Web Design, Digital & Social Media Marketing in Singapore

Video : Did You Know 4.0

// September 22nd, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Agency Management, Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Ain’t you glad you are in this exciting business? ;o)
Tip – Great stats for you when preparing your decks!

Video – Clay Shirky: How social media can make history

// September 8th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing

This is a great video on how social media will change the way we see, understand and do things. It is also a great tool to use to convince brands the power of groundswell and the need to understand it. The takeaway piece for this video is the need to understand and adopt the ‘mature way’ of embracing social media.

btw, you should make it a habit to view one video a day from ted.com. I sure made me smarter. ;o)

Incentives for your hardworking team

// August 25th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Agency Management

Monetary incentives for the team as a form of reward, motivation and recognition is part and parcel of agency management. Do it right, morale will be boosted, productivity will increase and teamwork will be enhanced. Do it wrong, not only it will be counter-productive, relationships within team mates and departments may be affected. Didn’t you hear $$$ is the root of all evil?

Assuming the agency has the following departments/ teams:-
1) Business development / Sales
2) Account servicing / Project management
3) Creative / Technical

Here is the recommendation:-

1) Divide the agency into 2 groups. Put BD as one group, the rest as the 2nd group.

2) Business Development – These people brings in the dough, or should I say new dough. They ‘run’ the marketing department of the agency, making sure the agency is always on the radar and sales leads flow in on a regular basis. They follow up on leads, cultivate them into business opportunities and eventually brings in business.

The commission structure can be structured based on the projected profit for each job. First, the costing for each project needs to be proper and the method to proper costing for digital projects can be found here. The commission for the business development team is based on a certain percentage of the the profit margin. For example, if the base cost of the project is $10,000 and the mark-up margin is 1.8x @ $18,000, the profit margin is $8,000. If the commission is fixed at 3%, the commission payable upon awardment of the project is $240.

Commission should be payable for jobs from new clients for the next 6 consecutive months after the 1st project. Reason is that for new clients, they usually start with small jobs and progressively increase the volume. This will also create the motivation for BD team to follow-up with the client until a more robust relationship is forged. Even though over this 6 months, it can be argued that it may be the Operations team doing most of the job, it is clear that they are also remunerated accordingly.

3) Operations (comprising of AMs/PMs and Production) – The key is to motivate the team to be more efficient, prudent and even to push them harder to put in a few more hours per week. After all, they are the ones delivering at the end of the day.

If the total overheads of the agency is $30k per month, the team will be required to produce work worth that amount. This means that the monthly billing to clients need to be $30k before the incentive scheme kicks in. Incentives are tier-based. I will show you how it works:-

Agency’s overheads = $30k
Monthly billings = $30k to  $40k (first $10k profit entitles the team to 5%) = $500
Monthly billings = $40k to $50k (2nd $10k profit entitles the team to another 10%) = $1k
Monthly billings = $50k to $60k (3rd $10k profit entitles the team to an additional 12%) = $1.2k
Monthly billings = $60k and above (Every additional $10k entitles the team to 15% for each $10k)

Assuming the billing of this month is $80k, the incentive will be calculated as:-
1st $10k profit @ 5% ($30k to  $40k) = $500
2nd $10k profit @ 10% ($40k to $50k) = $1k
3rd $10k profit @ 12% ($50k to $60k) = $1.2k
4th $10k profit @ 15% ($60k to $70k) = $1.5k
5th $10k profit @ 15% ($70k to $80k) = $1.5k
Total incentive payable to the team = $5.7k

One important point to note is that any outsourced work will have to be deducted off the profits as accordance to the sequence it is being paid out to the external suppliers.

Synergy among different teams
To some extent, structuring the incentive scheme this way creates synergy between the BD and Operations team. Operations will now be willing to push a little harder for sales pitches since whatever that will be brought in will goes into their billable work as well.

Possible pitfalls
Bear in mind that this model is a $-driven model. It does not encourage quality of the work being done. Instead, teams may overly driven to deliver and neglect quality, from customer service perspective to production quality perspective. To ensure the loop is closed, other feedback mechanisms need to be in place:-

1) Customer feedback form / survey
2) Awards

These feedback mechanism be incorporated into the criteria to evaluate individuals for promotions, remuneration reviews and variable bonus at the end of the year.

Not just $$ please…
At the end of the day, it is not just money that motivates people. Middle level managers who lacks managerial skills or motivational skills may solely relying on this as the key driving force and that’s 99% going to backfire. Understanding of individual team members’ need is important. Structuring proper rest/recharge schedule for all is key to rejuvenation. Workshops, seminars and conferences are brain food for the people. When it comes to motivation, think macro and micro.

Are digital agencies in Singapore embracing social media?

// August 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Agency Management, Social Media Marketing

Social media changes the way we do businesses. At least, that’s what most digital marketers believe and preach. We have always been telling our clients here in Singapore the importance of listening to the clients, building relationships and establishing trusts online. So how about ourselves as digital agencies?

Marketing
I did a quick search on google “digital agency singapore“.  The 1st page contains 5 local digital agencies (I have filtered out those non-agency results):-

• Profero Singapore
• Above 1
• Adwright
• Oasis Interactive
• Method Media

There is no doubt that all these agencies are established and respectable companies that serves some of the best brands in the Singapore. My question is – if we are are digital marketers, shouldn’t the agency be embracing digital media to the fullest, including social media? Blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter feeds, facebook, etc….

People
Like our clients, we started off with people that are not exactly into social media. There is a phase where existing team members need to ‘educated’ on social media marketing and I have been through that myself. Implementing social media to a group of team members that have their primary jobs to perform is not exactly the easiest task around. People that live on social media do not need to be reminded to tweet, update their blogs, tag their friends of flickr & facebook… I would see the shift in recruitment criteria in digital agencies to include being ’sm-savvy’ as one of the primary criteria soon.

To be continued…

Banking & Social Media in Singapore

// July 14th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Social Media Marketing

Banking and Social Media

I chanced upon an article shared via Twitter a couple of days ago. It is called ‘Social Media and the banking Industry’. The article touches on statistics on the adoption of social media as part of the banks’ digital strategy as well as some examples on how they were implemented. I was just talking to a good friend whom runs a financial institution in Singapore about the use of social media for banks. This blog post is for you bro.

The use of blogs for knowledge sharing with fellow team members across organizations has been adopted by many corporations for years. However, for the banking industry, we have yet to see blogs as a form of social media marketing tool being embraced by banks and financial institutions. I’m going use Wells Fargo as an example to showcase how blogs can be part of banks or financial institutions’ digital strategy.

Wells Fargo was the first bank in US to launch a corporate blog in March 2006. It has now expanded the use of corporate blog as a key platform in listening, understanding and communicating with its customers. It takes courage within the hierarchy of a bank to do this and they have my deepest respect.

The roles of the blogs run by Wells Fargo is to communicate. To communicate in a personal, non-intrusive way. To enable a conversation between the bank and the customer. To allow the bank to listen and know what the client wants and expects.

In the case of a merger between Wells Fargo & Wachovia, the blog not only allows merger news and information to be disseminated, comments from the ground are also heard and addressed. If such concerns are widespread, the following blog post will address them in greater detail. Adopting a blog approach in their digital PR strategy in this case facilitated listening and allows ‘questions’ from turning into ‘issues’.

The blog also focus on specific products like the student loan. It engages potential customers with good and useful content,  allowing banking relationships to be build from college years. That relationship is eventually the key factor in more businesses when the student graduates.

Banks need to wake up to the call of groundswell. There are numerous forums and online communities in Singapore that are talking about banking products and services. Choose to ignore gets you out of trouble momentarily, choose to listen allows you to learn insights of market demands, choose to engage will give you the leading advantage over the rest of the pack.

Will the Twitter craze hit Singapore?

// July 2nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing

Twitter in Singapore

I asked myself this question before I decided to take the plunge into the world of tweets. I cannot find statistics of twitter users in Singapore. I asked around and most of my peers heard of twitter, probably got an account but has never used it since then.

The question is our mind is – who the hell what’s to do what you are watching, eating or playing with? I can do take on Facebook, I can share that on my blog so why twitter?

I recalled 10 years back when Blogs hit the shores of Singapore. People where asking, who the heck with the right frame of mind will want to publish his/her diary online? And who would want to read them?

Today, blogs have evolved. It has taken over corporate websites, spearheading the frontlines of digital marketing for various companies, allowing them to share their thought process and beliefs with clients. Blogs has became an integral part of digital marketing, a powerful tool in SEO and a necessity for promoting thought leadership. Would those would ridiculed the thought of a Weblog10 years back be left wondering how mypoic they were? I was one of them. my friends.

I see Twitter as a form of blog -micro-blogging. I didn’t coin that that word. With the emergence of multiple social media channels, consumers and companies will find it more an more difficult to devote their precious time to these channels. Maintaining a blog is time consuming task. As such, we are seeing a hybrid of blog and tweets. Blog sites can now pull twitter feeds real-time. Integrating these 2 channels allows content to be updated regularly. Tweet content that are shorter, or a hyperlink to a good read somewhere, etc. Blog content that are longer and requires more efforts in articulating your points.

Twitter will take roots in Singapore. Soon.

Integrating social media marketing into your digital strategy

// July 2nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing in baby steps

All these years, we have been focusing on SEO (and also SEM) as part of our internet marketing strategy to drive traffic to our websites. We have been obsessed with page rankings, keywords optimization, inbound links, etc. We are not wrong. But today, it is important to recognize that consumers are not just relying on search engines to find information, there are many more places that they search now.

We need to look into social media marketing as part of our strategy. Companies need to be more searchable in social media networks as well. Probably soon, somebody will be coming up with a social media page rank. From this perspective, Search Engine Optimization should be expanded to include Social Media Marketing, thus the new term Search Optimization.

According to the Aberdeen group research report released in March 2009:-
* 63% of companies surveyed plan to increase their social media marketing budgets
* 21% plan to increase spending by 25% or more
* 34% responding plan to make no change.
* only 3% plan to shrink social media budgets

This clearly shows that despite the current economy turmoil, which also hit us badly in Singapore, companies are beginning to understand that traffic sources are no longer solely dependent on SEO.

Companies in Singapore is slow to pick up social media marketing. They have heard alot about it but is clueless what it can be done and how it should be done. If we understand the important of being Search Optimized, our strategies our clients should  My point is that agencies need to start educating clients, encouraging them to take small steps into social media marketing. Illustrating to them their ROIs and managing their expectations. Small steps in this infant market is crucial.

Social Media explained

// June 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

A simple-to-understand video on what’s social media all about.

To me, the emergence of Social Media, globally and in Singapore, allow consumers to influence decisions of fellow consumers. At the same time, it shifted the way businesses are managed and forces people like the ‘Big Ice Cream Factory’ to rethink on their marketing strategies.

The video did not really touch on how the ‘Big Ice Cream Factory’ be affected by groundswell. Although it benefited directly from the increased sale of vanila flavoured ice cream, there are other more crucial effects that may result from this.

First, social media flattens the playing field. Small start-ups that has a ‘better idea’ can now compete on a level playing field with the big boys. They focus on a niche market, has a smaller but more loyal customer base. They are nimble and if they are listening to their customers, they will be able to change product offerings based on consumers’ demand. The ‘Big Ice Cream Factory’ now faces the risk of losing market-share, when more and more such start-ups emerge. What the ‘Big Ice Cream Factory’ can do is to then flex their ‘$ muscle’, invest heavily in traditional advertising and attempt to influence buying decisions. That increases cost of sales and diminishes margins. Even if the market share is maintained, profits are reduced. How long can that last?

It is natural that companies will start looking at this powerful medium eventually (if they have yet to). That will change the way they market their products, engage their consumers, develop new products and even the way their organize their teams. The effect of social media to businesses is deep.

Chris Brogan: Listening in Social Media

// June 21st, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing

Social Media is not merely for marketing. It is a space where meaningful conversations on brands are taking place. It is beneficial for companies to filter these conversations from chatters and derive insights on information pertaining to their brands and products. I found a tool call SPY by Ben Hedrington. It is a search engine that sniffs out conversations on blogs, flickr, twitter & more.

Keyword-to-Conversion Model

// June 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Digital Marketing

The usual approach to SEM by most companies are:-

1. Identify keywords used for search (either by guessing, online media companies or online tools like Google Keyword Tool)

2. Craft out Ad copy, focusing on product USP and Promo mechanics

3. Link to website (either homepage, promotion page, microsite or specific product pages).

This method is not wrong to some extend but if you give it a deeper thought, the entire process could be more focused, direct and conversion-driven. I term it as the keyword-to-conversion model. Basically, conversion starts from the point a search attempt is made.

The key here is to identify the search objective through the search words/ phrase used. Based on the search objective, the ad copy has to be crated to address this. The aim here is to allow the ad copy to be relevant to the search objective, thus allowing the consumer to be able to relate to the ad. With this, we can achieve what we call a ‘true click-thru’.

A ‘true click-thru’ is a result of a non-implusive, need-driven action. It basically filters real clicks from those that are merely in for the wron reason, thus reducing your PPC budget, increasing ROI. Let me emphasize that this approach is strictly for Search networks and is not applicable if you are advertising on a content network.

With a ‘true click-thru’, 50% of the battle is won. Remember, the person that is coming onto your site now has a ‘real’ intention / objective and is not merely browsing. As such, the landing page is crucial. It has to make reference to the ad copy and search objective. For example, if the search objective is to compare prices of a service, the ad copy could say ‘voted most cost effective service by ABC magazine’, providing a point of comparison. The landing page should further emphasize the concept of ‘comparison’ – such as allowing the consumers to select some brands and do a side by side comparison. With this, a high level of interest and relevance is maintained.

In a conversion site, traffic resulting from a PPC campaign on a search network needs to be guided. Imagine someone comes up to you and says he wants to buy an iPod. You bring him to the entrance of yor shop and drop him off there and say ‘Feel free to browse around’. ???

Guide them around. Create informational paths within the site that has a purpose in mind – conversion. From the landing page where you have shown that your service and product is great, bring them to the next page to reinforce that buying decision. I called this the Influencing Page. In this page, contents are create to reinforce buying decisions. It could be testimonials, it could be a summary of USPs, it could be a promotion to create the need to ‘buy now’.

Remember – in a conversion site, it is important to craft contents that are relevant to the search objective, guide them through the site, reinforce buyng decision and then convert. The process should be sharp and sweet.