After the encouraging response from users and support of established industry names, DataGuru.in, the leading provider of B2B Sales & Marketing Solutions, seeks to build on their user base by introducing innovative online tools. DataGuru.in has a client base comprising of one of the largest retail coffee chains, top IT services companies, India’s most popular travel portal and real estate companies amongst many others.

Google has rolled out its “Panda” algorithm update globally for all English language websites. This is one update that webmasters and SEO professionals will be very closely monitoring, particularly after the negative impact it had on traffic for a large number of sites when it was implemented in the US in late February.

According to leading management consultancy McKinsey, the number of Internet users in India is expected to jump five fold to about 450 million by 2015 from its current level of about 81 million. Digital consumption is also likely to increase to about US$9.5 billion. These are the projections in a recent McKinsey Quarterly article by Laxman Narasimhan titled ‘Can India lead the mobile Internet revolution?’.

All along we have been led to believe of the (potential) power of mobile and social media advertising. Afterall, considering the reach of both mobile devices and social media, it is only logical to expect that advertising here will work. Yet, marketers need to be a bit cautious, if some recent studies reported by eMarketer are any indication.

“For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year”, so says the introduction to the announcement of Facebook’s 26-year old founder being chosen as the Person of the Year.

If you are wondering what a cricket tour has to do with SEO, there’s quite a lot. As almost anyone with any understanding of the field will agree, one of the main aims of SEO is to attract relevant traffic to a website, typically by being at the top of the search results. Just as the Indian cricket team found out when they went on a seemingly underprepared tour of England where they got whitewashed 4-0 in the test series and lost their top spot in the International Cricket Council cricket rankings, companies using SEO as a key element of their online marketing strategy should realize that getting to the top of search engine rankings is difficult enough; staying there is equally hard, if not more so.

One of the challenges a marketer faces when coming up with an online advertising media plan is getting a reasonably reliable set of traffic metrics of the prospective media outlets.

There are three main problems I have encountered:

a) Different publishers use different web analytics tools, and hence there is no common benchmark.

b) Publishers report different metrics in their media packs: for example, some highlight unique visitors, some talk about visits while some rave about their page views. Occasionally I stumble upon some publishers – admittedly not very large ones- who still talk about hits!

One trend stands out in 2010: The integration of email marketing and social media, says Martin Lieberman, Managing Editor of Constant Contact, in this article published in the Hints & Tips newsletter. He makes the point that social media is beyond buttons and lists a few best practices to adopt to acheive success with social media.

When looking back on a given year, one expects to find a number of trends that stand out in just about any line of business. But for 2010, there was really only one trend for email marketing: the impact of social media. It’s now easier than ever to add the social interactivity to your emails that customers and members are coming to expect from the companies and organizations — big or small — that they do business with.

A client we work with was embarking on a significant new initiative, which they wanted to be rolled out very selectively. Since they were particular that their audience in a particular country (let’s call it Market X) should be the only ones to see their new initiative, they decided to adopt IP-based content delivery.