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 Thursday, November 16, 2006
From highly realistic and interactive product demonstrations to lively online communities; online marketing as we know it is taking on a whole new look. Whilst the region has typically lagged behind in Internet growth, this is a trend that is quickly changing.
The number of Internet users in Asia Pacific is expected to top 560 million in 2009, with penetration rates for countries such as Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand around the 70 per cent mark, and South Korea leading the pack at 90 per cent (according to PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2005-2009). A majority of these connections will be on broadband signaling more efficient access and greater convenience and possibly higher subsequent adoption.
If Singapore’s numbers are indicative of the more mature markets in Asia Pacific, people are spending almost as much time online as they are watching television programs and definitely more than on other forms of traditional media such as radio and print.
Increased Spending on Online Advertising
According to Carat’s Global Market Update (June 2006), Asia’s advertising expenditure is growing faster than the global rate – 6.4 per cent versus 5.7 – and is expected to overtake Europe’s in spend terms by 2008. This phenomenon can be attributed to the fast expanding online advertising pie. In Korea, the Internet will be the third biggest advertising medium this year after television and newspapers. ....To be ContinuedEarl
Excerpted from the November issue of AdAsia
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Tuesday, November 14, 2006
"I really like the process of peeing. It aids in purging
the unnecessary and bad stuff from the system. When done in a precise and on
the mark fashion, will surely leave anyone with a sense of relief and good
feelings of having just been through a great experience.”
In line with World Usability Day which falls today, the 14th
of November 2006, I have decided to commemorate this meaningful day with a piece
on, what else, Usability.
Right, let’s get on with the show.
Let me get one thing straight first. I have a major gripe
when it comes to this topic ‘Usability’. I really hate this term. It explicitly
implies a 'user'. The more we use the word ‘usability’, logically our mind
starts to encase around the concept that the target audience of whatever we
develop are good ‘ole ‘users’. Is it just me or does anyone else find it insanely
odd how the industry labels your target audience and clientele the same way
society labels a bunch of crack addicts? Users, Schmu-users, I say.
Besides, there’s that other issue with the term ‘user’. The
term ‘user’ is so stripped of emotions and thoughts. The word ‘user’ is so void
of past experience, curiosity, logical thinking and analysis. And the more we
use the term ‘users’ and ‘usability’, the more we believe the ‘user’ (you made
me use the 4-letter bad word again!) is indeed so. Just some faceless entity
somewhere out there.
But people (well, most that I have encountered thus far at
least...) are not zilch in those departments. And as technology proponents, we
really need to acknowledge this. We need to understand and realize that behind
all the fast-paced advancements in the field of Internet technologies, behind
all the bells and whistles that Flash animation and video streaming bring, all
those fancy widgets and applets, all those funky graphics and feature-bursting web
applications, that at the very end of the day, people, yes people, are the ones
who are going to interact with your systems.
Hence rather than naming this field ‘Usability’, ‘User
Interface Design’, ‘User Experience Design’ or what not, I instead propose that
the powers that be join me in propagating this new acronym I have coined for
this respectable and highly important field of Internet development. I have sat
down and thought long and hard to derive this acronym and without further ado,
I give you PEE. It stands for People Experience Engineering of course, what else
could it be.
Whatever we develop, we develop with people in mind. We need
to engineer a powerful, emotional experience which people can relate to and
respond accordingly in order to be effective and meet the business goals of our
clients. We need to engineer the experience such that peoples’ needs too are fulfilled,
be it using imagery, interactivity, content and/or whatever technologies
currently at our disposal. We need to always engineer the perfect experience
for PEOPLE. We need to PEE.
In the early ‘90s till recent years, projecting your
business onto the Internet has always been a ‘first-place’ rush basis. So many
businesses flocked to jump onto the Internet bandwagon, in order not to get
left behind. That was back in the hay day. As time went by, many businesses
found themselves floundering in their online forays. They wondered what went
wrong, why didn’t the market respond to what they had presented to the Internet
community? Many simply faded away, with the deluded belief that the medium was
just too new and their target audience was simply not ready for this brave new
front.
Sadly, this couldn’t have been further from the truth. If
they had only put more thought into PEE-ing, their online presence might still
be around today. Whilst the in-thing back then was “Let’s get it up NOW”,
businesses today seriously need to rethink their online strategy. They need to
formulate their plans with this new mantra: “Let’s now make it WORK.”
So this is going to be the premise of what I will be talking
about in the coming weeks. I hope to be able to share some of the PEE-ing
concepts I have come across both on projects I have worked on as well as from
general reading from books, websites dedicated to this field as well as other
resources. It is my hope that everyone should learn to PEE. It’s really not as
difficult as it sounds; all it takes is a little conscious effort.
So remember to PEE regularly, for the consequences of not
doing so can be potentially damaging. Kidney and bladder infections have been
known to result, though still significantly not as damaging as a bad web
experience.
Arthur
Technorati Tags:
usability, human, interface, engineering, design, web 2.0, content, architecture
Friday, November 10, 2006
The statistics on social networks are fascinating: My Space alone drives 2% of traffic to shopping and classified sites. Financial, travel and communication sites are all seeing traffic growth from social networking sites. The research shows that social networkers are more likely to rely on peer reviews and word of mouth than on the latest ad campaign and they spend 25% of their income online (vs 17% for non networkers).
For marketers, traditional online advertising within social networks has proven to be wanting. Integrated strategies through branded micro-sites, peer reviews and forums are the tools showing results.
Marketers are slowly but surely are moving into niche marketing, within the suburbs of the social networks. While this sounds good, (especially in Asia) marketers will need to grapple with a plethora of issues both within their organizations and the new consumers they market to. Within the organization, they will have to deal with possibly conflicting marketing initiatives, logistics issues and stakeholders who want to see more immediate results (For the corporate cat: a print ad in a leading paper is probably easier to comprehend than your product persona’s having 8,000 friends on My Space). With consumers, marketers will need to be prepared take feedback head-on and work out how to work with and reward buzz generators while helping them maintain their credibility.
It is going to be exciting to see how marketers navigate this new space. I’m expecting new technology and measurement tools to emerge that will help marketers justify and execute their strategies in this area.
Have a great weekend ahead! Joanne
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Tuesday, November 07, 2006
I was hearing out Rachel’s business plan, running through the business goals and objectives. In essence, she was seeking to create an online community where people could swap and meet items with other community members in their area. Anything from collectibles, used clothes, old toys and what not, such an online community service could be eagerly in demand she said. After nailing down some concepts, we started to go into more specific details. The first logical step to building the community is to build the website in which most of these activities would gain a ramp up from. As the website is not meant to be the online front of a brick and mortar shop, Rachel did not have any organization name at hand to be used as part of the domain name for the new website. She did have one idea for an easy to remember and meaningful name though: “How about Goods Exchange? People can register in 3 simple steps and be on their way to exchanging goods with fellow community members!” she chirped enthusiastically. Amid my fits of laughter and her puzzled look at my reaction, I managed to pen down her desired website domain name on the notepad in front of us. www.goodsexchange.com
It took a while for her to get it and needless to say, she was understandably embarrassed but amused at the same time. In case you still do not get it, this domain name can easily be misread as GoodSexChange.com…. Choosing the right domain name can be critical to the success of your website. Your domain name is the only way visitors can find you on the Internet. Obviously you really need to spend more time coming up with the good domain name for your website. Rather than reinventing the wheel, here are a couple of links which might help you along: For those interested, Rachel didn’t use that domain name eventually. This might have or not been a good thing though. Sometimes a domain name such as the one mentioned above could garner the attention of the Internet community if only because it has viral marketing potential (think spreading of the domain name through friends and colleagues due to the humorous nature of the domain name in comparison to the actual services provided by the website). So that may have been what the following web enterprises had on their minds when they came up with the domain names for their sites……or not. Anyways, if you are genuinely interested in undergoing a sex change, here are some links you might find useful: www.comicsexchange.com www.veteransexchange.com www.musiciansexchange.com www.actorsexchange.com www.exoticsexchange.com www.graphicsexchange.com www.homesexchange.com www.kidsexchange.com www.momsexchange.com www.playersexchange.com www.womensexchange.com www.studentsexchange.comI could go on and on...but I'll leave you to do the exploring. Arthur
Technorati Tags:
choosing, domain, url, name, domain name, website, company, internet
With the next round of the console wars reaching its climax
this month, who would have thought that Nintendo would still be a viable player
in the fray. Once the king of the hill with its Nintendo Entertainment System
(NES), it has long been supplanted into third place by Sony and Microsoft.
With what could probably be its last hope to turn around its
fortunes, Nintendo has decided to introduce the Wii as its next generation
console. In my opinion, they have correctly chosen not to take on the Xbox 360
and Playstation 3 by competing on who has the fastest processor or who can
render the most realistic and beautiful graphics.
It seems that the videogame industry has devolved into a
impossible one upmanship on who has the most powerful hardware at that
particular moment. Microsoft, with its Xbox 360, jumped the gun last year and
was the first to enter the fray of the new generation of consoles. Touted as
the most powerful console in its day, the upcoming Playstation 3 by Sony will
soon shoot it out of the water, at least when you compare the spec sheets.
It seems that creating games that are actually fun to play
and easy to pick have fallen by the wayside in the race to be the “biggest,
baddest hombre” out there. I remember the golden age of gaming with my Sega
Genesis and Super Nintendo. Simple 2D graphics with tight and excellent
gameplay that offered hours of fun with nary a need to go to university to
learn how to play.
Nintendo has finally understood this and is going back to
making fun games again. Games that are not made for the narrow and traditional
demographic of teenage and 20ish males. Witness the success of the Nintendo DS,
with more than 21 million units sold, it has managed to reach non-traditional
gamers such as women and older people. It is a brilliant stroke of genius by
Nintendo. Why pour millions of dollars to fight for a slice of a diminishing
pie, it is definitely much better to go for the whole pie where the competition
is not present.
What Nintendo has learnt is a good lesson that many other
companies can learn in many other industries. Sometimes being short-sighted and
seeing a zero sum game in your industry may be crippling a much better strategy
of going for the bigger picture.
Dan
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