What we do? We call it Social Media Branding. What is different to other consultancies in that space? We believe that we understand Facebook, Twitter and blogs quite well, but they stand at the end of the process. What matters more, that Ray and me bring combined more than 30 years of experience of marketing, communication, media, branding, operations and business building to the table. Hence, we are able to advise very clearly how and where Social Media fits into a clients’ bigger picture of integrated communication. Last, but not least we can both recommend and implement on the execution level how this whole concept will fit well within his often complex operational framework.

Founding Brain Pirates GmbH has been a natural step both from the obvious demand side of the market and a couple of assignments which Ray and I have had in the past two years. Where we can help concretely is in a modular end-to-end approach for clearly larger organizations.

• High level, kind of “philosophical” explanation what Social Media stands for. It is still surprising to see that many companies are literally standing on Ground Zero.
• Devising a tailor made social media strategy which fits into the broader plans of the client’s marketing and communication strategy.
• Setting up tangible metrics and KPIs (=Key Performance Indicators) against which to benchmark progress and success.
• Providing a comprehensive overview of best practices which would spark innovative change within the clients’ organization.
• Setting-Up creative concepts which are centered around Social Media, but would be thoroughly integrated into all other channels in reach. Online and offline.
• Building software like Facebook Apps, websites and other enabling connectors.
• Running campaign on the operational level from communication on behalf of the client to online advertisement on social networks.
• Employing a variety of exciting software tools in the market which facilitate the publishing- as well as the measuring part.

And of course, iterating over and over throughout the process to just become better. We are very excited to take this company into the market today. We have a webpage here and a Facebook Fanpage, too. We like if you like. Any feedback is – as always – highly appreciated. And if there is anything we can help you in that space, let me know :-)

Let me explain here on my blog in a bit more of a conversational tone what we are up to. We are global publishing network writing stuff that matters for our life, in particular the various lives of each of us. You might be familiar with Edward de Bono’s concept of the various hats we should put on during decision making. Similarly, on a broader perspective in one’s life somebody might be a teacher by profession, have a family with a lovely wife raising two kids. But there is more to life than the obvious on the surface: This human being might be an avid guitar player, enjoys going for a hike in the mountains and really love his food. That same person will find help, advise and entertainment for his various lives like in a magazine as a teacher, spouse, parent, musician, naturelover and foodie. Check out our overview of all the lives we are writing for.

Here’s the deal with „global“ for our publishing network. I’ve been living and working in various continents for the last years where I dare to say that I have a fairly good understanding how to assemble a business that brings together the best pieces from each part of the world. Our company is incorporated in London (U.K.), a big chunk of our operation runs out of Bangalore (India) with an international team, the design for aMillionLives.com has been done in Poland, our writers hail from India, the Philippines. Our users as we know from our logfiles appreciate our content from all over the world, the U.S. running with 60 % at the forefront.

Where does the name MillionMiles Media (MMM) come from? Two simple explanations: I was looking, no surprise, for something that sounds somehow cool and has „Media“ at the end. If you check out every freaking word on this earth in combination with „Media“ at the end, the domain is taken by some filthy domain-grabber. So extending the query to two prefix-words, landed me with MMM. Second, I liked it because last year with all my travelling I had crossed the mark of a million miles in my frequent flyer programme.

Yep, that’s my news of the day. Happy about every feedback, good or bad, sympathetic or just pathetic. If you like our Fanpage on Facebook or moreover, place a link from your blog or site to aMillionLives.com, I’ll include you in my evening prayers – hands duly folded. Promised.

This year’s top participants from India were the Union Minister of Commerce, Anand Sharma, who spoke about his country’s resilience to weather the storm of the global economic crisis, aspiring to a double digit GDP-growth and acknowledging the requirement build stronger ties to Europe. As a reference to his hosts Mr. Sharma mentioned in particular Spain whose trade volume with India ranks only 43.

From the Spanish side, the Crown Prince Felipe gave himself the honour to speak. As someone who has rather reservations to monarchy, I was honestly surprised not to see some smug royal retard, but a highly educated, soft-spoken and down-to-earth guy who is very well able to play his constitutional and social role in such a setting very well.

I had the pleasure to moderate panel on a topic which is personally very dear to me: Innovation. In particular “Driving the Future: India’s Technology Pioneers – India’s IT and other technology firms are emerging as global players in their own right. What areas are they pioneering in and how do they compete in world markets?” The participants had a lot to share from their experience:

• Dinesh Dhamija, former Founder and CEO of ebookers.com, now Founder and Chairman, Copper Beech Group, United Kingdom
• Sachin Dev Duggal, Chairman, Nivio, India
• Naeem Ghauri, Co-Founder, NetSol Technologies, Pakistan & United Kingdom
• Clas Neumann, President, SAP Labs India, Germany
• Jeff Heenan Jalil, Head – Wipro Technologies, Europe, Wipro, India
• Glenn Proellochs, Chief Executive Officer, Travelpaper.com, Switzerland
• Sudhir Sethi, Chairman, IDG Ventures India Advisors India
• Sudhakar Shenoy, Chairman, IMC, USA

This format of a so called “board room dialogue” in an intimate setting allows for a true conversation among the panellists where the “audience” blends seamlessly in. Three main conclusions on innovation that I’d to summarize here:

• IT-Innovation in India has multiple dimensions. It’s not just about the classic Western understanding of filing a patent for some say cutting edge laser-thing. It’s often process innovation: Just think of the 1 million resumés (!) that Infosys is getting every year to fill 12,000 positions, you need to handle that somehow. Or business innovation with a particular focus on the price point, see for example the world-class rate of 0.5 US-Cent per minute on Indian mobile operators.




• Bigger organisations like SAP or Wipro can only innovate of their culture embodies constant change whereby their organizational frameworks act like a stable meta-layer for innovation.




• India is not good at everything, should and often does recognize both its strengths and weaknesses. For instance anything around User Interface can be done with a company in the Silicon Valley much better. The conclusion here: In times where you can assemble easily global sourcing chains, also from the Indian perspective applies: Do what you can do best and outsource the rest :-)

After all the inspiring discussions over the day, we headed off for a cocktail reception to the beautiful Jardines de Cecilio Rodriguez where Mr. Peacock was greeting us with his evergreen mating-show.

Last but not least, thanks a lot to Frank for once again putting such an awesome Horasis-event together.

A few weeks back, we got the green light that communication was free. So I wanted to post a few lines on the company, the founder and why I thought it was a good idea to invest. Reverse Logistics India (RLC) operates in a space which at the first glance does not appear as sexy as promising to build the next Facebook. But I have learned well from my entrepreneurial experience that such businesses can bear an amazing business potential in combination with very healthy margins and – unlike Facebook – really make money :-)

So what does RLC do? To provide a simple example: An Indian consumer buys a new mobile phone with one of the big retailers, after a few weeks well within the warranty-period the things breaks. What now? So far in India, for retailers unlike in the U.S. or Europe, the legal obligation to manage the scenario is just in the making and therefore the priority of installing a proper process rather low, whereby plenty of customers have been left behind dissatisfied. Or, the retailers did not know how design the process at all.

This is where RLC as the outsourced solution comes into place: Organizing this entire process end to end with both satisfying the customer and recouping value in mind. Concretely, the company would on behalf of the retailer handle the customer from communication, picking up the broken item from his home, delivering it to RLC’s delivery centre to finally inspecting it. The inspection can yield that the item has to be disposed of (within the legal framework of “e-waste” in India) or, if it can be repaired, resell it. Just a simple example with plenty of variations and different use-cases.

RLC, based out of Delhi, runs by now two additional operating centres out of Mumbai and Bangalore. I met the founder Hintendra Chaturvedi last year January in Delhi and was impressed by his vision how to occupy this under-served market in a big picture, yet at the same time keep a razor-sharp focus on getting traction in this extremely “execution-heavy” industry. Interestingly, Hitendra is one of these famous cases of “reverse brain drain”: He had been living in the U.S. for two decades or so, before he took an executive position to run the OEM-division of Microsoft India. There, he realized that this huge sphere of “reverse logistics” he had see in the U.S. did not exist on the subcontinent and decided to set-up his own company. Here, on LiveMint is a nicely written portrait about him along with a sound depiction of the reverse logistics-landscape in India.

We from MumbaiAngels were convinced both about the concept and the founder so that we decided to give it a go by providing the necessary seed-funding. Good to know that a year down the line, RLC has been building traction with several marquee-customers and Hitendra is step by step executing on his vision.

Mr. Chandrashekar who has taken on the big challenge of fixing Bangalore’s rotten infrastructure conceded that it has started to decline from 2000 and since then only gone from bad to worse. Compounded by the influx of more and more migrants, Bangalore has grown in the last years to a 8 million population and is expected to accelerate its growth to become a mega-city of 16 mn by 2020. Without a complete change of direction in urban planning, or better the holistic introduction of such thing, a collapse on almost any infrastructural dimension seems inevitable.

For that, he has proposed a change of law which would incur three levels of governance: First, the creation of ONE binding urban plan which is missing today (as one can tell just by looking around), second the establishment of a coordinating body for the various agencies (which does not exist today) and a partial self-governance of the regional communities through a democratically elected institution (which has been in the last years replaced by faceless bureaucrats).

What I found remarkable: Fully acknowledging the problems with politics and moreover politicians in India, Mr. Chandrashekar prefers to work with the current institutions as opposed to founding his own party. The latter might appear as a natural choice for an accomplished businessman he has been in his life. But after learning the basics of politics, he explained: “In a democracy where everyone has a voice, yours has to be the loudest to be heard and followed.”

For that, he is trying to bring as many supporters as possible behind his bold plan.

Wie der Name schon suggeriert, dreht sich alles um Kultur, und zwar in der ganzen Spannweite von Musik, Literatur und Film. Wie ich auch gut unterrichteten Kreisen erfahren habe, wird demnächst auch Kunst, Design, Architektur und Bühne hinzukommen.

Eine erste Vorauswahl wird von der Redaktion getroffen, dann macht die Community weiter und kann CDs, Bücher und Filme bewerten und empfehlen.

These three days at the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2009 have – like my previous two attendances – been tremendously inspiring with phenomenal speakers like John Chambers (CEO of Cisco) as the starter and management guru C.K. Prahalad for the grand finale. Moreover, and that’s what I love deeply in Indian culture, if you know on Day 1 some people, on Day 3 you will know many people thanks to the cordial introductions which those some will make for you to the many. The strong impression which the evening events left on me, is the result of a long-term effort putting these choreographies for the shows with all the awards and dancers together. All fine, and I am quite sure I will attend next year again, that’s for the red cross in the calendar February 9th to 11th 2010.

Yet, and that’s where it really loses me, that in spite of the professional organization of the event, India’s IT-industry association NASSCOM simply doesn’t get it what this beast Web 2.0 or Communication 2.0 or Innovation 2.0 or however you want to name it, is about. Ironically, the two top-speakers I mentioned above where teaching and preaching how it works, what it means and how it positively impacts the outreach of an organization. Specifically, C.K. Prahalad mentioned in his talk that he sees a huge opportunity to consult companies in “social architecture”. NASSCOM should be the first customer.

So in my perception, NASSCOM is still stuck in the mindset: “Uuups, there is this something called Facebook, Twitter, Web 2.0 – and we have to do something with it.” The result: Applying the old mindset (which again Prof. Prahalad was pointing out as the biggest obstacle) onto these platforms and forcing the existing command & control structures of its organizations on these platforms. And it just hurts, because it just doesn’t work this way and thereby gets stuck in the old format (sorry for the blurred quality of the pic).

Examples:

• NASSCOM is running “a blog”, hu-ha-hu a blog, how fancy does this sound with a few “bloggers” writing for it here and identifying themselves on the event with a badge “NASSCOM – I’m blogging” plus some through the audacity to have their hair grown over the tip of their ears. Nothing to object, but this has nothing at all to do with blogging. What NASSCOM in fact does, it hires a few people as editors, thereby controlling the message and pushing it “out to the world”. I wonder if the world cares when the oracle has spoken. (When I got the offer by Avinash Raghava from NASSCOM to “get an account also write for us”, I politely declined. I prefer to write what I think on my own blog.)
• NASSCOM in on Twitter, check out what came out in the last three days of the conference under http://twitter.com/nilf2009: It’s nothing but pushing one-directionally micro-links of these same messages out. Moreover, using the account name NILF2009 carries a fundamental and obvious flaw: It terms that NASSCOM easily understands, it’s simply not “scalable” as for 2010, 2011 etc. there have to be a new accounts over and over again with losing all the old followers and starting from zero. If I was a cynic, I could argue: With the 36 follower at the time of writing no harm done. Note by the way, the absence of NASSCOM’s interest in conversing by only following back 10 people.

• NASSCOM has set up a community “Emerge” of its own using CollectiveX to have its members and the delegates respectively interact on that platform beyond the face-to-face meetings. So far absolutely a right move. Yet, it stops exactly there as the old mindset dictates that one must own, control and monopolize the conversation. This platform is not bad at all, but it is not exactly the comfort that Facebook offers. So where is the Facebook-group of the conference where there are not just the better features for interaction, but more importantly where EVERYBODY is already around. When I asked new acquaintances on the conference after receiving their business cards if they were on Facebook, in 80 percent the answer was “yes”.
• NASSCOM is taping all of the keynotes and most of the panels on video. Why in this world is there no channel on YouTube to put these treasures out? The same applies to the presentations where NASSCOM-president Som Mittal mentioned at the very end that most of them will be available for download. Thank you very much, had I known that before I would have not written my fingers off with taking notes. Just see this slide from John Chamber’s presentation on YouTube’s impact on his organization.

• NASSCOM, and that brings me to the last point, is acting in an era of connectedness entirely disconnected in all the separate, distinct and isolated silos of activity. The moderately talented moderator who regularly stumbles in just presenting what the presenter is going to present is of little help either in that context. Where are these closed feedback loops of someone qualified on stage continuously bring the pieces together?

But let’s take a step back and not get stuck in doing the same mistake of bashing single flaws here and simple formats there, but re-draw the big picture of what this all is about: It’s about providing the delegates with a profound and sustainable experience of the event in terms of learning, connecting and participating. Beyond that, the message should get out of the “echo chamber” and travel as far and as fast as possible to anybody who could be a relevant stakeholder. As part of a communication strategy, NASSCOM perfectly includes the press in the process. But here the story ends. Where NASSCOM entirely fails, is getting real word-of-mouth out by engaging into a CONVERSATION. A conversation by definition requires at least the same amount of listening as much as of talking yourself.

Attend a conference of O’Reilly like the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco next month (I will be there, too) and you see how it can be done differently by pulling all levers and connecting them. Attendants can twitter questions upfront which the moderator will use for his interview, he will suggest tags for pics and videos which will be uploaded etc. Furthermore, the conference organizers will invite impartial bloggers equal to traditional press which will, of course, write on their own blogs. The official conference-bloggers would read them, link to them, comment, retort, put things straight or, clearly, ignore trolls who are just out there for parasitic attention.

Or, visit the DLD-Conference in Munich where I moderated two panels a fortnight ago: There is a dedicated video-channel with all the panels. Also, from the organizers’ communication team someone will constantly watch what is being twittered in order to make improvements of the event “on the fly”.

Overall, if NASSCOM is serious about its efforts to move up the value chain towards products, it would require some colourful “Gondalization”, named after my friend Vishal Gondal from Indiagames, who won this year’s NASSCOM India Innovation Award for evangelizing his service in a novel way. Vishal was not the only one to wear an orange T-shirt in the dark ocean of seriousness. What is more, he has fully understood how Communication 2.0 works, he is a real blogger who has a tremendous network to leverage upon. This includes that NASSCOM would have to deal with posts like his Why Wipro, Infosys and TCS are “The Axis of Evil” for Indian start-up space which has garnered 120 comments. One of the major properties of Communication 2.0 is the ability to let go and have the network do the work from amplifying to correcting the message.

It’s not about if Vishal in right in all he writes, or if I went too far with criticism in this post. That would be missing the point which John Chambers got so right as the bracket for this keynote: “If you agree in all I say, I have failed.” But listening to it from a position of equals is the starting point for a true conversation.

Panel “E-Commerce”

Panel “Mobile”

Link:

Thanks to all the great panelists with their profound knowledge and enthusiasm which they displayed during the conversation and which they display every day to run their businesses successfully.

We had an inspiring peer-2-peer exchange with respect to best practises on the entire value chain of creating deal-flow to closing a deal. In the context of funding I understood that some angel investors have become a bit hesitant since their stock-portfolios in India got destroyed whilst uncertainty has started to cover the entire economy. At the same time, as Google-founder Sergey Brin put it recently, "Scarcity creates Clarity. In my interpretation also in the sense that certain business ideas will thrive in a rather downturn economy as they help companies consolidate their act through cost savings when management attention is not just obsessively concerned with hyper-growth.

In the afternoon, like a year and two ago, I joined an invitation by INSEAD for its "globalization course" for a Danish Business School. The participants were all senior executives in Denmark who are undergoing an MBA-training. Three groups of companies presented to us their "India Business Concept" and we were supposed to give constructive feedback and share our experience on "founding and running a business in India".

Between the breaks, us panelists exchanged our current state of affairs when it's no point denying that we are in a recession:

1. One young entrepreneur told the story from above from the MumbaiAngels from her perspective (unrelated to MumbaiAngels, yet to investors in general): In spite of a signed MoU, the investors backed out in the last minute.
2. The head of a globally active petrol retail company lost a higher double digit figure of his revenues when the oil price hit US$ 140 per barrel a few months ago. Reason: His company is privately run and therefore fully exposed to the price fluctuations it has to pass on to the customers while the majority of petrol-retail in India is state-run and heavily subsidized. In the meanwhile the price has dropped and the company's revenue recovered. 
3. The India-responsible for a luxury clothing brand reported that two months ago, customer inflow into his stores has become incredibly lame. Understood that this sector gets hit first, as it is certainly not somebody's primary concern in uncertainty to spend EUR 1.800 on a new suit.

All in all quite eye-opening stories I wanted to share here, especially as they come from so many different angles: investment, consumption, government-spending where everything is related/looped to everything and we practically have the entire macroeconomic equation in front of us. Although one where the maths have recently become a bit shaky. 

Previously, due to the reason mentioned above, the entire nightlife was entirely fragmented across the various locations in Bangalore. No doubt, that there is nothing more boring that going to a bar or a club and having the impression to be almost the only guest. So today 23-year old Entrepreneur Viren Khanna seized the opportunity of aggregating the dispersed crowd. He made a deal with existing clubs and started to send out text messages to people of his address book on the mobile phone which he systematically grew with every event; a typical example of "building momentum". Since then, the so called "Viren-Parties" have become a synonym for "something is happening" at least two times a week in Bangalore.

In a not surprising quest to grow his business, he went on to organize fashion shows. What is more, the platforms of communication got enhanced as well, getting into the Web 2.0, an environment that the mentioned target group is very familiar with. For one, a group called "Viren's Nightlife Group – Blitzkrieg" on Facebook with 789 members at the time of my writing. For second, in order to provide a higher level of proprietary branding, a social network of its own, "The Ives Club". 

Positioned as a club for interns, trainees and expats in Bangalore, I was astonished in the first place about the technological sophistication of it and wondered what huge effort it would have taken it to engineer this monster. When I digged deeper into the souce code, it dawned on me that the platform entirely uses Ning, which allows you to "create a social network for anything". Co-Founded by Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape in the 90s, Ning is an amazing example of the Über-Plattform, as Marc elaborately explains in his blog-post on "The three kinds of platforms you meet on the internet". When I asked Viren how long it took to build The Ives Club based on Ning , he replied "It did not take me much long to stitch this thing together, but it did take me an extremely long time and a lot of fidgeting with CRM softwares, phpBB and 3 versions of it to find out about Ning and use it."

As the fundamentals of Web 2.0 go, these services become better the more people use them. So besides just having a distibution channel to annouce further events, the members among each other begin to interact before and after the events. So the shy ones for instance get the opportunity to address a girl onlline which they have failed to do while seeing her "in da club". Subject to some positive response he will be able catch up during the next party and prove that is is not that shy, though …