2011 is coming to an end, and marketers are still trying to decipher what the Digital Platform holds for Indian brands. The medium is constantly evolving; technology is changing as is consumer behavior online. One of the tools we find constantly relevant in this chaos is Gartner's Technology Hype Cycle.


Basically, all technology goes through these stages.
>Technology Trigger - this is when some smart techies in Silicon Valley, Bangalore, or apna Mahakali Caves churns out a neat piece of tech
>Peak of Expectations - fortuitously, the tech has caught on! everyone is using it, are you? it has to be part of your brand strategy!
>Trough of Disillusionment - over time, people realize, this new tech? not really going to solve world peace
>Slope of Enlightenment - over some more time, you start understanding what this tech is good for
>Plateau of Productivity - you've made your piece with the tech and now you're using it the right way, to your advantage!


In Action: NRIMatters 'Light a Diya' campaign

We built a neat tech, beautiful visual layered on top of Google Maps, to allow Indians to send diyas to loved ones all over the world. Celebrate Diwali in temples, pujas, and this year, online. Check out the campaign, you can get lost in reading Diwali messages being sent real-time across the world.

We built a very cool gadget. And we just new, it would attract people, incite them to share, get featured on portal homepages & so on and so forth. Yep, expectations were soaring in the EC office. It's a good thing we relied on Tries & Tested activities that lay in the 'Plateau of Productivity' stage to meet those expectations. A combination of online ads, email marketing and good ol' online PR (a nice mention on the Yahoo Homepage), and we're enjoying numbers soar with every page refresh.



A very cool gadget -- as all web apps must be, to attract people, incite them to share, and to get featured on portal homepages. This gadget was soaring in expectations in the EC office, but it was really the Tried & Tested activities that helped adoption numbers soar as high. We used a combination of online ads, email marketing and good ol' online PR to get our app out there. And share options & an embed code to let people spread word as well.

Every bit of tech has it's purpose. The onus is on us to discover it.