My website disappeared from Google Search

About a week back, my website www.vijaymenon.com disappeared from Google Search. The site used to rank very highly for my target keywords and phrases relating to marketing and communications consulting and writing in Bangalore. About a week back, the site just refused to come up for any of the keywords. It didn’t just drop in ranking or get relegated to 10th page -- it disappeared. Period.

Now, this was pretty disconcerting since I rely (a lot) on Google Search for getting visitors to my website for my consulting business. 

All equity analysts are lazy? That's a bit harsh!

Deborah Kops, a former marketer and currently a researcher with HfS, an outsourcing analyst firm, recently wrote a scathing piece on equity analysts. In her well argued piece, she lambasted the analysts for not doing enough research on the companies they covered.

What is the communication mix for a zero budget marketing plan?

A zero budget is almost always a misnomer -- what it usually means is that you don't have money for expensive advertising, events and paid PR.

Should analyst and public relations be combined?

Analyst relations and public relations are both marketing activities and the same set of people can, and indeed should do both -- they get slotted into silos only when the sheer volume of work merits dedicated resources for each.

The high spend marketing gamble of Tier 2 Indian IT companies

The Economic Times reported today that Tier 2 Indian IT services companies are sponsoring big ticket events to try and hobnob with CEOs of prospect companies. According to the story, Mindtree recently spent $100,000 on a baseball tournament in the US; iGate is planning to spend over a million dollars on a CEO golf tournament in January 2013; and NIIT is committing 2% of its revenues to big budget events. 

Why is it so hard to tell a good business story?

Stories are fantastic ways to communicate but I've found it hard to develop good stories in a corporate environment.

What kind of reports does the CEO expect from the marketing team?

What the CEO really wants is leads generated and leads converted but you won't be able to deliver that! 

How relevant is Philip Kotler in IT services marketing?

Don’t get me wrong. I think Philip Kotler’s Marketing Management (the world's most widely used graduate level textbook in marketing, according to Wikipedia) is a must-read. It is superbly written, and I found the South Asian edition (13th edition, 2009) particularly interesting since it has a wealth of examples and case studies from India and the sub-continent.

But after more than 20 years in technology, media, and marketing, I get the feeling that Kotler’s view of marketing is divorced from the reality on the ground –- at least in the context of the IT services industry.

Marketing primer for CEOs

In theory, marketing should be involved in all the four Ps -- product, price, placement, and promotion. In technology companies however, marketing has little or no influence on product, price, and placement since they are managed by other groups such as corporate planning and solution design. Marketing is thus primarily concerned with researching the market, branding, positioning, and communicating the company story to widely different audiences -- customers, analysts, media, investors, and employees.

See this Slideshare presentation for a quick reality check and primer.

© 2011 Vijay Menon

How to write a CEO speech

I’ve been writing CEO speeches for over 10 years now. I started out writing speeches for CEOs of the companies I’d worked and now I write speeches for CEOs as a consultant. 

The big difference is that as an employee you generally know the CEO’s personal style and mannerisms. When you write as a consultant, you have to form an impression of a person after just a couple of phone calls and some email. That makes it just a little bit harder to write something that is just right for the speaker.

Can't afford a full-time marketing head? Outsource one.

Here’s something that happens to a lot of midsized technology companies. The personal contacts of the founders and the sales team are no longer enough to grow the business. To scale up, the company needs a structured marketing program to build a brand and generate inquiries on an ongoing basis. 

How much of CSR is just image building?

Research shows that employees do feel good about working in or joining a socially responsible company. So yes, corporate social responsibility makes business sense. 

Are HR and marketing overlapping?

The short answer is yes. One of marketing's big responsibilities is to build and tell the company story to all the different stakeholders -- that means prospects, customers, media, analysts, investors and employees.

Do the core values of a company define its brand personality?

I think the two things are different. Core values articulate the brand idea -- what the brand stands for. It is about putting a stake in the ground and saying this is who we are, this is what we do, this is why you should buy from us.

Is Pluto a planet? Can you afford to wait?

Can you really afford to wait while experts argue on whether Pluto is a planet or not?

As a working professional, you simply can't wait for knowledge to be codified by committees (is Pluto a planet or not) -- you have to use your expertise and experience to deal with the ambiguous information and take decisions. 

In today's world of near instant information access, staying updated on information is relatively easy -- but harvesting insight from that information is what gives you the edge.

© 2013 Vijay Menon