The Times of India reported today that Zynga will and has agreed to launch an Indian Flag for its popular game Farmville on Facebook sometime this week.

Farmville , allows users the choice of hosting multiple flags on their farm and has surprisingly not had the Indian flag as an option – Surprising , because i would assume that the Indian Subcontinent would hold some weight with the developers keeping in mind the ever increasing member base from here on Facebook and Farmville.

Ofcourse trust us to make an issue out of it. Snippets of conversation carried in the Times suggested people considering this exclusion as signs of racism and offensive. A supporting campaign / cause was launched on Facebook sometime ago as well for pressurizing the developers to have the flag as an option -the group has a 600 odd members.

Needless to say while having the flag as an option is good , the whole thing was an unnecessary melodrama. One of the bloggers interviewed suggested that this was a sign of the times and the philosophy of Gandhigiri among the youth – pretty heavy stuff….

Google Brazil is definitely ecstatic about winning the Olympics pitch – they have already gone ahead and made a Google Doodle to celebrate this win as well.
Pretty nice logo , one of the more complex ones from Google recently if i recall correctly. Either way , many congrats to Brazil!!

Google Brazil Olympics Logo

Stumbled upon this brief but interesting interview on WatShow with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress. Like i mentioned, brief but interesting insights into WordPress. See it here

Got asked by a friend today about how to go abut doing a bulk sms on Facebook to everyone on the friends list. Honestly was a bit stumped, since i have never done it.

It appears that there is no real ‘direct’ way. One can setup an event and invite everyone , there is ofcourse a manual process of tying in the email id’s , or importing email addresses. I found that they best way , comparatively, was to create a list of all your friends and then while composing a message simply type the name of the list in the “TO” field and you can send a message to everyone.

After clicking your friends tab , on the left navigation you will see multiple lists present , you can create one from here or alternatively , click on “All Connections” and then click “Create list”. The unfortunate part is that the friends need to be highlighted manually one by one – No control “A” here

Whats good about it is that one does not need to go through the entire process of creating an event. The list stays till you wish to delete it and can be used again and again. Ofcourse it will need to be updated as and when you add new friends but thats a comparitively small update

Anyone know a better way? Would love to hear about it.

Picked this one up from Wat-blog a little while ago – Oktatabyebye.com , the online travel community was hauled up by the TATA’s for using their name “Tata” in the website address , and the world intellectual property organization has ruled in the favor of the Tata’s – Make my trip is now going to move the Delhi High Court ( and rightly so in my opinion)

I wrote on WatBlog that – Given the state and condition of our trucks here in India , if TATA’s have such a problem with the name being used , they should haul up every truck driver or union and get them to remove the name from their vehicles as well….. after all i am sure it would not be too long ago for anyone to have noticed the Tata name on the back of a truck covered partly in garbage , or dirt – hows that for brand image? ( Anyone got a picture to share?)

Jokes aside , the community has been around for 3 years , Tata’s longer , why the problem now? And whats more where does one draw the line between everything being an intellectual property for someone or the other – Tata ( please correct me if i am off on this) has been a hind (slang?) word for ages , should generic words such as this even be allowed to fall under the preview of IPR’s?

What the Hex , What the hex! – ruins the drive back home every evening.

I am sure a lot of you would have also got exposed to this ad on the radio over the last few days. I dont know about anyone else , but i thought it was irritating as hell…. for the first 2-3 times i firmly believed that the voice over was wrong – some guy and girl trying to be cool and instead of saying ‘heck’ were saying ‘hecks’ – till i realized it was neither – it was Hex!

I get what Reebok is trying to do – play on the word but unfortunately i think they and their writers got it wrong. It does not come out smart sounding at all – just sounds like 2 people who cannot pronounce the word , very very B grade if you ask me.

Any opinions?

Just to add on to my viral post a few days ago , one came across this great ad from Air New Zealand which is making quite the waves online. Youtube shows almost 1.8 million views since it has been loaded in the 1st week of May 2009 – Now thats a viral!

Check it out here.

I dont understand why client cant get it!

Over the last week , all i have heard is ‘lets make a viral”  ‘ i have a brilliant idea, lets do a viral” , “why cant we do a viral”….

You cant , becasue its not in your hands….

A viral is in it pure marketing sense is an advertisement or a creative which is pushed into the market and will get passed from person to person if it stands out , has someting infectious in it. Its like the name say’s – VIRAL!

Marketers, Online planners all hope that it will grow and reach a large audience set , but there is little which can be done to influence the complete path that the creative takes. Making a creative and sending it out via email to 500,000 people is not a viral – thats email marketing.

Whats a viral  – a viral is cloverfield , the KFC advertisement , the Benny Lava video , Zoo Zoo.

What can a marketer do – make a good creative , have interesting communication and hope for the best. Your only influence is the medium which you use to push it into the market for the first time – the way you seed – after that its really out of your hand.

Just finished watching this really great documentary which i thought i must mention and recommend on the blog given that one speaks about the internet so often here.

The plotline according to IMDB

Friends since high school, 20-somethings Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman have an idea: a Web site for people to conduct business with municipal governments. This documentary tracks the rise and fall of govWorks.com from May of 1999 to December of 2000, and the trials the business brings to the relationship of these best friends. Kaleil raises the money, Tom’s the technical chief. A third partner wants a buy out; girlfriends come and go; Tom’s daughter needs attention. And always the need for cash and for improving the site. Venture capital comes in by the millions. Kaleil is on C-SPAN, CNN, and magazine covers. Will the business or the friendship crash first

A lot of fun for anyone from this domain. Definitely worth a watch.

I have been surfing around the self service system for adverting on Linkedin – DirectAds – for sometime now hoping to be able to put the same into an online promotional plan for a client. I have to say its one of the easiest looking interaces i have come across , its simple to understand and move through , write the ad , arrange the targeting and move onto the payment page.

This is where i got stuck. I realized , and i am quite surprised that Linkedin would not have factored this in , is the absence of a proper budget system. The current platform allows for Daily budgets to be assigned but thats it. I found this to be a bit crude because it means that i need to keep going back to the site to turn on the ad’s everyday (assuming the daily budget is expired) – it would be so much simpler and efficient to be able to put it long term budgets – for example 15,000 USD a month with a daily cap of 50 USD a day with a cap of 3 USD CPC – in one shot , i am set for the month , and protected with a daily and a creative cap as well.

I doubt its an oversight , probably a conscious descison , atleast i hope it is , it would not insipre much confidence if the team looking after the DirectAd system had simply overlooked this. Hope they get thison the site soon.