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Corporate Social Responsibility: Profits or Planet?

Green marketing, green designing, sustainable marketing, etc are the buzzwords of the new generation marketing. Ever since the ecological concerns have crept in the psyche of the marketers, anything that is green has become venerable. Corporate and industries have been at the receiving end of the blame game that wants to locate the blame on somebody else and clean the self from its guilt. In order to oblige to the planet, corporate have added a social rather ‘ecological’ responsibility upon its shoulder.

Corporate social responsibilities should not be limited only to social contributions that encompass education, better living, health and cultural exchanges. As major contributors to the planet’s well being, and more appropriately ill being, corporate are realizing their accountability towards restricting further damage to the ecology.

This has, in fact, put many corporate in quandary. It is an imperative for the corporate to adopt advanced technologies to maximize their efficiency. At the same time they are forced to convert to non-conventional methodologies that may not be equally efficient, to preserve the environs.

Advanced technologies, most of which were introduced towards the last quarter of 20th century, are effective in maximizing the utilization of available resources without paying much heed to its impact on the ecology. These technologies were mainly concerned with garnering maximum revenues for the entrepreneurs.

The beginning of 21st century has thrown a spanner in the wheel by inputting the ideology of the corporate with eco-guilty consciousness. Most of the corporate were used as a scapegoat to pass on the blame of endangered ecology and imbalanced growth. Individual contributions towards ecological problems like global warming, pollution, etc, and misplaced government policies were swept under the corporate rags.

The important point that was sidelined was that the corporate are here to make profits. Most of them do it within the legal and ethical framework. They should not be held outright responsible for the damaged caused to the environments.
If the corporate spend their efforts on ecological sustenance, they may have to compromise with a major chunk of their profits. Though the advent of green technology is taking certain strides, it is in nascent stage that still is a far shot from its total acceptance and adaptability.

Corporate may be sitting on a fence as far as changing their designing and manufacturing processes are concerned. However, it looks imperative that they will have to forgo their short term profits in order to gain long term benefits for the planet.

Go Green: Adapting Green Strategies for Marketing

Marketing and advertising has always been a prime mover of economic activity. They create a huge direct and indirect employment, a flow of money and initiate consumer activity that is a lifeline of any economy.
Owing to the criticality and necessity in business and revenue generation, marketing activity has mindlessly taxed the precious resources to achieve its motives and targets. The resultant is visible in the form of ruthless ecological destruction, depleting resources and energy crisis. The global concern for sustainable development has highlighted the need for going green in every sphere of human life; and that includes marketing.

Green Marketing for better future
Green marketing means deploying resources in a manner that reduces adverse impact on the environment. It incorporates processes that take care of sustainable ecological development and advancements in technology simultaneously. Digital advent is effectively helping ‘greening’ of marketing activity by changing the very fundamental methods of marketing. Green marketing can be effectuated,
• By utilizing greener mediums of marketing like internet marketing. The internet has been the key-initiator creating paper redundancy. Hitherto traditional marketing methods relied heavily on paper that gobbled a chunk of our green cover.
• By using mobile phones and cellular network to send messages directly to prospective customers. It can do away with the need of circulating pamphlets, brochures and other printed material.
• By using solar, wind and other non-conventional energy resources for illumination. It can reduce our dependence on traditional energy resources that are generated by fossil fuels or natural resources.
• By doing away with the use of plastic and other non-biodegradable materials used commonly in marketing and packaging. Internet marketing can, instead, reach consumers’ homes without depending on these.

Green marketing from the core
Other than these outwardly methods of going green, the campaign will be effective and successful in a true sense only if it is incorporated at the root of every process including designing, manufacturing, marketing and waste disposal.
Internet marketing has already affected the marketing methods and strategies. More and more companies are adopting this eco-friendly method that rides on advantages offered by the internet. Consumer awareness program shall also be crucial in this aspect. Eco-aware consumers can opt for the product and methods that are less taxing on the environment. Large consumer preference for greener products will compel the manufacturers to adopt eco-friendly practices.

SEO vs PPC: What Helps the Conversion Ratio Better?

SEO Vs PPC has been a long standing subject of many debates. Which strategy gives better results? When it comes to web presence, SEO or PPC which is more effective?

Honestly the answers to these questions are highly relative and would depend on many factors and considerations. SEO and PPC both have their pros and cons. SEO strategy is used to rank your website higher in the organic search results of search engines. SEM (PPC) on the other hand involves paid advertising on the search engine results and other web pages.

Let us dig deeper into the subject by first busting a long held myth that PPC is costlier than SEO. No, it isn’t! In fact you may very well need to spend about $5,000 or more over 6 to 8 months, to get your page on top listing for highly competitive key words like weight loss or life insurance. A PPC advertisement however, can easily be seen in the visible spots on related pages. And it is relatively easier to control your budget for the PPC campaign.

A recent survey mentions that the websites receive 8 times more clicks from the organic search results than the clicks from PPC; however the goal achievement and conversion ratio is 1.5 times higher for the traffic coming from a PPC advertisement.

SEO obviously is a long term strategy. It may take about 3 to 6 months to see the actual measurable effects of the SEO campaigns. On the other hand PPC campaigns can give you immediate traffic. The biggest benefit of a PPC campaign is the speed of the expansive reach. It frees you of the headache of trying to figure out the search engine algorithms, and how can reach to the top position in the listing.
Thus if the website is about sale of products for Christmas where you would like to give away discounts and bonuses, the best way to go would be a PPC campaign. Because, in this case, it will be too late till the time SEO starts showing its outcome.
Another upside a PPC has over SEO is that the SEM campaign can be managed and changed in real time. PPC gives you the opportunity to hit the internet market with right advertisement at the right time thus grabbing quick eyeballs. With a PPC campaign it is easier to target large number of key words, whereas optimizing the website landing pages for a higher number of keywords is a highly daunting task. Hence a rightly managed and appropriately monitored PPC campaign will surly increase conversion ratio and gives a better ROI than a SEO.

Google Analytics: How Stale Data Can Kill PPC Campaign

Google analytics or any other analytic tools you may use can sabotage your PPC campaign. Internet marketers and SEO’s have been using tools like Google analytics for tracking the performance of websites and PPC advertisements. Google analytics provides you with the data about customer behavior in the last 24 hours. Although somewhat useful, this data is stale. You get to react to customer behavior that happened 24 hours ago. In other words, you come to know about the flaw after you lose a significant amount of budget to useless clicks.
Real time analytics adds the spice and dynamics to otherwise dry analysis of the obtained data. You can modify and alter the content of the site and observe the change in consumer behavior at the very instant it occurs. Using a real time analytic service shows the performance of the web page or a PPC advertisement in real time. You can check how visitors came to your website, what generic or long tail key word the public is searching, and how the people spent time on your website. Web masters can react to customer behavior immediately by making changes right away.

How does Real Time Analytics help
In the dynamics of the web environment, a lot of money is spent in PPC campaigns. Real time data analysis can help you discover the pattern of user behavior towards a particular advertisement. With this data you can alter your content in 5 clicks rather than making change after 500 clicks. Now imagine the amount of money you can save with this dynamic data. The live environment in real time analytics re-focuses your attention and can facilitate to optimize your SEO efforts.


Real time analysis can tell you about adding an image or changing content or adding a call to action button, etc. and observe changes as they occur. You can make changes in a sloppy layout or even change of certain key words in your content depending upon the real time data. It is definitely a more satisfying experience to observe the shift in results in response to your change of strategy. Thus real time analytics undeniably adds value and gives you an edge above your competitors.

Search Budget Presentations

I-informationGlobe-819x1024Times, when most marketers are having trouble getting the CEO’s understand and interested in search. Any CEO, in fact, would hardly be willing to care about search marketing, as the way he sees it are two separate subjects. SEM for him is a combination of marketing and technology, and few marketers are able to make them understand how searches are capable of affecting their business goals.

Marketers talking to CEO’s about brand awareness, search ranking and keywords hardly help, and end up as unable to break ice. Bang clear on target, and let him know and understand, if money isn’t spent here, there will be lesser products to sell and sales will eventually drop. Explain how search marketing brings in revenue at low costs, and how what you are doing will coincide with the growth of his business prospects. CEO’s are least interested in any kind of jingo, apart from the money if this can make. They need to see that searches are able to increase share holder value and help them make money.

Marketers having a direct marketing background effectively understand the relationship with sales. Search marketers will do better and help people understand and admit that the Web is the biggest direct-marketing opportunity of all time, where every move is traceable and constantly measured so that they can be improvised and optimized. This is e-commerce, you know the value of every new visitor, the conversion rates and revisit.

Most companies look at marketing as printing a brochure or going for a trade show. Make sure to help them understand that the virtual world has a concrete and a solid base, and you can look on how every person interacts on your web-site. Furthermore, make them see where they went next and how they bought from you. Let them have a direct view of this virtual exercise, and you have a perfect tool to justify every cent of the proposed marketing expenditure plan.

internet-marketingWhat every executive really wants to see is sales, leads and leads expecting to close. He is hoping to catch on the projected revenue targets at any costs, and any talk on brand awareness, positive sentiment, site traffic or ranking on search results will only put him off. If marketers can focus on relating touches that they have made to customers and sales will be the only way to persuade people to allocate funds. Set the map right so they are able to see clearly which route is more economical and valuable as well. After all, your budget level also requires sensible justification.

Web metrics systems, like the free Google Analytics to the expensive ones that help you understand the need to be passionately made use of. Search Marketing would come to be more useful if it were, eighty percent marketing and twenty percent search. If you don’t understand the marketing basis in SEM, it would be very difficult for you to show how effective your campaign would be.

Does social media rely on traditional media?

images--2Every now and then, we hear about another nail being hit in the coffin of traditional media, especially newspapers. Recent findings have suggested that the print editions of some renowned newspapers have been victimized by some combination of blogs, free-online news and Twitter. In Canada, some Television channels have requested the government to implement a TV tax and issue funds to save the local TV.

Not many people would disagree that journalists and news publishers should be paid for their work. However, the advertisement supported model is not generating enough revenue to sustain the conventional news gathering infrastructure.

If you know the basics of Economics, then you would know that if ad-space (supply, in economic terms) is blasting on every social networking site, then without a similar increase in advertisers (demand, in economic terms) the price will drop down drastically. Considering this, we can only hope that a new model will soon come up. Some newspapers have taken initiatives to issue e-books instead of print versions as prospective models for the future.

Wall Street Journal editor, Robert Thompson, has mentioned in an article that some websites can be best described as lice in the intestines of the internet. He also says that readers have been socialized in a wrong way and that search engines like Google have profited from that wrong perception. He strongly feels that much of the content on the internet should be free.

images--1Today, significant parts of the stories we see on social networks, blogs and tweets, have originated from the traditional media. While this does not mean that the bloggers don’t provide original news content and commentary, the question is: If we need to pay more for news content that we used to get for free, then will it negatively impact the quantity or quality of social media discussions around those news items?

Time will definitely provide an answer sooner than we think.

Mind Reading Technology — The future of social media

images--1In some ten years from now, social media could significantly change for the better. You wouldn’t need to strain your fingers to type things into structure or type the uniform resource locators in the browsers, or bear with annoying communications about useless products. In the future, social media will be easy and in all places.

The mind reading technology is one such technology that will make our lives (social media lives) very easy. Controlling an interface without using your fine motor skills will have huge implications for human computer communication. Imagine being able to tweet what you are thinking without having to pick up your phone, key in your message and hit send. Also, by just thinking ‘Facebook’ your screen will show a summary of your friend’s action stream.

How the system works?

The new mind-reading system works by displaying letters on the computer screen that flickers one at a time. When a person thinks of a letter, and then that letter flickers on the screen, brain waves propel a signal to the computer that it identifies. While this form of communication is at a very experimental phase and is also quite slow, it does work for sending short messages such as tweets for Twitter. Twitter messages are restricted to only 140 character limits, and you really have to think hard about what you want to say. However, with mind reading technology thinking is all that you would require.

images--2This new form of communication is currently meant to help people who have restricted motor skills, and not lazy social media fanatics! There is also a scope of applying this technology to senses other than vision. In the future, this technology can also help read feelings and complex emotional states. And one day people who cannot otherwise communicate will eventually interact with the outside world.

Whoever said mind reading was impossible are in for a pleasant surprise!

Is Google Being Evil Again???

ppc_image2What happens when you search for “PPC Service” in Google and find “Pocket PC Services” displayed as the inaugural result.

As a customer you might just go through the remaining results, that catches your attention or try on with a new search phrase for a better set of results.

As a more technology savvy user, you might laugh at Google’s search algorithm and wonder what the “Pocket PC Services” has to do with “PPC Service” and carry on.

However, what if you are in the on-line business providing zone? Would you not rub your eyes and get blatantly surprised? You’ll wonder how it could be possible. You would go back and refresh the page, might be several times, and if still you see the Pocket PC Services as a result for PPC services, you certainly would lose faith in the business abilities of the unerring search magnum.

How can Google, the leader in PPC business not understand the impact of losing the search by one competitor, and in this case not even a competitor?
How can the ruler of SEM allow one’s quality score to get affected by such an outrageous activity?

How can the LSA fail like this? Anyone endowed with the technological reasoning would understand that the algorithm can never err. It would under no circumstances deviate like this.Evil google2

So, is the crawler crawling wrong limbs or is it one more of Google’s evil designs???

heading evil