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I am Starting a Digital Marketing Club and Here’s Why

By Deepak Kanakaraju in Events —
I am Starting a Digital Marketing Club and Here’s Why

This idea has been brewing in my mind for a while and slowly it will come to fruition. I want to create the largest and the most exclusive digital marketing club in the country. Defining the WHY of it is very important for its success because the purpose is what drives us. And I want to take a moment to address the WHY in this blog post.

We humans are social animals. We stack ourselves up against an established social hierarchy. Like minded people get together and form a small social group. Back in the days before the internet, it was very difficult to find like minded people across the country. If you were interested in a niche topic, there wouldn’t be enough people in your city or town to actually make a club around it. Even if they existed, it is difficult to find them without a tool like the internet.

So the famous and active clubs were city based clubs. Almost every city has a several decades old club named after the city itself. Bangalore Club, Salem Club and so on. And there are Lions club and Rotary clubs. I have been part of these clubs and they are not that exciting. You might find one or two like minded people and the rest are little bit… (I don’t know what to say, but you get it!).

In the era of internet, it is 100x easier to connect with like minded people. But the ease of connecting has also restricted most of us to an online medium where we just use text to communicate… most of the time. Audio and Video are available, but we are too shy to put ourselves online because someone who is hesitating to troll you offline would comfortably destroy you online. And also there is a permanent record of what you’ve said that will exist, for who knows how long?

A video that you post on YouTube and Facebook, could be there for another 1 million years… or forever. With quantum storage technologies evolving where you can store bits of information at an electron level, a 1mm x 1mm chip can store 1 petabyte of data (I just made it up… but you get the idea).

Online mediums bring us together but it can never connect us on a deeper level. The relationships that we have with people would always be superficial and it can never lead to serious business partnerships and friendships. One of the reasons I moved from a Tier 2 city like Salem to a Tier 1 city like Bangalore is because I could meet people face to face and build serious relationships. That’s how I found my co-founder. That’s how I found mentors. That’s how I found industry friends… and that’s how I built my dream team.

There is immense value in connecting two people. If I know two people who might be like minded and if they don’t know each other, just the act of introducing one person to another might create tremendous value. Who knows, these two people could become co-founders and create a billion dollar company in the future. And if the introduction didn’t happen, for all you know, that billion dollars worth of value just wouldn’t exist in the future.

If you think about it, most of the changes would have happened in your life because you met someone who changed the direction of your life forever. I have plenty of examples like that from my personal life. My life as of now just wouldn’t be possible unless I put myself out there to have met new people who became a part of my life.

If you are reading this on my blog, that’s probably because you are at least a little bit interested in the topic of digital marketing. And this is just an excuse to connect with people. We all look forward to like minded people to make business partners and friends. And we will use “digital marketing” as a reason to bring together people in the real world.

A lot of things are yet to be crystallised for the club to take shape… but here’s the idea on its first stage of evolution:

  • Get at least 10,000 people to register who show interest in joining a digital marketing club.
  • Each city will have a chapter, and people can join the club in their city.
  • Bigger cities will have multiple chapters.
  • The first digital marketing club will be created in Bangalore, more will follow as we learn how to run it perfectly.
  • Each club will have a president and vice president and they will be elected. Every 2 years there will be an election and a new president will be elected.
  • If the club membership goes more than 20 people, we might have a treasurer also who will take care of all the finances. They are also responsible for making the finances public for 100% transparency.
  • The club will run under a foundation / trust and all the money collected in membership fees will go to the pool to be spent back into the club.
  • As we expand into several cities, we might have a yearly event where all the members of all the clubs will come to one city for a mega-event with prominent speakers and noteworthy entertainment activities.

These are the ideas I have for now. And I believe that this is insanely difficult to execute, and it is going to be a group effort with a lot of volunteering activity. Let’s see how it goes. I will keep you posted on updates.

– Deepak

P.S. Email me at deepak@pixeltrack.in if you are interested in becoming a part of this initiative.