“Silent Salesman”
Really, it’s a old and proven methodology that sometimes too much shouting leads to disaster and a silent but too the point marketing treatment has been winner.
The big dot bubble has started bursting a lot in US & UK. Most of the companies shedding their Heavily paid staff, have cut down the advertising budget, lots of merger and Joint Ventures going on. Even companies like Dell have cut down their employee by 11%. Its high time companies and the so called dotcoms start realising the importance of the content and usefulness of their website and come to basics.
One such portal in India is 123india.com. I know this company when it started its operation from Ballard Estate with minimal investment and a very small office with well-managed staff.
123india.com
This is not a great portal but there are some features which are definitely better than most of the advertisement crazy websites. When it started, I had met a senior person from 123india and he said that they didn’t believe in the flashy advertisements and huge spending. Their first motive was to let first people know that what their site is all about and started giving hoarding advertisements all around the metro cities, once people got to know, they got hits because of their better services. They knew their basics really well hence are still surviving and now has gonna ahead with the second round of funding cleared.
Design
The first instance on looking at the site was that it’s a copy of yahoo. Why not there are lot of copycats on the net but only the best is going to survive. No doubt being a yahoo look a like they needed to justify that they are the best and they did prove because it is anytime’s better than yahoo India. It’s got a very simple design, faster load time and easy to navigate.
Search
123india, like yahoo is not a search engine but a web directory where the links are websites are stored in a categorised manner and gives you really well defined results. Its one of the best web directory in India. At least since last 1 year I have been using this site for all my Indian searches and it has never made be dissatisfied with really appropriate results and that too at a quicker time.
Content
As far as content is concerned they, it’s a one stop website with lot of features other websites provide, Chat, email, clubs, news, egreetings, auctions etc. Like rediff, they are surviving on their own with their own content team with all the sections handled by 123india.com. But still they cant survive solely themselves hence have roped in some good websites as their partners. Though one of their only bad tie-up is Baazee but you cant expect all good things.
Chat
Its using one of the best chat software, (Eshare Expression) which is used by most of the well known sites including rediff. They have quite a good amount people on their chat rooms with around 250 and more members logged in so you have lot of people to chat on.
Email
It does boast of 10mb email space and that too really quite a good features which others provide and it’s pretty fast but not as fast as compared to rediff.com
The best thing at 123india is one userid for everything. You register for chat and you get your email id along with it. Really cool!!
Customer Service
They do have a quick customer service and do try to solve the issue as soon as possible. Though I never had any problems with their site because never failed as far as technology.
It’s a pretty decent site, with very useful features like:
Properly arranged Web Directory
Chat
Email
Yellow Pages
Egreetings
News
Stock quotes
Business & Finance
“I would like to rate this site next to rediff.com and it’s worth a visit. Though it has shown some bullshit sites like Indya, indiatimes, indiainfo that even silent salesman can bring revenue and people do like things, which don’t scream a lot.”
So let all the falling dotcoms learn from this “Silent Salesman”