Lets debate on topic :demonetization in India-- good and bad sides?

The regular viewers of news channels were in for a shock on the night of the 8th of November, 2016. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the  stunning and hugely radical announcement that all INR 500 and 1000 notes were to cease to become legal tender from the following day onwards, with a few exceptions(hospitals, petrol pumps and toll booths). | Soon the news had spread like wildfire, and within the next few days, huge queues had piled up outside banks,ATM outlets and post offices. Everywhere, people were desperate to exchange their outdated notes for their replacements-a new INR 500 and a 2000 note.

This radical step was touted by Mr. Modi as part of the never-ending fight against black money. Over the years, India’s parallel economy has grown, in spite of numerous attempts to suppress it. Currently, it is almost 25% as large as its “white” counterpart. The recently banned notes formed a large proportion of such transactions. Overall, $123 billion has gone untaxed over the past decade- an immense loss in a developing country such as India.

Black money also forms the backbone of crime. They are used for smuggling all kinds of illegal contraband, from drugs and weapons to illegal wildlife products such as tiger skin and rhino horn. It is also used to finance terrorism; the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai, which claimed 257 lives, were financed almost exclusively by untraceable “hawala” transactions which make use of black money. The cash-heavy nature of electoral campaigning has also generated concerns regarding the role of the parallel economy in influencing politics.

The announcement’s  sudden nature was intended to catch those dealing in black money off-guard. And it seems to have served its purpose; hoards of outdated notes were found discarded at various locations by suspected criminals. Among other benefits include the extensive deposits, which  have greatly eased the chronic credit crisis faced by Indian banks. Moreover, it has brought the various channels of financial transaction under greater scrutiny. It also shows that the establishment has the political will to crack down on endemic corruption.

That’s one side of the story.

The other belongs to those who are queuing up. Daily wage labourers, small traders and shopkeepers, eatery owners, and the beneficiaries of social welfare programmes such as the gigantic NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) are heavily reliant upon INR 500 and 1000 notes on a daily basis. These segments form a very large part of the population-over 90% of all economic transactions in India were being carried out via the outmoded notes. Suddenly, many millions are struggling to find enough to meet even their most basic of daily needs. And we are already a country where 58% of the population goes without 3 full meals a day.

But they can always head to the banks, post offices and ATMs for replacement, i can hear you say.Well here’s the thing-up to 47 percent of all Indians lack a bank account. This figure is a whooping 80% for women. Financial inclusion is still a far-fetched dream for many. In remote areas, some people are getting to know of the decision up to a week after it was originally taken.  

Even in places where banks already exist, nightmarish logistical and infrastructural conditions prevail. The new 500 rupee note is yet to achieve widespread circulation, and banks are quickly running out of INR 2000 notes as well. Even for the relatively wealthy businessmen, demonetization spells doom in the short term, because of its possible adverse impact upon customer demand and resultant growth.

“Short term pain will lead to long term gain”, is the Government’s reply to its critics. According to many, protesting civilians should take lessons in endurance and resilience from India’s soldiers, who soldier on daily under the harshest of conditions. These critics have also been accused of not thinking about not putting the nation’s economic and security-related concerns first. The heated debate continues. Are short-term sacrifices a worthy trade-off for long-term gain? Or is the Government displaying apathy for the many millions who require instant cash on a daily basis to suit their most basic of needs? Will “Swach Bharat Abiyan” extend to the corrupt as well, or will demonetization hurt both the common man and the Indian economy? Let us know at #eclipseindia or Eclipsetech12. Last but not the least, Eclipse Technoconsulting Global Pvt Ltd, Information technology service provider company , Kolkata,India, never shows any special favor to any political party but it salutes ( whoever takes it) if anything is done for the betterment of nation. However, we are open to get reader’s view on the same, either in favor or in against. Logical contradiction and argument will be great to read though.

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Do you know difference between Worrying and Thinking?

You are about to attend your  first ever board meeting. Your overall performance has been excellent, but your superiors have pointed out a few flaws nevertheless. You naturally end up worrying, and the resultant fear and anticipation of  rebuke cause your performance to get affected adversely. | Essential points are missed out on, and the meeting fails to arrive at a decisive strategic conclusion. This causes a buildup of stress and produces even more worry, creating a vicious cycle of negativity.

This horror story  was caused not by earlier flaws, but by worry itself. Had objective thinking taken over, the board meeting would’ve concluded successfully. Thinking and worrying are extremely similar processes, but the few tiny difference among them  results in a hugely varying impact. These include:

• Objectivity: As we have already seen, worry is always accompanied by doubt and fear. These emotions prevent us from objectively analyzing the situation. Rational thinking would’ve led us to believe that the meeting would’ve been a success, because of our overall excellent performance. Then Mr. Worry came along and  caused the spotlight to shine upon the few flaws, resulting in our poor performance at the meeting.
  Thinking is always a balanced process. The various aspects of each situation are carefully taken into account. This allow us to develop a clearer and more accurate image of the situation. On the other hand, worry’s deadly allies create a fog of despair which prevents us from taking the right decisions.

 

• Self-belief: “Confident people never worry, they always think”, is a very apt saying in this regard. Rational thought might seem like a process devoid of emotion. In reality, it is only devoid of negative emotions, but extremely welcoming of positive ones. And the right dose of self-belief is one of the most positive of emotions. It provides us with the will to motivate ourselves and rely on rational thought under even highly difficult circumstances. In the process, worry is dissipated and the seeds of success are planted.

 

• Moderation: Confidence is a great driver of success, but only when  present in moderate amounts. Rational thinking is a soup of innumerable emotions(confidence, self-restraint, passion), but even the slightest imbalance turns it sour and causes worry. The thinker carefully prevents any single emotion from clouding his mind.

 

 

 

Not only is worrying fruitless, but it is also harmful. Research has revealed that worriers are several times more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease and depression. Turning worriers into rational thinkers is thus the need of the hour. Eclipse Technoconsulting Global (P) Ltd. ‘s holistic stress management programs seek to do exactly that. Follow us on our journey of creating more happiness at #eclipseindia or Eclipsetech12.

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The everyman's AMC checklist

Here is all that you need to know before signing an Annual Maintenance Contract

Are you finding it difficult to  maintain various kinds of complicated software on different types of platforms? Are you worried about the impact of the sudden emergence of bugs upon your work schedule? In that case, you would be well served by signing an AMC(Annual Maintenance Contract) with a software maintenance company.

However, not all AMC companies possess similar levels of expertise or quality. Very often, some will simply not turn up after the first few occasions. Others might have to be called within days or even hours of fixing bugs because of their work’s incompleteness. Here are some of the factors which need to be taken into account before signing an AMC:

• Warranty periods: This is usually  the #1 factor which needs to be looked at while signing an AMC. Poor maintenance companies may choose to provide only low warranty periods. One should never sign a contract unless completely satisfied with the warranty period on offer.
• Operator’s obligations: If warranties are #1, then operator obligations are second on the list. Very often, you may end up with  glitchy software only to be told that the flaws lie outside the maintenance company’s scope. To avoid this scenario, the signer’s obligations and the complete scope of the agreement need to be clarified beforehand.
• Security performance: Bugs and glitches might be irritating, but security deficiencies in operating platforms are truly scary. How a  software maintenance company performs in fixing security flaws and recovering compromised information is a big test of its expertise. In addition, the exact scope of software security-related performance also needs to be clarified.
• Termination of agreement: As with all instances of contract termination, AMCs need to be concluded professionally and responsibly. The release terms need to be carefully determined, which is in the long-term interests of all projects.
• Intellectual property and confidentiality: Software maintenance companies often have to deal with significant amounts of sensitive data. Maintaining its confidentiality is a must in order for all the parties to maintain their professional reputation. A breach of sensitive data is the gravest setback a company can face.
• Extensive monitoring: No work can ever achieve excellent quality unless it is adequately monitored. Monitoring has to be holistic in its various aspects-financial, operational and technical.

Without first taking these 7 factors into account, one must never sign an AMC contract. An excellent company checks all these boxes. And Eclipse Technoconsulting Global (P) Ltd., a leading software development company in Kolkata, India is proud to announce that it does so. Our professionalism and high quality of work in AMC agreements continues to bring smiles to the faces of many a client. For more on our success story, follow us today at #eclipseindia or Eclipsetech12.

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Why you shouldn’t be surprised if your paid social media ad campaigns fail ?

“Free products and services are always of poorer quality compared to expensive ones”-is a common saying. The word “cheap” has come to represent pettiness, in addition to low prices. Enterprises which use cheap infrastructure and outsourcing are usually looked down upon, and not without  reason.

Thus, using paid ads for digital marketing might sound like a good idea. After all, the package offered by paid ads usually includes powerful design tools. Surely expenditure leads to success here, as is the case elsewhere?

Here’s the thing: it doesn’t.

Social media’s innumerable engagement opportunities has given birth to a wholly new realm of digital marketing-SMM(social media marketing). Using paid ads on social media is one of the most common SMM techniques.
And it does seem to be an attractive proposition, at least at first sight. Facebook is the #1 platform for paid ads. Thanks to recent upgrades, it is now possible to plan highly effective campaigns there. At $0.25 per 1,000 impressions, Facebook’s ROI is 10 times higher than that of TV advertising. The figure for Twitter is also an impressive $1.1. Thus, you now know that Twitter isn’t all about following sportstars. 

Yet social media is crawling with stories of paid ads not securing good enough returns. Curiously, we once came across a comment complaining about Facebook Ads right below an ad itself!!!
The complainant belonged to a large group-up to 43% of all enterprises still indulge in purely organic  marketing(through Social Media Optimization or SMO)

Even after so many years of fine-tuning, paid ads on social media are still not a foolproof way of ensuring lead generation. Why is this system still not maturing?

“It’s free and will always be”-Facebook’s motto holds the key to the answer. Simply put, anyone can open an account on Facebook, or any social media platform for that matter. Posting information about company products and services, creating specific “pages” and linking to a company’s website can all be done absolutely FREE of cost.
This is of immense significance. Basically, some of the most basic digital marketing activities, such as gaining a virtual space and promoting it, cost absolutely nothing. There is thus no need to go in for paid ads for basic marketing. 

Could you suggest a few more reasons for enterprises not choosing to go for paid ads? We certainly can:

• Rules imposing limitations: All text in Facebook Ads must not exceed 90 characters. This is a big burden upon creativity, especially since some of the most innovative of ad taglines go over this limit.
• Quality: If Facebook is burdened by arbitrary limitations, its rivals struggle with ad quality. Neither platform allows enough customization. Twitter ads are often lost among non-ad tweets. LinkedIn Ads struggle with visibility as well, and offer only very basic analytics options. Compared to Facebook, these two channels struggle highly with ROI; only a shocking 17% of all LinkedIn ad campaigns have ever managed to break even.
• Content is King: It might sound cliched, but content is indeed king. And a free post with great content will outperform a poorly designed paid ad campaign any day of the week. Facebook’s incorporation of a wide range of fonts, emoticons and animations, Twitter’s retweets and LinkedIn’s  articles are 3 incredibly useful  tools for marketers. All of these are completely free.
  
  As we can see, the good and the great in the world of social media marketing aren’t separated by money, but rather by quality. Eclipse Technoconsulting Global (P) Ltd., a renowned digital marketing company based in Kolkata, India, follows this principle to the fullest in its SMO campaigns. We firmly believe that while paid ads are useful, organic marketing on social networking is likely to yield massive benefits. Will it succeed in making expensive campaigns extinct? Let us know at #eclipseindia or Eclipsetech12.

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Don’t be confused with the terms of digital marketing. Know it better

Lost in the acronym soup of marketing? SEO, SEM, SMO, PPC, CPC, CPM(no, the last one doesn’t stand for the Communist Party Marxist)-the huge range of acronyms and definitions on display in digital marketing often stuns beginners. 

Many often end up getting confused between these terms. Does SEO involve search engines, social media or structural engineering? A customary glance at their expanded forms-in this article, we will be taking up the first 3 terms- makes it clear:

• SEO: Search Engine Optimization
• SEM: Search Engine Marketing
• SMO: Social Media Optimization
  
  
  
  
  

Search engines and social media have become the “two pillars” of digital marketing. An estimated 1.7 billion people- 20% of the global population- is active on Facebook. Taking other social media networks into account, the figure reaches almost 40%. Meanwhile, 6.6 billion searches are being carried out per day on all search engines. These mind-boggling figures mean that digital marketing is capable of reaching out to potential customers and generating leads on a scale which no other mode of promotion can.

However, in order to make the fullest use of the 6.6. Billion figure, one needs to make sure that the web pages involved in the marketing campaign end up at the top of the SERP(Search Engine Results Page). The cheapest way of doing this is to follow a few basic principles of content creation and marketing. These principles make up SEO.
You have probably employed many of these principles without realizing what they actually constitute. Here’s a list:

• Finding out which keywords are most relevant to your campaign. In case you are unaware, keywords are the words/phrases which users type into Google/Bing’s search bar.
• Deciding which parts of the content should contain keywords, as well as the keyword density.
• Whether related phrases should be incorporated or not, and if so, to what extent. (Keyword concept)
• Which URL’s should be included into the content, and in which places.

Keyword concept, density and analysis all fall under the ambit of “keyword research”.

This isn’t an article on SEO techniques,however, or we could’ve gone on. The most important aspect about it is that it doesn’t involve any paying services at all. SEO generates “organic” results, distinct from campaigns involving paid search engine ads.

Organic results and paid search engine campaigns aren’t really enemies. When they come together, they produce SEM. Thus, SEM is SEO’s daddy(or mommy). It includes SEO, and quite a bit more.
The question “should SEO take precedence over paid search” is often asked by those new to marketing. SEM, like a benevolent father, tries to keep peace between his two offsprings. And quite a few marketers do like this-innumerable marketing agencies are using both paid search ads as well as SEO, depending on the client’s requirements and sensibilities. Even for those who stick to one of the two distinct methods, SEM provides a good overview of how influential search engines are in the realm of marketing.

The third guy on the block-SMO-is only a relatively distant relative of the other two. Marketers have been quick to take advantage of social media’s innumerable advantages, using a variety of techniques, such as:

• The use of posts containing links to campaign pages.
• Hashtagging-especially relevant to Twitter and Facebook, allows for content curation using exciting-sounding phrases.
• The use of slideshows to present content in a more attractive manner, as slideshare.net is now an integral part of the social media platform LinkedIn.
• The use of analytics tools to track the progress of campaigns.

All of which makes up SMO. Social networking sites being extremely diverse, this mode takes up a wide range of practices. Some of these are specific to particular channels.

How does it compare to the other modes which we have discussed already? SMO is not wholly unrelated to SEO. Social media results will often turn up on SERP’s. Using the right synthesis of both SEO and SMO will be of even greater benefit, in such cases. That is where the similarities end, however. Social media uses post reach and the number of likes on company pages instead of rank to measure marketing performance. Many SMO tactics can be implemented at zero cost; however, posting ads on social networking sites does cost money. 

To sum it all up, we have:

SEO	SEM	SMO
Search Engine Optimization	Search Engine Marketing	Social Media Optimization
Ensures high SERP rank	Ensures high SERP rank	Ensures greater visibility on social media
Tactics implementable at zero cost, generating organic search	Implementation may be free or may require a price.	Implementation may be free or may require a price
Uses position on SERP as a measure of effectiveness	Uses position on SERP as a measure of effectiveness	Uses number of likes, shares and relevance of posts to measure effectiveness
Tactics include keyword research and concept, use of backlinks, appropriate length of title, and others	In addition to SEO, includes the use of paid ads on the SERP	Includes hashtagging, post outreach research, use of paid ads on social networking sites, and others.

In order to take advantage of the ever-dynamic nature of digital marketing, it is a must to develop holistic programs using the best synthesis of these 3 methods. “Should i leave out SMO and focus on SEO?” and  “can i forego the use of paid ads?”, might be common questions for those obsessed with ROI. However, these people would be best served by asking themselves “how do i develop a comprehensive digital marketing strategy embracing every platform?”. Eclipse Technoconsulting Global (P) Ltd has the answer. To know more, follow us at #eclipseindia or Eclipsetech12.

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Advertising vs Promotion: the fine differences every business must know

Your company is offering an exciting range of services. You are hopeful that it will attract a large number of customers. You decide to go in for promotion by setting up billboards, creating a website and marketing it on social media. Is this advertising? Wait, didn’t we just refer to it as promotion? 

While engaging with others, businesses usually focus on the exact methods being employed. Does PPC bring in more clients compared to organic search? How much should one invest in Facebook Ads? Innumerable people ponder over these questions. Yet, when asked about the difference between ad making and promotion, one will only receive blank stares.

Both refer to a wide range of activities. Let us begin with ads.

Most of us first experienced advertising through newspaper columns and billboards. Elaborately designed and easy to create, they have nevertheless been superseded by advances in technology. Digital methods have taken over; now we come across ads whenever we open Google. Social media is also awash with ads-some exciting, others worthy of being ignored. Put very simply, advertising includes putting paid messages on various channels to let people know about a company/individual’s activities. 

There is one thing common to all forms of ad creation however-they are part of the greater process of “promotion”.

If promotion is the dad, then advertising is the son(though not the only son). The Oxford English Dictionary(here’s the link; not everything about the Dictionary is intimidating) states that promotion is the “the publicizing of a product, organization or venture so as to increase  sales or public awareness”.

Don’t ads provide publicity for the increase of sales as well? Thus, it becomes clear that ads form part of the general umbrella that is promotion. If you are involved in ad making, then you are certainly promoting a person(it could be you, so good luck) or a company.

If you want to promote, you will have to hit upon a SPECIFIC method. Advertising is one. Hosting seminars is another. One could also provide free samples of products for brand marketing.  For instance, all toffees might have the same shape and size, but you wouldn’t really know which one you should buy unless you’ve tasted them, would you? Other methods of promotion include handing out catalogues, direct emailing and the hosting of contests.

Here are a few more ways in which advertising is distinct from other forms of promotion:

• Cost: Ads are almost never free. It is a big source of revenue for the various ad channels, after all. Posting ads on newspapers, billboards, social media and blogging websites always costs a certain amount.
  On the other hand, handing out a free sample or conducting an opinion poll doesn’t cost anything. Thus, there are modes of promotion which are almost completely free.

           Bottom Line: Some methods of promotion are free, others aren’t. Ads are never free.

• Response time: You are probably familiar with the seemingly never-ending wait for the responses to ads by leads. Not all methods of promotion have long response times. Direct emailing often leads to quick responses. Seminars and contests have real-time participation with instantaneous responses.
  Bottom Line: Not all promotional methods have the same response time. Some do see quicker responses compared to ads.

• Ultimate purpose: Ads are ultimately aimed at ensuring sales. Leads show interest, and are further enticed to become long-term customers so that the end-result is a transaction.
  On the other hand, a promotional football match organised by a company will not result in a transaction. However, it will enhance the brand image and strengthen loyalty.
  Bottom Line: Both ads and promotion deals with sales, but the latter centres around brand loyalty as well.

Understanding the subtle differences between promotion and advertising is key to bringing in customers. At Eclipse Technoconsulting Global (P) Ltd., we have used a variety of methods to contribute to our clients’ holistic growth. Their success stories include both brand image enhancement through all-round promotion, as well as an increase in sales through specific ad campaigns methods. To join this success story, follow us today at #eclipseindia or Eclipsetech12.

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