Online Social Media – how much does it actually influence buying decisions ?


As a consumer, I am influenced by online social media. But the bigger the purchase, the less I am influenced by “online” social media, and more by “offline” social media.

I won’t try a new restaurant without checking yelp reviews.I won’t buy a book without reading what others say in Amazon. I won’t buy a widescreen TV without checking 15 sites and then talking to store clerks, friends etc. When I bought a house (the biggest purchase for me), I did comparisons online – but eventually I had to walk in and out of 50 or so houses before my wife and I agreed on a place. The bigger the purchase – the less I trusted social media, and the more I trusted “real” people and my own “physical experience.

When I say social media – I am typically thinking only of “online” media – twitter, facebook and sites like that. I am excluding other “offline” social things like hanging out with my buddies at the water cooler, chatting with other parents at my daughter’s swimming lessons, talking to others on phone and stuff like that which we don’t associate with “online”, despite being totally “social”.

It never fails to impress (ok, and scare) me when I log on to a site, and find context specific advertisements. I have seen a lot of SAP ads,Pet product ads, Cricket (the game, not the mobile phone thing, and not the creature ) and Tennis ads and so on when I use my yahoo email, google searches and facebook. Fantastic – yet in all these years, I have not clicked on even one link that these sites showed me. If anything, I get some pleasure in not clicking on them – since in my mind, I think of them intruding my private space.

And although not prolific by any stretch – I am fairly active in online social media, and spend some time every day on it. At best, it must be having an indirect effect on my buying decisions, since my gut feelings over time are surely influenced by what I read, and I read a lot of stuff online.

I started to think that maybe direct advertising is what is not working in social media – and that vendors can influence indirectly using social media by sharing information via blogs etc. But Forbes advoice single handedly ended that theory for me. I honestly cannot stand most of what gets published there by vendors and now it has gone to an extent that I don’t take any time to even glance at it when someone says “Forbes says” and point to an advoice link. No thank you.

TV advertisements influence me more than social media ads. I am not sure exactly why this happens. My hypothesis is that people have more experience making them and tuning them over years that it makes more impact. But even then – when it comes to big purchases, I still prefer the offline social media . It could also be that I grew up watching TV and not online social media, and hence am more influenced by TV. Others who are younger might not look at it the way I do. Yet another theory I have is that while video is more impressionable for me, since I consume most of the online content on my mobile device, low bandwidth decreases the user experience of video ads online, there by making me tune out quickly.

Enough about me as a consumer, what about me as a professional consultant and a seller of consulting services ?

All my clients know that I blog and tweet, and that I share some (hopefully useful) content with them – and some of their CXOs tease me on what I write. So, on the bright side – they do read what I write. I also have on occasion benefited from name recognition from my blogs, where I walk into a room and someone googles me and checks out the content that I have authored in past, and (so far) giving me some credit. But I cannot imagine (yet) any one who has given me business primarily because of what I have done in online social media. Not by a long shot.

Buying decisions for consulting services are still mostly influenced by past performance on delivery, trust,price, word of mouth publicity (even fierce competitors talk to each other when it comes to quality of consulting services or product maturity).
I am yet to see a multi-million dollar deal signed with a CXO saying – “it is your online ads that finally persuaded me”.

Even the big cloud players who sell the idea of “online sales” will readily go in person to meet the clients and sell them on their cloud wares. Sales people can be very superstitious. I have a friend who insists she needs to wear her “closing heels” to get ink on the contract, and another friend who insists on wearing his “deal making tie” for the same purpose. I keep wondering what will be the equivalents when it becomes virtual.

“Digital eminence” as my employer refers to it, is a big deal these days. Clients do google about consultants – and check out linkedin profiles and all that. And I have been rewarded to some extent in my career for my online social media activities. But when I think about it – I think what gave me some credibility in online social media is the experience I gained (and continue to gain) in the offline world. That outweighs the reverse situation of online credibility helping me in the offline world. It will be interesting to watch if this balance will ever shift in future. I am not holding my breath on it.

What about big companies who tried innovative online social media advertising? Couple of years back – Pepsi had such an initiative that I read about. I believe it was called “Refresh”. I am typing this on my flight to Portland, so I cannot google it to confirm. They took their foot off the gas pedal for TV and print ads, and focused heavily on online social media – primarily facebook I think. I do not follow superbowl, but I did hear they even pulled out of advertising there for that year. How did it work out for them ? They got tremendous coverage from analysts and marketing experts for being innovative and all that. But it did not exactly help them increase the sales of the pepsi softdrink. Not only did classic coca-cola remain the number one drink, pepsi lost the second spot it long held, and that spot was taken by diet coke. Pepsi went right back to heavy advertisements on TV etc quickly after that. The irony is not lost on me – since I followed this story using online social media 🙂

I am not saying that this experience will stay the same for other companies. It probably will improve over time. If I am a representative consumer – then companies will do well to pair TV and online social media to work together. I say this because I forgot the last time I watched TV without multi-tasking on an online device at the same time. In fact, I usually check out things I see on TV at real time on internet, and make buying decisions depending on size of purchase.

Now there is one last thing – I have no idea if my view is shared by any one else on the planet 🙂

Big data – because it “can” deliver you huge value doesn’t mean it “will”


Big data is the talk of the town in social media, and has picked up some interest amongst customers too.I had a series of big data conversations this week with customers, colleagues and friends and thought I will share some here. As always – these are just my personal ramblings, not my employer’s views.

In social media – “big” usually means close to petabytes or at least several tens of  TB rushing at you from all over the place. At customer sites, the expectation seems to be much more modest – 50 to 100 TB is considered excessively big data even for some very large customers I know.

Cost of big data is bigger on all fronts compared to status quo volumes (and velocity and all other factors) of data in most shops. Storage is cheaper than few years ago, but it is not free – and when you talk about petabytes and all, it needs a LOT of storage. And then there is the multiples needed for HA/DR/Archiving etc. And this needs more data center space, cooling , power and so on.

What about the quality of data? As we know – poor quality is a big problem in all kinds of data related stuff. Quality becomes a bigger problem when volume and speed increases. Existing tools may be stretched to deal with that kind of data. But assuming tools can somehow do this – there is a question of the human effort to fix data. A lot of data projects fail to deliver value because no one owns data from business side. Big data will most probably make this problem worse, unless software improves by leaps and bounds in short order to make data quality a non issue. How many of us will hold our breath on that?

What about security? even with just 2 TB of structured data – there are companies who struggle to make sure everything is secure, and everyone is kept honest, and all the legal compliance is ensured. I have seen the amount of trouble they go through when status quo is changed (like an M&A , or even a small CRM system is introduced).   Most of them are not equipped to deal with more data unless they beef up on more sophisticated governance, and probably more staff.

Some companies love BYOD and others do not. The ones who do not, frequently worry about support cost and security. Imagine the effort they have to go through if BYOD will happen in their companies, and they have to protect much larger data than they are used to?

We are right now in the middle of a small POC for a customer – and the data in the datawarehouse is miniscule compared to what “Big Data” can be. We are talking about something only like 150 to 200 million lines per cube. The data comes back at lightning speed from database to appserver. But the user did not see this speed from his iPad connected from a starbucks wifi via VPN. He did see some improvement, but not enough for a big WOW.  And every drill down needs a roundtrip that also chokes up the network yet again.  Essentially, the bottleneck moved from the DB/App server side to the network/client side. These networks will need serious upgrades in capacity to cope with big data. And the mobile software should be smart enough to use the processing power and memory of the device to minimize the use of bandwidth when it is not required. Carriers will probably need big upgrades too, and if big data catches on – we should start seeing different types of data plans from them, dissimilar to the rates that we see now when we buy tablets and smart phones.

Then there is the cost of licensing – and the models of licensing evolving. But if licenses are tied to the quantity of data that is processed/stored – then that adds up quickly.  And even with sophisticated software – you need smart data analysts who can make use of it to generate value. These analysts – or architects, scientists, artists, artisans or whatever it is they are called this week – don’t come in big numbers, and they won’t be cheap either. And long term – I am not sure if this is given enough importance in universities.

The other side of the equation – the more important side, is the value that big data delivers. There is definitely value in big data – significant value – for sure. But it is not value that gets delivered overnight, and it is value that takes significant investment before reaping benefits. And this value will not be spread evenly across industries, or even companies across industries.  So it is a decision that needs to be taken carefully.  Given the cost, the insights from big data has to be not just “big” but  “BIIIIGGGG” – for the investment to be worthwhile.  And because it “can” deliver value does not mean it “will” – it is not a secret that several companies could not even make good use of much smaller quantities of structured data available to them readily all these years.

Several CXOs I have spoken to are willing to dip their toes despite the cost.  And they are all trying to find out where it is that they can gain competitive advantage by jumping in. Several are interested in a cloud offering for big data – mostly from a cost point of view. This is an area where SIs and SW vendors and analysts et al need to do a better job in my opinion. There seems – in my limited visibility – a serious shortage of  specific use cases to help companies make a business decision. There are a few – like in healthcare for example – where compelling arguments were made, and customers and vendors are partnering effectively.  Given the investment needed for big data – evolutionary change might not make it look appealing to the buyers.  It needs to be revolutionary . And as my ex-manager used to tell me –  almost every project that pays for itself will get funded irrespective of the economy.

PS: If big data catches on big time, then we can seriously expect a boom for the tech stocks across the board since several companies will benefit from the vendor side. The economy – at least in history books – will probably thank big data for the good that it did 🙂

IBM Watson – what better use of analytics than fighting cancer ?


From 1992 – when I joined the mechanical engineering degree class in TKM College, till today – I have been a fan of Analytics.In fact, I am pretty sure it is the engineering education that put this fascination in me. And it was my statistics professor Mr. Kalyanaraman who took it to the next level.

Nothing fascinated me more than numbers and making inferences based on them. It was not as if I didn’t realize that texts and pictures and all the so called “unstructured” data was very important – it is just that I always felt that there was plenty more to be done in the “small data” world of numbers, before any one worried about “big data” . I have kept on questioning the value of the insight that will come out of big data for most companies, since they cannot even make decisions based on relatively small and highly structured data from pre-defined sources.

And then, along came IBM Watson and it changed my perspective on analytics and big data completely. Although I work in IBM, I don’t work in the team that works on Watson directly. If I am envious of any one professionally – it is that group of colleagues who get to work on Watson. Watson captured my imagination from the first day I heard about its plans to play Jeopardy on public TV.

Now, god knows how I don’t suffer marketing . I attribute it to the compulsory marketing classes I had to take in B School. And the irony is that IBM has world class marketing. So when IBM trumpeted Watson from the roof tops, my natural instinct was to cringe. But as I thought through the implications – it became clear that Jeopardy was the perfect way for IBM to avoid evolutionary steps, and make a grand leap into the future of analytics. Jeopardy needed everything – ability to consume big data with no structure, ability to understand natural language, truly massively parallel processing, ability to work on commodity hardware, lightning speed, ability to make a decision, ability to learn and many more. And it was a safe test bed to see if technology can stand up to that stress in an environment that is not “life and death” types, but useful enough to make a determination if this has a future.

Right after Watson won Jeopardy against the “human” champions, the IBM team started focusing it on real world problems. And this is where I was most fascinated by the choices of that team and its leader, Manoj Saxena.

IBM has a huge army of smart sales people, who could have very easily sold Watson in some form to a large number of clients across the globe.It would not have been hard at all – my own clients have asked me multiple times how they can use Watson to help their business, without me having to bring it up. As we know, IBM is a publicly traded company with a published roadmap for earnings till 2015. But instead of taking a short term view of cashing in right away, they took a long term view of proving it out thoroughly in the real world with real customers.

Instead of trying to do too many things across all the geographic regions that IBM does business in, they chose to focus on a small number of very specific high value use cases in healthcare, insurance, banking etc. And they partnered with some of the best in class clients in those industries to do so – and in public,not behind closed doors. Now, that is good marketing – the kind I can relate to. Let the customers declare the vision and the success, not the vendor.

The use case that makes me most excited is the cancer treatment one where IBM is teaming with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Like everything else, there is of course a commercial angle to this – and I can imagine this to earn IBM good revenue. But that revenue could also have come from many other use cases. It is the humanitarian angle that impresses me the most. Cancer research and knowledge can now be spread across the world in very short time once this project succeeds. Doctors outside major research hospitals can reduce a lot of dependence on opinions and guess work and experience, and do a lot more “evidence based” decisions. Of course I don’t expect Watson to ever replace a doctor, but Watson has the potential to be the strongest weapon an oncologist has in the fight against the deadly disease. That is not evolutionary – it is revolutionary. It makes me wonder how many other big problems can be solved by the judicious use of analytics theory and technology.

Please watch this and listen to Dr Norton explain this

And finally, I like the sense of reality the IBM team and the clients who are partnering with them display. They clearly explain what Watson can and cannot do , and how long it will take to get there. Now, I know a lot of my friends like innovations to be out in the market quickly – and I understand where they come from. So on this cancer treatment use case, I pinged a few friends who are doctors in India, who I know from childhood to understand more. It sounded like on an average it takes anywhere from 8 to 12 years according to them for information on diagnosis and treatment to become common knowledge from the time it is published. According to them, they will be thrilled if they can cut that time by a third. So even if Watson can start being of help to cancer patients in couple of years, it will be a big deal, and quite fast in “time to market” .

I am sure the Watson team will have its ups and downs in this journey – but I think it will be well worth the proverbial blood, sweat and tears. I wish them the best. And tonight I will dream of doctors in my Grandom’s village having a pocket Watson with them when they help their patients fight their diseases.