Which countries best survived the Economic Crisis?

Yes, India is one of the top 3 countries that survived this downturn very well.

Below are the full results from the Servcorp International Business Confidence Survey which was conducted in April 2009 over a period of two weeks.

Australia and China took 1st and 2nd place respectively, while India came in at 3rd along with Singapore.

Surprisingly, Except Canada none of of the western countries made it to top 10!

Most of the developing nations emerged favorites among international businessmen for their ability to withstand the recession. Out of 36 countries listed by Servcorp International, 21 countries are emerging market economies.

International Perspective:
The countries perceived to be surviving the economic crisis the best, as voted by international businesspeople are:

Rank
1st -  Australia

2nd - China

3rd equal - India, Singapore

5th - Hong Kong

6th - Canada

7th equal - Japan, Qatar

9th - New Zealand

10th equal - Malaysia, Sweden, Vietnam

13th equal - Netherlands, United States of America

15th - Indonesia

16th - South America

17th - France

18th equal - Belgium, England, Korea, South Africa

22nd equal - Austria, Taiwan

24th equal - Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Lebanon, Russia, United Arab Emirates

30th equal - Brazil, Morocco, Philippines, Scotland, Sri Lanka, Syria, Thailand

The survey was commissioned to understand the current mood, business morale and impact the economic downturn has had on businesses around the world. As part of the survey, Servcorp asked 7,500 international businesspeople from more than 24 nations to identify which countries they believe are surviving the crisis the best.

Why Knowledge Pays Now More Than Ever

The true strength of any company is in the knowledge it has.

Transforming this knowledge into sales, overcoming lost opportunities due to a lack of follow-up or being too slow to respond to sales' request for data can drastically slow down a company's ability to compete.

I've seen small but very technologically astute companies work very hard at coming up with databases that have everything imaginable in them for their sales teams. From unstructured content organized through the development of semantic search, through highly structured content in enterprise-wide content and knowledge management systems, these solutions run the gamut of automation.

Yet all of them have failed in serving the sales force. Why?

When you look at why such Herculean efforts on the part of IT departments to equip their sales forces with the best possible tools and knowledge fails, it's clear that automating already-efficient processes is not enough. Here has to be more, and the "more" includes the following:

• C-level skin in the game. This is critical, and the C-level executives (CEO, CIO, and CMO) have got to present a unified, consistent and even passionate pursuit of change for the new systems to make a difference for the sales force. Why? Because if you think of a company like a series of watch gears, all departments interlocking like watch gears, it just takes one department or even one individual to think change does not apply to them to bring it all to a grinding halt. C-level skin in the game sets the example, pace of change and clearly communicates that this strategy of knowledge sharing is critical.
• Freely sharing knowledge and making sales happen is the best job insurance there is. Every company lives and breathes by the sales force and their accomplishments. More companies have to equate the speed they share information as the speed at which they make sales happen. Share more, sell more, it's clear in the services businesses I've been a part of. Hoard more and everyone loses. Company management must attack this problem head-on and the insecurity that breeds information hoarding. To hoard is to kill sales, to share is to grow them.
• The more knowledge you provide customers the more trust you earn, the more opportunities to keep that trust by performing well. Excellent selling is more about teaching prospects you can solve their problem first, and closing the deal second. Look at Accenture and the many problems they had trying to create an enterprise-wide content and knowledge management system. This is an organization with legions of brilliant people yet no one was sharing information. What happened? The company allowed portals to proliferate, and needed to completely re-architect their knowledge management strategies to put sales and the customer engagements first. It took exceptional effort to create a shared base of knowledge that was based more on creating cooperation, not competition between Accenture divisions.

Bottom line: The quickest path to being a trusted advisor is to be the most knowledgeable one. Equip your sales force with the knowledge they need to win now.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Expert Access

This Blog “Fails”

Here is a blog or site – www.failblog.org that defies successes through pure “failures”. This is a unique concept that seems to be defined and conceptualized to provide the funny side of things, when they “Fail”. Fail to convey what it was supposed to or “situations” or “things’ that was..….purely not expected. This is a site that seems to depict the humorous side of things that may happen in any of our daily life's. This site encourages people to send picture and videos of real life situation, events, things, etc that failed. And I am sure, just by seeing some wonderful work on the site and level of participation, people logging onto this site just loves to see and even send their experienced or noticed “daily fails”. Hence I would say that this site is making a success from the failures.

I sometimes wonder that why failure is so much of in connotation to negativity. Rather it surprises me, as I believe that you can only learn from your failures. Success does not teach you  muchor provides you with so much of learning opportunity(s), what failure does. Bill Gates once said that “It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure”.

This man dropped out of college, even though his parents struggled to get him there. And, ten years after starting one of the most innovative computer companies in the world, he was fired by the board. Imagine getting fired from a multi-billion dollar company that you started in your own garage. The person was Steve Job, the name we associate with Apple. Goolge had to cut its IPO share price range to $85-95 a share - a reduction of about a quarter from the previous level of $108-135 in 2004. So aren’t these companies or people learnt from failure? The key is the attitude towards failure.

Mahatma Gandhi take on failures was something like this - “My imperfections and failures are as much a blessing from God as my successes and my talents and I lay them both at his feet.”

Stanisław Lem said that if man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently. So to put the humor back and see things differently, I recommend the failblog. It also makes fun with “Funny Look-Alikes”, “Fun With Charts” and so on.

I am sure most of the things that you will visit in this blog | site will be so called…….…. “unexpected”. But as they say you can expect the unexpected and should expect failures. So here are some failing moments captured at www.failblog.org.

The Day I saw 2000+….in India Sensex

The 2009 general elections outcome announced a huge surprise. It was by far the best outcome in terms of strength of the leading party’s tally since 1991 elections. Indeed, this is the first time since 1960s that any Prime Minister would return for second consecutive term in office. We believe this strong political mandate will allow the new government to  accelerate the pace of reforms.

Today a history was created on Dalal Street, markets hit two upper circuit limits on Monday in a buoyant reaction to ruling UPA coalition’s decisive electoral win in the 15th Lok Sabha elections. In fact this is the first time ever in Indian market’s history, trading has been halted for the day due to markets hitting upper circuit limit. The 30-share BSE index rose 17.34% to close at 14,284.21 and the 50-share NSE Nifty surged by 651.50 points to end at 4,323.15. Within just over a minute of trading today, the turnover is at Rs3,103 crore with only 272 stocks traded on NSE and 842 stocks on BSE.

Trading was suspended for two hours, as the index zoomed 1,790 points (14.7%) to 13,963. As soon as trading resumed at 1155 hrs, the index surged to 14,273 - up 2,099 points (17.2%) - and trading was suspended for the day.

The Top Ten firms add Rs2 trillion in a minute. Report suggests that the country’s top 10 firms witnessed an over Rs2.27 lakh crore addition to their market valuation, with Reliance Industries contributing the most to the club’s kitty, as the Bombay Stock Exchange benchmark Sensex recorded its historic single day gain today. Additionally  Investors reap Rs 10,000 cr every second in today's trade. But the Fund managers say stock surge irrational.

However the Industry bodies said they were not surprised by a “euphoric” rise in the stock prices as the market went into a buying frenzy on the back of emergence of a stronger UPA, set to start its new term on a confident note.

In addition there are 11 experts tell you where the markets are headed, along with Sectors and stocks to look out for.

Happy Trading.

Why Businesspeople Use Twitter: Tales From the Trenches

Sharing a wonderful article by John I. Todor, Ph.D., the managing partner of The Whetstone Edge, LLC, a customer-centric consulting firm that helps clients build customer equity by engaging customers online via social media and delivering compelling offline customer experiences.

A great article at Customer Think accentuating the importance of your brand on a New Age Marketing element Twitter.

The Article…..

Are you Twittering? If not, don't you know that it is the fastest growing social network with seven million people using it?

If you are like me, you may have thought: "What will it do for my business? How much time will it take?"

To get some answers, I decided to interview some business people I know and respect—people who are successful and yet find time to Twitter. Armed with the insights I got from them, I started Twittering last week (johntodor).

Here is what I learned.

Lesley Russell, VP of Direct Marketing and Sales, St Supery Winery
Twitter username: stsupery

Twittering personally about 8 months, for business about 4 months.

What motivated you and how did you get started?

I kept hearing from marketing gurus that consumer brands needed to monitor their online reputation and Twitter was mentioned as one way to do so.

I started by searching Twitter for mentions of St. Supery and almost immediately discovered that people were talking about us and it wasn't all good. I came across a tweet by a woman in NYC saying she was disappointed in our Sauvignon. I responded by mentioning that I was sorry she was disappointed and offered to send her a different version of our Sauvignon Blanc. She was both surprised and pleased to hear from me. She loved the wine I sent her and said so on Twitter and in her blog. What I didn't know was while she is a PR Professional in her day job, she is also an amateur wine blogger with a big following.

Wine bloggers have a tremendous influence, so we invited a group of them to spend a day with us at our winery. They were twittering away all day long. Tremendous word of mouth.

In addition to monitoring and responding to comments, I answer questions like "When will the 2004 vintage of our Elu wine be ready to drink?" or "Where can I buy your wine in Florida?" I try to help our customers have a better experience with our wines.

Pamela Swingley, President of Savvy Internet Marketing
Twitter username: pamelaley

Twittering about 8 weeks.

What motivated you and how did you get started?

I am developing software for personal healthcare management and will be looking for investors in the near future. My background has been in the technology sector. I wanted to learn about the investment and healthcare communities, fast. I also wanted to start building visibility and credibility within both communities.

I searched for active Twitters in both communities and started following them. I quickly got a feel for the culture of the communities and started asking questions and adding my insight about Internet Marketing. They must like something I am saying because twice as many people follow me than I follow. I am learning and building credibility in a new industry.

I get great results and it only takes 15 minutes per day.

Randy Saunders, Senior Marketing Manager, Cincom Systems
Twitter usernames: randysaunders and cincom

Started Twittering about 9 months ago but only got serious 3 months ago.

What motivated you and how did you get started?

More and more business people I know were using Twitter, so 3 months ago I decided to make a concerted effort to figure out what you could do with 140 characters.

I started with two goals. One, I wanted to connect with a wider range of business professionals and to learn from them. Two, I wanted to monitor and enhance Cincom's online reputation.

In the first case, I was very pleasantly surprised to learn how accessible, open and personable many CEOs are on Twitter. I am also learning from people outside my core industry. Now I am educating others within Cincom of how to use Twitter.

One of the beauties of Twitter is that it is rapid fire and easy. People say what is on their mind. There is something very real about this type of communication.

Cincom's online forum, Expert Access, provides thought leadership on Customer Relationship Strategies and Business Process Management. We now use Twitter to promote it.

We also use Twitter to monitor mentions of our Call Center products and learn directly from our customers. It is also a good way to monitor what our competitors are up to.

I get on Twitter 2-3 times per day and try to keep the total time to 15 minutes per day.

Bill Flitter, CEO and Founder of Pheedo
Twitter username: bflitter

Twittering about one year.

What motivated you and how did you get started?

Curiosity. Pheedo is in the business of syndicating and aggregating content for clients. I wanted to see if we could use Twitter to syndicate our own content. I also wanted to know what people were talking about.

I started by using search tools to find people who were Twittering about topics that interested me. I was surprised by the volume of people chiming in. People let loose with whatever is on their minds. They also tweet about what is happening right now. Once I discovered #hashtags, I realized you could follow the conversation about a give topic, often as it was happening. People twitter about events they are at, while they are at them. How else could you get insights from conferences you are not at or get multiple opinions, now? Events now post the #hashtag on their site, just paste in the search window to learn what people are saying.

We also use Twitter for brand monitoring. We quickly find out if a client is having a problem and can respond. We poll people to see how widespread a problem is and allocate resources accordingly. We want our customers to have a good experience with Pheedo.com and we want them to know we are responsive. Twitter is a good way to do so.

I must admit that I am also a little cynical about Twitter. There is a lot of noise, a lot of posting of things I am just not interested in. I actually seldom get directly on Twitter.com. Rather, I use friendfeed.com as an aggregator of all my social media sites. I find this to be much more productive.

My digital center is my blog. This is where I share ideas and content and use syndication tools to distribute it to Facebook, Twitter and so on. For example, Twitterfeed.com converts my blog to an rss feed to my Twitter account. It stays within the 140 character limit and links back to the actual blog.

Mark Ginnebaugh, President of DesignMind
Twitter username: markginnebaugh

What motivated you and how did you get started?

I run several professional groups and was looking for ways to raise awareness and increase attendance at meetings. I also have a blog and wanted to promote it.

I started promoting my events, and within a week got results. People who never heard of our groups started showing up—because they were interested in the topic.

In addition to gaining visibility, I am learning a lot by being on Twitter. I try to only spend about 15 to 20 minutes per day on Twitter but often spend much more. I must warn you that if can be addictive.

If this article motivates you to Twitter, you might want to start following these people (see their Twitter username). If you are already Twittering, please share your insights and stories.

Here is a list of resources to help you use Twitter for business.

eBooks

• How to Use Twitter for Business: a Beginner’s Guide (free)
• The Twitter Power Guide: Advanced tips to make the most of Twitter (free)
• Twitter Means Business: How Microblogging can help or hurt your company ($17.95)

Articles

• 7 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid on Twitter
• Twitter: A Marketer’s Duct Tape
• From Twits to Tweeple, Why I Embraced Twitter and You Should Too (part one of a five part series)
• Beginner’s Quick Start Guide and Tutorial to Using Twitter (From Zappos)
• Twitter 101: Connie Benson provides a roundup of Twitter-related resources

Video

• Twitter in Plain English (Common Craft Show)

Google Analytics API is Rocket Fuel For Guided Selling Widgets

Today’s announcement by Google that Google Analytics APIs are available for public beta has the potential to revolutionize channel management analytics as well.   It’s been six months since Google made the commitment to go public with these APIs, so it’s a big deal in the Google developer community. TechCrunch has an excellent analysis of the announcement Google Analytics API Now In Public Beta, Desktop Reporting Takes Stats Offline. The popular blog Google Operating System also has an excellent post on the APIs’ potential, API for Google Analytics.

The implications for creating customized Web gadgets using XML to link with analytics data in conjunction with AJAX are significant to managing channels as well. Imagine being able to see how cross-shopping behavior is being impacted by a microsite’s launch, or being able to see the impact of multi-channel promotional strategies on loyalty rates?  This API would make that possible across channels and in the end get close to defining cause-and-effect of marketing strategies to strategy performance.

Given how channel management strategies are increasingly reliant on analytics, the Google API is going to lead to entirely new apps relatively quickly.  The following are a few apps that most likely will launch within a relatively short period of time due to the API being available:

• Cross-shopping Widget. Being able to track cross-shopping during a product introduction would be a fascinating to watch over time using Google Analytics data.  This API would make it possible to isolate the most critical factors in enabling cross-shopping and closed sales.

• Guided selling effectiveness index. There is such a wide variation in how guided selling apps are constructed.  Some are based merely on a catalog and others are based on configuration engines including Cincom Socrates.  The effectiveness of these guided selling strategies can now be indexed across all microsites.

• Optimizing Channel Spend By Strategy. Over time analyzing data across all channels tracked on Google Analytics would provide an assessment of how optimal the mix of spending is by return or leads generated.  There is the potential of creating dashboards that will allow for tracking optimization and long-term effectiveness of not just a single strategy, but the combined effects of the entire set.  That would provide insights into which set of synchronized strategies make the most sense or not - and deliver the best results.

Bottom line: It is feasible that within a year to eighteen months the traditional concept of the large, cumbersome and high-maintenance dashboard will give way to a series of widgets based on Google APIs, XML integration and the advances made in AJAX programming today.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Guided Selling Blog

What's Your Company's Eleftheria to Customers?

“Do You Know How to Think Outside Your Bubble?”

People have a passion to be heard, and in a world that at times shows it doesn't have time to listen much less have real, in person relationships, social networking has proven to be the proxy for people too busy to connect in real-time.

Paradoxically, giving face time to customers is now the ultimate compliment.

Social networks have unleashed a freedom and candor of communication never seen before. One can pull back and try to clinically analyze the exponential growth of social networks using concepts such as The Network Effect, theories of information velocity, or collaboration theories – but in the end it is all about the passion people have to be heard and to be free in doing that. The passion people have to communicate on social networks reminds me of the word Eleftheria (Greek for freedom), a word that reverberates with strong emotions of being able to do what others said you could not. Never mind if those who said you couldn't were governments, bigoted people who judged you because of the color of your skin or your gender or even your appearance. Eleftheria says those people don't matter. It is a beautiful word and one my Greek immigrant grandparents said with passion and reverence too.

Eleftheria: Too Valuable For Any Marketer to Waste

Don't waste the Eleftheria social networks give you to serve your customers and enrich others. The best marketers get it. They don't waste or trivialize the Eleftheria that exists in social networks, they capitalize on it to enrich, serve, support, strengthen and get their customers to their goals. You have to love the paradox of how the best marketers involved in social networks look to free their customers, not ensnare them.

For any marketer looking to excel at social networking the most important questions to ask are "How can I free my customers from inconvenience, from unnecessary costs, from their problems by sharing more relevant information? Or by listening to them more using social networking?" Imagine how much more valuable many of the social networking sites would be if marketers asked themselves these questions rather than seeking out virtual bull horns. Social networking is not a virtual bull horn, to trivialize it to that is to throw away Eleftheria.

Marketers Listen Up: You Get What You Give

I'd like to suggest a contrarian thought to those companies and persons on social networks: the more followers you have, the more people you have to serve. They are not there to serve you; you are there to serve them with encouragement, insights, support and most of all, to give them a chance to get to their goals. That is what Eleftheria is really all about – freeing your customers (and followers) to get to their goals. Self-aggrandizement is a distraction. It takes marketer's eyes off the real goal of helping customers to their goals. Better to be part of their passionate pursuit of freedom than tell them how great you are.

What Makes a Great Social Networking Marketing Strategy?

Honesty, being real, getting your customers (or followers) to their goals and re-orienting every social networking platform strategy to embrace these values is what matters most.

Think of it this way: trade off sending out thousands of Tweets to promote your brand (or yourself) and think of how powerful it would be to deliver Eleftheria to just one customer (or follower) through social networks? To free just one customer or lighten the load of just one follower – so much more worth it.

Yet it does not need to stop there. There are so many more ways marketers can free their customers – from time drains, from annoying problems, from costly errors in their approaches to doing business – using social networks to achieve this. Here are some additional thoughts on how marketers can use social networks to deliver Eleftheria – yes, a passionate freedom of giving customers the ability to get to their goals. Now keep in mind I am no social media expert, but I do know that trust is earned when you can deliver Eleftheria over and over again to your customers.

• Be very selective of which social networking platforms you participate on. Marketers who attempt to be on every single social networking platform often fail. Why? Because they can't scale to support the conversations and unique needs each. Seeing social networking as a means to an end – delivering Eleftheria – is the real value. One of my favorite authors, David Meerman Scott, has used the cocktail party analogy of how annoying it is when you attempt to have a conversation with someone and they keep watching the door to see who else is there. Don't be that person. Actually listen to conversations.
• Own your problems in public. There are not enough companies doing this on social networking today. Comcast comes to mind as one, and there are many more. How powerful this is for creating credibility. Own even the ugly, messy problems online and strive for a solution to them together with your customers. Deliver Eleftheria from them.
• Assign an Acronym Assassin on your marketing team to seek out and destroy gobbledygook. Make it fun yet make sure any content going out makes sense to anyone outside the four walls of your company. Check out Hubspot's Gobblygook Grader. This is not meant to be snarky or mean; it is meant to say embrace clear

  communication as another step to deliver Eleftheria.

What You Need to Know

Think about those companies and people that really matter to you, that you are fiercely loyal to and then consider the full meaning of Eleftheria – chances are they delivered that to you over and over again to win your trust. In that experience is the essence of using social networking for marketing.

Coutersy – Louis Columbus At Expert Access

Elections in India -

Today is the forth phase of election in India and I will be voting today. This will phase see the voting from general public in Bihar, Haryana , Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, NCT Of Delhi.

Actually the monks where the first people to vote in India. It is one of the most extravagant event that comes after every five years (Normally).  In 1952, every Indian citizen above the age of 21 was granted the right to vote. Later it the voting age was changed to 18 years. So what is Election on India and how they are conducted.

Indian electoral system (Source – Wikipedia)

The Parliament of India comprises the head of state — the president — and the two Houses which are the legislature. The President of India is elected for a five-year term by an electoral college consisting of members of federal and state legislatures. Parliament of India has two chambers. The House of the People (Lok Sabha) has 545 members, 543 members elected for a five-year term in single-seat constituencies and two members appointed to represent the Anglo-Indian community.(as envisaged by the Constitution of India, as of now the members of Lok Sabha are 545, out of which 543 are elected for 5-year term and 2 members represent the Anglo-Indian community). The two unelected members are a relic from the past. The 550 members are elected under the plurality ('first past the post') electoral system.

Council of States (Rajya Sabha) has 245 members, 233 members elected for a six-year term, with one-third retiring every two years. The members are elected by legislators of the state and union (federal) territories. The elected members are chosen under the system of proportional representation by means of the Single Transferable Vote. The twelve nominated members are usually an eclectic mix of eminent artists (including actors), scientists, jurists, sportspersons, businessmen and journalists and common people.

An election is a decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold formal office.

Since independence, elections in India have evolved a long way, but all along elections have been a significant cultural aspect of independent India.

In 2004, Indian elections covered an electorate larger than 670 million people—over twice that of the next largest, the European Parliament elections—and declared expenditure has trebled since 1989 to almost $300 million, using more than 1 million electronic voting machines.

The size of the huge electorate mandates that elections be conducted in a number of phases (there were four phases in 2009 General Elections). It involves a number of step-by-step processes from announcement of election dates by the Election Commission of India, which brings into force the 'model code of conduct' for the political parties, to the announcement of results and submission of the list of successful candidates to the executive head of the state or the centre. The submission of results marks the end of the election process, thereby paving way for the formation of the new government.

Happy Voting.