Sometimes it can suck to be a guinea pig for a new curriculum. But, there are classes that make up for it. One of them is Advanced Applications (Marketing). As it’s the first course of this sort to be taught to first year MBAs, it had a rocky start. However, it’s slowly become an incredibly exciting course to be part of.

On Tuesday, Visa’s Chief/Global Marketing Officer came to class to discuss the company’s marketing structure before its IPO, and the challenges this structure posed for the company going forward. Our goal, as a class, is to work with our professor to come up with recommendations for how the GMO should restructure the company to create an accountable and effective marketing-oriented organization.

It’s pretty cool (to say the least) that we’re working to solve a problem that is real and happening now. I’m pretty sure few of us have had the opportunity to think about how to change an organization that captures 15% of a $20 trillion dollar market opportunity (personal consumption). While I doubt we’ll come up with anything as clever as the GMO already has in the works, it’s amazing just to have the opportunity to learn about what he is facing and to have the chance to think about these things.

Now I can see why our 2nd year is going to rock!

Recently, I went to South India to learn about scaling health care services across large, low-income populations. While the businesses are "offline," there is at least one significant similarity to many web-based businesses: leveraging social networks in order to acquire trust, gain customers and generate revenue. Here are just some of the ventures we visited:

• Scojo: low-cost reading glasses. The company has an innovative microfranchise model for training entrepreneurs (low-income individuals, generally women) how to identify problems with vision in order identify prospective buyers and sell the eye glasses. Interesting learnings were: How do find your entrepreneurs and educate them? How do you get low-income entrepreneurs to be willing to pay the upfront costs of the glasses and training? How will buyers overcome the negative stigma associated with glasses? One really interesting take away was the importance of style despite the consumer they were targeting.
  

• Medicine Shoppe: traditionally served the high-income population, but is expanding its pharmacies/clinics to low income communities in India. This has required completely rethinking how they approach medical services. For example, after finding no business was coming in they removed all the windows and doors from the pharmacies/clinics in the low income areas - with them there, it looked too strange to the local residents and they would not enter.
  

• 1298: Dial 1298 Ambulance is a private ambulance company. Their business model is especially interesting. It's services are provided at a premium to affluent populations and at no cost to the poor. Scaling up operations in India is challenging - the wealthy and poor live in different areas, separated by traffic and bad roads.
  

One core focus for many of the organizations was on leveraging already established channels of distribution in order to tap remote / distributed populations. Unlike most developed areas, technology is not always an option for acquiring attention. When things are not easy, you need to find a way to redraw your understanding of the world. I think that's when innovation starts to get really exciting.

If you're interested in more details, here is a write-up on our trip Southern India.

In the last year or so, I've seen two "self-help" reality TV shows become "hot" - The Dog Whisperer, which i learned about because my dog attacks strangers (and me if i try to stop him), and The Pick Up Artist, which my housemate convinced me to watch to prove that learning "game" is not trash. Essentially, the show teaches the average guy "the method" of attracting and seducing the opposite sex. 

It's amazing to see how reality TV has evolved from talk shows (pre-reality TV) to MTV-style house arrest (ie, strangers living together) to exceptionally theme centric. I believe we're seeing the exploration of the web's long tail also taking place in networked TV. While I imagine the tail won't be quite as long as it can be on the web due to production costs and quality constraints (although they are apparently lower for reality TV shows, according to this Salon.com article), the concept of niche markets seems to be taking hold (if it has not already).

My question is, what are the driving factors that have enabled niche market reality TV shows to thrive in terms of revenue/cost (Dog Whisperer is probably the more relevant example here)? Are these really mass market needs that were not identifed before?

While I'm not a big TV watcher, I highly suggest you take a look at the first episode of the pick up artist (trailer here)- It's surprisingly educational contrary to remarks that reality TV "... is not just bad television in the sense that it's mediocre, pointless, puerile even. It's bad because it's damaging."  As my roommate said to me, I think this show has the power to improve the personal lives for lots of people.

today, i was introduced to Gizmoz - an application that a buddy used to turn a picture from being a semi athletic/female photo into a trans gender australian. now that takes talent. good chuckle. sticky, fun, and entertaining. wish it were easier to upload photos (might be a mac thing but i could not get a photo to load) and wish i was able to tweak the mashup he created. i think the latter of the two would be a great way of enabling low investment interaction - swap out the background, switch up the voices, etc...

for your personal amusement, below is the photo jawed started with and the output he created :)

I think one of the most challenging parts of building a "marketplace," which for discussion purposes I'll simply say is the same as a community or forum as long as one party has something the other needs, is keeping both sides of the table balanced. For ebay, these parties are buyers and sellers. For Trulia Voices, these parties are home buyers/sellers and real estate professionals/local residents.

Having Trulia Voices w/in a larger real estate site - Trulia.com - helped resolve some of this need at launch; we were able to leverage current visitors and partners to drive awareness and early usage of the product. Questions initially came from onsite promotion and answers came from marketing outreach to the industry. [For products not imbedded w/in larger sites, partnerships with other services/communities seem to be the great substitute (as some of my friends are beginning to discover in their own product development efforts).]

Keeping both sides of the table in equal proportion is a challenge that extends into the lifetime of the product. There are constant tweaks that need to be made in order to assure each side is contributing at the level needed. As one side scales but, another set of changes must be made to assure the other side matches.

This challenge is what makes online marketplace development exciting - your creative hat goes and you hash through the ideas to find the answers. And, each time, the answer is very different.

today i hit up mad dog in the fog to watch the uruguay vs. brazil semi final soccer match.

as i intensely watched the screen, certainly interested in the conversations around me but giving zero social signals saying "hey come talk to me," i observed strangers who did not know each other become rather social. and it all started with small social signals, such as gregarious eyes that invite conversation in. it is these small, less obvious signals that are exchanged between people that fosters trust and conversation, that turn a one off, boring experience into a fun one. and after a beer (i am a light weight, what can i say) i too started looking around and joined in the conversation.

just as in offline relationships, online products need to enable members to signal to each other in low involvement ways, enabling them to "get to know each other" without actually saying hi directly or boldly. it is only through such low involvement tools that relationships can begin to be fostered. while not the only component, it is the rewards that are derived through such exchanges that a loyal membership base is able to establish.

on Trulia Voices, low involvement relationship building can happen indirectly by participating in a conversation (answering the same questions). On Yelp, it can be through cool little icons you give to someone that don't make you feel like you need to say hi or that the other person is obligated to respond in return to my gesture.  

Fatdoor, a website that visually displays neighborhood homes on a map, puts an icon next to each house where a registered member lives, and of course provides each member with a public profile, launched a pilot test in the San Jose area so a coworker and I thought we'd take a poke around. What we found was amazing - on my coworker's block (he lives in the area covered by the pilot) 8 of his neighbors were already registered members and had pretty complete profiles. Given that the site just launched, we were really shocked to see such rapid adoption of users in such close proximity. As my coworker's next door neighbor was registered and had entered her email address so we could contact her directly we dropped her a note to find out how she heard of it, and why she signed up. She didn't responded, so my coworker walked next door and spoke with her. Turns out she never even heard of the site and had no idea how her information (full first and last name) got there!

While it may be legal to display a persons full name next to their property, i'm not so sure it's cool to act as if that user is actually a registered member of the site. The site goes one step further and actually assigns political, among other, preferences to that person. This also makes me wonder if they are pulling our email addresses from public databases to ensure we get lots of the spam we all know and love so much.

Personally, i think Fatdoor has crossed one Fat line! Have some ethics people, well at least when you're going to be caught red handed. I doubt this will a be socially accepted move. Stupid community building act for sure if you ask me.