There is a mad rush towards online social networking space. Every second person wants to get on the bandwagon with his own social networking website with a silly-sounding name. In my opinion, most of these sites are just a fad and are not built on strong fundamentals in terms of a) revenue sources and b) the problem they solve.

What is online networking, btw?

The purpose of a social networking website is to help you keep in touch with your existing contacts and to generate more contacts! In case of social networking, the contacts are friends or prospective friends, whereas In case of business networking, the contacts are business associates or prospective business associates.

Now, answer this question - How much time and money are you willing you spend to keep in touch with your: a) friends and b) business associates. It is important to know this fact. Online market may be different, but it is closely related to offline consumer behaviour. Online business model can help in extending the product composition with new innovation and format of delivery. It is important to know if people are willing to pay for a given convinience. And if they are not willing to pay for the convinience, what alternate source of revenue do we have?

So how do you keep in touch with your friends?

In real life, you spend nothing to keep in touch with your friends. You call them up when you want to hang out with them, you give them a shout on their mobile phones or drop in to kill some time! If you are tech-savvy and love to announce a great news, you send them emails. Why will you like to send a scrap to someone (when you can simply send a short email or catch up on various instant messengers)? And why will you like to create such huge volume of personal content and share with millions of people on the Internet who are not even known to me.

Though you may have build friendship /relationship on social networking websites, they are generally not for long. And the long ones actually use the social networking as only the contact point and then evolves and flourishes offline.

What about business associates?

However, business networking sites will keep evolving, since it adds value to businesses. It help people refer / recommend a vendor or buyer to other people in a networked environment as a recommendation network. It has been very successful, when it comes to executive search and generating new business.

Again, the formal nature of relationship and privicy factor makes business networking websites a great place to get connected and exchange notes.

So, the conclusion is:

So, as on today, given the trend, I can say that social networking is a fad, which is getting saturated and is not supported by a proper revenue model. Online advertising cannot be considered a decent revenue model for a site where people come to kill time! However business networking is here to stay. Corporate intranets having social communities may stay. 

I have already written the orbituary of Facebook, My Space, Bebo and social networking platforms. These are evolving as a fad and will vapourize in the same way in years to come. I wish these trillion dollar valuations to be true, but my mind says otherwise. And I am not the only person saying this. Steve Rubel of Micro Persuation feels the same way to a great extent (may be for different reasons).

What do you think? 

Do you send handwritten seasonal greetings to your clients?

It may sound to be very simple, regular stuff.  But it is surprising that still a large percentage of small businesses fail to use such an opportunity to strengthen their relationship with their clients on a personal level. And when I casually asked some of the culprits about the big problem that restricts them from acknowledging their clients, this is their surprising relevation:

• It is about time. Or shall I say (as I understand), mismanagement of time, since clients are the purpose of the business!
• Procastination. Almost every culprit claimed that he thought (I am really not sure if he is being truthful), but kept procastination and in no time the festive season was over.

But, if you are doing this, you are missing out on a great opportunity to make a personal contact with the "core of your business (i.e. your clients)" and saying them "Thank you" for the business they have given you. Not only it makes them feel special, it keeps you on top of their mind at all times, which can lead to more word-of-mouth and references.

But, its never late.
I will recommend that you:

• Plan out a small budget and some time for your special customers. BTW, if you can do it for all your customers, then go ahead and do it.
• Create a mailing list of all customers whom you wish to delight. Sign greeting cards personally. Do it much before the festive season (so that you do not forget this due to the big conference). Despatch them at the right time (or else have someone responsible for sending over these greetings on time).
• If your budget permits to spend 0.25% - 0.50% (I generally do spend this much) of your annual turnover, do send over seasonal gifts, sweets and wine to your special customers! You do not need to buy something very expensive. Just get across something special, which makes the day for your client and his family.

It makes your clients feel special and they remember you more often. And if they remember you more often, you get more business. Because timely recall and top-of-the-mind position will be the difference between you getting a deal over your competitor when the credentials, pricing and quality of service / product stands neck-to-neck.

Just a random thought:

Programmers are supposed to use their programming skills to automate business process for their clients. Therefore, a good programmer should be one, who takes an initiative of automating his own work and never repeats the line of code he has written once Charity begins at home!

Unfortunately I have hardly seen many such souls.

What do you think?

When creating an exhaustive keyword list for your AdWords / PPC campaigns, you might face a tedious job of creating all possible combinations by joining two words / phrases to cover the keyword that your prospect might key in. This can be a very frustrating experience.

Recently, I sumbled upon this website: http://www.imscripts.com/keywords

It can generate these keyword combinations in less than a second.

So if the keywords are:

• web design
• web design company

And the cities are:

• kolkata
• chennai
• delhi

This tool will create these keywords:
 
web design kolkata
kolkata web design
web design company kolkata
kolkata web design company
web design chennai
chennai web design
web design company chennai
chennai web design company
web design chennai
chennai web design
web design company chennai
chennai web design company
 
So you could get valid and useful combinations!

Now think how much time this tool can save when you have to make a combination of 100s of keywords with 10-20 different "add on words" or "cities". So use this tool whenever you need to create the combinations!
 
This tool can also help by adding the {} and " " operators of Google Adwords if you want.

Apart from doing software / web development on Open-source platform, Indus Net Technologies also customize and implement open-source products for clients on demand. Some popular (and free) open-source products are SugarCRM, Drupal, osCommerce for CRM, content management and e-commerce respectively.

IMHO, these are some limitations that I have observed. It is important to know them before initiating a project. These are not very serious in nature and using free open-source products remains a good option for many small and medium sized enterprises around the world.

1. Like any product, it is very important to align the product with your workflow and/or requirements. You must fit the product into the organization by making necessary changes. Therefore a gap analysis should be done and the effort must be estimated for aligning the product as per the current work-flow and/or requirements.

2. Most free open-source products lacks in usability. Therefore if you are doing a major implementation which will be used by thousands of people and you are going to pay for their time, you must consider a major overhaul of interface by involving a usability consultant from your vendor. Otherwise you will end up spending a lot of money.

3. Most free open-source products have very poor reporting system. These reports are not good enough to run a business and shall be re-done as per your company requirement aligned with your key measurement matrix for the given business function.

4. The programmers who can change the software as per your needs are the code-hackers types, who love to dive into existing system architecture and make small changes to achieve the desired results. Therefore you must identify and hook up with the right programmer / programming company (like Indus Net Technologies - a bit of shameless self promotion) to get it right.

5. It is a myth, that implementing open-source software is free. Software code is free, not the hard work of programmers and analysts which goes behind implementing it. And you need the later to successfully implement it in your scenario and reap the benefits of the solution. Yes, it considerably reduces the cost, improves reliability and gives you a head start from where you can take informed decision about your IT needs.

Do not get me wrong. I am only listing the limitations. The benefits are well-known and they out-live the limitations any day. However it is very important that these limitations are known before proceeding.

Feel free to discuss / debate!

I was recently speaking on "Myths & Facts of Entrepreneurship" in Entrepreneurship Summit 2007 at IIT Kharagpur (KGP) on behalf of NEN. Overall, the event was nice, but it made me think over few points.

1. Can we really teach entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship, as I see is,

• An instinct,
• An attitude to create something new,
• An activity which creates value in the entire social eco-system, 
• A creative expression of interest in solving problems around us 

Till date, I am yet to meet an entrepreneur who has been taught about this subject in a formal setting, and that he has actually gone out and done it, and made it successful. It is a state of mind, which develops naturally, based on his surrounding and experiences, which makes him think about life and career in a given way.

Such events (like Entrepreneurship Summit) can inspire someone to be an entrepreneur, make a person desire to start a venture, but I am not sure if it can create the state of mind.

2. In many cases, I have seen that entrepreneurship is not be plan. It is by destiny. There are hundreds of people who were pushed to the wall and were left with no choice to take on the world all by themselves. They rose up to the occasion and did what it takes to survive. Today we call them successful entrepreneurs. This again emphasize that entrepreneurship is a state of mind that is there or emerges under given circumstances - mostly adverse situations.

3. Most wanna-be entrepreneurs start off with a business plan which predicts his revenues, profits, break-even point and growth trajectory. If you see most successful entrepreneurs, they never planned, they dreamt. They created value and chased their dream. The dream was not the riches that entrepreneurship can bring, but a dream to dominate / be successful in a given domain and create value that can change the world. They want to lead. 

For example, Bill Gates never planned to become the "richest person on the planet" through Microsoft. He dreamt of a PC on every desktop in the world! He worked hard to make his dream come true and reaped the rewards in form of the riches that he got in the process as a result.

Wealth is a by-product of entrepreneurship, not the destination.

So, the question again comes - Can you teach someone to lead, dream, continuously innovate, rough-it-out and fight back. I think - NO. You can only motivate someone to do so.

Your comments are welcome to debate my point of view!

Everyone who watches television in India must have come across the "Hari Sadu" advertisement aired by Naukri.com. This ad became very popular for its creativity and also won the award from the Advertising Club Kolkata. Here is the full story board followed by the video of the ad.

There has been a lot of controversy around the advertisement by two set of people:

1. Whose first name is "Hari"
2. By a group of people who caused objection since "Hari" also refers to a deity in Hindu mythology

Naukri.com decided not to withdraw this advertisement citing that this is a work of fiction and they got a clean-chit from Advertising Standards Council of India.

This advertisement is really humorous and can be a great way to advertise a job site. In fact they managed to create a character - Hari Sadu, who can be recognized with the Naukri.com brand.

On the other hand, I find the ad to be in a very poor taste, showing bosses in very poor light who should be insulted and abused when opportunity strikes. This is teaching people to consider boss (or a business owner) as a blood-sucking beast, an idiot and an inhuman being. This is definitely not true in most of the cases. Above all, it shows that - when you don’t need someone, have a go at him - and walk out of the door!

In a growing economy like India, where attrition is sky high, job ethics are hard to spot and consideration for one’s job responsibility is at an all time low, this ad has only added fuel to the fire.

I know, Naukri.com has got superb mileage from this ad and it is close to heart of thousands of people. However, the question remains - Is this ad instilling the right culture? As a corporate, does Naukri.com understand it’s responsibility to communicate the right culture to the people who are destined to shape the future of this economy - the young executives.

Business organizations can never be in equilibrium or achieve stable position. Either they are moving up or they are moving down, depending upon their innovation quotient. 

If you are trying to keep things stable, they won’t remain so. You will slowly slide down simply because:

• there is no exclusivity,
• competition will catch up on the technology front and -
  • either cut price - if they too are not innovating (resulting in your margins to shrink)
  • or innovate and better the product - if they want to add value to the product and move up the value chain (resulting in your market share to shrink)

And if you continuously innovate and apply new ideas (refer to my post on manufacturing ideas), you will continue to move up.

It is unfortunate that in some cases, the entire industry decides to stabilize their position and take customer wants for granted. For example, consider:

• radio manufacturers,
• alarm clock manufacturers,
• camera manufacturers (there are some really big names out there)

They decided to stay at their position and were swept away by mobile companies like Nokia (who is the largest digital camera manufacturer in the world today). They decided to experiment and give more to their customers by integrating digital camera in mobile phones (possibly the thought process was that mobile, camera, clock, alarm are all things that need to be handy). It took some time to gather market acceptance which was created by the initial hype, but later on sustained due to the instant-in-the-hand value of the additional gadgets.

Seth Godin has highlighted how alarm clock manufacturers can still make a small change in their product and make it stand out. These are simple improvements which can make a product stand out and desirable!

Are you moving up or moving down?

I was reading about Ed Kohler’s post about social networking update redundancy.

I think there can be a simple solution. To do this we may need a simple new standard format of data syndication, which can be a simple derivative of RSS. Basically every individual can have a personal RSS feed.

A person shall provide an input socket (it can be a XML-RPC based system, which already is used by Wordpress and several other blogs) when he signs up with any social networking sites or any website where he might update his personal data or make comments or blog posts. These sites can have a system to push the information to this personal RSS feed, which can be the only RSS feed that your friend need to subscribe to know all the latest news about you or your company. I understand that when all data is pushed to the same personal RSS feed, redundancy can be controlled by smart pattern matching algorithm (may be simply matching the heading to start with).

I think this technical solution might work

Blogs have fueled the growth of peer-to-peer information flow in form of news, knowledge packets, ideas and individual point-of-views. However it has also resulted in "Information overload" which drives a normal person nut as he