Practical Internet Marketing in Pakistan with Google

google pakistan badar khushnoodToday I just wrapped up an all day session attending a workshop by Google on Practical Internet Marketing delivered by Badar Khushnood the Country Representative for Google and it was organized by Octara wrapping up the three day Media and Marketing Festival in Karachi.

I have known Badar for barely a few months and have occasionally interacted with him since his accession to the Google throne in Pakistan so when I heard that a Google seminar was being held in Karachi, the geek within me could not resist. I also found the topic to be quite relevant to a blogger and his feeble attempt to maybe use this medium to hopefully spin it into something profitable, albeit the topic was centered around AdWords, the other end of the spectrum from blogs but it could never hurt to understand the intricacies of this system to maybe help me squeeze a little more juice out the ads being displayed on my blog.

The full day session took off early morning at 9 (I must admit that i crashed the party late due to some heavy traffic) Reaching the venue Badar was already on a roll and was discussing the statistics of the Internet usage in Pakistan, he had a ton of data showing some definite growth on Internet usage in Pakistan but even with his own admission there remained many a loop holes in the availability of good statistics and it seemed that the Government of Pakistan / PTA had no clue of the exact demographics of the digital revolution in Pakistan, let alone plan and cater to its present and future needs. An Internet Policy seemed to be based on hearsay rather then based on facts and figures which in turn was of concern to the few marketing people in the audience at Sheraton, who continued to pester Badar for more information but sadly none were available, which can help these marketing people design a campaign around.

A good 20 minutes later I had finally pulled apart my own laptop setting it up to live blog the entire event, but I was soon made to realize that there was no availability of a WIFI connection and were informed that very soon a ‘hard wired’ connection was to be provided but due to the cumbersome nature of this wired technology only one laptop per child table would be connected this news effectively knocked out about half of the high-end laptop-flashing users out of the ball park. It also ruined my plans for a Live blog and a simple attempt to show the corporate sector the impact of a live blog to an event in Pakistan. I could call myself lucky to have dropped the plan earlier as the WiFi glitch even hit Badar WiFi stumbled with an unreliable hotel network to connecting to a slow GPRS uplink, definitely taking the steam out of his brave effort.

The Google Country Representative in Pakistan gave the participants a very good run down on a number of tools available to an Internet Advertiser literally boasting a garage full of highly customizable products ranging from research tools like Google Trends, Google Zeitgeist, Google Earth and Maps, leading to the more targeted products like Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Google Site-maps and Google AdSense.

Google Badar Khushnood and Awab AlviBeing a very avid user of a number of Google Products I learnt a number of tricks practically in every aspect of Badar’s talk. AdSense being the bread and butter of a blogger it definitely interesting to understand the AdWords component in much greater detail from the actual sign-up to a detailed designing of a campaign leading, keyword research and its selection, simultaneously geo-targeting the campaign to an amazing minute detail. To complement the enture system Badar gave us a through run down of the Google Analytics tool which is a research tool to better understand the targets and optimize the product in further detail

Throughout the day the floor remained open to a number of questions which helped the presenter customize the speech on the fly and clarify issues which a large number of people had. Simply said I walked away having learnt a lot from a day of Googling and hope more such seminars can be arranged allowing the marketing industry a better exposure on the intricacies of a very dynamic and helpful tools for promoting their products.

New Media and the Pakistani Marketeer

Many of you know that I am a dentist by profession and have little exposure to the marketing industry to the extent I remain a layman looking in at the industry. I come with the presepective of a very tech savvy indiviuald who is at best usually at the cutting edge of technology better understanding the future trends and potential market direction. In this very same arena I have been one of the early few Pakistanis who embraced this new media concept relizing its potential a good three years back and have over the past years observed the importance of blogs globally as a very critical marketing tool.

Having sat and watched a handful of individuals from the marketing industry, I was pleased to have had the opportunity to interact with some brilliant minds and am confident the industry may very well be in the right hands, except, with apologies, for the following observations (take them as constructive criticism)

  1. It seemed that people were aware of blogs, as a few read them regularly (I assume on a personal level) but on a corporate level it was close to being non-existent apart from a few I remember for eg. Jang blog and BrandSynario the rest were not using this tool in any significant way
  2. The most probable reason of lack of corporate awareness could very well be lack of exposure to such a tool and its potential impact on a product. These executives apparently do see the international trends hence the reason why many attended this seminar but I feel a lot more exposure needs to be provided before this becomes main stream
  3. A number of reasons for this lack of interest could be that the targeted audience may not exactly correlate directly to the Internet surfing Pakistani individual, even if this were the case there can be no harm in testing this idea out. What can you possibly loose
  4. There is a definite need to have a comprehensive demographics on the Internet usage in Pakistan (if there are any such papers please post it in the comment)


Solutions I have can be as follows

  1. Solutions which I may have to offer for discussion can range from helping expose the corporate giants understanding and appreciating this concept in a little more detail to many hiring a number of bloggers to do the job for you. I can assure you that a number of experienced bloggers will be more then willing to teach the intricacies of blogging. In fact just recently the Karachi Metroblogs team held a mini-seminar in this regard on Blogging 101, which can in time be tailored to a more advanced version ensuring a full grasp of the concept.
  2. The next hindrance is an apparent hunt for people to write for the blogs, as historically its been seen that a regularly updated blog attracts readers as compared to website which was last updated two years ago
  3. The next problem faced by our local marketing teams are people to write on these blogs about their products. This problem is not at all difficult to handle, the best resource are a trimmed down / humanized version of the press releases that are issued regularly from the marketing team but with a little more creativity small tidbits about the products do wonders in ensure blog stickiness
  4. Worst come to worst, the administrators can often hire the copyrighting services any journalist or even a blogger who can be entrusted with a target of two posts a week deadline in exchange for a little monetary reward, for teams looking for such individuals a good online hunt of global sites like RentaCoder are great, but if you are interested in a local chap then maybe if you drop an email to me I can rustle up some blogger who might be in need of some spare change

Please take these suggestions with the understanding that these are the personal opinions of a person sitting outside this dynamic industry looking in, but with a little experience from the new media perspective. I also feel this Google course today should be repeated with increasing regularity and more advanced courses setup allowing the development of local expertise.

Badar being the sole representative in Pakistan cannot be expected to manage all such issues and may want to invest some time in training the trainer which can soon train an army of Google professionals and start a chain reaction. I feel once such course start to take shape there will then be a natural tendency to embrace the new media as yet another potential source to promote a product, granted all this will not happen in a day, but it has to start somewhere, and Pakistan may very well be a little behind the global new media boom, bet lets not sit idling watching it instead embrace it as quickly as possible.

Wrapping up the day I must tip my hat to Badar for a great session (a few audience members may have slept through it but I on the other hand enjoyed it thoroughly – Geek speak is caffeine for my blood stream). The only regret would have been the lack of Internet connection during the event which can be an administrative glitch on the part of Octara who happened to be the bhatta (ack) collectors in this seminar. Without doubt Karachi needs more such sessions and it can be only possible when the corporate sector can help foot the bill


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10 responses to “Practical Internet Marketing in Pakistan with Google”

  1. The Pakistani Spectator Avatar

    Sorry for the offtopic, but I just wanted to share a blog post with you by an American on a Pakistani blog.

    The address is:
    http://pakspectator.blogspot.com/2007/09/democracy-versus-government-by-elite.html

    Yes Its the same old shameless promotion, but with a cause.

    regards.

  2. Awais Ahmad Khan Avatar

    Hi
    Few month ago i just start work on “GOOGLE ADSENSE”, i use it on a site http://www.funnyjokesms.com — i really feel its a good things. GOOGLE products like ADSENSE, ADWORDS, TRENDS, ANALYTICS , MAPS/EARTH These all products are superb.
    If anyone want to share ideas reagrding any prodcut of google specialy google Adsense then please contact me at mr_awaiskhan@yahoo.com

    Regards

  3. abdul baseer Avatar
    abdul baseer

    sir
    if u provide training about google web marketing ,
    then plz send me your contacts # .

    thanks
    baseer

  4. omar Avatar
    omar

    badar? i thought it was zafar ahmed who works in Google? http://www.zafarahmed.com

  5. imtiaz ahmad Avatar
    imtiaz ahmad

    sir
    if u provide training about google web marketing ,
    then plz send me your contacts # .

    thanks
    imtiaz

  6. tahir Avatar

    i want to promote my site http://www.alnoorpakistan.com tell me how to advertise it using google and how to get more traffic

  7. Usman Ali Avatar
    Usman Ali

    salaam,
    Dear brother im BCS(Hons.).im interested in being a google professional.kindly tell me some proper way.
    my personal contact is 0321 4024089.
    Regards
    Usman Ali
    DHA Lahore.

  8. Adnan Ali Avatar

    Usman bhai. Being a Google professional is all about advancing the level of innovation in what ever you are doing. You can always use Google provided tools to advance that purpose.

    By the way, if you want to learn, you can do what I have done and work on as many online marketing campaigns as you can. Even if you do not get paid to optimize a friend’s website, for example, you will gain immense insight into the process.

    It requires not only good conceptual and practical knowledge of Marketing and Consumer Behavior but real skills in statistical analytics too.

    Good luck in your endeavor.

  9. Junaid Khawaja Avatar

    How can I get information of seminars by Google?? I want to conduct it..!!