Eric Schmidt almost hit the bull's eye when he declared, "[Google] can more or less know what you're thinking about." Ever since we had Google stick in front of 'dot-com,' the humanity has never ceased to reap the dividends of its mind-altering technology. The advent of Google was the big switch after the invention of press by Gutenberg. Its intricately developed and artificial intelligence powered search infrastructure has made it a Know-it-All one-stop destination for all the information hungry masses worldwide. The efficient search technology of Google has an answer for everything in less than a second, rendering those bulky tomes of encyclopedias and almanacs quite obsolete. Professionals and amateurs, housewives and kids all can just 'Google' any query that stirs their imagination or whips up their anxiety. Reliable and fast searches coupled with spell check, dictionary, and calculator as the omnipresent-assistants-without-pay, now finding and mining information on almost any topic has become a breeze! From images, to articles to scientific papers and government documents, Google has it all!

Ken Auletta was prophetic when he exclaimed in his fantastic book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, "We do not search for information, we 'Google' it. Let your computer do the walking! The quintessential search tool has become almost synonymous with the term 'search.' An intellectual revolution of sorts has been let loose by Google making Tom Friedman's (The World is Flat) conviction become a vibrant reality. Google is our best companion today in finding information and knowledge that is free, credible and swiftly available on a multitude of subjects.

The world of media and advertising in particular, has been totally transformed by the online ad-brokering capabilities of Google. The Google AdWords program backed by hard-nosed efficiencies and profound research has emerged as 'the' most effectual advertising mechanism available for small, medium and large-scale businesses today. The Gmail and Google Talk with phone-out utility is something that we use without even a thought for our messaging needs while Google Docs is like a safe vault for all our documentation and collaborative sharing requirements—all in the 'Cloud'! The Google Apps veritably have galvanized the way organization today communicate externally and internally. Corporate and entrepreneurs alike are increasingly migrating their contacts, calendar and email from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail Apps. All this has bettered our strategic interactions and regulated the costs of software upgrades in companies.

There are a number of cutting-edge products by Google like the Google Blogger, Google Chrome, Google Plus, Google Scholar, Google Webmaster Tools, and Google Adsense etc. which leverage our efficiencies in the online space these days. Though, currently Google is busy preparing itself for a mighty battle with Facebook to capitalize the social space and make it a basis for revenue collections in course of time, one thing is certain: Google is here to stay and the Web is really a place to get stuck!

Happy Googling to all of us!
                                                                                                                       Guest Blogger: Sanjay Joshi

The current scenario of B2B marketing and online sales has gone beyond the confines of enticement and persuasion. Contextual information, Gartner maintains, is a crucial enterprise trend of 2011 slated to be a $12 billion global market by 2012. The legendary marketing pundit Gary Vaynerchuk had once remarked, somewhat portentously “Context is the new Content.”
 
The tribe of car salesmen actually provides a stark peek into the world of contextually charged interactions. A successful car salesperson is one who is an avid observer of customer needs. He gauges a prospect’s financial limit by the car (vintage, sporty, economy or luxury) used for travel and introduces various models accordingly. Picking up minute verbal cues and body language hints from his interactions with a prospect, the salesman consolidates the available context to drive a sale.

Just like in Quantum Physics, where the attributes of subatomic particles can only be comprehended in a dynamic context, the world of B2B marketing content derives its engagement value from the user context. The objective of visitor engagement is easily accomplished by a B2B marketers through its contextually aligned content. The ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach in case of web content stunts the possibilities of meaningful and lasting customer engagements.

Customer context gains in importance like never before. The landing page optimization campaigns offer a good instance where context plays a critical role. There are indeed no intuitive reasons for the success of a well-crafted landing page except the fact that the audience was pre-selected and was connected to a site that was meant to be totally relevant to it at that moment.

The swift growth of location-specific services like Gowalla and Foursquare has increased the significance of an individual’s contextual information while using mobile apps. Customized searches on Google are already a reality and news portals are quick to align content delivery based upon visitor location.

The wonderland of a retail store provides one of the most interesting sites to observe the interplay of contextual forces upon buying intent and behavior. These supermarket chains are in fact one of the most controlled ecosystems on planet Earth with shrewd marketers keeping a keen eye on shopper responses and interactions. Disguising themselves as customers they follow visitors in stores recording their reactions and exploiting any available opportunity to recommend a product discreetly.

B2B web context conceptually indicates the situation, framework, environment or background surrounding a visitor’s interactions with a corporate website. It is rather the behavioral framework of a prospect that counts most while harnessing the value of any B2B marketing strategy. Today, prospects have become more knowledgeable and adopt non-linear routes during buying journeys. B2B context provides an individual focus in contrast to the mass-market approach often espoused by businesses.

B2B visitors are an upshot of their environment and never really subsist in vacuum. In addition to location, occupation, culture and history, the customer needs, preferences, experiences and behaviors equally define the online context. Contextualizing the content to each visitor’s situation- social graph, online profile and online interactions offers a straight path to rich customer experiences and positive business results.

B2B marketers can use context information of online visitors in a big way to influence their buying behavior. The key sources of consumer context information available to B2B marketers include a person’s personal/professional information, location, preferences, owned devices and social networking information. Strategic use of such context information improves the quality of consumer interactions and shortens buying cycles. The result of information-driven and qualitative website interactions can impact top and bottom lines of a company. The real success of a B2B website lies in adaptive capabilities to offer users with requisite information without them soliciting it explicitly. The omens are all very true, and context is the new god of B2B marketing.

By Guest Blogger: Dr. Sanjay Joshi

Content may be the proverbial king online. However, qualitative content alone may not be adequate for contacting and nurturing assorted web audiences. The key to effective engagement and conversion lies in, a) the ability to tailor activities to each audience’s particular situation, and b) gathering as much audience profile information as possible. Efficiently fulfilling these two criteria helps an organization generate and render relevant content that wins favor with audiences.

In a paradigm shift today, content is displaced by user context as the lynchpin of online strategy. Engagement with today’s B2B buyer calls for being in the moment, active listening and being relevant with demand generation activities. In the absence of an integrated approach to target prospects with contextual content and consolidating sales efforts in bending moments, prospects are easy to get lost on competitors.

There is no hope of doing perfect research (Griffiths, 1998, p.97). Do You Agree?

Our values and the entire body of knowledge comprising arts, humanities, and sciences handed down to us are revisable. Degrees of improvement, enrichment and restatement are possible in any branch of learning leading to newer insights and various good or bad repercussions for the entire mankind.

Constraints of time, design, sample, methods, control mechanisms and scope often come in the way of realizing a conclusion that is perfect, all-comprehensive and impervious to amendments in the future.

A certain lack or inadequacy seems internalized in the very fabric of the term 'research,' urging all the research-minded individuals, as it were, to scratch, explore and uncover the layers of meaning  pulsating deep within some entity, phenomenon, problem or program of whatever breadth, scale or magnitude.

Is perfect research possible? Well, the answer to the question is often tied to the nature of the activity requiring focused or extensive research. For instance, if a sixth grader is asked to write an essay on the preamble of the U.S. constitution,  then gathering data from some select sources, outlining the key principles, interspersing few relevant examples and synthesizing the details into a logical narrative would serve the immediate objectives of a well-researched essay. However, if a foreign ministry official is called upon to submit a conclusive report on ways to end, avert and predict a nuclear holocaust, no amount of research can be labeled 'perfect' to render the job complete.

The ideal of doing a perfect research seems to be far from easy, particularly, in the case of social, behavioral and fundamental sciences. In such exact sciences, the statistical outcome always varies depending on the sample, its size, environment and controlling factors. Based on the availability and nature of the sample, absolutely opposite results are quite possible on the same theme or topic.

Even in a connotational framework, the terms 're' and 'search' carry the sense of a repeat inquiry—a study that is constant and a never-ending process. This only indicates that the idea of doing or planning a 'perfect research' is pretty unworthy of realization and effort.

The idea of doing a perfect research is also complicated by extraneous factors like personal bias, conflict of interests, data size, data collection methods, study design, inappropriate study procedures, wrong analysis and errors in working definitions or conclusions.

No less important to the idea of perfect research is the concept of validity. To quote Babbie, "validity refers to the extent to which an empirical measure adequately reflects the real meaning of the concept under consideration" (133). Quite often, less-skilled researchers fail to measure what they think they set out to measure. For instance, a graduate developed an interview schedule to determine the health needs of a community. The object was to explore the health needs, however, the interview design was actually finding out the respondents attitude towards health services.

The involvement of less tangible concepts like attitude, satisfaction, or effectiveness makes it all the more necessary to ask as many questions to cover various aspects of the concept and establish that the questions raised are indeed measuring it. It really is not easy to demonstrate validity in such situations (Kumar 154).

The aforesaid discussion makes it plain that the idea of undertaking a 'perfect research' is fraught with many limitations and one cannot help, but agree with Griffiths' statement about the futility of such a research activity.

Works Cited

Babbie, Earl. Survey Research Methods. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990. Print.

Kumar, Ranjit. Research Methodology: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners. 2nd ed.  New
                     Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005. Print.

                                                                                                                           Guest Blogger: Sanjay Joshi