How We Work : Blog

...Continued from part 2

Getting Up to Speed

 

How do companies effectively tap into online marketing in the face of such rapid growth and multitude of options and choices?  Start by getting to know your target audience – the Web 2.0 user.

 

Web 2.0 is here, be it as a marketing buzzword or more formally defined by Wikipedia as “a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users”.

 

For marketers, it is crucial to take note that Web 2.0 users are active participants who demand greater control and transparency.  From blogs to social networks, we are seeing a clear shift away from vendor-produced content to user-generated content, customers moving from passive information receivers to active participants.  Where websites used to rely heavily on sales and marketing to drive traffic, we now have lower customer acquisition and retention costs, as a result of effective and powerful word-of-mouth.

 

Working the Internet to Your Benefit

 

Publisher and Internet guru, Tim O’Reilly, made a number of insightful observations when describing technical design principles of Web 2.0.  Two of his observations can be applied to marketing to the Web 2.0 consumer.

 

1.      Data is the Next Intel Inside

Competitive advantage comes from having unique data.  Look at Amazon.com, which took its original database from the provider of the ISBN database.  Amazon enhanced the data so that today it is the primary source for bibliographic data on books globally.  Marketers are always relentlessly collecting data but this data needs to be properly managed and augmented so that it can be used to build richer user interactions.

 

2.      Users Add Value

 

Get users involved and connected to the brand.  Shoe designer John Fluevog has been getting brand enthusiasts to submit their own designs for his brand of shoes.  He posts the entries on his company's website and gets visitors to vote on their favorites.  He makes and markets the most promising designs.  He terms it "open source footwear".

.... to be continued

Earl

Excerpted from the November issue of AdAsia

Technorati Tags: online marketing, online advertising, asia, marketers, strategy, web 2.0, internet, campaigns,
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Throughout the course of my working life, I have come to realize that one of the most important things in getting anything moving is motivation. Motivation represents a measurable increase in both job satisfaction and productivity. The motivated worker does his job better and likes it more than those folks who are not so motivated. I met up with a close friend recently for drinks and as the night wore on, he began to lament the plight of his working life:

“Hey Art, I feel like I’m stuck and not going anywhere. I had thought leaving the old company and taking on this new role in XXX would have stirred things up a notch and made me noticed….but I’m still the guy who gets passed on. Damn it.”

In between burps and sneaking glances at the voluptuous lady sitting two tables away from me, I decided he needed some cheering up and thus so put on my motivational speaker hat and started to spout the first things that came to mind.

You see, I have had the pleasure of knowing Jesse for close to three quarters of my life, and I pretty much know what he is about. He has always been a quiet one. One who simply goes with the flow, easy going and introverted.

He simply nodded his head when I proceeded to tell him what his problem is.
“You need to form your own opinions man, you need to stand up for yourself and stand by your decisions. You need to speak up and not be afraid of ridicule. Don’t keep saying yes, don’t keep letting things slide. Take control, grab the bull by the horns and quit letting it always turn around to kick you in the nuts.”

This week, on a somewhat parallel track, I seek to be an emotional and motivational compass directing countless men, women and children towards their potential and possibilities for personal growth at the workplace, success and inner peace. I shall attempt to dip my toes into the murky depths of motivational speaking, hoping that the ripples that resonate would be able to reach your ears. **

Oscar Wilde once said:

“Most people are other people.

Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions,
their lives a mimicry,
their passions a quotation.”

A seemingly simple sentence which yet holds so deep and profound a meaning.
I have found this quote to be extremely quoteworthy. It has come to define who I am as a person. Too many of us go by in our daily working lives without forming our own opinions, our own ideas, and our own points of view. We are too caught up in thinking what other people would think of us, that we relegate our thoughts, our ideas and our opinions into the back of our minds, never to see the light of day for fear of ridicule or non-acceptance. We have failed to understand there is no right point of view, or wrong point of view, there is only a personal point of view. We have failed to comprehend that a good idea is an idea that actually happens and that if an idea is not taken up and used as a solution to a problem it has no value. We have failed to pick up that our thoughts make us who we are, and not just another clone in the endless sea of repressed and afraid minds who simply nod or shake their heads in unison, depending on which way the current flows.

Take a look into the mirror today; is this how you look like?



If so, you might want to change your look today ... wool's out, chiffron's the in-thing this season.

By the way last I checked, Jesse got fired from his job. I heard from a reliable source it had something to do with grabbing his boss’s toupee and kicking him in the balls.



Arthur


*All names, places, events and information have been changed to protect the identity of everyone concerned.
** Or it could just be that I have nothing more intelligent to say this week with regards to PEE-ing.
*** No toupees were harmed in the making of this entry

...Continued from part 1

 

Are Marketers in Asia Responding to the Trend?

 

As the market grows, online advertising has been aligning itself quickly with what people do on the Internet.  The top online activities pursued by Asians include information search, email, communications like instant messaging and entertainment (especially music and gaming).  In line with this, search advertising is gaining market share on traditional display advertising. Advertisers are also tapping into the burgeoning gaming market.  For example, in China, Coca-Cola is sponsoring an online basketball game and McDonalds has partnered with a local gaming platform GOQO in a promotional push.

 

With more people getting online and spending more time and money online, some insightful marketers are definitely leveraging the trend and including creative and innovative online components into their campaigns.

 

Motorola took it a step further and launched a few mobile phones in China last year without using traditional media channels.  Instead, it hired two college students from Guangzhou who had become famous among the Internet community with homemade videos of themselves lip-synching to Western pop songs.  The phone manufacturer’s online marketing campaign centering on the two lip-synching to a Back Street Boys hit garnered a tremendous response.  A related music competition saw dramatic new phone sales and visitors casting more than 1.3 million votes to decide the contest winner.

 

Online Marketing as a Long-Term Strategy

 

Microsoft understands the importance of the Internet for relationship marketing.  The company previously focused its developer outreach in Asia through offline events such as user group discussions and training sessions.  This was both manpower and resource intensive.  Feedback was not necessarily channeled and disseminated efficiently and events were often perceived as one-off campaigns.  In 2003, they set out to build a portal known as MSDN Connection that allowed the regional Microsoft team to maximize manpower, achieve consistency in campaign management, eliminate duplication of effort, capture developer profiles, fine tune programs quickly and most importantly drive engagement with the developer community through targeted campaigns, membership incentives and personalized online training programs.  The success of this relationship marketing program led to it subsequently being implemented in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region in 2005.

 

.... to be continued

 

Earl

Excerpted from the November issue of AdAsia

Technorati Tags: online marketing, online advertising, asia, marketers, strategy, web 2.0, internet, campaigns,
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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 Continued

Earl

Excerpted from the November issue of AdAsia

Technorati Tags: online marketing, online advertising, asia, marketers, strategy, web 2.0, internet, campaigns,
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"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 14^th 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