Friday, January 16, 2009

Get Addictive!

How to drive people to your blogs by creating addictive personal ads? 

People get addicted to things that can make them smile. Though smile is actually a reflection of inner happiness, people are so engrossed in their routine  that they forget to smile. They need an external reason to smile. People appreciate anything that takes them out of their routine. They appreciate it even more if it can also make them smile. And that’s addictive.

When you wake up in the morning, what do you look for, Newspaper/Laptop/TV/CellPhone? Now that’s addiction. You don’t get paid to read the news, sometimes you dont even read it full. Just read the headlines, scan the pics and you are done, ready for the day. So what is this Newspaper effect? What news-papers do is just take you away from your small room and open a world in front of you. This 5 minute scanning doesn’t disturb your routine, and sometimes it might just make you smile. They have something new (NEWS of course). They give you something (usually interesting) to talk about (And you love to talk). Most advertisements try to use the Newspaper effect. They are short, innovative, entertaining and give you something to talk. If they don’t do all these, they suck!

  Q.  So how can you create the Newspaper effect to market your weblogs /ideas/products? 
  A. Simple, run your own personal ads.   
 
There are many things available for you, to run your personal ads.  

Emails : One of my friend sends lovely good morning emails. Sometimes they are beautiful, sometimes thought provoking and sometimes plain and simple wishes. I am so addicted to reading them first thing in the morning that If dont see them I’d rush an email to her asking if everything was ok. Do you see how you can use this strategy to Market your objects? 

Chat status: Usually all Chats provide you with custom status. I would always keep status as an interesting thought, song or lines of some poem. It is so intersting that people can’t just stop asking me about it or sending me an appreciation. Now that’s where I can get them addicted. They love to see new messages, updates, thoughts, signs, greetings, links to interesting websites,articles, blogs, reviews, resources. People will read them without my knowledge, follow the link and enjoy it. Sometimes they come back to me that it was good. And we get a topic to talk about, which is otherwise very hard to find, considering distance and our not so close relationship. When I say “Volume X.0 is out” they’d ask for a copy of latest edition of my journal. Now that’s best form of permission marketing.

Signatures: If you are doing a lot of emails everyday, Email signatures or usually the last line of emails are another place to run your personal ads.

Profile status: Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn and likes all provide with such status that you can convert to your ad-space. Now here is a catch. You can’t use a ’status’ as ad-space, until people are addicted to it. And people dont get addicted to requests and uninteresting blabber. So you have to keep them interesting all the time. 

Tweets: Use twitter. Its just ready-made for your purpose. 

There are many other mundane things that you can make peculiar and interesting! SMSes, Talks, your desk, cubicle, Notice boards(if u have the privilege), T-Shirts.
 
Always remember that you gotta be 
   x  Short (no disturbance) 
   x  Entertaining (leaving a smile)
   x  New (gotto take them out of there routine)
   x  Providing something to talk about.

This excercise can go a long way in Building your Self Brand by driving regular interested readers to your blog, and then if you really serve quality, they’d certainly stay.  
Posted by Ujjwal Trivedi at 16:28:47 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Friday, January 9, 2009

Creating a knowledge portal

Here is a quick take on why creating a knowledge repository is vital for an organization (of any size) or an individual, and what are essential features the knowledge repository must have. 

So it’s an information savvy world we live in. If you have the information, you have the edge. We all have been in situations where we need some potentially vital information which probably has already been acquire.  More often than not, the constraint is not availability of information. It’s there somewhere, the real issue is accessibility. Do you have immediate access to that information is what matters. We all have some information that can potentially be vital to someone else, probably in more of an emergency. With these thoughts organizations usually initiate the knowledge share among employees through various means. But I have seen in most instances, such repositories are often under utilized. There are several reasons for such attempts not being successful.
Here is a list of reasons that i think cause the trouble.

 Lack of motivation for employees to share: An employee is motivated to share only when he sees a benefit in sharing. When someone finds it useful, then only he would be motivated to contribute. One should understand that those who are not used to using such a repository dont “get it”.  
 Lack of internal marketing: most of the employees are unaware of such resources. Organizations start such initiative at large scale but gradually the momentum is lost in the mundane activities. And as we know that people wont use it initially until its a part of their regular activity.  

So now if these things are taken care of by the organization, there would still be a need of a few essential features that would make the repository actually useful and effective. These features will actually help employee addicted to using such a repository and also to contribute to it.  

Here is a list of features:

 Search: all information should be easily searcheable. If the search doesnt yield relevant results the entire venture of creating a repository goes at a toss.
  Label: Information should be available for tagging/labelling so that it can be searched and sorted easily. A user specific labelling/rating can also be a nice feature. 
 Add: It should allow very easy interface for adding information. It should necessarily allow copy paste from a Word document. Generally available text editors make it quite difficult to add images. 
 Edit: Again a simple interface for editing should encourage users to add their dots to the master-piece.
 Alert: User should be able to receive alerts if the information he has been searching for becomes available some time later. Also follow up comments on his contribution and tracebacks can keep things live and interesting. 
 Comment/Rating: User should be able to comment and rate the information so that other users can decide upon the relevance of information faster. This is as important as being able to add information. 

If you don’t have all these features you are surely missing something in your knowledge repository, which means Your users are not happy. It calls for a quick check.   

Posted by Ujjwal Trivedi at 16:06:42 | Permalink | No Comments »