Sales, Social and Tech

A friend asked about setting KPIs for one of the LinkedIn group that the department created to link to a corporate portal. The department has set up a LinkedIn page and are looking to use it to promote and drive members to their community portal. As such, the question posed was “What would be a good KPI measurement for this LinkedIn page? How about having two levels - # of members on the LinkedIn Page and # of signups at the community portal? Finally, what would be realistic target number? Is there any industry benchmark on the number of members a corporate LinkedIn page typically gets?” Given that this was a corporate B2B LinkedIn group, setting a generic number count as a KPI would be good for the ego but not for the productivity. As such, I advised the following: 1. Set KPI to the number of decision makers in the Group. As LinkedIn is more corporate and b2b than other social networks, I highlighted that it was important for the team to come up with a list of a who’s who of...

(Update: In the press release, we mentioned the RFID transit card which can be used as the preferred tap and go card. In Singapore, the RFID transit card refers to the ez-link card or NETS Flash cards. Other countries like Hong Kong uses the Octupus card which can also be used.)   Taggo today announced the launch of its patent pending technology that empowers brands the capability to identify and reward fans of Facebook Pages in the real physical world. This allows brands to launch promotions on their Facebook Pages which can be executed immediately at a physical venue.  At the same time, brands can launch in-store promotions to turn customers into fans. “Facebook Pages are now an essential part of the brands’ social media campaign to reach out to their customers. With Facebook Pages sprouting out by the hundreds per day, it is essential for brands to differentiate their Pages from competitors. The ability to identify and reward their online fans offline in their sto...

The National Heritage Board announced a tender recently for “a digital media agency and an online agency to conceptualise it's Explore Singapore! 2010 campaign”. Wrote Marketing-Interactive , The social media campaign will include NHB's existing platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Yesterday.sg and aims to drive traffic and interest to Explore Singapore! 2010's events/activities virally. According to the tender details, the campaign aims to clear misconceptions and stereotypes about museums and heritage attractions, and reduce its intimidation. The campaign is expected to run from 20 November to 12 December 2010 and will involve NHB museums and Museum Roundtable members. As such, is driving traffic and interest to the Singapore! 2010’s events/activities more important than actually getting online visitors offline to the venue? Online to online conversion is easy to track but the conversion rate has usually been low. Even Google was quoted to say that ...

The founder of local sports blog, Redsports.sg, has written an open letter on his Facebook notes to the Singapore Democratic Party to stop taking stories from the blog without permission. Wrote Leslie Tan , founder of Redsports.sg, By putting my name and the name of redsports.sg up on your site at the head of the article, you make it seem like I contributed the article to you willingly and am part of your news gathering crew. I never was, am not, and never will be (especially after this incident). I wish to tell you in no uncertain terms to stop taking any redsports.sg stories from now on without permission. This is the second infringement. The first time, we put down to an honest mistake. The second time is just dishonest. Leslie was referring to the two articles, first on the YOG and the second on the brawl at a recent S-League match. The article on the S-League match has since been replaced with another story from Mirror.co.uk, but still infringes on the copyrights...

One of my clients will be running a movie marathon in October and I was thinking how I could have some fun with the movie posters. It has been awhile since I used Animoto and they added templates to help with the animation of the photos almost instantly. It is so much better than having a pdf of movie listing. The photo video montage will work well for those in the property business looking to present their property to overseas buyers. Why send photos or documents when you can send a photo video montage! The videos can also include a 10 sec video which the agent can talk about the property.

Found this interesting Youtube video on how Air NZ responded to a negative comment about its alliance with Virgin Blue. Quite an interesting way to respond to somebody who chose not to listen to your side of the story. Sometimes the silence can  be evening more deafening.

The National Heritage Board is offering free entry to Students, Teachers, NSFs and Senior Citizen. But what about the 2,784 Facebook fans on the I Love Museums page? One of the biggest problems that agencies and marketing department faced in their Facebook campaign is to identify and reward their online Facebook fans offline. The Facebook page also does not allow for easy identification of fans. If you click on the “Show All Fans” in the page, you get a whole list of names and many more pages if you fan base is huge. The easiest way is to upload a JPEG of a form that allows fans download to exchange for the free entry. Again, the problem of filling forms arises and there is no certainty that the person giving the form is a real form. The National Heritage Board requires students to produce their EZ-Link card to gain admission for free. Taggo.me also makes use of the EZ-Link card to identify the fan. Take a look at your EZ-Link card now and you can see a UID number on it. ...

After the last post on DBS attempt to connect on social media via Twitter, I received a comment from Chris Ng whom I found to be the Vice President, Group Strategic Marketing & Communications at DBS Bank on Linked-in. I replied to Chris that the DBS should look at the 3Rs of crisis communications which is inspired by a book, Drop The Pink Elephant by Bill McFarlan, I read a few years back. Bill wrote that in any crisis communications, the brand, via the spokesperson should show Remorse, Reason and Remedy. Today DBS Group CEO Piyush Gupta apologise with a message to bank customers. A video message to client, via Youtube, would have given it more weight in show more sincerity. However, it seems a written letter would have suffice for the bank. Did DBS Bank follow the 3Rs as suggested? (All quotes are taken from http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_552965.html .) 'I am writing to personally apologise to you for the inconvenience caused b...

(Updated post - DBS apologise with the 3Rs – Will social media bite? ) It was the bluest Monday for DBS/POS Bank in its entire banking history when more than 1000 of their ATM and online banking services were taken offline due to a software upgrade an outage (PR announced that it was down due to software upgrade, but the outsourcer, IBM, later claimed it was an outage). So on that Monday, DBS decided to sign up onto Twitter and post a 140 characters one-liner onto Twitter to post a one liner to inform the Twitterverse of the down time. Everybody knows that if you just create a new account on Twitter, you would start off with 0 friends. How would you be able to inform the Twitterverse if you start with 0 friends? DBS Bank did something smart to insert the #dbs and #posb and that probably drew some attention to this account. However, the effectiveness of the tweet was lacking as it drew only 28 retweets. As of this posting, DBS Bank attracted 274 followers. A letter to T...

You know the cliché, “A photo is worth a million words”, yet it took a blogger to identify a rather unglamorous photo from the billion dollars Marina Sands. MrBrown, a popular Singapore blogger, was searching for the press release of the opening of the Marina Bay Sands Sky Park when he noticed a photo meant for the press to be not fit for print. Wrote MrBrown , I don't think you want the media to download a full-res photo of your fancy garden in the sky, with your construction workers still in it, do you? You can even see the luminous safety vests they are wearing and the hose or measuring tape still on the ground… The photo could have been edited to crop out the construction workers before launching it on their media list. Or the photographer could have asked the construction workers to move out of sight for a second or two. With newsrooms cutting cost and staff, the lack of the sharp eye from a photo editor might lead to this photo being published. When t...

I had a very interesting strategic discussion with a creative agency on a tender pitch this afternoon about how we should approach an existing Facebook Fan Page and introduce a new branding to these fans. We came across an analogy, which if sounds blasphemous I apologise, for Facebook Fan Page with that of Church. And when you think about it, it can explain why some fan pages pass or fail. For this campaign, the branding we proposing will be religion where the we look to make the fans followers or add new fans to the community. Obviously, Facebook Fan Page is the church where the fans congregate. The brand owner/s are the sponsors. There can be one sponsor or many. Alas, the social media consultant is the.. drum roll please.. the pastor! This struck a chord with me. Many brands look to themselves as the religion. The Fan Page is about them, the brand. As such, unless your brand is already as big as cult like Apple, you are then more likely to have the loyal followings alrea...

(This is dedicated to Kate212 who send me a question on my role in New Media) It took me awhile to define the various channels for New Media and after many revisions, I may have finally narrowed them down. First, there is the online awareness channel that is made up of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing . The next channel I have developed is digital content. This consist of creating vidcast, podcasts and digital photography. Yes, they will be put online for sharing but I am on the current crusade to push these content on a social media release format which can be used as that new press release or pitch to the media and bloggers. Interestingly, there have been an increase in demand for vidcasting recently as many are looking at the visuals to tell the story. The job includes scripting, storyboard, the recording itself and the final editing. The third channel looks at the social networking sites to increase the awareness of the brand. Usually, B2B cu...

OK. You have signed up for pitchengine.com to create your first social media release. Cutting and pasting the standard press release sounds very easy, but there could be improvement. Let me start with your photographs. One of the advantage of the Social Media Release format is that you are allowed to “paste” the photos of your spokesperson on the release. One thing I realised is that there can be at least two to three spokesperson in your press release. One being the corporate spokesperson and the other could be external spokesperson. As a PR agency, your are most likely to put up the photo of your client’s spokesperson. It should be a no-brainer that if the release came from company ABC, the photo attached in the social media release should be of spokesperson from company ABC. However, without a caption in your photo to highlight who the person is in the photo, some might wonder who he or she is. You don’t need photoshop to enter the captions. Use paint...