Week 3 - How a business can avoid negative publicity

I learnt important lessons on safeguarding your brand by listening to the 'Information Liquidity' video. Some of the lessons learnt include:

• Appoint a social-media team or person in your company. Constant outreach and monitoring are important.
• Use tools like Radian6 or NetVibes to constantly search for information about your company from a number of sources on the Internet. These tools can alert you to negative publicity about your products.
• Publish guidelines to your employees on posting company related information in social media.
• Use meta-tags on social media to search for information about your company.
• Take immediate and timely action to reach out to dissatisfied customers and correct the problem.
• Reach out to community leaders and influential bloggers to improve your brand outreach and reputation.

Week 3 - Chris Anderson's Long Tail

The podcast of 'The Long Tail' by Gil Frisbie and Frank Acito of Indiana University was very interesting and it led me to explore more about the phenomenon online. This article by Chris Anderson explains the phenomenon in brief.

Essentially, the distribution of sales by volume looks something like this:

The red portion of the graph shows the most popular products by volume. The yellow portion (Long tail) contains the not-so popular products. With the advent of ecommerce and Internet, the Tail is rising and getting fatter. The reason for this is two-fold. The first is that Internet provides increased variety of goods. The second factor is the consumers are demanding increasingly unique and customized products as they become savvy shoppers online.

This phenomenon of the Long Tail is going to work in favor of e-retailers.

98% Rule

The 98% rule states that 98% of your revenue comes from the Long Tail. Traditional rule is the 80-20 rule where 80% of your revenue is derived from the 'Head' rather than the 'Tail' of the graph above. After the advent of the Internet, the tail has become so long and fat that your major revenue source is the tail.

Lessons for businesses

1. Your major revenue source is still the 'Head' but you must pay attention the the 'Long Tail' as it will become increasingly important for driving revenue.
2. Customer satisfaction is driven by the 'Long Tail'. If customers find the unique product they are looking for in the 'Tail' on your website, it is more likely that they will buy the regular 'Head' products from your site also.
3. Social Media works against the Long Tail by concentrating traffic to the most popular items in the 'Head'. Advertising works in the same manner.

Week2 - An Entrepreneur's toolkit

The article 'Build your start-up without building code' introduced me to a great variety of tools that I can use not just to launch a new venture but also to do well at my current job. I am listing out some of the tools here along with a few of my own.

• Code Academy - Learn or teach coding
• Balsamiq - Great for UI mock ups
• SnapzPro - Screen capture for web casts and training videos. Costs just $69
• iMovie - Video editing
• Weebly, Wix (free!!) - website building tools for businesses
• Qualtrics - Free online surveys (250 free surveys)
• 99designs, Crowdspring and Launcrock for design sourcing 
• Kickstarter and AngelList for venture funding

I spent a lot of time learning about these companies and their business models from their website. Each one is pretty interesting. Thank you for introducing me to these tools!

I am adding a few productivity enhancing tools to the list that any team of professionals can benefit from. All of these tools are cross-platform:

• GoogleDocs and GoogleDrive. Dropbox
• Evernote for sharing notes with teams and across devices
• Prezi for great presentations

Week 2 - A paradigm change in business models

Crowd-sourcing 

The phenomenon of crowd-sourcing is very interesting. If you have a great team of motivated people working together for a common cause, you can achieve wonders. The internet through crowd-sourcing does just that. Distances, time-zones and national boundaries are no longer relevant. Crowd-sourcing is going to disrupt a lot of businesses. Some examples spring to mind:

• Wikipedia 
• Education sites like Khan Academy, Coursera and Codeacademy
• Amazon Vine program
• Communispace 
• CrowdSpring for design sourcing
• Kickstarter for venture funding

Internet is bringing together masses of people who are interested and passionate about specific topics. It is accelerating globalization. After the services revolution, companies must plan for the crowd-sourcing revolution.

How businesses can benefit from crowd-sourcing

For a company, it makes sense to embrace and make use of crowd-sourcing rather than hoping that it will not disrupt their business. Described below are ways a company can exploit crowd-sourcing.

Crowd-source within your own organization

If you are a medium to large organization in a relatively specialized field, this option can work great for you. You can pool together your employees to generate ideas and reward them. For example, my company Bally Technologies caters to the specialized market of casino games and systems. Bally has about 2000 engineers world-wide. Our company posts an innovation challenge on its intranet portal and asks employees to contribute. Employees can comment on other's ideas or post their own. The top 3 ideas get a cash award. 

Crowd-source to a trusted and small user group

The Amazon Vine program is an excellent example where a group of customers who have posted helpful reviews are given discounted products in exchange for their expert reviews. Another example is Communispace a company which brings together expert user group of 200-300 people to provide great feedback on a product or service. For example, Communispace brought together executives from British Airways and a group of frequent business travellers to launch 'Beds in Business' which improved revenues significantly. Kelley Connect Week and Agile consulting projects are also a great example of crowd-sourcing. The businesses benefit from ideas and students learn from the business.

Crowd-source to the world

This model works best for idea generation that thrives on contributions from a large group of people. Threadless.com listed in the the article 'The Dawn of Human Networks' is a great example. iStockPhoto is another example. 

Week 1 - Update

The 2013 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies by Gartner is an interesting graph. It reminds you that change is the only constant and you have to keep an eye on the emerging technologies and how they will affect your business. I am currently working on Content Analytics and Gesture Control technologies for my Digital Signage product, so it was insightful for me. Good to know that Content Analytics will see some decline before it becomes mainstream.

The Forbes article on 'Secrets of Engaging Customers In Online Communities' reminds you that sometimes old-fashioned rules of transparency and engagement apply to latest trends as well. You have to keep doing the basics right, having a great online strategy is not enough.

The video 'The Web and TV, a sibling rivalry', Peter Hirshberg was entertaining and informative. He gives an interesting historical perspective on the internet and television and the interplay between the two.

Week 1

Goals for this week

This week I would like to familiarize myself with the course material and setup my blog and twitter accounts. I would like to read the first 50 pages from the text "Business Model Generation". I seems to be a good book and I have been wanting to read it since I bought it. I have already started reading the article "Made to Engage" - honestly it was a little slow for me. I will probably skim the rest of the article and move to the Forbes article on consumer engagement.

Twitter

I did not use Twitter before. I just setup my account and started following Microsoft, my chosen company.
I found that the "Mastering Twitter in 10 Minutes or Less" link does not work. I found this useful video instead: How to Use Twitter (Tweet, Retweet, Direct Messages, Lists) 

I started following 5 users and straightaway realized that I need a way to organize the large number of tweets. I learnt how to create a Twitter list for x501 course and added Microsoft (my target company) to it.

Business Model Generation

I finished reading the first 50 pages of this book and learnt about the Business Model Canvas. I think it is a great tool to evaluate a new business or a new venture in your existing business/work. It forces you to think about all aspects of the new venture or business. I am already brimming with ideas on how I can use it at my current job. I am planning to use the canvas to evaluate a new sub-product we are launching. It will help in identifying the areas of the business (Eg: customer service) that may be incompatible with the needs of the new product. In such cases I will have to work with the customer service department to see if they can accommodate the needs of this new product.

x501 Introductory post

A little bit about me...

I work as a Software Development Manager for Bally Technologies. My company provides games and systems for the casino industry. I work on a digital signage software product for casinos. I live and work in Las Vegas, NV. I moved to USA in August 2010 from India where I worked for the same company.

My expectations from this course...

I am excited about this course. Although I am a technocrat by profession, I am not fully into social media or marketing. I have used Blogger and AdSense before. I am keen on learning how to incorporate digital marketing strategy for your product or service offering. I would like to learn from case-studies and real world examples.

I think this course has an innovate grading system and is very flexible. It was a great idea to use a learning journal to grade as each person may tailor to course to his/her needs.