Happy New Year!!

Here’s wishing everyone a very happy new year! May you have a lovely 2010, and remember dont drink and drive , party safe.

See you all in 2010!!

Seasons Greetings!

A very merry Christmas to everyone. Have a fun filled and safe holiday season!!

Fashion and you: Whats happening there?

Yahoo occupied a lot of the gossip grapevine over the last few months over various structural changes which took place within the organization amid which there were numerous resignations handed over.

One of the more prominent moves was that of Pearl Uppal and the consequent news that she was launching her own portal with Harish Bahl called www.Fashionandyou.com (covered reasonably extensively by Alootechie and Watblog). An exclusive , private , property wanting to reach out to the cream of the society with respect to its defined TG as well as the offerings (products) which it was going to make.

I have been trying to follow the developments on this property as closely as I can. It’s a relatively new model to enter the market and I am keen on seeing how it develops and gets accepted within the Indian market. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be moving.

The launch date for the website (and I assumed the products as well) was mid November – the website launched in time but nothing has taken place beyond that. What does seem to be occurring is a viral effort by the team to get as many members as possible. Earlier just prior and post to the launch, the ability to get an invitation was reasonably difficult – but the objective currently seems to be exactly that – the site is giving freebies (high end bags) and a credit of 1000 for people referring other people.

Dell’s Twitter Account

Many of us are , atleast in the online space , are aware of the fact that Dell through twitter has generated about 7 Million USD over the course of 2 years , and i keep hearing about it as the possible benchmark for revenue generation for companies through Twitter , and to be honest have myself quoted it as an example a few times to conclude the possible effectiveness of Twitter…

…. But what i did not know was that Dell has close to a 100 employees who manage their twitter accounts. According to boygeniusreport.com , Dell has a 100 employees tweeting on 35 different channels across 12 countries! Now thats what surprises me more than the revenue generation.

Forget about India not really having a great success story on Twitter – look at the gap – here we are still debating over Twitter and we have companies like Dell which have over a 100 people looking just after that one channel – the size of a medium digital agency in India.

Of-course investments must pay off – and there are a few theories on the above blog about whether dell is actually making enough revenue through it given the salary investments that a 100 people require.  While there are different numbers one can assign – if i was to assume that all 100 are based out of India then the maths works out to something like

100 people X 15,000 USD ( 750,000 INR per year – i think you would agree that  i am being very generous with the salaries) = 1.5 Million – lets add another 50k for bonuses and other infrastructure investments and round it off to 2 Million USD. Now this in turn leaves 5 Million – assuming a 15% profit margin we are looking at an overall profit figure of about 750,000 USD – not bad at all in my opinion , especially knowing that scaling up on Twitter will get cheaper not more expensive and if Dell was to really try , they could probably cut down the 100 workforce to a lower number as well.

Best Digital Campaign 2009

Not surprisingly , it goes to Tourism Queensland.

The internet was abuzz post the campaign breaking out.  For those not aware , the campaign essentially offers people the opportunity to come and be a caretaker of an island for 6 months and earn 105,000 USD during the period for essentially doing nothing beyond lazing and reporting to the world through video and imags. More details here.

The campaign got its official recognition through the MIXX Awards 2009 where it was selected as the Best in Show.

Any thoughts on what could have been India’s best for 2009?

Farmville is Bigger than Twitter

And how !

Farmville tweeted on 2nd December 2009 on how its bigger than Twitter itself.  With over 69 million active users on Farmville the application has surpassed Twitter in terms of users. For more read here