Category: Online Marketing

Indian Web companies are growing or may be Indian companies have started respecting web for its reach and power. Not only Indian companies but all Indian organizations. I just wrote a letter to one of the Christian organization head quarters on web reach. In my previous post I had mention about the alpha phase of Indian web, everyone wants to experience the true web power. It looks easy, attractive and powerful but not till you experience it that way. I knew this phase was to come (in India) and thanks to all who spent plenty on industrial awareness.

What is industrial awareness?
We Indians never thought that we could get a life partner through web (thanks to shaadi.com for the industrial awareness). We never thought of getting a job though web till naukri.com made it a visible reality. It took some time and thanks to naukri.com for having the patience and the will to spend extra on industrial awareness. Hey, orkut knows more about my batchmates than I do, I never thought of such an option. Selling, buying, communicating and everything is now possible through web. Thanks to all the advertisements and extra pain taken by the companies in doing industrial awareness. (Also you can thank me for industrial awareness. I talk about web industry before every pre-placement talks) It costs a lot but it certainly helps in getting the early lead and to become the synonym for the industry (like Google is for search or xerox is for photocopy). Branding for web-industry is not an asset but THE asset and early birds can go all the way to the top as THE BRAND.

Offline example of Industrial awareness
One of the best example I can remember is from the Sportswear industry. During 1995-96 when the global sports majors entered the Indian market, they spent a lot of money on advertisement. Most of the money was spent on industrial awareness, a shoe for jogging, a shoe for basketball and so on (Though many global winners became local losers in India). There was no visible sports wear market but with industrial awareness campaigns it became a need. Everyone then started to desire and own a paid of sports shoe. Recent introduction of after-bath products are other examples (Livon, Marino, after-bath lotion ..).

Does Industrial awareness helps?
In my opinion half of the money spent by naukri.com was utilized for industrial awareness. Web being in alpha phase in India might have cost leaders even more than half of their marketing budget. I have heard people unsuccessfully explaining web illiterate about getting a job through web. Without an industrial awareness companies in the industry will have no relevance either. Now there are plenty of job portals targeting Indian market but I am sure people consider naukri.com as the best and only brand (yet, Also job portals are a different market where a customer, the job seeker, never gains anything in being loyal, surfers uses more than one portal to get a better reach). Becoming the only brand is the only advantage of Industrial awareness.

“You’re a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well” say wsj.com. Is it talking about businesses? No, this time it is about individuals, the unborn babies.

I stumbled upon http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117856222924394753.html, which says,

So when Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she ran every baby name she and her husband, Justin, considered through Google to make sure her baby wouldn’t be born unsearchable.

Great. Will future babies have md5 encrypted names too :)? I forwarded this article to SEO groups to motivate them (who are somewhat depressed with recent Utah episode).

A scene from 2009, Aaron Hall’s office.

Client: I want to name my baby?
Aaron Hall: Thats great, everyone needs to name their baby, how can I help you?
Client: All the names have high competition in Google, I want a name which is SEO friendly, easy to remember (should pass phone test), easy to search and should be able to rank #1 in Google in next 8 month 12 days.
Aaron Hall: Do you have a paypal account (owned by Google by 2009)?
Client: Yes, I do have.
Aaron Hall: Do not worry Maa`m, you deliver baby I will deliver the ranking.

If this craze picks up then no one will ever name their baby’s Matt. Guess the future names then?

I was a little hesitant to the Google’s new web history but after thinking carefully I got converted. Now I am not only a user but a great fan for this great tool. The biggest reason why we should use it :-

Our knowledge comes from what we have learned and many a times we refer back to our old books for solutions as we know we saw it there. Same applies for web history, you search from your own memory (visited sites), can I call it an extension of my memory? Recently I used Google to fix one typical apache/xen related problem. I lost the useful referral website which later I could get it from the history, it was a great time saving for me. We are using to our browser history search, google history search is just an advance version of it.

Why do you worry?

• Is it a privacy concern? They already know it, now it is that you need to know (or accept) that they know :). (Already by now they know too much about everyone) Moreover even if you are logged into your gmail/google account, no one can peek through as it prompts for the password again. Google will anyway anonymize user queries (does it count for web history as well?) after 18-24 months.

If you want to avoid it?

• Use two browsers, one where you are logged in and other where you aren’t (even without google toolbars). At visitlab.com we use to catch fraud clickers using IP but I do not think Google will do it for web history as one IP is share among many in our offices.
• Use a dial up connection and reconnect whenever you want to play safe. Make sure you have cleaned your cookies.

There were many who knew this and were a little cautious from the very beginning:-

• Do you use google toolbar with seo activities?
• Google and Privacy – antonyms? – This was posted much before the web history stuff.

Google uses same cookies across all their products including adsense, analytics – The net can be wider some day, so learn to play safer :).

I had covered Page Rank (PR) topic with some really funny pictures for our Intraoffice SEO book. Page Rank is a very simple concept, A (web page) links to B (web page of same site or different site), A passes a part of its link juice (or PR) to B. Let me take a small example to show how it works. Lets consider A and B to be a pot with Green liquid.

• Bigger PR => More liquid
• Links going out of A => Hole in pot

• If A has less holes and more liquid then you will get a better share of the liquid and thus more liquid.
• If A has less holes but less liquid you will get less liquid (but still a good share).
• If A has more holes and more liquid then you will get lesser share but still may end up getting more liquid.
• If A has more holes and less liquid then you will end up getting very less.

A will give some liquid to B, now if B is connected with more pots say C,D,E…. then it will end up getting more liquid from all these pots. If B gives link (or has holes) then it will lose some of its liquid.

PR of B => how much liquid does B pot has. This is how I explained a lot of new web aspirants (new recruits with no web knowledge). If you want more technical viewpoint you can visit :-

1) http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
2) http://searchengineland.com/070426-011828.php

Wishing you a better PR, I was crazy about the thin green line when I joined the industry, now I hardly care.

I just saw a post by Aaron Wall of SEObook.com saying “People Don’t Look Beyond the Page“. It says, “I once saw a college professor cite a page about caffiene on a low quality site about pornography, gambling, and drugs on his official profile page. Many people never look beyond the page when linking to a story.”

Call it “Good Page on Bad site Problem”

This is generally true as most of the people are not aware of backlashes of linking to bad sites. So my team asked me two questions :-

1. How to handle it in an effective way? (I do not have time to check the whole site whether it is good or not)
2. What happens if I want to use the bad site as a bad example, bad sites are not 100% bad they can still be good examples for bad sites :)? (I liked the question)

Here we go

1. You need some plugins which will help you understand the site quality. You can install site advisor or SEO tool (and browse the homepage). This will let you know what others feel about this site as a whole. Still if you are not sure of what you are linking to then add “NoFollow” Tag.
2. If you want to talk about a bad site, let the world know you are not recommending them with a nofollow tag.

In Short, link to only good sites (that you know as good) and for everything else (even for the sites which may be good but you are not aware and have no time to investigate) use NoFollow tag.

Are you fighting with yourself? This is a sample where site is paying for a free lunch. A search at overture shows that a variation of NaturallySpeaking can cost the company a good amount of money. Can this be avoided? Is there any advantage of doing it?

(Google SERP for NaturallySpeaking)

Economics of abundance? Then what happened to the economics of scarcity (real and virtual)? Demand Vs Supply graphs? Things are changing, even google embraced it for a longer innings when they redefined gmail marketing (“by invitation only” to “open for all”).

Go through http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/10/the_economics_o.html for economics of abundance. You can also go through the PPT, http://www.longtail.com/poptech.ppt.

This is certainly a change in perspective. Around 2 years back we had integrated the virtual scarcity with many marketing campaigns successfully, now what works is the freedom. Does this change reflecting at Human resource level as well? a point of discussion for sure.

Now Google is showing the link visited time. This will help me understand that I have visited these pages. How will this help user? I haven’t seen any announcement by google guys yet. I did some tests to understand more about Google visited link time option. Some of the queries I had, Is it cookie based (then it is not better than the visited link color change)? Is it user based? Is it query based? Is it computer or browser based? I found following answers to my queries

Summary of observation

1. Observation 0: I saw the time with the search results
2. Observation 1: Once I logged out I was not able to see it, user based
3. Observation 2: When I logged back I was able to see it. Also I tried it from a different browser from the same machine. Also from a different machine and it showed.
4. Observation 3: It is not query based, I searched with a different query and it still worked.

Is this a replacement for the browser based visited link color?

(Description with screenshots below)

1. Observation 0: I saw the time with the search results
   
   (Example see the time with the first and second link)

2. Observation 1: Once I logged out I was not able to see it
   
   (The visited link color tells me that I have visited these links earlier)

3. Observation 2: When I logged back I was able to see it. Also I tried it from a different browser from the same machine. Also from a different machine and it showed.
   
   (The visited link color does not tell me that I have visited these links earlier, google is able to tell me that now, VERY HELPFUL here)

4. Observation 3: It is not query based, I searched with a different query and it still worked.
   

Enjoy Google, Enjoy innovation

I am deep in work with the AGM lined up, last Sunday had meetings to approve the financial report but due to some confusion could not approve the reports. It is rescheduled for 29th of this month and AGM on 6th May (for ICPF, Kolkata Chapter). I need to send personal letters to all the shareholders before this Sunday as per rules. On 22 we have our church AGM. With all these work I am enjoying the wink team mails and comments.

Some more feedback before heading to work. After a serious scrutiny I got another mail from their team (Highly appreciated, very professional approach). Also I got permission to publish it on blog, here it is

Hi Aji,

I read your posts. You raised some good points! Thanks so much for all the feedback.

Oh and I have no problem with you posting my email on the blog. I’m glad that you took the time to try out Wink again and I’d be glad to talk with you about Wink any time you have questions.

If you want to do a post in future about trying to get the Wink Widget and setting it up somewhere (like on your blog) I’d be thrilled to hear your feedback about how that process works as well. As you already know, there’s nothing more valuable than the feedback of users.

Thanks again!

Also I got another mail which said,

Greetings Aji Issac

Matthew Stotts has posted a comment about you!

Click here to check out the comment: http://wink.com/AjiNIMC–profile

Thanks!
Wink
http://wink.com/winksearch–profile

Scrutiny 1: Why a link to http://wink.com/winksearch–profile, instead there be a link to Matthew Stotts profile (adding only the link that is needed, visitors brain cycles are expensive events).

I then visited my own profile to read my comments
Scrutiny 2: If you want the message section to grow and used frequently then it should be a separate page which less of module calls. Speed is important says Google (and Aji). Also I want to see what I want to see, I wanted to see my messages not my complete profile this time. In orkut people participate because they see what they want to see, the messages. It will be a good idea to separate the message from profile page. You may end having more participation on message pages than profile pages. I liked profile page as I can forward it to my friends to show my Internet presence points. You need to separate the pages as per the purpose. Very important marketing lesson, “Pages should define its purpose and should be structured accordingly”.

Gosh, again a confusion

(What will you think first? To reply to Matthew I can post my comments just below it).

I did the same, I posted the comments below it and it appeared just below my profile. I am not sure whether Mathew will come to know about this or not.

Scrutiny 3: “Add your comment: (No HTML please) ” does not make sense, either it should be “Add a message for AjiNIMC” or something similar. What is this comments meant for? It needs to be clearly stated. Also a reply button will be helpful.

Since I added a comment under my profile I got a mail as well (I am aware that I added a comment, so why this mail. Any task that is done extra will create complexity)

Greetings Aji Issac

Aji Issac has posted a comment about you!

Click here to check out the comment: http://wink.com/AjiNIMC–profile

Thanks!
Wink
http://wink.com/winksearch–profile

I am loving these feedback sessions, thanks to wink’s team for motivating me to take this step. Hope it helps (Please ignore spelling mistakes, I am writing in hurry). Good day.

I got this mail from one of our youth pastors, he is a big time orkut fan (I have mailed him to get a permission to publish his name with this post, but you are free to guess 🙂 ). Here he goes …………..

Dear friends
Welcome to the Orkut revolution…!
I marvel how this thing called Orkut could

• bring me back in touch with friends from school & college days
• keep me in touch with friends from church, chai shop, circus(lol!) etc…
• and of course help me meet new friends…

At one click of a mouse, I am updated about my friend in Tennessee or in Timbuctoo or Tatanagar…
Its a brand new world…its the 21st century Global village…
Oh yes…its great guys & gals like you who make it worthwhile to be on orkut!
But anything fantastic & friendly can also be fanatic & fiendish. I was thinking of the best way to keep this ORKUT revolution…really refreshing & real and not raw & ruthless.
Because of my passion for acronyms I tried to cook up one for ORKUT. Its not the best, but it explains best my personal guidelines, when I am on orkut. If it helps…its great.. .otherwise…forget about it…

O – Original Presentation of who I am(I enjoy the way God made me, I don’t have to try to become more presentable with more colorful words about myself(though it can be creative!)or a picture which is not me)
R – Respect others privacy & Scrap-Books(hmmm…its a tough one, but i generally avoid reading conversations on others scrap-book)
K – Kindness in my use of words, pictures etc(specially online – the words we use to scrap or write presents our public profile…and if we disagree with someone the scrap book is not the best place to present our views…as the whole world reads it..woah!)
U – Use of my personal information is selective (hmmm…I avoid giving the privilege to WTC Bombers or other terrorists or people with similar tendencies, to get in touch with me..lol)
T – Talk beyond the Orkut(this is a difficult one especially for introverts like me who find it easier to chat online than in chat in person. But I have to consciously have to remind myself that there is a real world beyond the WEB)

Its great, this thing called Orkut…its makes me feel good…it gives me privilege to make others feel good…and in general stay good!

Stay Orkutted,(sorry…connected , I mean!!!)