AdityaSpeaks

As blogged about earlier, i went to the TiE Digital Marketing Masterclass. I was accompanied by JimKarter, his friend Gaurav, and Tarun Jaswani (CEO of RingIndia, A BPO company based in Delhi who happens to be my friend). The conference was basically targetted on how indian companies and merchants can use the internet to generate leads and sales. So as you have guessed, the core topic of the conference was a bit different from my business. We actually stand on the other side of the wall. The conference was a great and one of the well organized summits i have ever attended. It was held at The Sheraton, a starwood group five-star property located in Saket, New Delhi. Everything started with digital marketing which includes all forms of digital media, but soon everything disappeared and the only thing which was discussed the whole day was Internet Marketing. The sessions were extremely well planned, organized and hosted by Mr. Mahesh Murthy, Founder of Pinstorm and a very well known person in the Internet Marketing industry. I was amazed by the depth of knowledge he and his team has. Absolutely wonderful !! I also got an opportunity to meet and discuss some new things with many people and other executives from some major Indian online companies.

The first session was led by Sanjay Tiwari of JuxtConsult, a research company. They shared some very interesting data from a survey conducted by them. The report is actually very costly and usually used by corporates. He shared some interesting analytics of the Indian web traffic. Important points were like 32% of Indian Internet users do have a credit card. 82% are males and 18% are females and 63% of them own a vehicle. There were some more interesting numbers which i cannot discuss in detail here.

Followed by that, there were sessions by Ansoo Gupta from Pinstorm where she talked about some basic things which were meant for Indian merchants and advertisers trying to build their online presence. She discussed about places where SEO and SEM could be beneficial to the merchants. The session was followed by Pradeep Chopra of OMLogic consulting where he discussed the journey of his earlier company Whizlabs, how they started modest and scaled up so fast and acquired corportate customers without meeting them !! Thats the power of Internet which no one can deny. His current company provides consulting services to Multinationals.

It was followed by a wonderful lunch networking session.

The next session was basically on SEO by Geetu Ahuja, Head- Online Marketing at Naukri.com (Inlcuiding 99 Acres and JeevanSaathi). Geetu worked with pradeep in his earlier ventures and then joined Naukri. I met her during the tea break later to ask her opinion on some topics like Affiliate Marketing in India and the analytics software she preferred to use. I felt that, she was one with a in depth knowledge on concerned topics.

The next session was by Rahul Nanda, COO of WebChutney where he talked about Viral Marketing. This was where i learned something new which I haven’t researched on so far. He visualized some funny creatives they did for Airtel, and some other indian companies and he talked about how they popularize the creatives and make them go viral. Then he also showed the stats of some pages after the creatives were launched. Amazing results !

The next few sessions were not that interesting, but there was still something to learn.

Some of the most important lessons which, i felt i learnt was that, we should never underestimate the numbers unless we have authentic information. I had been doing affiliate marketing and was shocked to know that, Yatra.com gets some 1000 sales / bookings per day just from their direct affiliates. ( I will be going to Yatra’s office tomorrow to meet and discuss some stuff with the affiliate marketing department about the creatives which i have used on some 30 new hotel related sites targetted on Indian cities which are exclusively being monetized through yatra.com affiliate program). I even didn’t know that there are such a large number of people who use internet more than 3 hours per day who have a credit card. Well even if the number is 30 lakhs and might look very less, but it is actually 30 lakhs. Its not less. Why do we compare to the whole population of the country ? We have 30 lakh people whom we can market e-commerce services !!!

Followed by that, we had a party at a restaurant till late night with me , Jim , Tarun and Gaurav (Not a part of the conference and has nothing to do with other delegates)

Finally, the conference was actually worth attending and I will be present at similar summits and conferences in future related to Internet Marketing.