My idea for txtWeb - Creating a Vendor - Consumer network via SMS

Think of a fine morning when you get up and realize that you need some fruits for your house. You pick up your mobile phone and send the keyword (Say @vendor) to a particular number. Immediately you get an SMS back showing you the list of possible vendors in your locality say
1. Fruit vendors 
2. Vegetable vendors
3.General Stores
4. Carpenters
5. Painters and polishers
 6. Home maintenance agencies etc
 (The system knows your location since you have submitted your location details when you registered for the network).

You send the serial number corresponding to ‘fruit vendors’ as a reply to the same number and viola – within a few minutes you have a fruit vendor with his fruit cart at your door step. After talking to the fruit vendor while making the purchases, you realize that he got your address as an SMS saying that fruits are required at this address. He also tells you that since he has registered on this network, he is regularly getting SMSes and his business has improved significantly.

Later sometime in the afternoon sitting in your office, you remember that you had to contact a carpenter for getting a new wardrobe. Tech savvy as you are, you send the same SMS and now get list of various carpenters in your locality. You choose the carpenter and send it back as an SMS, and within a few minutes you get a call from the carpenter and you fix an appointment for the evening – the job is done now!

Having said the above, I have two questions to ask:
1) Is a network like this possible through internet in India?
2) Does the above stated idea look very far sighted?

I think even in the best of scenarios, a vendor – consumer network like this cannot be achieved through internet in India. But yes, when it comes to SMS, this looks very possible. Each of these vendors carries a mobile phone. In fact, I saw a road sweeper yesterday, talking on a simple mobile phone. So when it comes to a vendor – consumer network, it is the SMS that connects us.

Secondly, I think the above stated idea does not look very farfetched, especially when there are engines like txtWeb which allow you to build SMS based application. If you visit the txtWeb appstore even today, you can see apps like @ebay (get product info on ebay on your SMS), @rest (get info of restaurants), @ask (get answers to your query, directions etc), @trains (get info on trains) which show that the txtWeb developers are on their way of developing apps to help people in their daily needs and soon somebody would develop an app for a network like this.

My book in the list of 'Books by IITD authors'!

My visit to IIT Delhi for Rendezvous 2010 resulted in a very pleasant surprise. In the midst of Accenture Rendezvous ( which if you happen to miss this year, let me tell you, you haven't missed much ;) ), I saw this banner of 'Books by IITD authors' and saw my book in it!

To add to it, I am glad that the book is doing farely well in the markets - at least better than what I expected in its first year of launch, considering that textbooks hardly have a marketing budget and they sell more on word of mouth which builds from year to year.

However I think there is immense room for improvement in the book. The book was written way back in 2008. Since then many interesting things have happened which are worth sharing. Moreover, even I have grown as a marketing professional and I think that now I have some more interesting things to discuss. Hence we will soon get started on the second edition of the book. I got some valuable feedback on the book from the marketing students in my guest lecture at IIT Delhi and I will be incorporating them in the next edition ( in fact, the most valuable suggestion was to get a new edition of the book - as in renew the case studies.) I think the kind of 'Case study' heavy book that we have made, would loose its value over time if we don't renew it. Hence it is anyway high time we should get cracking on the next edition.

All the best to us! :)

How to manage online communities

There are three critical stages involved in building and nurturing online communities. The first is the ‘plan’ part, where the online community product is conceptualized on paper; the next is the ‘build’ part where these communities are coded on various content management systems like Joomla, Drupal etc; the final but most lengthy part is ‘engage’ where these communities need to be managed and nurtured.

You might think that communities have the capability of taking care of themselves through the networking effect. However that is in fact a very rosy picture. The truth is that such communities need to be promoted, handholded and inspected to get the best out of them. The way each successful party needs a host and bigger parties needs organizers and managers, similarly most of the online communities (which can be interpreted as an online avatar of a get-together) need dedicated resources like community managers to execute the above jobs. In case of larger online communities you need additional resources working with the community manager for successful scaling and nurturing of the online community.

I have generally seen that most people underestimate the role of community managers and think of them as people who are needed to put a comment here or there or at maximum start some discussion threads. However if you consider your online community as a product, then you must also see the role of community manager equivalent to the product manager. In fact while managing some online communities myself at 2020social I realized that a community manager’s role can be divided into 5 broad parts.

Content Moderation: Moderating content, seeing if all the published content is according to the community policy and sanity norms etc

Content Creation (and seeding/ copywriting): Creating critical content for the community. They can be your conversations and the community admin or content seeded by you to provoke further conversations.

Promotion: Promotion and scaling up of the community. This involves managing community outposts (Facebook/ Twitter pages) to other tactics that can lead to increase in relevant traffic on community.

Response Mechanism: Channelizing responses so that adequate responses are generated. This involves well thought response flowchart to acknowledge positive/ negative comments, handling crisis etc. This also involves setting up work flows for successful execution of ideas and providing support/ solutions to user queries.
Retention tactics: Miscellaneous tactics to increase engagement of users on the community. This can involve running micro campaigns or directing users to appropriate parts of the community so that they have more to discover and engage around on the online community

Moreover if you look at the roles, all of them can be set across to range from Scaling focussed roles, which focus on increasing the size of the community, get more relevant users, to retention focussed roles, which focus on engaging and retaining people once they have joined the community. In fact I would like to take each of these 5 roles separately in 5 different blog posts.

Thought leadership for B2B companies: part 1 of 2

At 2020 Social we used to suggest a lot of our B2B prospects of a thought leadership way to inbound marketing and we used to practice it ourselves for our own marketing for 2020 Social. (All of us used to regularly write about social media marketing and social business strategies on our company blog). Believe me, almost all of our marketing effort went into showcasing our thought leadership in social media marketing and we rarely spent a penny on anything else. And even though we were a start up, we got a good number of prospects contacting us rather than we calling them up and asking them whether they have any requirements!

Today many B2B focussed services companies want to seen as thought leaders in their space; as companies that can help their clients not just with execution but also with ideas. They want to show that they know their stuff well, they think ahead of their competitors and they want to remain in a preaching mode. However, perhaps it would be wrong to say that this is a new concept because we saw this very thing being practiced years ago by Ogilvy and Mather for their own advertising campaigns. Here is a snapshot I took from the book 'Ogilvy on Advertising'. You can see that O&M's advertisements used to be one page articles teaching about 'How to do better advertising'

In this book, David Ogilvy writes - "The purpose of my ads (for his own company- O&M) was to project the agency as knowing more about advertising. You may argue that this strategy was ill-advised, knowledge being no guarantee of creativity. But at least it was unique, because no other agency could have run such advertisement - they lacked the required knowledge. My ads not only promised useful information, they provided it. And they worked - in many countries."


It is fascinating to to see that even at a time before there was web 2.0, the ideology of marketing oneself through one's knowledge existed. And today, when social technologies have given us all the tools to comfortably preach and publish our thought leadership in our area of expertise, I see very few companies actually practicing this in a proper manner.

I think among the companies that I have seen showcasing their thought leadership in their areas of expertise, Adaptive Path (a user experience design company) understands it the best. If you visit their homepage, it gives you a glimpse of what is recent on their blog and Twitter page. Moreover, most of their blog entries show that the company thinks ahead of others when it comes to user experience design and gives the reader the impression that it has got a team of some very smart people. Also you will notice that their homepage is designed differently than others. Three out of the seven tabs on the header talk about the thought leadership of the company - blog, events, ideas, which shows that the organization has a serious focus towards exhibiting their ideas. Also the homepage is designed in a way that you can get an idea of  'who is adaptive path' and 'what they do' in 15-20 seconds of staying on the homepage.

Among Indian companies, an organization which understands this ideology better than others is Infosys. You must visit their blogs page where the company has multiple blogs running about upcoming IT technology and its need in various industries.

This post is more about showing that if your are a B2B focussed company, and if you are indeed in the business of thinking ahead of the market then it is high time that you start showcasing your thought leadership. Ogilvy preferred printed posters, adaptive path prefers blogs and events. What other ways exist in exhibiting thought leadership and how are some other organizations doing it differently? These are some of the questions I will like to take up in my upcoming posts.

How to market your brand through Social Media - My guest lecture to IIT Delhi MBA class

I remember having a long discussion with my IIT Delhi marketing faculty (with whom I co-authored a book on brand management) some time back about how social media and social technologies are changing traditional modes of marketing. I remember him asking me all sorts of question regarding the credibility of this upcoming media and at that time I found it pretty hard to convince him. Hence it was a bit surprising that a general chat with him last Tuesday got converted to an invitation to give a lecture to his marketing class on social media marketing and how brands are using this upcoming form of media!

Here is what I presented to the class. It was great to see that some of the students grasped this very fast and came up with questions like returns on social media marketing, monetary impact, benefits of going for online communities over a simple Facebook page etc.

Iitd pres 01102010

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I would like to thank Dave Evans, Gaurav Mishra and 2020 Social for providing such great research out in the open that it was possible to plan this presentation and get adequate ideas at such short notice.

PS: At the end of the day, what stole the show was not just the opportunity of giving a lecture to some smart people but this SMS that I received from my prof in the evening: "Good feedback of the class.like this feedback I have received. Mahim, thank you for the guest lecture today. One of the best lectures in dms i have attended." :)