Much has been written about how internet has changed our lives and how it is leading us to Life 2.0.

What is often spoken and written about is how the Social Media is changing marketing and advertising as we know it and there is enough of hype around it. And that is missing the wood for the trees. The reality is that Web 2.0 is fundamentally changing and creating new business models. And that some of them are making a difference.

Nothing can be more interesting than those changes in the financial sector. More precisely in the micro-finance/social lending. At a time when every possible scam is rocking the industry. Social lending as a concept is nothing new and has been around for generations. Borrowing from your friends, family and community certainly is not new. The internet has only made it universal, scalable. Just like it did in many other business.

Zopa is first online market place that connects lenders and borrowers. Lenders and borrowers register on the site, get the best deals. No middle men. No extra overheads. Zopa started in UK and is now in four of five countries. Prosper is another player which started in US. Kiva is world’s first international person-to-person micro-lending website where individuals can lend to entrepreneurs across the borders.

DhanaX is India’s first such site. Connecting needy to the lenders. Dhanax works with NGOs in identifying the borrowers. Dhanax works on a ‘for-profit’ model, where DhanaX gets a share of the interest collected. The effective interest to the borrower is about 20-22%. RangDe is non-profit initiatives based out of Chennai, but seem to have consciously stayed out of an online payment gateway (I did not understand why). RangDe aims to get micro loans at a very low interest rate, where the social lender gets 3.5% returns on investment.

Online p2p micro lending is opening a whole lot of opportunities for many of us to be actively taking part in building the economy. And also an interesting example of how digital connectivity changes lives.

What do you do when you don't know what to blog about here?

Then change the templates, change the layout, colours, widgets and whatever...

This is what happened here exactly. I changed the 'look and feel'. The house is now repainted on the occasion of new year.

Hopefully, this year I will be able to write something as I have been doing reasonably successfully in my travel blog.

(This is a piece which i wrote recently for Alootechie, the only Indian website on Online marketing / advertising industry)

Have you heard of Social Technographics? Social what? Or have you read the research paper ‘Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness of the Economic Performance of the Organizations: The Social Network effect’. Huh! I still haven’t understood the title itself. But then if you are in the online marketing profession, all these will catch up with you soon.

It was in 1999 or 2000 that the Cluetrain Manifesto was published. Initially, it was cluetrain.com, a collection of ideas put together on a website about the way internet is changing the markets. The book, ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ was later published as a sequel to the website and turned out to be an instant hit, topping the charts for a long time.

I came across the manifesto in 2003. Just before taking up my new job with an online media/marketing agency, I asked my then would-be boss on whether I should do some reading up, since I was getting into a new role. He gave me a copy of this book and said that would suffice. (I am itching to say ‘the rest is history’).

Written in a tongue-in-cheek, humorous and delightful style, it is hugely entertaining (the preface asks ‘when was the last time you laughed aloud reading a business book’), but at the same time make many marketing professionals squirm in their chairs.

Sample some here:

If language is a living organism, TechnoLatin words are like those pod people in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They look real, but they are not. And like the pod people, TechnoLatin has become the norm. Clarity is the exception when it should be the rule. Today we no longer make chips, circuit boards, computers, monitors, or printers. We don’t even make products. Instead we make solutions, a fatuous noun further bloated by empty modifiers such as total, full, seamless, industry standard, and state-of-the-art.

Equally vague and common are platform, open, environment, and support when used as a verb. A veterinarian using TechnoLatin might say that a dog serves as a platform for sniffing, is an open environment for fleas, and that it supports barking.

In short, this brilliant book tells the story of how markets changed from real human conversations to the ‘business-as-usual’ where everyone is demographics, eyeballs, abstractions or statistical aggregates. And now finally, with internet and new technologies, how everything is changing once again, and how the customer is having the last laugh. An eye opener for me was the phrase ‘Markets are conversations’.

Much bits and bytes have flown through the wires since then. (In the industrial era, this phrase read as “much water has flown under the bridge”). New fads and jargons came. Some remained, while some died.

The conversations have now been baptized and given a new name: Social Media. And the new battle is Social Media marketing. Predictably we have a new series of jargons, definitions, terms, and then of course, the consultants.

Just as we thought that we have learned something – that markets are not about xxxgraphics (demo-,psycho- etc.), here are some things you need to brace up with. ‘Social Technographics’ from Forrester research will tell you what kind of social animal are you (or your customer) online. In this new social ladder, one can be slotted anywhere between a ‘creator’ at the top (wow!) and an ‘inactive listener’ at the bottom, which your father certainly will not be very proud of. (especially in this ‘Chak De Bacche’ season). What will you do with this data? One more slide in our PPTs. Someone commented on a popular blog about this research report – “Gosh! You'd almost think they were selling dot-com-2.0 snake oil in an opaque bottle”

Then there is something called ‘Community Analytics*’. Earlier we have heard of Marketing Analytics, which typically tells a bank that there is 58.23% chance of a customer applying for a personal loan before his second wedding anniversary and that an offer like a free vacation to the moon has the highest propensity of generating response.

And yes, there is Web Analytics, “which gives a wealth of information like comprehensive cross channel view of your customers’ behaviour, preferences and motivation and evaluate your ability to build and maintain sustainable relationships while keeping an eye of powerful attributes like customer life-time value, channel loyalty and ROI”. Life was certainly a lot easier earlier.

And now Community Analytics will help you identify communities, influencers, laggards with the help of complex mathematical models. No sarcasm intended. All these are powered and driven by well-meant intellectuals. Wonder what is next!

Meanwhile, some of us are trying to ‘engineer’ some conversations. We air drop some characters or sometimes ourselves into these conversations and talk how great that product or this service. Maybe it is working now. Isn’t it only a matter of time before genuine people start recognizing these engineered conversations? Perhaps yes.

Getting into the honest conversations in the market and ‘marketing’ is a genuine challenge. The ‘why and how’ of social media marketing is still debatable. Till then we continue to believe that we are ‘innovating’, ‘disrupting’ and in the bargain, hopefully a little bit of learning as well.

If you have not read the book ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ the complete version is available at http://www.cluetrain.com. After a hard day at work, it is worth it.

*Community Analytics is a name of an organization.

This year (ie June 2007 till now) has not been great from the point of view of our trekking feats. (I have a vague sense of this timeframe called year. Neither does it start in January nor in April. More on that later).

Hectic travel schedules (returning to town mostly on Saturday mornings), the continuing saga of house hunting on weekends and those couple of unavoidable trips to the telephone office, banks and LPG agency in effect robbed most of our Saturdays from what otherwise could have been an action packed, fun-filled treks or hikes with Nature Knights.

So was this weekend. No treks. Had canceled the road trip planned. And fortunately there was a respite from house hunting since we postponed it by a couple of months. I then decided to catch up with the some blogs bookmarked earlier and explore some new ones.

The interesting discovery of this week was http://my-think-pad.blogspot.com. ‘Reflections’, ‘musings’, ‘random ramblings’ are perhaps the more found (claimed) variety of blogs. Except that reflections are hard to find in those. This one however was refreshingly different. These were every day stories, well told. Often with genuine reflections that make readers think. The web of hyperlinks to comments from involved readers and pointers to other stories made it a treasure trove. I ended up spending over 2 hours in reading most of them.

Not bad for a Sunday.

Tailpiece: While on blogging and reading, I came across this nice cartoon

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Much has been written about ‘The Attention Economy’. I heard about this term only a couple of months back. While I haven’t understood all the philosophical moorings behind this term, the fact that money is spent all the time to get people’s attention and there is a whole economy behind that is simply baffling.

When I heard this initially, I thought it is yet another jargon (I suppose it is) coined by some tired corporate executive-turned writer. Little did I realize that I make a living out of an industry which is all about creating attention and yes, there are businesses built around it. And the more I think about it, the more baffled, surprised and bemused I am.

The reason for curiosity on the business of attention was nothing but the IPL (Indian Premier League), which has off late been filling columns in newspapers, magazines and airtime in television channels. A lot has been said and written about. That it is good for cricket, professionalism will now seep into cricket, that more talent will be attracted and so on and so forth. I do not know anything about that.

All I have understood is that it is a brilliantly crafted business piece, and that is fairly de-risked. At the foundation of this piece are a cricket crazy nation and their attention span. For, majority of the investments have to be recouped from advertisement and ticket sales. Sony TV’s $ 1bn gamble is based on advertisement revenues. (Read attention). The returns for the corporate houses that have invested in various teams are from stadium revenues, sponsorship opportunities, sale of merchandise – all of which in some way related to advertisements.

It is money out of thin air. Not result of any tangible product or a service. A castle that is built purely on revenue from advertisements. Whether the castle is of rock or sand, time will tell.

Some Factoids from Wikipedia

Herbert Simon was perhaps the first person to articulate the concept of attention economics when he wrote:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

For more on Attention Economy, read Michael H Goldhaber's blog

Some brand logos with bylines that talk about their age or heritage always conveyed certain timelessness or strength. I am talking those brands with logos that says ‘Since 1805’ kinds. The St. Gobain byline is one of my favorites. ‘The Future of Glass. Since 1665’. There are a few others as well. The South Indian hotel in my residential area in Chembur says ‘Since 1958’. Not very very old. Yet it sound old enough to have a reasonable heritage value.

But recently while traveling in Bangalore, I noticed this large logo of New Port Jeans. It said ‘Since 1994’. Since 1994! Huh! Wasn’t that yesterday? Not really. 14 years old. It is more than 13 years since I finished college. It is some time.

Perhaps for the generation born after 1991, the children of liberalization, the tag ‘Since 1994’ does convey something.

First things first. The title is a straight lift from a regular column in Mint. And plagiarism ends there.

After driving to office all this while in a car, I am now back to Mumbai’s lifeline – the suburban rail. I am a firm supporter of public transport. Even those days when I was driving my car, I preached about public transport like a hypocrite.

I have resisted the trains all along. The fear of getting thrown out and into the train mercilessly was not easy to deal with. Coming to Mumbai in 2004, I looked for a place to stay so that I don’t have to rely on train for my commuting. That was contrarian. For the first three years BEST buses, rikshwas and taxis met my transport needs. There was not even an intention to buy a personal vehicle. It was parked for some time later, when we move out of Mumbai. But a few months back, a change in job and a default hike in salary made me succumb to the temptations. Wants suddenly became needs. The summers appeared more sweltering. Buses looked more crowded. Rikshaws became jerkier and taxis more expensive. And I committed for one more EMI payment. I had my car.

Much petrol has flown under the hood since then. Statistics show that over 2 lakh more cars got added to Mumbai roads since then. My average time on road increased from 1 hour in a day to 2.5 hours. Back pains gave me company during those 2.5 hours and even later.

And one day I decided that I deserve a better life. A suburban train pass now jostles for space in my wallet along with a few currency notes, a few plastic cards, and a bunch of visiting cards. I now spend a little over an hour commuting, including a share in cabs and rikshaws. Climbing railway overbridges four times a day also makes me a little more physically active.

I now get to see real people every day. I get to hear vigorous arguments about dropping Shewag from the team. I get to listen to anxious remarks about Reliance Power shares. I see people cribbing about their jobs and bosses. At Dadar flower market, where I get a cab, I see variety of colourful flowers every day, and equally or more colorful men and women in hurry. I see small traders on flyovers selling hundreds of wares and thriving in chaos. I see toddlers begging and scrambling for strewn food. And I wonder about our own cubicle talks in cosy offices about not being happy with 25% increment in salaries.

And I walk. With my feet firmly on ground.

Life is better. Atleast till the next Mumbai monsoons.