Google goes shopping, Buys Waze for $1B

The deal with the Israeli app maker Waze has finally come through and Google, as earlier rumored, has acquired the crowd-sourcing app maker for over a billion dollar.

Waze is a mobile navigation app which uses crowd-sourcing to find places and routes. The app has a strong community of app users who have feared that the Google will interfere with the app features. But these doubts have been put to rest in the official press release wherein Google has stated that the product development of Waze will remain in Israel and work as a separate unit.

Google Maps will use some of the Waze features to improve the traffic related info for the users and Waze will use Google's search capabilities. Waze has been of much interest to Facebook and Apple in the past and Facebook had actively shown interest in buying the mobile startup.

One thing is for sure with Google's acquisition of Waze - This will be the fastest way to make Google's mapping product, Google maps, slick and competitive.

Stuck in Apple's Skeuomorphic world?

Apple has recently launched iOS7 and it will be compatible with only its latest devices - iPhone5, iPod Touch and iPad2/iPad mini. The iPhone 4S and  4 will only get the new look and few of the features. All the older versions like iPhone3 will have to work only with iOS6.

Now Apple is known for its skeuomorphic designs and there have been talks about how iPhone3 and below will be stuck in the skeuomorph universe of iOS6. But that is not a bad thing. Read on to find out why.

A skeuomorph is a design technique like any other and it also has the tendency to be misused. To define it more clearly - A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains the original structure only as an ornament in the newer design. An example would be phone's address book icon which still displays the physical address book. The image of the physical address book is an ornament in the newer design.

No doubt that Apple has gone overboard in its designs of apps over the years but that is not necessarily a bad thing. A skeuomorphic design is made to simplify the product use and to make it slick.  Providing an image of glass thermometer in a weather app familiarizes the user with the expected functionality the app and hence increase the app usage.

Reinventing Job Search

Job search is a tricky subject.The paradigm of searching for job has shifted from ruffling through the pages of employment newspaper to websites like Naukri, Monster, Shine and Times Jobs. Applicants have started maintaining their professional profiles on these websites in order to facilitate a search for the recruiters.

Services like Headhonchos and IIMjobs have segmented this job market and targeted the premium end of it. These services are hugely popular within the elite end of job seekers who do not wish to start their searches with generalized job portals. These sites also provide other premium features of applying on applicant's behalf and some of them also claim that the candidate does not even need to go for the first round of interview.

The job search is obviously a lucrative market with many students with professional education are entering the job market every year. Linkedin, world's largest professional network, had denied adding the job search feature to its product, before ultimately succumbing to the opportunity present in this sector. They provide a paid feature through which an applicant can become featured applicant for a job along with few mails that can be sent directly to the recruiter.

Each of these players have built onto the basic job search function and have tried to provide enhanced set of features. They have used various marketing techniques for improved targeting and segmentation. But none of them can really be called an innovator as far as this space is concerned. This was true till yesterday but not today. Enter: Rich Barton.

Rich Barton foresaw an impact internet was going to have on our lives way back in 1996 when he started Expedia, when he still was an employee at Microsoft. He sold this company for over $3.5B in 2003 and have invested in several others. The product that we are going to discuss today at Slick products is one of his  companies in job search arena called Glassdoor. The name of the website co-relates with the transparency of services provided by them.

Instead of opening just another job search site in a crowded market, Rich went on to bring innovation aat the product level. He added the extremely popular anonymous employee feedback to the job search functionality and has brought about a unique differentiation. An applicant can read through the list of multiple reviews for a company, basically having an access to the inside view of the company , and can then make up his/her mind on the job application. Another feature which provides an average salary information at various levels in the company is also pretty interesting and becoming hugely popular. The reviews on Glassdoor are unbiased and negative employee reviews are also as much part of the website as is positive employee feedback.

Glassdoor is also integrated with facebook which allows you to find which of your friends from the social network are on Glassdoor. It also tells which of your friends or friends of friends currently work at or have worked at any particular company. This also allows you to get a more personalized and trustable feedback about these organizations

Glassdoor started in the US, and now provides services in UK, Australia, Canada and in
our India as well. Many of the established job search portals have started taking notice of this latest entrant in job search market and are forced to innovate to stay with the market trend. Although Glassdoor's size and presence in India is still small, I can see it becoming a major player in the times to come and significantly impacting the job search behaviors of applicants.

SEO tips for your website

Good content is the most important thing which results in a website's success. The second most important thing is a good SEO strategy in place. Most of the web designers forget this. SEO looks like this big black box which is super hard to understand and accomplish. Surprisingly it is not so and just keeping few things in mind, a web designer can easily create a SEO friendly website.

Always keep in mind that the website is created for the users and not for the search engines. But you cannot ignore search engines because they help in facilitating the targeted user's passage to your site. By keeping these below pointers in mind, an SEO friendly website can be created and some common errors can be avoided.

• Links - Back links to your website from the websites which are hugely popular increases the PageRank of your site. Although PageRank is not the only criteria for search engine success, it is definitely an important one. Also more important than the number of links is the quality of links and so always go for the relevant links.
• Keywords - Always be sure of what is your site's purpose and what are your most important keywords that you wish to target. Keeping these in the title,header,H1,H2, H3 helps in getting your site listed when the user searches for these keywords. Also keep in mind the mobile specific keywords that will be used for your site's search.
• Speed - Google is obsessed with speed. So it will be helpful if your site does not take much time to load completely. Google has recently announced that speed will be one of the factors for determining placement in a search engine.
• Avoid AJAX and Flash. Googlebot or Spider generally cannot read the content placed within a JavaScript   code.
• Use Facebook OpenGraph and Twitter Cards API's to engage and share on social platforms
• Stay away from accidentally blocking your website's content by placing in in Robots.txt. Spiders will not be reading through this file.
• Use "next" and "prev" and make sure the links point to correct pages
• Optimize images and videos on your website - Keywords should be included in the alt tag and names of images.
• Attribute content to known and trusted authors thereby make use of Google's Author rank to improve search engine rankings
• Use Google analytics to track what users are doing on your site

No one can guarantee that the site will be placed at the top in the search results of Google. But every web designer can work towards the same by  following some easy to implement SEO practices.

Why is SlideShare important?

Most of us have used the presentation sharing services of SlideShare. I used it a lot during my MBA days when the life objective used to be to make as many Power point presentations as humanly possible and to present them to faculty in order to get good grades for the assignments. Many of us have also taken inspiration (read : copied) from the valuable content on multitude of subjects.

Working professionals, apart from the students, are another major consumer set for the SlideShare's services. You can upload your slides, documents, Pdfs and even videos. You can use the Zipcast feature and organize web meetings from remote locations. You can even pitch to the clients, share your presentations with them and engage them with through video or audio. The presenter controls the slides but the participants can move them forward and back. You can also hold your webinars using zipcasts. Real time messaging between participants is enabled using HTML5 features. As you can imagine, the number of use cases for this feature can be many depending on your communication need.

Now that is all about students and working professionals. You must be thinking on how does SlideShare be of much use to the Businesses and Marketers. Todd Wheatland, author of  The Marketers Guide to SlideShare, offers three compulsive reasons for the marketers to take notice of the growing power of SlideShare -

• Traffic - SlideShare has over 60 million visitors a month who view over 3 billion slides monthly. SlideShare is one of the top 150 websites in the world and one of the top 50 in India.
• Business Audience - This platform is mainly used by businesses and student community, giving quality audiences for your brand
• Leads - A simple tool called Leadshare helps you set up and manage your campaigns and lets you collect leads. Lead collection forms help you do this by simply being part of your slides.

The public content on SlideShare can be copied and reused by anyone. With the amount of content present with SlideShare, they are easily the biggest muscle in the content marketing business. With more and more businesses diverting their marketing monies to content related marketing, SlideShare's value will soon be evident more clearly.

SlideShare follows a Freemium model for its services. The basic upload of content is a free service which makes your content public. The paid services start from $19 a month and gives access of analytics to you. Also you have the option to make your content private, have an ad-free zipcast,  and upload videos.
Using gold and platinum services allows the custom creation of lead forms, geo targeting and customization of your profile pages.

Your profile pages are equivalent to your channels on Youtube. These channels have a Follow button which allows brands to have a following, a service very similar to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Customizing your pages in sync with your brand profile allows for a seamless synergy between your brand's website and your profile on any other medium. SlideShare's widgets can be directly embedded into your site. This is similar to a Youtube plugin on your site to play videos. You can also promote your site or blog on SlideShare by uploading your content there and thereby bringing the traffic to your site.

Two words define SlideShare in my view - Social and Content. With more and more advertising budgets keep getting directed towards social media and content marketing, SlideShare holds a very unique advantage in this evolving ecosystem and has become very important for businesses and consumers alike. An acquisition by LinkedIn has also done a wealth of good by bringing in the two biggest professionally inclined networks to make use of each other's services. As of Jan'13,  LinkedIn has 200 million active users worldwide. And these users are the prime consumers for SlideShare's services.

Product vision of SlideShare has always been more focused on the width of services than the depth and engagement with the user. Using Agile methodologies to the core, the product has been pivoted multiple times and improved upon. In future, it will be interesting to note the features that they come up with to help meet marketers social objectives, as they vie for a bigger cut of the social media ad budget.

We will continue to track the product and company's progress very closely here at SlickProduct. In the meanwhile, I would strongly advice for you to opt for the $19 silver service and give it a try.  

What is a DMP and why is everyone going crazy about it ?

Data Management Platforms or the DMPs, as they are commonly called are the latest buzzwords in the field of advertising technology. They  are being discussed at every technology event among advertisers and publishers with similar curiosity. So what are these DMPs and what all are they capable of? Read on.

A data management platform is a platform service based on the SaaS model which is licensed to organizations. A DMP centralizes the advertising data from various digital touch points that a client might have, combines that data into a common repository, and then creates buckets of data which show a similar behavior. The advertising campaigns can then be targeted to these specialized buckets which eventually result in much improved campaign performances.

An advertiser runs its campaigns on various mediums - both online and offline. From the online medium, campaigns could be running on different platforms,services and inventory types.Campaigns could be running on video, Search, Social, Mobile and Display inventories by different vendors and they could be targeted to multiple products from the same advertiser.

Campaign data from various online mediums can be combined to club users who show particular behaviors, and various permutations of the same can be achieved. For example, some of the interesting use cases for a car manufacturer are - People who visit their website, People who have liked their products on social media networks, people who show interest in the product category, people who are interested in competitors products, people who have shown their like or dislike across multiple mediums,  and people who have demonstrated a strong interest in any particular product by committing an action like ordering a test ride for a car. So the possibilities are endless and depends on the campaign's objectives to decide on what kind of users they want to target.

How a DMP achieves this is by letting the advertiser place its tag, on the websites from where they want to collect data, and when a user visits those pages, a cookie is generated for the user. This cookie is unique and user's activity can now be tracked across the internet. This way if a user has shown interest in any particular product of an advertiser across a channel, say brand's website, this user can then be shown an ad when he visits Facebook or Youtube through the use of an ad server with targeting capabilities on these mediums.

These days DMPs have also come up with the abilities to tie an advertiser's online campaign data with offline campaign data as well as with sales CRM. Many vendors are working towards achieving this functionality ahead of others and some have found success as well. Major notable vendors in the field of DMPs are Lotame,Adobe and Turn. A DMP is also known as Audience Manager as the buckets of users created in the system are called Audiences.

Facebook has started verifying pages and profiles

Facebook has started verifying the pages and profiles now for the people and businesses. A verified status will be given to the account with this is highlighted with a blue tick mark next to the name on the profile.

Verification of accounts is something which twitter has been doing since the start and is one of the reasons for higher twitter use among celebrities when they want to connect with their fans and followers. Allowing this feature is a move to bring in the celebrities and other high profile people to Facebook and hence allowing the fans to follow them here.

Twitter has traditionally been a platform of choice for people who have loads of followers interested in what they are saying. This feature has been rolled out globally and celebs everywhere have started getting their pages a verified status. From Mark Zuckerberg to our very own Amitabh Bachchan have their pages verified. The blue tick mark is also visible when these people are searched through the search box on Facebook.

Facebook has not reveled their methodology on how the verification process is being conducted. Twitter also has never  revealed its verification methodology ever. If you have a large number of followers, you also can get your  account a verified status.

Advanced feature set for Enterprise Social Media Management Softwares

I wrote about what Enterprise social media management softwares are and about the basic services they provide. In this article I will talk about the advanced features on which vendors these days are differentiating themselves.

The ESMMS market is still not fully developed and there is a lot of scope for innovation. Both big and small players are competing in this category with varying feature sets. One thing that is very clear at the stage of market right now is that there is no clear leader in this space but 3-4 very strong contenders for the same.

The clients are waking up to the fact that having a social media strategy in place is a key to realize their business goals and so have started investing seriously into the ESMMS packages.

The vendors in the markets have started building the advanced features in order to differentiate themselves from the crowd and hence arrive at a unique selling proposition.

Some of these features which these vendors are looking at are -

• Automating the responds/replies to posts and comments
• Delegation of tasks across various team members spread across different locations
• Access controls for the team members 
• Compliance with company standards and legal compliance to avoid disasters
• Synchronization with client's other marketing softwares  - Email databases, web analytics software, Sales CRMs
• Sentiment analysis based on keywords

No vendor in the market currently has a solution that serves every client's need and hence a lot of scope for innovation in this industry is still left. Apart from these advanced product features, vendors also provide a host of services to the clients which range from the set-up and on-boarding to digital media strategy consulting.

Enterprise Social Media Management Softwares

Enterprise social media management Software (ESMMS) are product packages which help the big enterprises to manage their social media presence across channels and geographies. What this essentially means is that big enterprises can control their social media activities across different channels like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Blogs, Company and Product websites and various other social networks from a single screen.
Social media is composed primarily of three types of media - Paid, Earned and Owned Media.

Most of the ESMMS vendors these days have either built or acquired the capability to cater to paid social media needs of their clients along with the features to support earned and owned media.The basic features that a client looks for in an ESMMS are

- Ability to monitor content related to brand
- Ability to publish and broadcast the message
- Ability to respond to user's message

Monitoring is made available with the help of building various listening functions in the package which captures the brand mentions across various social network pages present in different geographies.
Publishing requires the ability to post brand status updates across social networks so as to to reach maximum users. This feature allows posting of various kinds of content - text, images, video and polls.
Ability to respond requires the ability to respond to user posts as well as to user comments. This could either be used to respond to consumer's complain or to just thank a consumer for his feedback.

ESMMS also allows various workflow tools that allow delegation of tasks among team members. This feature enables a social media management team members present across different locations in the world managing multiple location wise brand pages to coordinate and streamline the brand communication.
Analytics and Reporting is a main feature provided by these packages which help the brands measure their social presence and in turn help in evaluating the business value driven through effort. This helps in establishing the social ROI by tying the social goals to the brand goals.

ESMMS are also known as Social Relationship software(SRS). Various vendors are present in the market these days and although all of them provide the same basic set of features, the ability to go deep into the advanced features set differentiates them.