Sales, Social and Tech

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.

Coca Cola recently implemented a real physical “Like” box at the Coca Cola Village in Israel that allowed fans to “Like” real places and automatically update the status on Facebook. This shows that Taggo, a client of Social PR, is moving in the right direction in allowing brands to identify and reward online Fans offline at a physical venue. Wrote Adland , The implemented these facebook-bracelets at the Coca Cola Village, a watersport, sunbathing, gameplaying amusement park activity-thing for teenagers. When the guests arrive, they are given a ‏ bracelet ID which transmits an RFID signal, which they program with their facebook login. They can then "like" activities and places in the real village, and their actions show up on facebook. Teenagers are driven by vanity like everyone else, so there was a photographer present as well, if you wanted to tag yourself in any given image all you had to do was wave your ID bracelet to the photographer. I recently blog about onl...

The Old Spice viral videos might have been the talk of social media but what does this mean for sales? SymphonyIRI, Advertising Age research , found that sales for Old Spice during the launched of their viral video increased by 30% compared to the year before but dipped 30% from the previous period. Advertising Age also wrote that sales increased by 107% vs the prior year in June 2010 when P&G offered coupons for a “buy one get one free” promotion. What if P&G combined its success on social media and that of traditional offline promotions? The Old Spice Facebook Page has about more than 800K Likes, but how can P&G, using the same ideas of coupons, reward their fans? One of the ideas that Taggo came up with after discussions with clients is that such brands that have booths at the retail stores but don’t own or control the POS can make use of the netbook mobility of identifying and rewarding online Facebook Fans offline at these booth. And instead of these tradi...

Thanks for the compliment.. or he/she could be looking for Aaron Nicholas Khoo..

Maybe Singapore government agencies should look at creating fun as part of their campaigns rather than take top-down approach to promote a cause. Might get better respond..

(Brad Lau has responded on his blog about the incident at http://bit.ly/c3X7uy ) Bloggers often lament how brands do not respond or take too long to respond to online comments. What happens when the tables are turned? Brad Lau, blogger of Ladyironchef, came under fire after it was reported that he demanded a free meal from a Singapore restaurant. I blogged about the issue in an earlier post . The article itself highlighted comments from the restaurant owner but Brad Lau was not quoted because he did not respond to the email. His Facebook profile has remained silent and a friend left a status to ask about his disappearance. The apparent suspension of the blog has only added to questions about his disappearance. The silence is deafening and has turned the possibly mild mannered Brad into a blogging thug. Should Brad Lau be responding to the accusations? In the traditional PR world, this is call crisis communications. Whenever a brand faces a major crisis, it is often recomm...

Has success of a local food blogger gone to his head that he demanded for free food from a local restaurant? Yahoo’s FIT TO PRINT blog wrote about Brad Lau, blogger of Ladyironchef, demanded for free food when he visited Private Affairs with his group of friends. Wrote FTP , The blogger in question, Brad Lau, who runs a food blog called Ladyironchef , had informed the management on Friday that he would be coming down to review the Sunday Brunch promotion. On the day itself, he and his partner came down at about 130pm, followed by his two other companions, each of whom came down half an hour apart.    According to Private Affairs’ operations director Ross Valentine,  the four of them had brunch until 430pm, even when the restaurant’s official brunch hours was from 1130 am to 330pm. Brad and his partner also enjoyed two glasses of champagne each. When presented with the final bill of $435, the blogger initially refused to pay and repeatedly told th...

(Update: We have made several changes to Taggo since this post. Please visit the following sites for more details. Besides ez-link, we now use mobile phone numbers as an ID, it can be anything now, email address, credit card number, etc.. Case Study:  Charlie Brown Café Fan Club Benefits beats UOB credit card discount 115 - 18 Video of how Fans can register for Fan Benefits:  http://youtu.be/jRoN-DfOM6Y ) There are many posts about the benefits of using Facebook Pages for your businesses, but none about the benefits of identifying and rewarding online Facebook Fans offline at the point of sale. Here are some of the benefits that Taggo.me and I have learnt from businesses and fans when pitching to them about about the Taggo.me solution. 1. Turn customers into fans at the point of sale There are many fan pages out there and the success of the fan page is often determined by the number of fans that “like” the page. However, most Facebook pages have very little fans ...

There is a Tumblr site that looks to gatekeep the existence of Digital Life. Called digitaldeath.tumblr.com , the site nitpicks on the use of the English language and the lack of technology suaveness of the writers and editors. The site scans clips of Digital Life to share with its readers and plays the external unofficial role of sub-editor. Wrote Digital Death , I am hoping to see this year the Dell Streak which is a 5-inch Android tablet and Hewlett-Packard which is rumoured to be building a tablet based on a Web operating system. ” Source: Grace Chng’s ST blog on “Popping the Tech Tablet” (whatever that means) Apart from the overall terrible sentence structure (no punctuation, equating a Dell product with an entire company leading on into a sentence fragment), our favourite Digital Life editor calls Palm’s WebOS “a Web operating system”, which is a bit of a misnomer at best. Insiders are already trying to identify who this blogger is. Rumours have it is that ...

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. ...

(Note: Taggo as mentioned in the post below is a client) In my discussions with active Facebook users, almost all of them are a fan or liker of a Facebook page. However, they are finding less reasons to be fans of pages or choose to unlike fan pages because they see no benefits from being a fan. However, when I ask if the brand could identify you as a fan of their fan page at their stores and reward you because you are a fan, their respond was vivid. One said it is akin to being VIP shopper of the brand, while one even said that she might convert to the brand even if she prefers the competitors. Brands are also trying to reward fans but the methodology used is very Web1.0. Take for instance the Friso Fan Page. Friso offer fans page with a buy 1 get 1 free promotion. However, the steps needed to receive the promotion looks very old school. First, the fan has to print out this form and fill in the details. It is quite ironic that the person is a fan but yet he/she still ...

If you are a Facebbok user, I would like to find out from you the things you all look for in a fan page? Your comments will be useful for a client project.

Some brands have started fan pages to go “social” and to gain brand awareness among these fans. However, once fans start using the fan page as a channel for customer service, some of these brands freeze at the thought of dealing with these complains.  More likely, the department that created the fan page must be from marketing and not from customer service. “Not my problem,” would most likely be said marketing. Parature introduced a Facebook app which allows the brand to properly manage the complains as opposed to deal with them, wall post by wall post. From Parature , Facebook page administrators can enable fans to search your knowledgebase, submit tickets and chat with customer service agents - all direct from Facebook using Parature Chat, Ticket and Knowledgebase. And your customers can even share their service experiences with their own Facebook friends. This could be a good solution to prevent social media fiascos like what happened on HTC and Tiger Airways ...

As Singapore celebrates the sporting future at the upcoming Youth Olympics Games, I thought it would be important to also look back at our sporting greats. Here is Fandi Ahmad’s gaol against Inter Milan in 1983. What made it great was it was against Walter Zenga.

If you have an infant crying for milk or water on the SMRT trains, you are wised to put down your parental instincts to immediately care for your infans’ needs of giving them their fluids. This is because eating and drinking in SMRT trains can result in a fine of SGD500. SMRT advise that you step out of the train at the nearest station, go to the control station and ask for permission to use their most comfy staff room to give your babies their much needed fluid. You have to do this even if the the next stop is a few minutes away and with your babies crying out loud. A wailing baby crying out of thirst and hunger is so much more accepted than spilled milk. If you find this ridiculous, so did Siew Kum Hong. Wrote Siew , The clip showed an SMRT inspector asking at least two different adults, each with a baby or toddler in a pram who was suckling from a milk bottle (although one of them appeared to be drinking water not milk), to essentially cease and desist. In fact, the ins...