TheAnand

Being the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of ayruz web holdings for the past year and a half has made me realize a lot of things. Amongst those is the realization that digital or Internet Marketing is only catching up in India when compared to United States or Europe. Social Media and Search Engine Marketing is a relatively a new medium that has cropped up and many of our clients need extensive education to persuade them to invest in this new medium for advertising and optimization.

“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

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.

Traditionally, when advertising and marketing was considered, we did not have much of a choice. Newspapers, Television ads and radio ads and our age old bill boards were the only options, of course after our very own ancient dhol beating announcer dude.

Problem was, me being online for more than half my life now never understood them. When I tried advertising my services a few years back, newspapers here in my place charged around $20 per day of advertisements which could contain less words than half a tweet(for those ignorant, a tweet is 140 chars!).  A 5 seconds ad slot on most national TV channels in the country will run you around $20 minimum in off-peak times. Problem: But how do I know if the people I want to approach will read this paper or watch that particular television channel?

A recent survey of the internet marketing execs of USA about the usage of social media in their companies interested me.

Most of these companies trying to increase their social media presence are not exactly trying to increase their brand awareness as I initially thought, they are trying to make life easier for their clients and customers with quicker assistance and customer engagement.

What is your company doing online? If all that your company has is a static html site, its time to wake up and join the “crowd”. If you are a freelancer with products online, you have to keep track of these social mediums to get real time feedback and opnions and tackle in time before bad news goes viral