Sales, Social and Tech

Economists will guide you to Singapore’s GDP figures and unemployment figures to tell you when the economy is improving. I have my own indicators though. You will know Singapore’s economy is recovering when… 1. …the number of coffee treats to Ya Kun reduces and StarBucks increases Ya Kun - The Toast That Binds... Kinship, Friendship, Partnership via kwout Ya Kun is Singaporean’s cheaper alternative to Starbucks. A cup of coffee will only cost you about SGD1.20. At Starbucks, a normal coffee will create a deficit in your wallet by about SGD3.80. However, some will suggest  you go to the nearest KopiTiam (coffee shop in Hokkien) for a SGD0.80 cuppa. 2. … Massage palour ads occupy 2 full pages or more in The New Paper Singapore daily tabloid, The New Paper, usually feature ads from Massage Palours all over Singapore in their classified sections. Most male Singaporeans know that these Massage Palours offer “Happy Endings” under covers which costs more than th...

I was in reservist training for the last week and thus explain this blog lack of updates. During the training, a CEO of a IT consultancy firm came to me and told me that he has been asked by clients on the possibility of him doing Public Relations for them. The discussion that followed covered mainly what Public Relations is and isn’t. 1. Public Relations is not Press Relations I didn’t find it surprising that the CEO kept asking me if I knew any of the IT journalists in town. I do know a few but that relationship can only get you so far. My answer to him that it was still vital that the designated spokesperson has something interesting to talk about before approaching the journalist. Opening an office in Beach Road is only going to get you less than one minute of time with the journalists at the pitch stage. 2. Guaranteed Interviews and Media Coverage The CEO was constantly asking if the PR agency can guarantee interviews and media coverage if his clients engage the ...

Small steps for Social PR: Kids help daddy get a job…

Hmm...

It seems Singapore startups are being misinterpreted by the media. For example, Leonard Lin felt he was misinterpreted and misrepresented in the local media. Leonard has since commented on the interview. The interview can be found here . SGEntrepreneurs has written a post on how to deal with negative media coverage. However, I feel that positive coverage can be achieved during the interview itself. Here are some tips from PR side. 1. Set an objective for the interview It can be quite exciting when a journalist call up for an interview. The journalist would have set in place the story angle for the interview before the call, but it is important for you to set an objective. For example, you could set your goal of the interview from your start-up point of view is to increase the awareness of your solutions and services. 2. Create three key messages In preparing for the interview, you should consider drafting three key messages that you want to see in print. These...

I was with family and a friend at the Esplanade and when I looked across th Coast park.    It started out as a quarter rainbow… …and soon developed into a full arching rainbow across the sky. Popular Singapore blogger, Mr Brown, also saw the rainbow and described it as “Like it's a promise of something good coming our way”. Technorati Tags: Rainbow , Singapore

(Addendum: You can now get alerted on the latest trailers on Apple at http://twitter.com/itunestrailers/ ) "Radio DJ announces on air that she 'understands' Twitter, and finds it stupid anyway. Methinks she's the stupid one.” Tweeted Sparklette, aka Veron . I can’t comment much on this statement as I did not hear of it but here are some reasons why you should use Twitter. 1. Get breaking news! Many online media organisations are using Twitter to break their news. Some examples include ChannelNews Asia ( http://twitter.com/ChannelNewsAsia ), B2B IT online site ZDNET ASIA ( http://twitter.com/zdnetasia ) and Interactive Marketing magazine ( http://twitter.com/MarketingEds ). 2. Follow your peers No man is an island and Twitter allows you to reach out beyond your circle friends. You can look for peers in your same field of interest on a global level. I visit http://justtweetit.com/ to look for fellow tweeters with similar interests. You can click on their...

  I used to work at Hardwarezone many years ago and one of the competing sites then was VR-Zone. Hardwarezone.com has since been acquired by Singapore Press Holdings but VR-Zone is still going strong. How do they compare in terms of stats? I found this new interesting analytics site, www.quantcast.com , that gives more than just numbers. From Quantcast, The Quantcast audience service is a new and innovative solution that enables the direct-measurement of traffic and audience, empowering both publishers and marketers to operate in a more connected way through the strategy, buying, implementation and evaluation phases of a campaign. In a major advancement over existing panel-based measurement methodologies, Quantcast's breakthrough solution couples machine learning with massive quantities of directly measured data and a variety of sample-based reference points to deliver detailed audience data in real-time for all forms of digital media including websites, video, audio, ...

I have thank this tip to my operations manager who told me a few hours ago that it was possible to sort highlighted rows in Excel 2007. I went like “WOW”! Sorting highlighted was one of the biggest challenges for me when I was at Cisco Systems. I was repeatedly asked then on how to sort highlighted bars and found it was Microsoftly impossible to do so. As excel sheets were one of the Office tools that ruled Cisco Systems with the endless reporting, I felt that it was necessary to share this tip with you. Above is your standard excel table and rows. You notice that I highlighted row 4. Let’s say we want to move this highlighted bar to the top. Right click on the highlighted row and go to the “sort” option. Select “Put Selected Color on Top”. Viola! Your highlighted row is now at the top. Assume now that I have a few rows highlighted and I would have to sort by the highlighted blue bar. Highlight the selected table and Right click on the highlighted row and ...

The bailout of the current credit crisis will roughly cost One Trillion dollars. How much is One Trillion dollars? Source: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

I have been asked a lot what is the ROI of social media. Maybe I was thinking of how to link traditional methods of measuring ROI in social media and thus unable to give a proper answer. However, reading Scott Monty’s blog post of “leading by example, I would now say the ROI of social media is one satisfied customer who happen to blog, tweet, etc about your brand. Wrote Scott , Coming down from the ivory tower every once in a while and interacting with your customers is an important aspect of any business. It's so important not to lose touch with the people that actually touch and use your products, to hear what they have to tell you and to be open about receiving feedback. It's a constant challenge to do that on a large scale, but the individual points of input cannot be discounted, for it is these people who will be so moved and so affected that they tell everyone they know about it (or call a television station or make a YouTube video about it). Locally, Co...

Found this video off mrbrown.com which gives a clear understanding of the current crisis of credit we are in. The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo .

I been asked by several close friends, with traditional PR experience, on giving them tips about how to incorporate Social PR into their traditional PR portfolio. It seems more and more agencies and even in-house positions require new consultants who join them to be both knowledgeable in both dealing with traditional media and the social media space. Before I continue, a fellow twitter shared this analogy about social media that I felt it is important to share. There is this story about a king asking a group of blind men to feel different parts of an elephant and described that to the king. However, each blind men was only allowed to touch just one part of the elephant. There are many versions to the story but let me use the Buddhist version. From Wikipedia , "When the blind men had each felt a part of the elephant, the king went to each of them and said to each: 'Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?' [2] ...

As most of our friends know, my wife and I got married in December 2007. We made plans to go to Australia five months later. That plan never worked out as I found out my wife was expecting a month later. As first time parents, wife was concerned about herself and our child she was carrying. Hence, we didn’t go for any honeymoon. As my wife isn’t working now as she is waiting to apply for PR in Singapore, it is harder for us to spend on luxuries as the current uncertain times meant that we cut back on luxuries. Nuffnang recently launched the “Come Walkabout in Australia and have an Unforgettable Adventure!” where you have to blog about the type of experience you would like to have and share the great offers on www.australia.com with 10 friends and stand a chance to go ‘Walkabout in Australia’ for two! The contest website can be found here . The Nuffnang contest website eventually led me to www.australia.com . Australia.com is a website from the Tourism Australia. ...

Are you looking to publish content on the Apple iPhone network but don’t know where to start? A friend of mine, Michael Logan, whom I had the honour of communicating with during my MediaConnect Asia days has launched Kanchoo to help publishers distribute their content on the Apple iPhone networks in 10 minutes or less. Kanchoo is the mandarin word for publish. I initially thought that Kanchoo was for the publishing of iPhone applications but after looking at the video, I realised it was for content distribution. I have since asked Michael for a beta account to publish this blog on the iPhone network and will share with you how hard/easy to use Kanchoo. Hopefully, it can also help to bring in more readers. You can visit www.kanchoo.com to find out more about the application, or if you would like for a direct introduction, just drop a comment with your contacts below. Publishers going on the iPhone is very common these days. Singapore’s Channel NewsAsia recently announce...

Two events in the past week, barcampsg3 and blogout!09, saw a new trend in communications at events emerging that could be things to come for events targeted at bloggers – The Twitter #tag brigade. Twitter is a site for microblogging under 140 characters per post. It works well for events as it allow attendees to post their thoughts or report on the event instantly and share it with their followers. Twitter also allows for communication between attendees and speakers who are also tweeting on the same event. #tag or hashtags is an adaption from mIRC days where you type in join #channel to join the channel. In Twitter, #tag helps to group the conversation of the event or topic and makes it easier to search on search.twitter.com. Web applications like twitterfall.com and monitter.com makes it easier to group #tag tweets to make it seem that a “live” conversation is taking place.   Why is this new trend significant? 170 tweets for #barcampsg3 on event day   ...

Joel Postman, of Socialized PR and author of SocialCorp, will be in Singapore at Blogout 09!. Blogout 09! is organised by The Digital Movement. Joel has left 10 questions about social media on his blog and has asked readers to respond. Here are my  thoughts and I hope to do a video interview with Joel at Blogout 09!. The “conversation” is not taking place on corporate web sites. Where is it happening? Unfortunately, the conversation is still happening in the traditional space. I feel that there is a social media generation gap in corporations in Asia. The top management is still unwilling to take that first step and those at the bottom  In Asia Pacific, its even worst as many here wait for direction from the top before even wanting to suggest taking the first step of the online conversation by listening. How much more “micro” will content get? Can we get by with fewer than 140 characters? Can you communicate anything of substance ...

At six months, Anson has started to make his first steps in crawling. Though his first crawling steps are rather unstable and some can say it isn’t crawling, but I admire his determination to reach his targeted object at all cost. We put a empty wet tissue plastic box which caught his eye and he kept crawling towards it. He still didn’t know how hard the floor can be and as parents you know what might happen. As Anson was about to fall to his left, hitting the ground hard, my hand instantly reach out to break the loud thud of his head onto floor. Anson seem to like being in push-up position. Wait till he has to do that for National Service when he is 21..