It’s been more than a month now that I’ve touched this blog. I even remember that I haven’t opened the dashboard to see what’s happening in there. There are couple of personal & professional reasons attached to it. But I won’t like to waste your single moment on it.

But today I’ve a very interesting video to share with you guys. Some might understand deeply what it means and some might not. Doesn’t matter – as long it reaches the right ears & eyes. So today when I watched this video (honestly I got it from Venturebeat’s Entrepreneur Corner – which btw is a must read if you think you have DNA of an entrepreneur), I had to break my month long probation – not because I’d something amazing or interesting to say but this video itself summarizes lot of things which IMO words can’t fathom.

In the whole 8-min video, one word sounds more fantastic than ever – FAIL(URE).

The speech was being given by Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins who distinguishes that Silicon Valley is not its successes, but the way in which it deals with failures.  The Valley is about experimentation, innovation, and taking new risks. Only a small business that can deal with failure and still make money can exist in this environment.  It is a model based on many, many failures and a few extraordinary successes.

In the whole talk, he even mentions India couple of times. Although the video is quite old and I’m sure that Mr. Komisar would be surprised at how entrepreneurship to some extent has taken off as a concept from being a loner’s game to a widely acceptable notion; yet there are some corners where failure is not held in good light & faith.

But as always, being an optimist, I see can that things are on its path to change soon.

..till then, enjoy the video and do let me know what do you think about it!

End of year 2009 is just round the corner. But if you ask me, I just don’t see that because for me year ending has always been a date than anything else. Nothing stops right! Yes, its the time, we make promises resolutions and sometime during the start of new year we again forget and again start..and the eternal saga continues. Also for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been not able to put my thinking & pen together to come up with any posts. It really feels weird now, trust me! Some sort of guilt trip I guess.

But something prompted me today to pen down some thoughts. I actually read this post on what Google did in 2009 and without a doubt I went back to Jan 2009 and the whole year flashed right in front of me. Technologically speaking, year 2009 has been quite interesting; especially tracking Google and what it has been doing all the year round. As someone rightly pointed out, Google in late 2009 is now covering or aiming to cover web apps, the browser that runs the web apps, the OS that runs the browser, and, according to rumors, even the computer that runs the OS.

And if you ask me, that’s truly commendable – not just from the technological prowess or its sheer strength in having some brilliant brains channeling their efforts supported by advertising but more often than not, Google has been able to disrupt almost everything they have touched till now.

In year 2009, many events took place which definitely deserves spotlight but they have been like spotting a comet once in while. But what Google was able to do is every once in a while got into different spheres which I believe is truly commendable. What I’m talking about is not the failure or success part of it but a unique culture perspective which is driving the innovation engine inside the Google-verse.

There are many companies which are bigger & better than Google but what Google has been able to imbibe in the culture  is unique – its one of those few companies which can & has handled innovation & business processes with much finesse and that’s what makes Google outstanding.

Initially they started off as:

• Search
• Search driven by penny worth advertising
• Advertising which reaches far & wide corners of the interweb and anybody can avail that.

After Google has established in the search market, the next logical extension was the use the information and monetize it in different platforms. And that’s what they did and are doing.

Google now has got into:

• Mobile ads via Admob Acquisition
• Browser/Chrome
• OS/Google Chrome OS
• Phone/Nexus One

And this is just the start. And this is for consumer segment. Google has also forayed into enterprise segment with Google Apps too. I believe what Google is trying to do is cover every aspect of human attention for information in the most accessible way. And the best way to do it is cover different platforms.

But what’s most interesting to me is how all these innovations (not to mention they all happened quite quickly) are managed and rolled out. Yeah, one thing is that Google has been planning it for sometime, but due credit to them for actually thinking something some 2-3 yrs back and then finalizing it and rolling it out for mass market.

So year 2009 has been quite impressive for internet consumer segment and sitting in front of my screen and having a premonition of things to come from Google and other players is nothing less than exciting.

I know you’re thinking either of these two – jeez, yet another social media guru (they are ones who just read the title and not the rest) and others thinking, lets see what’s this wanabe guru is upto and bash him up.

Don’t worry – you didn’t miss much. At the end of the story, you’re always welcome to bash me since I’m not the one born with extra intelligence who knows it all. But yes, with my little bit of experience in social media marketing and the industry I belong, I can rightly say that I’m not totally misfit to write this content.

Now to some bigger issues – over the past couple of months of my interaction with many digital marketers, agencies, social media marketers and rest I can rightly say that couple of broad based ideologies has been already established. I’ll try to list some of them below:

• Social Media is a subset of Digital Media and digital media is broadly classified as internet and mobile.
• Most marketers (I mean those in agencies), especially in India present their pitch to clients with broad based game plan of Digital marketing which also might showcase couple of slides which touches facebook, twitter, seeding of content etc as part of social media.
• All through the pitch to finalization process words like customer engagement, brand conversations are mutually agreed terms without further delving into details of how to measurably attain that which coincides with layman’s sales report.

By now, I guess you’re totally sure where am I leading. Also some images or perhaps videos might suffice you if you are to look for how social media has evolved and thus led to evolution of a new breed of marketers who dub them as “Social Media Gurus”.

Google India search of “social media guru”

Now a video perhaps (actually a screencast taken from a cool service called Screenr).

In the video, I’ve tried to capture how social media has evolved (at least from trends graph and google search results) and thus the social media gurus.

btw, mind it, I don’t have any problem of anyone being a guru in something. Infact, I would love to meet somebody and learn as much as possible but in the midst of it all, I feel the actual conceptual understanding of social media has vapoured.

I can’t believe how people practically (not theoretically) consider social media as a subset of Digital media because IMHO the core idea of both these ideas are disparate.

Broadly speaking if you ask me, then this is the way I see how they are different:

- Digital media is a platform for communication which is bought or paid form of media where the currency is attention. So we pay in online ads, banners, social network apps, microsites, paid sponsorships, paid ads etc

- whereas social media is a neo-classical example of earned media where the attention (as the currency) is the same but you can’t pay to get attention from users, audience, customers (whatever you want to say).

Now that’s the challenge because social media can’t be scaled by money. It’s a human driven effort like self-created, user generated and most often collaborated. Now no money in the world can do it.

But yes what we as intelligent marketers can do is try to understand where’s the tipping point which can stimulate, harness and amplify the response. Now that’s where we have to work on – and not with asking an influential blogger write a post about your product/service or making a pricey FB app thinking thousands will come and join your charade.

P.S. If you’re still wondering why the hell did I titled the post as “I’ am the social media guru”, then recently I came to know that people like to read negative stories and pay much more attention. So thought of experimenting. If you ask me, the title of this post should have been “Digital & Social Media Chasm” (how’s that for a post’s title)

Off late, I’ve been collecting some thoughts on e-Commerce in India – the perpetual questions also allures me as well like why isn’t Indian e-Commerce catching up faster like it did in the west, what are the problems other than the usual infrastructure roadblocks, what sort of business models might work better in Indian markets etc etc.

More on it later. Before that – today I read couple of informative posts [1] [2] [3] which paints the overall eCommerce picture in India.

Fair enough. I won’t say that those comments present a groggy state of Indian eCommerce but surely the picture isn’t bright. But yes, that brings me to yet another perspective. Talking to close contact from eCommerce world who’s been there, done that says that Indian eCommerce is still behind 5 years from western counterpart. Interesting comment and I can see why so!

But I was wondering that can’t we do better than that. May be yes or may be no. Only time will tell but I know one thing for sure – one who listens (only) stays back and one who listens and moves forward sets his own path.

Now back to this post – some of the comments I’ve been hearing from people far & near who has little, some and much experience in ecommerce are here as follows:

• Technology trends are always over estimated in short term and underestimated in long term. The user base for digital commerce is really expanding and while we wait for the growth to kick in we need to be careful about how sophisticated an experience a business is offering to the customer.
• The reason why number of people shopping on net will be low is that the interaction with the internet has always been about free; be it news, email services or any other thing and free is the most difficult price to compete against. Web is about removing layers between the product manufacturer and the consumer, while e-Commerce in India adds layers. The main reason why value is difficult to build for e-Commerce in India is because the tax-structures are in favour of offline business- due to the inventory holdings the respective businesses need to maintain. One needs to be patient for e-Commerce to deliver real value. The reason the travel in e-Commerce has really taken off is because one could deliver the information to the user online and needs no logistics.
• e-Commerce is not just about transactions but replicating the whole shopping experience.
• E-commerce delivers a phenomenal value in re-sales market because it is a complex business to implement offline and that offline methods are extremely in-efficient. It is impossible to sell a Rs. 5,000 bike offline while people are already doing it online.
• From UI Aspect – Overcrowding the portal and flooding it with tacky products, Google ads and not highlighting the product in good enough size is behind low adoption & last mile selling of eCommerce in India since an end-customer won’t spend a good enough price for a product which doesn’t allure her in the first place. So the whole shopping experience goes for a toss in the initial contact of user with a shopping portal.
• Lower adoption of e-Commerce in India is due to delays in shipment which may run more than 7 days here in India whereas in West, Amazon delivers in one day.
• The overall experience of shopping is missing in online shopping portals i.e. Indian buyer expects & wants to “touch & feel” the product even though she’s buying a lesser worth product. It adds to the overall consumer experience which is missing in online model.
• Also, shopping for most Indians (mind it that here I’m talking about most Indians and not everyone of us) is still a social affair i.e. a small outing sort of thing which many enjoy. Now this sort of experience can’t be replicated online.
• Mediocre Payment gateways is yet another hurdle.

There are many more. But let me not paint such a sad picture overall

Now digressing a bit, couple of months back I was doing some work on eCommerce models in India, their business models and what’s lacking that can and can’t be hidden or over-ridden. I’ll tell you what excited me the most from my findings. Most of the eCommerce platforms that are here in India which is making some amount of money to stay afloat have deeper pockets since lots of cash is burnt initially. So smaller players are more or less mutilated if they can’t hit the jackpot right away.

Similarly, new business models emerged like social shopping couple of years back. Now when I went back to some like Storrz.com, myprodoktspace.com – they are gone (there site is down or they have really left the building). Few survived – amongst them one is ShopCorn.in. (btw do check these interesting uber uber online social shopping biz models – Woot.com and Dell Swarm).

Point is the evolution is happening even though some have perished but still newer business models are emerging fast and wide in this segment and in due course of time, we are going to see more innovation from business model aspect but the macro aspect is proving to be the biggest laggard in the whole ecosystem.

So I was wondering if a trade-cartel sort of arrangement might work in this case? I don’t know for sure. May be you guys can help me. But one thing for certain that measuring Indian online shopping with western countries in mind isn’t a good idea.

P.S. One of the most successful venture that comes on top of my mind which has been most successful in recent times is IRCTC. Wonder why? Does it give us any hints?

Couple of days back I wrote a post called “Social Media Disconnect“. I’ve thinking about the same topic over & over again. All the more, going by above post’s title, I guess it should have been “why Indian marketers are so bad at measuring social media”. But will try to generalize it (so that I don’t hurt anyone’s sentiment here). In principle, I believe that’s the state of most of the traditional marketers who have joined the digital bandwagon.

The very idea of this post came when I had a jaw-breaking continuous debate with a friend who serves as a digital marketing whiz for a traditional B2C company. During the conversation, we touched many points regarding the current state of Indian internet, his latest campaigns, the overall brand objective blah blah. But when I asked about what the metrics he’s been using to understand the cost-vs-effectiveness measure, we got into a winkled conversation which led to many facets which kind off led me to write this post.

Couple of questions I asked during our conversation was:

• How do you define & measure engagement in social media efforts?
• What’s your average lead/conversation ratio in different digital media campaigns?

Now to keep the sanctity of my friend’s indulgence, I won’t divulge into letting you know about the numbers or stats. But consider this that I was less than satisfied – not with the numbers/stats but more with the overall approach.

One of the comments I received about engagement was – Engagement is measured with repeat numbers. The more you engage with intenders, the more you transform them into brand ambassadors….when he (customer) is willing to put in his number on a property, i treat that as an engagement.

Now is that what engagement all about in digital medium? Basically, what repeat numbers tells us is that X number of customers have likeness towards your brand and hence they return. That no way shows that they have turned loyal to your brand or bigger than that – they think of buying your product or rather endorsing it. Now when that it done repeatedly, we can call them as brand ambassadors or evangelists.

Also there are some more important issues underlying:

• What is the percentage of repeat users over a period time? Do they fall in sync with your brand sales or can they be charted in your sales record over a period of time? If not, then there’s disconnect.
• What if users come back to you, what do you do? Fend or elope. May be tracking the positive, negative or neutral comments might help.
• The bigger question as mentioned in my last post – Do you (brands) really really want to hang out with targeted user-groups?

I do understand that for a website, one of engagement metrics can be its repeat visitors (while the bounce rate is no where in the picture most often) but for traditional brick & mortar business model, I hardly can understand how engagement translated into pure-play numbers can be scientifically put into sheet of paper so as to say yes now thats my engagement. So what do you do – put a percentage on it saying x% is my engagement of your put numerical number to it saying X numbers of users/visitor is my engagement.

Although, this approach might be working for few (I’m not saying it’s wrong) but its lacking. Somehow it irks me thinking that there can be various other means & ways to measure engagement effectively- for example, how about using multi-metric to understand the engagement like sudden spike in traffic volume measured along with sales leads translated into actual sales, volume of UGC for your brand’s objective, how many comments (in positive, negative or neutral showing brand advocacy), lead generated versus brand awareness. Now these are few metric should can be used to understand any campaign strength amongst the user groups. Check with the back-end if the numbers showing are translated into actual sales and awareness. Then may be the FB fan page or twitter profile can help you understand if users have increased and people are conversing about it.

Now these are certain approaches that brands can take when going for a campaign. Even though these are long term strategies (say 6-8 months), but the brand itself wants to be there for a longer time, right!

Call me insane but I kind of find this only metric to measure engagement especially when engagement is bounced off as an idea of harmlessly engage with audience (in normal term it means bombard messages in twitter or FB) and then more you engage more u transform into brand ambassadors bit off the hook.

Now isn’t that the whole traditional model where you slap ads after ads in tv, print or any other tangible media thinking consumers are just there waiting for ads to show up and then they run off the nearest store and buy the goddamn product.

Now there can two reasons why such conditions arose in the first place – one may be the term engagement has been mutilated enough in the corporate boardroom and what left is the blood on the floor or may be I’m wrong. If I’m wrong – then it’s good since then its one Sampad who’s wrong but if its the industry wide nomenclature then SoS.

What do you say?

[img]

I’ve been writing about Social Media as far as I can remember. If you go through my about me page, then one thing would be certain that by profession I’m into or onto social media. So basically what I mean is I do understand what is social media – what’s the use of it – where to use it- how to use it along it measure it (effectively) and blah blah blah. Now one disclaimer though – this post is not to give the panacea you’ve been looking for!

But lets get back to practicality – what the heck is social media? As in, what’s the practical implication and application part of it. Even Marta Kagan did an interesting slideshow on it with the F word. And most importantly, have we ever asked the question as an end-user of this ubiquitous medium – Does any company really really wants to hang out with me?

If you talk about social media then most people who understand it would say that its about engagement and making conversations which will lead to dialogue and hence may be (I mean may be) lead to sales or as we marketers like to put it as the most-fake sought after word called ROI.

Now, I would request you to just concentrate on the above sentence – words like engagement, conversations, dialogue, leads, sales and ROI is what you might have seen (if you’re a client) or put in jazzy ppt’s if you’re an agency.

Fair enough. Whatever sells. I agree. But now does that really help? Both from client or agency perspective. yeah, I can hear from far distance that someone said yes, it helped. I agree with you too. But short sell is what agencies are doing and clients are buying. It’s a vicious circle if you ask me. Clients blame agencies for not being creative enough with their social media strategy and agencies blame clients for not having balls to try out something new.

Now in that case, I don’t want to make my hands dirty with this post. Will reserse my zest for some other post.

But I’ve one really really important question from an end user perspective. Does any company really really wants to hang out with me?

Here’s an story if you’ve some time to read i.e.

Imagine you have a crush on a girl at the bank.

Every time you talk, it’s only business.

But one day she says, “Here’s my cellphone number. Call anytime.”

Wow! She likes you!

You call her and ask her out. She says OK.

You meet up for dinner and after talking for 15 minutes she says, “Could I interest you in a home equity loan?”

Arrgh! That’s worse than if she had never given you her number in the first place!

The fact that she only wants to talk about her business proves that not only is she not interested in you, but she was trying to trick you.

Now you’re insulted and will never go to that bank again, or at least never believe it when they pretend to care about you.

This is what’s happening with most companies’ “Social Media Strategy”.

They’re acting like they want to connect directly with you, get to know you, or hang out where you hang out.

But unless they learn how to stop selling, listen, and be real – they’re just permanently alienating potential crushes.

Sums it right huh. If you think for the last year or so how many brands (small or large) have tried to connect with you via Facebook or Twitter and then you never heard from them shows the real case study.

So there’s the disconnect. It’s not that we are not creative enough or don’t have balls. It’s a shift – a big shift – shift in the mindset of how things work now and should work if you’re at all interested to take your brand to the customer next door.

P.S. I could have changed the story from the actual one; but really would it have made more sense. I think you got my point right!

[img]

In India, I think we will see more of standalone niche consumer internet business models rather than the next Google or Amazon in the immediate future.

Let me give you a prologue before you think I’m too cocky to state that. Yes, some might think that. But for them, what the heck – you can always bounce me off in the most powerful section of this blog called comments through your words of wisdom or may be simple bashing. Whatever suits you!

Now to some important things – yes, as I was saying about the prologue thing. Last week, I met at least 10 people from the start-up fraternity (both investors & entrepreneurs) who are on their way to build their next business models which you might get hooked onto or miss it below the radar.

Whatever it is, I tried to understand the psyche behind those ideas which they are hatching. In total, the ideas or my point of view is a culmination of all the ideas which I’ve been part of; some heard, some in which people seeked my advice and my bit of research over the internet about the kind of consumer internet business models that have come up lately in India.

So to set the cat amongst the pigeons, I already said that I see the start-up ecosystem evolving in India is more biased towards niche consumer internet business models rather than becoming the next big internet behemoths like Google or Amazon. More biased because building a company is a not an easy task. More so, building a great company which can stand the test of time is somewhat a difficult proposition. Also, building a company which has scale, scope and more importantly sustainable monetization model is quite a task.

What most of them I met are trying to build niche products. Not the big ones which will require higher upfront investment, time to scale and market. It’s imperative to say that internet obviously marginalizes the barrier to entry axiom but surely this fosters more entrepreneurs to try their luck.

So what I’ve been seeing recently are plethora of ideas catering to different niche problems. For example, how about making the information local doctors easier or how about making the legal information like making your will easier or how about making it easier for online users to buy products with an easier & surprisingly amazing UI.

These sort of ideas are relatively easier to build and quick to market unlike trying to make the next big Google or Amazon or even Rediff for that matter.

Surely there are couple of reasons for this:

1. Diversity: India is country of more than a billion population but internet population hasn’t yet achieved a critical mass of active users who can be mass targeted. Blame it to diversity in language, buying habits, cultural preferences etc. So this makes the task of any entrepreneur to build the next big thing much harder. May be that’s why we don’t see much horizontal portals like Rediff, Indiatimes coming our way in the last couple of years. Also the competition is pretty high in such areas which are primarily dominated by big media houses till now since they have the money & can afford a high-burn rate initially.

2. Investment: “Cash is king” is the holy grail for any web entrepreneur. But if we think about raising capital from other than friends, family & fools (FFF), the whole system is still fragmented broken. We don’t see prominent venture capital funds investing in smaller amounts (which is the need of the hour) which calls for Angels or seed funds to do so which is again lacking in numbers since they are very cautious about taking high risks with unproven business models and especially which has a high probability of getting copied soon by competitors. And rightly so.

But I’m not undermining the possibility of niche business models working for India. Actually, I feel niche is the right way in Indian scenario for internet business models.

Some of the reasons I feel so are:

1. As I mentioned earlier, building niche consumer internet products are relatively easier to build and market with low investments. Now that’s the most important factor for any web entrepreneur. Build the product>>launch>>take feedback>>keep working on it. This way, the burn-rate is more manageable and its easier to understand the hit rate.

2. Also, going niche helps to mitigate the risks. Let me explain how: risks in terms of initial investment which is way lesser than going for the big kill initially. Later, scalability becomes easier since experience curve plays a bigger role.

3. Finally, lets face it. In internet, starting niche has a probability of higher payout in terms of bringing a new solution to a problem with a totally new service. For example, internet job market is one of the largest service accessed by people. Now since jobs are getting diverse, newer services targeting specific verticals are coming into picture – like for mobile industry – a big job portal will have different vertical jobs (without concentrating on any specific niche one). But people who want only VAS jobs or only mobile apps building jobs would like to visit websites which only focuses on such jobs. So there’s much possibility to target those individuals. Though scale in terms of number of active users initially would be low initially but engagement and referrals to such site would be more than bigger job portals; which again reduces your marketing costs and adds to your bottomline. And since industry like mobile is growing in India, people would be interested in more niche job opportunity than mainstream ones.

So these are my thoughts on how niche is the next phase of growth for Indian internet market and why being the next Google, Amazon or Rediff might not be the right approach for new-age web entrepreneurs in India.

Would like to know more from you guys. So calling all entrepreneurs, investors, stakeholders or anybody & everybody who think that I’m making some amount of sense here. Care to share some of your wisdom?

Related resources:

• Why Can’t India Produce $GOOG’s or #AAPL’s?
• Why “Now” is the Perfect Time to Build a Startup

(img credit)

One short comment before you read on. This post is not about my insights or analysis. It’s more about more factual things that have been happening over past few days months years. So we have reached a point where we might as well call it as War of for the Web. Yes, the game is slowly shifting towards who’s to control the web.

So if you really want to now what’s been happening, then you should head towards this blog post by Tim O’Reilly.

He explores the vast landscape of internet, devices, apps, interoperability, maps, acquisitions, distributed social networking and many more. To sum it up, he writes

…It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

Now to think of it, it’s really true. But what surprised me more is his last comment where he says,

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

Interesting. Though I would like to see MSFT playing more on open platform’s turf but seriously I don’t see it coming anytime soon. May be other players might push them to play like that. But there’s one catch? Why don’t I see IBM in between of all these? Sometime back when Friendfeed was acquired by Facebook, I wrote an elaborate blog post on “Hint of Loss of Trust…” where it was quoted that,

IBM is afraid of Microsoft who is afraid of Google who is afraid of Facebook who is afraid of Twitter who is afraid of whales.

So its interesting to how that if MSFT plays by rules of Open Platform, then what stance will IBM take? Will it then focus also in consumer segment along with enterprise market.

So to sum it up, before we face any monopolistic  market which we saw early in PC era, open source is the right step forward it seems.

Still I’m trying to convince myself how scalable it is from monetization point of view. May be on this point, I’ve think harder. May be it’s not the right time to think its I’m already hitting 2 am in the morning. So may be later….

Couple of days back, I went through a post from Forrester blog where “Social Product Management” as a terminology was being talked about. Though the post talks about the term with much caution but surely if you ask me, it definitely makes lot of sense. More because, most part of my work depends on continuous interaction with different social media properties on web. What that means is I continuously use internet destinations to understand the evolving community dynamics and where the ball is settling to come up with more intelligent solutions to everyday situations we face. (Read more in my “About Me” page to know about my work).

So what exactly is “Social Product Management“?

To put it in a framework, we can say SPM describes how social media is changing the way product managers and product marketers work in pretty much every aspect of the job where social media are relevant; moreover they supplement existing PM tasks, deliverables, or resources.

But I was wondering more about the evolution of such terminologies in Indian job market.

Now for sure we use internet to a large extent everyday for our daily work activities. I’m sure that primarily confines to Googling to find some information. But apart from Google, there are vast amount of information lay hidden in evolving social-graphs of twitter, facebook or other social media properties which provide a vast array of opportunities for today’s evolving product managers.

Also because simple googling only provides an intermediate solution to our “intent” which many a times doesn’t get fulfilled because of huge amount of data sets being fed to web which makes it all the more difficult to locate & present. There I believe the social graphs can really come in handy if used effectively since social media properties not only solves the problem of “intent” but also takes care of the “social proof” which we mostly need.

But there’s one problem to it. Many Indian offices don’t allow internet access to most of the social media properties. I have even seen the same state in companies where you most expect. But now that’s another story I guess.

But truly I believe that the concept of “Social Product Management” is something which won’t bounce off like many other neologisms. At least that’s what I hope. But I’m sure for that to happen (at least in Indian market), a mindset change has to happen from top level management where they see the importance of “Social” in Product Management and how it makes a textbook PM more efficient & skillful.

So what do you think?

Yes. I feel that’s true. No, I’m not talking about post-recessionary effects which many dub as the perfect scenario to build a great company. That’s true. But I’m not looking at it from a short-sell proposition but from a long entrenched business cycle which has been evolving from the past 30-40 years or so.

Although, I wasn’t there to see it myself but surely textual resources can help a lot to understand how it all happened or I should say how it’s happening.

But surely building a startup (let’s keep the taxonomy of startup to “only internet” ones) has become far more easier than it was a decade back or so; and by building a startup, I mean starting it up and making a grandeur exit, if possible.

Lets take couple of examples here:

• AdMob acquired by Google.
• YouTube acquired by Google.
• Mint.com acquired by Intuit.
• Twitter.com valued at more than $1 billion.
• Facebook.com valued at $10 billion.
• News Corp bought MySpace.com.
• Social games maker Zynga’s revenues are close to about $250 million.

These are top-of-my-mind recall of multi-million dollar deals that happened over the past few years.

So fact of the matter is those who are doing it are doing it faster, quicker and at a very young age. Infact, it’s quite common nowadays that a young entrepreneur builds a great company, accrues an awesome valuation and in some cases sells it at a premium.

This wasn’t the case earlier.

Perhaps a small personal story – my dad is a 1st generation entrepreneur who started off his small business (non-internet related) during 70’s. It took him nearly 15-20 years to achieve what many would say as a successful venture. On top of that, it took huge efforts starting from capital raising & deployment. But that was it – during that time, many would consider it be a victory of some sorts.

Now if that happens in today’s world, I wonder what would we make out of it. To be very specific, it was the late 90’s dot-com boom that catapulted many internet based business model then. But as we all know, what happened as we touched 21st century. Too many startups were chasing too little money in the market – and boom – we hit the floor. Actually as I see it, those were the days when the extra flab in the system were carved out to give a new direction.

Below is one of my today’s tweet wherein I pointed out the direction of modern day entrepreneurship. It genuinely reflects the barrier to market entry…

So the question is – were the guys from my dad’s era less intelligent or less hard working than folks of our generation? Sorry to present it dramatically but fact is this is not the case. In 20-30 years, I don’t think average human intelligence has changed so much or we are more hardworking than our fathers.

There’s something more intricate than outside reasons.

Talking about this topic, other day I read an interesting story which talks about the same too.

So coming back, the basic difference between entrepreneurs now & then is the amount of leverage available to a modern Internet entrepreneur is far, far greater than was available to entrepreneurs of previous generations. The number of entrants has dramatically increased as well. The overall hit rate might be lower, but the ones who win, win bigger and faster – thanks to the leverage.

For example, gone are the days of server farms, telesales and support, marcom material, tradeshow booths, direct sales forces, licensed software, mountains of code, reseller agreements, plane tickets, hotel rooms, printing CDs, voicemail systems, and so on and so forth.

Modern Internet entrepreneurship starts with a few engineers working for nothing and carrying latops and cellphones. They coordinate with Skype and GTalk and wikis and bug tracking sytems. The company itself is snapped together with outsourced HR, cookie-cutter incorporation, and outsourced finance / payroll. Marketing is done virally, or through SEO, or SEM. Customer service is handled via the community and forums. PR and outreach through tweets and blogging. Payments come via Paypal. Ads are served up by third-party ad networks. Storage goes on Amazon. Computation scales via Amazon, Softlayer or Rackspace. Code is built upon stacks of open source, SaaS, and $10/month services.

What used to cost $1M-$2M to set up, now costs $10K or even less in Indian scenario. What used to cost $5M to build, now costs $250K. What used to cost $20M to go to market now costs $1M.

So true! Isn’t it?

Also if we talk about the market size in terms of internet population, it has been considerably moving northwards. Every year or even every quarter millions are people are added online. Infact, the stats says that more than 3 billion people are online now out of about 6 billion earthlings. They all want to use products and spread it if its good. But we have to build products which meets a specific need or cater to a genuine problem. Then there’s network effects which has been growing stronger day-by-day. With time, labour costs are reduced. Skill sets are become a commodity. That means less capital required. Less cost to scale. More so, most web products have near about zero marginal cost of replication; adding a new customer is pure-play profit which makes it easy on marketing & shipping costs.

So every day or so, we hear stories about another Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon coming up since leverage is the name of the game now. Anybody who has some solid product to a solid game-changing problem, then that’s a hit.

So if “NOW” is not the best time to startup something, then I don’t know what will?