Since I started my company in digital marketing I keep getting some queries, clients etc.. through my online network. One of the most surprising calls I got was from a tweep, who wanted to help me with the work. In passing he mentioned that he was visually impaired.

"What??" I am sorry, I thought I misheard, did he say visually impaired?

The obvious question in my mind was How can he possibly do any online marketing when he cannot see!!

Since I have chatted, emailed him, and he has some interesting tips for social media marketing too!

I thought all you guys would be interested in knowing about him and how he uses the internet... also Why he does that. Here is a small video and his interview about how he got into internet marketing.



"I started surfing the internet during 2004 that’s when I got my first desktop computer. I am a game geek so I use to play a lot of games with my low vision. It was during 2005 my sister showed me how to use google and then I found that windows xp has got an in built magnifier which opened a new world together. Since then I stopped playing games and started off learning a lot of tech stuff, reading and networking with people using mails. But I got my limitations, in spite of using
the windows xp magnifier I need to give rest to my eyes after 1-2 hrs of continuous work on the computer.

You might be wondering how can I play games when I cannot see any thing on computer with out magnifier, the kind of disease which I got degenerates my vision slowly day by day and during that time I had some good vision which helped me to play games.

Online marketing is a life changing agent and how I entered into this field was due to my interest, hunger to learn and enthusiasm. It was during September 2006 I stepped into online marketing, I went to a friends house and there I saw him making a website with Microsoft front page and when I asked him he told that from these websites we can earn money. It was interesting but my friend told no when I asked him to teach this to me. He said you cannot see properly how can you design websites, don’t strain your eyes…drop the idea. I was stubborn and did not give up the idea of learning web designing. I still remember that every day after coming from college I use to sit before computer for hours together and trying to read lots of tutorials on web design trying and testing new free software’s to crack and make a website. I was not successful but gained a lot of knowledge on web design and learned a lot about the web world as I surfed thousands of pages, read hundreds of newsletters and tested lots of software’s. I don’t like my vision limiting something in life and I always tried to keep up my spirits by cheering my self. When I met the same friend next time I asked him are you earning money, he said I need to get “SEO” done for the website…..when I asked him to teach me SEO the reply was same like before...

I came home and used Google to find out more about SEO and found that it is search engine optimization and I understood what exactly it is. During my campus placements I haven’t got selected. I walk out of the
interview halls because the kind of questions which they asked look silly and use to pull my spirits.

It was then that online marketing took birth as a profession in my life. I thought to my self I can do some
thing with what I had learned through Google. Then I started a blog and got content on it. Did lots of SEO to it and finally sold it for some where around 200$. Then I really thought I can adopt this as profession then I dived into it totally and started doing lots of research.

During this time I met couple of other’s through referrals and started taking clients and offered the
services of internet marketing. We did pretty well and I regularly updated my knowledge in the field of online marketing when my friends use to take care of work under my instructions.

I continued it for a long time of 3yrs until I thought to join some company and learn some corporate stuff. I ran 2 online marketing ventures successfully.

I joined a job at IBM and I can say if online marketing has brought a tremendous change in any ones life I am
a real example. Sometimes it is good your friends might not teach something to you and they may say it is tough and hard, but my message to world is never stop learning by yourself and one day certainly it will
pay you off."

You can contact him on Twitter @raghavasatish He also blogs @ Raghava.in

Came across this concept on @mrjain's blog about DeBeers the Diamond Giant. It an intriguing read on how they made Diamond Rings the symbol of an engagement ceremony so as to keep up the diamond market!

It made me realise what we call as culture might actually be the direct effect of 'marketing' gimics by huge corporates that gain a lot of money from it. Hmmmmph will older people understand that if I tell them?

DeBeer's and Google by priyanka

Later I read this other articles about Google and Sify, and they are around the similar topic about Big Brands and their markets.

Google gets into consulting small businesses. Google is actually into a lot of things.. some which we don't know of like they have this scholarship for youth into non-profits work.

Sify - Indian AOL? Its cool to understand how they went about tapping into their market.

Sify by priyanka

Brands and their market and how they influence 'their market' which we also call society??

How important is automated content generation in Social Media? I have seen many twitter profiles who have many automated feeds in their twitter. These are not bots, they are actually popular twitter people who for some reason are tweeting a lot of autofeeds! These tweeps often have over 10,000 followers. Moreover these feeds are not their own blogs or sites!

I myself was trying out such feeds, but did not see much ROI in it, so have removed them as of now. Used moderately I find that such RSS updates are useful, as they reduce the need for content generation when managing accounts especially for companies.

Mashable recently had an article stating that on Google Buzz, 89% of the content is autogenerated! Thats a pretty huge figure!

Most of this automation is from Twitter sync where tweets of the individual get buzzed also. It also includes RSS of blogs, newspapers etc... I have very promptly stopped following anyone who has synced their twitter with buzz! I anyway would follow them on twitter.

I myself have synced this blog to my Buzz, Twitter and Facebook. That I feel is useful since I often forget to update the networks individually.

What do you think about auto generated content? What are your thoughts on your twitter or buzz contacts sending out feeds?

Posterous recently introduced the custom domain feature. It has a blogger like option which lets you register a domain through them and they manage all the redirecting and directing automatically.
Pretty cool!

Previously I would have thought that since they have brought this feature in now, it meant that a custom domain couldn't be used on posterous before. Recently I figured that the domain can be forwarded to the posterous from the domain register service, too.

All this domain directing stuff would probably fall under the SEO work profession. The difference between SEO (Search engine optimization) and SMO (Social media outreach) keeps merging every now and then. Recently I had a client for social media whose main concern was what Google ranking his site was getting. That is not really my job as far as I see it, but then social networks, and outreach does get a lot of Google love.

In fact my efforts including the wikipedia page, did get them some good results for various Google searches.

So I have had reason to ask the question about what is Social Media? I will write another post on that. let me know your thoughts!

Source

 

I have been noticing this for some time, but poignantly now I realise that Indian newspaper articles that are published on the web for all to read have really bad Google Rankings! Its surprising considering how important these results are for the Search term!

Couple of days back I had written an article RIP Harish Maroliya, this incident has been covered numerous times in leading Indian newspapers. When I searched Google for any recent news coverage about the incident I found my blog article to be the 3rd result on the 1st page.

I noticed something similar while doing social media stuff for a client Amara Fashion House, events at this boutique have been covered a large number of times in the newspaper, however a Google search barely showed any of them. Even now a search for it will show all social network/website results not a single newspaper article!

Very surprising, newspapers are such a rich source of content. I guess they need to seriously work on their SEO stuff! I guess what also would help is to have a strong social media presence like the NYtimes.

Easy integration with Google
Contacts that don't read blogs but check emails are nowing reading blogs and commenting to them on Buzz itself! I have gotten comments from couple of such people!
Though I have heard some people complain that business contacts can read their personal blogs etc... I really don't think thats a problem cause you can choose whether or not to share a site on Buzz.

Rise of the Microblogger from the Inbox
SMS microblogging, using API's all helps people use Twitter, however so many people open a twitter account and it dies down, now they don't have to open an account! I have seen many of my contacts who are dormant on Twitter are all of a sudden microblogging on Buzz!

Easy commenting from the email itself
Comments to Buzz posts come as an email and I can reply to it from the email itself. Now facebook has that feature but its late in its coming, I have already stopped FB notifications for comments!
The ease of use is awesome.

No need to make contacts
All the email contacts and any person has some Gmail contacts for sure, are all on Buzz. Moreover they will get the notifications by default unless they unfollow you.
Often people sign onto Twitter and they don't know what to do, cause they don't have friends there. Especially in India I know many who barely have any of their friends on Twitter. With Buzz there is an inbuilt community already!

Makes your email into a Community!
Man is a social animal and Buzz makes the inbox into a social community. I am genuinely liking it, as I have seen some contacts I never see active on social networks actually update!

What are your thoughts about Buzz?

So Google announced the Wave with a lot of fanfare and a hour long video at a conference. They release the product and it is between and errrrr and an ummmmm. Most people are disappointed, some claim that since its still in a preview version, it will get better.

All of a sudden some days ago they start rolling out the Buzz functionality for all the Gmail users. No fanfare, well not much until people got the feature and then of course everything was aBuzz! I am a little miffed at having it pushed into my face... but over all I think its powerful, for the main reason that if every Gmail user is on Buzz then well thats a huge population of people to be on a social network.

Big Tip
Unfollow everyone that has connected their Twitter to Buzz. They thought of this means they are avid tweeters, imagine getting someone's tweets in your inbox. (Horror!)

I have not gotten much time to check this functionality out, but it looks pretty cool. I realised that it was a truly serious product when I saw these Buzz buttons out there (see below this post).

Currently Internet ads are not seen as part of social media, because of the lack of any social component in them. They are as any other newspaper ads, except online. There have been discussions however about making these ads more interactive. In fact an interactive and social component to these ads is seen as one of the possible solutions to the low effectiveness of online ads.

Already we can see the ads on Facebook which are very social they provide a like or close option. They sometimes show pics of our friends, show which friends are fans and other interesting info to make the ad a lot more relevant to the viewer.


Another example of an interactive social ad is a viral video with a tweet and share on Facebook option, all embedded as a banner on a website. Instead of getting the visitors on your site, and measuring CPC etc.. here you work to make viral a video of your brand!!

I haven't got an example of such an ad, but I thought of it when watching Google's viral Superbowl ad,



Pretty cool! (BTW if you are someone like me you might also have not gotten that the ad is depicting an American who falls in love in Paris thru the status updates.)

What do you think about these sort of 'socially relevant ads' ? Please share any examples you may have come across of innovative ads!

(pic courtesy)
A few days back Google published an article on its blog, stating its decision to move out of China or at least stop censoring its search results for Google.cn its chinese search page.


"In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different. Read More."

An interesting article by TechCrunch covers the different sentiments around the web on this move. There are people applauding Google's stand 'against communism' and other who state it has come to this only because Google was not the leading search engine of China anyway (It was Baidu) and there was no way it was going to be numero uno in the BIG C.
Read more on those two sides.

I frankly think both sides are too extremes. If Google was number one, then what it would do could be very different, but the thing is that its not on the top. So when it is not getting the largest market share in Big C, and it is seeing all sorts of 'unethical' surveillances by western standards it may not want to take it sitting down! So they are standing up and saying NO, which is fair enough.

While it may not be a decision made solely against the communism in China due to ethical reasons, it would still be a blow to the communistic regime of China. That is the other issue here, the Chinese communism. Towards this I read an interesting article today, it states that while China has been doing a lot of talk towards becoming capitalist and it opening up its market, in action it still remains a communistic regime and might become even more so! Read more on this here.

Another aspect of this entire debate is the role of Government in the 'free web world'. Recently a cousin of mine from Germany said that the German government actually tracks pirated and illegal web content like movies, audio etc.. to the violaters computer. Where in it automatically takes a picture of the illegal content and then simply sends a summons to the person for cyber fraud. So this raises another question of ethics, how much of access should the government have to a citizens net access.

I have just penned down some thoughts, what are your ideas?

Taking it forward from my last post on guest blogging here are some of my guest blogs in the last few weeks,

The Religious Nasik

After a four-hour drive from my house in South Mumbai, I found myself approaching Nasik city. Spending a day there, I was surprised at the myriad host of religious places that the city has. Here are some of them to give you an idea about what a multi-religious fanfare this small city close to Mumbai really is.

5 Killer Tips to select a Blog theme

Some things I learnt while choosing this new blog theme...

Marketing on google Wave

After all the hype about Google wave and many people being disappointed with its usability and lack of invites. The question remains, how is it as a marketing tool? Here are some simple steps to begin marketing on Google Wave.

Google Wave Basics

BTW I still have Wave invites with me, let me know if you need one!

Lately reading about real-time and social features in search engines, where they will be showing results from social networks on the search page made me think about how this affects Social media and Search.

- This will give a huge boost to social media
Companies who want to rank well for search, can and will want to rank well in social media too!
Moreover web users who are yet only searching and surfing, will have social network results hitting them all the time! Social networks can't be seen as timepass stuff anymore, they are as important as a website or any web page is in the online space.

- Social media gets recognized as the huge and integral part of the web
The search engines want these social network results on the search pages cause otherwise users will deviate to these networks for search.
Adding a social media component to search only improves its value to the users.

This second point came to me later. This is in fact a salient part of marketing...

When I first started marketing via social media, I would contact bloggers to review the startup I worked for. It felt like I was imposing on them, if they actually did review it then it was a favour.

Soon however I understood that the bloggers need good content for their blogs. If the users like our product then it will enhance the reputation of the blogger who reviewed us! If the blogger in the relevant niche did not review a popular tool, and the user finds it from elsewhere, he might doubt whether the blogger is dependable.

So its always such two way processes that create a win-win situation for both parties involved. This is proverbially spoken as "Two hands make a Clap" in India.

Now my understanding of marketing has changed. Its about letting people know. Opening the doors and making visible! Telling the right and relevant people that look here, here is something that is of your interest.

Clap!

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A lot of people logged onto Google Wave but then their interest waned as they had very few contacts on it, or no one else ever really logged in anyway. Some tips on networking with Google Wave,

Search Public Waves

In order to search for all public waves on social media, type "social media with:public" in the Search tab on the wave Inbox (the middle column), as shown in the pic.

The search may be slow depending on your internet connection. You should see a list of the available waves. Click on any wave to open it.

Read Public Waves

A good way to check out interesting waves...

Playback: This feature lets you see how the wave evolves and get the feel of the entire conversation. Better than reading all of it, you can also see its chronological happening.

Follow: Following the wave will make it appear in your inbox. You can track any further edits or replies made by any one else.

Make your wave Public

A great way to spread your blogposts, have discussions on interesting stuff and more on Gwave is to start a wave and then make it public. To make it public, you have to add easypublic@appspot.com to the wave. Save this app as a contact so you can add it easily any time.


Put the necessary tags to the wave. The tag button is at the lower left hand side of that wave. You can add as many tags as you want.

Read more about marketing with Gwave from my blogpost here.

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Looks really exciting after I watched this video!



(source: Techcrunch)

An aggregation from Facebook, Myspace and Twitter live updates is pretty powerful and becomes easily the preferred channel to watch when following a hot event.

Facebook however will be giving out only its page status updates on Google, for the public profile status updates users can search on Bing. (Read more on this).

I don't have real-time search yet, do you?

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Rupert Murdoch is the the chairman and CEO of News Corp. which includes Star TV, 20th century Fox, Fox channels, MySpace, Tata Sky (partly) and a lot more!

From quite some time he has been making indignant remarks against Google, Bing, Ask.com and other 'usurpers' of news content. Google retorted by saying that it was these usurpers that sent about 4 billion visitors to news sites!

In a nutshell the entire debate is about free online content. Really good, researched and analysed content is available free of cost to all. This is great from a larger point of view, where any simpleton computer user can access important info free of cost. However news corps are not able to monetize their sites well enough.

One of the ways to get some ROI on the articles is by asking readers to pay for the content. On these lines Wall Street Journal has started a 'subscribe to read more' policy.
Surprisingly if you take the title of a preview only article and copy paste in Google, it shows the entire article in its search field. Googlers can this way read the entire article, anyway!

The reason that Google displays this charged content for free is due to cloaking...

Google has strict policies against what's known as cloaking: showing one web page to the crawler that indexes it but then a different page to a user. We do this so that users aren't deceived into clicking through to a site that's not what they were expecting.

Given the publishers ire at this arrangement, they have introduced a feature that allows only the first 5 clicks for free, but after that the user gets directed to a register/subscribe page. Read more at the Google Blog.

Below is a longish (30 mins) video of Rupert, where he explains his idea behind charging for online news.



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Google recently released some information about its system Chrome to be released in 2010. They have released an interesting video about this OS,



Check out the Google Chrome OS Youtube channel

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Recently I used Google Wave for something kinda useful other than chatting, playing sudoku and hangman. We along with other wavers made a wave for a tweetup! If you see the snapshots below...

First we put a poll for those that are coming for the Kalaghoda Festival and Rs 9/- Gelato tweetup. Then added the Location via Google map...

Then we had some chat conversations about the time, itinerary of the festival etc...

The wave was started by a friend @mehulved, he added me and a few others to it. Then I added lot of my contacts who might come for this tweetup to it. A few others also added people.. so very possible to make things go VIRAL on wave!

Again the setback was that as yet not too many people are on Google Wave, hence we also made a twtvite, which was more popular. This wave was made using very basic apps of maps and poll. As more and more apps get developed I think we should be able to do a lot more interesting stuff with this tool!

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I have a few Google Wave invites, whoever wants it can leave their email id as a comment to this post. If there are more comments than invites, then I will choose some of the emails Randomly.

Some things people don't know about Google Wave invites:

-Its not instantaneous like email. When I send out an invite, the email goes to Google and gets lined up there. After a few days Google will send you the invite on my behalf.

-I can send the invite to an email from any domain, but in order to sign up for wave you will have to have a gmail email id.

-Your wave id is the same as your gmail id. So if you want a different wave id, better procure that email id.

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Initially on Google Wave, things felt really bland with barely any friends on it. Moreover it was tough to find a friend who chats with you real time so you can test the features. Now however after the nth rounds of invites having been sent and received it feels a whole lot more populated.

A new useful feature added just a day ago is a green dot next to the profile pics when the people are online. This is good cause now I can have prolonged wave chats with online friends. In case they are offline I can still wave them! (no need for email or a social network)

I also downloaded a plugin for Firefox that lets me know when I have new pending waves. Suddenly Wave seems more usable! I can just keep this plugin on and now I have another more futuristic and modern email box with basic functionalities!

Why Wave cannot be a primary platform as yet!
Still very few people on wave. The ones that are there are mostly techie... what about my non-techie friends?

Nascent stage of many apps like Twitter, Facebook, Blogger etc.. so I still have to use those platforms separately.

In the long run however I think G Wave can become the main platform from where all this happens.

A list of keyboard shortcuts and its extensions and apps for G Wave users.

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Recently I have been coming across many articles about wi-fi access on airplanes.

Right now, Virgin America, United, Delta, American and Southwest are just some of the airlines offering in-flight Wi-Fi as an extra perk (a perk that usually costs about $12 or $13 per flight). (via Mashable)

How abt some free wi-fi in air?

Ad support: One of the ideas is an inflight wi-fi service that is supported via ads!

Mobile media company JiWire and satellite broadband provider Row 44 are teaming up to deliver an in-flight Wi-Fi system that will come to you via advertising support. Read More.

Sponsored: Google and Virgin Atlantic are coming together for the holidays to provide free wi-fi in the latter's flights. This is another good way of enabling some free wi-fi. Surely the sponsor will get some love from the net addicts :p

When will we see wi-fi in Indian flights?

With wi-fi becoming more and more available, the world gets more and more connected! The world is getting flatter...... :)



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Today morning in my mailbox was a very mundane looking mail 'reply-wave' - My Google Wave preview invite! In my past posts you can see how excited I have been abt Google Wave!

Initially wave was kinda confusing, cause my contacts were not online, but then got a few of my twitter friends on it. So now we are waving together, they have discovered ways to play Sudoku and all kindsa stuff. I am not exactly clear how it works.

The chat speed is real time, as in you can read what I am typing as I am typing it... and the UI is definitely more interesting than the usual IM chat boxes! You can see in the below screen shot, the chat can happen in different parallel strings... in the same wave.


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