Sales, Social and Tech

(Update: In the press release, we mentioned the RFID transit card which can be used as the preferred tap and go card. In Singapore, the RFID transit card refers to the ez-link card or NETS Flash cards. Other countries like Hong Kong uses the Octupus card which can also be used.)   Taggo today announced the launch of its patent pending technology that empowers brands the capability to identify and reward fans of Facebook Pages in the real physical world. This allows brands to launch promotions on their Facebook Pages which can be executed immediately at a physical venue.  At the same time, brands can launch in-store promotions to turn customers into fans. “Facebook Pages are now an essential part of the brands’ social media campaign to reach out to their customers. With Facebook Pages sprouting out by the hundreds per day, it is essential for brands to differentiate their Pages from competitors. The ability to identify and reward their online fans offline in their sto...

I was looking through at the Facebook statistics of a client and I found that “Live” photos updates on your the wall of your Facebook Pages brings about increased LIKES, Page Views and Photo Views to your Facebook Page as opposed to posting a photo album days after your event is over. First of all, your photo views will obviously increase during the event and trickle in the next few days. With the photos updated as a status, it will appear on the fans’ wall and the friends of these fans will also see it. As such, this results in more unique page views. I would say the unique page views achieved with “LIVE'” photo updates is almost equal to 50% of the number of existing LIKES. With more unique page views, the chances of new Facebook users LIKING your Facebook page will also come naturally. Here, after the posting of the number of new LIKES grew by 300 in total. Updating “LIVE” photos is just making use of what is available on Facebook. Of course, you would want...

The Economist Digital Economy Rankings 2010 reported that, while Singapore is still in the 10 top of its digital economy rankings, the island state slipped one spot down from last year, allowing Hong Kong to overtake 7th position. The reported highlighted that Singapore lost out to Hong Kong in the areas of connectivity, legal environment, and policy and vision. The island state scored better in areas of business environment, cultural environment and business adoption. The report, however, did not go into details for the scores for the individual countries. The report can be found at http://graphics.eiu.com/upload/EIU_Digital_economy_rankings_2010_FINAL_WEB.pdf

The National Heritage Board announced a tender recently for “a digital media agency and an online agency to conceptualise it's Explore Singapore! 2010 campaign”. Wrote Marketing-Interactive , The social media campaign will include NHB's existing platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Yesterday.sg and aims to drive traffic and interest to Explore Singapore! 2010's events/activities virally. According to the tender details, the campaign aims to clear misconceptions and stereotypes about museums and heritage attractions, and reduce its intimidation. The campaign is expected to run from 20 November to 12 December 2010 and will involve NHB museums and Museum Roundtable members. As such, is driving traffic and interest to the Singapore! 2010’s events/activities more important than actually getting online visitors offline to the venue? Online to online conversion is easy to track but the conversion rate has usually been low. Even Google was quoted to say that ...

For some reasons, I got some good shots of the Red Bull team.    

Got a free pass to the Grandstand stands to my uncle. Here are some quick photos from first practice lap.

Cutting and pasting an article from the online version of The Straits Times into your blog or website is as easy pressing CTRL-C and CTRL-V. A website owner did just that and it might result in him SGD749 poorer. Temasek Review wrote that Mr Gilbert Goh, the owner operator of transitioning.org, received a lawyer’s letter demanding he pay SGD$535.00 (Incl GST) being licence fees per article per year and $214.00 (Incl GST) being reimbursement to the legal firm in respect of their investigation fee. I am not surprised by this as the article produced by The Straits Times is a copyright of their publisher, Singapore Press Holding. However, I am slightly surprised the reactions that people have over this. This article came in useful for me as I stopped a client from posting an article about them on Facebook wholesale as I knew it was against the copy rights of The Straits Times. I was searching for the cost, but it wasn’t that easy to find at The Straits Times website or at Singapor...

To LIKE a Facebook Page is the “in” of social media marketing, but what does this mean? The real value is when you, as a brand, are able to bring fans into the store, identify them as a fan and reward them accordingly. It is the identification of the online Facebook user who have LIKED your page that has always been an enigma. But once you are able to identify your friends,  you can let your imagination run wild with promotions. This is what The Camera Corner and Cafe Le Caire are able to do now that they are able to identify the Facebook users who LIKE their Facebook Page and reward them at the store. The Camera Corner has started their promotion activities to bring Fans to the store by giving them a free camera cleaning kit. Once you have your Fans at the store, The Camera Corner can build that offline relationship with their online Fans!   Cafe Le Caire, a Turkish cafe on Arab Street,  has taken another approach to its promotion. Their approach is to get ...

Noticed that there were 10 unique addresses from Burson-Marsteller (SEA) today visiting the blog post on how The Camera Corner identify and reward their fans at the store. If you would like to contact me for a demo of Taggo, my email is at aaron(at)taggo.me.

  From the blog of Aneace Haddad , CEO and Founder of Taggo, BBC was in Singapore this week and did an interview with me on entrepreneurship and the launch of Taggo fan recognition. We did the interview at Paulaner Brauhaus , a German brewery and restaurant that will be launching Taggo October 1st. To get a feel for Taggo, go to Paulaner's Facebook page , become a fan of Paulaner, and click on the taggo me tab to register your Singapore transit card. Taggo then links up all of your Liked pages to that card number so that we can easily identify you as a fan when you are out in the real world. For overseas friends, if you have a Singapore transit card from a recent visit here, you can register now but you'll have to come back and visit again to enjoy fan privileges at Paulaner and other places. ur next goal is to integrate lots of other tap and go cards in other countries.

A friend recently complained how he couldn’t catch up with the all the tweets and Facebook updates from his thousands of friends. I couldn’t agree with him more, but i have used some apps to help me solve this problem. If you have an iPad, Flipboard is the answer. Flipboard turn your Facebook updates and Twitter tweets into magazine content. This means you can read what your friends share without having to worry about the timeline. If you don’t have an iPad, the app I found for the web would be http://paper.li . However, paper.li only turns your Twitter feed into a newspaper format at the end of the day. I see many uses for paper.li and one of them is for brands to use it as a online newsletter. This is even useful if you have linked your company’s Facebook Page to the company’s twitter account. At the end of the day, you just need to send the link to your database, even to those without twitter, to find out about the stories shared by your company and your followers. ...

Come this October 2010, all fans of The Camera Corner Facebook Page will enjoy 20% off TENBA bags and 10% off all camera accessories. How will The Camera Corner identify you as a fan? Step 1 - Visit http://www.facebook.com/thecameracorner and click on Like! Step 2 - Click on Taggo Me tab. Step 3 - Select your ez-link card. Step 4 - Enter your ez-link card number. The number can be found at the back of the card. Click TURN ON . Step 5 - Viola. You are ACTIVATED . Easy right? Step 6 - Count the days to 01 October 2010. Go visit 3 Coleman Street B1-14 Peninsula Shopping Center with your ez-link card and tap at the counter when you purchase TENBA bags and camera accessories. Once you tap your ez-link card, the cashier at The Camera Corner will identify if you are a fan! If you are not a fan, ask the cashier how you can be a fan and enjoy fan promotions! Thank you for being a fan of The Camera Corner.

Singapore politicians are starting to warm up to social networking. Lee Bee Wah, Member of Parliament for Ang Mo Kio GRC, posted her questions for Parliament prior to a seating today. The notes post was up at 8:21 this morning and there were already 2 comments made with regards to question 1.   Wrote Ms Lee Bee Wah , 1.   To ask the Minister for Education in the recent balloting for admission to primary schools (a) how many schools have to conduct balloting in Phase 2C of the admission exercise; (b) how many children gained admission to the school of their choice through the parent’s volunteer scheme; (c) how many children gained admission to the school of their choice through their parent’s donation to the school; (d)  has the Ministry any plan to fine tune the current system such as giving priority to those who live within 500 metres from the school. 2.   To ask the Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports with the screening of ...

"Of all the items on the menu, soup is that which exacts the most delicate perfection and the strictest attention." Auguste Escoffier

Steve Jobs is violently against porn for the iPhone and iPad, but it seems Microsoft may have other ideas. Photo is from techcrunch.com . Original photo has since been deleted from the Flickr account of the Microsoft employee who took this photo. Photo was taken with a HTC Evo running on Android. This photo was part of a parade at Microsoft to celebrate the availability of the manufacturing version of Microsoft’s new mobile OS. Part of the parade also saw the funeral march of the iPhone and Blackberry as a taunt to signal the arrival of the iPhone and Blackberry killer. Strangely, Android wasn’t part of this funeral march.  While this float might have been in jest to Steve Job’s “no sex in iPhone or iPad”, it could lead to possible misinterpretation. Parents might choose the iPhone over the Windows Mobile 7 phone or Windows Mobile 7 users might be sterotype as mobile sex addicts. As such, it could lead for consumers to stay disassociated with the new Microsoft mobil...

The founder of local sports blog, Redsports.sg, has written an open letter on his Facebook notes to the Singapore Democratic Party to stop taking stories from the blog without permission. Wrote Leslie Tan , founder of Redsports.sg, By putting my name and the name of redsports.sg up on your site at the head of the article, you make it seem like I contributed the article to you willingly and am part of your news gathering crew. I never was, am not, and never will be (especially after this incident). I wish to tell you in no uncertain terms to stop taking any redsports.sg stories from now on without permission. This is the second infringement. The first time, we put down to an honest mistake. The second time is just dishonest. Leslie was referring to the two articles, first on the YOG and the second on the brawl at a recent S-League match. The article on the S-League match has since been replaced with another story from Mirror.co.uk, but still infringes on the copyrights...

This is too long for a tweet, and too short for a blog post. I call it a tumblr. Speaking of tumblr, it seems the post this blog made in August about a tumblr that is critical of Digital Life has made that tumblr tumble. It has been a month since a post has been made. In blogging, that’s a very long time. Who killed the Digital Death blogger?

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism, gave a speech to his incoming class of journalism students at Science Po in Paris with advice on how to prepare themselves as the new media generation. Perhaps the new generation of PR can learn from these tips too. Said Jay , Typically when people like me—a professor of journalism who is deeply involved in the digital world—advise people like you—students just starting their careers in journalism—we say to you things like: You need to be blogging. You need to understand search engines. You need to know Flash and perhaps HTML5. You need to grasp web metrics like Google analytics. You need to know how to record audio or edit video You need to “get” mobile. ("Mobile is going to be big!") And all those things are true. They are all important. But I want to go in a completely different direction today. Ready? You need to understand that the way you imagine the users will determine how useful a journalist ...

The Nokia account for both Singapore and Malaysia is up for grabs. Wrote Marketing-Interactive, Nokia has confirmed that it is officially holding a re-pitch for its public relations account for Malaysia and Singapore. The final phase of the competitive review is scheduled to kick-off between late September and early October. According to Hazel Abu Samah, marketing manager for Nokia, the exercise is going to involve multiple agencies. To date, the brand has invited three PR firms to participate in the pitch for its PR business including incumbent Text 100, who has been on the account for five years now. Though social media is more than just Facebook, but with close to 8 million users in Malaysia and 2.4 million users in Singapore, it is rather surprising to find that Facebook Pages of Nokia for the two countries relatively low. The Nokia Singapore only has 421 Facebook users liking the page and the Malaysian counter having a decent 2,335 likes on the Page. If one of th...

What motivates a Facebook user to LIKE a brand on their Facebook page? A survey by ExactTarget and Co-Tweet showed that up to 40% of Facebook users surveyed would like to receive discounts and promotions. The top six reasons mostly included motivations like “freebies” and updates on “future sales”. (Image from http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2010/3882/facebook-users-like-brands-for-discounts-social-badging ) The survey, however, found that the sales conversion to be rather low. Wrote MarketingProf , However, "liking" doesn't always lead to buying. Among Facebook users who like at least one brand, only 17% say they're more likely to buy after liking that brand on Facebook. Most promotions by brands on Facebook pages are most similar or repeats of what is being offered to a normal customers. For example, some brands just post a newspaper ad targeted at the masses and say this is a special for Fans. Another problem is that most promotions on...

One of my clients will be running a movie marathon in October and I was thinking how I could have some fun with the movie posters. It has been awhile since I used Animoto and they added templates to help with the animation of the photos almost instantly. It is so much better than having a pdf of movie listing. The photo video montage will work well for those in the property business looking to present their property to overseas buyers. Why send photos or documents when you can send a photo video montage! The videos can also include a 10 sec video which the agent can talk about the property.