SEO/SEM is no more enough. Get ready for NFO/NFM.

The advent of social networking tools & specially Facebook has changed the arena of online marketing.

Brands & websites which were worried about getting higher page ranks in popular search engines have now one more challenge which is popularly called as NFO – News Feed Optimization (in relevance to Facebook News Feed page).

Earlier a significant amount of online advertising budget of various online sites used to go to Search Engine Marketing initiatives, but now marketing managers also have to allocate money for one more channel which is called NFM – News Feed Marketing.

SEO	NFO
SEO is all about making Google and the other search engines think that you’re authoritative on a given topic and deserve to be listed highly in its search results	Whereas NFO is making Facebook think that the Feed items published from your application are more relevant to your followers & hence should be displayed in their News Feeds.
SEM	NFM
SEM is all about paying Google and the other search engines  for some particular keywords so to put your site link on the search result pages of those particular keywords	NFM is paying Facebook to insert your ad next to Feed items that it thinks are important or relevant to your product/service & to a very targeted audience who might have interest in it.

Until now people Search Engines were the most important tool to get visibility to users but not anymore. Social networking websites hold a very important place in their lives as social sites are where people spend most of their time.

People spend 3x time on Facebook than Google. 

For any marketer NFM is relatively easier to do as for this he/she just need to pay Facebook & they’ll put the News Feed at relevant places & guarantee a very certain quantity of guaranteed traffic.

But News Feed Optimization is a bit trickier & needs a lot more efforts & energy. Similarly to Google’s page rank algorithm, Facebook also has its own NewsFeed algorithm or an EdgeRank algorithm, which is not completely disclosed to public.

At a high level, the EdgeRank formula is fairly straightforward.

 Every item that shows up in your News Feed is considered an Object. If you have an Object in the News Feed (say, a status update), whenever another user interacts with that Object they’re creating what Facebook calls an Edge, which includes actions like tags and comments.

                                       NFO Edge Rank = ∑_{edges e} u_ew_ed_e

_where

u_{e – affinity score between viewing user & edge creator}

w_{e – weight for this} edge type (create, comment, like, tag, etc.)

d_{e – time decay factor based on how long ago the edge was created}

Moreover, gaming the News Feed is going to be harder than gaming Google’s PageRank algorithm because of the personalized nature of Feed item selection. Because so many components of FeedRank depend on individual user behavior, there is only so much you can do as an application developer to boost your Feed item’s score across the board.

The best one can do is to design rich, engaging Feed items that convert well & are viral in nature.

Over & above it there are various Feed item elements like title, body & images which should be optimized & made really interesting. Also the feed application should be designed in such a way that it leads to some sort of provocative action from the user & make him install & share the application.

Well in my personal opinion, the battle for News Feed Optimization has yet to take its true colors as marketers are still struggling to use Facebook as an effective marketing tool for their products & services. But of course as a smart marketer, one must be aware of the nitty gritties of this field.

How fast can you scale?

The first & foremost thing that any popular web application on Internet today tries to achieve is to provide its user a memorable & seamless UI experience. And do we realize what this great popularity on Internet means in terms of traffic or usage or pure numbers.

Just to bring your attention to some usage statistics on few popular sites

-  Twitter hits 1 billion queries per day & see 50 million tweets per day which means 600 tweets per second

-  Facebook gets 60 million status updates per day & 2.5 billion photos are uploaded on it each month

-  Google is processing 2 billion search queries per day

-  YouTube get 5 billion video streams every month & gets 15 hours of video uploaded every minute

-  Flickr now hosts more than 4 billion images

But do you think it's so easy for all these websites to handle these millions & billions of user requests each day & still give a seamless & uninterrupted browsing experience. 

This thought made me really curious to study the web architecture of some of these websites that see massive traffic every day. And what I found was that all of these have almost similar kind of architecture with minor differences that has resulted in so robust & efficient systems.

The very backbone of all these website is this very popular LAMP architecture. LAMP is an acronym for a solution stack of free, open source software, originally coined from the first letters of Linux (operating system),Apache HTTP Server, MySQL (database software) and PHP/Perl/Python scripting languages. The software combination has become popular because it is free of cost, open-source, and therefore easily adaptable. Moreover almost every distribution of Linux includes Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl, so installing the LAMP software is almost as easy as saying it.

Now to appreciate the most sophisticated web architecture one must should also be aware of simple & less efficient solutions as well. So let me talk about different solutions around this basic LAMP architecture.


1. One “Box” Solution

- Basic Web application

- Low Traffic

- Apache/MySQL/PHP on one machine

- Bottlenecks are Disk I/O and Context     switching 

2. Two "Box" Solution

- Higher traffic application

- Apache/PHP on box A and MySQL on box B 

- Bottlenecks like Disk I/O, Network I/O 

3. Many "Boxes" Solution with Replication

- Yet even Higher traffic

- Apache/PHP on box A & MySQL on many boxes

- Writes are separated from reads. Web Servers have read/write ratio of somewhere between 80/20 and 90/10.

- Master gets Insert/Update/Delete & slaves get Select

- Load Balancing is used

Bottleneck
- Slaves can’t keep up with replication as they are too busy Reading (production traffic) and   Writing (replication)

- So this manifests as Comments/photos/any user entered data doesn’t show up on the site right away. So users will repeat the action thinking that it didn’t happen the first time, making situation worse.

4. Many Boxes Solution with Hardware Load Balancing MySL

- Standard MySQL master/slave replication

- All writes (inserts/updates/deletes) from application go to Master 

- All reads (selects) from application go to a load balanced VIP (virtual IP) spreading out load across all slaves

Benefits of Load balancing
 - Add/remove slaves without affecting applications

- Additional monitoring point & some automatic failure handling 

- Capacity planning lot easier if the ceiling of each slave is known.

Some more add-ons or tweaks
- Web Server (machine with APACHE/PHP) can also be scaled with up with multi-threading.
- Increase App Servers too with a load balancing mechanism along with DB Clusters. (Each cluster has Master-Slave DB’s of their own).
- Add caches to your App Server. Cache your static content. SQUID is good.
- Also have Memcached which is distributed memory caching solution.
- Use RAID10 instead of RAID5 as it has more read capacity & less write penalty
- Use interleaving memory
- Choose SCSI hard drive over SATA
- Use MySQL with SAN (Storage Area Network). SAN is better than RAID.
- Use CDNs (Hello Akamai)


Hence if we look at an overall picture of any good & robust architecture behind any website, we can easily generalize into something I've shown below.

You think you are fast enough. Try beating Google Instant.

Google today announced a new feature which they call “Google Instant” & it focuses on giving search results even before a user has finished typing the search query. So even before a user types a query & hits enter he/she will be able to see search results on the search page & it will help them narrow their search.

Users now looking at the suggested results can adapt their search & find exactly what they are looking for much faster. But to me it seems like a natural extension of the “search suggest drop down list” feature provided by Google way back on its search engine. What Google now doing is that it is fetching the search results for the top items in its search suggest drop down list & showing it upfront.

Having said that, we can no way steal the credit from Google of making search faster & more efficient.

Google claims that with this new feature users can save 2-5 seconds on every search.




Google Instant is not available on mobiles right now but Google is planning to release it soon on mobiles as well. And mobile space is the place where this neat feature can do wonders. It’s always tiring to type long search queries on mobile & with this feature it will be damn easy to search on mobiles.

Gmail Priority Inbox – What an idea sir jee

There comes a breath of relief for intense email users, receiving hundreds of emails in single day, with the launch of Gmail Priority Inbox. With Priority Inbox, Google has built up a system which intelligently figures out & categorizes emails into ‘important’ category & puts them at the top for user’s immediate attention.

Please also have a look at this wonderful video created by them which explains the functionality in a very layman's language.

And the best thing about this useful feature is its simplicity. It’s just a one click process to activate it on your account & the user doesn’t need to teach Gmail anything or set up any rules. It automatically start working based on a number of criteria like

§  How frequently one open, read or respond to a message from a given sender

§  How often one read a message with certain keywords

§  Or whether one responds to messages if the mail is not directly marked to you but to a group etc.

So as this system keeps on learning with time based on user’s behavior towards his/her emails it keeps on getting better with time.

Along with the automated system Google also takes inputs from the user where he/she can manually upgrade a message to ‘important’ category or downgrade a message to normal & this is recorded in the system for future categorization.

I’m using this service for more than a week now & it is brilliant. Almost 98% of the times the service seems to be working for me. At times I saw some promotional or group mails from some websites/forums getting in the ‘important’ section and I couldn’t know the reason behind it. But that’s ok. Once I manually mark them unimportant they never appear there again.

But what worries me is what if I get used to this system & some person whom I’ve kicked out of ‘important’ category sent me an urgent message which needs my immediate attention. Will Gmail systems will be smart enough to figure that out from its content & overwrite my previous actions thus putting into my priority inbox.

The funny part is that assuming other email service providers introduce similar functionality & it becomes a norm then we might see rise of a new group of MEO Consultants (Mail Engine Optimization) J where they advice corporate on how to write emails with important keywords, subject lines etc. to get place into the priority boxes of its users.

 I think solutions like these should inspire the proud engineers & product managers around the world to solve world’s most challenging problems with easy & intuitive solutions.

Advent of Ecommerce Era in India

Recently IRCTC has created a lot of buzz in news. Thanks to the total makeover they did to their website including new business lines like flight booking, hotel booking & tour package booking. The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited (IRCTC) is a public sector company set up and fully owned by the Ministry of Railways. Can’t believe that a govt. run company can be credited with words like efficiency & professionalism then let the numbers speak for themselves.

-          Out of total Rs. 9000 crores worth of transactions seen by Indian Ecommerce Industry in financial  year 2009, IRCTC had a major pie with total transactions worth Rs. 3500 crores which is meaty 39%.

-       On an average IRCTC get 0.2 million unique visitors every day with total of 5.5 million hits per day.

-       More than 1.5 lakh tickets(including I-tickets) are booked everyday on IRCTC out of which 1500 are airline tickets at present. IRCTC is making Rs. 50 lakhs per day alone from flight ticket booking.

-       Every day, around 8000 I-Tickets are sent to around 200 of India’s biggest cities daily in specially crafted envelopes.

Around 80% of total E-commerce market is captured by travel portals like IRCTC, MakeMyTrip & Yatra. Keeping aside all these rosy figures about IRCTC let’s talk about pure play online shopping in India which has annual transactions value worth Rs. 1300 crores in financial year 2009. Major players in this space are Rediff Shopping, EBay India, and Indiatimes.com. Currently India has around 8m online shoppers.

According to a recent study by IMRB International on Indian online shoppers

Top 6 reasons given by shoppers in buying through Internet	Rank
Saves time & Effort	1
Convenience of shopping at home	2
Wide variety / range of products are available	3
Good discounts / lower prices	4
Get detailed information of the product	5
You can compare various models / brands	6

As I see the current industry, there are few powerful forces in the Indian Shopping space which cannot be ignored by any company who is planning its Ecommerce operations in near future.

1.      Young Brigade

a.      Today’s youth have high disposable income & large appetite for leisure & entertainment.

b.      Also 48% of parents agree that their children play a major role in decisions about household     purchases and what brands to buy. Hence this is a major target group for Ecommerce companies.

2.      Empowered Women

a.      More of the women are getting educated & joining workforce. Also women really enjoys shopping and it’s a great stress buster for them.

b.      In all classes, women do & make most of the shopping decisions. 85% of the time women have upper hand in making purchasing decisions in India.

3.      Rising Non-Metro Aspirations

a.      Tier II, tier III & rural area accounts for more than half the total market for TV sets, mobile phones, fans, pressure cookers, bicycles, washing soaps etc.

b.      People in these areas have high aspirations but limited reach of big brands & designer products creates a supply gap.

4.      New Age categories

a.      Ethnic, traditional & customizable product category is fast catching people’s attention.

b.      Beauty & health products along with natural & organic food category are fast catching Indian consumer’s attention.

5.      Emerging Technology

a.      With more than 500+ million Indian population having mobile phones, mobiles have become a much powerful tool than just a communication device. Cheap GPRS internet connections on mobile along with safe & secure mobile payment methods is giving a big push to m-commerce as well.

b.      Social shopping is another trend which is catching user’s attention. 

Looking at the current trends and a lot of new start ups like Flipkart, Infibeam, GoIbibo getting into this promising business, this space is really worth to watch out for.

Social Media Strategy

Before defining any social media strategy, businesses have to understand the consumer who uses these social media tools & their consumption pattern on internet. Also social media strategy is not a onetime investment but rather it’s an ongoing process & it takes time to show results.

Instead of blindly jumping & start using all the social tools available, to reach their customers, businesses should first have a clear plan of engagement in place. In the world of social media content is the king. Consumers are searching & using online media for information that goes beyond price point & product name. Hence content creation plan is of paramount importance to engage users.

1.     Create compelling content that people will share, that people find valuable & interesting.

2.     Have content that educates, gives user more information.

3.     Generate consumer participation. Give them a chance to interact with your brand & create their own content.

4.     Create opportunities to answer questions from your consumers. 

Important Online Cycle for Businesses

Social Media Strategy: Roadmap for Success

1. Goals: - Who & What?

a.     Define audiences & identify influencers as well as long tail communities. Understand sociographics of customers.

                                          i.     Where are your customers online?

                                         ii.    What are your customers’ social behaviors online?

                                        iii.    What social information or people do your customers rely on?

                                        iv.    What is your customers’ social influence? Who trusts them?

                                         v.    How do your customers use social technologies in the context of your products?

b.    Define objectives

c.     Set reasonable expectation

2.     Media:-

a.     Choose social media platforms.

b.    Social media sites & networks.

3.     Engagement: - How to listen, interact & respond?

a.     Content: types of media, voice, frequency

b.    Duties: operational plan for producing, posting, sharing, responding

c.     Policy: addressing negative comments

4.     Reach: - How will you promote your program?

a.     Online, email, offline, PR, word of mouth

b.    How will you build your network?

5.     Resources: - What is needed & what it will cost?

a.     People, process, assets, tools etc.

6.     Metrics: - How will you measure success?

a.     What metrics will you use?

b.    What tools will you use?

c.     How will you translate into ROI?