Economy of Social - Social Media Tips, Marketing and Business

"If the photo is legitimate, it seems to have worked like a charm."  Source: instagram.com/kimkardashian This was the final comment of a post on the daily beast on the subject of a naked selfie by Kim Kardashian on Instagram. For those living under a rock, on 7th March, Kim Kardashian barely a few weeks after giving birth to her second child posted an innocuous comment " When you're like I have nothing to wear LOL " with a picture that got the internet drooling.

Entrepreneurs spend so much time getting more visibility for their idea that there is tendency for them to loose focus from their long term vision. 

If he isn't one, he better be. With the proliferation of Big Data for better insights and decision making within an organization, it is very important for startups , small businesses and big businesses to understand analytics for better decision making.

If your lemonade does not sell, would you switch to selling Viagra? Even more if you are passionate about making a lemonade.

Entrepreneurship is about innovation and the ability to tackle problems. Doing both means you have a successful venture. Redbus.in is a classic Indian example of a startup that tackled challenges through innovation. RedBus (redbus.in) is now India's biggest online bus ticketing company. Interstate bus travel in India was a highly unorganized sector with many private local players and government buses. A consequence of this was the selling of bus tickets through traditional brick-and-mortar agents. Another problem with bus travel was immediate booking of tickets before journey. There used to be few advance bookings. Travelling to remote corners or on an immediate basis through bus remained a cumbersome task. Moreover there was no guarantee that if you went to a bus stand, you would find a bus.

The identity of a brand is built through its story. It is similar to the way our identity and personality becomes a reflection of major events and the story of our life. The story of founders of these brands in a way gets spilled over to the brands sometimes positively, and sometimes negatively. If you are building a new brand, tell a story. As a startup, following the MBA jargon is good, but it reduces the human touch. The human touch is what gives a brand a personality and makes it memorable.

Expertise [ˌɛkspɜːˈtiːz] n Special skill, knowledge, or judgment; expertness We have often experienced the rigidity that comes with experience and knowledge. When it comes to people with "work experience", an important question to ask is it's effectiveness ( or ineffectiveness ) in influencing the future of an organization. Bill Taylor has highlighted this in a very well articulated blog post . He quotes the work ( The innovation killer ) of Cynthia Barton Rabe to explain the paradox of expertise and Vuja De' (The flip side of déjà vu). Paradox of Expertise Many organizations, she argues, struggle with a "paradox of expertise" in which deep knowledge of what exists in a marketplace or a product category makes it harder to consider what-if strategies that challenge long-held assumptions. "When it comes to innovation," she writes, "the same hard-won experience, best practice, and processes that are the cornerstones of an organizatio...

An amazing interview published in the strategist section of Business Standard revealed two basic problems hindering innovation and the start-up eco system in India. Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish puram (Aditya Birla India Centre) highlight very important points. If we want to become a true innovation hub, we need to have more science and engineering graduates and PhDs. We need to increase education from the primary sector all the way till the PhDs. All this is needed if you want to develop products that can be seen by the rest of the world.  Right now VCs are funding models that work, which they know will work and they need money to scale up. They are not funding ideas that may never work and that is our issue. It is more like a guaranteed loan to someone. It gives you good return but that is not the purpose of VC. That will come with more competition. There is change in the last couple of years and it will happen. Two solve these problems we need a radical change in mindset. ...

What happens when a guy who loves his work stops loving it? Or What happens when the work you love does not bring you success? You start to question. Here is one such question. I have no life. I never see any of my non-work friends, and I’m wasting away my one and only youth. I ought to be out doing fun things and active things, the kind of things I won’t be able to do when my mind and body finally decay. But instead I’m stuck inside under fluorescent lights, pushing bits around inside a computer in ways that are only interesting to other nerds. Startups are not about billionaires. Risks are not shortcuts to success. They are about survival. People who learn it young have a higher chance of making a fortune. So stop cribbing. Start working. If you are over-worked, start f#ck&ng. But get back to work so that you don't stop loving it. PS: Uncrunched has taken an interesting topic .

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.~ Martin Luther King, Jr. We often tread on a path of uncertainty. Uncertainty has a tendency to move towards adversity. It happens since we tie a lot of resources, time and money on that path. This adversity leads to greater courage. If the Britishers or Soviets had not kept faith Hitler would have been a victorious in the second world war. All successful innovations had innovators who kept faith in their judgement. After all adversity makes us stronger. Entrepreneurship is another such challenging way of life. Uncertainty is in the DNA of entrepreneurship. All successful entrepreneurs (with Steve Jobs being the role model ) just learned to deal with uncertainty. They simply kept faith.

In my last post, I said that only competent people can afford to be arrogant. So what if your arrogance gives the other person a feeler of your competence. Getting a bigger client for a smaller business would mean matching the level of arrogance displayed by the client. This is what I call pro-arrogance. You arrogance is directed in the same direction as your client's arrogance. This makes you birds of the same feather. And they usually end up flocking together. Prospect to a confirmed sale may just mean matching the arrogance of your prospect. 

If you think all inventions, political campaigns, entrepreneurial ventures were successful because of a great idea, think again. Not all great ideas gain acceptability, and not all Barack Obama speeches are successful. Hitler was one of the few dictators in the second world war who had mass support during the initial phase. He lost it, and finally the war. The success of an idea does not lie in its greatness or its novelty. It becomes great because of a sound economic framework. An idea is like a variable, whose success depends on the mathematical equation where the success of the idea is a dependent variable, and the idea is one of the few independent variables.  Y- Success of the idea (Dependent variable) X1 - Idea X2 - Support from executors of the idea X3 - Support from the beneficiaries of the idea X4 - Processes governing the execution of the idea X5 - Social support for the idea X6 - Ability to generate monetary gains to support X2-X5 Y = f(X1,X2,X3,X4,X5,X6) Stil...

People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges. Arrogance is one such wall. It does not help in winning people or making friends. Like rust on the iron curtain it also manages to succinctly take away existing social support. What remains is a lonely person. Success breeds arrogance and that is the reason people on top sometimes end up being all alone. The same phenomena happens with brands. Successful brands end up being arrogant. Courtesy: Successful managers of these brands. On the contrary humility provides that extra cushion of social support. It gives grace when a defeat can be humiliating.

My friend started his own business of building online portals and platforms for SMEs. His enthusiasm and passion for business drives him to cut his sleeping time, eating time and most importantly party time. Although in all respects I can assure you that for him, work is like a party. It probably gives him a bigger high. I’ve seen him work on a startup since our third year of our graduation and ever since despite many hiccups his go getter spirit is still on and he is fighting it out. But… What happens when you meet another fighter ? A similar person who has been fighting it out for so many years and has seen the same ups and downs, gets a similar kick and is equally competent, if not more… And suddenly you see an army of such people who are competing, with equal passion, but … driven by different values.

We know about the Self Help Groups and Micro-finance institutions that take advantage of collective buying power. Groupon (groupon.com) brings the same concept to web by offering a sales promotion offer (Coupon) everyday in every city it operates. Before I talk more about groupon.com here are some facts. Its founder Andrew Mason turned down a $6 billion offer by Google (Google's highest offer, almost double of its highest acquisition in history) - Dec'10 It took two years to reach this status and Groupon had net revenues of around $350 million in 2010 ( Founded in Nov'2008 ) Andrew Mason (Founder of Groupon) used to work in web design with another serial chicago entrepreneur ( Eric Lefkosky ) When Andrew Mason Left Lefkosky to go to high school and started working on a project " The Point ", Lefkosky got the word. He went to Mason and told him to draw the outline for "The Point". Lefkosky instantly gave Mason $1 million in seed money and Maso...

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is a subsidiary of the Indian Railways that handles the catering, tourism and online ticketing operations of the railways. Economist is now using this huge database of IRCTC to promote their magazine. In the huge clutter that is present on the internet, millions of sites, Facebook pages, ads (which people don't even look at), this is a smart move by IRCTC and the Economist. IRCTC gets additional revenues for the database and Economist finds a subscription. Or lets rewind a bit. Do you remember signing up for additional promotional offers? We already pay a service charge for using the website and now IRCTC is sending up promotional offers through my email. It is a blatant violation of privacy . There is a lesson to learn here. To get quick and easy money it is better to not resort to such cheap gimmicks. Startups face this dilemma when the cash flows aren't strong. But its better to not cheat your customer. Some stupids mi...

As I keep writing about 2010 is Social Media , in this post I'd like to mention another important medium for businesses: The Mobile. As Indians keep breaking mobile subscription records with the total number of subscribers added in March'10 close to 20 million and a total subscriber count close of 600 million, there are still many (mostly archaic)  who refuse to take this into account. One such organization is Hindustan Times, owned by HT Media Ltd. To put it simply, they don't have a mobile site. Is it a blunder, sheer arrogance to refuse the fact that people read news on mobile or a tryst of their ex-editor with the 2G scam, it is hard to decode. Its even more pitiful since they are in the publishing business with a readership base of close to 35 lakh (India's second most widely read English newspaper), and have others (TOI) who are present on mobile. There are companies who generally go first, there are those who learn and closely follow and then there is Hindust...

Chef worked at the "Corporate Bite" for 15 years. He is bored and will be leaving the guys at corporate bite to join the super adventure club. His colleagues, some with a white French beard, some with droopy shoulders and others with a paunch are crying, because he is leaving. Are they crying because they'll miss him? Probably not.

Business Plan is not an idea alone. It is a process of continuous feedback. Life should be like a profitable B-Plan and for that effective listening is important. The unsuccessful B-plan is the one that gives up. Although a B-Plan contains a lot more, the pic above is the black box of a B-Plan.

Size does matter. Size of advertising expenditure, size of air time, size of budget, size of the newspaper ad, size of the celeb endorsing your product and the size of stupidity. Size does matter. But fortunately a small business does not suffer from the stupidity this big. They can do it by being small, by being smart.“ It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. ”