Yes, the World.

Ajanta Hotel takes to the web

I came across a banner ad for a hotel in Delhi and I’m not sure what it was about the ad, but I clicked. And I’m glad I did. Ajanta hotel is perhaps the best example of an Indian Hotel using the web to its max potential.

A quick look at the site and you’ll find video testimonials, quick-booking and even a ‘send-an-sms-feature’(though I wonder why).

Clearly this hotel is looking to attract the foreign travellers and they’re doing it well.

The Hotel has a page on facebook, it supports UNICEF and is pet friendly as well. The perfect triple sundae to get those foreign tourists salivating.

Now that’s a businessman, who knows his TG well and is going all out to make it known. And yes their online banners show a nice picture of a clean hotel and their emphasis on ‘budget hotel’ sure made me click.

I’m really impressed by the way the hotel has taken to the internet and has said all the right things.

Their homepage is perfect and tells me everything I need to know. Their booking system is lovely and even shows you thumbnails of rooms to help you decide which one to pick. While booking you can even add a trip to agra if you wish.

That’s a wow for a little hotel in New Delhi.

there’s something about twitter

Wassup?!

Wassup is the most asked question among pals and one that provides answers from ‘nothing much’ to ‘thinking about the meaning of life’.

But what if you have too-long a friend-list and can’t ask all your pals this all-important life-changing-question?

Enter twitter. It’s a site that basically ‘wassup’s your friends all day long and lets you read their answers if you choose to subscribe (follow: in twitter parlance).

Twitter lets you publish updates about your life in 140 characters or less to family or friends who choose to follow you. (people on your twitter contact list are called followers)

All you need to do is answer the question. ‘what are you doing?’ through your phone, messenger, site or even email.

‘Life happens between blogs and email’

As Common Craft puts it, ‘Life happens between blog posts and emails’. And it is this life between the blog and email that twitter lets you publish.

While many people send out updates like “had an amazing cup of coffee” or “going for a jog”, twitter is increasingly being used by people to share their thoughts and links to things they are reading.

There are many benefits to twitter, other than of course keeping up with the lives of your pals.

For one, it’s easy. With technology at our beck and call, we’re pretty much a lazy people. Blogs of 300 words or more are passé with people turning to micro-blogging from the comfort (or the stylus-inflicted awkwardness) of their mobile phones.

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s twitter!

Saving men, helping the helpless, almost sounds like superman.

Twitter recently saved a man from jail and got an unemployed person the job of his dreams. A man who was jailed in Egypt sent frantic tweets (updates) and his ‘followers’ (contacts) mobilized forces to get him out of jail. Another man in the US sent out a minute-by-minute update of the day he was laid off by Yahoo! His followers were glued to their screens as he sent updates about packing his belongings, meeting HR and leaving office. Before he knew it, job offers from helpful netizens were pouring in!

Of course this doesn’t mean that all the one million twitter members get such dramatic results through their tweets. Why then does twitter generate so much interest?

Thoughts. Ideas. Conversations.

Twitter ignites new thinking, conversations and ideas. It allows people from across the world to come together and share their thoughts and lives. It brings together people and their ideas which lead to newer conversations and lines of thought.

Twitter lets you follow the most creative, bizarre, new-age thinkers on the internet. So if you’re bored of getting the same old updates from friends, you can follow some CEOs, inventors, thinkers.

Follow Scott Goodson (CEO, Strawberry Frog) on twitter and

you’ll get updates about what he’s reading, thinking or doing. It’s pretty much like being with the person 24*7, only that they choose what you get to see.

Twitter’s also great for self promotion and resource sharing. You can send updates about your company, your work or share links to resources that are of value to you and your followers.

Tweeting brands

Brands too have jumped headlong into twitter and few are faring well.

Some twitter users believe that brands that exist on twitter are ‘lame’ since they aren’t people and are pretending to be part of a conversation where big corporates don’t belong.

American airline, Delta Airlines is on twitter and sends our tweets about offers, promos and other airline related information.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of popular online company specializing in footwear – Zappos, is on twitter too, though his tweets are as much personal as professional. He has a whopping 7000+ followers. What that does f

or his brand is debatable, but here’s a CEO striking a conversation with his TG in a space of their choice.

Twitter it right

As much as I may love twitter, there are enough people who hate it. Complaints about receiving silly updates like ‘in the loo’, ‘eating a muffin’ are aplenty in twitter world. But then twitter is a network, and a network is only as good as the people in it. Pick the right ones to follow and you may just find yourself tweeting gladly in twitter world.

Oh and for those who hate the 140 character limit, there are always blogs…

PS: the Zappos CEO is now following me on twitter… it doesn’t mean much since he follows many, but it’s a step in the right direction for the brand.

NOTE: twitter works on the give and take principle, so follow a couple of people to have people follow you. You can’t hoard in the internet space you know!

green marketing – can we only plant trees?

PrimeGreen is perhaps one of the only Indian agencies to offer ‘green solutions’ to its clients. They do some amazing work in solar powered hoardings.

But when it comes to brand equity, it needn’t be all about planting trees and saving energy. You could go ahead and save something totally cooler that links better with your brand and makes it endearing.

HaagenDazs did just that. They decided that they’d like to save the bees. Like ‘The Happening’ tells us, there’d be no world (no fruits, no flowers, no nothing) if the bees died.

Haagendazs decided to save the bees that are responsible for the natural flavours of their ice creams. And ofcourse they used the ‘cute potential’ to the max.
Help the Honey Bees is a cool initiative by Haagendazs and you get to learn how to save the bees an even create your own bee self.
The site is cute and sweetly done. And once you create your own bee self you’ll love the little stripey creatures so much that you’ll swear to save them.

Stuff to remember when marketing the green:

1. Choose a cause that is linked to your brand/product
People need to remember your brand. That’s really why you’re doing it. And if your cause and brand are headed in different directions, chances are people will remember the cause and ignore the brand (shudder). Haagendazs chose a cause that was closely linked (or they linked it anyway) to their product.

2. Choose a cool cause
Everyone is saving the trees, the forests, women, children. Pick a cause that won’t be lost in the crowd. And trust me, there still are many very important causes left in this miserable world.

3. Don’t let the cause overtake your brand
Every time you read about the bee, the site reminded you that the bees were responsible (not for nature) but for Haagendazs lovely natural flavours.

My take-aways as a site visitor
1. Bees are cute. and they’re important. I’d like to save ‘em.
2. Haagendazs uses natural fruit.
3. Haagendazs is classy and cool.

PS: This is the bee-me.

Create your own and off you go! Wheeee! I mean Buzzzzzzzzzz.

twinning!

To state the cliche yet again – man is a social animal.
While the digital medium allows for easy sharing and networking, in the offline world it seems to put people in silos.

The mp3 player or the mobile phone allowed people to keep to themselves (which they often wanted) and yet be entertained (which hadn’t happened since books).

Ever since we came up with the earphone (not the headphone), people discovered a way to share what is essentially an individual sport. I call this ‘twinning’.

Twinning: The act of sharing an ear phone with another person so that you can share content.

For youngsters in crowded places, it’s the perfect ‘personal hangout’. Sharing music, videos and chit-chatting, it provides the ultimate in personal social networking in a crowded place.

Increasingly friends are seen giggling at a video, humming a tune in unison with an ear phone plugged in one ear.

So it’s true, you can give people the digital ‘individual’ space, but at some point they’re going to want to share that too; perhaps as a sign of their friendship, their boredom at being on their own, their courtesy towards a friend who isn’t carrying her mp3 player, or just as the ‘provider’ or entertainment that makes one ever-popular. Who knows!

There’s something to this twinning, which quite interests me. For the life of me, I just can’t seem to put my finger on it.

social-life-killer I am not!

Too many articles and opinions have been doing the rounds about how online social networking is killing real life relationships.

Sure, people are spending a lot of time scrapping each other or hanging-out on gtalk, but that’s hardly enough reason to bad-mouth the net as a ‘social-life killer’.

With e-networking I can have a word with Bill Gates if I like, so what if I haven’t a clue about my neighbour.

How can this kill your social skills when all it’s doing is giving wings to those who never had any? It’s letting me say hello and wish people on their birthdays when otherwise I probably wouldn’t bother.

Yes MMOGs and heavy gaming is killing people’s ability to interact and relate with other human beings. But that’s hardly digital’s fault. Isn’t it the same with any form of addiction? Doesn’t it consume you, especially if it’s an addiction that only involves the individual and not the entire community.

In fact, even if people are becoming more and more withdrawn, they are finding relationships in a different dimension. Why, only some time back a woman tried to attempt suicide and was saved by a joint effort by her online group to locate her.

With busy-bee lives, old-world socializing is dying. No need to see red. Change is inevitable.

Online Social networking isn’t all that bad.

God knows, without it I’d be living in my head and talking to myself!

Netnography – i know you now

Newer worlds are being explored fearlessly in the digital domain and newer terms are being born at lightening speed.

Our experiment, ’72 hours in Second Life’ in which some planners immersed themselves in the virtual lives of Second Life residents, is apparently ‘netnography‘. (thank you, Prof Falguni)

‘Djinn Saphir’, my avatar pranced about Second Life, wore fancy denims, carried Gucci bags, and bought coke for a L$ all in the hope of understanding Second Life and it’s residents.

Now at least I can justify my paycheck. I wasn’t prancing about Second Life, I was performing (doing/practising?) Netnography.

if you’re marketing, you’re dead

We all realize that the digital space is about engaging people and having a conversation with them.

One-way marketing messages mean you’ll rot in digital hell. (which isn’t any better than the real hell, what with the distinction between the real and the virtual blurring)

While trying to promote a website for diabetic kids (chidia.com) I ended up plastering orkut and facebook and created a page for the lovable little chirpy that was the mascot.

I had committed the dreaded M word. Marketing. I tried to post mention of the public-service-site in as many forums as possible without giving any thought to the existing conversations on the forums.

Why the digital space is tough on marketers
1. It takes too much time and patience to be a part of the hundreds of conversations online!
2. Poor things, they confuse digital and broadcast all the time. Marketers have been broadcasting messages forever and it’s not easy to suddenly have to have a ‘dialogue’ with consumers, who historically were supposed to just shut up and listen.

It’s so easy as marketers to just advertise. I shouldv’e known it wouldn’t work. I mean, if I was having a conversation with my friends and an idiot of a marketer jumped in, mouthed a jingle or a message and ran away, I think I’d be pretty pissed.

So, here’s to having more conversations about chidia.com and lesser social-network-bombarding.

i no speaka da english

1. you didnt understand a thing
2. you don’t know about the fuel crisis
3. you think sonal has a shitty sense of humour (hmph)

Language just evolves so much. I remember when during my teenage ‘move it’ and ‘cool it’ were very popular terms though I was never sure what the ‘it’ was. I even recall telling a cow to ‘move it’ as it struggled past our car, leaving me with an LOLing family and a rather bewildered cow that went WTF!

when digital should shut up and watch some TV

I don’t know about you, but the TV has given me many great memories. The most important thing that TV advertising has given me (yes it has given me something) are the fun jingles.

Okay so i’m no TV-geek but I find myself singing old jingles that formed a part of my childhood. Remember Nerolac?
Jab ghar ki raunak badhani ho..
deewaron ko jab sajana ho…
Nerolac! Nerolac!

Maybe these are early days, but digital really isn’t ‘making memories’. It’s making links, forwards and all that, but that collective memory is missing.

Sure I may say, ‘seen that forward?! No??’ and then quickly look through my mail to find it and show it to you. But it’s really not that same.

I think it’s the lack of use of music and other content that can be viralled by ‘mouth’. No, WOM as in digital buzz is not same as it actually being viralled by ‘mouth’

So give it up for ‘Doodh doodh doodh doodh, piyo glassful… doodh!’

While I love the digital space, I think sometimes when the TV scores over it, we digitophiles should shut up and listen. TV’s not all that out the window just yet.

PS: I know you sang the nerolac jingle when you read this :p

One Ferarri please.

I would like to inform you that I want a Ferrari and shall wait for you all to make it come true. No, i’m not being silly.

Turns out that a man in the US got laid off by Yahoo and soon started to twitter about his unfortunate ‘day of firing’. This got many people involved and some thought of it as quite ‘engaging’.

Needless to say help poured in and now he not only has many job offers but a new business partner.

So now, where’s my ferrari?