New Media, Marketing and Entrepreneurship

Listening to Steve Tappin from Yorkshire, and he pushes the ambitions of CEO’s to be the best and be more inspirational which is his day job and his night job is the book he is writing, which is secrets of CEO’s.
Interestingly, Steve says that two thirds of Global leaders that we have at the moment are not big enough, two thirds are managers at best and they don’t have the leader’s qualities. Steve gives areas for CEO’s:
1.    Business performance
2.    Business leadership
3.    Personal performance
4.    Personal leadership
5.    Talent

And after a good networking energy filled opportunity, we have Peter Rigby, Chief Executive of Informa Group plc, Non-Executive Chairman of Electric Word plc. Peter starts the day with introducing the Leaders In India and how the contribution of such platforms can make a meaningful difference to the communities we serve and as the community as a whole.

We now have Steve again talking about the TRUMP group and here we have Donald Trump. And Donald starts with the resilience of the Indian marketplace and Donald will be talking about the emerging markets in specific the Real Estate Market. WSJ has dubbed Real Estate as India’s new Tech.

It takes an outsiders perspective to look at the things that can change

Donald is sharing his experience of a conference he attended at Dubai and well how the buying patterns are evolving.

To move things forward we really have to get things back to basics.

My father was teaching me abotu business and about focus and he told a story in the early nineties which explained to Donald what focus really is. you can’t be all things to all people. One of the biggest pitfalls every one has seen over the last few years is that all are going the same direction, but in my view we have to understand the subtleties. We hence lost track of basis, we lost track of cost, margins shrunk. Its time to ge trealistic!

Why India today?

interestingly, Donald is talking about the India story and what things can you do differently and what new things can you do to move forward. In 27 years India has only had 1 year of negative growth.

Fluency in English in India is a great advantage, which I see as a great potential, as it still is the language of business

There is a level of aspirational wealth here, that you don’t see anywhere else in the world. The desire here is so much stronger that I have not seen anywhere lse in the world! People here really love try and do things. And you have to love what you do to be successful. You never will out-perform anyone else in the company if you don’t love what you do.

Urbanisation is another thing which is very rapidly growing and is a mind boggling statistic which has applications everywhere

I have always heard of the American Dream, even in Obama’s speech, but today listening to Donald Trump, creating the amazingly HUGE Indian DREAM! I am a proud Indian (as always) !

Opportunities:

• People wanna know what they are buying
• They wanna know who they are dealing with
• Creating a risk adjusted level playing field

The biggest issue in my mind in investing into any emerging market, is the lack of transparency

Certainty creates value. Without transparency its going to be difficult to create continued investment. When my own backyard is getting interesting, it creates good competition for not just the emerging markets but for everyone.

The TRUMP organization has developed a model over the last few years to do business across the globe. We dont assume that we know all things about all markets. The first emerging market which cracks the transparency code will WIN – Donald Trump Jr.

I just love the so much home grown talent in India, but that doesn’t still mean that you dont want to attract foreign talent.

You don’t get anything that you don’t ask for. And this is one of the biggest lessons I have learnt in life, which took me three years. Transfer of knowledge creates clarity. International players have not been able to get in touch with the legal system in India.

Donald Trump Jr. is now talking about Infrastructure and I agree to him on this, as an emerging market, we do need infrastructure, not just in terms of rail and roads, but also agriculture, education etc. Someone has to bite the bullet and it has to be done says Donald.

Cultural Differences

Donald Trump talks about talks about business and how it is done globally. And how people do need to understand that there has to be a common understanding in doing business. A times I go losing 3 hours on a business call which should effectively get closed in 5 minutes for me. Trump talks about creating a level play, a level playing field and I agree no less to himi on this. Business in India has to become this.

Donald, closes with his remark the potential for this country is amazing if some of these things are changed and now we are in the Q&A mode.

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Okay, so after a sumptuous lunch and networking around with people, I must say I have connected with some pretty young and amazing entrepreneurs. Good to be connecting with people with similar interests and background

And now we have the session being led by Jonathan, post lunch and the room is full of people enthused!

So, we start by discussing User centered Design and the User Centered Design process. I can very well see the interest level rising in the room. People are now coming up with queries related to their sites and other queries on how to really design according to the user, how to keep your design centered around the users psyche. I know of a few people in this room who have still not launched their sites, and I think this discussion would be of high value!!

What focus groups wont tell you?

Jonathan raises an intriguing point for the audience to comment upon, that is what’s there, that a focus group meeting won’t ever tell you, there are various viewpoints here, and Jonathan answers:

Well, what they wont tell you is whether someone would buy your site/product or not!

Usability Test happening LIVE

So now we are looking at a Usability testing happening LIVE on a web site hotelly.com. We have a participant who has not seen the site before and he would now be interacting with the site LIVE. So we are looking at the home page and asking the participant that what does the web site does? Well looking at the home page, you could not even realize there is a scroll!

The site is being analyzed with huge insights for the girl who represented hotelly at the workshop. I can see people in the room eager to share their inputs on the topic, but what I think is, we have this habit of acting as if we are the experts and we know it all, and that is what is happening in the room. There are all sorts of comments flying around, I personally feel hotelly guys have an amazing content value. The site is content rich, its just that they are not being able to leverage upon the content. I would advice hotelly on:

 
• Branding and Positioning their content right 

And now we have a scenario by Neha, given to the participant leading the charge, “your family is going to London and you visit this web site and you want to compare the prices of the various hotels. What would you do at this website?”

So the guy is pretty confused and is not able to understand how to really navigate through the site. Okay so we are pretty much over with the test and wallah, we still are not very clear about the site. And now Jonathan is talking about how to define your target market in terms of sites who are in the recruitment space.

We pay people to get the do this research for us. But we do it keeping the task in mind and we track what the person is doing and whether he/she has completed the task or not.

Why does Motorola puts the alarm function under the settings option?

So after a brief tea session we have an exercise which tells you about how to really use persona as a technique and create a solid site map, creating a sense of priority from the content elements that you have for your web site. Jonathan says it’s a very powerful thing as far as SEO for your site is concerned and also really fasten your goto market strategies with a beta phase for your site.

I don’t mind how many clicks do you want me to do, till the time they are mindless clicks

Earlier the home page used to be the main navigation page for any website, but now due to Google we can land up in internal pages as well. So we need to understand the navigation intuitiveness from a users perspective.

Seduction points while designing a site

Its not a bad idea in travel to really give a separate window to the users to cross sell. I would not open this information in a separate window though, answers Neha to a question raised by a member of the team makemytrip.com. The question was realted to the fact that at times travel sites give supporting extra information on a flight search as a new pop up/window opening. Is this the right approach?

Squint test

Whatever you see at the first go after you squint your eyes, well that is what your users will see 90% of the times

Provide a quick access point to the user: 10 second is the frustration limit.

I must confess, this was one activity in the workshop which I really found useful amongst others. Squinting your eyes really tells you what 90 per cent of users would see at the first go. Amazing results, I am taken aback!! I think this would really help many a people to define and refine their designs.

We are almost towards the end of the workshop now and Jonathan now shares attributes of a good search results page

1. Position the best hits at the top
2. Indicate the number of results

We are now almost at the close of the workshop and well, I found the entire workshop highly useful and my interaction with various participants has gotten me the same feedback. Majority of people said that it was amazingly simple a technique in which Neha shared thus making the entire topic of Design and UI easy to understand by the audience.

I would love more such workshops, probably more focused, with integrated product reviews, as to why does a product work and how does the message on it/shape/design/color/packaging affects the perception of the message by the end consumers.

We now have certificates being distributed to the participants and I appreciate, Neha writing and signing the certificates singularly herself.

The event was organized by : TiE New Delhi (The Indus Entrepreneurs)

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Business Travel in Recession

I am a LIVE blogger and I get invited to many a conferences and events in the industry across India to LIVE blog the entire events.

And since quite sometime I have been hearing from many an Event organizers that due to recession, Business Travel has been restricted, thus expecting huge turnout at any conference is a challenege today!

I am sure this is one concern many a Conference organizers would agree to!

Well, so what is the solution to this problem?

Let me say I cannot monetarily give you an alternative that you should not attend any conferences, as these are some of the best grounds to network and reach out to existing and potential business partnerships. You can get new talent for your company, you get a platform to share your expertise on various agendas relevant to the community.

If there are so many benefits and still you have to see how much can you spend on your travel to attend these conferences?! What do you do then?

Social Media comes to Rescue

To the rescue is Social Media! Yes!

Now that you cannot afford to lose the chance of being in these conferences, well you can definitely work towards making sure that you can make the most of your business trip.

There are several tools on the internet which can help you arrange your travel and connect with people in the city you are visiting and also with the people who are attending the conference, so you can connect with the relevant people and break ice much before you actually meet them at the conference.

Social Media Tools to Get the most of your Business Travel

Linkedin

Explore your professional network on Linkedin to know who all in your network are attending a conference that you are and who all are there in the city at that particular moment of time and day.

Before reaching the designated city, you can connect with these people and pre-schedule meetings, to make the most of your travel. All you needd to do is add the Application (Tripit) on your Linkedin profile.

Twitter

Twitter is a tool where you can subtly announce that you are going to attend a conference and people who are there in your network who may be visiting the same would tweet back and there you go, you connect with the relevant community of people, thereby increasing your chances of creating more possibilities for yourself in your travel schedule.

Google Reader

Google Reader, well yes I know you would say Google Reader? Yes, its pretty simple! subscribe to the blog feeds of all the companies/people you are expected to meet at the conference/event you are going to. You would hence be updated with all the action points that you need to discuss and take your discussions forward in a more constructive manner.

Follow/Subscribe Events/conferences updates on dedicated Blogs like – OMShare

I confess, there is a self promotional aspect in the following note, but it would be of a higher value to you than anything else! I along with one of the people I work with, created The First from India, Online Platform for Taking Events and Conferences Global (OMShare). Its a platform where I LIVE Blog some of the best conferences and events around uptill now only in India (though open to invites Internationally as well).

We would soon be integrating RSS Feeds letting our followers know at no cost and at not much time, which events are happening where and if they would be of value to you and your business. Also we are extending the platform to include event representatives and organizers who can further help you network with the who’s who attending the event.

Based upon this information you can take an informed decision of whether to attend the event or be negative!

If you wish to connect with me, I would be attending (LIVE Blogging) the following events in the coming future:

1. The Web Usability and Design Workshop at India Habitat Center by TiE New Delhi on 7th March 9am-6pm
2. The JFPS CORPORATE COMMUNICATORS’ CONCLAVE in Mumbai on 16th and 17th April

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