Sales, Social and Tech

Judge Richard Posner of United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago suggested that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed. Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch disagreed and even felt it was unbelievable that he had to come up with a post to explain why this was a bad idea. Wrote Erick , Blogs and other sites just take content from newspapers, Posner asserts, but they share none of the costs of news gathering. Of course, that blanket assertion is simply not true. A growing number of blogs, including TechCrunch, do their own news gathering and send writers to cover events at their own cost. But even if we limit the discussion to cut-and-paste sites, the free rider argument still doesn’t hold much water. You can’t be a free rider if you are giving something back of value. A link on its own is valuable. Where does Judge Posner think all of these newspaper sites get their readers? It is mostly through links, not direct traffic. Removing the links would obliterate ...

A recent Text100 survey on Asia Pacific bloggers revealed something that I have all along knew and put into practiced when engaging bloggers – Introduce yourself first to the bloggers first before you engage. Case in point? Read this old post at http://socialpr.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-field-in-socialpr-social-media.html If you are in PR and dealing with bloggers for the first time, you must always remember you are now dealing with the public, not the press. The press maybe used to the mass email but not the public. Put yourself in the blogger’s shoes. Would you like to receive an unsolicited email that suddenly inviting you to attend an event or asking you to blog about it? Even at a networking event, you approach a stranger with an introduction of yourself first before you launch into your elevator pitch. Hence, your first email to the blogger must always have a personal salutation, and an introduction to who you are, how you got the blogger’s contact email and why you a...

Charmaine, a 4-year-old, is suffering from neuroblastoma, a form of cancer that has now spread to her bone marrow and bones. Her relative is helping to raise half a million dollars as an upfront deposit to send the little girl to New York for treatment.   Cynthia, her mother, wrote in the original website at http://www.ourfeistyprincess.com/ I thought over, probably a couple hundreds of times wondering how to write this entry. At the end of the day, I still have no idea what to write. Truth is when I first saw the email sent by Dr Aung on the amount needed to bring Charmaine to New York for treatment, I was shocked. $350,000 is the upfront deposit. I weren’t sure what currency it was in. Sent Jolene and Charlene a text message, ending the message with “I would give up if it is in USD”. And of course, the bad news never ends. $350,000 USD. Half a million Singapore dollars. How would I ever be able to raise this amount of sum? How do I convince anyone ...

I started the Supermodelme.tv and Christabel_SMM fan page to help Andrew Peters increase traffic to the supermodelme.tv site using Facebook. I took this opportunity to volunteer my service as it gave me a chance to experience the advantages of Facebook fanpage over Facebook groups. A lot can be learned from the last month of activities. Fan growth is not immediate   Setting up a fanpage is fast and easy, but getting fans may take a longer process. From this graph, you noticed that it took awhile for fans to join Christabel_SMM fanpage. The first week or so was quite slow with only 14 members. It took lots of interaction to increase the fan base. I am still trying to determine twhat caused the spike of fans on June 18. Is it because the online show has started and many were trying to find out about Christabel? As of writing this post, the number Christabel_SMM fans stands at 371 and this was after I threw out the challenge to fans to get more fans to join this fan pa...

This presentation I found summarised everything I have thought about on how to start a social media campaign. It covers objectives, processes and goals. Very corporate like, but yes, I believe it will answer most of your questions you have about starting a social media campaign. How to create a social media strategy View more Microsoft Word documents from David Griner .

(Update: I was told FB treat facebook.com/aaronkoh and facebook.com/aaron.koh the same. The gist of this post is to highlight whether having facebook.com/yourname is a good or bad thing especially now that is googable.) Many of you might have jumped onto the Facebook vanity bandwagon this afternoon by booking your name at Facebook. I took facebook.com/socialpr instead. Ok I was late. There was only facebook.com/aaron.koh left when I tried. However, somebody at aaron.koh@gmail.com must be having missed emails because I keep getting it into my aaronkoh gmail account. There could be a possibility that same mixed up might happen. So I chose facebook.com/socialpr. Hopefully, somebody who is looking for social pr can across this blog. There are some concerns about having facebook.com/aaronkoh though. I would say if your friends have to google search your name to find your Facebook page, I would question if they are really friends. This means you are going to get total s...

About two weeks ago, I was asked by a friend at Digital Life to contribute an article on interesting Singaporeans who are tweeting. With a blog post on the contestants of Supermodelme.tv tweeting their way to victory, I decided to write something about that. Furthermore, I knew that Joe Augustine was also using Twitter as a channel to promote his podcast so I decided to add him as part of the story. Two weeks now, I received a call from the producer of That’s IT, a digital tv show for ChannelNews Asia, for an interview on social media. I saw this as an opportunity to promote the company I worked for, so I got my boss to do the interview too. During the shoot, I spoke to the producer and asked her if she be interested to interview the contestants of Supermodelme.Tv on how they are using Twitter to gain followers. I highlighted the various models but Christabel stood out as she was the 2nd runner up of Miss Universe 2007. So Christabel will be on TV and she appeared...

It seems the PR agencies here have not learnt how to send bloggers email. Singapore Blogfather, MrBrown, recently got an email invite from a PR agency and he had to give his 140 characters worth.   An email with “Dear Blogger” means that the junior PR executive have BCCed the entire email list of bloggers and send a mass invite out. This is another example of using PR1.0 to do PR2.0 stuff that has gone wrong. Been in the PR field before, I know if you personalised your invites or even pitches to journalists that it might be unappreciated. The number of PR professionals here easily outnumber journalist 100:1 so probably the journalist might not care if you have personalised the invite as yours could be the 100000 invite for the day. Bloggers, on the other hand, are still fine with getting invited, but treat them as how you would like to be treated as a friend, more so if you are a stranger to these bloggers. How would you like to have received an email from some...