Internet never forgets... :)

I got an interesting email from a premier career-development website today. It went on to say why social media is a double-edged knife... while it lets you express, share and discover there is also the inherent danger of letting out way too much!

For instance, if you are using Facebook or Twitter to update the world everytime you are irritated at your boss, chances are high that the next time you are out in the job market, potential employers treat this as an attitude problem and not contact you at all! The email infact provided relevant statistics based on a survey it conducted amongst several recruiters in the North American market. I am not sure how much this applies to the Indian scenario but the trend will soon catch up... mostly in the IT space to start with.

Come to think of it, in the last 3 months, whenever I had to interview a candidate, I have always checked his/her LinkedIn and Twitter profiles (if any) before even starting the interview.. and asked questions based on whatever I saw on their profiles. It was surprising how unconscious I was about the way I personally use social media and this email I got today was like a wake-up call...

So, here's to anyone who reads this post... be careful on what you put on your social status... if you do not want to talk about something standing in the middle of your office's lunch room... you probably should not be putting it on FB or orkut. Internet has ears & eyes all over the place in the form of umpteen businesses that are making life easier and easier for others to search your content on the web. The Web 2.0 elephant can remember very well and it's memory is so powerfully indexed that your boss can fire you for bitching about the company on FB so quickly, that by the time your friends see it, you would probably be jobless!!

IE8 RC1 released

..and it is super-fast compared to IE7!! Here is finally a product from Microsoft that might actually give Google Chrome a run for its money. I switched to Chrome 3 days after it was released and have not touched IE ever since except when I had to login to some Java enabled sites that simply won't work on Chrome. And I was of the opinion that IE lost me forever. But looks like v8 might actually succeed in winning my respect back. (A bit of history here - I was virtually married to IE all my life and had never used any other browser till Chrome came along.)

IE8 has bundled some cool features like Web slicing, suggested sites, InPrivate browsing (like Incognito mode in Chrome) but the true difference is in the speed. As someone who has used IE long enough to crib, I must say that it doesn't feel like IE at all, if you know what I mean:)!
However, I am really not sure about the timing... what is microsoft gonna do to reclaim its lost share in the browser market? More marketing? More bundling with the operating system? Or does M$ even care that it lost a few hundred thousand users to other browsers? Probably not. That said, I can't decide whether I will switch back to IE8 after becoming so accustomed to Chrome's speed, omnibox and quick find. For one, there is a strong association of IE with "slow" in my mind - just like many others who have moved away from IE.

But if Microsoft is to meet the competition that is popping from unprecedented avenues, it cannot go on ignoring lost customers. The world is moving online and if MS is losing its share in the very browser market that enables the world move online, it is a serious issue to be considered. IE may not be a money maker but it completes the vision of "seamless experiences that combine...software with..internet across a world of devices" (More info here). With Firefox, Safari and Chrome at 22%, 8% and 1% shares respectively (Source: NetApps), MS must work harder to retain its two-thirds of the pie. If it doesn't, it is probably digging the first feet of its own grave.

Loyalty - A Myth?

Yesterday we had a class on relationship between customer loyalty and profitability. Prof. VK took us through a series of marketing models built upon 8 indicators of whether a loyal customer today is going to be a profitable one in the next few years. It was interesting to see a lots of myths getting busted - a loyal customer is

- costly to serve

- price conscious in some sense

- not always profitable

The moral of the story was firms need to decide when to stop chasing a customer. And the evidence Prof. VK put forth were satisfying both quantitatively and analytically. The more I think about these indicators (which included frequency of buying, returns, focused buying etc), I feel that loyalty is not really a concept to worry about because there are no "loyal" customers in the world. There is only waves of propensity which firms could ride along and make money. When one dies, another one comes up. A smart marketer should only look for the right wave. On an average, the loss of customers gets compensated by new ones.

But one thought still lingers in my mind and it might even be recursive in some sense. Once we stop chasing a customer does that mean he is never going to be a loyal one in the future? I remember an example Prof. Bell used in class about Starbucks. There are 2 people who come n drink Starbucks coffee every day - one spends lot more than the other. But the costs of serving these 2 people are the same. The question Prof. Bell posed was 'should we let go of the second customer who pays less and costs more?'. Almost everyone in the class yelled yes except one student who said he would wait to see if the second customer pays more in the future and would not lose him just because he spends low today. And that indeed was the right answer in that situation. 

Coming back Prof. VK's conclusion, in an ideal world where you acquire customers just by way of innovating in products and services, losing a not-so-profitable customer is not a big deal. But we live in a world of marketers and it costs a fortune to acquire n retain customers. Shouldn't we also be asking the question of "when to start chasing a customer?". The window of opportunity is not between time zero and when a firm stops chasing. It is between the times when the chasing starts and stops. It would be interesting to look at data that captures both these frames. And it might even be true that customer loyalty is cyclical - there are only waves of loyal customers...