Ask your client does he know why Barack Obama is the President-elect and Mccain is not!

If your client does know it, well, half your work is done and if he does not hmmm…you have a perfect playground to set your rules!

Strange it may sound, but if we trail the campaigns of both Obama and Mccain, one of the biggest differences that takes you where you least expect it is the effect of properly defined, structured and followed up Social Media. Obama’s campaign team leveraged the Social Media aspect of the internet so effeciently that Obama had a clear cut lead over Mccain online.

One of the best blogs on the internet which provides elaborat figures as to how Social media made all the difference, I found is: http://adultaddstrengths.com/2008/11/05/obama-vs-mccain-social-media/

NEARLY 6000% MORE PAGES ON Barack Obama’s website than Mccain’s.

Okay so lets dwell deeper…into figures…

SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS/WEBSITES

Search Engine Results For “Barack Obama” and “John McCain”

Internet Presence For Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s Offical Websites

So what do all these figures say? My client is getting confused!! What should I do?

Now you actually do not have to say much. Your client says he has multiple options in the internet domain who provide services at a lesser cost then why should he still go with you?

So its simple, either your client’s campaign could be Obama’s or Mccains.

What does this signify?

Well, in the Online Marketing space its not just the quality that matters, its also how well does your online marketing solutions provider (partner) unedrstands your business domain. How well does he/she understands your objectives and goals and then charts out a workable architecture, that’s how you should choose your online marketing partner.

That’s our philosophy @ OMLogic!

Slowdown…slowdown…slowdown!

Absolutely you heard it right! Its all about perception, what the word says is Slow-Down, put your brains to rest and think, re-think your business strategy, innovate, build relationships to leverage on them when you again fire up!

So how does the slowdown affect the Digital Media market?

Well, not really in my personal opinion. Yes! for publishers and other third party agencies it may mean a dip in revenues but not a massive jolt. If a business reduces its spend and allocation on promotion, branding and advertising, well the offline model would be taking a larger share of the hit.

The need of the hour is to innovate and reach to the relevant audience in minimum time and position your offerings to the right cliet base. Seems like a sunny Goan’ beach in the midst of a storm?

Well, no! Undoubtedly the markets are slowing down, budgets are being hit, promotional spending is going down, but all this presents an opportunity to expand your network and create a reliability stand! your client is also sailing in the same boat. GO HOLD HIS HAND, offer him your USP’s which were words till date, and you would be established!

Being specific to the Digital Media Industry, Digital Media spends for large corporate are not a huge pie of the entire cake. Thus digital media companies stnd to gain (in a positive manner), the slow down may hit the revenues in the short term, but it would still be positive, as compared to similar dips for the offline advertising budgets.

ROI based business
The Digital Media Industry is an ROI based industry. Moreover there are several tools which can help map not only statistical figures, but also human behavior towards products such as Attitude, Decision behavior.

Understandably advertisers would play a wait and watch game and would be doubly cautious on the media spends, but in the long term Digital Media is bound to grow and with Social Media market shaping up, innovvations into product positioning and branding would definitely see an upward trend!

The online website business/sales depend on the quality of traffic coming to your site. If the traffic is relevant the business will grow no matter the traffic is low or high. In B to B scenario people looks for and read article which are related to their product or they search for very specific keywords into search engines. The search engine plays a crucial role in generating targeted traffic.

There are various traffic building methods like Search engine marketing, Search engine optimization, link exchange, email campaigns, Social Media Marketing etc.

Search engine marketing (SEM) generates the traffic to business website by placing sponsor ads on various search engines like Google, yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, looks smart etc. The sponsor ads show on different pricing models like cost per click (cpc), cost per mile (cost per 100 impressions) cost per lead/Action. The Search engine marketing method is known as the quickest method of generating online traffic and leads. Sometimes it depends upon the competitors. The advertisers who want their sale fast then they can rely on search engine marketing. If you are in c2c business then Search engine marketing (PPC) will be the excellent and accepted method of generating traffic. The traffic generated by pay per click advertising is considered to be very high and relevant. The traffic depends on the allocated budget for your pay per click campaigns.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the other most accepted method to generate relevant traffic. SEO is a free traffic generating campaign which comes under search engine marketing. The keywords play very crucial role for a search engine optimization. The selected keywords for SEO should be very much relevant to the content of website. As the SEO listing seen on organic/ free listing in Search engines so, here is a requirement of listing your website on few first pages. This will give visibility and helps to generate traffic. The messaging is very important it should fulfil the users query and attract him to click on your website to see/read more. Those advertisers which have time a need a long time branding then they can choose SEO as their marketing strategy. The optimization of website is very hard and cumbersome task. There is a requirement of dedicated SEO experts in order to get your website listed in the first few pages of search engine. There are millions of websites launched each day by companies or individual so there is a huge competition SEO. Only few sites are listed in first pages and they get relevant traffic and leads. Also I want to call SEO work as a work of deep patience where the SEO people work for months in order to get your site listed in search engines. The search engine crawlers plays important role in listing. If your content is original and very specific to your website then definitely the crawlers will show you website in the listing.

Link exchange is another internet marketing campaign in which we exchange the hyperlinks with a quality site that is somehow related to our company’s services and products. For example a php developer site will exchange their links with a site which is related to PHP, SQL, and LAMP etc. When you exchange your website link/ landing page link with an already high Page rank (PR) then there are good chances of your site to attain high PR soon. Good Link exchange vendors can help you to increase your website’s page rank and automatically targeted traffic. But at the contrary bad or wrong link exchanging may also harm your page rank. So here there is need of continuous research and finding right website with which we can exchange our link.

Email Campaigns is also a very potential channel to bring targeted traffic to your site. In Email campaigns first you collect the email addresses of your potential and targeted customers (this can be done either by search on net or by purchasing from third party) after that you send your newsletters regarding your offers, programs, and promotions. Although the conversion rate in Email campaign is very low, but for the companies having lots of good offers and good list of loyal visitors, I think email campaign is important channel. In my opinion email campaigns can create succeed stories for B2B advertisers. For a B2B advertiser the email marketing may play vital role as retention tool. According to a recent Forrester Research study, email has reached almost universal penetration, with 97 percent of consumers and 94 percent of marketers using the channel. So the email campaigns are very potential to bring targeted visitors to your site.

Social Media Marketing is utilizing social networking and user-generated content platforms to promote a product, service or content. There are lots of popular social networking sites like orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, MySpace, facebook, youtube, jigsaw etc where advertisers create their profiles and communities to discuss their products and services. Social media marketing (SMM) knows the youngest channel of online media. This channel is still its growing face but now marketers and advertisers started promoting this channel. When we create community or forum on any social network site then we adds people around us to join and to discuss the product and services. In this way we are expanding our community and at the same time we are advertising and our product and service by word of mouth. Social media is very potential source for branding your product and getting feedback about the product. The popularity of Social media can we proved by JupiterResearch poll. According to the pool in year 2007, 38% were planned to use social media which increased to 48% by 2007. The social media need to be taken care at each level. Like when we post some article related to our product/service, we need to be very much aware about the product and ready to reply the user’s feedback. This will create a long term loyalty and the right and targeted traffic will definitely increase to the website.

There is a need to give equal attention to all channels in order to get targeted traffic to your website. However the original and fresh content helps to return the visitor which helps in reducing bounce rate. Keeping fresh and relevant content will always helps in increasing traffic, because if someone like the content then he might refer or pass the link to his friends which will automatically increase the traffic.

Monetizing Facebook applications effectively seems to be the holy grail: While it is easy to put CPM or CPC ads onto an application and start earning some money, maximizing the revenues and tapping the full revenue potential of a successful application is definitely not trivial. With typical CPMs of $0.5 to $2 per 1000 impressions and typical per click earnings of $0.05 to $0.10 at CTRs (Click through rates ) of less than 1%, typical earnings end up being around $10 per 1000 Daily Active Users (DAU), which is very low.

We recently did a presentation at BarCamp Delhi, where we presented a few cases where some applications have been able to go far beyond these earning figures. One such application is iLike, which has created a huge community of users on Facebook around their interest in Music. iLike has successfully monetized on Facebook using ticket and music sale referrals.

Another application which has successfully monetized is MobWars, which has created a interesting and engaging virtual economy built around crime. When people run out of money on this economy, they can buy credits using actual money, or by taking actions according to CPA advertisements on MobWars.

Creating strong user engagement seems to be the key to creating effectively monetizable Facebook applications. An application that can tie the mode of engagement with methods of monetization can potentially earn a lot of money on Facebook.

Every year millions of students pass out from their schools and colleges with dream to be a successful. Some wants to be a well known doctor, engineer or manager in some top MNC. They work hard to reach this stage where they can fulfill their dreams, but suddenly they realize that the economy is not favorable as entire world is facing recession, there all dreams shattered in a moment, some people are lucky enough to get their dream job not everyone is lucky so what to do now this is the biggest question they face, i have one solution, specially for Indian students, that there is one industry
where good talent is very rare and where you can be benefited as first movers and that industry is known as online marketing industry.

So there rise a question what is so special about this industry? Does this industry do not suffer from the world wide depression, then the answer is yes this industry also suffers but with the rise and rise of internet and especially after the introduction of WEB2.0 such depressions hardly matters. For an example there are 1500 million users worldwide who uses internet and if you analyze them then you will realize that they are your potential customers and every industry wants to target right people and they will continue to invest to reach those people and then comes the role of online marketer expert, which you can become without any courses, just what you required is the open mind and intelligence (which i guess most of young Indian have), if you have both then no power can stop you to become a successful person not only professionally but also personally as you will be working with different culture and with different people.

Online Marketing also becomes very important when most of the economics are in crises Its evident that most of the companies are cutting their cost but to be functional every company still have to market themselves to generate more revenue to sustain the tough time. In this situation online marketing is very handy mostly due to the following reasons:

1. Its cost effective (You choose how much you want to spend and if it’s not delivering desired result you can stop it any time)
2. Its measurable (You can measure which ad is performing for you and modify or remove non performing ads)
3. More reach than traditional marketing (You can target any country it becomes important when you operates globally)
4. Its quick (Your ads will be functional within 15 mins)

Considering all this parameters one can say that this is the perfect media to market your product even when the markets are going down and everybody is looking to save their money.

Mind you this industry is very niche in India compared to other western countries like USA or UK but it has the potential to overtake all the countries because we have the greatest manpower, just we need to guide them properly then surely one day all the world will look towards India for their online marketing solutions.

So guys what are you waiting for, the online marketing is calling you. Go and grab the opportunity now!

LinkedIn Answers is one of the most powerful and under utilized Professional Networking tools available today. Here are my take on top 3 reasons to leverage LinkedIn Answers.

1. FREE Expert Advice: Obviously, the most common reason to use LinkedIn Answers is to get free advice. Almost contrary (you still need to put effort to ask the question ☺) to “there is no free lunch”, LinkedIn Answers offers an awesome opportunity to get valuable answers from experts. So far, I’ve asked 4 questions on LinkedIn and without exception I’ve always received tremendous response from industry experts. My recent question “Are you a blogger? Did you reach your 100th post milestone?” has already received close to 30 answers.

2. Build Your Professional Network: Your participation (either asking the question or providing the answer) on LinkedIn Answers is guaranteed to support you in enriching and growing your professional network at LinkedIn. Coinciding with my asking questions on LinkedIn, I’ve always received invitation requests from other industry experts from across the world. LinkedIn Answers must have contributed significantly to my crossing 500+ strong professional network on LinkedIn.

3. Contribute to Your Network: Without this reason, the above two values offered by LinkedIn Answers won’t exist. Share your knowledge and contribute to your professional network by answering questions in areas of your expertise. You don’t just get the satisfaction of contributing to others profession but also stand to grow your network and take your expertise to the next level (teaching is still the best way to learn).

So, what are waiting for? Don’t tell me that you don’t have questions for which are looking at expert advice. How about experiencing the power of LinkedIn Answers yourself?

Please do add your reasons to use LinkedIn Answers.

For those of you who are yet to take the plunge on LinkedIn, I recommend checking out “Ten Ways to use LinkedIn” by Guy Kawasaki and “LinkedIn in Plain English’ Video:

OMLogic is an Online Marketing Consulting and Outsourcing company, which helps organizations realize the full potential of Online Marketing in their businesses. OMLogic engagement with clients starts with helping companies ask and answer the right questions to identify the “right message” for their target customers. Followed by offering SEO and PPC promotional services to bring potential customers to the website and have them take desired actions.

All the members of OMLogic team are passionate about building online businesses. They are in the Online Marketing Domain from the very inception of Online Marketing in India and have built one of the leading online brands from India. OMLogic helps businesses harness the power of the Web in growing their reach or taking on bigger competitors.

Want to be part of passionate Online Marketers Team?

Desired Profile:

Qualification:
Graduate (MBA Preferred)

Experience:
Experience in social media marketing including Blogging, Discussion Forums marketing, PR and Article Marketing
Strong understanding of Web design, applications, navigation, Web 2.0
At least an year of experience in serving SMM customers
Deep Passion for Social Media is MUST
MUST be an active participant in the Social Media Sphere
Minimum of 3 years of online marketing/advertising experience

Skills & Knowledge:
Deep knowledge of social media tools and technologies, including Technorati, social bookmarking, tagging, dynamics of XML and blog publishing
Exceptional Communication (both listening and writing) Skills
Relationship Building Skills
Creative Skills
Analytical Ability

Please mail your resume with a cover note to careers@omlogic.com mentioning the job code in subject line.

Lakhs of graduates passing out each year from the several establishments for learning in our country. We have been discussing the employability percentage which a report suggests to be around 26%.

How impressive does the figure sound? Comments anyone?

Well, I have been teaching and interacting with management grads across the country and to my amazement, well ‘what is a blog’? Ask a management student, and out of a batch of 80 at a certain institute I visited only two (2) knew! Talk about majors in marketing!

The rules of the game are changing now. In fact just yesterday I was attending the NASSCOM EMERGE OUT Conclave @ New Delhi, in which one of the speakers remarked, that the rules of the game are being changed every day now! Times are a changing! Hmmm…

Well today its all On Line! I suggest students, while pursuing these courses they should focus at creating a brand for ‘themselves’. Why do we like donning a NIKE or a LEVIS? The general answer its a brand! My question : why cant we create our own brand? A brand ‘YOU’!!

WEB 2.0 provides enough bandwidth which could be leveraged to create successful brands! And who better than yourself as your own brand ambassador!

For starters, Blog, Blog and blog more….take your name out! Let people know you! Go discuss a case study or write a paper with others pitching in! Being on orkut is fun! Now go and find an answer as to why is orkut FREE for you? Would you ever buy such a large web space and maintain it for FREE for people?

Before you say yeah I know the answer to it, advertisements! That’s what Google does!

Well lets rattle our brains on something other than advertisements…lets think innovative!

Ideas ticking away in your mind? To discuss more click HERE

On-page SEO is defined as those things that are indeed a part of the website and whether they are favorable to search engine algorithms. It tells the search engines what your web site is about, so they can index it properly. It is the foundation and directly associated to the content and construction of the site. There are many factors of on-page SEO, which are very known by SEO people.

It’s time to recap all the basic factors of on-page optimization:

The Title tag
<title>some title words</title> This is the most important elements for good rankings. Make sure that the page’s search term is contained in this tag, and place it as near to the front as is reasonable, whilst ensuring that it reads well. There’s nothing wrong with placing the search term up front on its own, followed by a period; e.g. “PageRank. Google’s PageRank and how to make the most of it”. The target search term is, of course, “PageRank”. Obviously each page’s Title tag should be different to the Title tags on the site’s other pages. Visit and learn more about “How to write a Title?”

The Description tag
<meta name=”description” content=”a nice description”> Some search engines, such as Google, don’t display the Description like they used to do but, even so, it should still be included in each page for those engines that do, and for the odd times when even Google displays it. Write an appealing description for the page and incorporate the page’s search term into it at least once and, preferably, twice. Place one instance of it at the start or as near to the start as is reasonably possible. Visit and learn more about “How to write a Description?”

The Keywords tag
<meta name=”keywords” content=”some keywords”> The words in the Keywords tag were never treated as keywords by the search engines; they were treated as text on the page. The tag isn’t as effective as it used to be but there is no reason to leave it out. So put plenty of relevant keywords into the tag and include the search term once at the front, and a second time further along the line. There is no need to separate keywords and key phrases with commas, as is often done, since the engines ignore commas.

The H tag
<Hn>some heading words</Hn> “n” is a number from 1 to 6; the biggest heading size being 1. H tags are given more weight than ordinary text and, the bigger the H size, the more weight it receives. So include the target search term in H tags at least once on the page, and two or three times if possible. Also, place the first H tag as near to the top of the page as possible.

Bold text
Bold text is given more weight than ordinary text but not as much as H tags. As much as is reasonable, enclose the search term in bold tags when it appears on the page.

Text Use the search term as often as you can on the page whilst not detracting from the page’s readability. Make sure that you use the term once or twice very early in the page’s body text and as often as possible throughout. Reword small parts, and even add sentences, to make sure that the search term is well represented in the text.

In all probability, each word in the search term will be found on the page separate from the search term itself. This is good. In fact, if they are not there on their own, add a few of them through the page.

Alt text
<img src=”url” alt=”some alt text which is displayed on mouseover”>
Include the search term in the alt text of all images on the page. Keep in mind that some systems such as Braille readers and speech synthesizers use the alt text, so you might want to make them usable whilst including the search term.

No follow tag:

The rel=”nofollow” tag is a HTML attribute to instruct search engines not to assign any value for the given link. It is generally used in forums and websites where the web master does not want to provide link value to its members. Especially in cases where the links were posted through some automated bots to gain higher rankings in SERPs.

Nofollow tag helps to avoid the tricks and clearly informs spiders with a sign “DO NOT INDEX THIS LINK”. Links with Nofollow tag will not be counted as a backlink.

As a web master you can instruct NOT to crawl any one page or the whole directory using the robots.txt file.

Readability

Most important rule: Don’t sacrifice readability. If a keyword doesn’t sound right, don’t use it. If a link doesn’t fit a post, remove it. You’re writing for humans not search bots.

- The post introduces the recently held Fridays’ 2.0 session @ NASSCOM, as part of the NASSCOM EMERGE community initiative!

You can access more HERE

WEB 2.0, Yammer, Mashup, Dapper, Pipes, Widgets, Open API’s, WOMM…

Greek, does it sound?

Well, the 39th session of the NASSCOM Friday’s 2.0 (Emerging Companies Forum - Marketing) was a big draw, which had people belonging to a wide strata of the industry, participating with varied interests.

The session was chaired by Mr. Jay Pullur, the Founder and CEO, Pramati Technologies Pvt. Ltd.a technocrat and visionary, building teams from the scratch has been a key trait that helped Jay in establishing Pramati technologies, a company known for its innovation and quality.

The session started with Jay introducing innovative products from Pramati in the form of widgets which they evangelized as integral tools for building simple yet highly efficient methodologies for leveraging WEB 2.0

A formal kickoff then followed with Jay presenting the participants with a presentation which was a two sided discussion, with the participants engrossed.

Jay started with defining young companies. A statement which laid the foundation for the discussion “big companies already do all the old stuff well and in good scale”, made quite an impact in the participants and the focus hence shifted to how startups and emerging companies (young companies) could leverage WEB 2.0?!

WEB 2.0 and that too in 2 hours, well Jay smartly divided the presentation into Three (3) parts -:

1. What is this new WEB?
2. What does it mean to us?
3. Why is it challenging?

WEB 2.0, a new style of working!

WEB 2.0 is more about user participation, peer production and not just simple one way publishing.

Social Media
Two simple words, yet they made every mind in the room actively interact and participate. Well why someone would not be interested when you hear “the traffic on my web site has grown 25times over the past 20 odd days, due to the implementation of this FREE widget”!

‘FREE’ strikes! And it struck!

The greek words which we started this post with now started making sense, Mashups, Dapper, Intel Mash maker, Yahoo Pipes are all WEB 2.0 tools which are the most innovative and effective tools in leveraging WEB 2.0 for the organisation.

Marketing Opportunity - Widget

How does FREE stuff adds value?
-    Social Networking Applications
Jay provided with examples from some applications that Pramati did for the recently concluded Olympics at FaceBook, which generated quite a response all across.

Open social platforms were again an interesting topic of discussion which generated quite an interest in the room. Various platforms were discussed. Including the free google platform, open API’s and web services.

Extending the discussion, Jay proved how widgets could be effectively used in the promotion of products.

2.    Strategy needs understanding of distribution models and uptake of new offerings

“Marketing is changing faster than ever”
-    Jay Pullur

“Usefulness is no longer the only thing that matters, it’s the experience that does”
-    Jay pullur

“Indian startups have not really kept the waves”
-    Jay Pullur

An interesting discussion ensued within the participants, which had WEB 2.0 researchers’ sharing their experiences into what they felt was lacking in the Indian startups and how could the power of WEB 2.0 still be leveraged.

Jay mentioned the Enterprise 2.0 platform which he simply explained as a very complex combination of openness and privacy.

The change in the WEB 2.0 space was very intelligently put across which had the participants in splits and was really a thought provoking idea…”who thought a simple application like twitter could ever work”?
Well, since people today are interested into other people’s lives, thus it’s not just working; in fact we all are Tweeting, day in, night out.

Yammer, Crunchbase, Semantic Web before the participants could say why English suddenly has become out of focus again, Jay explained the various tools and how they spell magic!

PART TWO
The session was now much more interesting as now Jay kept his point through which he gave what the audience wanted…good, but what does it mean to us?

1.    Specialize and grow on the fast track, remarked Jay

With a reference to the blue ocean strategy and other such methodologies, Jay was instrumental in providing the audience with methods of marketing new products and service offerings through WEB 2.0 tools.

PR2.0, Blogs, WOMM (word of mouth marketing) etc. were the cited examples

Beat the downturn, commoditization and Market pressures, remarked Jay

PART THREE
Why is it challenging?

1.    Competency bar is growing up

Before the participants could voice their concerns of implementing such WEB 2.0 strategies, Jay was quick in adding the various challenges that could be faced.

“Invest little to gain a standing” – the statement clearly reflected Jay’s long term standing in the IT industry. The experience was speaking for itself.

Post the formal discussion, Jay shared his experiences with the audience. What was engrossing was Jay’s openness in coming out with the go to market strategies that Pramati implemented while they were in the process of launching their Enterprise 2.0 solution.

Lesson well learnt, and such discussion was received with great response by all present.

The session concluded with a Q&A session and the forum opened for networking which also had Jay interacting very openly