Information Proliferation & the Segment of One

Readings:

Origins of Social Media

IBM’s CEO on data, the death of segmentation and the 18-month deadline

Community Relations 2.0

The LongTail

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The evolution of the internet from a read and learn to an inform and disseminate has occurred at an extremely rapid pace – blame ubiquitous connectivity for it. Never before has information, people and their opinions had the reach or the influence they wield today. Social media has redefined the way news- national, international or local spreads. Viral, a term previously associated with the spread of infectious diseases, today is commonly used to describe how news proliferates. This power in the hands of the individual has in my opinion created the “Segment of One”, where each of us has the ability to take a stand, express an opinion, share an idea, collaborate, contribute and clearly articulate our likes/ dislikes, needs and wants & be heard. Companies that used to build and experiment with their product or services now have a conduit into their customer’s use habits. This of course comes with the added baggage of catering to those needs or losing the customer to your competitor. In the old way, firms could afford to ignore the customer’s voice and still do business as usual. The social web has networked all these customers and there is indeed strength in number! The AOL and Comcast customer services are instances of how firms that had a culture of ignoring customers in the past continued to do so and paid the price!

Crowdsourcing and crowd-funding are great examples of how venture financing has changed since the spread of social media. As a part of my other course this semester, The Integrative Capstone, I am spending two full days around start-up at a New Venture workshop in Indianapolis in a couple of weeks. It will be interesting to see how many of the new ventures build on this social media platform and also leverage this medium for funding, ideas and feedback. The HBR article on community relations is a great example. Most of us reach out to google every time we come across a roadblock- be it a personal one related to a medical condition or a professional one related to our work lives. Just as there are social groups discussing specific cures, there are groups that tackle challenging problems- aerospace, computing , engineering - all only for personal gratification. The social web has indeed made the world a village where individuals can make contributions to worthy causes in any corner of the world. A typical example is “Narayana Hrudayalaya”- a heart-care center that performs heart surgeries free of cost for those who need it- based in Bangalore, India. People all over the world make charitable contributions that help with keeping the mission alive. Would this have been possible without the social web- I am sure it would have, but not at its current pace.

However, the use of social media has other ramifications. People leave their footprints all over the web and social media-either knowingly or involuntarily- it is this data regarding their preferences, buying habits, activities, personal and professional life etc. that is invaluable to companies and helps create a segment of one.  I think this is where the concept of longtail creeps into the picture. I work in modeling risk- mainly risk of failure of aerospace components, an area of engineering that is extremely risk averse. Distributions play a critical role in driving failures- a rate/ low probability event can sometimes cause catastrophic failure- so a long tail with low probability of occurrence events is a concept I am intimately familiar with. In the context of marketing, unless the cost of selling to these long tails can be justified or the product is a niche’ offering it makes little sense to build a business around it. A significant percentage of products in today’s world are commoditized- where margins are low and profitability is dictated by volumes. You can see it even in the media business- where books, music and movie offerings are tailored for the majority. The segment of one helps in understanding the individual needs and better, informing the customer of the product and influencing his buying habits. A lot of firms were ambushed by the proliferation of social media and were caught wrong footed. But over time they have developed means to use this to listen to their customers and sell them the products they want.

Creative Intrusion: Sum of parts greater than the Whole

Readings:

Crowdsourcing: Dawn of Human networks

How to build your start-up without learning code?

Information Liquidity

Why the groundswell- and why now?

Making the transition to the social web

Star Search

Days of developing breakthrough technologies in the isolation of a laboratory are long gone. Today, people come together through the social web to provide their inputs whether you like it or not! I call it creative intrusion- giving individuals and firms the opportunity to leverage the collective intellect of people all over the world. The GNU and “Beerwares” are typical examples of this collaborative effort. This ability to harvest the opinions and inputs of people presents firms a valuable opportunity to - 1) collaborate on product development 2) have a real-world control groups to market test 3) determine segments of the market that need to be convinced  4) reduce product life cycle times and many more. The social web has allowed people to have an opinion and express it and be heard.

The groundswell in people participation is direct fallout from “Ubiquitous Connectivity” and “Information Liquidity”. Social web has given people a channel to publish their opinions, likes/ dislikes about any and every topic – products, services, social issues, environmental issues, fitness and many more. In addition, these opinions are finding an audience. These opinions are triggering specific reactions from the people. None of us buy a product, book a hotel, eat at a restaurant or visit a place without first learning about how other people feel about it. The web populace has been very smart at discerning genuine opinions from propaganda or advertisements. Firms are now starting to see the need for being active listeners and participants in these fora. Tools like Salesforce.com’s Marketing cloud provide a platform for monitoring their digital brands and creating digital marketing campaigns.

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/how-ge-plans-to-act-like-a-startup-and-crowdsource-great-ideas/ shows how GE “accessed the global brain” to solve a complex aerospace problem. The “Not Invented Here” attitude of large firms is gradually giving way to collaborative development. However, there are many instances where marketing on the social media or unintended missteps led to disastrous outcomes (https://econsultancy.com/blog/7913-14-epic-social-media-fails )

But has crowd sourcing/ crowd funding helped propagate start-ups with little or no thought process? I see very little relation between writing code and a start-up. I see entrepreneurship being more than having a gee-wiz code and snazzy mock-ups. Creating and delivering value still needs to be front and center. The dot-com era is littered with numerous examples of start-up that failed due to e-commerce hype. I feel crowd sourcing and crowd funding and the social web in general fueling a similar hype. 

The 5th P: How social media has added People to the mix

Readings:

Made to Engage

Do You Trust This Face?

Does the Internet Make You Dumber?

Does the Internet Make You Smarter?

Secret of Engaging Customers in Online Communities

The internet has provided unfettered access to information, both good and bad. How individuals or firms leverage this information to their advantage essentially drives the final outcome(s). The internet and social media, for the first time have provided firms an unprecedented access into a customer’s mind- his likes and dislikes, needs and wants and finally his/her perceived value of a service/product. Firms in the past, spend millions in market research, product testing, segmentation, now have access to similar information and that too real-time through social media channels. Firms having spent decades working on the traditional marketing equation of 4Ps- Product, Place, Price and Promotion with little or no interaction with the 5^th P- People are now forced to rethink. The internet and social media has flipped this equation to let People be the driving force. Twitter, Facebook and Amazon provide a conduit for customers to praise or vent about a product helping form instant opinions about a firm’s product that are hard to erase. However, the upside for the firms is the ability to better segment the markets, refine their offerings and customize their products as needed in collaboration with the people who want it. Days of “Any color so long as it’s black” are long gone. The access to information is eroding the advantage firms had in the past- trying to sell the same product at different price points, offering products that are perceived to have “advanced” or “new” features and finally resorting to advertising gimmicks. Now potential customers have access to price information of the product and its competitors in the different channels and locations. Have detailed reviews of product features by real customers and don’t pay any attention to traditional media advertisements.

Has the internet made us smarter or dumber? Can we really pass judgment this soon on its impact? To me, internet is a tool- how you use it drives what you derive from it. The same internet that has given us Wikipedia, GNU and a collaborative search for cure to major diseases also gave us cyber stalking, pornography and the silk route. IS that to say all internet is good or all internet is bad- of-course not. As with any invention, the good come with the bad. Having a Facebook to connect with friends/ family and express opinions comes with all the associated privacy concerns and identity thefts. I am sure similar concerns were raised regarding children’s grades when the television became popular (http://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0819/081943.html) , did that keep its influence from growing? However, over time people realized the need to recalibrate and use it to our benefit.

The internet and social media has shortened the news cycle, redefined how we get our news and information about everything. It gives firms a unique ability to learn, cater, collaborate, influence and watch real-time how their customers react and use their products. It is hard to ignore the irony in this strip by Scott Adams on how social media and the internet have affected the way we do business and how it still is a quite a confusing landscape to navigate.

A brief background

I go by GK and work for a a small business aerospace consulting firm in Nashville, TN. I have a front row seat to the challenges of running and keeping a small business afloat.  We have been a start-up for over 12 years! and the past two plus years I am involved in a variety of business development activities in addition to leading the technical work.

The good part of working for a small business is that you touch every aspect of it- from making the morning coffee to being involved in marketing, sales, finance and the actual technical work, so every day is different. The bad is the susceptibility of the firm to adverse business cycles (like the recent recession). Small missteps have fairly severe repercussions. We have beaten the odds to be successful, so the next logical step would be to make the leap to the next level and how we go about making this transition.

In terms of my education, I completed all of my early schooling in India and have an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Bangalore University and a Masters in same from The Ohio State University.

On the personal front, I have been married 8 years, we have a 3 year old girl and a 7 year old puppy! My free time is mostly spent ensuring the kids are sufficiently tired! We are also avid travelers and half-marathoners. 

PS- This is is my first ever digital account.