Shashank Rana

Buzz, Wave, Facebook and Twitter

I have been working hard to understand the Buzz behind Google’s latest product. While Wave, their previous offering, has not be of any productive use for me so far, I do not know how can one make use of this Buzz!

Social Media on Internet has become too many of ‘me too’ type websites. With the improving bandwidth and technology, it has been easy for companies to get inspired by Facebook and start websites to ‘connect’ people. VCs have been investing the money and the Entrepreneurs have been burning it on crowd-sourcing. No doubt there are various web communities that have added value to the people. I have been really impressed by the likes of Mint, which have helped people in learning from the best practices of others and improve their financial situation.

Twitter have become a place for link building and sourcing more and more traffic to the websites. Every time I login, I find people sharing websites and content that is mostly not developed by them, but is RT or just shared. There are less people who are getting into a conversation, and even if they have conversations, they can always use IM, which is real-time! Why would someone use a service to shout out to the world, ‘what have you been doing’ and then raise all the hue and cry about privacy with Buzz.

Facebook, which started as a place to connect people, has turned into an online gaming site. There are more people who login only to play games than to reconnect with old lost friends. More and more people are getting on to Facebook but probably they do not know what is the purpose of signing up. They are getting on to the Facebook bandwagon because everyone they know is already there, or signing up. Most people on my friend list have not responded to any wall posts or messages because they do not login that often. It is easier to call them!

Social Media has to have a purpose. It is supposed to be an aggregator where people from different walks of life can come together and create, discover, collaborate and contribute. Websites that are only a place for people to signup and forget why they created a login are no good for the internet or for the society. Email has a purpose, IM is for real time conversations, VoIP is cheap telephony, Social Media similarly has to prove its mettle before it can be considered a medium. Social Media should be used as a facilitator to provide the solution to a problem. We have not identified any problem but are creating websites for people to come together and… do nothing!

Social Media is about engaging visitors in something that is productive for them. It is about providing a service, a solution to the visitors’ problem. It is not the ultimate panacea and neither is it the solution itself. It is only a medium for providing solutions.

My point of the post is: If you believe that a particular website or web-app can solve one of your problems, signup. Rest all is noise.

Tags: buzz, facebook, privacy, social marketing, social media, social networking, twitter, wave, web applications, website

Steps in Website Promotion and Business Generation

The website evolution has a few steps enumerated below:

1. Announcing the launch of the website

2. General promotion of the website on the internet

3. Specific promotion of the website at relevant locations for lead generation

4. Specifically targeting the consumer for business generation

5. Business

6. Regular maintenance

Announcing the launch:

This needs to be done to ensure that the website is indexed quickly and is available in search results. It also gives the ‘big business’ feel to the customers who are researching for due diligence. The easiest way of such announcement is via Press Releases. A good strategy for press releases is ‘three’, where a release is issued before the launch, one on the launch day, and the last a week after, to celebrate the ‘fabulous’ launch. It completes the full circle. There are multitudes of free and paid PR sites, which can release the News Article. It is suggested to use a mix of free and paid agencies for the release.

Expected Budget: $350

Frequency: one time

General Promotion of the website on the internet:

This includes Pay per Click campaigns on search engines. It is particularly good for an e-commerce website, to know what the target market is looking for and to analyze the direction of business. The traffic from particular keywords can give an idea of the future of business and the demand. It also helps in designing the strategies for ‘Featured Product’ on the website.

Expected Budget: range from $600 to $3000 per month

Frequency: continuous

It also includes Search Engine Optimization. I consider it to be a general promotion category item as the SEO cannot be specifically targeting your customers. It is a means for generating traffic and optimizing the website for user interaction. The target of any SEO activity should be to ensure that the user can find the website at relevant locations, and not to improve the search engine rankings. For example, one of the newest ways for a user to find the website is via the image search options. It is important the ‘all’ the images in the website have an identifiable name, and they include the right tags (alt, title etc).

Expected Budget: $1200

Frequency: one time, annual suggested

Specific Promotion of the website

It is important that the website is promoted at specific locations like trade directories or online trade magazines. It gives the relevant exposure to the business and is a good way to generate leads. There are various trade websites for the purpose and it helps to get a paid account at the best performing ones. If required, advertising inventories can also be purchased at these websites to stand out among the crowd.

Expected Budget: $800

Frequency: annual

Specifically targeting the consumer

There are various ways of targeting the end customer. The most frequently used is via newsletter and email. There are various email lists available for mass mailings, and if the website has a newsletter, the list can be used. Trade magazines also have a periodic newsletter which should be used for promoting the business. The website should be designed to create a mailing list, which can be used to send promotional material.

Expected budget: $300

Frequency: Monthly

Business

It includes maintaining the website’s ecommerce system, to ensure that the system will respond in time and also tracks the buyer behavior on the website. It helps in learning about the business opportunity in the future and also allows for removing the non-performing items from occupying precious screen space.

Regular Maintenance

This includes blog posts, twitter and Facebook pages, and other social media applications, to crowd-source visitors. It is beta testing changes and also gives an opportunity to business owner to get an opinion on new product releases. It is an ongoing process to keep the visitor engaged and to ensure repeat visits from users, who are looking for new content on the website. It helps in making a fan-following, which results in word of mouth publicity and business generation in long run.

The first rule for any business remains the same. There has to be an inherent value in the proposition and the visitor to the store/website should learn about it in the first 30 seconds. There has to be an activity for visitor engagement (like designing your room in this case), which makes the user come back and ask for more.

 

Tags: beta testing, business development, business promotion, CPC, internet marketing, lead generation, online advertising, online promotion, PPC, press release, search engine marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO, social marketing, social networking, web applications, website designing, website development, website marketing, website promotion

Privacy Tips For People playing Games on Facebook – Part 1

I am writing this post as the first in the Privacy Protection series, as promised in the last one. This post is specifically for those who are playing games on Facebook and that also with specific reference to Farmville. Farmville is an awesome game and I am really in love with my farm! I have been spending hours on it and it is addictive. I am troubled when my entire Facebook stream is filled with updates from my Farmville Friends.

When you are playing the game, there is a time when the game asks you for special permissions. We do not read the fine print and accept whatever is asked for. This is where the problem starts. With Farmville, the problem begins when one takes a Picture.

Here is a sample of what happens.

When we take a picture, the Farmville asks for special permissions. If you allow Farmville to allow publishing automatically, you will not be asked for permission in future before posting anything in your update stream. For people who spend quite a lot of time on Farmville (or even other games), this could mean filling their streams with updates of ribbons, like below. You may not want everyone to know every time you spend time helping 5 friends, or you are a level up!

What are your options in such a case?

I will tell them to you in the next post, to avoid making this one unnecessarily lengthy.

Tags: facebook, facebook applications, farmville, games on facebook, privacy, privacy settings, social media, social networking

The ‘Social’ in Social Media

There is so much to do all the time, I think that a day should have more than 24 hours!

Internet has made information so accessible that if someone is looking for it, it is readily available at all times. Google has become a verb and life’s so easy with information a couple of clicks away, I wonder why did they have books in the first place! I realized in the past few weeks that it was much easier to find out what’s happening around you, by using twitter! For those who joined us late, Twitter is a website that lets users share 140 character messages with the entire world.

Unlike SMS, twitter is a broadcast service. SMS is meant for an intended list of recipients, while twitter messages are for everyone to see, making it public, and therefore social! It is funny the way the meaning and definition of ‘Social’ has changed. Anything, which is not private, can be considered Social. The more open you are, the more Social you are.

If you can share the dirtiest of your secrets in public, chances are that you will have a good fan following!

Websites like Facebook, MySpace etc have brought everything in the users’ life in public domain, all in the name of Social. It is easy for people to know things about others that otherwise would never be in the public domain.

What makes life worse is the number of companies that use the API of these Web Applications. In user language, these companies are providers of the numerous quizzes, cute quotes, comparison reports, photo tools, games and all that jazz on Facebook and MySpace.

People continuously add these applications, opening up their profiles to the providers, and also allowing the provider to access the information of all their friends.

This means that if I want to protect my profile from potential spammers, ID thieves or just want to keep my private life private, I will have to ask my friends to not use these applications. With the increasing number of people getting on to the Social Networks, it gets all the more difficult to keep a tab on how and where can your information be distributed. Currently, I do not know how many people read the TOS and Privacy Policy and all the other fine print of these applications. I think most people don’t even realize that these parts require any attention.

The next posts will have the details of protecting profiles in Facebook for a start.

Please protect yourself and help others.

Tags: applications, facebook, facebook applications, internet, myspace, privacy, social media, social networking, twitter, web applications

Why do I use Windows 7 on my Laptop and not Linux/other OS

I recently bought a new laptop, HP dv7-2180us, Core2Quad, with 6GB RAM and an ATI Radeon with a GB dedicated. It had Windows Vista preinstalled on it and before I bought it, I ensured that I had a Windows 7 upgrade available (postponed my purchase for 3 days). I have used other operating systems, including OSX, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and CentOS. The moment I came home and unpacked my new beast, I took out the DVD with the Windows 7 RC and upgraded my laptop.

I knew that I will have to do a fresh install when Windows 7 will finally be available, as upgrade from Windows 7 RC to Windows 7 Release is not allowed (yet). I knew that my license allowed me an upgrade to Windows 7 Home, which meant that I will have to do away with my installation that I was about to perform on the system as RC was available only in Windows 7 Ultimate. I knew that the Windows 7 RC will stop working after sometime, the bi-hourly shutdown to begin on March 1, 2010.

Even after all this, I chose to install Windows 7 RC on my laptop.

Windows means a ‘life without walls’. After using all the operating systems that I could put my hands on, I can say that I love Windows. I have used Windows Mobile on my HTC Touch Diamond, and when I changed it to Nokia E71, I missed the convenience of doing things the way they were meant to be done. Cut, Copy and Paste were so much easier on Windows Mobile, am glad IPhone users are also able to experience it now!!

Windows 7 seems to have been designed for the latest machines. Adding my Canon Printer or the E71 or HTC Phone was not even a task. I connected them and the Device Manager automatically installed the required Drivers, else told me what was required. Before installing the Windows 7 RC, I forgot to make a driver-disk, which would have all the drivers of this new laptop. I was amazed to see that everything installed perfectly and there were no conflicts whatsoever!

Windows 7 makes the online life easier. With Windows Live Essentials and the Internet Explorer 8, there is not much that I would require for working on the Internet. I have an instant messenger, blog writing application, email client, movie editor, networking utility, safety and security software, Fax and Scanner software and everything that I will require in a Home PC!

I didn’t have to do anything except give a couple of details and press next. It was smooth and it works perfect. I am not in a habit of shutting down the laptop anymore because the wake-up time from Sleep is about 2 seconds, and it doesn’t consume any battery on Sleep. I can move between my work and home wireless without worrying about establishing connections and the networking with a wired connection is also painless. The Action Center keeps on telling me about the problems ‘and’ the solutions, which taught me to create a Backup of my important files.

I don’t know if I have any reasons to move to any other Operating System. I have Windows 7 and I am very happy!

Tags: device manager, laptop operating system, linux, netbook operating system, netbooks, operating system, windows, windows 7, windows 7 for laptop

Domain Names and Business Ideas

When I came across the simple domain registration process from Znetindia and the right prices, I got into The domain business. I started to spend my time looking for the right domain name at domaintools.com and to my surprise, I did find some amazing domain names! Over the course of last couple of years, I registered over 50 domain names. These domains were regular dotcom domains and weird ones like this, shashank.asia! I even have a .ws domain, besides .info and .whatever-you-can-get!

I realize that this is not the Californian Gold Rush. There is no hurry and the domains will always be available for your business, anyhow. I know of companies with strangest of names and their domain names have no connection with what they do or what they are called. They are still doing well!

A domain name is only a domain name. It is not equivalent to ‘your name’ or the quality of work that you do. One of the biggest companies that I came across didn’t have their own dotcom name and I know that it did get a few eyebrows raised. Having said that, the domain name does not have any apparent effect on their business and they appear to be doing pretty good!

My learning from the entire process is that please do not try to register a domain unless you know why you want it and you have a real purpose in mind. A domain name is not equivalent to a business idea and a business idea cannot be held back due to non-availability of a domain name. If you think you need a domain name, get it, but not because you think you may need it in the future.

Remember, it is easier to get a domain registered, it is far more difficult to let it go; and when your renewals run in hundreds of dollars, it is too late!

Tags: business idea, business name, domain and business, domain name, domain registration, domain tranfer, dotcom, international tld, tld

Using WordMobi – wordpress client for Nokia Phone

I had spent sleepless nights looking for a good blogging client for my Nokia E71 . This is a great phone and I had really thought that Nokia would have taken enough care in making things more efficient with it’s business series!
Little did I know that people in the enterprise do not really blog, they have people to blog for them!

About 10 minutes ago, I stumbled upon a great tool – WordMobi . I was directed to this site by an unofficial Nokia E71 blog – E71.wordpress.com. WordMobi is available here . The developer claims that the application will work without any trouble on Nokia E71 and has also been tested on Symbian 5 series . It requires Python to be installed on the phone before WordMobi is installed and there is a very good installation guide here .

I particularly like the insert options. There is no need for you to know HTML anymore. The application has everything set for you, in form of start and stop. So if you want to insert a link, all you need to do is select Insert Link , and type the address. You can continue o write your text after that, and once you are done, again go to Insert Link and select it!

This post has been created using WordMobi!

Posted by Wordmobi

Tags: Blog using mobile, Blogging on Nokia, freeware, live spaces, microblogging, Mobile blogging, Nokia E71 blog, shashank.asia, social networking, tested freeware, wordpress, wordpress customization, wordpress installation, wordpress plugins

Listing the Best Free Software for Windows PC

I market software and my clients respect their IP because it is their bread and butter. At the same time, they also respect the IP belonging to other companies and people because they understand the effort behind developing it.

I have learned to not use any P2P software to share music or torrent sites to download software. I download demos of Games and if I like any, I purchase them after looking for the best deal! I enjoy buying good music because it ensures that the good artists will be encouraged to perform better and create masterpieces.

There are times when I am stuck because the task at hand requires a specialist software, which may be expensive. For example, creating or editing a document may require an Office suite. The first option that comes to our mind is Microsoft Office. There are however other cheaper Office suites available in the market, which offer almost the same features. There are also free software options, which can fill in the place of your existing software suite, without any learning curve or costs!

I am trying to make an extensive list of freeware. The purpose of this list will be to let users start from a free Operating System (which may be a trial from Microsoft) and add on other free software which they will require during the course of business.

I will try to divide this list into interest categories, like business, home and entertainment, but that will of course depend upon the number of freeware I find in each category! If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment.

Tags: best freeware, business software, entertainment software, free computer, free office, free operating system, free software, free windows, freeware, office software, software for home, tested freeware, trial software

Google Search and Wolfram Alpha… and yes, Bing!

It looks as if after the browser war with the entry of Chrome and Opera 10, there is some action in the intelligent search market. ‘Search’ on Internet has been dominated by Google, despite the fact that Search Engine Optimization has killed the logic of intelligent search on Google.

Having said that, it is true that Google is and will rule the Search Engine market for a long time to come. For a search query like “brief history of Jaipur”, Google has about half a million results while Bing only produced about sixty thousand. What’s funny about Bing is that the first result was from something completely irrelevant to the search term. It gave a website from a school that has a hostel named as Jaipur House! This query did not produce any result on Google Squared or Wolfram Alpha.

I thought of looking for something more intelligent. After all, Internet is supposed to be a place for research and I personally believe that if there is no learning from it, there is no use. I tried to look for the “distance of sun to moon”. I think it is different because there may be several websites about distance of sun from earth and moon from earth.

Google had the first result from Wikipedia, the entry for Moon. It didn’t give any information about the distance but the third result was from Wiki answers and it was the one I was looking for. Of course this could be better, like Bing. The first result was from Wiki answers and the excerpt was on target. What’s more, I could also place my mouse over the result and see the preview of the website, getting more information about my query.

Sadly, Google Squared didn’t bring anything out, which made me realize that it is not meant for such queries. The best answer was from Wolfram Alpha, the clear winner here! It told me that the Sun was 1.016 AU away from the moon. An AU is an Astronomical Unit and another query told me the meaning of 1.016 AU in KMs, along with the values in Miles, Meters, Minutes (travel at the speed of light), and comparison of the distance with other similar entities.

This is what I call intelligent search! I am looking forward to a great Search Engine, which will help people find information that they can use. Black Hat and White Hat wearers have already spammed Google database and the websites looks more like link directories. Information is being replaced by Keywords and content by strategy!

Tags: bing, google search, intelligent search, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, wolfram alpha

You Need to be Connected to remain Disconnected!

Please bear with me as I give the background of this story.

I was trying to look for a nice template for Zen Cart, which I have installed for the new domain, ITShopIndia.com. This site is supposed to be a place where the buyers of Computer parts and Accessories can connect directly with the suppliers and manufacturers and get products at wholesale prices. I reached the site of Kuroi Web Design, which has demos of free Zen-Cart templates. To appreciate the service by Kuroi Web Design, I decided to Tweet the page using Twitthis. I started to browse the top twitted pages and found a nice article by Seth Godin, the marketing guru. Phew!

The article is about personal branding and the Google effect. It talks about three people who applied for a job and how Google revealed the truth behind their claims. It is important to realize that privacy has a new meaning in the Internet era. People may think that they can disconnect their lives by not signing up to FaceBook, Orkut, MySpace and the likes, but it is not true.

Recently, I was seeing my own profile on FaceBook and realized that someone had tagged me in a photo. With over 2 billion photos uploaded, almost everyone in the world who has ever been clicked must have been tagged at least once, or will be tagged soon. It is true that you can restrict people from tagging you in pictures but you need to have a FaceBook profile for that!

You need to be on the network to ensure that you are not on the network!

It is difficult to remain behind closed doors when there is someone on the prowl all the time. The crawling spiders will not let any stone unturned. It is better that you are in control of the situation and manage your Online Profile judiciously. Even if you consider your privacy very important, just ensure that you have a decent public profile available to those who seek it, lest they will have to settle for what is made available to them.

Tags: facebook, google, myspace, orkut, privacy, public profile, seth godin, social networking