e Magus

N ewspaper websites designs are defined by 2 key features - Order and Regularity (of content updates) Since most of the newspaper websites are dead ringer of their offline version..it comes with a baggage of having the same design/mastheads, editorial, colour schema, culture, language, etc. Order is built into the website design to replicate the above features..Thus like an actual newspaper content spread, you have sections built - Home page, International section, National section, Sports section, etc... Added to it, large quantity of content updates on a regular - if not realtime basis... Looking at the above points, it would seem, on the face of it, that technological impact on newspaper website design would be minimal. While it is challenging to re-look at design of newspaper website; with the technological advancement and the change in the user behaviour of consuming content online, there are things that can be done without compromising on the publication’s overall vision and...

Most people think that we are not ourselves, when we are online. True? True. While we tend to fake most of what we say or do in the online space, especially in Social Media platforms – we somehow are more real than we would be in real life. Most of our actions and utterances in real life depend on our immediate environs. The impact of where we are, whom we are with, and about whom we talk; all impacts on what we do and say. For example: saying ‘No’ face to face to a friend is harder than typing ‘No’ on a chat window, email, or even a tweet According to John Suler, the ‘online disinhibition effect’ can be further divided into benign and toxic disinhibition (The Pyscology of Cyberspace – The Online Disinhibition http://users.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/disinhibit.html ). Suler goes on to talk about six prime factors that influences the way we behave in the online space 1)    You don’t know me (Dissociative Anonymity) 2)    You Can’t see ...

If you looked hard at today’s online marketing, 2 things stand out. Ever recall seeing an ad of a website that you’ve visited recently, while browsing other sites? Also, did you notice that most brand interactions are from your Facebook profile – either through the FB ads or by what your friend in your network had done or recommends… Call it re-marketing, social marketing or whatever… digital has changed the way marketing campaigns are run Ask any advertiser and they would say that key differences about online medium (from the traditional media) are – interactivity, engagement, measurability. The bigger impact of digital medium on marketing is that advertising campaigns have become more ‘on-the-fly’… Gone are the days when ad agencies was thinking about finding the ‘Big Idea’ and launching the campaign… In today’s world, it is more about managing the ‘Big Idea’ on real-time basis As more and more consumers become an intrinsic part of carrying the brand communic...

Working for a digital agency ( www.mrmworldwide.com ), I come across various digital marketing requirements from clients. One common client requirement is - website redesign/ changes. And familiar client remarks in such cases are – “Make it look different from the existing website”, “Identify best practices from other website and let’s incorporate the same” . On the face of it, it looks like a very common and straightforward ask …. But the truth is far, far true. Sheryl Crow sang- A change would do you good. But the truth is, as humans, we seek familiarity. Be it the people we meet, the road we take from home to office, and in majority of the cases the food we eat….we tend to seen familiarity; so would it not be true even for our other habits including online. Yet, when as digital marketers we think about redesigning a website, we mostly seek complete change in the design including structural changes with little regard to the impact on user path A casual glance into any website an...

As we approach the end of another year, there would be multitudes of new people who would have joined some social networking site or other. Well, there are dime and dozen reasons for the success of Social Networking Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Orkut, etc…. but is there any common thread or insight that binds the success of these SNS sites? We humans spend most of our waking hours in building and maintaining ‘relationship’. This behavior is embedded in our genes. The activity of ‘grooming’ in primates, a human child crying for attention, the activities we, as adults, do in our day to day life – like the friendly greeting to colleagues, the discussion over cup of coffee, meeting the client deadlines too :) - All these actions is related to building and maintaining relationships. One of the core objective of building and maintaining relationships is to create an opinion about oneself in others mind. The way we talk, what we speak, the way we dress, the way we walk, all communic...

Google has released the latest Zeitgeist for 2009. While the overall results shown are predictable (basis the different headers)… there are some things which were interesting. Let’s have a quick recap of important happenings in India over the past one year – - General Elections (by far the biggest event) - Indians win at Oscar - The Budget presentation (during the time of recession) - Interest in the Economy (the ripple effect of the global economic scenario) - And of course: the staple diet of most Indians – movies, cricket, celebrities Google search queries correlate to the above happenings with Budget 2009, Election Results, Slumdog Millionaire etc., all being the top search queries of the year. However, some interesting search queries too were to be seen. ‘Bhuvan’ too was seen to be the fastest growing search query. Launched in Mid-August, Bhuvan, the ISRO’s Geo-satellite, which can zoom to 10 square meter (similar to Google, or Wikimaps), would have been of interest to many. I hav...