No, I have not lost my brains yet. And certainly I am not reeling under the new year fervor. The context is, post doing my Social Media consulting company, Until ROI Consulting Pvt. Ltd. I joined The Indus Entrepreneurs, TiE Delhi – NCR chapter. Its been a fantastic journey and its growing and getting exciting by the day. There is so much to do and so much to learn.
Though I Have a Problem and So Do Almost 1500 odd People!
TiE Delhi – NCR is one of the best chapters globally and we are growing and am I excited to say this, hell yeah! But let me share my experience from my interactions with TiE Delhi – NCR members and entrepreneurs who are still not aware of what all they can achieve, by being part of the world’s largest entrepreneurial network.
Most of our members have amazing feedback to share with us and I feel amazing at times to hear from a young entrepreneur when he comes and says, TiE helped me grow my business from this level to where I am today.
There is another set, though who have yet not realized the power of the network. Yes, I have always been telling fellow entrepreneurs, that TiE is the world’s largest network of entrepreneurs and well, if you are still not leveraging the power of networking, then you have still much to work upon.
My Personal Experience!
Before joining TiE, I was also a member with the Delhi chapter and let me be honest, I was much helped in my business by the team. I used to volunteer in many events without seeing a profit motive and in almost every event, the network automatically helped me create many new business opportunities.
But what helped me here, was my own pro-active approach to leverage the network by being a member. This is exactly what I tell people who ask me what’s the benefit of being a TiE member?
Gentlemen, I am sharing the Secret, Listen Carefully!
Its simple, once you are a TiE member (which takes less than INR 10 a day of an investment, as INR 3309/- (annual membership fee) broken down is less than INR 10 a day). You could simply use your debit/ credit card to make payments online on the official TiE Delhi site and wallah you are in.
What Next?
Hold your horses guys, well, next comes the step of engaging with the team and letting the TiE team know more about you and look at exploring various possibilities. How to do this?
Call a TiE Delhi team member for a coffee and well, set your objectives and plan your various engagement pointers with TiE.
Attend Events – these are golden networking and knowledge opportunities!
Ohh Yes! You might be a great networker and you might know everything there is to know in the world. But believe you me, I have been on both sides of the table. Attending TiE events and doing them now. And these are amazing opportunities, which are to be latched upon and not to miss.
Ohh my ROI!
Its better to say Ohh my ROI than Ohh my Gawd later. Yes, I realized it early in my entrepreneurial stint. Investing a couple of thousands in attending TiE events and other Industry association events year round is well worth every penny. Obviously how worthy do I make of it is my own skills.
My simple suggestion to all entrepreneurial brains is straight. The network is open for you. The value is there which has been created over 2 decades. Now its upon you to leverage the same and create bigger opportunities.
If You Still Have Questions?
Well, if you still have questions, call me/ write to me: paritosh@tienewdelhi.org
Why am I doing this, Is this part of my Job?
As a clarification, at TiE its not about doing a ‘job’. What I enjoy most is the freedom to create value added initiatives and super quick decision making. No, this post is NOT a part of my job in any manner and has not been influenced by anyone.
Its about how badly I want every entrepreneur to come and be part of the world’s largest network of entrepreneurs which is available so simply. Obviously you have to be proactive to keep in touch and build opportunities.
Paritosh Sharma speaks on Social Media and Mobile 2.0 at OMCAR 2009
I take pride in presenting my talk at OMCAR 2009, a hugely successful event which was held by OM Careers in association with TiE, Delhi at Amity University, Noida.
I am humbled by the response received by the delegates and some amazing insights from the fellow speakers.
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
Position the best hits at the top
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.
"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
