Well, I am back from a very good trip to Bangalore. Met some old entrepreneur friends, some interesting people. Connected with some very established people and re-fueled my engine for my entrepreneurial journey ahead!
Though while on the way I connected with some online marketers on the flight back and here I am writing a piece which I have wanted to since sometime now!
Let me start by saying: Branding and Obscenity are Pretty Much the Same
Why do I say this? Well, the guy sitting right next to me looked at a book I was reading, which was about Branding and how radical concepts have changed consumer perception overtime. I was reading a few case studies and making notes, for a couple of Offline Branding Campaigns I am working on. Now suddenly this guy shoots, about how he is an Online Marketer and does handles campaigns online and how his firm has been doing lots of work.
Without an introduction, I heard him as a client, and asked queries, and he started telling me about how Google helps, SEO, PPC and SMM works. Especially SMM, which we also know by Social Media Marketing. Since I was in the Case Study mode, I posed a question:
Give me 4 solid case studies with the ROI that you have generated for the client or where you have actually gone back to the client telling him that he needed offline/ other marketing techniques as well, and how did you execute it!
And this gentleman starts discussing the best works he has done. A viral campaign, which had x number of hits…Helped a company generate these many leads online (which he had no ideas, of how much was the conversion).
Anyway, being a good listener, I patiently heard him, and then asked another question:
What is the difference between Branding and Marketing and why did some of his campaigns did not survive and what he then suggested to those clients?
I am NOT generalizing this, but I have been interacting with Online Marketers, majority of them in their late 20′s and early 30′s who have had no experience of raising a brand. Who have not seen the entire cycle, boasting about serving the Indian SME in scaling up.
I have been into the Social Media scene, since sometime now, and have struggled with the statistics, which I could really go back with, to a client and suggest him, this is where you should increase/ decrease your marketing spend and this is what you should look at diversifying.
I have NEVER heard from an Online Marketer that they have ever gone back to the client telling them, that look you product needs this, as this is what you customer is looking for on the internet
Majority of Online Marketing companies optimize campaigns according to what the clients are searching a product/ service with. Well, I challenge this thought. How do you that it was the right consumer who was searching this term which you just took from suggestions which Google Adwords provide you.
Branding – YES, Social Media helps You do Just That
Okay, so now I have my Branding lessons on. I get to know how Branding is established, online:
a page/ profile on facebook
an account on twitter
targeted Ads on blogs/ sites
ghost writing on discussion forums etc.
videos on YouTube
ppts on Slideshare
photos on flickr
And if you still cannot achieve traffic numbers, well, go and post this content on various multiple platforms which are identical, so your content will be looked upon by more and more people an chances by simple probability to achieve are higher.
Okay, so I understand probability, but I am still not convinced with this number generation method, I remarked.
I am a Social Media guy and I have a problem with how things are going in India today
Okay, so for all those, who feel I have a personal bias, I have explored the online media to a good extent and hence I write my thoughts here. Majority of bloggers, social media experts/ evangelists/ marketers, strategists, have not had any Branding experience and talk Brand all the time. I have a particular issue with this, as many a times, what they dont realize is they can grow only if their client(S) grow.
Online is the new thing – you have to get on Social Media coz DELL made 3 million dollars from twitter
This is what I have heard from every religious online marketer, I have interacted with, who is pitching to any business from technology to holiday to whatever. Coz DELL did it, hence the opportunity exists and as in India, a small company thinks, even if I can achieve 30% of this, at a low cost, well I will make decent numbers.
And what happens month on month when you go ahead with Online Marketing for your business
MONTH 1
Both the online marketing agency and the client are excited, many things happening around, online training, blogs building up, google ads, higher listing on search engines WOW
The marketer goes back and shares the numbers:
number of blogs, number of blog posts, google ads numbers, how they got the company(s) site(S) listed high on search engines on specific keywords
Month2
Create content | POST it – HOST it – Virality!
Lets do it! Pictures, PPTs, Blog posts, Videos and what not
We will post it here – there – everywhere and wallah this will happen and this
Conversations are not happening – says the client!
Lets do ghost writing
Lets do ghost profiles
Lets do ghost comments
Month3
Houston We’v got a PROBLEM
Firefighting mode
What did you till now, after a quarter?
Well, Sir, look at your brand, look at how many people came to this landing page, look at all of this. Sales will start happening soon.
Lets See – the client now is thinking of how to convert the contract into a pay for performance?
Well, and this is where problems start. Retainership goes down and performance kicks in, knowing well, you dont even know what GAP EXISTS (if any) between the following parties:
Senior management
Existing (employees and clients)
Prospective (employees and clients)
The majority of online marketers, go ahead with no such GAP analysis, and without knowing what exists in the market and what needs to be addressed, just go ahead because they have a medium to connect people with, because out of the 300 million plus people on facebook, there will always be some who will be looking for your product/ service.
Well, I have no inherent bias against anyone, but if I strongly feel, if you are not clear of something, well, dont fluke and sell, coz what you don’t realize is anyway, after 3 years, there are only the better ones, who will be having the repetitive business, because you will be out of market to which you have been marketing.
I landed back from Mumbai just yesterday and surely it was great LIVE Blogging the biggest Leadership event ever in India. Out of my many experiences in the financial capital of India and the city of dreams. Bollywood stars and the rest, I found this very amazing example of simple yet striking innovation by an entrepreneur.
This is what I found:
What you see in the picture above, no its not a Google van! Its the freshest and the best Gola (ice candy) made of fresh mineral water and fruit juices called Gogola India.
I bumped across this van while I was going for a meeting on the Hill street near the Globus mall in Mumbai and just for the fun of it and to interact with the van guys, I did buy two Golas from the van. The van looked pretty okay (a second hand maruti van) with all the electrical machines inside to make a good gola in seconds.
Interestingly, the menu is like an IE page, which gives you all the options of the various flavors available simple, yet unique!
The Revenue figures of a single van which stands since 12pm till late in the night and keeps rotating in between two streets in Mumbai are:
Daily sale (golas): 300 (in good times) 150-200 (in normal business days)
Price per gola : INR 30
Positioning of van is changed on weekdays and weekends
There are more than 10 vans in the city, doing the rounds
My Feedback and Comments as an Incubation Consultant:
Good to see that the logo has been duly trade-marked (good asset)
Good revenue model (taking in consideration, all operational costs, costs of building the supply chain, maintenance of vehicle etc.)
Simple and effective!
The Gola I had, was pretty good and was surely packed in a healthy manner, with properly kept juice/ color bottles.
I very strongly feel, the kind of Innovation we have in India, is amazing! Its simplistically brilliant and a concept which can surely become into an auto-generating proposition, and once your brand is recognizable, and you have a size, you can diversify.
India market and the SaaS/Cloud Computing landscape – Session three of the NASSCOM EMERGEOUT Conclave
Speakers: Kishore Madhyam – CEO, ImpelCRM, Sharad Sanghi – CEO & Founder NetMagic Solutions, Chandra Prabhakar – Global Head, OnDemand Solutions, Ramco Systems
Moderator: Ibrahim Ahmed – Chief Editor, Dataquest, Cyber Media group
Now we have Mr. Ahmed moderating the session, adding a quick point, I think one of the earliest propagators of cloud computing was an Indian professors in the US. The entire mindset about cloud computing and on demand computing is rising and therefore I am very very positive about the same.
We are glad to see the rising interest and concepts like this are going to be very very powerful. Ibrahim is now introducing the speakers on stage.
Interesting to understand from Mr. Sharad Sanghi from netmagic solutions on how netmagic understands cloud computing. I am particularly interested in knowing how easy it is to scale up and scale down applications using cloud. Making things simpler for the delegate to understand, we have Sharad simplifying the cloud and showing us the silver lining with it, along with some very interesting numbers.
Driving factors in india:
Low cost
High operational efficiency
Elasticity
Scalability
Sharad is creating the picture of how start-ups and emerging businesses are adopting the technology and what factors really are pushing the same out.
As long as you do your capacity planning well, cloud computing surely works
Energy efficiency is a crucial point Sharad has taken up, with cost of power going up every-time, Cloud is surely a solution. Sharad now ends his session with an introduction to the architecture.
And now we have Kishore from PK4 software. Kishore is a friend and I surely have seen him EMERGEOUT connected through the NASSCOM EMERGE community. Kishore starts sharing some very interesting numbers showing the delegate the Indian market. There are phenomenal names to follow in the saas space.
I personally like Narasimhan’s way of sharing his own learning’s saying that he may not be an expert but he has learnt
And we’re still not talking of the bottom of the pyramid says Narasimhan. Its amazing what people can do with software out in the field.
Narasimhan is now talking about how they as a company operates. We have got one of the largest optical brands in the world. Interestingly Narasimhan is now sharing his companies sales model.
Adwords
Website
Eva
Purchase
Renewal
Being a Social Media evangelist myself, I can surely agree and connect to what Narasimhan is talking about. Sharing an example how the bounce rate to his site drastically reduced with a redesign of his website.
We dont have the freemium model, but yes you can have a free eval fo 15 days
Pricing is always an issue says Narasimhan. the biggest issue in this model is that companies don’t pay periodical. systems don’t exist in these companies. Training is a big issue, its critical but its expensive. There are always engineering choices to be made.
Narasimhan is actually creating the real picture for the delegates. I am particularly likeing the way he has simplistically made sense of the challenges and the headroom both which is available in the space.
What we don’t know:
Decisions happen very quickly here
Web – 2.5 % EVAL – 2.5 % purchase
us or the market?
Feet on street
traditional model is beguiling
Partners
“pull” more important than “push”
Mobile client software
Not enough uptake
Now we have someone from Ramco Systems sharing theri experience as how did they deploy the technology. We have been focusing predominantly in the ERP space since its inception. We have been in the business with the SaaS model since the last 2 years making it available to the SME segment specifically.
Sharing his learning’s, he speaks of the challenges SME’s go through.
Business challenge
IT challenge
There is a lot of SME segment who are looking for such applications to counter these challenges
We are now seeing what the Ramco OnDemand ERP has for the enterprise scale operations. Talking about numbers, we are now understanding how Ramco has expanded with over 1500 customers who are satisfied with the deliverable(s). We have our own data center in Chennai.
The inability of the SME segment in deploying solutions in their own premise, creates a reference for us
We are now looking at the industry wise break up and how ramco is present across the various business verticals. Talking about the benefits in the various verticals, its interesting to know how technology is spanning across the business arena and how value is getting created far across.
This particular product will always be evergreen
We are now in the Q&A mode after a very comprehensive session. I am glad to be blogging the session and create value for many followers who are reading this blog.
I am Social Media Marketing Evangelist and over time a crucial aspect of the entire Social Media Marketing process has come into the picture which if inferred in simple terms makes you ponder over the most basic question:
Do Your Clients Really Understand Your Service/ What You Are Trying to Do?
As with the new buzz word and with a huge outreach new brands are coming onto the social media scene and products and services are trying to connect to the relevant audience, but somewhere I personally feel, many Online Marketing companies, are just trying to experiment with the customer, in the process, not really being one with the customer’s business objectives.
And there goes the entire effort down the drain, with the client dissatisfied and disillusioned at the end.
Listen to your customer!
I strongly suggest all marketers, expecially those in the online domain to listen to their customers. its highly crucial that you understand the customer’s business objectives and are on the same page as the client. Its necessary that you have a solid graps of business understanding of your customer, to be able to create solid and successful campaigns and create success stories in the online world.
Yes the title of the post is correct and well, I am writing one after a long time. There has been lot of action lately in the social media domain. While working towards refining Social Media metrics and measurability and making things more transparent and understandable for the client, I have been working towards synergizing Social Media with the business objectives for my clients and the journey has been fairly fruitful.
Have stumbled upon a few tools which I found fairly interesting. In this post I am sharing with you a search engine which I digged, DuckDuckGo !! Yes, that’s the name of the search engine, and No, I havent lost my senses!
Strange name, but effective results. Far from the advertisement laden Google results, DDG comes fresh with a new interface and search results which are in contexts better than Google search results. The way DDG classifies search results and shows you the official site for yoru search result (if there is any existing) and then shows the rest of the results is amazing!
Who created DDG?
DDG is the brainchild of MIT grad Gabriel Weinberg, who is self funding the initiative!
I support Weinberg when he promises “less garbage” results. While I am writing this post, I have explored DDG for almost a couple of hours now and I do appreciate the design!
Design – what has it got to do with a search engine?
When you have just a text box on the landing page, what do you need to do with the design of the page? I found it highly intuitive and intelligent of DDG to be giving the user the option of clicking on the many options of internet web sites available on the right sidebar of the screen of your search results.
So, lets say, if I search my name: paritosh+sharma
The first result that comes is my official site:www.paritoshsharma.com followed by the other search results. Now I was fairly amused by the deep search results that I got while doing a name search.
Okay, so I got the search result, now what if I need to see the presence of the searched item on Social Media?
DDG has very intelligently placed links on the right sidebar of the page, which link to various social media channels and other popular sites and an automatic search query goes to the channel which gives the searcher access to your social media profile on the channels directly.
Thus with a single click on the YouTube icon, I reached to my channel on YouTube
Though not a Google yet, but DuckDuckGo is soon predictably going to prove to be a toughie in the search space, creating its own apprecaitive user base.
Well, I think this post has been in the waiting since a long time now. Most of the readers of the blog and some of my friends have pursued me to write this piece!!
Okay, so without any vague stuff, i would probably share the basic points every blogger must keep and take care of to increase the traffic!!
Increase TRAFFIC to your Blog
Concentrate on the topic… write posts that need to be read right now.
Talk like an expert (so you have to have enough knowledge about the subject you are writing about).
If you can break news nothing better!!
Start a topic which has not been started before by many (be amongst the first few) and let people discuss about it in their blogs/posts etc
Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you
Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.
Don’t write about your wife, your boyfriend or your kids.
Write long, definitive posts.
Write neat things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog.
Have you ever tried googling “yes we can” and the TOP two results that appear are related to none other than Barack Obama, the US President-elect.
Though Obama may not have remembered to invite our Mr. Prime minister at a meeting of leaders held (as in the news channels), this post is more about tracking the Obama winning trail!!
So is Barack Obama the first US “social media” President elect?
Watching Obama’s victory address, I could feel here in India, what a connect he makes with his words with people. I read sometime back somewhere “people move when their emotions are moved” and wow Mr. President elect, you’re on the move already! So many people in tears, believing in real change, it was as if people could feel a change in the air! Oprah (the famous star show host) in tears and then cheering for Obama clearly showed what an effect he leaves! Well, So much for Brand Obama.
What motivates me to discuss about Obama on this paltform? SOCIAL MEDIA!!
Yes!
Web sites have termed Obama as the first “social media” President in the US history. He’s the first one to understand and harness the power of the sharing and collaboration platforms available on the web, to reach out effectively to even the remotest and the passive voters. Obama’s campaign team leveraged the power of this media to its righteous advantage! not just blogs, pictures, videos, wiki’s, Tweets and talk about all of these tools on the net!
So here’s a glimpse into Obama’s social media world:
So now you know where those 600 million dollars came from? Every American pitched in those 10, 20, 25 dollars they had and became part and witness to history!
So much for Obama, well the power behind the most successful campaign in the political history of the US has been the social media. Today we’re discussing the biggest financial crisis since the great depression, corporate cutting down on the advertising budgets and the rest. I personally would suggest people (both individuals and coroporate) to look at innovative methods of exploring new potential markets and reaching out to the relevant traffic and communities on the internet.
So you’re a part of Orkut, LinkedIn etc. and you may well boast of a 500+ links, but how many of them could truly be converted into potential relevance to your work, that is still a question.
So how do you go about building that elusive brand? Position your product right to the relevant market?
Go connect! Get linked! Create SIG’s (social media platforms, common interest groups). Let people find you and it’s been proven they do! A simple example in this case could be, the links I’v provided above, there would be a multitude of the EMERGE community members who would click and be directed to these pages, and ahy would you click? May be to know more about Obama or be interested into the right Social Media Market.
Innovation is the name of the game now and businesses understanding it right at the right time would EMERGE out winning!
"We thought we understood social media marketing and seo optimization fairly ok but after our one on one session realized many of the fundamental mistakes we were making plus learnt many new tools. Overall an investment I would recommend every entreprenuer to make"
- Nidhi, Founder CEO, Pinnacle Works
simple, yet unique!
Yes the title of the post is correct and well, I am writing one after a long time. There has been lot of action lately in the social media domain. While working towards refining Social Media metrics and measurability and making things more transparent and understandable for the client, I have been working towards synergizing Social Media with the business objectives for my clients and the journey has been fairly fruitful.
