But yes, coming back to ‘contextual reputation’, I liked it because it gives a lot of relevance and credibility and adds a layer to an answer – you can better understand where this  answerer and his response is coming from, for example. Another nuanced way of helping the reader weed out noise. I also thought this was a good way for brands/organisations to develop credibility in their domain, and involve their users, using function specific spokespersons, (brand, HR, operations etc) since “brands are currently not supported on Quora“.

And now we can go off on a tangent and check out a few brand experiences I had last week, all with oblique connections to contextual reputation, though lycra like they might seem

When Airtel changed its logo sometime back, though there were infinite debates on the need and quality of the new logo, their on ground management of the logo change was almost unequivocally appreciated. However,

To their credit, the ‘everything’ search, though has the old images, has the first link pointing to the new logo. But from an image perspective, ‘contextual reputation’ for logo change online gets a thumbs down.

Cleartrip, quite a favourite brand for their ‘no nonsense. clear talk and action’ way of managing their product and online presence, has a new campaign ‘Every trip has a purpose‘. But favouritism unfortunately doesn’t stop me from wordplay and I tweeted

Just as i was chided for provoking a brand, and was replying that I trusted Cleartrip to have a sense of humour, they replied with a ‘laughing hard’. Contextual reputation thumbs up. Hopefully they weren’t being sarcastic.

The last experience was from Tanishq, whose new Blush campaign I came across last week. Like I tweeted then, immediately after the Quora tweet, I found it quite interesting and worth an applause that a brand was experimenting with a Firefox/Chrome plugin. Instead of me explaining how it works, I will, in my new found enthusiasm for imagery, give you a screenshot.

As you can see, the plugin gives you, in addition to the ‘Like’, ‘Comment’ options you see after a Facebook status, a ‘Blush’ option, which when clicked, adds a comment with a link to the ‘Blush’ page. Hmm. I won’t get into a ‘app within FB vs outside website’ debate (there must be some reason, I assume). But unfortunately, boring that I am, I’ve never seen a jewelery that has made me blush. I can’t even see it in the Tanishq collection, assuming that I have the ‘where to wear it’ right. Maybe girls/women see it differently. So, why didn’t Tanishq just have a ‘Gold’ button, which would actually add to their ‘contextual reputation’ more than blush, and tie it to some sort of action that would actually get something tangible for all involved.

For example, I install the plugin and start using it just because of the ‘show off’ value. What if they tied in an offer linked to the number of “Golds” I gave/received on statuses, and then communicated that in the comment that appears after I have ‘Gold’ed a comment. Or how about virtual gifts, a way to showcase the gallery, and then an easy app to add the virtual gift to a profile pic? I have an inkling that women are likely to have a “nice earrings/pendant. where did you get it from” conversation. They could even make this Like based contest i.e. if you virtually gift someone and get them to add it to their profile pic, and they get maximum likes (make a leaderboard) we’ll let you actually gift them for free. Do that on Valentine’s day, and it just might work.

Meanwhile, I have a ‘reputation’ for longish posts, so I’ll just stop here.

until next time, add to the context?

]]> https://www.manuprasad.com/2011/01/27/while-on-contextual-reputation/feed/ 1 https://www.manuprasad.com/2010/10/14/facebook-groupie/ https://www.manuprasad.com/2010/10/14/facebook-groupie/#respond Thu, 14 Oct 2010 04:21:05 +0000 http://www.manuprasad.com/blog/?p=3709 What kind of a blog would this be if we didn’t discuss Facebook’s new announcements. At a simplistic level, it would seem that Facebook learned a lot from that Google study. (via a conversation with Mahendra)

Though i can’t access it yet, I’m very happy with the backup option, and hope that its a step towards portability. The new chat availability ‘visualisation’ seems slightly better than the old one. I can’t see the app dashboard yet.  But the other big announcement was the revamping of groups. I’d been categorising friends using lists for a while, but didn’t actually utilise them for anything specific. Though its easy to see this as a wall within a wall, from initial usage, I think the new Groups allow that one layer that needed to be added to generic ‘friendships’ – context, not to mention better control over who sees what. And from what I see, I don’t even have to be friends with a person to share things and have a great conversation on a topic both of us like. There are other advantages too. Of course, there are a a few issues, and as always, Facebook kept everything as public as possible (as default) but changes in this version is as inevitable as the waves of outrage that follows all Facebook announcements.

I’m still debating whether I’d like the Groups to be integrated better in the newsfeed (with ways to filter as per importance) or whether its current location (sidebar) is a better approach. From a signal-noise perspective, perhaps it should stay the way it is. I’m not very convinced about looking at Groups as ‘Friendfeed going mainstream‘ or even Wave. But that does make me wonder whether the next version will also have a feed aggregator, directly, or indirectly – allowing apps like Networked Blogs. That might actually get RSS to go mainstream. If that happens, I am also wondering about the implications on Google Reader, and actually any other network which serves as a content distribution/consumption channel.

Groups can be made ‘Secret’, and I’m still not sure how ‘Open’ and ‘Closed’ groups will show up in Facebook Search. Also, since I still don’t have access to Places, I can only wonder whether ‘Location’ can also be made a group feature. I’m seeing both the above from a brand perspective. Would a brand, for example, be able to highlight a location specific group on their Page, as part of a local promo? Even if the brands do not get information about the groups, Facebook would still have it, and that would definitely help target ads better.

Groups are not really a silver bullet, but I don’t think Facebook is aiming for that now either. Its just that they’ve not missed the starting gun, to slice and dice my social graph – that’s useful for me, as well as advertisers.

until next time, group on

As a regular user, I’d say that people who give only partial feeds stand to lose out a bit on the ‘Like’ part. It would also be great if the time lag between publishing and the post appearing on Reader could be reduced. As a publisher, I wish Google would tie these social features in Reader with Google Analytics, so that I can know who shared/liked my posts. One way to know the number of ‘like’ is to subscribe to your own blog, but I’m sure that Google can make it easier if they want. Then maybe a plugin that can show these details on my post (at the site). Much like the Tweetmeme plugin I have installed on my other blog.  Speaking of Tweetmeme, according to Venture Beat, the button is now shown more than 50 million times a day across the web. It has its share of competitors, and is even threatening to sue one.

That number gives a rough idea of why Google want a piece of the sharing pie. In fact, this chart, created by AddtoAny (the same guys who gave us that awesome widget at the bottom of my posts) shows how sharing happens on the web. Facebook leads, followed by email and Twitter. Google, though dominant in search, would be looking closely at specific competition – the Yahoo-MS deal and how Bing’s interesting games shape up. But more importantly, it also has to keep an eye on how generic search and sharing (social) are changing and shaping each others’ future. Twitter just got itself a new homepage, and ““Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”  clearly shows the intent. I thought it even answered, to a certain extent, the oft heard question – “But what do i do on Twitter”. Call it discovery/recommendation/trend, but it is just a different perspective on search. And its not just Twitter, Friendfeed recently added a feature – ‘recommend friends’. No, silly, not the Orkut/LinkedIn type, if you feel your subscriber would also like the feed of someone you subscribe to, you can share it easily. Though its nothing radical, its helpful for new folk.

The Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey shows recommendations (from known people) as the most trusted source of advertising, at 90% and consumer opinions posted online at 70% next. Among Indian audience, recommendations top, but editorial is placed second. A post on Six Pixels of Separation blog talks about how the next ‘Google’ will be a referral engine, which ranks website not basis text optimisation, but basis what people have said and done there, and how the information there has been used by people. But there are challenges there too as such a system needs to incorporate relevance, immediacy, trustworthiness and have an interface that will display it in the most intuitive, easy manner possible. This post on RWW discusses the concept of Social Relevancy Rank, with five layers, where search results on streams (like Twitter, which already have real time) will be arranged basis relevance to your social graph. Friendfeed does this and provides more options in Advanced Search. The post also suggests ‘friends of friends’ as the next layer of results, and a concept of ‘taste neighbours’ (a mining of ‘people who liked this also liked’) after that. The last two layers are made of influencers and the crowd aggregate. In fact, I thought, maybe a possible visualisation would be to actually have all five layers arranged vertically side-by-side and a thumbs up/down button by the side of each search result, so that each user can contribute to filtering. Is this a perfect method? No, but then neither is Google’s Page Rank, as the author says. Which perhaps is why Google, while it is master of the algorithmic search, needs to experiment with Reader and see if it can create a social layer on top of its Page Rank search system. A new system that also incorporates the data from likes and shares beyond the optimised keywords, and is able to operate in real time too. Possible? That would be fun, and would even take Ad Sense to a whole new level.

So what does this mean for brand and marketing? Beyond mastering the algorithm, optimising all the queries, mining all the data and connecting it, how does differentiation happen, other than the obvious product possibilities? This very interesting article (via @vijaysankaran) discusses the battle between art and algorithm. Amidst the quest for perfect targeting, and the smoothing out of our search experience, we might be losing out on serendipity. The  author goes on to say that in this ‘end of surprise’ is the opportunity for marketing – to deliver revelation along with relevance. The perfect  of left brain analytics and right brained creativity and emotions, which seemed to have been lost somewhere in between.

until next time, search and socialise