Aside from being Pristine’s CTO, I also happen to be my company’s webmaster. I really do not mind this task, in fact I think its one of the under-rated jobs out there in the market.

The cool part about this role is how closely you have to work with the Google ecosystem of Analytics, Adwords and Webmaster tools. The thing about Google products is that many people might know about them, but how many of them use it the way they are intended to be?

In my quest to find the right person I have interviewed so many professionals, that its not funny. Almost all of them put everything but the kitchen sink on their resumes. That might be a good idea, but they all of them come down crashing in the interview. A royal waste of time.

In case if you want to differentiate yourself from the horde of wannabes out there, this is one of the things that you have to know!!

URL Builder Tool

Here’s the link to the tool.

* Ta-da! and all the fanfare *

What this tool allows you to do is allow you to track a segment of the visits which are generated on the provided link to be tracked as an individual campaign! The reason why anyone should be excited, is that now you can slice and dice all incoming links to your website (provided you can alter the incoming links).

Some of the ways in which it can be used is -

• Tracking a segment of your traffic which is coming via an online-ad – For example, I could put a banner ad on Timesjob, or some site. I could also have posted a job posting there with my website’s URL in the job description. Now instead of relying on the simply the data from Referral traffic to measure the ROI of this ad campaign, I can give them a generated URL and track it without worrying about any other source of traffic
• Email Campaigns clicks can now be tracked as a segment. With a little help of Goals and Conversions, I can calculate the ROI on a per email basis
• You can even measure the effectiveness of traffic being generated from different properties on your website

Well, this is just the start, you can go pretty much wild with this tool. Just remember folks! Slice and Dice data for better control and tracking.

I was checking on my list of target keywords on Google for both SEO and SEM, when I chanced upon “CFA Hyderabad” where we are doing good on both the paid rankings as well as the organic rankings. When I was checking the ad, I noticed that one of the ads was by olx (in case you do not know about this site, do not bother to find out!).

They have recently started advertising in a heavy way (even on TV as well).

Buying advertisements so you could sell your advertising platform? Really? Is that how effective your platform is, that you have to pay to get traffic?

Or are you just trying to siphon off traffic from one of the market leaders?

In fact not quite sure whether they are directly in the advertising space, somewhere between Craigslist and e-Bay. I still wonder, why will anyone pay good money to put advertisements on this site?

Copy as in the written text. Often organizations do not realize how important a properly worded message can be. If the communications department does a muck-up of the job, then the intended audience misinterprets the messaging.

At work, we were discussing the entire content cleaning and re-wording of our marketing communications. Anyone who has been to our flagship portal would realize that the learning curve required to understand the concept and use the product is quite steep. During this discussion, we learnt the Study Technology that Scientology proposes. I thought that I might share this with you.

Scientology states that there are 3 barriers which stop an individual from studying a particular topic -

1. Misunderstood Word – If an ambiguous or a complex word is used in the message, then that is a deterrent to the individual. Jargon comes in this space. Look at the text you have written from your audience’s perspective, if there are any words which could be misinterpreted, then replace them with simpler words.
2. Steep Gradient – If the student is expected to perform new actions, without getting enough time to learn from his previous actions, then this results in confusion. You can see this problem with most failed games, the tutorials are too small or are too confusing. Give them space to assimilate new actions, try to setup a practice play of the new actions. Games like World of Warcraft excel at these things.
3. Lack of Mass – Attempting to teach something without anything concrete is difficult. Imagine trying to teach an abstract concept to a student without any solid examples.

For mainstream adoption, if these things are not done, then the level of  energy and commitment required for an individual to take up your content would be too high. It might attract like minded people such as yourself, but it certainly wont attract the masses.

Looking back, when I apply these to our own tour to the site, I realize that there are still colossal huge gaps to be filled.

What brings a community together? What really binds the members of the community?

Two things: Pride and Fear.

Was listening through a podcast by Duct Tape Marketing on Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik. It started of as an interview promoting his new book on analytics powered through crowdsourcing. Towards the fag end of the interview, something that Avinash said really got my attention.

Most people treat Twitter as a shout channel. Please do not treat it as one.

Then he rattled off two important parameters for measuring one’s tweeting success. They made more sense because I agree with him on Twitter being an engagement space with your customers. His parameters are -

1. No. of RTs/1000 followers
2. No. of replies per day

The first one measures how many of your followers are listening to you and see value in your ideas. The second one measures how many of those listeners are engaging with you.

Simple.

A classmate of mine has jumped and launched his enterprise with some of his friends. MyZingo is in the e-commerce space, and has launched their first online B2C initiative known as buytheprice.com. As part of their launch, they are planning to give out free t-shirts to the prime registrants.

So if you do want a t-shirt, then head off to their launch portal and register.

PS – If you have a gmail id and if you know how to use it wisely, then you can win a free t-shirt for sure!!

Yesterday, I attended Startup Saturday … the theme was Social Media and how it can be leveraged by start-ups effectively.

Some of my key learning -

• Online marketing does not replace offline marketing efforts, and vice versa. If you are planning a huge effort in one media, do not ignore the other
• The best way to use these platforms is not as a broadcasting medium, but as a way of engaging with your customers
• Don’t create propaganda, create evangelists … who can propagate your name
• Social media marketing is not cheap, and it is certainly not a free alternative to traditional marketing
• In case of B2B space, marketeers can target the end-customer through social media and get the attention of their intended customer organization

Will attach the respective presentations as and when the organization committee puts them online

Wikipedia definition of Niche -

A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing on; Therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.

A micro niche is a much more focused and a smaller component. For example if you take people who listen to Techno music in the Indian market, thats a niche … people who listen to Tiesto only (and he is GOD ), then that’s a micro-niche.

I gave the music example specifically because I was talking to a good friend of mine about airing Techno. Niharika works for Red FM, and handles their marketing activities and although I am not a listener, I would have been one. Had they played Techno , then I would have been an ardent follower. Then it simply became an MBA-to-MBA talk, and the final answer came out as simply as this – I am not their target segment.

That’s why I have a Worldspaceradio at my home. Thats why I listen to the System channel. They cater to my needs, however small a business I represent.

I actually am willing to pay a premium for that service. What normally was free for Red FM or other channel users, I have to pay something like Rs. 3000 a year. But I get what I want at the end of the day. I think businesses should cater to more and more micro-niches, especially businesses which are planning to enter a red ocean. They need that small group of ardent followers. What say?

Buzz behind Zoozoos – Everyone is talking about Zoozoo these days. Even me for that matter!! And you know what this is creating my friends? Its creating a buzz … a buzz unlike any other in the market these days. People love it, people hate it … but people definitely talk about it. Vodafone has a winner here – or so one might think.

Industry situation – With mobile penetration in India going to touch around 90% by 2014 (thats 1 billion mobile phones!!!), the revenues from simply voice based services are going to trickle down. What were considered to be luxury services on mobiles (missed call alerts, caller ring back tunes, et al) are now considered necessary services. Living in a country which has multiple mobile service provider also means that all these service providers have to invest for customer acquisition. Which means even lesser charges from voice based services.

Jumping the gun – The only way voice based revenues could be increased is to increase the Value Added Services (VAS) part. Before we go any further, What do you mean by VAS?? Don’t worry, even I didn’t know about them a few months back, I worked in an IT firm making solutions for Telecom Operators and I had no clue what they meant by VAS!! Thanks to those beautiful ads, now I do!! But why will people buy these services, how can they buy them if they do not even know what they means?!? Hence the need for awareness for these VAS was recognized by Harit Nagpal (Chief Marketing Officer, Vodafone India). Ogilvy was given the charge of creating the buzz for Vodafone.

The Buzz Explained – A good buzz can be dissected to have these elements

• Clarity of message – Each ad ends with the particular VAS feature. The message is clear.
• Simplicity – Ogilvy’s Rajiv Rao, in charge of this promotion knew that the entire idea had to be simple and yet stupefying to cut across all ages and convey the idea. All the ads depict this minimalistic approach.
• Stand out – The egg shaped head; it stands out. The cute shape of those zoozoos; it stands out.
• Variety – A single idea can also cause a buzz, but over a period of time it dies down, simply because people cannot keep on talking about the same thing again and again. e.g – pink chaddi campaign. You need fodder for people to talk during train journeys!!
• Right time, Right medium – IPL for TV, Youtube for online.  Zoozoo is everywhere. An nice article by Sushrut Bidwai can be found here.

It’s a great campaign, and I would not be surprised if this turns out to be a case study in a few years. As I finish this post, a question still remains in my head – what will happen if the Zoozoo’s buzz transcends Vodafone VAS and moves on to something totally different (e.g I saw a political ad with the zoozoo theme)?

That is the question you should be asking yourself whenever you are about to buy something.

If you are not clear then, check out this site. The content is presented by Anne Leonard, who manages to deliver the message so clearly and logically; it’s a shame that we did not notice it earlier. We Indians are copying the western culture to the hilt, so much so that we are trying to adopt the same practices at work, at home, at how we treat things, becoming more of consumers and less of contributors.

Half of the stuff that we buy, do we really need that? A new phone, a brand new gaming desktop (I was thinking of getting this one), a flat screen tv, a dishwasher, an A/C, the list goes on. And once we buy that, we dont stop … we keep on buying newer versions of that. Our perceived obsolescence drives us to trash our already existing goods for the sake of the newer and better. Such a waste.

Please go through the site – storyofstuff.com. And try to make a difference.