Sales, Social and Tech

List out your end-game goal before you start your social media campaign. Image Source:  http://ideaswar.com .  It is very easy to start your social media campaign on any social networks, but the problem often lies is most starters do not start with an end goal in mind. Starting a social media campaign should be like starting any marketing campaign and most marketers start them by asking themselves - "What do we want to achieve from the campaign?" If the goal of the social media campaign is to get more customers in-store or to your online store, what are you, as a brand, committed to doing to get them in-store or online.  Once you get them in-store or online, how are you going to track if the customer came from your social media campaign. If customers do not originate from your social media marketing campaign, should you consider improving it or drop the campaign and look at alternatives. If the goal is to share updates and content with your captured audience on...

PRecious Communications and Mynewsdesk released a survey of media and bloggers on how PR practitioners can make their press release better. One of the suggestions given to the PR community was to provide visual links that do not expire. From the  Brands and Media Engagement Survey Report 2013 report, Engaging Visuals. 73% think press releases should contain more than just text. Images should also be made easily accessible to the media, with links that do not expire over time. Here are some suggestions for PR professionals on how they can do so. 1. Use Flickr to store highres photos Now that Flickr is free with 1TB of storage data, there is no reason to start storing photos on Flickr and sharing the photo links in the press release. One other advantage of using Flickr is the automatic resize feature. As such the trick here is to upload the high resolution best quality photo on Flickr. If it is print media, the journalist can select the original version. If it is for onl...

A Facebook acquaintance have highlighted in a Facebook post that the OPT OUT option of Starhub's SMS ad maybe not be working as intended. It seems OPT OUT only works when one complains to the Starhub twitter account. Wrote on Facebook, I have received one SMS dated 27 Jun 2013, and if you look at my opt out at 76333 dated 27 June 2013. By right, I should not be receiving any more unsolicited SMSes from Starhub. However, I have just received another unsolicited SMS from Starhub today, despite I have already sent them an OPTOUT. Either they are lying about their optout option, or they are just continuously spamming me with their offers by paying lip service to a customer's complaint of opting out.  If you are seriously going to implement "Do not call" registry, please get something like this as simple to be enforced.   It was only after a complain was made and tag to Starhub Facebook account was the user removed from the Starhub SMS marketing database. H...

Mosquitoes are attracted to the carbon dioxide that humans emit. So what if you could trick the mosquitoes' radar to sense carbon dioxide? Kite Patch from SPARKHOUSE on Vimeo . Singapore's National Environment Agency should start looking at this Kite Patch to combat the dengue epidemic.

Nokia announced the availability of the Nokia Lumia 625 which will have a bigger screen but with a small price with the other smartphones. It will also support 4G. Rumours have it that that the Nokia Lumia 625 will cost €220 or about SGD370, without contract. If based on Singapore contracts, the telcos here might charge you around SGD50 or nothing for a value contract. This will be challenge for Nokia. Will Singaporeans even grab the phone at this price or free for a contracted plan? But Nokia needs this to succeed as the low-end Symbian phones will be phased out around this time. The jury is still out there for the two 90s juggernauts which somehow lost out in the age of the touchscreen. From the Press Release, Fun, Fast and Affordable: Nokia Unveils Lumia 625 Espoo, Finland - Nokia today announced the  Nokia Lumia 625 , an accessibly priced 4G smartphone to help people see more of what they love. The Nokia Lumia 625 delivers high-speed entertainment to a wi...

I am not ashamed to say I support Mr Tan Kin Lian as a presidential candidate because I believed in what he stood for. And when Mr Tan posted his "misadventure" with a thermometer app, I did shake my head in disbelief that he did that. Source:   http://www.mrbrown.com/blog/2013/07/we-could-have-had-him-for-president.html Thinking twice, there could be a possibility that Mr Tan misunderstood how this app work. Most  thermometer app take data from various weather stations to display the temperature on it. Yes, the technology savvy will do a #facepalm when they read the post and mrbrown's post demonstrated it perfectly. Wrote mrbrown , "Maybe the former Presidential-hopeful didn't realize he needed to upgrade to the Pro version of the app. Then his iPhone would not only measure temperature, it would also measure current PSI (PM2.5 included), tell you if you are having your period, and cook instant noodles. Good thing he didn't try to measure boil...

When it comes to Facebook marketing, getting "Likes" has become a numbers game and you could easily get LIKES in a heartbeat via Facebook Advertising. The real challenge after the "Likes" is to engage these "Likes" on the Facebook Page.  Source:  https://www.facebook.com/business/engage One way to engage Fans is to  "Post at least 1 to 2 times per week" so that the brand stays top-of-mind and relevant to the people who liked your Page".  Facebook uses the metric "People Talking About This" to show the number of engaged Fans.  Wrote Mashable about the importance of " People Talking About This ",  People Talking About This is an important metric because it emphasizes interactions beyond an initial Facebook Like. Pages that create posts that fans enjoy will benefit. When people interact with pages in ways that generate stories, pages reach an audience beyond their existing fan base. Users benefit, too...

Google received some bad news about its social network, Google+, from Gigya - only 2% saw Google+ has the key destination for shared contents. In comparison, Facebook scored 50% and Pinterest scored 16%. Source:  Gigya This low percentage score means that its users are not sharing content on Google+. No content on Google+ means there is no reason for its 359 million users  to visit Google+. Google should relook at how it is going to make this social networks popular. My suggestion is that it should start from the merchants' angle rather than from the end-users' point of view. Why do I say this? From my daily engagement with merchants on the ground, merchants, big or small, are starting Facebook Pages first and web-sites later. Discussions often start with "How many likes can I get" and no longer "How many visitors come to my site?". A Cafe Celebrating Likes Than Visitors to the shop... Merchants are starting Facebook Pages first because it e...

(Contributed By John Gower, a writer for NerdWallet .) Creating a Facebook brand page is a popular way to reach out to users, especially because so many people already use Facebook. However, just setting up your brand page isn’t enough to fan the flames of user engagement. You need to find ways to stoke your brand’s fire and light up your user base. There are lots of ways to build your brand using Facebook — and many of them are actually quite simple. Check out these five ways to spread your brand using Facebook. #1 Know your audience . You can’t spread your brand if you don’t know whom you’re trying to spread to, so do a little research. Facebook is informal, so posts like “Tell us about yourself,” “What is your favorite product of ours?” or “What kind of things do you want to see on our Facebook page?” are an appropriate way to find out who is following your brand. Once you have a baseline idea of who your users are, make some posts and see how they do. If you don’t get t...

Most Gmail users in Asia would have woken up to a new Gmail inbox with tabs that filter your emails accordingly. You can get your old Gmail inbox back into two simple steps. Step 1 - Click the gear box on the top right hand corner and select "Configure inbox". Step 2 - Uncheck the boxes "social" and "promotions". Click save. Viola. Your tabs are going. Say a big welcome back to your old Gmail inbox.

In my last post, I wrote about how a user sent her her laptop to Lenovo service center for faulty speakers but instead got a $1000 bill for faulty motherboard . However, before it was admitted to the service center, the laptop was found to be in working order in front of the customer service. The good news is that the head of communications of Lenovo has picked up the blog post and is now in direct contact with the user to get the issue settled. Kudos to him. The bad news is that an exchange of emails between this Lenovo service center and the user's techie husband has uncovered a deceitful sales tactics to upsell services that may not be needed by the users. Wrote the user's husband, "Let's just say that Lenovo seems to have an upsell policy. Apparently after my emails got angrier, they clarified that the mobo "likely to die" vs "died". So I said please send me email to detail which part likely to die, and how soon, so that maybe I can jus...

How reliable is Lenovo after service care in Singapore? This question was raised by a group of corporate communication folks when one of there members sent in her Lenovo notebook to service faulty internal speakers, but was billed $1,000 for a  Lenovo service center in Singapore was a hot conversation topic among corporate communications folks when a user send in her Lenovo notebook to service faulty internal speakers but was billed $1,000 to replace the motherboard. Wrote the corporate communications professional,  "Lenovo's service centre wants 1k to replace my laptop's system board which died during diagnosis... or so they claim. And I sent it in only to get the faulty speaker fixed, a $60 job. Anyone else had a similar experience?"  In the group discussion, the Lenovo laptop was tested to be working well.  Should a user bare the cost of replacing a faulty motherboard when it was in the hands of the service center? A Lenovo user recently al...