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Tata Nano Online - The Brand, The Buzz and The Where to Buy?

March 23 it is and in a matter of 4 odd hours Tata Nano will be officially launched. The $2500 car has now gone down to $2000 thanks to the rising tide or dollar in this case, though we might need to wait till the launch to know exactly how much this is going to cost us. Hey wait this is WATBlog and our interest lies in something else. The online buzz going around on the car.

The Tata people have done some commendable job with regards to the online promotion of the car and thankfully has gone beyond the traditional methods of advertising and promotion online. So while we have a banner on top of Rediff as a countdown to the launch, they also have a website which is quite interactive in nature. What’s more there is a pretty active forum, a blog and links to social media communities on the site.

And that’s the exciting part, the last one. Social Media communities. On the home page there are links to an Orkut and Facebook community for Tata Nano, both of which are pretty active in their own right. Here are some social media details about Tata Nano:

Official Orkut Community Members - 6,906.
Official Facebook Group Fans - 4,210
Highest View Count on YouTube - 303,006 (it was just under 3,00,000 when I began writing this post)
No. of Blog Posts - 61,664

While Orkut and Facebook are quite ubiquitos when it comes to social media strategies these days, however, media sharing and blogs certainly are more active setups compared to networking as seen from the above example. The discussion on these blogs ranged from various issues ranging from how the cost worked out, to the safety of the car to the markets that it can tap into. Even YouTube videos are filled with comments on these matters. Point to be noted that perhaps Tata motors could have used these grounds as well as part of their online involvement strategy.

In any case, the online buzz is enough to point out the brand that Tata has already built with this product, the buzz has caught the attention of even regular people in international markets if the forum topics on the official online communities are to be beleived. To their credit Tata has handled these touch points pretty well by being active on them. In fact they also have a blog on the official website where they have been discussing quite interesting topics and generally maintaining an active community.

One such instance that caught bloggers’ attention was them asking our opinion on selling Tata Nano online.

There is a very interesting thread in the forums section of this site which talks about online booking and purchase of the Tata Nano. Thanks to our user Mathew Vattolil for sparking off such an interesting discussion.

(Click Here to participate in the discussion)

Selling cars on the net. How real is this option for a manufacturer? Does the web really stand in competition to a conventional dealer?

This is an excellent example of a blog being put to its proper use. The other aspect of the post which is what Tata Motors did about the question of selling the car online, I haven’t come across any credible source of online retail of the car. Anyone has any idea on this?

Considering Tata is creating quite an innovative in their retailing idea - like using Westside and Chrome and even SBI for bookings the web is certainly something they should be trying out. Tehre were reports earlier of autojunction.com being planned to use for selling the Nano online, but I doubt if that idea is going to take off for the moment.

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Facebook unable to interpret 'Change'

As a user of a product or service, you only like a change when it provides additional value to you. If the change is just brought forward to the user for the sake of it, nothing much happens to the company in terms of increase in sales or word of mouth. The only thing that happens is a wave of criticism or appreciation depending on the change that has been brought into notice.

The same happened with Facebook, when they changed the user's homepages last week. Stats say that not even 10 percent of people who voted for the new design liked the change. The common reason which was cited was that it looked too much like Twitter. Remember, a brand loses its credibility when its uniqueness matches or gets its users confused with its competing brands. It is in verity shocking to know that the Social Media Branding experts on Facebook didn't realize this basic concept, which even a common man can assume. Worse for the brand is when its loyal followers come out in the open protesting the action, rebel and join your competitor.

The reactions to the change would actually take Facebook on a backfoot and make them re-strategize their options and alternatives and develop a work around solution. The nasty comment of disgruntled users of Facebook was made as a tag cloud by ReadWriteWeb and displayed on their site as follows –

Facebook is definitely not immune to user criticisms. It has faced a plethora of critics very boldly and still made business. But, will it survive this time is the bigger question. Facebook once started the option of tagged photos as a method to generate spam which was again disliked by its users. The names of the tagged photos were deliberately used to curtain down the main cause and acted as a veil over a hidden cause, product or event which was promoted. The worse thing was Facebook promoted this idea of online advertising and thought that people can actually be fooled into this.

Of the most recent controversies the surrounded Facebook was when they announced a change in their "Terms of Service" which again caught the user stupefied. The sense of ownership was the logic that Facebook put forward this time and was not appreciated by its users again.

Phew!! Isn't it actually commendable on Facebook's part to still remain one of the best social networking sites inspite of all these management blunders? Okay, that was sarcasm.

But, probably with this news that Twitter has been the fastest community that grew last month (as in a report stated by ACNielsen); it is high time that Facebook get their act together. The Nielsen Wire reported that unique visitors to Twitter.com increased 1,382 percent year over year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009.

The Gurus in Branding have said time and again to think a million times before rebranding a product or service that is famous among its user group. The logic here is that the users would have grown so accustomed and familiar with the existing functions and applications that they would not appreciate a change.

For sure, Time will only have all the answers to Facebook's next plan of action.

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3 Simple Reasons Why I Think You Should Use Wordpress to Build Your Website

As a blogging platform, wordpress has been able to tap in millions of users both for its self hosted as well as the .com version. While worthy competition do exist from other platform providers, WP to many has become the definition of free publishing. However, this post is an attempt to look at Wordpress as a CMS or a website development tool rather than as a blogging platform. Below I enumerate my reasons why I feel websites should have some wordpress love.

1. Wordpress is Easy and Free

WP has been often taken as a success story of the Open Source world with the following that it has gathered in relatively small time. While the initial interest might purely have been because it was free and therefore worth a try, it has scaled so fast because of its ease of use and flexibility.

So much so that the Wordpress.org installation instruction page proudly proclaims the whole process as the Famous 5 minute install. With tools like Fantastico it might very well become the under 1 minute install as well. The admin panel has seen a lot of changes from the initial versions to the much loved one of WP 2.7, however even before the new version I have always found the interface practical and uncomplicated to get on with what I need to do. If you need to set a website up in a jiffy, I don’t see a better tool than Wordpress.

2. Wordpress is Flexible

When I first bought a domain name to develop a website I ran around quite a lot trying to figure out what’s the best tool to get things up, and I heard a lot of opinions and suggestions from Joomla to Drupal to custom CMSs. However, I had no idea of development and all these things cost too much to get made. (The developers charged quite a lot). The project never took off and all I had was a PSD sliced HTML home page.

A few months later I came across a website that looked somewhat like a blog, but had a lot more. It had polls, it had pages, it had a videos section, there was a photo gallery. And the man running the site said that his blog makes a couple of hundred dollars every month. It was not just my initiation into the world of making money by blogging but also to wordpress. A couple of searches and I was drawn into WP awesomeness. You can have separate pages, there were millions of free themes, and WP even gave space for you to edit them.

I found a blog post somewhere that listed some useful plugins for WP. Analytics, polls, a contact form (long cherished dream, which I will tell some other day), Feed subscription, Favicon, Bookmarking, Related Posts, Rotating Images, Adsense Manager, Ad Manager (and some powerful ones at that).. I went mad. All these features and all I had to was upload a file and activate it from my admin panel. Suddenly a blog could do so much more. Later I realized that WP even allows you to even keep a separate page as your home page so that your visitors don’t need to see your blog upfront. This was the begining of WP as a website thoughtflow.

You need to make video sharing site - WP has plugins, you need an e-com site - WP has plugins, you need to parked page - wp has plugins, you need a corporate website- wp has plugins and themes, you need a personal site - wp has themes, plguins and a blog, you need a gallery - WP plugins and themes, you need magazine - wp has themes, you need real time site stats- wp has plugins.. the list can go on.

3. Wordpress is Community

And the list above can go on not because Automattic which owns WP keeps churning out these features, but because it lets others do it. Wordpress has one of the most active community of users and evangelists online. The scores of wordpress themes both free and paid are not just an exhibition of design but often defines trends in web design and development. I don’t know CSS, I don’t know PHP but I have customized almost all of my 5 odd websites the way I wanted them to look. In the process I also learned enough of CSS and PHP to parade around as someone who can handle it.

The power came not through my own curious intelligence or experiments but through the numerous tutotrials and powerful themes that the community of WP designers have made available over the years. Again it is not just about the theme. All the features above are more often than not free plugins developed by people as part time projects. Developers often take it as an excercise to experiment and innovate. There are many who enhance someone else’s project and make the plugins better.

The number of articles covering Wordpress hacks is huge. The activity never seems to stop and that in turn finds newer people jumping on board. Essentially WP has become a web product. It is not just for bloggers or content publishers anymore, it has a larger set of web designers in the system, a huge developer system added to this. In turn this means that you can develop a website with any feature that you want and look whichever way you want it to and you are sure to find someone to do it for you, the talent pool is that huge.

There are a lot more stuff that I can add to this post in my appeal for WP. However, they would basically be reiterating the above points. These 3 reasons form the fundamentals of the Wordpress ecosystem. So if you need a website made using wordpress the forces acting in your favour are the ones above. Wordpress makes your site search friendly (SEO plugins), it makes it social media friendly (heck a blog is social media), the only thing that remains is paid advertising to get traffic on your site which you can do even if you don’t own a website so doesn’t add up in the marketing aspect of your web design and development. Content is what keeps people on the site and makes them come back often, and I don’t see a simpler content platform than wp to add the dynamism of content on the site.

In essence, wordpress helps you get traffic on the site and helps you keep them and all this for a fraction of what you would pay otherwise to get your site developed, in some cases even free. In some post some other time I will also list a few examples of websites that you’ll be surprised to see use wordpress as a system to run their site. Till then go make one yourself, it will take 7 mnutes.

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