The Quora Bandwagon.

I have been using Facebook for a long time to keep upto date with all the cool stuff that we marketers get excited about. Of the 465 (as of last count) people on my friends list, a majority are from the media, advertising and social media space and between them post enough to give me an idea of whats going on around my connected universe.  So when a curious ‘Q’ started appearing like a rash on Facebook it perked me up like nothing before. I discovered the great www.Scobelizer.com  cat fight (those who follow tech and media will know what that means)  and the many versions of what actually Quora does online. I must confess, I have been on the tool for around a week and am no where close to using it to its fullest potential. But here is a list of this that one can do with Quora - These are things that have come from random searches and cannot be attributed to any one article or source. Some of it have been discovered in the last one week.

Quora can be used for marketing or for self promotion. It is rather easy – set up your ‘bio’ for all the topics that you know about – in effect you can choose from hundreds of topics you think you know and then interlink it to websites and so on. You can ask questions anonymously for topics or search for questions related to your areas of interest and follow them.  You can also answer some of the questions that you have genuine answers about them or pretend you have an answer. The correct relevant answers are quick to rise to the top and your reputation is based on how many times you have risen to the top of the heap.  Quora allows all kinds of questions to be asked – suppose I wanted to know more about the Kizashi from Maruti, I can look for a question relating to the same and then follow the question for as long as I want. Consider that Google made huge moneys on the intentions of people by placing ads when they were looking for information relating to a topic, Quora has a potential to have advertising in some new innovative form placed along side questions and answers. In case that does not happen, very soon we will have brands creating questions and answers and then reach out to people who follow these – logic being that these people are interested in the topic or the product to which the question is linked.  It is also possible that you will get all kinds of information about a product or a company from the people who have been linked with the company or brand in the past. Quora can then become a great research tool.

www.Mashable.com recently had a great article suggesting that people use Quora for job related searches.  The easiest ways to attract people who are looking at talent in specific areas is to show up as the expert with you answers.  You could also follow the people who matter and their topics and once in a while when you know what you are saying can answer a question to a topic and create a following. When that HR guy comes looking for a relevant position you will feature as an expert.  What is important about Quora is that it will never be able to solve your problem at any instant but over a period of time it can be used as a sounding board for ideas. It is great in finding the collective intelligence of the masses to any problem and like any solution to a problem it will take time for the answers to give results.  Small businesses and startups and eventually anyone in the world should be able to get answers to issues that are relevant to your life. In the last few days itself I have found people getting answers to natural child birth to parenting to marital issues on the site. In time this single system has the potential to give Google a run for its money in the race for being the knowledge repository of the human race.

Trust me when I say this – the site will become mainstream sooner than what is predicted. If Google became mainstream in 7 years and facebook in 4, twitter in 2, I would assume that given that everyone is connected more than ever before, Quora will be mainstream in 18 months. It will grow at a pace that will encompass facebook, twitter and Wikipedia.

What I am truly worried about is the pressures the team will face from the people who have backed the venture to create a revenue mode and the propensity of the social media experts to milk everything as a tool for shameless peddling of goods and services.

This article first appeared on trak.in

Television Viewing Audience - Three generations

The Past

Back in 1982 just after the Asian Games, my dad decided that it was time for us kids to have a TV set. We got for us a Crown Black & White TV, that evening we played host to our entire community of neighbours. It was fun, mom made snacks for everyone, when that got over, people got their own dabbas. Slowly the entire neighbourhood got their own TVs. Over a 3 year period television viewing in my neighbourhood went from being a community experience where people commented, hooted, whistled, laughed, cried, poked to a more private experience – atleast we could eat dinner without the entire neighbourhood being witness to the event.

Television became the centre point of our family lives. The Saturday, Sunday movies and the film songs and the stray English serials were all mish-mashed into one government run channel and served hot. The family that watched TV together, commented, and laughed together it seemed stayed together. It was the time when intimate scenes required the younger lot to get out of the room to get a glass of water or take a loo break ( how can you watch the ‘hot’ scene when your parents were around).
Eventually we moved to a colour tv set and then we had two sets – one for me and my sister and one for the rest of the family. TV watching became selective and personal. Your family did not define what you watched, your sister and you compromised on what each wanted to watch. From being largely driven by what was available on one channel to the VCR to the cable Tv change was inevitable. Advertising funded programming started created aspirations and fuelled a generation of people to move from socialist India to the new bold consumerism.

The present

Over the ten year period from 1982 to 1992 advertising funded television in India with generous dose of government subsidy. The first Gulf War brought a sexy new avatar of television to India via the cable and satellite model and it changed the way people perceived competition. Over 200 TV channels later, a incomplete model of monitoring and measuring exists which does not take into consideration the real audience but relies on approximations and adjustments.
Sir Martin Sorrell – the high priest of media and advertising recently forecast two paces of advertising growth: rapid growth in digital media and slow growth in traditional media. He adds that TV has the opportunity to be part of the digital future, but the industry needs to evolve if it is to compete effectively. The model that has underpinned the ad industry for the past 50 years won’t safeguard it for ever.
Viewing habits are changing already; high-value consumers – people like you and me watch less TV and are even less predictable in what we watch. Channel V and MTV have reported that most of their audience is no longer in front of the TV sets. The youth has their world has fit into their pockets through a plethora of devices which are convenient to use and play with. Their audience is their larger social network. They connect and share and comment much like what my neighbors did in the real world in the 1980s.
The demands for content is much different from what used to be default broadcast standard fare. It is now personalized and each one has a take on what their needs are. The more mature audience is moving to their portable devices, their carry along entertainment streamed live or available when they want in sizes they want.
No one has worked out how TV will be funded in the future. Content delivery via broadband is a reality and more homes will eventually have broadband than satellite. The eventual rollout of 4G services will make bandwidth available on a tap at prices that will make it as low as the cost for cable tv or a DTH service.
With more and more choices, on demand and otherwise. The ability of shifting time and device seamlessly will mean that the audience could be anywhere. The consequence is further fragmentation. Yet the ad industry has not resolved how to attach commercial messages in an unregulated market and make it accountable. While the digital audience is connected and trackable.

The question then is how are we in advertising media measuring the audience? Are we still talking about the television audience or are we factoring in the audience that’s consuming content wherever they are. Are we still talking about a primetime and hence the premium rates for ad inventory or are we talking prime content? And hence prime audience attached to that prime content. Will we be measuring the audience on the basis of the interactions they have done on a piece of content – the number of times they shared, commented etc or on the basis of what a people meter told us.

These are going to be interesting times and for an industry that has not evolved in the last 20 years in India from a cookie cutter model, we might see a lot of shake up happen. The ones that realize and change their game plan will be the ones that will survive and have an audience that brings value.
Thoughts welcome…

( this blog post appeared first on Trak.inhttp://trak.in/tags/business/2011/02/01/television-viewing-audience/)