So what exactly do we mean by being a Mensch ? It is an Yiddish word which means (according to Wikipedia) -

“a person of integrity and honor”.The opposite of a mensch is an unmensch (meaning: an utterly cruel or evil person).  According to Leo Rosten, the Yiddish maven and author of The Joys of Yiddish, mensch is “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being “a real mensch” is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous“

So the meaning – at the end of the day we should all strive to be a better person. By helping others and paying back the society. And remember – we are not doing a favor by helping others or doing something good for the society. Each and every person owes to the society and to the whole ecosystem he lives in. So if you helped your friend find a job, you did not do a favor to him ! You actually have paid back something. Turn back and look into your past life, you will certainly find many strangers who helped you, whom you won’t even meet anymore.

And remember, the key is to do it with the right attitude. Winston Churchill once said “Attitude is a little thing which makes a big difference”. A mensch not only helps others but does so with the right attitude – and without expectation of return. For instance, if you help a friend find a job that is a noble thing to do, but if you repeatedly joke that they “owe” you or brag about it, then the act of goodness loses its value. Also make sure that your organization doesn’t harm the society for your and its own profit. Such organizations fail. (Bad Karma). You have to set the highest level of moral and ethical standards for your employees , leaders and management.

A Mensch is a guy who loves everyone. He is very broad minded. He doesn’t hate anyone for any reason. He looks at this whole world from God’s point of view. Is there a person in this world whom you don’t like ? Why you don’t like him ? I don’t think there is any reason to hate a person unless he is some kind of Bin-Laden or Hitler. Karma is something which really works and you must believe in it. Good things happen to good people. Experiment with it. Start being good in your life, and you will find that luck will be with you. I have experienced it in my daily life.

Guy offers some tips on how to be a real mensch on his blog.

Okay enough of lectures. Now try doing some of these things -

1. Do something nice for someone you don’t like. Start small, so it doesn’t hurt too much.
2. Do something really nice for someone you like. But, don’t tell them. Never let them know.
3. Do something nice for someone you don’t know. Be sure you do it to sincerely help them and not to position yourself in their good graces.

People forget the fact that -”Good businesses are built on good interpersonal relationships”. AND , “A good interpersonal relationships can’t be formed out of a lie”. People just forget the value of relationships. Its many, many, many times more than money. When you interact with a new person, your focus should not be just on selling something, it should be on developing a very good rapport with him.

A common perception is that – “People will not value me if i tell them that i am a one man show or that my team is small”. Thats a totally wrong perception.

Start thinking this way – “People are very good. They will help me”. Be a little more optimistic. The world isn’t that bad. I’ll give you an example -

When i started selling SEO / Link building services 5 years back on online forums, i met a person from US who wanted to optimize his ecommerce website where he sells clothings. After some initial chat about the SEO strategy i had for him, we had a small personal chat online as well where we talked about business and life – a lot of casual stuff. I had told him that, my company is me and a few partners. And that, we have just started up with the business. I even told my age – I was 17.  I told him my past achievements and we became very good friends over time. Nevertheless, i got the order and he was happy with my work. He went on to become a partner in my next project and he did invest money with me. We successfully developed and even sold the website for some 15000$ 2 years back.

And this has happened with me more than a few times. People whom i had been truthful have become very good friends over time and it has only helped my business. It helped me getting more connections and eventually more money.

Relationships are not made out of lies. Learn to invest in relationships. In longer run, your relationships become your core competencies. I have seen that happen multiple times in front of me. A company to which i pitched for a certain service, gave the order to another guy just because he was the CEO’s friend. There lies a lesson. People grow along with you. If it is still not convincing , think this way – Your client’s company which might be small at the moment, might grow into a 500million$ firm 10 years later. The guy whom you talked to just now, might become the CEO of the next Google. So invest in relationships.

1. Avoid outside meetings as far as possible. Try to minimize travel. Unless the meeting is between multiple teams, long and complex in nature, try to avoid it.  Think for a while, is it really necessary to meet that guy. Can this stuff be discussed over phone, or the net ? It is a waste of  petrol, and waste of time(you are going to waste 1 hour in the traffic). When you can use web-collaboration softwares like GoToMeeting , WebEx, Zoho etc. to conduct presentations and meetings across the globe in real time using audio – visual aids. You can do video conferencing. You don’t really need to meet for every small thing.

2. Avoid courier, printing etc. Many companies have already come out of this but many still love brick and mortar. You can send invoices in a PDF format by email. There is no need to print, stamp and courier it. (One internet company asks me repeatedly to do this and i have tried to explain them every time.). You can sign documents on PDF and communicate by email.

3. Books and Magazines are burdens. Avoid buying books and magazines as far as possible. Read them online. I used to buy lot of magazines and books but now i realize that as soon as you finish reading it, it becomes a burden. You can get all books and magazines digitally. Get an iPad or Netbook and keep books in digital format so that you can read them on the go.

4. For some digital businesses on the internet, try to hire work from home or part time employees. This might not be possible for every job position, but yes it does help somewhere. Jobs like customer support, content writing and production, editing etc. can be done from home. It will save you time and money. The employee saves 3 hours of travel time and hence more productivity. He saves petrol and helps the traffic.

Understand yourself first – your strength and weakness. Which areas you are good at and which you are not ? Instead of trying to be a all-rounder super-hero, do only those things which you know you can do very well. Recently i saw some actors who turned into film directors and came out with real crap movies. If you are bad at tech stuff then don’t try to do it ever. Hire someone to do it for you. Don’t even try to learn it (unless you have plenty of time). Because nothing is easy, everything requires a lot of time and energy to learn and attain perfection.

When i started my internet business way back in 2006, i didn’t have funding. No money to hire a web designers, coders, tech guys or content writers. I had to do everything myself. My business emerged out of 100% boot strapping from my bedroom on my laptop. Things were not good initially. I was bad at everything actually. I wasn’t a good designer – i used to rip of free online themes and edit their colours. I wasn’t a very good writer as well. My english skills were too poor. These were all the reasons why it took me so long to get to a point where i was financially stable. But once i did, i was quick to realize my mistakes and weaknesses. I never design myself anymore.

Today, my work is focussed around selling. I don’t like to do anything else. Everything else is handled by people who are better than me at those things.

It looks great to me and should be beneficial to the marketing professionals. It will help them to make better digital strategies for their companes.  But only strategies and nothing more than that. Remember, its only going to benefit someone at the top management level. There are 5 classes spread over 6 weeks for 3 hours each. I.e a total of 18 hours. The course doesn’t seem to be going down to technical details of online marketing. Using an adserver , Working with adwords, Onpage SEO tricks. Link building, running a PPC campaign on facebook, conversion optimization etc. Infact you can’t teach so much of online marketing in 18 hours.

We badly need a comprehensive course on online marketing which actually gets down to details of the business and teaches everything right from On-Page SEO to Adwords, Facebook PPC and media buying from ad networks. Such courses can be an interesting addon to management degrees for students. We need to produce more people who are expert at marketing webstites and increasing relevant traffic on them.

The first interview was between Forbes and Rajiv Bajaj (Chair – Bajaj Auto) on 11th Dec. Rajiv Bajaj used his newly created twitter handle @motorcycleyogi while forbes used its regular @forbes_india. The topic of the chat was “Yoga, Motorcycles and the Business of Brands”. Mr. Bajaj will also answer reader’s questions through his twitter account which will be moderated by @forbes_india.

Forbes has also built facebook and linkedin threads on this topic for public discussion -

Facebook: This discussion thread – http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=12079&uid=97368389993
Linkedin: This discussion thread –  http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=1959962&discussionID=10675427

The idea seems interesting, though i have no idea how much result it would have produced. Offcourse, its going to be higher than a normal image/flash CPM banner. Now the question is, how many engagements did the banner made per 1000 impressions ? Perhaps someone from media2win would like to share it.

By asking you to get started, i mean start doing the business you have planned to do. People tend to waste their valuable time on writing a business plan down in Word and building an excel of sales forecasts. You don’t have to do that unless you are going to an investor. You actually need to start doing the business. If its the website, get the coder and designer and start working on it.

I still find people who have started a company a month back. They try to give all sort of speeches on how they are going to do what they have planned, what all they have planned and their strategy. When i ask the question, “What all have you done till now ?”, they have nothing to say.

Get yourself off that bandwagon and start implementing things.

They have boutiques of Mont Blanc, United Colors of Benetton, Longiness and Reebok. Every boutique has a list of products from that industry. The company claims to be offering upto 50% discount on the MRP (showroom prices).  They have limited the number of products to be sold to one single person. Calvin Klein watch with an MRP of Rs. 7300 is currently available for Rs. 3499, a discount of around 52%. BagItToday is offering a free Reebok Watch for Rs. 2599.

In my opinion, the site is great and everything is great except the fact that the whole idea lacks mass appeal. It might not be as profitable for the investors. This is because a very small part of the population acutally shops for luxury brands. And those who do, always like to do it at the malls. A very small percentage of them will go online to buy such a product. Discounted pricings might be an attraction, but then you can only offer discounts on few items for a limited number of sales. You finally need to make money out of it.

Net4 which is one of the few publicly traded internet companies in India issued about 16 lakh equity shares at a cash price of 88 rupees per share. This values the company at about 166 crores which is somewhat higher than the market rate of 87.95 and a market capitalisation of 146 Crore (Source: Moneycontrol). It has a P/E of 27 which is excellent during recession. (Infoedge India has a P/E of 35). Net4’s annual net profit after tax is 2008 – 2009 was about 5 crores.

Net4 is an old indian web hosting company which is active in providing customized hosting and content delivery (CDN) solutions, VOIP, E-Mail solutions to larger companies and corporates in India. The company lacks presence in Retail hosting which is still being dominated by large overseas players (Godaddy, ThePlanet , Rackspace). The company owns 7 data centers and is the only ICANN accredited domain name registrar in India. Net4 has two other competitors – Reliance Data Center and Tata Communications. Net4 is especially used by large portals in India to serve content in faster to the Indian Audiences.

The web hosting market in India is set to grow very fast (Both the retail and corporate market). As the internet usage increases, more and more people will be interested to have their presence online in India. Even companies like Rackspace have interested in setting up data centers in India. I can see a big market and a big potential here for new players to join in with innovative ideas. Though, this space seems to be too competitive for smaller players / startups to even survive.