Archive for May, 2008
These are my notes from an internet marketing seminar I attended. Read through to see if you can figure out who delivered this and i promise you would be surprised 🙂
Topic: Web & New Media: Emerging Trends
183 bn emails sent a day
49 mn internet users in India
7.5 hrs spent on internet/ week (18-35 Males)
1.2 bn searches / month- search increasing at 80%
80% online shop
Online Time Spent in India:
- 23% – TV
- 30% Internet
- 26% Print
- 21 % Radio
Advertising Money Spent:
- 41% TV
- 1% Internet
- 40% Print
- 12% Radio
1.4 bn online out of 6.6 bn in the world
mobile is the next huge thing… computing cloud is the current stage after PC being personal era..
web is not US centric.. 211 still the largest..
inspite of the company being so "open source".. the presentation consistently says Confidential & PROPRIETARY .. paradoxical..
the presentation laptop from google is running Windows XP.. sweet.. and oh! the presentation is being delivered on powerpoint 2003..
shopping is most important for users on internet.. 80% shop online. but shopping not translating to buying due to lack of credit card proliferation ..
UK: celebrity gossip; india: cricket & hollywood; china: she rock group
interesting: 80% people said customer found vendor and not the other way around.
s/w downloads & white papers leads resources used in buying process.. least used is podcasts.. blogs r low too.. webcasts & IT newsletters are also effective .. surprise! search engine is also effective..
honda case study being discussed..
ads shudn’t only be for keywords but also related keywords..
lesser known: search within search..
16% likely to NOT buy if brands are not on search results
generic keywords have higher CPC.. if keyword is relevant to a company it is cheaper..
Case studies: fiat case study for design of new Car – crowd sourcing.. mastercard case study – punchlines from consumers.. T-Shirt design by consumers..
170 mn bloggers; 21% uploaded videos; 41% uploaded photos..
an ad that doesn’t look like an ad.. video as content itself.. Heinz case study: video integration.. gadget ad can also be delivered via google..
100+ mn subscriptions from feedburner..
DISCOVERY: google hot trends..
IDEA: use skype as inward hotline for placing orders..
google trends for what geographies are responding well to what products..
ms office keyword being utilized by naukri and monster
Type of Communities":
- Event Oriented
- Commercial e.g. Woot
- Social Media
- Around Products
- Around Q&A e.g. Yahoo Q&A
- Mediated Communities
Twitter was down for few days. The micro-blogging soothsayers had nowhere else to go but wait for the service to come back online. However, twitter is simply a service (and prone to failures).. for now, inspite of the numerous times it keeps throwing the cute error messages, people are willing to forgive the outages.
my observation to this episode is if the whole “micro-blogging” ecosystem could go down based on a service, aren’t we putting all our eggs in one basket? if micro-blogging has to go main stream, can one only rely on a single service to deliver the same? Where are the alternatives? oh yeah, u might start thinking of 3jam, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Jooopz, Jyngle, Loopnote, tumblr, plazes, Pinger, pownce and Swarm-it but none really have achieved the status or ubiquity that twitter has..
the other reason why this is more important for social media is that all of these services are online. and online services are prone to disruption more than any other thing (self inflicted or malaise oriented)..
another example of eggs in a basket is the “Google Adsense”.. google made a whole lot of us greedy and a few dollars with the adsense program. of course, you have to give them credit for spawning a new “professional blogger” SMI category. yeah there are other money earning programs but none as ubiquitous as adsense.. what happens when adsense goes down?
currently, i am feeling the pain as adsense has stopped working for my blog and i have no clue why? what if google decides that i am not fit for their ad network? fortunately, my daily bread doesn’t depend on this but what if it did? what if not earning for a few days was NOT an option?
in the recent BlogCamp, a participant mentioned google turning off his gmail account when he wrote a mail to their CEO complaining of the ill treatment he had received from one of the google recruiters. what could he do except watch in pain?
in some cases identities of people have been wiped out when google decided to erase their site from the index.
the age old maxim of diversification is becoming more relevant for a Web 2.0 world. sure the reliability of the services have improved tremendously but what if it failed ever? would we be willing to take that risk?
What do you think one should do to tackle this?
One of the most important products of the Microsoft Office suite is Outlook 2007. This email software is basically an email management software but can also act as calendaring software, task, note taking software, contacts manager or conversation tracking software!
And in case you want to buy one in India, it isn’t exactly a simple thing as i realised when one of MVPs asked me that question. It goes that the cheapest option to buy Office 2007 in India is the Office 2007 Home and Student Edition that costs INR 5039/-. But that doesn’t come with Outlook 2007! The next option is to buy an Office Small Business edition that costs INR 15,990… You can explore these buy options from the Original MS online store.
But the MVP mentioned that he wanted to be able to buy Outlook 2007 only. However, there is no option of buying a retail Outlook 2007 box from the online store! The next simple way would be to buy it from “Dial a Software” partner. However, you can get this in few cities in India. Once you place an order with the partner in city, they would deliver the ordered software right at your doorstep!
And what would the approximate cost of Outlook 2007 FPP standalone would be? The exact cost would be advised by the partner but you should expect the price around INR 2600.
In summary, if you are looking for Office suite, MS Office 2007 Home and Student edition is the best for you at INR 5,039. And there is a hidden advantage of buying this edition. You can actually install this edition on 3 machines at your home instead of just on a single machine! So per PC cost of the Office suite would only be INR 1680… now, isn’t that a cheap price for a supposedly expensive Microsoft software 🙂
So get Outlook 2007 working for you!
I had earlier made a post on buying Microsoft software in India.
In any internet marketing or Web 2.0 conference (e.g. BlogCamp Delhi), case studies are often quoted of how great user generated content is. The case studies are mostly geared around how brand X led generation of videos that provided the next BIG idea to the company!
Now Microsoft has delved into this internet marketing by launching a video contest at: www.ultimatevideorelay.com. The idea is to finish a story for which Act I has already being done. Budding filmmakers are then encouraged to pick up the story and submit their scripts for Act 2. The contest community will then vote to determine which scripts will become finalists and those filmmakers will be presented with the equipment needed to make their film, including Sony HDR-SR11 camcorders, Falcon laptops, Windows Vista Ultimate, and Pinnacle editing software. Finalists’ videos will then be voted on to determine the winner!
The process will be repeated for a third act and then end result will be a three part film created by three different filmmakers.
Now, we have heard plenty of good work that Bollywood does in India. Would a film school student take the time to outshine the international experts? Does India have what it takes to appeal to international audiences?
We’ll see when the script submission deadline ends on June 2nd..
You can watch the first of the three videos here.
The success of a tool is determined by the no. of people using it 🙂 .. i have two tools that i use everyday:
- IE7Pro: Internet Explorer quintessential add on.
- Feeddemon: An industrial quality RSS reader available from Newsgator (for FREE)
Both the tools have been updated. While the latest version of IE7Pro is v2.3, FeedDemon RSS reader is at v2.7.
if you have been using any of the above tools, update them now. And if you not been get them today (both of them are FREE)!
Everyone knows that blogs are an individual medium. And there are more than 60 mn bloggers in the world… The needs, frustrations, aspirations and thoughts of these 60 mn does have a remarkable similarity… and in delhi we collaborate together at Delhi bloggers & New Media Society (DBNMS): www.delhibloggers.in
On Saturday, May 24th, the group in collaboration with IBNMS came together at BlogCamp Delhi to learn and share with each other. The event was conducted in the international format of a Blog Camp where the participants become presenters and attendees choose the sessions they want to attend by themselves! The venue of the event was the Microsoft Office in Nehru Place who graciously opened up their office to welcome the bloggers (though we started late at 10:30 only). Not only that they also let the attendees experience the XBOX 360 thunder via a kiosk put up there. Lunch was from the Golden Arch in form of burgers that were quickly devoured by the active folks there 🙂
The atmosphere at the BlogCamp was all about collaboration, learning and sharing. The BlogCamp logo above was developed by one of the members Sudipta Sengupta. The spirit of sharing was in the air as two volunteers immidiately jumped in to help open up the registration desk.. a spirit like this is difficult to find otherwise.
The cricket match in the city on the same day lost 50 attendees as they chose to be participants at BlogCamp Delhi. The sessions that finally got presented were:
- Introduction to IBNMS
- Blogging in Hindi
- 4Ps of Blog Marketing
- Corporate Blogging
- Open Access
- How to monetize Blog effectively
- Twittering
- Basic SEO
- Photo Blogging
- Smart Blogging can fetch you good money
The photos were clicked voraciously by Abhijit and are posted online at: http://abhijit.space.live.com
And amit gupta has now posted his photos here: http://www.flickr.com/tags/blogcampdelhi/
I presented an hour long session on Corporate Blogging. This covered what challenges does a company face when it decides to start blogging. The information helps a company ease its way into blogging avoiding costly mistakes. You can view my presentation below:
There were a few journalists at the event who were well tuned to the topics being discussed there. A camera crew from NDTV 24×7 covered the event and held some focused interviews (i had the luck to share my views too!)
When the new media is the name of the group, could the event be limited to the confines of the location? the event was broadcast live over internet at: www.delhibloggers.in/livesessions Around 15 attendees from all over the country logged on to participate in the sessions including the very famous Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration..
and if you were on the twitter you would have felt the shake-up at http://twitter.com/blogcampdelhi where Arjun Ghosh twittered the event live. all the buzz on the twitterville can be seen here: http://summize.com/search?q=blogcampdelhi+OR+ibnms
my key takeaway from the blogcampdelhi was that the participants eagerly agreed on that bloggers need to support each other much more than they currently do.. due to this support, the bloggers in US command much more attention than in India. we need to think about how can we make each other more visible and strong.
the other opportunity that could present itself was aggregation of bloggers for collective advertising on their blogs. Everyone agrees that adsense throws pennies. the real way to monetise a blog would be to present a single front to the advertisers (rather than via ad networks)…
we hope to conduct many such successful & valuable sessions… nothing would be possible without the support of the participants and we hope to bring more value to them in the future…. if you have a suggestion or comment about the event, please share with us via comments here.
Google Sites is now available separately from Google Apps suite. This means that you no longer need a domain name to set up a site for yourself. Your site will be available at: http://sites.google.com/[your-website]
The maximum size available via this service is not mentioned anywhere..
This is an excellent service for people starting up trying to setup a website for the first time. The site provide plain vanilla WYSIWSG editor. The types of pages you can create are Dashboard, Announcements, File Cabinet and List. Dashboard provides a page where one can host any google gadget.
However, I would advice all the businesses to stay away from this and try Google Apps or Office Live.
The trend these days for individuals looking for a web presence is to host a blog. Hosting a blog has inherent advantage of getting indexed faster and easy to author via variety of tools. My advice to individuals would be to use blogs if they want to make a beginning on the web via Blogger or WordPress or Live Spaces.
Today Live Skydrive got an update! And no there is no increase in space provided.. however the service does seem to be becoming more and more of Office Live Workspace 🙂
Most updates seem to be related to adding more metadata to the documents uploaded. The 2 new features in this area are:
- i was able to add captions and descriptions to the files uploaded on the skydrive. Nice to be able to describe content to people esp. when u have more than one file in a folder.
- the second feature that got added was ability to comment on any file in the skydrive and see a view of all the recent comments users have left for you. very useful if you want to let someone know that you have accessed the file.
The second set of features are related to navigating the file.
- The first in that series is the browsing widget that lets you scroll through the other files in the folder
- The second here is the larger photo previews so that you can see what is in the picture before you open the same.
Finally if it mattered to you, the service has been extended to 24 new countries (if it makes sense as internet knows no boundaries)..
SkyDrive has been a great service to use from Microsoft and we hope that the innovation goes on..
Welcome to real world interoperability that works – Interoperability 2.0. and we have an unlikely harbinger of this effort – Microsoft Corporation.
Microsoft has announced that from Office 2007 SP2, it will start supporting other document formats including Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and XML Paper Specification (XPS) – within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. This means that customers now don’t have to worry about what format they receive their documents in, they can work on it using Office 2007 SP2. The default format for MS Office remains to be OpenXML, a recently approved open ISO standard. However, a user will be able to change the default to ODF..
MS Office 2007 SP2 will have ability to open, edit and save documents in the Chinese national document file format standard, Uniform Office Format (UOF) as well.
This makes MS Office 2007 suite the “uber productivity suite”..
The sceptics would already be wondering – “MS is at it again. milking the standard for its commercial interest again”.. the news for them is that Microsoft has committed to supporting the future maintenance and evolution of these format standards by participating on the standards committees of these standards i.e. OASIS . Here’s my missive to them – make Open Office support OpenXML. this is what will help the customers realise true benefits of interoperability. Open your minds and deeds and let Interoperability 2.0 settle in.. it should be about the customer and choice, shouldn’t it be?
Have you used the Vista SP1 or XP SP3 or IE 8 BETA 1 yet? I am pretty sure that you have an opinion on the same :).. Now, for your opinion you can win a prize!
The contest at MeraWindows – The Windows Community for Indians is on! More details available on the forum.
All you need to do is to author a review (good or bad) for these products and submit it before June 15th. The forum admins also want you to be active on the merawindows forums having made 25 posts earlier there atleast..
On the stake is some very handy geeky stuff like 160 GB Hard Disk or Video MP3 players!
My keyboard fingers are already twitching 🙂
when technology is a part of the whole! 