CRM and ERP News

Procter & Gamble is making its first foray into consumer-generated content with two new Web sites.

The company's P&G Productions unit said Monday that it has launched Capessa.yahoo.com. an "online community" where women can share information, practical advice and inspirational stories.

P&G Productions also said Monday that it will launch the People's Choice Community, an online forum that will feature voting for the People's Choice Awards, as well as blogging and chatting.

The site will go live Tuesday night, at www.pcavote.com, with programming and online activities to continue year-round.

Imagine a day when 120 million Indians( and expected to reach 400 million in 2010) can have their own personal TVs on their mobile. The day does not seem to be far off.

Modeo has launched a beta of their version of mobile TV in the US. Services like Modeo can be soon expected to be launched in India.

Modeo is a digital television broadcast live to the one device you're never without—your mobile phone. Modeo is transparently high-tech, making mobile TV as familiar as the coffee table clicker. Modeo's content is provided by most distinguished entertainment brands in the business, airing today's hits and TV classics. One can watch top-rated sitcoms, dramas, news and sports. Also one can tune-in to music and talk radio. You could also download video podcasts, bite-sized episodes of your favorite shows and exclusive made-for-mobile content.

No wonder, London School of Economics has written that the future of TV is personal.

MobileTV has the potential to unleash a new revolution in the country. The telecom revolution has created a new wave of growth in India and if TV goes mobile, it can just mutiply the benefits of telecom revolution.

New marketing opportunities will surface:

• 5-sec TV Spots
• Interactive programming - Voting, Personalized programs, Channesl etc.
• User generated content
• May be one can start trading entertainment time with air time!
• M-wallets
• Product purchase requests from mobile etc.

It can also create new development opportunities like:

• e-learning can just become easy to implement
• The rural-urban information divide can be bridged very quickly

I can't wait to see TV go personal!

Alex Iskold has a great post on Read/Write web on how search needs to get a lot more customer-focussed. The key take-out for me from the post is :

• The 'simplicity of thinking' one needs to have when developing products or services.
• It's about analysing 'customer interactions' and customer behaviour' first and then applying them to products or technologies.
• It's the easy usability of the product or service that will determine acceptance and adoption.

Alex writes:

What is perfect search?

It is interesting to ask: What do we expect when we enter a term into a search box? Ideally, we'd like to get the perfect answer right away. Often, we have an idea what that perfect answer should be, and when computer does not get it for us we are disappointed. But are we being reasonable? Can we expect the "perfect" answer all the time?

Consider for example, our interactions with an Information clerk at the mall. When we ask for a location of a store, she may or may not give us the "perfect" answer. She might not know where this store is, she might not understand us or we may not understand what she said. So for many reasons we may not get the "perfect" answer right away.

What is qualitatively different between our experience with the Information clerk vs. a search engine is that with the clerk we have a dialog. When she does not understand what we asked, she has a chance, to say Excuse me, what do you mean?. Google does not do that, it just gives us the results. If we do not like the answer we have to start from scratch.

The problem is that human interactions are fundamentally iterative, while our interactions with computers are mostly stateless. Perhaps we could get to the perfect search results if we could have a dialog with the computer? Clustering technologies, particularly the one offered by Clusty, give computer a chance to clarify: Excuse me, when you searched for Alex Iskold, did you mean to look for Read/Write Web or AdaptiveBlue or perhaps you where looking for static analysis tools that Alex worked on while at IBM?.

Much has been written about the power of blogs and its power to shape customer opinion. Measuring the business impact of blogs is an area of great interest to me. Some key questions I often ask myself are:

• Is blogging an island without too many inhabitants - Is it a niche waiting to get mainstream?
• Does the opinion of bloggers matter at all when it comes to brand purchase decisions?
• Do consumers consider blogs as a trustworthy source vis-a-vis other forms of media?
• Is user-generated content considered valuable by customers?
• Is it possible to summarize the business impact of blogs by way of addressable customer numbers? Is it a large enough market waiting to be tapped by marketers?

Well, there seems to be some answers for these questions. Here's a research done by IPSOS in Europe - a leading marketing research firm. I think this research clearly gives directions for other markets too, on how customers perceive this new medium and its impact on brands. Here's the presentation: