To the moon Page 17
But now that we’re here, lets learn a little something from the late Steve Jobs (CEO and co-founder of Apple Inc.) Here are two of my favourite quotes by Mr Jobs and what they have taught me.
‘Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.’ Now, take a moment to think about this. As the leader of your troops, it is up to you to consistently reiterate the importance of quality and the pursuit of excellence. Nobody but you can do that job.
‘Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.’ Yet again. Mind the gap. Think differently. Don’t be a me-to entrepreneur. Take the time and make the effort to find your identity and what it stands for. Then shape your brand message accordingly. It is the only way you will stand out in the crowd.
I know I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. There is no business without passion and there is no passion without heart. You simply MUST be rock solid in your belief and intent when building your brand and all its assets. And eventually, heart boils down to identity. Who are you really? What are your values, what matters most and how do you ensure that everything you do (whether at work or at play) reflects that in some significant way? I know that is a tough question to answer so try this:
When I went to the Malaysia Social Media Week back in 2014, I came across a fascinating and beautifully simple way to identify your core values. Or as Evan Carmichael, a Canadian entrepreneur and author, described it – your one-word bio. He said identify the one word that you find in common between the books you love, the movies you watch, songs you listen to, companies you admire, friendships you nurture and even the quotes that inspire you. That is your bio. That is your heart. And once you know where your heart is, you can use that filter to shape your brand, apply it to your campaigns and even tailor all your social media messaging to reflect who you are, leaving no risk of sounding insincere or all over the place.
No prizes for guessing that the word I came up with was ‘Love’. I hope it shows.
PS. Did you know that the frequency of love is 538 Hertz? I learnt this at a design forum in the band Bhavishyavani’s Backyard (also architect Ashiesh Shah and Tejas Mangeshkar’s then office). I was astounded by Nandita Kumar’s installation called ‘Notes from Nowhere Land’, which showed the concept that broadcasting the right frequency can help open your heart, prompt peace and hasten healing.
‘We now know the love signal, 528 Hertz, is among the six core creative frequencies of the universe because math doesn’t lie, the geometry of physical reality universally reflects this music.’ – Dr Horowitz1
Amazing.
B is for Blogging
In the online Oxford dictionary a blog is described as: A regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style.’ Several other descriptions I found online went like this:
Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or reflect the purpose of the website that hosts the blog.
A blog (a truncation of the expression web-log) is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts).
Blog definition, a website containing a writer or group of writers’ own experiences, observations, opinions, etc.
A blog, or weblog, is often a mixture of what is happening in a person’s life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site.
Definition of blog: A website, similar to an online journal, that includes chronological entries made by individuals.
If you notice, all these definitions have one thing in common; they say a blog is informal, personal, conversational and a collection of the writer’s own experiences, observations and opinions. A blog therefore must have a personality, and ideally that personality should be yours.
If you ask me what it takes to write a successful blog, I’d say the most important thing is to be real. It doesn’t matter what you’re blogging about as long as it is evident that you are blogging with interest and passion and not just for the sake of putting something up. I always ask myself this question when I write a blog. Would I read this? And if the answer is a lukewarm ‘maybe’, I scrap it and start over.
There’s a great Hollywood movie called Julie & Julia about a blogger who documents her trials and tribulations of ploughing through a French cookbook as she blogs about her experiences of recreating all 524 recipes in it. I loved how she used the blog to share her experience, and often her frustration, with empathetic strangers across the globe who were following her journey with a great deal of camaraderie and support. That’s an amazing example of how one blog can bring together so many people over a common interest – their love for food. And probably the healthiest form of voyeurism!
C is for Competition
I’m often asked, ‘How do you feel about all the competition that’s coming up in blogging?’ And my answer is always the same – ‘It’s great. That means we’ve paved the way for an actual industry where one previously didn’t exist.’ I mean, think about it, if I was the only blogger in India, what could the potential for blogging as a career in our country ever become? The more bloggers there are the bigger the industry. The bigger the industry, the larger the advertising market. The larger the advertising market, the more chances you have of making a living by blogging.
Plus, we’re all basically geeks who love to play in the same virtual playground. The fact that we’re also into fashion and Bollywood just makes us #geekchic, that’s all.
I think the best thing about the millennial generation is that we are finally learning how to play together nicely. Gone are the days when everyone existed in a silo and refused to even acknowledge their competition. In fact, millennials on YouTube have taken things to the next level by turning their competition into collaboration! I mean think about how often you’ve seen your favourite YouTubers do a TAG challenge or a video together and been thrilled to bits. Meanwhile, in the process, both are tapping into each other’s audiences and thereby growing their own. It’s brilliant.
Taking off from that idea, we at MissMalini Entertainment have launched our own blogger network called IGNITE. The premise of IGNITE is that 1) we want to give back to the blogging community, and now that we have the means and expertise to do so, it’s time to share the love. So, bloggers who join the network have free use of our studio space, tools and training, and access to office resources when they need it. And 2) There are so many brands out there that want to work with the top-tier bloggers in India but it’s almost impossible for them to keep track of their increasing numbers, as well as the quality and reliability of their work. Not to mention the challenges of finding the perfect mix of influencers to best represent their brand. We do all that homework for them thereby bringing large-scale campaigns to bloggers in our network. The bloggers benefit financially and don’t have to deal with any of the client servicing aspect themselves, and the brands get an infinitely better reach across the audiences they are trying to engage. Everybody wins! I must give credit to Mike here because this has been a true labour of love for him and we are all proud to see it finally taking shape exactly the way we always envisioned.
D is for Dopamine
Here’s one for the nerds in the house. Did you know that social media engagement and action on our cell phone releases a chemical called dopamine? Simon Sinek explained, ‘That’s why it feels so good when you get a text. Harvard research scientists released a report in 2012, which showed that talking about yourself through social media activates a pleasure sensation in your brain that is usually associated with food, money or sex. That’s why we trip on the number of likes we get and go back a hundred times to check the count. When you get the attention, you get a hit of dopamine, which feels great and which is why we keep going back for more.’
But on the flipside, he cautions of the dangers of dopamine as well, ‘Dopamine is the exact same chemical that makes us fee
l good when we smoke, when we drink and when we gamble. In other words, it’s highly, highly addictive,’ and just like any other drug has, as you can well imagine, a very unpleasant withdrawal. He says, ‘The trauma for young kids to be unfriended [and I would imagine even trolled] is it too much to handle.’1
Now, as people and brands it is up to you and I how we leverage this social media addiction in a way that is both successful but at the same time, responsible. Remember what Spiderman said, ‘With great power, comes great responsibility.’ I believe we must draw a line where anything we are creating propagates hate or ridicule. This is why I am personally opposed to negative press and promoting things like fairness creams. I feel they send the wrong message to legions of our youth by manipulating their insecurities. To this day suffer people all over our country from poor self-esteem because their own mothers told them they were too dark to be beautiful. I’m not buying that.
Thus, remember to apply one more filter of moral goodness to your content and ask yourself honestly if what you are selling and how you are selling it is at the cost of someone else’s sense of self-worth.
E is for Emoji
The first-ever emoji were used by Japanese mobile operators. Per Wikipedia, emoji were first used by Japanese mobile operators (of course it was the Japanese, must have been some guy’s Ikigai!) The first one was created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita. His inspiration were weather forecasts symbols, Chinese characters, street signs and manga stock symbols to express emotion. Even things like the lightbulb that signifies inspiration. Kurita created the first 180 emoji based on expressions he observed people making and other things in the city.
And if you’re as old as I am you probably remember ‘emoticons’. The difference being that emoticons were facial expressions made by using punctuation marks like :) and now we can do a full-toothed grin. Oh, how far we’ve come.
Anyway, I recently came across a cool article called ‘The Psychology of Emojis’1, which explains how emojis have taken over our communication. Apparently ‘74 per cent of people in the United States regularly use stickers, emoticons or emojis in their online communication sending an average of ninety-six emojis or stickers per day. If you add it up, that is about six billion emojis flying around the virtual universe every single day! Fifty per cent of all captions/comments on Instagram have one or more emojis in them.’
The article also explains how ‘today emojis are doing what your tone of voice did on the telephone and what expressions or gestures did face-to-face. Emojis are even getting rid of internet slang. Who’s saying ROFLMAO anymore, right?’
The part that struck me the most though was this, ‘What’s interesting is that emojis are not only changing our language, they’re changing our brains! Humans, it seems, mimic each other’s expressions and emotions while talking in order to build relationships. But until emojis came around that was the crucial element of communication that was missing online. There was no empathy. Or at least no way to really show it.’ Scientists now say that looking at a happy-faced emoji activates the same part of the brain that it would when looking at a real human face – it changes our mood. And we weren’t born this way, our brain patterns have evolved over the past few years to accommodate these new methods of visual stimulation.
According to the list of top emojis on Instagram, it is clear that it is a platform where we go to laugh, encourage, be inspired and share beautiful pictures. MailChimp decided to map the network of emojis people use together. The map shows how emojis that are near each other, when you’re typing, tend to get used together more often, but there are several emojis that connect to tell visual stories like the earth, travel and planes. People often use the heart emoji along with fashion emojis and the soup emoji is often consumed alone! Cool, huh?
F is for Facebook
Probably the most inspiring tale of entrepreneurship of our generation. Everyone knows the Mark Zuckerberg story (and if you don’t, please Netflix the movie Social Network tonight) but did you know that Zuckerberg is colour blind and that’s why Facebook is blue?
Back in 2010, he told the New Yorker, ‘Blue is the richest colour for me. I can see all of blue.’ In a happy coincidence, it turns out this worked out great for Z because per designmantic1, there is a reason social media sites prefer blue logos. It just so happens that blue can emit a sense of calmness, security, honesty and trust, which is useful when you want someone to sign up and give you all their personal information. (I truly feel like that was the universe giving Mark Zuckerberg a sign by the way.)
But can you even remember what life was like before Facebook? It completely revolutionized how we interact with the world and our relationships in it. (Not to mention proved to be the best birthday reminder of all time!) I’ll give you the skinny on what you need to know about Facebook and all the other social media platforms for better engagement metrics in my next blog but for now, ponder this:
Millennials don’t use Facebook like we used to. Heck, I don’t use Facebook like we used to. I remember a time where the first thing I did every morning was try to come up with a clever ‘Facebook status’ that I would change several times a day.
Now I use Facebook as a magazine feed of my friends lives and a place to create a whole lot of fun-filled entertainment content. Content that is increasingly becoming video. One of my favourite things about Facebook is the Live Video feature and you’ve probably seen our weekly series out of the Facebook office called ‘Friday’s At Facebook’ where either a Bollywood star or a fashion/beauty expert comes and chats live with our followers and it is heaps of fun. Other uses for Facebook: stalking exes (come on, admit it, we’ve all done it) and I must confess, requesting lives on Candy Crush. There I said it. #GuiltyAsCharged
But I came across a very interesting article1, which explained why Facebook is good for you. Apparently, Facebook boosts your confidence. ‘According to a Cornell University study, spending just 3 minutes on Facebook can make you feel better about yourself, possibly because you’re able to choose the information you put out there.’ Bonus: Editing your own profile during a Facebook break yields the biggest confidence boost, researchers say. Your heart rate lowers and so do your stress levels. In fact, Facebook, can even help you fight pain! A UCLA report says that people reported lower levels of pain while viewing photos of a loved one. (Remember that the next time you go to the dentist!) Facebook breaks can even boost your productivity. In a study at the University of Melbourne, workers given a 10-minute break to read Facebook were 16 percent more productive than a group that wasn’t allowed to use the internet during the rest, and 40 per cent more productive than people who didn’t receive a break at all. And finally, a University of Arizona study found that older adults who used Facebook experienced a 25 per cent improvement in their working memory, possibly because it requires you to process so much information – photos, status updates and comments – at once. It’s a mental workout.
So, I guess Facebook is awesome.
P.S. Did you know? Facebook’s ‘Like’ button used to be the ‘Awesome’ button?
Facebook engineer Andrew Bosworth explains in detail, on Quora the history of the ‘Like’ button. But the part I found fascinating was the fact that even though he and other engineers at Facebook were enthusiastic about the ‘Awesome’ button, Zuckerberg vetoed it in 2007. Facebook eventually settled on the Like, Andrew says, ‘Something that got a lukewarm reception from the team at the time.’
I think it’s time to re-introduce the Awesome button Mark. I think it’s time.
G is for Google
I believe there are no wrong answers in life, just poor Google searches.
Google was invented on 4 September 1998 making it now young adult, but the impact it has made in its young life has been immeasurable over the years (Goodbye Encyclopaedia Britannica). Everyone is familiar with the term ‘Google it’ and the search engine is the single most-visited page on the internet, revolutionizing the way we browse, learn and connect with the world. Not to
mention how our day-to-day lives are made so much more efficient with Gmail, Google docs, Google calendar – the list goes on and on.
David Koller from Stanford University explains the genesis of the name Google on a Stanford college web page I found and clarified the various incorrect accounts all over the internet. He says his source is, ‘A colleague from Wing 3B of the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University, where Google was born.’
‘Sean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name – something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word ‘googolplex,’ and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, ‘googol’ (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as ‘google.com,’ which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name ‘google.com’ for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from 15 September 1997).’1
And that’s how we got Google!
A serendipitous typo, isn’t that all kinds of amazing?
Kind of like the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button on Google’s home page. I looked it up and according to Phillip Remaker a Google user since the beta days, there’s a story behind that too. There was a Clint Eastwood movie called Dirty Harry in which the line, ‘Do you feel lucky, punk?’ became legendary as kind of a bold challenge if you will. The button dates back to when Google was starting out and ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ was their swag way of saying we’re confident about this search engine finding you exactly what you’re looking for from the very first hit. And so ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ takes you to the best result/highest ranked site. Have you tried it?