How can entrepreneurs get ready now for the future on digital platforms like Uber Eats and Amazon?

This is going to be our future. You can be in agriculture, you can be in technology space, it does not matter, right? Digital economy is going to be the future of any country in the world. That is why platform is such an important topic to have now, whether you're a small business, whether you're a large business, you need to think about the platform approach. How do you use information about your customers effectively and more importantly, ethically, so that you derive that personalized message to your customers.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. Today, I'm delighted to have joining me Arvind Murali, who is the Chief Data Strategist with Perficient. Arvind, thank you for joining me all the way from Texas today.

Glad to be here, Jim. Glad to be here.

You've got a double master's, I think.

The first master's was in science and the second master's was MBA.

So you obviously get data. But what we're going to talk about today is data and platforms and how business owners, entrepreneurs can make the most of getting onto platforms. Because if they're not on a platform like Uber Eats or Amazon, they may not have a business. So with your background and profession, can you tell us how can they get noticed by these big platform operators?

Sure, sure. Great question, Jim. So let's talk about the evolution of platform first, right? I won't take more than 2 to 3 minutes to explain it. So back in the '80s and '90s, software and hardware companies dominated the world, right? So think about Intel or Wintel, think about Apple, Microsoft. These are the companies that basically had both software and hardware, software and/or hardware that are upfront, right? And very popular. Now in the '90s, there was this new family of businesses, small companies called Netflix and Amazon that nobody knew of. They started, right? And basically their offering was, how can I make e-commerce or e-anything as an offering as an internet-based company? That's how they started their business. Of course, I don't have to tell you today they dominate the world, right? In the 2000s, these new social media companies started popping up. So these are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all of these guys, right? They said, all we are doing is we are inviting you to participate in our platform, but you can talk to your friends. You can do all of that, but use our platform to talk to your friends and families. So this whole social media revolution started in the 2000s. We're here now, right? Now it's the age of platforms. So the simple example is Uber is the largest taxi company in the world. They own zero taxis. Airbnb is the largest real estate company in the world, and they don't have much real estate at all, if that much, right? They use the power of platform. And then look at Alibaba. Alibaba is China's largest platform, right? Essentially, the digital economy is driving the platforms to be extremely popular. Now, 30, 40 years from now, we'll be talking about blockchain, which is very real. The value of NFTs and cryptocurrencies are slowly but surely popping up in mainstream. So blockchain is a bunch of platforms that is going to talk to each other, yet you will know from a digital asset standpoint where that conversation originated. This is going to be our future. You can be in agriculture. You can be in technology space. It does not matter, right? Digital economy is going to be the future of any country in the world.

Yeah.

So that is why platform is such an important topic to have now, whether you're a small business, whether you're a large business, You need to think about the platform approach.

Now, what does that mean for the company that's starting up or midsize from a marketing and getting noticed perspective? Because presumably you've got to get approved by the platform to be in the platform. That's the first stage. Can you just take us through that then, Arvind?

Yeah. If you're a small business, right? What are some of the things you need to think about if you want to participate in the platform? You don't need to be the platform. That's Once in a lifetime, these kinds of companies show up, right? But if you want to be a part of a platform, think about what value proposition you offer, right? Say for example, if you are a company that is a small business, a small shoe company, a retail company that is starting in some remote parts of the United States, then your essential goal is how do I make myself appear in Amazon? Because everybody around you shops on Amazon. Right? So the easiest way is, how do I start working with Amazon, the platform? How do I onboard my little company, my little world in Amazon? Now, if you're a restaurant who's starting, your number one objective is, how do I be a part of Uber Eats? How do I make my little startup so accessible to Uber Eats so that they will show up anytime when I search for a, let's say, a Chinese restaurant? if you're a Chinese restaurant as a startup, and essentially you want to show up as the number one list in the platform, right? So you're now actually participating in the platform, but what's important there is you got to have the technology that supports them to operate with you seamlessly. So think about application programming interfaces, APIs, easy ways to pay, easy ways to interact, easy ways to choose a menu, because of course COVID has changed the way— we don't have paper menus in the US anymore. We have digital menus, right? You scan it, a barcode, and then your menu shows up in the phone. So how do I make my customer, or how do I make my company so appealing that I show up as the top of the list? Of course, the food has to be good too. Don't get me wrong. That's an example of how startups can think about participating in the platform economy.

And let's say they've managed to get presumably a shop or a place on Amazon or Uber Eats. How do they muscle into what would be a very crowded space. And with your background in the data science and the data analytics, start to track how they're doing. Because in the old days, you'd maybe have a restaurant in the high street, and you could see footfall, your number of customers coming in. It sounds like a very different game for the new retailer entrepreneur business owner.

So if you're a new business owner, the first thing you need to think about is a little bit of empathetical thinking. So if you're in the shoes of Amazon, how do you think about this ecosystem of many, many startups? You're not the only startup, right? How do they think about it? Well, they think about it in 2 or 3 different ways. So number one, they look at from an experience perspective, how is a customer's experience with you, the startup? That can be a rating system. That can be the unique value proposition that you offer. The more your rating grows, right? So you start with a 1-star and then you go all the way up to 5 stars. You start with 1 review, maybe now you have 15,000 reviews. These are all ways that Amazon looks at you and shows up in the top of the list, right? Something called Amazon Recommended kind of looks at this from an algorithmic standpoint. So this is no human being behind the scenes. This is all machines calculating this, right? And you need to show up in that list. Now, obviously, if you're a startup from day 1, you're not going to have 15,000 reviews. But it's always important you constantly look at your review and you take it very seriously, and then you start doing things that will change the review if it's bad, number one, right? Number 2, the other one that Amazon looks at is the number of transactions that are happening. We're talking about Amazon as one example, but any platform player looks at it similarly, right? So essentially, they will— the second thing they will look at is How many transactions are happening in a day, in a week, in a month, in a year with your company? The more the transactions happen, the more they will favor you in their list of returns when I search for some startup, right? Some specific niche area. The same works with Uber, same works with any other platform company. The other thing that they look at is recommendations. What are the 3, 4, 5 keywords right? That you offer. Keywords meaning, again, going back to the Chinese restaurant example, right? I don't remember the menu, but if let's say you are offering a particular type of food, best in class, right? Then your keyword should be that. Anytime when somebody searches for that, you should show up. Just a general Chinese restaurant is not going to help. Some value proposition has to be there, and you got to know what that is to register to these platform vendors. Right. So I think those are the things, Jim, that I can think of. If you empathize yourself and put yourself in the shoes of Facebook or Amazon or Twitter, some of these larger players, which you want to be a part of, right? And the last but certainly not the least, content is going to be the driver for this. If you're a startup, the biggest advantage for you is that you need to put a lot of content. This can be videos about your company. This can be some PDFs and some little brochures about your company. Put them out there in social media. If you're playing in the space of technology, LinkedIn is an extremely powerful tool, right? If you're playing in the social, like restaurants and some other value proposition, Facebook is a very powerful tool. They call this process the network effect. So let's say your technology shows up in LinkedIn and I go and just click on it and I press the word like. I press the like button. My network will then receive a notice that says, Arvind liked this little startup technology company. Let me go and explore it. And then the chain continues, right? So you got to think about that network effect. And that's why I'm saying, don't get disappointed if you don't get too many likes for your contents. Keep uploading contents in social media. That is a big value driver for you. For these platforms. They have machine learning algorithms that looks for these things.

So Armin, can you give us a case study from Perficient?

Yeah. So we don't work with startup companies as much. We work with enterprises. But I'll give you a thinking on how an enterprise is actually thinking about becoming a platform themselves, right? So this is a very large pet adoption company. Essentially, what they do is they are the largest, I'm gonna say, online pet adoption company. Now think about that for a second. I'm the guy who's looking for a pet to adopt for my house.

Mm-hmm.

So I go to this platform, this technology, this website, and I look for pets around me. I fill up my name, my address, my phone number, basic information. 5 minutes after, this technology allows me to map all the pets around me, that are either in shelters, that are either with retailers or wherever the pets are, and it will recommend the best pet based on certain certifications.

Right.

Is the pet having all the vaccinations? Is the pet well-behaved? Are the people who own the pet giving good reviews about the behavior? Is the pet non-hypoallergenic? All of those things, right? And it automatically looks for those patterns. I explained this example in less than 2 minutes. But the platform takes all of this, this is all pieces of data, right, about the pet adopter, and machine learning marries the two together with a variety of parameters, right? And essentially, this is the technology platform. When you fill up that form saying who you are, you're asking the technology to do some magic behind the scenes and map you, the buyer or the adopter, to a pet Automatically in your circumference. If you say, I need to look for a pet within 50-mile radius, it will automatically take that consideration and give it back to you. Same way Uber works, right? When you look for a taxi, it works the same way. So it's the Uber— you know, I use the word Uberization of the industry, but that's an example to show you the power of platform, right? And they're very serious about it. They've embarked that journey. They're building that platform to make them a very powerful force. In the world for pet adoption, not just US.

Luckily, my beagle's still asleep. He didn't hear any of that. Did you, Binky? He's staying here in his bed. He's been for a walk. So really, Arvind, then no industry is going to be spared this, as you say, Uberization. What does that mean for the marketing department of enterprises and SMEs? Because the traditional event management, trade show, advertising, DM department. What happens to all of those? How does that transition into this new app landscape?

Yeah, so worldwide industry analysts Gartner and Forrester, you know who they are, right? They, if you go look at their trends in 2021, the top 10 trends, customer data platform is one of their top 10 trends. Now that is their way of saying Hey, digital marketer, if you want to personalize your interaction and your contents to me, Arvind Murali, based on certain characteristics of me, the persona, right? You have to use a lot of data and machine learning to get there. Customer data platforms gives you a platform approach of getting there, right? So Gartner rated them as the top 10 because they thought it's important for organizations to think about this. To think about this platform approach, right? Marketing is in such a sweet spot right now, and it's a very hot field at the moment, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

One of the reasons that is, is because traditionally marketers need lots of data and analytics to do what they do. How do I build a campaign? How do I launch a campaign? How do I find out the success of the campaign? They do a lot of that analysis day in and day out. And that means they need finance data, customer data, transaction data, inventory data. They need all of these data assets in the enterprise to do what they do best, right? And these new breeds of digital marketers who are getting trained in college to start using analytics, they are coming in guns blazing, asking for questions on their information. We've launched 15 campaigns the last month. How much of Facebook likes that we have? How many people actually moved on from just liking us to filling a form to get back? How many of these people converted into a customer? How many of them became loyal customers and they are advocating about us to their friends and family? They're tracking all of this to create a successful campaign, a very effective campaign. In addition, a marketer has to think about personalized message, right? My shopping patterns of electronics in Best Buy is going to be different from you. You're going to buy podcast mic and you're going to buy headphones and other things. I'm going to go buy iPhones and laptops, so they can't do the same message to you and I because we're 2 different people. That's what personalization means, right? They will offer you something unique for yourself based on your pattern of shopping. They will offer me something unique for myself. That's all coming from the platform, right? And the more they offer you these kinds of personalized contents, you're going to tell your friends, hey, I love Best Buy because they're offering me something for me, not for you.

Yeah, and I've been looking at the platform called Vidyard, for example, which is really personalization at scale with video, which is pretty cool. Can you think of any tools that SMEs and enterprises can use that are off the shelf, Arvind, that don't need double master's degrees to use? Because your average entrepreneur business owner doesn't have that Gen Z, Gen X marketing team. Are there some tools that people can use that are relatively simple?

Just to be completely honest with you, I hate to say it, Microsoft Excel is still the best tool in the world, right? Everybody uses Excel, everybody likes Excel, and it's still the largest database in the world. You know, keep it simple. So it's not the tools and technologies that's going to make you effective, it's the kind of information you seek and you gather and you use. That's going to make you an effective marketer. It's about the data, right? It's not about the tools. There are a number of tools. So Alteryx, Telium, Salesforce, Adobe, all of these guys offer you tools that you can use as an effective digital marketer. It's not that. It's how do you use information about your customers effectively and more importantly, ethically, so that you derive that personalized message to your customers?

I think that's a great point about the ethical. Now we have GDPR here. Any advice for companies around GDPR? Is it in reality something that people are being— companies are being prosecuted for, or any safeguards that you think people need to put in place?

Data privacy is being taken very seriously. So in the US, we use CCPA, California Consumer Protection Act, right? Which is the GDPR version for the US.

Right.

So data privacy is taken very seriously by every organization. Make sure you know how you're planning to use the data about your customers before you use them. Ask a question, right? Use your company's data team to ask those kinds of questions. Am I using this ethically? Am I using this the right way? And more importantly, am I using this legally as well? Right? So those are the questions you need to ask. And it's— yes, it's a very serious violation if you get into trouble.

But just to be clear, you can send out an email one time to people, can't you? It's just that you're not allowed to keep sending them information if they haven't asked for it. Otherwise, people are thinking, how do you start the conversation with people if you're never allowed to write to them unsolicited?

It's not— so I don't think there's anything wrong in sending an email, right? So what GDPR— and please don't quote me for it, I'm not a legal guy— but essentially what GDPR says is With your customer's consent, you can send information to them. You can communicate with them. The moment your customer does not consent, don't bother them. In a nutshell, that's what— in a simplified version, that's what GDPR and CCPA is.

I think what most people want to know is that they can send information, but they can't be a nuisance, right? That's the nub of it, I think.

Exactly.

Arvind Mehrani, Chief Data Strategist with Perficient. Thank you so much for sharing, especially all about this concept of the platform. That's really thought-provoking. If people want to find out more about you and the work you do, how can they find you?

So I'm very active in LinkedIn. You can reach me out, you can add me at LinkedIn. You can also find me on Perficient website. I believe, Jim, you'll put all of that in the show notes.

Arvind, thank you so much for joining me on The Unnoticed Show.

Thank you for having me, Jim. It's a pleasure.

Absolute pleasure and very insightful. So we've been listening to Avi Murali, who's a results-driven Chief Data Strategist with Perficient, and that's perficient.com. And I will put all those show notes as always for you to read. Thanks again for joining me on this episode of The Unnoticed. And I wish you in the meantime the best of health, a profitable business, and that if you're going to be marketing your business, Do think about the data because that really is where the value is going to lie for your business. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for joining me, Jim James, on The Unnoticed Show, and I hope that you found it useful. I'm on a mission to help business owners to unlock the value in their businesses through communications and getting noticed. If you've enjoyed this show, do please share it with other business owners, rate it on iTunes or on other players as well. For articles written about each podcast and other topics to do with getting noticed, just come to my website eastwestpr.com, subscribe to the free weekly newsletter. Keep on communicating and let me know how you're getting on.