7 Habits of Effective Early-stage Entrepreneurs that are counter-productive to scale

Entrepreneurs & Start-up leaders that are successful in the Jump-start phase are so because of certain effective habits that they either have or have developed during the initial phase. However, the same habits, if carried forward too long become counter-productive to scale for their business. The main reason being that once the business is off the ground, it’s not about the entrepreneur any more, but about the engine that propels the business. Here are seven such habits that are very effective for entrepreneurs in the early stage, but can potentially become counter-productive as business scales. […]

This is how you Hype-Jack! The Tactics of a Smart Marketer

Marketers are looking to create hype all the time. But, Smart Marketers are looking for the hype to hi-jack on. They just Hype-jack! The more official term for this phenomenon is “News-jacking”, but I somehow prefer “Hype-Jacking” for the intent, for the relevance today, and for the simple phonetics! As PBS demonstrated during the Presidential debate and Blendtec successfully did it amidst the Apple v/s Samsung battle; an effective hype-jacking may not be planned in advance, but can be achieved with a constant tab on the market, a spark of brilliance, and a rapid-fire action. […]

Don’t Leverage Social Media for Customer Service, if this is what you do!

It has become a “fashion” among Service Providers to use Social Media for Customer Service, or rather becoming an imperative. There’s no problem with the intent of leveraging “technology”, however, there are so many ways in which this goes horribly wrong. Couple of weeks back, I had a “temporary” issue in accessing certain websites through […]

Why aren’t more developers creating serious Mobile App Products?

[This post was first published at ProductNation.in on Oct 10, 2012] These are the times, when every third person that you meet in Technology world has an idea for an App. It could be every alternate person if you’re hanging out in geeky groups or among heavy Smartphone users. The Industry trends suggest a phenomenal […]

Through the SEO maze, a good resource in Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors

Technical side of the SEO is pretty complex, made even more so by the incessant updates from Google on their algorithms. We have had 20 Panda updates, 3 Penguin updates, an EMD update, and 2 ‘Top Heavy‘ updates, and four of them in the last two weeks itself. It’s nearly impossible to keep a tab […]

Five Paradoxes of building a successful Product Business

[I wrote this post on 27th Sep 2012, for ProductNation and Nasscom Product Conclave Blog] Building products is hard. Building a successful product organization is even harder. Start-up ecosystem is replete with ideas and prototypes. Few of them reach the market with a product and very few turn up as successful. And, a minuscule number of product businesses are […]

Content Marketing Strategy in Implementation, from Coca-Cola

The new business landscape demands for a different marketing approach. I’m an advocate of Content Marketing strategy (where fit), and have been often asked to explain what it is, how is it different from other stuff the company may be doing, and most important, how does it translate into the difference in implementation in a daily life of the organization. Truth be told, the proof of the marketing Pudding is in the eating and no matter how many times it is explained, one has to go through the motions to understand the implications of a Content Strategy versus the traditional marketing approaches.

However, this video set with Jonathan Mildenhall – Vice-President, Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at The Coca-Cola Company, is a terrific resource for anyone who wants to know What Content Strategy means, and how a conglomerate of the size of Coca Cola is translating the Content based Marketing Strategy into their plans. Worth every second of those 18 minutes!

Dear LinkedIn, Rethink the Endorsements. You’re not Facebook or Twitter!

LinkedIn is a professional network. LinkedIn should want to improve credibility of the professional credentials & demographics that are recorded on LinkedIn, for the growth of their money-making businesses of “Jobs”, “networking”, and even “Ads”. Alas, Endorsements are targeted to something else altogether. Traffic & social plug, it seems. For the sanctity of professional credentials of millions of professionals who made you the leading professional network, LinkedIn needs to rethink the implementation of endorsements. This is net-net negative value right now!

When Ideas have Sex. Of Development Kingdoms and Developer Kingship.

Apple App Store has 700,000 Apps. Google Play has 450,000 Apps. Number of Apps submitted on iOS App store alone nears a 1000/day. Any statistics in terms of Apps is astounding in numbers – millions & billions. And to imagine that none of this even existed few years back! What’s amazing here is not just […]

Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2012)

I’ve been trying to get my head around the Marketing ecosystem in order to figure out where the investments would make sense and how do the available options really tie together. And then, today, I came across this amazing capture of the Marketing Technology Landscape. Sharing along. (Click the image for larger, readable, view!) I’ve […]