The Quest for Content 2.0

When your first – and most profitable – product is content agnostic, you can be forgiven for not thinking about content. Resources are rallied around the flagship, beefed up and a superstar is born. The superstar, over a period of time, meanders into the cash-cow category and the quest starts afresh for that Superstar 2.0. Quite the same seems to be happening out at Google. We are getting a bit ahead of ourselves though – let’s first tale a quick lowdown on the landscape

Eric Schmidt, ex CEO of Google speaking to Forbes named Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google as the four horsemen in the tech leaders pack (he used the accounting firm Big 4 metaphor). I do not have the gall to challenge Schmidt (except that the world of tech is a funny one and while this true now and in the short term, the medium term could throw up surprises. And in world of high tech the only other thing more foolish in predicting the long term is actually believing it). So we go with Schmidt’s assessment and look at the four knights in their shining armor. Facebook is a platform company – its monolithic, multi-purpose, multi-tenanted social platform is its strength. It is hugely sticky, quickly scalable and does not have to bother about content because the users are filling that bit up in a frenzied pace. Apple has long ceased to be a technology or a software company. Many argue – and with merit – that Apple is a hardware company raking in big bucks from selling super elegant, easy to use, irrationally priced hardware. Peel that layer back and the effort at owning content is apparent. Apple has been at it for a while to create a good ecosystem that allows content creators connect with content consumers. Its Achilles heel however has been that it is as yet a distributor platform for the content – it does not quite own it (and neither have been very successful in binding mass content creators into economically sound contracts. The movie studios’ refusal to play ball with Jobs was one reason why Apple TV never quite took off). Turning to Amazon we find ecommerce being a dominant source of its current revenue yet a perceptible change towards content. It is signing book deals to beef up its ebook content (content that it owns and not merely distributes) and some of the 70% of enterprise value that Amazon has from ecommerce is around content that it has closer ownership of (like Kindle Direct Publishing platform). So where does that leave Google?

In a bit of a fix, I would argue. Google’s key strength has been taking truckloads of content – not its own – indexing them and creating smart algorithms that bubble up the most relevant when you are looking for something. Searching someone else’s content, that is. There is a whiff of change though at Google in terms of understanding the power of content. Google Finance was an early example where the firm applied software skills on publicly available content or content provided by data vendors. Google Public Data Explorer is another example of the same approach – take reams of content (mostly abundant content from the public domain) and add value to it by applying a smart software layer. An adjacent approach has been to embed content in form of ecommerce via the Andriod Marketplace as embodied by the recently launched (and tepidly received) music service. But will Google ever try monetizing these in a manner different from how it relies on search for monetizing?

That is a multi-million dollar question and I would bet on that happening in the following manner. Google will go after content acquisition in areas where content is becoming commoditized and hence less valuable to the current owners. Google’s super smart engineers will then bring their technology and engineering competences to bear and create insights out of data in a manner that data owners cannot. It will allow that holy grail of content insight – commingling proprietary data with public to glean specific and localized insights. The firm has already trained its guns on primary sources of public data (the World Bank, OECD and such) and I suspect that momentum will continue and encompass primary sources that monetize their content (exchanges, central banks). It will not surprise me if Google at some point in time seriously takes a look at acquiring a pure-play content company

Content was once king – it perhaps still is but in an indirect manner. Consumers are not willing to pay for vanilla content. The value exchange point has shifted to either gleaning out intelligence out of the content at scale or delivering the content at precise workflow points to consumers. The obituary of content has been a touch premature as was celebrating its status as King early. Content is important but not in the form it is produced – a different entity needs to breathe life, and ergo economic value, into it

Let’s first get them all

And then do what with them?

The first fallacy of creating a community is just this. The mindset of a hoarder. Gathering anything without a purpose places the cart in front of the horse – or, the business model in front of the raw material. People are the raw material in a Community. Just as a steel manufacturing business does not hoard up strawberries, a Community must eschew the lure of mindless “customer” acquisition at the cost of defining upfront who are being served and with what purpose

Hoarding impacts your community in two equally destructive ways. One, once the purpose of the community is established (post membership acquisition) members discover they do not have intersecting interests or expectations with the rest of the gang. There is no tribe to speak of. They quit. Secondly, a few acquired members are perhaps of the correct profile who would quickly discover there are a sprinkling of non-conforming audience engaged in community activity and will quickly disappear

What about multi-interest communities then? Yes, they do exist. If that is what you have in mind then it is better to think in terms of platforms. A Platform with different communities as tenants. It is perfectly possible – and correct – to design a handful of services as horizontals that each tenant feeds off. Then get onto community (tenant) specific services.

Irrespective of tenancy plurality, member acquisition should not broadbrush to pixalate the specific community picture. The rule of member acquisition remains unchanged

Photo courtesy Broadmoor Community Church

Positive Reinforcement

“What is good about life is as genuine as what is bad and therefore deserves equal attention” – C. Peterson, 2006

The days I play my favorite songs driving back home are the days I had a truly enjoyable work-day. And invariably those are days when someone recognized something good I did at work – and said so. Positive reinforcement – the official organizational psychology term – as an instrument of motivation has been long understood but sadly less implemented. Let me rephrase that – improperly implemented I should say.

Over the course of our employment we end up doing a gigantic stream of good work (and some stupid stuff as well but since societies have made evolutionary progress, I am assuming the algebraic sum of smart and stupid work is positive). These bits of work all go on to make something substantial in both volume as well as the impact it has on our employers (and ourselves). Many of these accomplishments are recognized – and that is where the problem begins

The problem is not in the recognition per-se but in the manner in which recognition happens, gets recorded, accumulated, propagated and associated. A bulk of the recognition takes the form of a verbal – “great job” or a short e-mail of thanks. Some employers have systems of physical rewards & recognition, which gives an employee a physical object – a trophy sometimes – that reminds her of her good work each time she looks at it. In most cases however these micro-recognitions fail in getting associated by either the employer (manager) or the employee to their performance goals, reducing the evaluative impact of the bits and pieces of work that go to stitch up an year’s work. Does it then surprise you that year end performance evaluations are usually an evaluation of the last assignment or worse, a totally subjective discussion of perceptions?

Happy employees make great workplaces. And great workplaces make great businesses. Happiness is a steady stream but has its ebbs and flows. Organizations rely more on point-in-time appreciation of positive employee efforts but have failed to put their employees bang in the middle of this river of happiness. The failure is perhaps not due to lack of intent but more attributable to absence of a solution that addresses this issue

Image courtesy: baobabinc.com

 

Playing in a Sandbox

What if LinkedIn decided to play in Facebook’s sandbox? Afterall, both are about creating social connections and sharing networks & information within that social circle.

The answer to the choice lies in aspirations. A newbie firm wants to test the waters and looks at the path of least resistance. A social business, they might argue, has got to mostly do with people. So why not gravitate to where most people are? The trouble with this is that the answer is correct but the question is wrong. The fabric of a social business is not the people per-se but what those people do within the sandbox. A social sandbox is like a society – and people get enamoured by reciprocating behavior as much as they put off by actions that seem incongruent to that sandbox-society. Example, notice how many times your eyes roll-over when you notice someone posted that “my cat’s just rolled over” type update on LinkedIn?

The sandbox you choose has got to answer a very important question. If you were given the choice of asking the entire population of your intended audience live inside a gated community what would that community look like? If that looks like Planet Facebook, please go ahead and play in that sandbox. But please ask yourself this question before you make the choice

PS: LinkedIn was a poor example perhaps – it had critical mass – and a different sandbox already as Facebook started its own growth. But you get the drift. Branchout is a better example and they made a choice of playing in Facebook’s sandbox

The Core

There can be serious and irrevocable implications of poor decisions. Take outsourcing for example. Bad outsourcing was based on costs. For every engineer in a “high cost” location we can get three in a “low-cost” venue. And development resource expenses are a big chunk of our direct costs, which means we shall see immediate margin expansion if we did this. Great – set targets and get on with this plan. “Hey, what if we managed to find four developers at the price of one? Won’t that help the company’s cause even more?” – the first seed of poor implementation has set in

Some years later you have built up a huge organization on the principle but the sign on the building still says “COST”. And in the meanwhile you have realized the added burden of handling complexity, communication and controlling quality coming out of a cost-optimized factory. Then someone throws up their hands and says – “you know what, we should have planned it better”

Both yes and no. No because it is likely that your firm did in fact plan all this – just that they chose the wrong core ideas to build their plans on (and perhaps did not think the thing through). Yes, because without a good plan it is likely that you will never understand what you are after. The idea behind planning is to start with a core and build concentric circles around it. The concentric circles are steps to fructify that core. And each outward circle has to be evaluated if it adds to or subtracts from the core (retain if former, discard if latter) In this example, the core could well have been “optimize costs” but it is likely that many concentric circles were allowed even when it was evident they were diluting the core. All plans get a reality check when they hit the asphalt making it even more important to keep a close watch on those concentric circles

The core is equally important when unwinding a bad decision just so one does not wipe out an accretive circle in the process

Sadly, in my experience, especially in outsourcing and breaking ground with new products or setting up businesses in virgin territories I have seen far too many plans with poorly thought out cores. Your experience could well be different. It will be a breath of fresh air to hear about them.

Twelve Word CV

When I asked him for a short bio that could go at the foot of his guest post on CDI, Basab Pradhan wrote back a one liner. I pointed out that this was far too much brevity for someone who has had a distinguished career like him. “Let it be that way”, was a short reply I received.

Basab Pradhan has come back to head up global sales for Infosys, a position he held before he moved on in 2005. Infosys faces tough challenges as it fends off competition, rebuilds the organization and also writes a better succession plan for the top post. They have made a good first move by getting Basab back – and in a familiar role where he can make a lot of difference.

Basab was co-authoring a book on Indian Offshore Services to India before taking up this assignment. Given Basab’s rich experience it would have been a great read – I hope the book stays on track.

Why does India not have software product companies – was the question I had posed to Basab, that prompted him to write a guest post for CDI. Read on…

Ceteris Paribus

There was a time when online retailing was a novel concept in India. There was Flipkart, a company started by two employees of Amazon working off their Bangalore offices. They started by doing books and slowly have added stuff like computers, mobile phones and cameras. While they were at it, information and news portals started e-commerce offshoots, specialized services like Ferns & Petals (for flowers & gifts) came up and one-stop-shops like Infibeam happened. Internet retail is no longer a novelty in this country. Products retail for pretty much the same prices everywhere and user experience of websites largely the same (Infibeam is a blatant copy of Amazon.com, including the arrow metaphor that has been twisted – literally – as a smile). Given this, how do these web services distinguish themselves?

One key dimension is customer service

Take Flipkart for example. Their customer service has been boringly efficient. My experience with them was restricted to books, which they delivered with unfailing punctuality and never with any glitch. Then a few weeks back I decided to buy a Nikon 35mm AF-S f/1.8G lens from them. The value of the order was more than all my previous purchases at Flipkart put together. Thus I was naturally concerned when the item did not ship in the three promised days. For the first time I had a reason to write to their customer support. I won’t bother you with the details but here are some key experiences going through their support infrastructure

1. Every e-mail was replied to. With a human touch, including splashes of random bad grammar at places. No canned responses. If you replied to their mail, someone actually replied back, referring to your mail. They read your mails, it was apparent. And each correspondence has embedded in it the history of responses against your complaint ticket
2. Their helpdesk did not have irritating marketing messages at the greeting tone. Three rings after you made the IVR choice there was an agent on the other side. No, thankfully they did not tell me how important my call was to them
3. The agents spoke with normal Indian accents. Not the stuff that Sumitra churns out at night when she becomes Susan. They sounded like a normal Flipkart employee trying to work through a customer issue
4. Sometimes the same agent that you spoke to would call you back, giving exact details of where the order stood. No bluffing. “If we cannot ship this by Monday morning, I promise to call you and help you cancel the order”. Now try that with an airline call center

It is unknown how Flipkart will behave once they reach Amazonian proportions. Actually, I hope they never become of Amazonian proportions. So often we put of the binary choice in front of businesses – Big or Small? Neither, is a perfectly acceptable answer. Let’s just stay “Best” is as good an option as any

Facebook e-mail

The battle is on to gain control over all your communication touch points. All. As rumors floats that Microsoft is buying Skype for an alleged $8billion, the rock-star of social media – Facebook – quietly switched on its email services (I am not sure if this was available earlier too but I noticed it today when I was about to message a friend. So if I am late to this party, my apologies in advance)

 How it works

1. You get a name@facebook.com e-mail ID. The “name” is the same vanity URL name that you had chosen once when Facebook allowed you to
2. The “Message” section on the left hand menu becomes your Message center. It integrates messages, texts and chat sessions and displays them in a conversation threaded manner
3. The e-mail address brings in other mail clients to your Facebook account – in a way. So now you can send a mail to your Facebook buddy from Outlook and Gmail even if you do not have a Facebook account (and know that your buddy is a Facebook junkie)
4. The service tries to integrate all your communication touch points, including your mobile phone. The service is available in India and pre-configured for some carriers, such as Aircel. For others – like Airtel – one has to send a txt message to a designated number to get a confirmation code and then set the service up (The thing did not work for me. I am awaiting my confirmation code still). I believe once this is up, you will be able to send messages to and from your phone to your Facebook friends (even if you do not have their phone numbers). This is particularly helpful and in the direction where phone numbers shall merge with other social identifiers that are more permanent in nature

For one, Facebook chose to keep the messaging application within their ecosystem and not spin it off as a separate web interface. By doing that it retains the user experience of the platform, but it does not stay faithful as a true-blue e-mail system given the potential of interruption (and distraction) from stuff happening on your timeline. Facebook e-mail will be less about e-mail than it will be a casual messaging platform

Gmail, in 2004, was a revolutionary step for e-mail clients. Unlimited storage (Facebook is silent about storage space), threaded conversations, google-search on emails, integrated GTalk , Labs – it truly changed asynchronous communication. Compared to that Facebook e-mail is merely evolutionary. All it strives is to give its users a Facebook Identity, which they hope will become calling cards of people in all forms of social interactions

The next round of upping the game will happen in VoIP, as social networks rush to control voice communication touch points. It would have surprised me less if Facebook had aggressively pursued Skype instead of Microsoft. This area promises to see a fair amount of action in the months to come

LinkedIn Today: News meets Professional Social Graph

Social news has got its latest avatar. LinkedIn Today, launched this morning, making the professional social networking site the latest entrant in the growing trend of social discovery and consumption of news

LinkedIn today invites publishers to contribute editorial content on the LinkedIn platform. Users of the platform can configure what they get to see in terms of industry news (I suspect LinkedIn snoops your profile to create the industries of interest. For me it was quite accurate to start with). The Facebook “Like” button is replaced with a “Share” button that looks quite like the action buttons in i-pad applications like Twitter and GMail. The whole initiative is powered by Twitter & LinkedIn, which probably explains the “Follow” metaphor to subscribe to content from a publisher

What I liked about LinkedIn Today

Analytical News: I am a big fan of news that analyzes – as opposed to news that merely informs. There is no “breaking news” thing in LinkedIn Today (great news doesn’t rush) and all the articles that showed up in my – what does one call it in LinkedIn? Timeline? – were good quality analytical stories. “Like”

Email digest: I get to configure my e-mail newsletter. This is a great plus and completely does away of having to discover the most interesting news stories from e-mail newsletters

Save feature: You can “save” a news article for reading later. I find this approach more convenient than bookmarking. Though I am yet to test, LinkedIn informs that the saved items can be read on mobile devices as well (kind of syncing web and wireless activity streams). By the way, LinkedIn also gives the world the word “Unsave” – in case you want to change your mind after saving a news story

Interface: The display of  the news is nice. It has the i-pad design metaphor of news widgets that croon “touch me” even when rendered on a desktop browser

“Like” button for websites: Growing trend popularized by Facebook also gets adopted by LinkedIn. You could add a small script to your webpage that will allow users to publish stories from your webpage onto their LinkedIn ecosystem (actually, I haven’t yet made my mind up if this feature is a good thing or bad – but that’s just me)

What I did not like

Social?: There is nothing social about the first (“beta”) release of the service. I get to see what looks like the most shared articles. And these could well have been shared by people I don’t know and are completely out of my network. There has got to be a better algorithm to show me those stories that my network peers have shared (I guess today being the first day there wasn’t much sharing data to go by. Benefit of doubt to LinkedIn) Update: There does exist a section called “From your connections” buried in the bowels of the page – bad design. Even worse intent (withdraws benefit of doubt)

Post click: Click on the news you wish to read and you leave the user experience of the parent platform. That is, the news service that contributed the story takes you to their platform. This experience is jarring. Facebook does a neat job of serving the information and retaining the experience of the platform

LinkedIn has the potential to bring a lot of sobriety in social discovery and consumption of news, much like the professional social networking (serious social networking, as a colleague had once described) it pioneered. It has the serious capability of handing back the control on consumption to the reader (and not ruin their experience by the ever encroaching ad space). It will be sad though if LinkedIn Today pretty much becomes yet another media aggregator service

Disclosure: Reuters, the media division of my employers is a contributor to the LinkedIn Today platform. The views above are entirely my personal

MNCs Hiring Abroad

Wall Street Journal recently reported about American MNCs sifting their hiring momentum to outside of the United States. This is not outsourcing, in the strict sense of the term, but kind of a mix between that and catering to local market needs. I am not aware what kind of reaction the report generated in the States, especially as President Obama continues to play to the domestic galleries with his recent rant about healthcare tourism. Irrespective of public reaction, this trend in MNCs is here to stay. Broadly, there are three reasons why MNCs go outside of their headquarters to hire talent and setup centers (apologies for the poor quality of the graphic. Pls click on the picture for a high resolution version. Opens in the same tab in the browser)

MNCs traditionally chased the top. Lever Brothers came to India not to exploit the talent and not to arbitrage costs – it found the Indian markets attractive for its produce. The state of technology did not allow them to come down the pyramid (they did however extract their top talent and put them for overseas assignments. Something that MNCs today call flow-and-grow). The game has changed significantly since. The MNCs that are here to stay have invested across the span of the pyramid. That investment gives them greater flexibility of running businesses and benefitting from economies of scale