapably becoming an Epicurean hedonist.

Before we go into the story, here are three Epicurian principles for happiness:

1) Friendship: “Of all the things which wisdom has contrived which contribute to a blessed life, none is more important, more fruitful, than friendship”

2) A thoughtful life: “It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly.”

3) Moderation/Subsistance: Epicurus advocated living in such a way as to derive the greatest amount of pleasure possible during one’s lifetime, yet doing so moderately in order to avoid the suffering incurred by overindulgence in such pleasure. The emphasis was placed on pleasures of the mind rather than on physical pleasures. Therefore, according to Epicurus, with whom one eats is of greater importance than what is eaten.

Now coming to the startup life:

Well, the third point on moderation is easy to understand, since you only make enough to live life in moderation . There is the expectation of the big exit, but till then you are working for what you can survie on and you make the best of it. Somehow it is in these resource scarce situations that I have had the most fun in life. (Those are the stories for later posts.)

Coming to the point of why I wrote this post-
Friendship and a thoughtful life are the two epicurean ideas that stuck with me as emblematic of a bay area startup. You live and die with 5-15 people you work with. You spend countless hours fighting over ideas and then implementing them. There is no escape from understanding each other at a level that you become best friends, if you want your startup to succeed. (In other words, if you are not in a dysfunctional startup, you will end up with lifelong friends ).

More importantly, with funding being constrained, your every decision has to be well thought through. You are in the game of making bets where the stakes are very high, you feel like Tom Cuise where others think you are writing checks that your startup can’t cash (literally and metaphorically). The only way this can work is if you think through every decision deep and hard. Oh and by the way, all the thinking needs to have been done yesterday.

For a techie like me, this sense of pleasure, can only be had in the startup world of the valley.I have no shame in being such a hedonist.

The question is though, is this just a startup thing or just a frame of mind that will manifest in other ways in different life situations?

Since this is my last post as a “student”, I am going to coin a big sounding term: “Lean Marketing”, inspired from the hot and trending “Lean Startup“.

The stand is: “a social marketing campaign, especially if it involves a new-media tool, should be approached as an iterative experiment and not as a one-shot deal.”

Traditional Marketing Campaign: Television and radio commercials, newspaper and magazine advertisements, billboards, tradeshows, product promotions and price cuts and the like.

- A linear process where the problem and the typical solution are known; it is all about execution.

Lean Marketing: An iterative experiment with new technology platform to engage with customers; in search of an optimal middle ground between business objectives and customer satisfaction.

- An iterative process. Neither the problem nor the solution are clearly articulated, but there is an eventual business objective.

Another way of looking at the difference is that traditional marketing campaigns require up-front capital, time, and other assets creating an indeterminate amount of risk.  In addition, it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of any traditional marketing campaign during the planning and investment stages.

With the transition of marketing strategy to one that effectively utilizes social media tools; an organization can successfully mitigate a majority of the risk inherent in traditional marketing practices.  Instead of a substantial up-front investment, social media marketing allows for smaller, incremental investments, which, if applied appropriately, should scale to the size of the participating market.  In addition, these incremental investments should stimulate immediate feedback among the consumer base that will allow for the organization to further optimize its strategy.

Updated. Thanks to Richard (see comments).

This dynamic call and response methodology, when compared to the traditional “static” approach, allows for a dialogue between the organization and the consumer that should further increase customer loyalty.

For an prototype “lean” campaign, here is a case study Umair and I wrote on Intuit’s Love a Local business campaign.
Btw. check out the slide share below, if you ever need to convince you boss about a social marketing campaign:

Brickbats welcome !

This is a short post, but first, a shorter rant:

<begin Rant> The “2″ in the title is in protest against all the “10 things, 8 points & 5 best” blog-posts out there. Research might say something else, but sometimes we need to forgo them “clicks” for the sake of some sanity. <end Rant>

Now, coming to the point. Much has been said about authenticity and how it is the new social media mantra, basically reiterating the old saying:

for every lie you will need 99 more to cover up

Talking from the perspective of personal online presence, we need to be authentic not because we can be caught cheating, but because the world knows us by what we put out there. Every word we publish is like a mental hook for people to latch on to and slot us. If we have certain passions and perspectives, we should express them as they are, instead of searching for the most politically correct and professionally sterilized form. These hooks or magnets will attract like minded individuals. I know, it’s obvious, but what is not obvious is how much stuff we say just because it’s cool to say it, would make us look intelligent or simply because the popular guy said it too.

Very few of us can really say whatever we are engaged in right now is exactly what we have always dreamed to do. Leaving the right hooks around increases the chances of being roped into the right kind of activity, community or job. In other words it increases the odds of serendipity.

So my new mantra is:

Be authentic, leave a few breadcrumbs around, leave the rest to serendipity.

< disclaimer: This might not work if you want to run for President, one day; but is awesome for the rest of us.  >

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