Saturday, January 30th, 2010
Blog Birthdays
This past Wednesday was Pat’s third anniversary party for Blankanvas (we all need to have blog birthday parties) and needless to say, the woman knows how to throw a party!
I also belatedly realised that January is this blog’s birthday and looking back on my very first “serious” blog post that was posted the day of my first Digital Media Across Asia class and a lot of that wonder and excitement is still there. The unfortunate thing is there hasn’t been a whole lot of opportunities for me to put what I know into practice. That’s something I really hope to change in 2010.
I think 2009 was a great year for the blog. The focus on local content has been working out well and although my blogging frequency has gone down, I’m still pretty happy with the content I’m putting out. I’m very much experimenting with my writing style (you might have noticed some of my more recent posts are much shorter than usual) and it’s something I’ll continue to be doing in 2010.
So embarking on the third year of the blog, I really hope by the time it “turns three” there’ll be a lot more real world case studies and organisations that can be featured here (and in many company’s case study books) as successes we can take into 2011.
[image via Laughing Squid]
Tags: birthdays, blankanvas, blog birthdays, blogging frequency, case studies, digital media across asia, january, local content, pat law, recent posts, turning two, writing style
Posted in Announcements | 2 Comments »
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
Pat has a great post with the same title: how to be a social media junkie and keep your job over on Blankanvas and it inspired me to make a post of my own, though I certainly don’t mean to compare my fresh 3-month agency life with her career!
It took me awhile to figure out that I although my work and personal life crisscross in that the subject matter happens to be the same, there would be no way to manage this on a long term basis unless I turned it into a well-oiled machine, and I finally feel like I have that routine nailed down enough to get close to full productivity at the office.
First, a little bit of what I do. I work in a 100% digital ad agency so thankfully all my client work is online. While I have my fair share as billable hours, as the resident “social media guy” (not guru) in the team, I maintain all of BLUE’s social media presence from the BLUE blog to our twitter account to delicious, stumble upon, Facebook and the like. As with anything, maintaining these accounts and doing my billable work takes time, so this is how my typical day goes:
0745: get up, check my own Gmail for important mails I need to take note of, have a once-over my RSS feed and check in on Facebook.
0900 (ish): reach the office, clear my work email and work Gmail. This includes looking for comments on the BLUE blog, seeing who’s followed us on Twitter, approving friend requests on Facebook and anything else that might have come through those channels.
0945: check in on BLUE’s Twitter account to look for anything interesting, mentions, DMs or tweets worth re-tweeting. I make it a point to try to follow 3-5 new people daily just to expand our horizons. We deal in everything digital so everyone from design to mobile people to SEO/SEM to social media to even mainstream marketing people are all “fair game”.
1010: next I peer into my rss feed on Outlook (which is separate from my personal Google Reader feed) to look for stuff that’s relevant to the team and stuff that will help with thought leadership, case studies and the like. Where applicable I forward them to the team or bookmark them on delicious, stumble upon etc. I also make a quick scan of oursignal.com just to see what else people find interesting.
By the time all this is done it’s anywhere between 1030 to 11am and I move on to whatever tasks I have for the day. This is where it enters “anything goes” territory and things are a little flexible, but I always feel like I cleared an important part of my routine by now. And in fact given the line of work I’m in, that’s about all the routine I can expect. There was one week where I had more work than normal to do and I completely didn’t engage in this routine for a good four days. It took me a long while to dig myself out of that black hole.
As much as starting the day off is important, I like to end it with some structure too. There’s a great post on Webworker Daily called firewall your time and I try to dedicate half an hour starting at around 545 to do certain tasks:
- Achieve inbox zero (both work and Gmail) (I sometimes fail this step)
- Check ‘later’ email folder for actionable items
- Save sent emails worth saving
- Check outlook calendar and Google Calendar for appointments/events tomorrow that I might have to prepare for
- Write todo list for next day
- Review any stuff I wrote down on paper today
- Check check my tickler notes for today and tomorrow to see if there’s anything outstanding for today I need to do, or take note of for tomorrow
- Clear physical inbox (things that I have to process once goes in here: paper to recycle, trash to throw, stuff to bring home. So I don’t shuttle back and forth)
- Fill up my timesheet (daily is a must)
- Decide what to do when home, enter that into my tickler file
- Clear what I can from my Outlook RSS feeds
- Clear my desktop – limited to what I’m working on tomorrow and archiving the rest. (I usually fail this step)
After work, I clear stuff I’ve written down on my tickler file and generally do my own thing (game, catch a movie, have dinner etc) but more often than not stuff I read online is work related, so I email that to myself and make a note of what action I should take the next day.
So that’s what I do to keep myself same, get my social media ‘fix’ and keep my job (so far) all at the same time. How about you?
ps: Interestingly enough, almost exactly a year ago Pat and I did a similar ‘day in the life’ post talking about the brands we would come into contact with and use throughout the day. Read about her brand timeline and mine if you’re so inclined. (Caveat: I was in Canada at the time of that post, so Canadian brands will probably be overly represented)
Tags: agency life, blankanvas, facebook, gmail, inbox zero, outlook, patlaw, rss, social media junkie, timesheet, twitter
Posted in Gen Y, social media | 6 Comments »
Saturday, December 6th, 2008
I had to do a marketing case study or “show and tell” in class awhile ago, what else would I use, but social media?
Two bloggers, Pat Law and Steven Hodson from Singapore and Canada, had negative experiences with Challenger (a Singaporean Best Buy alternative) and Tim Hortons (the Canadian alternative for Starbucks) respectively. With Pat, there was a huge mess with getting delivery on time, horrendous customer service and problems all round. With Steven, a Tim Hortons cashier short changed his wife of $20, and despite the fact that it was obvious from the CCTV that there was an error, they were told there was nothing Tim Hortons could do.
Both cases resulted in pretty strong words from the bloggers and the commenters against the companies involved, but also pretty strong statistics. Pat shared with me her blog stats, and there were over 1,000 views in five days, with the average time spent clocking at six and a half minutes.
Think about that. 1,000 people with 6.5 minutes of negative exposure to your brand. You can buy all the ads you want and you probably won’t even get 6.5 minutes of positive brand exposure in a month.
Why is this a problem?
Any Monkey Can Blog
It’s a problem for companies because it’s just too simple for anyone to set up a blog and blog about a negative experience with your company. Why would I bother picking up the phone calling customer service when odds are I’ll get crappy customer service anyway? It’s just easier to “stick it to the man” online.
The Mistake
Companies are mistakenly not monitoring their brands online, thinking “no one” cares. Well, one thousand people at 6.5minutes each suggest otherwise. I think when we’re talking about customer lifetime value and potentially large amounts of revenue being lost (you can rest assured I’m not buying a television from Challenger although I’m in the market for one), someone should at least be attempting to make things right.
So What Then?
I'm Not Listening
Companies need to focus on good customer service and relationships to differentiate themselves. Especially for companies like Challenger and Tim Hortons who are selling fairly homogenous products, it’s just too easy for a consumer to go to another electronics store or somewhere else for coffee. Particularly in this recession economy, excellent customer service both in and outside the store may just be the differentiating factor you need. If you’re going to hire those service staff anyway, you might as well make sure they’re doing a good job of it.
The bottom line is this. Stop asking what positive ROI social media is going to bring you, because it isn’t the most important question. If it manages to bring in some sales/conversions, great. But at the very least, it can be used to negate the effect of such negative word of mouth. From one blog post, Challenger easily lost a $3k purchase from me, and who knows who else? How many people are going to forego that product from your company because of something they read, and your company did not respond to set things right?
How much is not getting involved in the social media space costing you?
[Image credits: Any monkey can blog | I'm not listening]
Tags: bad customer service, best buy, blankanvas, canadian blogger, challenger, crappy customer service, excellent customer service, homogeneous products, marketing case study, pat law, show and tell, singapore blogger, social media, steven hodson, stick it to the man, tim hortons, winextra
Posted in Marketing, Poor Practices, case studies, social media | 7 Comments »
Friday, November 7th, 2008
So Pat Law invited me to do a little collaboration with her (her post here) inspired by this post featuring a brand-timeline portrait. And one of the results is of course to see how different a male and female’s brand usages are, but I think there are going to be a few interesting insights as well. I definitely found out more about my needs, wants, usage patterns and brand loyalty by doing this.
Our criteria is simple: If we are likely to use a particular brand on an average day, we’ll include it in. So for example, even though I may only use my Flip Mino once or twice a week, I include it because the probability I use it on an average day is about even.
While originally, this was organised by timeline (i.e. at what time would you interact with which brand), I’ve decided to do it by category because I think it says more about my consumption patterns that way. Does it mean I use all of these brands everyday? No. But it’s fairly representative in that if I feel like a coffee, Tim Hortons is my destination.
Social Media/Web Apps
Social Media/Web Apps
So I’ll start, obviously, with social media and web apps. This is fairly straightforward, but the one thing I noticed when I started to list down the brands I’d include, was that Windows Media Player was an app I particularly wanted to list due to my immense dislike of iTunes.
Technology/Gadgets
Technology & Gadgets
Pretty straightforward here, so I’ll leave it as that.
Apparel
Apparel
This was just about the hardest category to do. For each of the brands listed up there, I have only one or two products from them: Zara (jacket, coat), Nike (sneakers), American Eagle (wallet), H&M (jacket, scarf), Guess (jeans), Levis (boxers, jeans).
This by no means indicates clothes aren’t important to me, just that I’d rather find some obscure shop and find a “slogan” tee, rather than head to the Gap or wherever to purchase one. However, the brands I do purchase for clothes (particularly Zara, Guess and Nike), I’m particularly loyal to.
Hygiene
Hygiene
Hygiene was fun to do because I have so many products. The ones I’m listing here are only those I’m using here with me in Canada, and I’m sure I have plenty more back home. I’m going to say hygiene is one area where I’m most susceptible to advertising.
Oral B from the whole “more dentists use” ads, Colgate was on all the time growing up, Axe from all the cool male advertising, Gillette is everywhere as well. I also want to say I actually have a strong dislike for Adidas as a brand, but only use their deodorant because it complements the cologne.
Interests
Interests
This was another really hard category because you don’t have brands for “books” or “music” or “Heroes” or “Lost”. So I included the brands of graphic novels I’m likely to read, as well as MTV (the TV channel I’m most likely to watch) and EA Sports which is the brand of the game (FIFA ‘09) that I’m playing now
Food
Food And Drink
This was not surprising at all. I generally don’t care about the food I eat, but I do like my drinks. The interesting thing here is that none of these brands would exist if I was blogging about this from Singapore. Tim Hortons would be Starbucks, Molson Canadian beer would be Corona, and Vitamin Water doesn’t exist. In other words, my brand preference is rather flexible and easily changed. Prior to coming here I hadn’t tried either Tim Hortons or Molson Canadian, but they’ve displaced my usual brands pretty quickly.
Finally, one miscellaneous brand:
Equality Logo
This is Equality, which is, from what I can tell, the house brand of Canada. Easily 20-40% of the stuff we buy here for the house, is from the Equality brand. Microwave food, toilet paper, eggs, canned food and much much more is all Equality.
I guess this is meaningful because when we first came here and went to the supermarket, we didn’t know what brands to get, but the mere pervasiveness of Equality made us gravitate towards it. Also, even though Equality easily accounts for a large portion of our weekly expenditure, I couldn’t find its’ logo online, and had to take a picture to get it. An overlooked brand, perhaps?
My takeaways from this exercise?
1) I experiment with a lot of brands. Nikon, HTC, Molson Canadian and Vitamin Water didn’t exist in my mind one year ago, but they do now.
2) I consider myself part of the “tribe” of some brands than others. Skullcandy, Nike, Flip, Sony, Axe, and MTV just to name a few.
3) Old habits die hard. I don’t think I’ve ever used another toothbrush except Oral B, or toothpaste except Colgate. Even if I did see products from other brands on the shelves, they don’t even register. It’s also very hard for me to use other social bookmarking tools like Twine because I’m so used to Delicious.
4) Word of mouth influences my purchase decisions a lot. Skullcandy, Sony, Nikon, Axe, Firefox, HTC, Flip, Versace and Tim Hortons are all word of mouth brands, that are now favourite brands.
How about you? What are the brands you feel passionately about? How do they fit into your daily/weekly/monthly behavior? If you were to do one of these by category or by timeline, how would it look?
ps: I’m sure I left out some brands of stuff that I use but just didn’t take note off, please excuse that.
Tags: adidas, american eagle, axe, blankanvas, brand timeline portrait, brands guys use, canon, colgate, dc, delicious, dopod, ea sports, equality, facebook, firefox, flip mino, gillette, guess, h&m, head & shoulders, htc, ipod touch, last.fm, levi's, marvel, molson canadian, mtv, nike, nikon, oral b, pat law, Plurk, popular brands, seaget, skullcandy, sony vaio, steam, tim hortons, twitter, versace blue jeans, vitamin water, windows media player, wordpress, zara, zirh
Posted in Gen Y, case studies, collaboration | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
As I’ve been reading the blog posts (and more importantly, comments) about Social Media Breakfast, I’ve come away with two thoughts:
1) We Aren’t Perfect – And That’s A Good Thing
I appreciate feedback from Su Min, Coleman, Brian and everyone else who contributed to let us know the panel wasn’t as balanced as it could have been, that we should’ve added a blogger on it, that we needed more audience interaction, to be conscious of the level of involvement of corporate entities.
It’s great because it prevents us from resting on our laurels. Not that we would, but arguable each SMB has been an improvement on the last, and it would be easy to say “We improved!”, but it’s comments and feedback like this that reminds us that improved we may have, but there’s always room for more.
We always learn from the events, and with your help, improve. From SMB2 we learned we needed structure, from SMB3 we learned structure doesn’t come naturally, so we need to “artificially” introduce it via a panel, now we learn a panel is not the be all and end all, but the execution needs to be worked on. I remember one of the “P”s from Dorothy’s live blogging: perpetual beta. That’s exactly what SMB is and it’s your feedback that helps us improve that beta product.
As we’ve said time and time again, it’s everyone’s not ours.
2) Where Are The Agencies/Companies Taking The Lead?
This is a very cynical view, and you can feel free to disagree with me, but where are these agencies and companies? I may be putting my future career on the line by calling them out, but I think it needs to be said.
Ben Koe has a list of case studies of social media marketing examples in Singapore, and I see some action going on, but nowhere in the proportion to the talk I hear about social media and Web2.0.
I’ve said this before in an audio podcast for For Immediate Release, as reported by Michael Netzley: It’s as if everyone is sitting back and waiting for someone else to jump in first, show results, and then everyone is going to be like a lemming and follow.
There are more than enough corporates attending SMB to plead ignorance anymore. By some attendees accounts, there are too many corporates attending, that it’s affecting the social. There have been suggestions of breaking SMB up to a “corporate” track and “social” track.
You know what? Not going to happen. The agencies and companies out there have hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions in budget, hardware, software, resources, connections, tools, networks, people and skills, to get a similar “corporate” version of this going around. If you don’t want to because you’re afraid that by sharing you’re losing your competitive edge or actually benefiting your competitor, then that’s the landscape we will have to deal with.
And no one benefits with that kind of landscape.
i also commented on Pat Law’s blog that the idea of sharing our “fishbowl” ie attendee list with marketers who would be interested, is not something we would do. The traditional way to get such a houselist is to go sponsor something like a huge IDC event or pay for money at an Ad:Tech booth and get it from there. Maybe some companies are looking at SMB with a lightbulb going off thinking “Hey these are the alpha consumers, the innovators and early adopters, maybe we can cheaply leverage that somehow”.
So that’s my frustration. If attending SMB is your company’s cheap way of doing some “research” into the shiny new object that is social media without actually getting your feet wet, I’m afraid to say you’re not going to get very good results. Sometimes we get someone approaching us with a “partnership” deal, it usually stinks of “let me leverage your network so I can shove my brand in people’s faces”. Sorry, no.
In short, I look at the current social media scene here and it’s driven by organisations like E27, TDM and us. Us being six people, half of which are still in school. Look at the podcamps worldwide and the SMBs worldwide, they’re organised by people who work in agencies, blog, podcast and live the social media life.
Is that the best Singapore and all the “top agencies” can offer? I really want to hear from you, bloggers, entrepreneurs, agency, corporate people alike. Is this a fair critique of what’s going on? Or are there things I’m not seeing? Love to hear it.
Tags: ad:tech, blankanvas, coleman, communicate asia, eok, fir, for immediate release, harmlessbananas, IDC, michael netzley, pat law, perpetual beta, social media breakfast singapore, social media marketing examples in singapore, ssumin, where are the agencies
Posted in Events, Singapore, community, social media, social media breakfast | 15 Comments »
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
This very disturbing story came in my RSS feeds just before I left work. Remember the Plurk Badges made by PatLaw over at Blankanvas?
Well LiveCrunch was asking for some of them badges and was referred to Blankanvas. This is what followed. (click for the full screenshot)
So I headed over to LiveCrunch and posted a comment basically asking what gives. Now LiveCrunch moderates its comments, and used that moderation ability to basically not allow my comment to get through and hide this ugly behavior from the rest of the world.
How do I know? Because when I checked my site stats tonight, I saw one referrer:
So I infer from this that LiveCrunch saw my comment, went to the “edit comment” page on Wordpress, and then did not approve it. I think this is really bad practice. Moderation is not meant to keep negative comments out. I moderate mine to prevent crazy stuff from appearing, but people are free to disagree with me if they wish or call me out on certain statements, and they do.
Well, since LiveCrunch won’t reply to comments, I’d like to ask everyone who reads this to drop him a Tweet at @Livecrunch or Plurk him at http://www.plurk.com/user/LiveCrunch, ask him why he literally stole Pat’s creation and did not credit her, and then did not own up to the fact afterwards openly on his blog via the comments. The online community should speak up. What trust (or lack of) does this foster among our designers who are happy to create things for others for free, and don’t even get some credit in return? Especially when it’s explicitly offered?
As for me, I have two words for LiveCrunch with the very same Plurk badge that PatLaw made:
Tags: bad practices, bad to moderate comments, blankanvas, livecrunch steals, patlaw, plurk badges, why moderate comments
Posted in Blogs, Plurk, Uncategorized, community, social media | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 9th, 2008
I’m beginning to feel the load of reading a lot of blogs right now, so every month when I subscribe to new blogs, I put them on a “probation” list, look at them at the end of the month and then decide which are worth keeping. Here are those that I’ve added to my Google Reader permanently this month, as well as one post I loved recently that I would like to share with you.
1) Colin Walker
2) Deirdre Breakenridge – PR 2.0 Strategies
3) Hutch Carpenter – I’m not actually a geek
4) Jason Falls – Social Media Explorer
5) Jonathan Wong – Armchair Theorist
6) Corvida – Shegeeks
- What college students can’t get from blogging – A nice contrarian view from someone who’s also gotten an internship from blogging, but a good reality wake up call for students who may think blogging is the solution to everything.
7) Pat Law – Blankanvas
8 ) Meg Roberts – PR Interactive
- Building brand you – I try to read as many PR students/fresh grads as possible, Meg is one of them I really like. And she watches Lost!
9) Sherms – Design is ________
10) Ellie – The PinkC
11) Julian Baldwin – Notes, thoughts, ideas and responses
That’s it for May, if you have new blogs to recommend, feel free to plug it in the comment box. Let me know if you liked these recommendations as well.
Tags: armchair theorist, blankanvas, blogs worth reading, colin walker, deirdre breakenridge, google reader, hutch carpenter, jason falls, julian baldwin, meg roberts, patlaw, shegeeks, sherms, the pinkc
Posted in Blogs | 13 Comments »
Saturday, June 7th, 2008
Patlaw from Blankanvas delivered on her promise to make some Plurk badges over the weekend, and here are my favourites:
Mother Plurker!!
Plurk Me
And my very own customised badge, Plurk UniqueFrequency. Aww.
Want yours? Head over to Blankanvas to take them. FREE! Show your love for your newest addiction, Plurk!
Tags: blankanvas, patlaw, Plurk, plurk badges, plurk uniquefrequency
Posted in Fun, Plurk | 1 Comment »
