Sales, Social and Tech

Taggo is currently one of my clients and I am lucky to have the spokesperson, Aneace Haddad, to be open about being interviewed by traditional media and also the by bloggers. I have managed to schedule a few blogs interviews with Aneace and I have been able to execute using experiences from my media, PR and social media out-reach to help the blogger and the client with the interview. For a successful blogger pitch, you need to think of the following 1. Read the blog and understand what they blog about This isn’t rocket science but I had of many stories from bloggers that PR folks fail to read their blog and mass email them. The mass email isn’t a good thing because it shows that the PR is randomly trying to spread the message in hope that one of out of the 1,000 BCCed email send out turns into a successful interview and placement. That’s a success rate of 0.01%. But why don’t make it 100% by identifying the right blogs for your pitches? For Taggo case, we have identifi...

Pardon the long title but it is interesting to find the Singhealth CEO making this announcement through the Ministry of Health’s blog rather than doing it via a press release. Wrote Dr Tan Chee Beng, CEO, SingHealth Polyclinics , We are already seeing increasing public interest in the vaccination. We have set up dedicated phone lines to handle queries and requests to be put on the waitlist. When our clinics finally receive the vaccines, we will set up appointments for those on the waitlist. At $29 nett at the polyclinics, the cost of the H1N1 vaccination is much lower than Tamiflu. It is a cost effective shield against H1N1. It is also interesting to find that while Today newspaper quoted the source from this blog, The Straits Time, strangely enough, omitted any reference to the blog as the source of the information. The announcement was made with a rather personal approach than the standard third party press release format. Are blogs now the Web2.0 Press Release? Would ...

How should you deal with difficult people aka bloggers? This talk by Ajahn Brahm is a reminder, from a Buddhist’s perspective, on how to deal with difficult people. If the food cafe followed the advice by Ajahn Barhm on dealing with difficult people with the food blogger, would the situation have changed instead of threatening the blogger with a lawsuit? What if the email started off with a Thank You note to the blogger for writing a review of their cafe? This followed with an explanation of how the desserts are made and invitation to the cafe to do a food tasting session. Would that result in positive blogging karma?

Beer goggles can make the ugly look very good. But this blogger advise that if you are a guy, you should avoid drinking Tiger Beer. See the ad first before I continue. Ok.. If I see my guy drinking mate as a female after a few beers, I be scared. It is worst that the guy also thinks he can be a hot chick in front of his best guy drinking mate to win that last beer bottle. Tiger Beer’s beer goggle is scary.

Another day in the blog-o-sphere and a food blog was asked by the cafe to remove the “negative” post about their cafe. Kaelyn Ong was asked to take down her blog post of the cafe or else legal actions will follow. The story took on the Streisand Effect with the local newspapers reporting about it and bloggers posting their views about the legal threat. After this story, I believed some companies out there are worried about dealing with bloggers. Actually, this case should be an example on how you don’t deal with a negative review. But how should you deal with a negative review? Here are some tips. Address the issue, not the blogger When you threaten the blogger to pull down the post with legal action, you are reacting to the blogger and not the issue at hand. In this case here, the blogger commented about the cakes and food at the cafe. Was there something that the cafe could have improved on? Was the Nikita cake really too dry for that day’s serving? The cafe has th...

I recently tweet about an agency in Singapore charging about USD3,500 per month to manage a Facebook Fan Page and it got a couple of “shocked” responses. Is USD3,500 too much to pay to manage a Facebook Fan Page? The agency might have a content strategy in place to get the Fan Page moving but it was not highlighted in details. A friend also highlighted to me that a UK agency charges 400k pounds per annum for social media activities. So how much is too much for social media?

There might be some optimism in the air that that global economy is improving and that we could be celebrating the upswing next year. However, the traditional media do not share the same optimism. The publishers might be putting a front, but the journalists themselves are not so certain how the improved economy would be beneficial to them. My recent lunch with a senior journalist and had conversations revolving around the economy and the journalist expressed concerned that traditional media will not benefit from the pending recovery. The concern was that when the economy recovered, it would be quite amazing if the vendor would be willing to spend ten of thousands in a full colour full page ad just for one issue.  But we all know that a successful ad campaign can only work over a series of issues rather than just one off. The senior journalist highlighted that with this amount of capital outlay, the vendor could just look at the digital alternative to get the job done. ...