Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That was my impression also, that cross-promoting using each other’s ad inventory that is not being sold, because nobody wants to advertise. There is a huge amount of unmonetized ad inventory.

Doyon Kim: And also, it’s a very targeted audience.

SM: It’s a very targeted audience, yes. So, barter is one of the trends in the industry. I see that, too. Is there any other major trend you’re seeing in gaming? One of the observations you were making – and I’m in sync with that – is that Zynga came into Facebook before all of these privacy settings came together. So, the virality was still there. And then anybody who came in before there were privacy settings with which the virality could be turned off used Facebook virality to scale up. But it’s no longer viable.

That’s an interesting industry trend; virality is now being turned off. And that has huge implications.

DK: That is true. But … I don’t believe in viral marketing that much. There is no tactic for that. A good product in itself will be viral.

SM: Because of the word of mouth that it generates?

DK: Right. Right.

SM: That is really viral, and it cannot be turned off.

DK: Right. So, that’s the most effective way. You’ve got to make the product well. And if it doesn’t work, you’ve just got to blame yourself.

SM: Right. Right. I agree with that. That is also Apple’s philosophy. That is how they got all the virality. The market talked about their products.

Switching topics, if you go back a bit in your career, you played a lot with online reputation management. I want to touch on that as a discussion of a trend because this is becoming a bit of a nightmare right now. Right?

DK: Yes. In Korea, it’s becoming a bigger problem, partly because of anonymity. People’s offline IDs and their online IDs are detached. Like, there’s a suppressed alter ego coming out.

SM: There’s no accountability.

DK: Right. There is a good side to anonymity. It provides some freedom. That’s one of the reasons the Internet became popular. That’s one positive aspect of anonymity. But at the same time, because of that anonymity, people tend to do just … anything … because, yes, there is no accountability. We wanted to solve that by providing a mechanism to get to some accountability, not necessarily to penalize them. Once you accumulate a good reputation, you can be recognized as a reputable person, and that reputation is portable. But for us to be successful this community, the owners of the community, had to be open to accept what we provided. But it didn’t have a direct implication about revenue in the short term.

SM: But that was your strategy. My question is a bit more generic. What do you see today? For instance, there’s a positive side to customers being able to report a bad customer experience. You are, as a business, much more accountable to your customers today than you were before because it’s public. People can discuss their dissatisfaction openly with their user experience with your product. There are also nutcases abusing brands and individuals. How do you deal with that?

DK: Of course, I have experience with that. For each company, whenever I launched something, for at least the first three or four months, I’d be the customer support rep. So, I responded to each email. Sometimes, I’d respond to 1,000 emails a day.

SM: It’s a great way to get in touch with customers.

DK: Right. It’s one way to know what people want, what they’re thinking. Of course, there are people who will say, “I’m going to sue you,” regardless of how I address them or what we do. They’ve been there for a long time, but I guess they became more powerful.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore
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