Sales, Social and Tech

(Disclaimer: Blogger's Treat is my own project, working in conjunction with Podfire.sg .) Michael , Sabrina and me will be launching Blogger's Treat , with Podfire and her other shows, this Wednesday at Geek Terminal around 6pm. I bet most of you have questions, so let me provide you with the answers here so you can concentrate on the food on Wednesday if you going to the launch. What is Blogger's Treat? Blogger's Treat is a under 10 minutes videocast that features blogger's favourite and popular food haunt. It is created by bloggers, for bloggers and with bloggers. Each episode you will see a guest blogger bring the Blogger's Treat team to somewhere in Singapore to eat. As you can see, the "with bloggers" element is very strong here as we often let the guest blogger determine where their favourite food haunt is. We are limiting ourself to kopitiams, food stalls and small cafes because of budget. Hopefully, we can bring bloggers to high end restaurant...

Bloggers might have new job opportunities in the future if Steve Rubel prediction of new digital careers. Wrote Steve , Google is downplaying SEO and increasingly rewarding those who create quality content. This includes the pros/media, amateurs and brands. Blended Search - which integrates noteworthy videos, news and images with web results - is winning over users, according to Jupiter Research. Net, as Jason Calacanis notes, there is a big market for people who know how to create or cultivate compelling content that pulls in people. To that end my employer is starting up Edelman Studios - a virtual content house that will identify online talent and pair them with brands. Many in the Hollywood community, ex-journalists and advertising/PR creatives will orient their careers in such a direction. Don't be left behind. There's plenty of need here. Most corporations I have met have great websites and are information packed. While these information websites were nicely designed, it ...

The reason is simple yet it is one of those that get overlooked most of the time. More and more people are spending their waking overs on the Internet. Sometimes they spend close to eight hours a day online. Because more audience are spending time on this medium, isn't the Internet medium the best place to capture these audience's attention? Before we jump to the web2.0 scene, most companies are still fully prepared for their web1.0 play, but most importantly how they can mix the two with their traditional PR practices. Say for example a company launches a product with a press conference and get maximum coverage. It gets coverage on the dailies. How long will that awareness be felt? On day perhaps. How about a monthly trade magazine? Maybe for a month. Getting coverage on the print is great. I still support print as it is still more mobile and always on compared to the Internet medium. However, finding a product or a brand is more difficult to do it in print. I was looking out ...

(Disclaimer: Riverbed and Trident are not clients of this blogger.) WAN Optimization and acceleration, what's that? A fresh IT journalist or a PR person new to the network space will definitely be stunned by the two network lingo. The following cartoon by Trident and Riverbed gives a broad overview why WAN Optimization and acceleration are important to the network guys, CIO included. The reason why I am highlighting this video is that this is one of the ways that the network providers can make of use of content that they have built over the years to include in their new media approach. At in a couple of keywords and SEOing, whenever somebody searches for explanation of WAN Optimization and acceleration, this video will surf as a quick introduction and some self promotion of the product. However, if there are journalists or clients who needs some refreshing on the topic, just send them the link to the video.

I was at the IDC Direction 08 panel yesterday to hear what four "prominent" bloggers have to say about the blog-o-sphere. The four bloggers on the panel saw Kenny Sia of www.kennysia.com , Daryl Tay of Unique Frequency , Victor Issac Cheung of Hong Kong Phooey and eM of thecompulsiveconfessor . The question that interest me the most was that about corporate blogging and whether it can be cool. Daryl responded that corporate blogs paid too much emphasis on the message and control. Readers, who wants to read these corporate blogs, want to know the human side of the company. Kenny Sia gave examples of a cool blog and an uncool blog. The cool blog belonged to Google whereas the uncool blog belonged to Microsoft. He found the Microsoft blog like an another online advertisement but he was able to identify with the people on the Google blog. "Corporate blog is cool if only the company is cool," said Kenny. I personally don't blame corporates on wanting to control the...

In the past year I have read the papers about blogging teachers who are posting all the wrong things. However, an innovative teacher, April Chew , is using a blog to update the parents of what their kids are doing. In a simple activity of posting letters, the teacher took a quick video and post up it up on the blog to show parents this simple lesson in letter writing. Kudos to April Chew for using new media tools to update their busy parents!

Media is a very powerful tool. Like fire, it can be a good servant but a bad master. With web2.0 tools giving the public to have the tools to create their own media, the empowerment can be overbearing. Take for example a "Andrew Teo" who recorded his shouting match with a taxi driver. Did that mobile phone give him the perception that he had the superiority over the taxi driver? In the end of the day, the greater power of the YouTube community and forums proved to be more powerful than this "Andrew Teo". Their comments made "Andrew Teo" the aggressor instead of being the victim which he portrayed himself to be. "Andrew Teo" felt too much of the heat that he took down, not only the video clip, but the whole channel. The irony of it is that in the clip, "Andrew Teo" dared the taxi driver not to run away, but "Andrew Teo" ran away from his community.

It only took me 2 mins to start this blog but I know my own blogging style. But if your clients was to ask you what style they should adopt, it can be hard to put into words. It easier to put it on slides though as one of my colleague found this interesting slide that shows the various 25 styles of blogging. My suggestion is that you mix and match the styles instead of sticking just to one. | View | Upload your own

One of the biggest ironies of a social media is that it is so easy to start something, yet the difficult part is to continue it. I read from the(new)mediaslut , her 1000th post, that Intel Asia Pacific has launched a Facebook group "What's your oldest working PC or notebook?" I congratulated Elvin Ong for crossing the chasm and starting a group in one of the most popular social networking site yet. However, his question to me was how can he continue the discussion. From this question, it somehow showed the group was started probably with the only short term objective of showing photos of PC from a recent competition in Indonesia and the problem now is about trying to get more content for the group. This is one of the common problems I see traditional PR struggling to gather interest about their corporate blog or Facebook group after posting the initial rush of setting up one. To solve this problem, traditional PR should add elements of of both PR and publishing when engag...