Recognizing Deven: Show me the Clicks…
Robert Scoble does another great job of linking me to Munjal Shah. Now I had never heard of Munjal before. Nor personally nor from his previous company Andale. Also I did not see any chances as to how it would have happen without Blogs (atleast I could not see it happening in the foreseeable future). This connection is just one more good example of “Power of Blogs”. Now coming back to Munjal’s post, he writes My thesis is: it is just too hard to translate ads you see in print to registrations online. A reader has to read the article, remember the name, find the URL, and next time they are in front of a computer – remember to go there. In an online article, you click and you are there “. I agree and I am a good example of this. I see so many good deals on the road (Banners), I see printed banners on the car advertising about their products and services. Recently there was a Nice looking small black Mini that had some really good deal for Home Loans. I did try to remember the website name while I was driving the car and the intention was to check the website when I get home, but that never happened and now I can’t even remember the website name. The only thing I remember is it was a good way of marketing the product on Black Mini! Now can’t write the URl’s while driving can I? So that business might have lost a prospective customer and I might have lost a good home loan deal.
I guess similar things must be happening to other printed media as well. Personally it’s been a really long time since I touched a news paper or even a printed magazine. As far as I remember, the only time I have to forcefully go through the magazines is when I go for a hair cut. There is nothing else to do there while I am in the que there. So rather than starring at strangers, I think it might be better even if I just look at pictures in the magazines! Where as with online media, if I find something interesting, I take an action there and there. Either I visit the site, or if it looks interesting than I will put it under Del.icio.us or I will link to it. And ofcourse if I am onto it and if I like the service/article/product than I will verbally tell it to my friends, email them about it or blog about it. And as we all know, if somebody recommends it to us, the chances are more that we will atleast try that service or product once.
Secondly I think online mention of a service is more valuable than a print media is because of ageing of the media. If my name was mentioned in today’s newspaper along with a URL address of my blog, people will only be reading that newspaper today or at the most tommorrow. Than I don’t see many people going through the old newspaper to read the news!. Whereas with online media, if the article was interesting and useful, people will search for it and when they find it they might click on the link mentioned in there. So the life of the online article is virtually for ever and is easilly accessible as well compared to print media’s.
Thirdly, getting coverage in online media is cheap and easy where as getting coverage/press in print media is not cheap.
Fourth benefit is people can give feedback to what’s written onlne easily, which I don’t is possible with print media. Now listening to feedbacks (and responding to them) and improving the products is very important to any company these days.
So coming back to Munjal Shah, I had a chat with him on Skype (having your IM id’s on your blog is another good way to connect to your customers). As always I was feeling very comfortable talking to a complete stranger and was talking to him like I have known him for ages. We shared some thoughts and he showed me a tool which I will blog bout later. Now Munjal’s group is doing some new and innovative work and we hope to see their product soon. It is related to digital photographs and he said his product does not have any competition as of yet. So good luck to Munjal and his group for this product. Munjal I can give you a hand if you want beta developers who are there just to find bugs and complain about them
. Although I don’t have 30,000 photographs, I atleast have nearly 2 GB of photos on my hard disk now. So apart from the fact that he’s a techie and working on a innovative product, why is connecting with Munjal important to me? One because he is another India (or atleast he has roots from India ( I can tell that by his name and last name), secondly he is a gujarati (people coming from the state of Gujarat n India) and so am I and probably he speaks gujarati too. And it’s a good feeling to see one of your kinds moving ahead and doing something big and innovative. So all this happened because of Blogs and thanks to Scoble for doing another great job, one that he is best at, linking people together.
TEJAS PATEL'S LIFESTREAM 