Two Goodies and a Back Flip

03 Sep Two Goodies and a Back Flip

I chanced on to Mikogo and tried it in conjunction with Skype. Excellent tool. I can set up a meeting and get all my participants to see my monitor in their screen real time while voice of the participants is carried via a Skype Conference. Scope, obviously is infinite. There are other tools. But this one is simple and free. I am not elaborating further since I plan a separate post on Mikogo.

Second is the personal income tax calculator for salaried persons provided by Y.Nithyanandan  in his web site for the past, may be twelve years. Freely downloadable. It is an accurate and simple tool and I know of a Rs.100 crores company which was using this spreadsheet until two years ago for its Salary TDS calculations! He is doing this service for a decade now. May God or Karl Marx bless him, depending on his belief or lack of it! These are the people who silently try to make this world a better place to live. They deserve all the appreciation that we can show. Download it, use it, tell others and send him a mail of appreciation. That is the least we can do.

Some of my well meaning friends had some serious differences with my previous post, “SMB Marketing – Do Advertisements Really Work?” They did not make comments for obvious reasons. The post indeed reads like a sweeping generalization. My bad. If you are going to write a cheque at the end of the transaction, Ads work extremely well. (Hiring Ads and Tenders) Classifieds work fine for intended products or services. (Second Hand cars and Home tuition) Targeted Ads work very well. People buy “Free Ads” just to look up Advertisements. Branding Ads work. One can debate on its ROI, but they do work.

What I was talking about is in the context of SMB Enterprises. With more established and reputed players trying crush them all the time, do SMEs really benefit trying “Sell” their Products or Services through Advertisements? Particularly, when most of them do not have the budget to make high decibel campaign, do sporadic ads really sell? These were the questions I was pondering. Sell is the operative word. I think, if SMEs can target ads to be present where their market looks and are able to convey their existence and obtain permission to educate the customer about their value system and differentiation, there is definite benefit to advertisement. Else, money is better spent elsewhere. That’s my opinion.

After all, SMB Marketing is about taking the prospect through an Hour Glass Strategy of Know –> Like –> Trust –> Try –> Buy –> Repeat –> Refer. This is the foundation of “Duct Tape marketing”.