K Srikrishna

The Entrepreneur Life

Category: Business (Page 6 of 8)

Matters pertaining to business

Marketing Your Services – Lessons from a Journey to Bhimavaram

March 26, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Vijayawada Junction

Recently I had to travel to Bhimavaram in West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh. Of course I had to look it up on Google Maps to figure out where it was. It’s about a 120km north northeast of Vijayawada. As my  daughter had to be there at 9am on a Saturday morning and had forgotten to tell me but five days before, I had to scramble to make the arrangements. Now that I’m back in Bangalore I realize somewhat belatedly how everything we needed was handled almost a 100% online.

The Economist in its latest issue talks of Indian technology firms and where they may be headed. While I didn’t agree with everything they asserted, my own experience of making it to Bhimavaram and back resonates very well with their core premise that technology, the web and mobile have already changed Indian businesses irrevocably. Here’s what I found and learned.

Google – of course this is where it began – with Google Maps figuring out where Bhimavaram was and the nearest airport – Vijayawada in this case. Cleartrip was my next stop to check out airline tickets. Once I found Jet Konnect had the best connections checked out their website as well and bought the tickets there directly. Usually when travelling to a new city, I’d call friends, to see if they had any recommendations for hotels. Given I was travelling with my daughter, I checked TripAdvisor for reviews and everyone seemed to suggest the Taj Gateway awas the way to go. So off I went to TajHotels website. Then I had the bright idea to check hotels right next to them – as in centrally located by not as expensive.  I decided to check out Stayzilla who’s ads I’d seen in Bangalore – and they got me a good deal at the Taj Gateway. Then off it was to find a rental car. I called the Taj up and asked them to refer a cab company. Once again I felt the cab rates were quite high and so a quick Google search revealed a service called Saavari.com that fit the bill – they could get you a cab (including rates, ratings, the works) in practically any city – most importantly in Vijayawada in this instance. However, I couldn’t figure out a few things re quoted price online, so I called them on their toll free number. They said they’d get back to me and never did. So in the meantime I kept searching and here’s where Google Local came in real handy. Several cab companies in Vijayawada had excellent reviews ratings on Google and I reached out to one of them over the phone after checking out rates on their website (which I’m finding hard locate just now). So here we were four days before our travel, with flight tickets, hotel bookings, local taxi rental all done over a couple of hours online and on the phone – to a city we’d never been to, whose language we did not speak and with some measure of perceived safety for my teen traveller.

Lessons learned

  • Online reviews matter – the hotel we ended up staying in had good reviews on TripAdvisor. The cab we used had good reviews on Google local. These were instances of a local supplier beating out a larger national “professional” supplier. Social and community word-of-mouth is getting better, even it’s not from someone personally known to us.
  • Websites matter – Even after locating the cab company via a review, the fact that their website had clear rates, reviews and contact info is what tipped us over. Good websites matter – Savaari.com and Stayzilla I had to look up in my mail trial as I couldn’t recall their names – and in the formers’ case I couldn’t figure out the pricing and latter’s case I had to resort to the phone to resolve issues.
  • Customer service matters – Saavari.com said they’d get back to me and they never did. They had a beautiful website – clean and while my use case was not a clear fit to their standard offerings, phone calls were not returned. Similarly Stayzilla called me back to say that the Taj Gateway room was no longer available – that they’d put me in an another hotel on the same street. To give full credit to them, they constantly followed up but were caught scrambling. The place they finally got me I passed on due to poor reviews on Trip Adivsor. Jet Konnect won over ClearTrip as it was easier to cancel or make changes with them.

This was the first time that I travelled to a new city – let alone a Tier 2/3 town – without seeking direct personal inputs from friends or family and did so at short notice and had a uniformly pleasant experience – despite not speaking a word of Telugu in this instance and carrying minimal cash. Whether web and broadband penetration is where we’d like it to be or not, for businesses the web and mobile have changed how they do business forever.

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3 Steps to Create a Culture of Innovation

November 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

InnovationYesterday I was part of a panel discussion on innovation and entrepreneurship at the opening of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Center (IEDC) at the Dayanand Sagar College of Engineering. One of the first questions the moderator posed was “How does one create a culture of innovation and what role does leadership play?”

To me this is not that different from the question, How does one create a culture of ______ (fill in the blank) – for instance courtesy and consideration. You start by being polite – kind and courteous. Similarly creating a culture of innovation within our companies, divisions or teams is to start by being innovative. What does that mean?

To me it means three things

a] INSPIRE Talk about, share and celebrate innovation – set aside time, whether a Friday lunch or before your weekly team meeting to show what you mean by innovation. Bring in a mechanical water sprinkler and share with your team why you think it is innovative or better yet ask them what is innovative about it. A clasp on someone’s chain, a pain-free blood sugar measurement tool – in other words – “the ordinary” and the extraordinary that’s around us every day. Allows you to discuss and develop a shared sense of what is innovation and over the common misconception that only a cure for cancer can be innovation. Over time this can be things that your own team or company are innovated, but don’t wait for it to be done in-house

b] MEASURE Put in a process, where the team can spend time focusing on problems – which allow scope for innovation – could be in technology, internal processes or methods or any other function within your business. Intuit for instance created a process for employees to share ideas and seek inputs which has eventually become a product they now offer their customers. And most importantly put in measures — only that which gets measured will get done. So when you talk about it, ask about it, measure it, everyone begins to pay attention to it and that’s how a culture of caring about innovation gets slowly built up.

c] REWARD & RECOGNIZE Nothing works like recognizing the work people are doing and rewarding innovative behavior. A critical element here is not to celebrate success alone or what is commonly perceived as success – ie a new product that launches or a new idea that’s implemented, but to recognize and reward risk taking. Unless we create a culture within our companies of tolerating mistakes and viewing them as a way to learn and do better, it will be very hard to create a culture of innovation. As Gordon Moore, founder of Intel put it “I view this year’s failure as next year’s opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly.”

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Culture, people & other imponderables

November 7, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Don’t worry that your kids don’t always listen to you, worry that they are always watching you.
— Robert Fulghum

taste [choices]Startups & founders have enough to worry about without adding culture to the mix. Or so it would seem. As Fulghum points out in his own inimitable style, culture is what is being built as you worry about execution, hiring or product market fit.

What most of us don’t realize is that we are actively, even if blindly building culture in our companies every waking moment. The trouble is when we do this without being mindful or engaged, we usually end up building a culture that we are surprised about as it invariably bites us in the rear.

Starting from the moment you step into the office, people see if you greet the security guard, whether you get your own cup of tea or put it away when done. Whether you text in meetings or worse yet when you answer the phone during a 1:1 meeting. Even if you answered yes, yes, yes and no & no, they see what you do or say when a senior team member flames another, or a team member screams at a vendor. When you are quiet about a white lie to a customer or don’t question why a payment is being withheld, you are communicating loudly and shaping culture – though not necessarily the way you want.

So culture in a startup is not an option – but what sort of culture you want is a choice you can make.

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3 Steps to More Effective Emails

April 7, 2012 / / 0 Comments
Novell evolution email client Nederlands: Nove...

Several years ago I read an article by Esther Dyson on making email effective and it’s stayed with me to this day. Granted some of its resonance stemmed from the insights Esther shares in her article (you can read the original here) But more of it is due to the fact that I see badly written emails nearly every week. And this is particularly galling when it is someone who wants you to do something. They need a favor, an introduction or your time but can’t be bothered to write short, specific and clear emails. Things get worse in a corporate setting, when various political considerations come into play and more time is spent on figuring who’s on the To:, CC: lists than even the body of the mail. Of course the worst mails are the ones written by our inner reptiles without a human editor or better sense intervening before the SEND button is hit.

Despite numerous claims otherwise, email is here to stay and continues to grow from strength to strength. But here are three simple steps each of us can take to make email more effective and less painful.

Here are the three steps:

SPECIFIC – keep your emails specific. If you can’t state why you are writing an email is 10 words or less, you shouldn’t be writing the email. Usually an email is a call for a specific action by the reader – in which instance it helps to call out the fact that an action is required (I use the initials AR in the subject line) and the action itself in the subject line. The more specific the mail the greater the likelihood that it will be read and acted upon. It’s not the family christmas letter where you pile in all and sundry information whether pertinent or not. By keeping the mail specific, it also usually cuts down on the number of people who need to be copied on it.

CLEAR – having decided to be specific, it is critical to be clear. Far too many of the mails I receive require interpretation and often  help from my colleagues to decode or my having to ask the sender, what it was they were trying to say – which generates even more emails. And no this doesn’t happen only with  Japanese writers, who can be excused as non-native speakers of the English language but nearly every corporate email writer, who perpetually seem to be in a hurry to get as many emails out as possible. The problem of clarity is compounded in emails that are not specific to one topic and things go from bad to worse in no time.

SHORT – keep your mails short. This is one I’ve struggled with for a long time myself. Brevity requires clarity on our part and focusing on one topic or subject should ideally make it easier to keep it short. All too often long emails are a result of both lack of focus – trying to cover a lot of ground in a single email – as though we are charged by the email and lack of clarity – not sure what is we are saying or worse yet laziness to take the effort to say it as precisely and concisely as it can be said.  This is also the most misunderstood piece of email etiquette in my opinion. There as those who take brevity to an extreme, that you are not sure if this was a SMS you received – there’s neither a greeting (who’s it addressed to? was it meant for you or others on the cc list) nor a close – almost feels like you are being shouted at (even if it’s not in ALL CAPS) – worse yet you are not sure what it is they are saying. And others who haven’t yet left the previous century and their notes are filled with both flowery language or overly obsequious greetings and the use of big words (such as obsequious) when shorter words would do and anything less than two pages is short.

The good news is that short emails have to be specific and clear to be effective.  Each of these attributes builds on the other and you will find your emails will not only be more effective but hopefully acting as a model for folks at the other end of the line to emulate.

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When do I need a business model?

September 20, 2011 / / 5 Comments
Business Model Concept

Image by Alex Osterwalder via Flickr

When this question was first posed to me, my immediate response would have been “At the very beginning.” However, upon a little reflection I realized that the answer needs to be a little more nuanced and is not nearly as self-evident as I reckoned. I’d still say  you should have a likely business model in mind, reasonably early in your startup’s life.

Of course, given the treacherous nature of the English language, it’s probably worth defining what a business model is.

Wikipedia defines it as

A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value

and in plain English, according to the fine folks at Walden University,

The term “business model” refers both to the way in which a business creates a product or service and sells it for a profit, and to any document that outlines the process. …The business model of a lemonade stand seems straightforward: make lemonade and sell it to passersby for profit.

Given all the talk of lean startups, I’ve met a number of folks who talk of figuring out their business model even as they roll out their product. Yet a number of sane heads seem to be be reminding us rightly, that a feature ain’t a product ain’t a business. To me fundamentally a business model is figuring out who is going to pay (& hopefully how much) for the service/product we offer. It could be the users, it could be their parents (in the case of children), their companies (for corporate/SMB), advertisers (for free consumer services) or the government – someone, somewhere is going to write a check or whip out a credit card or cash for your product or service.

Once you have a business model you can then figure out how much money you will actually make – your revenues. Done right, you hopefully know what is it going to cost you to deliver it and how long before you can get it to operational breakeven (making more than you spend on a quarterly/monthly/weekly basis.) Of course if the numbers don’t add up in your revenue model, you return to your business model to tweak your assumptions, targets etc., till you can iterate to something that looks like a practical (or at least realistic) business model.

“There’s not a single business model… There are really
a lot of opportunities and a lot of options and
we just have to discover all of them.” Tim O’Reilly

Back to the question of when do you need this? I’d still say start with something as simple as “We’ll provide P for Q, which {Q,R} will pay for in the form of S.

A couple of examples might help illustrate this.

We’ll

“enable consumers to discover relevant videos easily and we’ll make money through advertising” or
“answer academic questions over SMS for high-schoolers.  Parents will pay for the service through subscription.”
“help solar installations achieve higher ROI. OEMs will license our technology or purchase our blackbox.“

This is more a statement of intent than a full fledged business model. Before you go spend a lot of time, figure out whether the world (or at least your target customer group) actually has the problem you reckon you’re solving for them and is willing to pay for it. Once the market need and your product/service fit to that need is established you can return to working up a real business model, that will allow you to build a real business.

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Discretion – a skill founders and CEOs need in spades

July 22, 2011 / / 0 Comments

As parent of two teens, I’d like to claim that my wife and I never argue in front of them. I’d of course be lying. That being said everyone with children knows, that even if their kid can’t rattle off the 5 times table, they can recall every last word you said in your last spousal encounter, down to the tone of voice. And if you are [un]lucky, it will be saved for posterity in their biography.

Now as an entrepreneur, founder or CEO why should this story be relevant to you? Basically, this is a lesson on discretion – or the lack thereof – and how it can come and bite you in the rear!

As an entrepreneur, founder and especially as a CEO, you are going to having some rough times out there – being plagued by self-doubts, or worse yet certainty that you are screwing up. You will also wonder why you are doing what you are doing (or not) and is this whole thing a mistake? You wouldn’t be the first one to have had these thoughts nor are they likely to occur only once.  The question is what should you do when you are thus assailed?

What you should NOT do is share it with your partners – immediately or without reflection. Usually it’s best shared with someone outside your founding team – a friend, an advisor and if you are lucky, with a spouse. This last can be tricky and deserves a whole another blog post.

I have worked in and with multiple startups and started two of my own, where the founders were friends, sometimes having known each other for many years and other times, been colleagues who’d worked with each other. Almost in all cases the co-founders had been friends before becoming business partners.

And in almost everyone of these instances, when one or more founders have been plagued by self doubts, voicing it without forethought to other founders or senior staff has caused immense grief. Not unlike arguing in front of the kids (or other 3rd parties) who have no context on my wife and our deep abiding love or other ongoing issues 🙂

In every case, talking about it with a non-stakeholder first would have done away with much thrashing and grief that otherwise ensued. Talking it out with a third party always worked better – in terms of achieving distance which helped in gaining clarity and perspective before looking for answers.

Many a times, our self doubts maybe no more than a fleeting moment of vulnerability – or the result of a bad day or week, a setback. We may bounce right back. At other times, they may be grounded in facts – in that we are operating at the limits of our ability or capabilities, personal life (or the lack of one) may be intruding into our professional lives or we may be avoiding a critical set of actions/decisions at work to avoid unpleasantness.

And if there are real issues at play that need to be brought up to your partners, it should not be done in a flippant comment or regrettable aside that can be misconstrued or worse. It can be presented with some distance and perspective that you’d have gained in discussing it with a non-stakeholder first. This alone is a good reason to seek out a mentor or advisor, but almost any friend, who’s not involved in your business and has no axe to grind will do.

So the next time you think of making a casual remark to the other founders, especially those who are your friends, bite your tongue. You are a parent – or at least need to behave as a responsible one – if you want to keep the job!

4 Degrees of Separation – The Indian Network

February 15, 2011 / / 0 Comments
Photo: marfis75 via Compfight

Photo: marfis75 via Compfight

As with many profound discoveries it began innocuously enough.

“I don’t believe that there are truly a billion Indians,” my friend Marcel has remarked more than once to me. Of course, when he first made this statement as a graduate student, maybe because it was after a late night party at Ms. Chan’s, I didn’t take him seriously. However, the events of the past few years, particularly each time I meet someone new, have convinced me that he’s probably on to something: There don’t seem to be a billion of us.

“Please meet my partner Habib, he’s coming down to the entrepreneur’s meet next week in Bangalore.”

Jaideep, a classmate who now was living in the U.S., and I had reconnected last Christmas at our 25th reunion. Despite, or more likely because of, the amount of libations consumed, he figured I must know a thing or two and asked me to share it with his Mumbai-based business partner.

Habib and I did connect over the phone soon after at a startup event and agreed to meet outside the auditorium just before lunch. When I made my way out of the hall a few minutes before midday, I found small clumps of people discussing the morning presentations and their own businesses. After several “Hail-fellow-well-met” intercepts, I heard my phone ring. It was Habib. As we exchanged “Where are you ats?” I spotted a bearded gentleman with a phone to his ear, standing next to my friend Dhruv just outside the gate.

“Habib?” I asked tentatively and the gentleman stuck out his hand

“You are Srikrishna?”

Inevitably, the discussion of “How do you know…” ensued between Dhruv (with whom Habib had worked for several years at an ad agency) and me. The longer we spoke, the more folks we found we knew in common.

Scientists in the U.S. as many as 50 years ago began exploring what they then termed “chains of acquaintances.” In fact, Stanley Milgram, then a young social psychologist (apparently you can study practically anything at Harvard) did his famous package-mailing experiment to see how short these chains of acquaintances were.

He mailed packages to 296 people asking them to post them on to a “final recipient.” None of them was told where the final recipient actually lived; just his name, occupation and some personal details (these were pre-Internet and pre-Google days, of course).

The folks who received the package were supposed get it delivered by passing it on to someone with whom they were on a first-name basis and who might have a better chance of finding the final recipient. Astonishingly, even without any Indians or Chinese being involved, the packages made it to their destinations in less than five hops.

Hollywood got in on the act with “Six Degrees of Separation,” based on the play of the same name by John Guare.

Before you know it, folks studying crickets and how diseases spread started working on this “Small World” theory. While the folks at the University of Virginia, in an urge to create something useful, released the Kevin Bacon game (look it up), Duncan Watts at Cornell published the first compendium of all key Small World theories.

What however was missing in all these studies is what my friend Dr. Sluiter, keen scientist that he is, formulated as Sluiter’s Lemma on Indian Connectedness or SLIC. I feel like Harrison Ford finding the Ark of the Covenant when I present these lemmas. If only these other folks had stumbled upon it sooner, the Small World theory would have made a whole lot more progress much earlier. But as the old saw goes: Better late than never.

Lemma 1: Any two Indians went to school with each other. Given the average Delhi Public School class has probably 300 kids in five sections, and every kid raised by a self-respecting, card-carrying Indian parent needs to become a doctor or an engineer, it’s almost inevitable that between 12 years of schooling and at least three years of college a good many of us have gone to school with one another. And this does not even count graduate school where a few more links can be forged. I can hear the mathematicians among you stating that the average IIT had only a class size of 400 to 600 and medical schools even less and that those are pretty small numbers. Fear not, Lemma 2 comes to the rescue.

Lemma 2: Or their siblings/friends went to school with each other. Regardless of what you may have read in this paper or other publications about the rise of nuclear families in urban India, we are blessed with a large number of siblings and cousins. When you now factor in all the other kids with whom we played on the street with marbles, tops, gilli-danda, cricket and numerous other sports, it quickly adds up.

Lemma 3: They are related to each other. In the unlikely event two Indians or their siblings or friends did not go to school together, they are usually related. “Oh, he’s my mother’s brother’s wife’s cousin’s son.” (In my case this person also happened to be my classmate in college.) In my brother-in-law’s case, he has found a good part of Tamil Nadu is related by blood — not that surprising when grandparents on either side have 12 siblings.

Lemma 4: If all of the above fail, they are married to each other. Drum roll on this one. Just when you felt that you’ve actually met a couple of Indians who are not connected, you’ll find, as Dr. Sluiter did, that they are married, either to each other or into each other’s families. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference in India, but that’s a story for another day.

This article first appeared in the India Real Time of the Wall Street Journal.

3 Rules to Keep Your Sanity in Social Media

November 1, 2009 / / 0 Comments

“It seems like there is always another social network to join or another tool I’m supposed to learn. How can I keep up?”

You can’t, asserts Alexandra Samuel, CEO of Social Signal in her Harvard Business blog.

SM Marketing Madness @HubSpotImage by HubSpot via Flickr

Like all cliches, the assertion that the blogosphere is one giant echo chamber, has a good deal of truth to it. To newcomers, it appears there are the few and exalted stars of the blogosphere, and a vast ocean of unwashed unread masses, that is the rest of the us bloggers. Unlike in Mumbai or Hollywood, it doesn’t seem you can work your way up, being a waiter, then an extra, minor part player and eventually get that big break to become a star. Or then again, even without the casting couch, maybe building a social media brand is not that different from a movie career. A lot of hard work, some teeth gnashing, a great deal more of prayer,and a dash of luck to achieve your dreams goals.

So let’s learn from the folks who’ve gone before us. Having done a fair amount of stumbling myself, here are the insights I have gained, to keep my sanity in social media. And there’s a benefit to taking the long term view as Marc Meyer reminds us.

the summary

  • focus – pick a few sites to make your presence felt and stick with ’em. Use a tool such as Posterous or Tumblr to be able to write once & publish wide
  • specialize – be something very specific, even if it is to very few people. you are more likely to stand out and enjoy doing this in the long run. Others will find you.
  • community – better to have a few highly interactive friends than vast hordes of “ships that pass by the night”. Participate, give and weed periodically.

Focus We all have only so many hours in a day, that we can devote to any one thing. It is therefore critical to focus on a few – be it blogs you track/read (how many of us have more than 1000 unread posts in our feedreaders?), people you follow on Twitter, social media sites you will be on. If you had to pick only one, I’d choose Posterous or Tumblr – as these are simple ways to set up a your blog, even via email and get things sent out to all the other locations you’d like to be seen in. Sure focusing could mean that some times you are going to pick a Hi5 or a MySpace but find the world’s moved on to a FaceBook – you can move then. And using a tool such as FriendFeed or a Twitter client such as TweetDeck or Seesmic

Specialize Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Even when you think you are specialized, you can probably specialize further. Don’t be another parent blogger or Adobe Air specialist, dive deeper – be a father of pre-teens, or focus on UX on Air alone. It will be scary and will at times seem that you have gone too far. You can always step back, but focus on being yourself and bringing things of value to your reader. While Copyblogger.com and Lifehacker.com seem to have built broad based properties, that is not the place to start IMO, given where the world is in 2009.

Community The raison d’etre of social media is to build a community of interested, if not like-minded, individuals – a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. This implies two-way and many-to-many conversations. The secret to building such a community is to give of yourself first, commenting, re-tweeting, meeting in person and virtually. All best done with small groups first. So focus on building a high degree of interaction, one of high quality rather than quantity. If you view your community as a garden, weeding it is just as important as seeding and watering it.

Focus, specialization and giving to the community will act as a virtuous cycle, if done right.

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7 Easy Steps To Get Started with Social Media

October 28, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Unless you have been living in a cave (or exploring one or spelunking) you’ve been bombarded by stories about Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media. And like most people I know over the age of 30, you have a vague feeling of “Is this something I should be doing?” or “Where the heck do I even start?”

Well look no further. This last year or thereabouts I have spent a good deal of time blogging, poking, tweeting, digging (more like del.icio.us – ing) around the social media sphere trying to separate the chaff from the wheat. While trying to persuade some friends, who I believe have a lot to offer, to start blogging, I realized, having a simple “Here’s what you need to do” might be the best way to get these folks started. In planning for one perfect yet tight post I nearly didn’t do this. Instead have opted now to get started and spell it out as I go. Clearly I build on the shoulders of others who have gone before.

For the skimmers, here is the quick & dirty version

  1. Have a written goal for why you are blogging
  2. Have one handle or name across all media properties
  3. Get started
  4. Do your homework
  5. Give, give and give some more
  6. Work across mediums – not just text
  7. Don’t forget the real world!
  1. Write down your purpose & goal This is as simple as being clear why you are doing this. Not because your boss told you, or your cousin thinks its a good idea or worse yet, your spouse wants you to. It could be as simple as “Coz I want to” which is want most mountaineers seem to state as their reason. Of course it’d be a whole lot better if you said specific thing such as
    • “Be seen as the #1 De-cluttering/organizing expert in the Tri-cities”
    • “Be perceived as a top 10 blogger in analog design in India” or
    • “Build a loyal following for my classical music compositions”

  2. Pick ONE name Think through the name you are going to use, for you are going to use it in a whole lot of places very soon – on your blog, on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare – and that’s just for starters. It has got to be distinctive (so folks can remember it), specific and long enough for folks to make out it’s you but short enough to not chew up too many characters. This may not seem such a big deal, but it can be if you are successful. So might as well plan for it. Some good ones to emulate
      Of course there are no hard and fast rules – one of the most popular vcasters of all time is http://garyvaynerchuk.com/ (I had to look that spelling up) – his Twitter handle is a little easier & different at @garyvee. Sure http://rohitbhargava.com/ and http://sramanmitra.com/ are also popular, but no one outside South Asia will be able to spell their names without a lookup. Their success shows content trumps all other considerations. I’d still recommend that you use a short & descriptive handle.

  3. Get started As my dad was fond of saying, none of your preparation for swimming is useful, if you don’t get in the water. So soon as you finish reading this para article, get started. Put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard and start typing. Sure it would help if you make a writing calendar – could be as simple as, “I will spend 30 minutes each morning or 2 hours on Tue/Thur.” Whatever works for you. But don’t wait for the calendar. Start with your own “natural” voice. Sometimes it takes a few posts to discover what that is. Regardless don’t try to speak in a voice that is not yours – be yourself (probably the hardest advice to follow)
  4. Do Your Homework Building up a good social presence is no different than finding a job or getting hooked up. You gotta let everyone know and it helps if the people you talk to are themselves well connected and well thought of. Do your homework. Find out where the audience, you think you speak to, hangs out. Who are the thought leaders/bloggers in the space that you plan to blog about? Get your tracking infrastructure in place – starting with Google Analytics. There are any number of good posts & resources about building an audience for your blog – so when they come, you can know where they are coming from, what they are reading. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
  5. Give, give & give some more Your mom was right. You gotta give, before you can expect to get something. So focus on giving – I mean freely – what would be of value to your readers. This could be links to other interesting articles, gadget reviews, your grandma’s secret crochet techniques or other exotica (no, that was not a typo.) Find what you are good at, and what is valued by your audience and deliver it reliably with no further expectations. It’s also worth keeping in mind that much of the social media is about conversation, which usually involves more than one voice – yours – alone. The best way to give is to comment on other people’s blogs, to participate in conversations on Twitter or other social forums. Give first and ye shall receive!

  6. Cross mediums – try audio, slideware, video This might seem a stretch. Here you are still planning to get rolling or maybe just started in stringing a few words together, maybe Tweeting or mini-blogging (on Tumblr or Posterous). As one of the hottest social media stars, Gary Vaynerchuk has found – that video is his gig or as a zany Aussie hardware engineer did, you too may be a natural video star. Sometimes your content served up as a podcast may resonate with your audience on the go, as Chief Penguin Michael Katz has found. Till you play with it you will not know – iTunes, YouTube and SlideShare and others are changing the landscape of blogging & social media

  7. Real world exists In the echo chamber that is the blogosphere (& now Twitter and FaceBook) it’s easy to lose sight that there’s a real world out there. So don’t forget to get out there, shake hands and pat backs (or is the other way around). Write for your local newspaper (if it is still in existence), attend seminars and better yet give talks. Volunteer with your local NGO, or BarCamp or TweetUp. Teach a class. Anything that tickles your fancy, will recharge you and change the world a little. You will bring all that and more back to your blog and writing. If you are like me, visiting the real world helps to stay married and seeing the kids before they get old enough to drive (away). And it will make you a whole lot more interesting.

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Talent, training and trust – building culture person at a time

March 20, 2009 / / 0 Comments

This evening I read Peter Bregman’s blog post about his experience at the Four Seasons in Dallas. It brought to mind my own experience at the ITC Windsor Manor in Bangalore.  The family and I had been visiting some friends in the northern part of town. It was late in the afternoon, when we headed back. Of course the kids waited till we were a fair bit down one of Bangalore’s interminable one-way roads, before clamouring to use the restroom. Usually, the chorus of “I’m hungry” or “I need to use the bathroom” from the backseat would result in much heated discussion between my lovely wife and myself. Luckily we were right in front  of the Windsor Manor, so no discussion was needed. We pulled in, parked the car and dashed to the front door.

The liveried doorman, the one with the enormous moustache, held the door open. “Which way to the rest rooms?” I asked as my eight-year old wiggled in front of me. The wife was still walking from the car, dragging our reluctant ten-year old behind her.  “Straight ahead sir, through the arch and turn left. You will find the restrooms in the first corridor on your right.” We made it safely with time to spare. As the girls and their mom, took their time powdering their noses or discussing Dad’s driving – I hung around the corridor, admiring the Raj era landscapes on the wall.

“Can I help you sir? Were you not able to find the restrooms?” I looked up to see the liveried doorman, who was clearly headed for his break. I assured him that I had already availed of their fine facilities, was merely waiting for the family and thanked him for his concern. After ensuring I had everything I needed he finally headed out the staff door. It was only then that I noticed the discretely designed staff door down the corridor, through which another staffer had just passed.

I was just blown away – there must have been 15-20 people at the front portico, as the family and I had passed through the front door. It was a good ten minutes or so later, when the doorman and I met in front of the restrooms. We were not guests at the hotel and I am sure that his job required him to manage matters primarily near the front porch. Yet, the care and sincerity with which stopped to inquire after my needs and the way he tried to address the matter of my possibly not having found the restrooms clearly reflected the sense of ownership he took over helping visitors and guests. Elsewhere at the Windsor Manor, at their incredible “Jolly Nabob” restaurant, I have seen the same excellent sense of ownership and pride with the maitre d’.

As anyone who’s been in the hospitality business knows, finding good help – the talent – is hard. Training them and inculcating in them the sense of ownership and service mindset is even harder. And institutionalizing it requires trust! This is a lesson all of us could use and Windsor Manor and the Four Seasons teach us well to use in our own business and lives.

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