Philosopreneur

Courtsey: thesituationist

Social Networks pervade the internet.Facebook CEO, Mark Zukerberg  often talks about social graphs and the new emerging business  model(and what not). Despite the apparent failure of Facebook to  leverage its business potential , there is a ring of truth in the  almost prophetic pronouncement of the CEO of the biggest social  network site.

Just like links have deep mathematical structures (which Google  exploited to the hilt), Social Networks have even deeper and more  meaningful structures ready to be exploited. And it has mathematical  precedence as a study of Network Theory.

Starting with isolated research in the early twentieth century , and  following with significant gaps in research progress, network theory  has recently formed a broad theoretical discipline. And it has just  just come of age. The most appealing aspect is the live and  extensive hot bed to test and exploit its theories in the form of  Social Networks like Facebook,Myspace, Orkut etc.

Network Theory fits within a broader theoretical discipline known as  complexity theory(the study of complex systems). Complexity theory is interdisciplinary and studies complexity on  multiple levels. Example of complex systems include weather  patterns, food webs, traffic flow. Network Theory is a subset of  complexity theory that specifically studies complex networks. These  theories overlap and influence each other and their boundaries are  fuzzy.

In this series I will shine a light on the results in Network theory  and how they can be leveraged to push social network marketing to a  totally new level. Think Yahoo catalogs and then think Google’s  intelligent search engine, I am talking about that kind of level up.

You must have heard of “ small world effect“, and if not that  then you surely must have heard of “ six degrees of separation“. It  is hypothesized that you are separated by anyone else in the tangled  network with average of six: means that there is someone who knows  someone who knows someone who knows you. The average length of this  chain is six.Now this is a very powerful result. And once you see  something powerful, the best thing is to start asking questions–  lots of it: How can I leverage it? Can it explain something that we  have noticed already? How can I manage that change now that I know this?  Can I innovate on it? Does it open a new dimension for marketing? If  yes then how can I get on it and exploit it?

It is very important to ask these kind of questions because the  questions themselves(even if you don’t have an answer right now)  show you that we find marketing space crowded only because we have  not discovered other marketing dimensions. Imagine living in a two dimensional  world and all of a sudden discovering the third dimension, and think  what kind of mobility that knowledge will give you.

These kind of results are fundamentally different from tactics  marketers apply to navigate through the crowd. These kind of results  show you new dimensions, not just how to eke out a living in an  already crowded space. And it is extremely important that you  yourself ask the questions before you see the answers.

And in short, what is that phenomena again? The phenomena is Network  theory which opens up a new dimensions in internet marketing, and  more precisely social network marketing. And when a new dimension  opens up the rules change, even for the dimensions you are already  working on.

It is very important that you think about it. Leave your thoughts, questions etc in the comments and I will try to address most of them plus what I have to say in my next post.

As Discovery Channel would say –”Think again.”

Tags: Complex systems, Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Social network

Courtsey : lostartofblogging.com

We will explore Social Media in the light of Network Theory in the next few posts. And figure out ways how to tap into the mathematics of Network Theory to make the market work for us.Here are some starters for you.

1. We don’t need a Social Media ROI model :Here you will get some very pertinent ROI models for the social media.Essential read !
2. 3 Surprising Mathematical Principles That Every Persuasive Marketer Must Know: It is a blog post based on my presentation to the marketing team of my erstwhile employer, Mindvalley. I talk about 3 little known mathematical principles, tied to psychology, which will tremendously help you in reaching out to the market.
3. How to Understand Your Audience: Data Collection & Analysis: Maki’s blog is one of my favorites . Here he details various useful metrics to consider while< analyzing your blog traffic and gives some tips on how to Read the rest of this entry »

   Tags: Business, Consumer, Marketing, Psychology, Social Media, Social network

Strategy:

A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. Strategy is differentiated from tactics, or immediate actions, with resources at hand by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed.

In the last post we saw how Bill Gates used a Portfolio of Strategies(henceforth called PoS) to remove some unnecessary uncertainties from the market. Today, we will extend and innovate on the PoS strategy in relation to internet marketing.

There are clear identifiable steps to deploy PoS strategy. And they can be roughly classified in the following manner:

1. Identify a global aim. First you have to identify the common meeting point where you want to go with your PoS.For example, the global aim of Microsoft was to be the leading PC software company. Each strategy in the PoS was achieving this common goal.
2. Contextualize your PoS. Just identifying a goal is not enough. Next comes putting your PoS in a context. Contextualizing mandates setting limitations.Let’s say your global aim is to make money through blogging, then contextualizing the PoS would amount to Read the rest of this entry »

   Tags: Bill Gates, Marketing, Microsoft, Strategy, Uncertainty

Image via CrunchBase

I had some major misunderstandings about Microsoft’s Windows strategy. After some research I realized even more what a genius Bill Gates is. (Even though I might disapprove of some of MS’s policies, but that is besides the point.)

In one sentence Bill Gate’s strategy for Operating Systems can be called Portfolio of Strategies.

It was 1987, and MS-DOS was challenged by more graphical and intuitive Operating Systems. And Microsoft was still a $346 million minnow. The then giants were already eying the OS market in various ways:

1. IBM was building a multitasking OS/2 system.
2. AT&T in collaboration with Sun Microsystem and Xerox was making its own user friendly OS.
3. HP in collaboration Digital Equipment was building its own version of UNIX Operating system.
4. Apple already had a highly graphical OS, and it kept out-innovating Microsoft.

To say that odds were stacked against Microsoft would be an understatement.

Apparently Bill Gates had two options: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Apple, Bill Gate, IBM, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, Operating system, Sun Microsystem, Windows

You have journeyed all the way with me, and we are here. Let me remind you of our wonderful journey together. And let me re-introduce myself. I am the Entrepreneur. I was tiny and unicellular, I moved around in the prebiotic soup. I am sure , you mighty observer, must have dismissed my micro and insignificant activity. I was helpless and vulnerable, and many the likes of me just vanished without a whimper.I somehow managed to survive, barely. I just hanged on enough till the next major evolutionary step. Despite the harsh conditions Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Evolution, Physical law, Psychology, Reality, Social Sciences

Courtsey : http://www.cindoc.csic.es

Imagine millions of neurons made up of simple chemical substances. And when they are meshed together they give rise to an amazing phenomena what we call as human brain.The magic of human brain does not occur because of the individual neurons but because of the way they are connected. Any system has two parts: component and connections. Almost always it is the type of connections which govern the system’s behavior.And those connections give rise to behavior which Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Applications, Combinatorics, Complex systems, Connectivity, Emergence, Graph theory, Human brain, Math, World Wide Web

Coutsey : www.scu.edu

There are a few books which impact you on so many levels and from so many angles. ‘ Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty‘ by Prof. Muhammad Yunus is one of them for me. The book is about the story of Grameen-Bank and how it came about, how it expanded and how it changed the life of millions of people. The book is just unputdownable.(Grameen-Bank and Prof.Yunus got the Noble Peace Prize in 2006.) I read around 200 pages in just first sitting.(it has 277 pages.)Through this book I witnessed the very soul of entrepreneurship and have gleaned some lessons for you:

(1) Believe in the creative spirit of yourself and others around you. When Prof.Yunus started the Grameen Bank his basic premise was the power of creativity of the borrowers of micro-loans. Without believing in the creative spirit of the poor borrowers, there is no way micro lending would have succeeded. Even if you are just self employed, if you believe in the creativity of your model and the people who use it, quickly your model will be adopted far and wide. That is also what happened with open source technology.

(2)An entrepreneur has to see through social conditioning. Entrepreneurship has one major thing in common with philosophy of science. That thing is Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Bank, Banker to the Poor, Business, Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize, Poverty

Courtsey: farm1.static.flickr.com

I love communicating with people and sharing ideas with them. And most of the conversations are
fulfilling and productive and we both end up learning from each other. However, there are times
when I find some glaring logical fallacies in our language which hinder communication and stunt intellectual growth.I do not mind them when we are talking informally, but in any serious conversation logical fallacies can create major misunderstandings.Those are the ghosts worthy of exorcism. Here are some common logical fallacies which I observed.

(1) “Statistically most of the Indian policemen have mustache. Mohan is an Indian policeman hence he should have a mustache.”
This sort of argument suffers from a basic statistical mistake. Statistics talks about things in bulk. It does not say anything about one particular case. Hence to draw particular conclusions from statistical data is fallacious. Mohan might be an Indian policeman but you cannot infer from that that he must have a mustache.

(2) “I found evidence of no disease.”
There is no such thing like Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Fallacy, Informal Logic, Loaded question, Luck, Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic, Statistics

Mostly it is the questions which really matter. Einstein said that if we ask the right questions, much of our work is done.

Not a while ago I did an interesting experiment. I wanted to see how much order can emerge from randomness.So I made these two computer programs.And the results suggested some powerful questions. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Giant Panda, Humour, Program stream, Randomness

SocialRank seemed like a brilliant idea. You get to the far flung niches and aggregate and rank the blogs in each niche.And you get a huge market of eyeballs. And not only our intuition but also a mathematical idea supported this assumption.That mathematical idea is called ‘The Long Tail‘, much popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name.I remember that this book was touted as the prime inspiration for the creation of SocialRank. When I first heard about it I was excited too. I was supposed to architect and program the algorithm which would do the job.And so I did.

As the work progressed, I took a peek into the book, which was the basis of the SocialRank marketing strategy. The more I thought about the idea the more it seemed dubious. And one of the major factors pointing towards the unsoundness of the idea was the mathematical giant named Benoit B.Mandelbrot(He invented Fractal Mathematics and he is called the father of Chaos Theory).He wrote in one of his papers Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Anita Elberse, Chris Anderson, Education, Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business School, Long Tail, Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More