TheAnand

What happened with the Internet in 2009?

Even though I suck at my math paper in college, I love numbers! I got this newsletter today morning and found an exciting coverage of Internet 2009 in numbers. Here goes!

Email

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.

You know how arranged weddings in India are, the whole family resume is important when you are getting married! My brother for whom a bride is being searched at the moment has put my professional life in the spotlight.

What do you do?

I am an Internet Marketing Consultant.

Usually the conversation thread stops right there because most of the time the person asking has no idea what the hell my job profile is! While its amusing to see that priceless expression, I decided to answer it on my blog anyway

If you are still skeptic of Social Media, you need to do something about it! I am sold on the idea that Social Media is mainstream and there are probably a hundred reasons why I think so starting from Micheal Jackson and backwards. This video from YouTube tells you more about why Social Media is important.

Social Media ia used by many in many different ways. Some use it for promoting their products, others use it to listen to their customers while others give away tips on using their products on the social media platforms.

I recently put out a tweet about how your blog is in the right track if you get more spammy comments. From what I see, you are seen by the bots, which means search engines and other kinds of bots should see you too. Its a good thing though not many followers agreed with me! What do you say?!

BUT, This post is not about spamming! This is about learning from a annoying marketing technique which has been existent since email came along. Spam emails! Everyone hates those nigerian bankers who want your help or those claiming to make your body organs bigger and even those promising you replicas of popular watch brands.

“Recommendation Marketing” is a buzzword that has been on my mind for sometime now. I don’t really remember where I got it from but it makes so much sense in terms of ROI in Social Media. Check this sample search on Twitter:

If you do a custom search based on your product/service, you will most probably find a bunch of “credit-card on hand” , “will buy now” and “help me purchase” hot leads on these Web 2.0 3.0? (or 3.5??) properties.

Wish you were there now?? Get your business a Social Media consultant

If you are a Social Media Consultant in a country like mine, you would have probably heard this one a lot.

What is the ROI I can expect from this campaign?

Will having a Facebook community help my business?

This post is in a lot of ways the expression of my inner feelings to my wannabe clients and would-have-been clients about the ROI in Social Media.

There are a ton of advantages to go online with your press meets and Press releases. I have been a part of at least 5 press meets this year and personally, I think its a waste of time for everyone involved. We see a turn-up of around 10-15 people who do not interact with us or have any interest in what we publish and in the end, only 2-3 companies cover it online with the usual spelling mistakes and factual mistakes.
I am all game to take these Press Releases online and it is virtually used and abused to a great extent by smart marketers who use it to constantly generate buzz around their own websites.

This is a very absurd. Google seems to be very aggressive or is stuck in its cashflow that it is approaching clients directly for managing their PPC campaigns at pretty much no expense at all. I was kinda confused to learn that one of our clients was approached by Google themselves to manage their PPC campaigns online.

Though, the initial reaction was to scream “Fake!!”, seeing the documents and other information they had sent to my client, I was kind of speechless. Is Google really trying that hard? Tough times eh Big G? But in the process a lot of small Internet Marketing Consultants like me are getting bitten in the backside.

A question posed to me by one of my chat mates. To answer that question, you need to know the chat we had before the question.

He: Hi Anand
Me: Hi
He: So, what do you do?
Me: I am into Internet Marketing
He: So, you are a liar?

Reminded me of the popular book by Seth Godin and a similarly popular proverb in my home state. In this age where the people have been empowered with search engines, decision engines and more engines than I can think of, do marketers and salesmen have any role to play?

My startup was recently approached by another small business with a very energetic man on top. They wanted to know how they manage their brand online as a company. We decided to go with the Personal Branding route as their CEO was a known personality with the number of conferences he had been to and the number of online relationships he had with his friends and collegues from his previous work experience.

Here are a few tips I provided him to get started with his own personal branding online.