Sales, Social and Tech

I was invited to the media launch of Microsoft Office365 on Wednesday to get a taste of the Microsoft cloud offering for its Office applications. Microsoft had four customers to present their experience of using Office365. Most of them liked the familiarity of the Microsoft Office interface without having the complexity of hardware configuration or software download. All they needed to do was to get onto a browser and you are Office ready. Using Office on the cloud makes good economic sense especially if you do not have an IT team as a department.  Leave the IT to Microsoft and focus on the real work in the office. I remember working in a PR agency where they had their own servers to handle the mail exchange and data storage. However, the problem was that once the server goes down, there wasn’t anybody really trained to pinpoint the problem and find the solution. The reset button may come in handy in this case but sometimes it work, sometimes it didn’t. The outsourced IT...

While I was waiting for the train at Raffles Place MRT, I was surfing on Facebook via the iPhone. When the train arrived, I was still glued to Facebook on the iPhone. As I boarded the train and it moved into the tunnels, I entered a comment to a friend’s status update. Then it hit me. I am in the tunnel heading north and that would easily meant I was entering the 3G deadzone. But wait, I managed to enter a comment. Checked the status bar and Starhub 3G was at full bar. Singapore telcos were given a deadline " to provision 3G internet speeds on SMRT's existing underground network by end July 2011”. Starhub has not officially announced it but it seems that the telco is on track to meet the deadline.

I have been visiting a couple of spas lately to look at their Facebook Pages and found that many of them face stagnant Fan growth. With the number of Facebook Pages increasing exponentially, it isn’t surprising that even when you put content up there on a regular basis, organic fan growth can still go stagnant now because your content can be easily buried by other status updates that appear in the fan’s news feed. The biggest problem with Facebook Pages is that it is extremely hard to find. Big brands have easier recall rates but the small brands are the one you most like forget when you reach home. Here are some tips for small consumer business looking to overcome stagnant fan growth. Tip 1: Get a username for your Facebook Page When you set up your Facebook Page, you will get a long url of words and numbers. There is no way anybody will remember them. Search us on FB will be quickly be forgotten. So if you have 25 fans or more, go to http://www.facebook.com/username to g...