Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts

Saturday, 4 September 2010

Focus on your competition to FAIL!!!!

A lot of people think that keeping your competition in view is necessary for your business to succeed, a majority of this lot thinks that focusing on them means focusing on yourself.. in turn your too much focus on competition leads to SHIT your own quality...

Today I tweeted about something and could not stop myself from focusing on writing this blog away... I put my tweet below

When your focus is on competition, your quality is going SHIT. 5 yrs later#wadeshwar seems to have lost touch#pune #foodie

Yes.. After a long time, I took my time to shop for kids on the other side of the city. We happened to spent all our afternoon shopping hence hungry stomach's we decided to take a food break. Eventually of the Fergusson College Road specials like Vaishali Restaurant , Roopali Restaurant we chose the Wadeshwar (The first time I had been here was almost 5 yrs ago). The first few times and the few years later whenever I had been to this place I really enjoyed the food.

Now that the area surrounding this restaurant has further been crowded with several fast food restaurants, it seems that the competition on this road has tremendously increased. Eventually the competition has also changed the menu and the service.. in order to attract and accommodate crowd the sitting arrangement has been compressed, menu changed to challenge the competition... Finally I see that the authenticity and the ethnicity of this restaurant has been converted to a mix of the whole lot of restaurants that surrounds it. Terrible I must say.

It is no different to what is happening in the world of Internet... Google in attempt to focus on competition created by Facebook ended up investing and failing Buzz, Orkut. Facebook in order to take up the location based market ends up building Facebook Places (I believe this will fail). The Apple Ping is up to tackle change possessed by Twitter and Music world...

The result of all this focus is copy-over of features , unrequited competition, Race to cover market share and what not... but surely they don't realise that

1. Over the years Google is no more the ONLY favourite for people

2. Facebook grew but the growth is nearing the beginning of a negative line

3. Twitter growth is no more rocketing...

4. Be it Microsoft or be it Apple they are not sky rocketing or going to stop rocketing sooner or later...

Many such examples where it is clear that if you are busy keeping your focus on competition, you are going to end up creating a SHIT for yourself.

5 reasons why not to link twitter with your linkedin and Facebook accounts

Posted by Sameer Shaikh

A few days ago linkedin had twitter integrated, when I logged into my profile I saw a whole bunch of friends linking tweets with linkedin. Whoa... isnt that the first thing you do when something gets hyped or over hyped? Facebook with twitter , linkedin with twitter , product portfolios with twitter and so on..... Eventually not only linkedin, everything thing that has status are now linked with twitter.

Eventually when you login to some profiles (include mine) al you would see is repetition of status across twitter , facebook , linked in.. in other words same info everywhere... I chose to unfollow those friends who have done so. Simple reason.. why see the same information everywhere...

Now this can cause you some followers, friends and good contacts or potential clients too... thus I am forced to give you 5 reasons not to do so.. at least not with Facebook and twitter.

1. Repetitive Information

I always felt that integrated twitter account helps a lot to manage your various status based social networks.. initially it started well... later it turned out to become a sort of unwanted link... for instance I followed the CXO of one of my previous clients over twitter , was a contact over linked in and of course a friend over FB, as time passed by it became apparent that I was only seeing info that I was seeing on twitter, to a matter that his blog also was showing nothing but tweets. Logically it was a waste following him on twitter and in my regular twitter cleanup exercise he got unfollowed. Why see same information again and again and at multiple places.

Moreover in terms of SEO this is of no benefit, eventually when twitter searches over google you may not find you high in ranks due to simple algorithm logic of duplicate content.

2. Dead Profiles

Profiles that are usually updated via twitter are less interested as the walls would show nothing but your twitter status. These profiles can be so dead that if your friends and contacts may decide to leave you. This usually happens with the Fan Pages. having your product twitter account and Facebook Fan page may result in duplicates and people may want to go to one source of information. This also comes with a fact that with several integration options you become too lazy to update relevant information across platforms.

3. No split in general, professional or social status

You may think that it is good to have them integrated but if you really want to link then choose what to link. Tools like Selective Tweets help you do that... this way you can limit the type of information (which could be very personal) going to your accounts (that are supposed to reveal your professional part). A friend of mine tweeted about how he hates his work, eventually his twitter account linked to linkedin. Over professional business networking platforms will be corrupted with unwanted personal tweets.. sometimes over hundreds of them in a day.

4. Confuse self , Confuse others

Imagine a housewife friend, a non internet savy who connects to your facebook profile only... what will happen if they see thousands of tweets all over your FB page or profile? Specially if you are a seasoned twitterer your profiles are going to confuse the only time visitors.

5. Dont get Hired , Soon get fired

If your linked in account says how much you hate your job, You are not getting hired and may soon be fired. This is due to the fact that many organizations over a period of time have started considering doing certain research about candidates they interview or new employees that are going to be part of their teams on internet and social networking sites. This gives a very bigger perspective of personal side of the members.. We ended up rejecting 2 potentially good technical resources as their social networking status revealed a greater sense of negative attitude and some statuses also revealed how much they hated working over certain things.

Not only this if you are tweeting how much you hate your company , Boss , employer and linking it to your FB or twitter you sooner or later going to loose your job.

Now before you go ahead and link your various social network sites with your twitter account, think, you may be watched, you may be writing on things that you dont want some people to know. Even loose your job and web credibility.

So what do you want to do?

Top Product Managers you should follow

Posted by Sameer Shaikh

Have you not always wanted a list of people who would contribute to your lives? Inspire you? Motivate you to do things? And while doing all of this they stay closer in touch with you? Well yes as a Twitter Advocate I would like to bring in some cool lists of people from various areas so that you can stay and follow them. Of course I do this so I can help you not get snowed under Knowledge Overload.... So as a part of my initiative here I work over next few precious nights of mine to put up a list of people from various areas that you may be interested in following... How about people who create these products? The Product Managers themselves?

Productologist - Blog Link here

Adam Bullied - Blog Link here

Covati - Blog Link here

Lisa Gardelle - Blog Link here

Brett Miller - Blog Link here

JP Fozo - Blog Link here

Abhay Kambale - Blog Link here

Christian Almgren - Blog Link here

Mark Kromer - Blog Link here

Peter Han - Blog Link here

Irina Dollov - Blog Link here

Rich Mironov - Blog Link here