Equilibrium is...dis-Equilibrium

Vedanta stock tumbles 8% on mining ban!

Mining in India took a different course with the ministry of environment and forest withdrawing permission to Orissa Mining Corporation (OMC) to extract bauxite ore in Kalahandi and Rayagada districts of Orissa. Vedanta Aluminium will have to continue sourcing raw materials from outside the state to run its plant. 

According to the earlier plan, OMC, a government of Orissa undertaking, was to exclusively supply bauxite ore to Vedanta's alumina plant, a subsidiary of London-listed Vedanta Resources. Now with Vedanta's Orissa plant continuing to source raw materials from outside, it will have to shell out an additional Rs 1,200-1,700 per tonne of raw material on account of logistics cost, a senior company official said. As a result of this decision by the ministry of environment and forest, Vedanta Resources stock on the London Stock Exchange tanked nearly 8% in intra-day trade and was trading at £18.83. Read the complete article here>>

Advertising to the crowd

With regards to advertising, perhaps the crowds aren't so wise after all:

The centrality of advertising to the new digital hive economy is absurd, and it is even more absurd that this isn't more generally recognized. The most tiresome claim of the reigning official digital philosophy is that crowds working for free do a better job at some things than paid antediluvian experts. Wikipedia is often given as an example. If that is so - and as I explained, if the conditions are right it sometimes can be - why doesn't the principle dissolve the persistence of advertising as a business? [...] A functioning, honest crowd-wisdom system ought to trump paid persuasion. If the crowd is so wise, it should be directing each person optimally in choices related to home finance, the whitening of yellow teeth, and the search for a lover. All that paid persuasion ought to be mooted. Every penny Google earns suggests a failure of the crowd - and Google is earning a lot of pennies.

via aworkinglibrary.com

Direct mail is my favorite form of drip marketing

Someone asked me the other day: What is your favorite form of drip marketing? Does email drip beat out direct mail, or is a drip-direct mail campaign still preferred? I told him: I personally opt direct mail as a form of drip marketing though it cost more than sending emails. Drip marketing usually entails promotional offerings, thus getting a discount in the mail or some other goodness and benefit will spark the recipient interest or curiosity (thus achieving the objective of drip marketing, keeping the brand in the forefront of prospects mind). With mail in recipient's hands they are most likely to read its contents. With the advent of spam blockers and all kind of fire walls it makes it harder for the information being transmitted to reach the recipient inbox and not thrown in spam or blocked altogether. However there are ways to overcome this challenge by wording the subject in such a way so it's not thrown in the spam folder. May I say, you have to be as artful as a wagonload of monkeys!

US Senator Charles Schumer calls Infosys 'chop shop'

American senator Charles E. Schumer calls N. R. Narayana Murthy's IT company a "chop shop" - a place where stolen cars are dismantled and parts sold separately. Meaning: the Indian company is taking away American jobs. Infosys is naturally distressed at the label, stating it has 1,300 citizens and permanent residents working in the US.

via timesofindia.indiatimes.com

"One bad experience for one unlucky person can lead to endless problems with how a brand is presented online. If you don't think that's the case, then you've obviously never had to deal with a Ripoff Report. There are right ways and wrong ways to handle every situation, but more often than not, responses to negative publicity, especially online, fall more into a gray area."

- Greg Habermann, via searchenginewatch.com

"Just because McDonald's sources its potatoes locally doesn't mean any other ingredients on the menu come from the neighborhood, or even the state. And while McDonald's brags about its potatoes,which might only be local because of coincidence, fast food chains like Burgerville are making an actual effort to source local, sustainable ingredients. So yes, McDonald's potatoes might be grown locally, but that hardly makes the chain a beacon of fast food sustainability."

via fastcompany.com

Government makes social spending mandatory for central units

From now on central public sector undertakings (CPSUs) have to mandatorily allocate a specified percentage of their annual net profits for meeting corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainable responsible business (SRB). The department of public enterprises has issued comprehensive guidelines on corporate social responsibility for central public sector enterprises (CPSEs), an official release said today.

Under the guidelines, CPSEs have to create, through a board resolution, a CSR budget as a specified percentage of net profit of the previous year. And, this is mandatory. The expenditure range for CSR in a financial year is 3-5 per cent of the net profit, of previous year, in case of CPSEs having profit less than Rs100 crore; 2-3 per cent (subject to minimum of Rs3 crore) in case the profit ranges from Rs100 crore to Rs500 crore and 0.5-2 per cent in case of CPSEs having a net profit of more than Rs500 crore in the previous year.

via domain-b.com