Eyes & Ears On Social Media

Someone In Mainstream/Traditional Marketing Explain How This Is A Good Investment

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

Passed by this yesterday, one of the many banners hanging on street lamps.

Two almost exactly identical banners hanging from every street lamp for a block.

So here’s where it doesn’t make sense.

1) Why two? If you really had to waste money putting a banner outdoors, wouldn’t one do the trick? Or does placing them on either side of a street lamp guarantee double the eyaballs?

2) Why every street lamp? Why not every alternate one? When I drive past by the time I see the first one and look up more closely, it’s the third street lamp anyway.

So essentially, they could’ve either done one banner on every alternate street lamp and spent a quarter of their budget, or done it over a larger area (ie four blocks) and spend the same amount of money.

Or they could’ve just contacted animal, dinosaur or bird enthusiasts online and invite them to come and spread the word. It’s not like putting up street lamp banners are any more measurable than doing a blogger outreach exercise.

I bet the ad company is laughing its way to the bank.

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Where Are The Twitter Journalists?

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

I open my Twitter homepage and see a Tweet of a shooting at Outram MRT from micamonkey

Not that I doubt micamonkey, but I didn’t want to go around telling people about it if it wasn’t true. So I checked out Channel News Asia (our local news channel) and got nothing. (click for larger image)

Channel News Asia

I opened Tweetscan and did a search for Singapore and here’s what turned up:

Tweet Scan

So here’s the question: Why doesn’t Channel News Asia have Twitter Journalists? If they can’t keep up with new media, then traditional media will really be in trouble sooner or later.

Edit @ 22:15:

CNA’s page now shows this:

Singapore

Note the time posted says 4:55pm? But that’s not what my earlier screencap at 6:45pm says. Are you allowed to edit your timestamp for news as a journalist? Hmm.

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