While most online retailers rightly try to attract bargain hunters — consumers who are comparing prices on several sites — social media strategy and presentation will play an increasingly important role in e-retailers’ success. Better online shopping experience is essential to the consumers who find the online shopping limiting in several areas such as assessing quality of the items, and to those who shop on impulse. (more…)

With Google Buzz, Google has launched yet another product to compete in the social networking arena. It’s just one week new, and already Buzz has a significant user base and poses a viable threat to several existing players.

Google, like Microsoft, keeps trying. In the social networking space, it has made several attempts to become more relevant: Orkut, though fairly popular in Brazil and India, never really took off in the US and became more irrelevant with rise of Facebook. (…more)

2009 marked another profitable year for online retailers with e-commerce growing by 5% despite lower overall consumer spending . This implies the continued decline of brick and mortar stores and rise of online commerce. This is due, in part, to the richer online experience, which helps consumers make better purchase decisions from convenience of a few clicks. What’s next for online retailers? Would social media transform online shopping into “social shopping”? … Continue reading

There are only a few users with more than a million followers on Twitter. A few of them might be flukes (Ashton Kutcher ?), but most are not. They are celebrities such as Britney Spears and Oprah Winfrey or popular media sites such as The Onion and New York Times. I call them “mega tweeters”.

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After reviewing social gaming companies, I move on to RockYou and LivingSocial — two very successful companies in the social applications space — to find out more about the similarities and differences between social games and apps.

You can see from the top Facebook apps list here that although they are fundamentally different, apps and games that are popular on Facebook and other social media are generally entertainment-based rather than utility-based. What’s more, on the iPhone, one out of three apps is an entertainment app or a game. Let’s look at some specific similarities and differences. Read the full article »

Social gaming is changing the way games are marketed and distributed. Rather than relying on big publishers and distributors such as Electronic Arts, studios are leveraging the power of social media to virally spread their games. In order to better understand how they have built sustaining businesses, I talked to the CEOs of some of the top social gaming companies. You will see that all of them have different yet successful strategies. Read the full article »

Let’s say you were launching a consumer facing web 2.0product like Yelp, Youtube etc., where network effects are huge and receptiveness at launch can make or break the product or company. Cuil is a great example of a company failing at the launch, though it was more due to bad product than bad marketing. But question remains: How can you rise above the noise with tons of other companies trying to grab the market? I hear you that product should be compelling and differentiated enough for users to use it, however product quality aside, how do you effectively market your product in social media? There are millions of users on social media today. Most influencers can are most likely on social media as are most end users. Industries with large network effects simply cannot afford to ignore social media. Read the full article »

This is not a blog on “in defense of”, but I wanted to paint a picture that is different from what many people tend to think of Facebook. A CEO in one of my classes called Facebook and third party developers “rubbish”. I argue that there are several third party developers who are making tons of cash on Facebook platform. Facebook has built a thriving platform, which is growing fast and can be a great source of additional revenue for Facebook. Read the full article »

With due respect for all Twitter bashers (see here for an example), I would like to make a few comments in defense of Twitter.

I certainly agree that it is easy and tempting to flow with the hype, and internet bubble of late 90’s and recent real estate bubbles are good examples of that. Therefore, I am not going to suggest that Twitter is going to be next Google, though it’s important to note that nobody could have imagined that Google would threaten Microsoft so soon so fast. However, few would disagree that social media is here to stay. Very few understood blogging when it started, but today it has opened up the long tail of journalism. Video sharing has become a phenomenon in itself, and though Youtube is still struggling to make money, there is little doubt that it has opened up a new world of opportunities for wannabe artists, producers, journalists etc. I believe that micro-blogging is also going to create an impact that not many people can anticipate today. Read the full article »