June 24, 2009
challenge must be won
In these days I am taking care of a specific website for the overall development, optimization and of course social media marketing. It’s ITCSlive.com which offers website designs and development services to the various business needs. One of my friends has taken the initiative to establish this company taking along with some true pals. It’s a very small organisation working PHP, Dot net and also on open source technologies. Besides client services they are having few in-house web models which are yet to rock the internet floor.
May 7, 2009
Wrapping the business
With the advent of Social Networking sites and social media marketing, is it the exact time to say that, so called job sites are likely to wrap up their business? Or, is it the case that the ventures will find newer ways for business development as their web businesses are hedged vertically and horizontally both.
Social media sites like LinkedIn and allied has open up the option for HR personnel to find the exact match of their Human Resource searches without involving in the service paid structure to the job sites. They are indeed can serve the purpose of Happiness Reservoir to the organisation and High Risk for the site owners. In addition, HR managers could check the IT skill factor for the job seekers by default. In a cost cutting scenario the network addiction would benefit the cause.
Hey HRs, don’t stop the media sites from viewing in office J
The primary business model of the job sites typically includes Resume services for the job seekers and the companies both, ad revenues, pay per impression ad, banner ad and so on. So emergence of social media would likely to reduce the clicks as a whole. But as the owners have more than one sister parallel sites like matrimonial, Sports, trading etc, they would able to sustain. Moreover, the matrimony ventures are likely to slow down due to this social Medias.
Site owners need to find some strong model on the existing business so that traffic won’t divert to another space and place. Strategic partnership on location basis could be one of the way outs.
April 29, 2009
Which one is the best way to communicate? Is it Local/own/mother language or is it the globally accepted language like English that may influence better and in more effective way to communicate with the global people.
Local language in Global Media
If the meaning for social media is to create some influence on the network, then it must be global language for an effective communication. Otherwise, it may hamper the viral effect after a certain point of time.
If updates are available in say French, then to us, the people who are used to English, it is difficult to grasp the exact wave. Participation stops.
Moreover, if local language say Bengali is expressed in written English, then also the process create a lot of difficulties for the end users across the friends network.
Now come to the marketing or Optimization. What happens?
Expressions with native languages would entail a local buzz. Hence a Niche Product. The way to globalize the fact would be a simple translation in English of the chats.
March 19, 2009
Let us assume, 3 NGO related projects came to an SEO agency and clients need the websites to be optimized within a given time frame for the targeted keywords.
A hypothetical example:
Month January:
Project 1: www(dot)abc(dot)com – an NGO (Micro Finance) Project to optimize Probable list of keywords: NGO, Social development, Micro finance, Rural micro finance, Micro Finance in India etc.
Month March:
Project 2: www(dot)etc(dot)com – Another NGO project to optimize. Probable list of keywords: Same as above say for example.
Month June:
A different NGO project all together having same sort of keywords.
What will be the strategies for an individual SEO or for the agencies in the example given above? Will it be 3 different ways or 3 sets of schemes OR the same process would be followed for the 3 websites?
Once the later strategy is taken, it could take a much longer time for the last website as the first one has received the maximum effort in the optimization process. The agencies have lesser scope in changing the contents or the pages of the GIVEN website. Moreover, the pages are constant and there is hardly any scope to change the usability of the landing page. Sometimes you don’t have the control panel or what I mean to say the analytics. But it is altogether a different story for the In House project where scope is much larger.
So the point is how an SEO expert will approach towards 3 same kinds of websites in optimization procedure. Well, I would like to say that agencies must have separate sets of back ups in such examples mentioned above. I have hardly come across this kind of open discussions in the search engine journals or news websites.
Any help will be highly appreciated.
February 25, 2009
From the last few days I was trying to find an optimum risk-hedging frontier (RHF) like what we had in our Economics graduation courses such as Production Possibility frontier. In the horizontal axis we suppose regions where the business are getting expanded and/or contracted and in the Y-axis we keep the business verticals. See the following image where I have tried to describe a basic architecture as to how all the 5 business verticals could be spread all across the continents and the question is, how efficient the frontiers would like be so that business could operate on a pre-defined frontier hedging the risk across vertically and horizontally both.
But the real problem is that, I could hardly draw a pentagon or hexagon so that in the point of intersection we could draw a business utility curve satisfying both the first and the second order conditions of profit maximization. Spend a lot of time but without concrete result. I need some guidance 
or productive discussion needed.
risk hedging frontier
February 20, 2009
Last time I had made a post on mobile technology that whether remote admin facility could be installed and transfer of battery charges from one handset to another irrespective of all the networks and the mobile service operators.
Here is the link:
http://knifedge.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/remote-admin-mobiles/
Now, is there any technology or could we able to develop such a technology that some recharge value or talk-time could be transferred from one cell phone to another in case of emergencies through cell phone to cell phone directly or through the service provider, I mean through the call center executives.
The idea strike me, when one of my friend send me a message mentioning to recharge a top up value of Rs.30 to a cell no at 10.30 pm at night. It was not possible for me to do that as shops were already closed. I do use a tataindicom no. and the no. he had requested to recharge was an airtel no. So in case of emergencies, once the technology is available, one user can dispatch some currency value of recharge to another user’s mobile on the basis of a small sms request. Its like having one ATM card using all bank’s ATM at free of cost.
May be some progress is going on, I don’t know. I came across with the idea and tried to share with you all. Loopholes might be there, but personally I think this technology will boost the business process to the technology holder and the employment opportunities.
February 15, 2009
Sometimes I wonder with the volume of searches through out the world and the business turnover at the same time. The local economics became global in these days and no metropolitan or cosmopolitan is indispensable to market the goods and services with the help of internet technologies. As a follower of Economics, I had proposed this issue to IGIDR (Indira Gandhi Institute of Development and Research, Mumbai) to shed some research light on this hot cake 
May be the process is going on OR might be kept in the dark chamber following the usual Indian tradition of not being a mainstream theory. So many agencies are doing online marketing, SEO, PPC etc. But so far my understanding is concerned, agencies must have some R&D wing to have a view of the trends. I had an opportunity to work with Grmtech, where some research works were done through brainstorming sessions and ideas used to emerge through the routine.
Foreign universities like Stanford have done lots of progress in this regard (Web usability, search psychology, Click frauds, eye tracking techniques and lots more). In a sense Internet has became a parallel economy as opposed to the mainstream one where one can sell his knowledge, intellect, ideas. This thing I guess we are lacking or there might not be enough scope to work with the existing infrastructure.
I would like to show a bit of courage to be a futuristic web strategist ha ha ha…..
Web 1.0: Read only – dotcom boom in late 90’s
Web 2.0 : Read and Write
Web 3.0 : Read, Write and Share (Semantic web)
Web 4.0 : Gather and generate information or ideas
Web 5.0 : Invention at a personal level
Web 6.0: Invention or technological driven economic growth, a more vibrant parallel economy. May be a point of inflexion (Convex to concave)
Web 7.0 : Start of business cycle and web inflation
Web 8.0 : Get rid off internet, a replacing technology
What else, please share.
February 12, 2009
I do get queries on a regular basis as to how one can start a share trading business rather a franchisee of share trading. Viewing the downturn of the economic activities and thus the stock market fortune, most of the renowned brokers have taken initiative towards a franchisee based business model reducing the costs and liabilities with respect to marketing, salaries and other back office operations.
For a new starter the following points must be kept in mind before they could get into this kind of venture.
- You should have the office space, required computers and the broadband Internet connection.
- You need to conduct all the marketing staffs to get a good no of clients and thus good brokerage level.
- The mother company will provide you the technical assistants, the ODIN or BOLT or NEAT operation terminals (in fact the software).
- You have to put some deposit money to the mother brokerage house (depends on the region, the reputation and the service).
- Brokerage will be shared in the ratio such as 70:30, 60:40 and so on. Remember once you provide a good business on a regular basis, you will have the bargaining power on your part. Moreover, your client would like to negotiate over the brokerage rate. In that case, you have to be careful in allowing that person to the expected brokerage level (delivery and intra-day) depending on the volume of business that person provides.
- You have to incur the cost of the terminal trader. But if you have that expertise along with the required NCFM certificates, you can reduce the cost at once and increase the profit margin on the other.
- Get aware of some of the compliance issues like self trading, marketing protocols, know your clients etc.
Feel free to communicate if you require more information.
