Monthly Archive for April, 2011

Delicious Acquired

Published on April 30, 2011 in News. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Social bookmarking service Delicious has been acquired by Avos, a new Internet company headed by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

Hurley and Chen’s vision for delicious seems to be to keep (and improve of course) the status quo. Accoding to the release, “Their vision for Delicious is to continue to provide the same great service users love and to make the site even easier and more fun to save, share, and discover the web’s “tastiest” content.”

“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

Avos will work closely with the community over the next few months to develop features to help solve the problem of information overload – something which spurred much of the interest in the service (as well as its social aspect) in years past. ”We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” said Chen.

The question remains however if Hurley and Chen can reverse the steep traffic drop with a social bookmarking service alone in light of more engaging social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

How to Find Your Customers On Facebook?

Published on April 29, 2011 in facebook. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

One of the easiest ways to figure this out is actually to go through the Facebook ad platform. Part of the Facebook ad platform lets you target your advertising and don’t worry, you don’t actually have to launch an ad for you take advantage of this feature.

Part of the process for setting up a Facebook ad allows you to target your ad to specific demographics or specific audiences based on their interests or their age, or their gender, or their location, all sorts of different factors. Part of that targeting actually gives you a number of the people who fit that criteria.

So it’s definitely a great free way to find out a ballpark number for who fits your target demographic on Facebook.

What are the four common mistakes of company blogs?

Published on April 27, 2011 in Blogging, Miscellaneous and News. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Of all the many tips and tricks of how to maintain a company blog that I’ve read, this quite recent article that I found while browsing by detik.com, an Indonesian-based independent online news forum, is one of my personal favorite. It’s rudimentary and simple. Of course, each of us can have our personal preference to what tips and tricks work best, but personally, I think the article by detik.com should be highly helpful for smaller companies who are still in the beginning phase of their social media websites and blogging journey. Since the article is in Indonesian, I’ll try my best to translate and paraphrase the content on the article.

Basically, the article provided four mistakes that company blogs tend to make:

1)      Starting without a strategy

2)      Thinking that the blog should be all about your company

3)      Failure to create links

4)      Ignoring the social media

The number one rule that companies should stick to when starting a blog is: have a strategy. In a previous blog post, Relationship Marketing Through Facebook Ads, I’ve stressed highly the importance of strategizing before launching the blog itself. Even then, it’s still commonly the first mistake that companies tend to do. As stated in the 2nd company blogs’ mistake in the article, your blog is not a press forum. Just as Facebook markets to the consumer by relationship marketing, blogs market to the consumer by the process of information sharing. After all, ultimately, no one wants to know that they are marketed to.

What the 3rd mistake that the article refer to is the common failure for company blogs to cite their sources (Yes, I may sound like an English teacher here). Instead of thinking that linking your article with other articles will drive away traffic, think of it as building up your credentials, thus maintaining your image and relationship with the readers.

Lastly, many companies tend to forget to link up their company blogs to other social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. The Re-Tweet and Share function in Twitter and Facebook, respectively, are highly crucial and helpful in spreading your blog, thus driving more traffic to the blog. As you are constructing your strategy, make sure that your company blog is connected to other social networking sites so that it’s updated automatically.

As I’ve said before, these tips and tricks are relatively simple and easy, but I believe that to advance into more development, companies should strive to cover their bases first by making sure that at least, these four mistakes have been avoided. When all of these bases have been covered, then companies can proceed into the next step such as maintaining a blog content or theme and so on.

Understanding the Role of Facebook Places

Published on April 26, 2011 in facebook, Mobile Website, Website Online Marketing, Website Search Engine Optimization and Word of Mouth Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

What should people who have a physical location be considering? Would they want to combine their Facebook Page or their Facebook Place? What does that look like?

Facebook has recently rolled out a specific type of Page called a Place page. It’s still fairly early in the adoption of Place Pages. If you are a single-location business, it might be better for you to use a Place Page instead of a fan Page just because there’s some additional things that you can do with a Place Page, such as the ability to do offer ―deals.

Deals are when somebody checks in at your location and you give them an offer. You pay for that in a similar way you pay for advertising. It’s the only form of mobile advertising available on the Facebook platform right now.

If you are the type of business with multiple locations, then it would be a good time for you to continue to keep your brand Page but then roll out a Facebook Place Page for each of your locations. And again, that allows you to roll out deals specific to each of those locations, and it allows people to start to then interact with the other fans. This interaction is one of the key things that people are looking for from the whole fan Page experience, and they can do so with people who are from their same geo-location.

If you are a massive franchise or a very large business, something like a CVS Pharmacy or a McDonalds or Starbucks, then you would have thousands of Place Pages to roll out. Right now, the problem that we have seen with brands is most brands are just trying to figure out how to manage a single brand page.

The idea of adding the complexity of thousands of these individual locations when the tools really aren’t mature enough to allow you to be able to manage a volume of Place Pages like that, it’s probably a little too early for a brand like that to get in unless they have some large investment that they plan on making for a Herculean effort to manage it.

Going Back to the Infamous 5Ws and 1H

Published on April 25, 2011 in Blogging, Miscellaneous and Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Ever since the explosion of social medial networking and blogs, the marketing and PR world have been pushed to keep up with the Internet as a new platform for marketing. While researching about tips and tricks of creating and maintaining a blog, I’m suddenly reminded of one tool that has helped me in many ways from biology lab research to news articles that also can be applied to strategy-making in marketing: the 5 Ws and 1 H.

For most of us, the 5Ws and 1H has been thoroughly drilled into our process of thinking by our formal education system that it almost seems like an innate trait and well, common sense. In the business of blogging, although it may seem common sense, I propose for the need of companies to consult back to the 5Ws and 1H more thoroughly. The thing is that it’s not just about answering the right answer but also asking the right questions. The 5Ws and 1 H are who, what, where, when, why and how.

Before starting a blog, companies should start building a strategy that can be constructed by asking and answering through the 5Ws and 1 H. Some questions that should be asked are maybe:

  • Who is the company trying to reach with the blog?
  • What is the goal of the blog?
  • What are the resources needed to start the blog?
  • What image is the company trying to enforce through the blog?
  • What other social media tools can be used to strengthen the blog?
  • Why is the company starting the blog? What are the benefits?
  • And so on…

By asking these questions, the company should now have a strategy, or in other words, a blueprint of where the blog should go. One of the mistakes that companies tend to make is to ignore the strategy-making of the blog. Although it might seem like something that can be put off later, the failure for a company to establish clear goals of the blog through strategizing will seep through to the blog itself, making the blog seem unorganized and confusing. In a more blunt set of words, if you do not care about the blog, then why should the readers care?

What Is the Best/Easiest Way to Grow Fans & Followers in Facebook?

Published on April 23, 2011 in facebook and Website Online Marketing. 2 Comments

The biggest thing is to have something that makes someone want to become a fan of your page or want to like a page. It’s really important to have good content that people want to engage with, but you also want to encourage them to do that. So to every blog post you have, to every piece of content that you create, add a call to action inviting people to share it on Facebook or ―like‖ it on Facebook.

This type of social media optimization will dramatically increase the number of people who are going to do those things. And definitely make sure you’re continuing to post the content. Try to engage people once they are fans on Facebook, because they have the power to increase your visibility within the Facebook community. So the more engagement you have, the more you will show up in news feed and gain a lot more exposure.

If you’re creating compelling content, actually spending time engaging on the Facebook page with your community and creating content that’s specifically for them, will bring you more visibility.

Draft Design on Himalayan Dog Chew

Published on April 22, 2011 in Website Design and Website Development Portfolio. 2 Comments Tags: , .

Here is the BEFORE and AFTER picture.

Stay tuned for more updates…

Relationship Marketing through Facebook Ads

Published on April 20, 2011 in Customer Relationship, facebook and Social Media. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Take a look at what’s on the right side of your Facebook profile page. Have you ever noticed the boxes of ads on the sides of your profile page? As a marketer, haven’t you ever wonder about the effectiveness of those Facebook Ads?

An article written by Nick O’Neill of the AllFacebook.com website listed the 10 laws of Facebook Advertising that all company marketers should definitely take note of. The article touched upon many advantages and disadvantages that come up in using Facebook Ads as a marketing tool.

One of which is the crucial understanding that Facebook Ads does not guarantee direct sales, which is the number one law listed, but instead Facebook Ads provide a platform for companies to maintain relationships with its target market. Although Facebook Advertising does not often lead to direct sales, maintaining a relationship with the customers is as important as making instant sales, if not more. Therefore, companies should understand that relationship marketing is the goal when using Facebook Advertising.

Relationship marketing focuses more on the maintenance of potential or current customers. The benefits of relationship marketing lie in the sense of loyalty and trust that foster in the relationship of customers and companies. In other words, through relationship marketing, the company or brand’s image becomes reliable for the customers. On another note, reliability is also a strong foundation for “word of mouth” marketing which is a highly effective marketing tool.

The relationship marketing that Facebook Ads is heavily relied itself on is also shown in the third rule that O’Neill wrote which is “Friend Users before You Sell”. By pulling the customer to add or like the brand’s Facebook page, an opportunity opens for companies to do follow-up marketing. So, the company is not only able to sell one of its products, but also create long-lasting relationship with loyal customers. In the state of world where people are bombarded with empty noise advertising everywhere they go every day, this type of customer should definitely be a valuable asset to hold on to.

The rise of the Twitter empire in Indonesia

Published on April 18, 2011 in Miscellaneous, Social Media and Statistic Data. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

A research done by comscore which was released in August 2010 revealed that Indonesia is statistically proven to be one of the leaders of the Twitter surge around the world. With a market penetration percentage of 20.8 percent of the Twitter usage worldwide, it’s no more unbelievable that we, Indonesians, definitely like our Twitter. Although we’re no longer the number one Asian country for Twitter, since Japan has taken over that title now, the statistics are definitely still crucial facts for companies when constructing marketing strategies, especially those reaching out to Indonesia.

In addition to the obvious Twitter popularity, thus implying the effectiveness of Twitter usage as a tool of social media marketing, the statistics are also able to reveal the traits of the ideal target market in Indonesia, which are practicality and personalization. Through that basis, companies should be able to construct marketing strategies that are geared around those traits, thus creating a far more effective marketing strategy to reach the target market.

This utilization of Twitter is shown by one of Indonesia’s music promoter, Java Musikindo’s founder Adrie Subono (@AdrieSubono).With 423,687 Twitter followers currently, Adrie Subono’s use of Twitter – one of which is by the occasional free concert tickets to the Twitter followers – is highly efficient in both marketing of the concerts that it’s promoting, but also image of the company. More also with the fact that it is the Java Musikindo’s founder, Adrie Subono, who also is promoting by Twitter, the company is able to personalize and humanize the relation between the company and the target market.

Welcoming Bellevue Insurance Group to our client list

Published on April 15, 2011 in Website Design and Website Development Portfolio. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Bellevue Insurance Group specializes in home and auto insurance. We are glad to help them design a new website for the business.

Stay tuned for their new website soon….