What an exciting day !

Two good things have happened to us today.

The first is the much awaited FIPB clearance. The clearance has meant that we can now go ahead and complete the pending issues on the merger of 141 Worldwide and Sercon. The duration of the delay has had its heart burn, but thankfully no missed opportunities. Now with the merger suspense behind us, all of us at the agency can go ahead and concentrate on things which we like to do best – get our brands to win in the market place. Do look out for updates on www.141sercon.com

The second big development is our readiness to launch 1010, our comprehensive digital initiative. While I will do a detailed post on space we intend to occupy, our point of view, our philosophy and our approach in the next couple of days, I want to invite you for a sneak preview (and don’t tell anyone ) to our beta site.

The link for the beta version of the site is given below for your preview. However, do keep in mind that the polishing for the sheen is still on. We will officially launch 1010 on Tuesday, 4^th of Sept.

Do enjoy your time in the wonderland and the real land: www.1010-asia.com/beta

Yes, I am hooked to Stumble!

I don’t seem to get enough of it and am hooked, have been speaking about it at every opportunity I get and to everyone. Do you still spend time searching for good content sites on the web? Have you never used StumbleUpon ? You must. It does not matter whether you are a casual browser, heavy user or a webmaster – there is good reason to move to stumble.

As a user you can modify the “stumbling” by your interest area and you will get highly relevant content that matches your preferences. As a site owner or webmaster, one gets substantial and steady traffic. My blog and sites have seen a steady increase in traffic from StumbleUpon and probably the best and most targeted traffic I have ever seen.

StumbleUpon, is easy to install and trust me, you will be hooked as well.

From a webmaster or site owners’ perspective reasons to take Stumble more seriously include :

New visitors; StumbleUpon traffic means tons of new visitors, visitors that are really interested in your subject / content / topic not just any visitors. Further more the visitors tend to rate your content and get more visitors on your site.

Most pages/visit: This analytics is about the level of interest that the visitors have in your content. Due to the nature of visitors, the interest levels are high and hence the page views as well. Visitors stay longer on your site.

Extremely low bounce rate; The user traffic’s bounce rate (use a tool like the Google Analytics to find out more) is the number of people who land on your page and leave instantly (maybe because they did not really want to come to your page). While this trend is very high from traffic sources like Google & Yahoo, the bounce rates from Stumble are extremely low.

International traffic; You will get subject interested visitors from across the globe. For me it has meant that I have been able to exchange my views visitors from countries in Africa & Latin America besides the normal traffic areas.

Instant traffic; Unlike long wait which you need to put in on engines like Google and Yahoo and the complexities of Page Ranks etc, Stumble gives you instant results.

So go ahead and download the tool bar, and happy stumbling. And while you are at it, give my blog a thumbs-up as well J

Good tool for search volume data.

I am sure you have always wondered about the size of search volume of your keyword or phase on the various search engines around the world. Understanding this volume could help one in choosing the appropriate phase to ensure your blog or web page is in the reckoning and properly optimized.

There have been a number of tools which help you access these volumes like Overture , however, this tool by WORDFINDER is excellent as it aggregates the results across various search engines.

While it is driven off the Overture keyword suggestion tool, it aggregates monthly regional monthly regional search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, MSN and ASK and then links the search volumes to the related global search results.

The tool currently assumes Google having 60.9% of the search traffic where Yahoo! having 22.3%, MSN 10.6% and ASK 4.3% of the entire search volume. Stats are based on a 2006 Hitwise survey.

Depending on your topic and your geographic location the search engines may have vastly different search volumes. The tool can only possibly offer approximations. It is sad that the geographies covered by the tool are limited.

Another viral campaign - with a brand association.

Here’s another example of a interesting viral campaign, Staedtler (the writing instruments maker) wants more and more people to write snail mail letters (or just write – instead of keying it all in), so much so they agreed to send 10,000 physical letters to users who submit their details on the Take Note site. You can even sign up to receive a letter from a stranger. Can’t recall when was the last time I received or send a hand written letter (as would be the case with most other folks) so this should be interesting for most people, especially the younger TG, who have probably never received a hand written letter.

While I really enjoyed the humor in the notes (good copy writers within the agency, I guess), I wonder why not extend the proposition to make this a worldwide property, Staedtler is afterall a worldwide brand. My view is that an international campaign would have increased the viral potential multifold.

Try this & record time you spend on it.

Another sticky place to hang around and spend time on the web is Net Disaster, much on the lines of “putting things you always wanted to in the microwave”. However, unlike the fun with microwave, this does not lead on to a specific product line. What is also interesting that it allows one to embed the app on any site and the relevance created by using the textual context of the webpage. No wonder 72 million trials have been generated on this so far.

In order to try and understand, record your own time using this and also the viral which it generates.