Brave For Free

Social is the new buzzword, and what a loud buzz that is nowadays. In the last post I described my theory of levels of social media - Presence , Participation , Penetration and Platform . Presence was passive, Participation was active entry into the world of social media. Penetration and Platform are quite a bit more complex. This part two of the series gets into the next P – Penetration . I’ll need another post for Platform . To understand where I’m going with this, lets see what a social network really is. The web started off as a way to connect content together. Any piece of content could easily and simply refer to another piece of content, even if it was on a different server in a different country. A browser allowed people to move from content item to content item, thus making the universe of the world wide web a wonderful store of content. People soon realized that this could be extended to all kinds of transactions – one could pass not just content but messages and info...

Social is the new buzzword, and what a loud buzz that is nowadays. Everyone from sedate bank to hippy dippy start-up wants to be "social". Being unsocial nowadays is like admitting to a fondness for bellbottoms - hopelessly anachronistic and just a little worrying. Its not unlike the early days of the Internet where everybody wanted to "be on the web" and "have a domain". What does social mean, though – does it mean putting up a Facebook page? Does it mean obtaining a twitter handle? Does it mean encouraging a bunch of people to like you on foursquare? And what does good this do my business anyway? This rush to keep up with the social Joneses lead to some absurd decisions. Companies put up, sometimes at considerable expense, a "Facebook presence" and then proceed to be puzzled when no benefit accrues from all this. As with many technologies in their early days, people glimpse vast potential but simply cannot figure out how to convert this potenti...

E-Commerce is close to my heart, and I have been asked many times in the recent past what I think of Flipkart buying Myntra. And really, the one thing I feel is dread. I really do like both Flipkart and Myntra. Both have good products, reliable service, convenient sites and great customer support. I have been frequent purchasers from both; everything from shoes to mobile phones. Both are businesses I hope will survive, as I hope e-commerce in general will. Why the dread, then? Its because I don't understand the deal, the reason FlipKart was willing to shell out a generous chunk of change to buy a good but not great brand. And what it seems to portend for the etailing category as a whole. People have pointed me to Facebook's purchase of Instagram or WhatsApp as the template, but I see more Compaq than WhatsApp in this deal. Instagram and WhatsApp were both global leaders, dominant in markets that Facebook was lagging in but hoping to penetrate. Myntra offers FlipKart neither - n...