Pratham Books Boards the StoryTruck

This blog was originally published on http://blog.prathambooks.org/2011/06/pratham-books-boards-storytruck.html.

Do you remember your childhood days when you would sit around your uncles, aunts, grandmas or grandpas to listen to a story? I do! I remember my grandmother who narrated Ramayan, Mahabarat and other mythological stories. We would never get tired of listening to her stories. She had read those mythological books so many times and never went wrong. It was a treat to spend our summer vacation at grandma’s place. We played the whole day, had ice creams, dug some sand pits and in the night, all the cousins sat around grandma and listened to her story while she served us dinner. I wish I could get back that childhood!


Like most families nowadays, my children live far away from their grandparents. They get to meet once a year and cherish these memories for the rest of the year. I wanted to do something about it so that they could continue to bond and share fun things even while they were not together. I founded StoryTruck, which is  a social storytelling platform where you can read, record and share stories. StoryTruck was built from the ground-up with the family in mind. We paid a lot of attention to everything including the colors & the design. The concept is simple. You first pick a digital version of the book from our bookstore. You then click on the blue camera icon to start recording. Once you are done, you can share it with anyone you like. You can share it via all the social media channels and via an email. The recipient of this link can then click on the link and listen to you reading the story along with watching the book being read.

With StoryTruck, I hope to help bridge this distance with a story. My children can now, listen to their grandma read a story. They can treasure this for many many years and probably share it one day with their grandchildren as well.

If you would like to try StoryTruck, visit http://www.storytruck.com

-Mohan Rao

Founder & CEO
StoryTruck 

Nuggets from Social Media Summit

Cisco hosted a two day conference in partnership with Ragan Communications. Here’s some interesting nuggets.

• 57% of B2B companies acquire customers through corporate blog and 67% through Facebook.
• 70% of customers using social media to connect with friends and families. 23% connect with brands.
• Who owns Social Media? Public owns it and businesses must just engage.
• What brands think their customers want from Social Media and what customers actually want are very different.
• Messages to businesses on using Social Media – If you don’t lead others will and you won’t be in control.
• 54% of companies still block Facebook because they see no business value.
• Social Media is not just Facebook and Twitter. It is your blog, video site, product reviews and anything where people talk about you.
• 34% of Americans have used Social Media to rant or rave about a company, brand or product.
• Facebook fans are 28% more likely to continue using a product than non-fans.

Flickr photos : http://bit.ly/iwjRM5

Twitter tag: #ragancisco

Books recommended

Facebook Era by Clara Shih C

Takeaways from TiE Social Media Marketing Panel

We had an awesome panel yesterday at the TiE office in silicon valley. If you missed the event, here are some key takeaways from this panel.
Panelists

'Social' is old but happens a lot faster and at a larger scale now.

'Social' is where people shared their likes and dislikes with friends they met. Word-of-mouth marketing has existed since ancient days. The new twist on 'social' is that it happens faster and reaches a larger audience.

'Social Media' is about building relationships.

The best thing that social media marketing has brought about is the two way communication in real time. A great example of a well done social media marketing is the Old Spice commercial. It is important to engage and get your audience to participate to increase the effectiveness of your campaign.

Content  calendar is helpful

Having a Blog, Facebook fan page or a Twitter a/c is simply meaningless unless you can constantly refresh them with new content. The worst thing you could do is to have presence on one or more of these channels and not update  for a long time. So, having a content calendar forces you to think and be disciplined about your social media activities.

Goal should not be virality; instead try to touch your audience

When you make a video or blog about something, your goal should be to try and touch your audience. Your article will go viral only if it touches your audience.

'Like' is social proof

If you are on a table with 10 other people who use iPhone, then you fall into the social proof trap and think that you should get one too. 'Like' is a tool to display social proof. If a website has 800 likes then the 801th visitor will feel more inclined to like the website.

'Like' is light weight sharing

Like is also a very powerful and simple tool that could be used to share. Before socialmedia, people shared links via emails and this was not public. But, now when you click on the 'Like' button, you are sharing with your social graph in public and this carries more weight.

Who's winning ? Google or Facebook?

The answer to this was very clever and interesting. It is both because your use of these tools depends on where you are in the purchase cycle. If you are still discovering, then you would go to Google but if you have identified a product then you would go to FB for social proof.

What is one idea that entrepreneurs can work on?

Priority Inbox for all social media channels.

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TiE is the largest network of entrepreneurs and organizes many such events through out the year. TiECon is the largest conference of entrepreneurs and is happening in May. If you are an entrepreneur, this is one event you don't want to miss.

 

Bootstrapping? How you can keep your cost low.

If you are an entrepreneur and are bootstrapping, then you are probably going to watch every penny you spend. Here's how I kept my costs low when I founded StoryTruck . At the very early stage I only cared about these two.

1. Infrastructure Costs

• I used my home as a office space and avoided renting an office space. This alone saved hundreds of dollars.
• If you are building a web based product, look for hosting services. Although Amazon's EC2 is the default choice of entrepreneurs, if you look around, you'll notice that there are cheaper and equally reliable services. I chose to go with My Hosting's VPS solution for a fixed monthly cost. 
• You'll  need a good reliable source repository and bug tracking system. I chose SourceRepo because it was the cheapest. After a year, I can say it was the cheapest and it is reliable!

2. Development Costs

The next biggest cost is your development cost. If you are a developer yourself, then you can probably get away with this. But I found that I needed some help so that I could spend my time on other things. I addressed it as follows.

• Choose your programming language and platform wisely: I chose Php over .Net because I could find more Php programmers and at cheaper rates.
• I also found that hosting a Php site was far cheaper than hosting a .Net solution in terms of the hosting cost.

What do you think? Are there other ways of shrinking costs?

Three tips for publishers from Disney

Disney publishes a number of children's books online at Disney Digital Books. This is an interactive story reader which brings some great books back to life in a fun interactive way.

Disney's Underkoffler talked about what sells in the children's apps category and mentioned the following.

• Keep it simple. Add fewer bells and whistles.
• Fine tune your marketing message. Remember that there is a buyer (parent) and then there is a user (child).
• Old is gold. Old content turned into apps and digital content is in demand.

Most importantly he noted that "Disney hasn’t seen any cannibalization in the digital channel, in fact, digital has only helped increase overall sales." You can read the original article in MediaBistro.

What are your thoughts? Has your digital content done better than you imagined? Has it cannibalized your other channels? Tell me in your comments below.

How Cisco uses Facebook for building its support community

Facebook is not only for sharing those awkward pictures that you took in a bar with your drunken friends or telling how much you liked or hated the local restaurant you ate at. It can be used as an effective medium for many more purposes. Facebook provides an eco-system where a community can engage, participate and share common interests. You can find a community on Facebook for almost any topic. Search for a topic and you are sure to come up with something. Given the size and the active nature of the Facebook community, does it make sense to create a technical support community on Facebook?

Cisco has taken a bold initiative to experiment with this idea and although it’s too early to measure the outcome, it definitely seems to be headed in the right direction. CiscoSupportCommunity , a fanpage on Facebook has nearly 50K fans and is growing fast. In contrast to the common perception about Facebook, you will find a great deal of technical conversation on the fan page . You’ll notice fans posting questions and answers in near real time. Cisco has gone a step further in experimenting a concept called ‘Facebook Forums’. This is a real time conversation between the community and a technical expert at Cisco. The event takes place on the Facebook fan page and fans get to ask questions and receive instant responses from the expert. This event has grown in popularity and a sample of this can be seen on this Facebook Forum .

So, for those of you, who thought Facebook was not for geeks, think again. The world is becoming more connected and there is nothing wrong in joining a Facebook community. For the skeptics, I say, Facebook is a tool and it is up to you how you want to use it.