The rising interest - Pinterest!

We have heard so many things about Facebook and Twitter. There’s just no doubt that these two sites are the top social networking sites. But, we need to know that there are other good sites too! They might even get better than FB and Twitter in a few days!  This blog is about one such site which has already started proving the big potential it has for marketing brands and consumers. For those who have started wondering, this is about an emerging social networking site - Pinterest.

Pinterest is a photo sharing website. It takes social networking to the next level. You’re not gonna do it with just 140 characters or a status update anymore! If you see a photo that you like on the web, or if you have one in your desktop, you can upload it on to Pinterest.  These photos are called ‘Pins’. You can create a bulletin board full of photos that you like, which is called a Board.

Once a photo is pinned, it can soon be re-pinned by the other Pinterest users. This is how a photo or an idea gets spread virally on the network.  Just like the other networking sites, what appears on your home page is determined by the people you choose to follow. The interesting thing here is, you can pick and choose what all boards of a user you want to follow rather than following all the boards of one user.

The other significant feature of Pinterest is that, you can add photos from other websites if you have bookmarked Pinterest on your web browser. Let’s say, you find an interesting picture on Amazon.com. You can create a Pin for this image on Pinterest just by clicking on the bookmark. This will also create a link to Amazon.com, where people can find out a lot more information about it. And, when you add price to an image like this, it will automatically create a banner for that image.

Pinterest can also be used for collaboration, in a way. You can choose to let your friends post something on your board. This is particularly useful when you have had a trip with some of your friends. It is only natural that you have some photos and your friends have some other photos of the same trip. So, when you have created a board for the trip and when you are done posting your photos on the board, you can add your friend’s name as a contributor to the board. He will now be able to pin his set of photos to the board.

Pinterest is one site which has tremendous potential. It has been around only for two years but the number of users on this site has jumped from a few thousands to over 10 million in the last few months. This provides an excellent platform for marketing brands and advertising. We are now in the era of Google Ads and Facebook Ads. But, there will soon come a time, when we will start designing a campaign for Pin-ads! One Metric that can be used to measure the success in Pinterest is the number of times an image gets re-pinned. It would be more valuable than the number of impressions (on Google Ads), as these images get spread by the users themselves.

Remember Sun-Moon-Star?

Lecture 10: The Essence of having a long tail

Of late, the term or phrase that’s seeking quite the attention is ‘long tail’. For those, who aren’t familiar with this phrase, it might sound like something that is never ending or something that’s longer than usual. Well, that could probably be another way of looking at it. What ‘long tail’ actually means is having not just the most popular ones, but also the ‘forgotten’ ones. This could be applied to any context. But, this is the concept or idea that’s been the root cause of some great success stories.

Let us consider Amazon for example. All of us know that it has a wide range of products and it caters to different sections of web users. But, one of the most significant factors for its huge success is – having a long tail! It should be noted that all the products that are offered by Amazon have long shelf lives and so Amazon is able to market those products at different times which includes times when the product is considered to be dead in the market.

It would probably be easier to understand with a real-world example. So, here comes one:

I guess everyone would know the latest Vidya Balan blockbuster “Dirty Picture”. It is based on a biography of a famous South Indian actress, Silk Smitha. When Dirty Picture released in 2011, it turned out to be a massive hit in North India and people started flocking the movie theatres. Stories and rumors about the actress started making rounds all across North India. What Amazon does is, it senses this big opportunity and starts recommending the old movies of 1970s and 1980s starring Silk Smitha, on its website. When people see those movies on the site, they tend to purchase them too, along with the new one. This is a simple concept that has resulted in a huge success. This was possible only because Amazon had not just the latest hits, but also the old forgotten ones. Now you would realize how useful it is to have long shelf life for the products and how valuable it is to have the ‘forgotten’ ones.

As I already mentioned, this concept of long tail could well be applied for different fields. In the context of Google Ads, it would be really helpful to have the ‘forgotten’ keywords or the most rarely used (specific) keywords as a part of your ad campaign. But, it is to be noted that having just one keyword of this type, wouldn’t bring about a significant difference. Whereas, having a handful of them, would prove to be prosperous.

Guest Lecture: How Communication has evolved!!

Back in the days, when people wanted to pass information from to another, they used to write it down on a tiny piece of paper and tied it to Pigeon’s legs, which actually acted as a carrier between the sender and the receiver. After the invention of telephone systems, the process of communication got simpler. It got even more simple and easier when the ‘web’ evolved. People could transmit information in the form of emails. This was believed to be the most efficient and the most simple way to communicate until now.

But, with the advent of Social Media, the process of communication has become much more interesting than ever before. It is amazing in a way, that web services like Facebook and Twitter which were actually developed with entertainment as their primary focus has now become a tool of communication. Studies have shown that people spend more time on these social networking sites than actually browsing when they are online.

Even in our last lecture, Gilad Lotan showed us a few significant examples of how twitter is being used to pass on information. From those examples that he showed us, the most significant facts that I inferred are:

v  The rate at which information gets transmitted (on twitter) is unimaginable. One of the stand-out examples was that map of information flow he showed, which happened when the East coast faced an earthquake. Someone in Columbia posted a tweet about the quake and the information got transmitted virally and people in New York got to know about the quake even before it actually hit the city.

v  The scale of communication on a platform like twitter is HUGE! It not only reaches the intended recipient, but it also informs all the other passersby! This is Information Broadcast on a level that can’t be compared to anything!

These facts are not just raw, they are real! In fact, I have done a similar thing two years ago. One night, when I was alone at home, I was watching TV and I was happily enjoying a song when I suddenly saw a glass of water on the table shake a little. I was not sure if the glass actually moved / vibrated. I wasn’t sure if it was a quake and it was half past midnight and so I did not want to call or text anyone and ask them if there was a quake. I checked out a few local news channels but nothing had any info about the quake. I was also online at that time on Facebook and so I updated my status, “Did I feel a mild tremor or is it just a wild imagination”! Within seconds, I got five replies asking me to run outta the house.

 Little did I know before, Facebook could be so useful!

Lecture 7: Traditional vs Online Advertising

In our last class, we discussed some pros & cons of Online advertising and Traditional advertising. Each one has a different business model and each one caters to different types of audience. Although, the line of separation is getting blurred by the day, you need to remember that there are still people who don’t use the internet and there are also people who don’t watch television (grad students like usJ) or read newspapers regularly.  So, you cannot reach out to the entire population of this world via a single medium.

Although online advertising is growing rapidly, it has still not grown up to the standards of Traditional Advertising.  Significant percentage of the population still prefers traditional advertising (TV or Newspapers) to Online advertising. It may be because of the fact that Online advertising is purely commercial whereas Traditional advertising has an entertainment factor to it. Some people watch ads on TV, not because they want to buy a product/service, but because they like those commercials and they enjoy it.

One of my favorite commercials is:

And, the most popular Superbowl ad: 

There are chances that people, who don’t like the actual Doritos, will still love this ad. 

This is one weakness of Online advertising. People do not enjoy it. Actually, there’s nothing in it to enjoy! It is just a piece of text or an image which talks about the product or service. There’s nothing interesting about it unless you add some graphics to it, which in most cases turns out to be annoying to the user/visitor.

However, the sellers don’t crib about it as it helps their business and it is just another way of reaching out to people. No matter what model is being used, be it Cost per click or Cost per 1000, they are gonna pay for it as long as it helps them grow their business.

Lecture 6 - Social Graphs

This week, we were given insights into how network analysis is done on social networking sites.  We all logged into our LinkedIn accounts and created InMaps.  Apparently, this was one of those things which we were not aware of, before this class.

So, what is an InMap??
As the name says, it is nothing but a map which is used to convey some information.  It is just a visual representation of your social network. But, little did we know about the process behind these inmaps until our Professor briefed it to us. This process is called NETWORK ANALYSIS, the results of which are portrayed as InMaps (on LinkedIn). These InMaps have different nodes and connections between them. These nodes are different people that a user is connected to and the connections between them are based on the interaction between people.

So, this is what LinkedIn uses as its social graph. Different social graphs are available now and each one has a different way of portraying information.  Our Professor also asked us one interesting question in class – How would it be if Twitter had a social graph like LinkedIn? Many students came up with different ideas and we had an interesting discussion.

When I was returning home after the class, I was wondering how a Facebook social graph would look like. I have never seen a graph like that on Facebook. However, I have seen InMaps on LinkedIn and I know how these graphs are made. So, I sat in a corner of the house and started pondering about different ways of representing Facebook data.

As we all know, Facebook has a lotta different things unlike twitter/LinkedIn.  In InMaps, the nodes represented people/users of LinkedIn. But, when it comes to Facebook, you can have different types of nodes.  One for the users, other for the groups and another for the pages.

When you have fixed the nodes, next task is to determine the connections between them.  You can use one or more parameters to do this. The most common way of doing it is by determining the frequency of comments posted between the two nodes. Another alternative is, using the number of ‘like’s.

Let nodes for users be represented by a small circle, nodes for groups be represented by a square and pages can be represented by a small diamond. We can all now start visualizing the maps.

You would be connected to all of your friends, apparently. And you would also see connections from your node to the groups (represented by squares) which you are a part of. Some groups can also have some of your friends as its members. So, the connection goes from your node to the group node and then to your friend’s node.

Remember, you and your friend are connected by another connection, too! But, there can never exist a connection between two groups!

Connections for Pages can be represented in the same way as Groups.

Facebook has tons and tons of data and a lot of different dimensions or features. You can come up with different ways to represent those data or information. What I have discussed here is purely my imagination and your views or opinions are most welcome!