Web Design, Digital & Social Media Marketing in Singapore

Chris Brogan – Don’t be that guy!

// June 15th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing

Excellent way in articulating the ‘wrong way’. We cannot further emphasize that social media is not a place or peddling your wares. You don’t do it in real life too. I was doing a presentation couple of days ago and was emphasizing that to the client. Imagine going into a social gathering for the first time and you whipped out your products and started pushing them to everyone you meet. We just don’t do that in real life. People that do these things are usually ‘excluded’ from the community immediately. In social media, it is the same.

Listen to Chris – don’t be that guy. please.

Why a Facebook username?

// June 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing

Facebook Username

The debate among the facebook community over the need to have a vanity URL, similar to what Twitter and MySpace, has been around for some time. It is until 87 mins ago that Facebook allows us to ‘land-grab’ our own piece of digital property. I got mine – http://www.facebook.com/jason.lim. I was excited. I email blasted all my colleagues at Oasis Interactive, my family and my buddies. Some asked me the need to have that URL?

Shareability

Less than 2 hours ago from this blog post, you need to tell your friend “search for Jason Lim on Facebook” and “I am somewhere on the 2nd page”. At this exact moment, I will say – “Find me at http://www.facebook.com/jason.lim“.

Branding

Having a vanity URL allows more ways to incorporate facebook as part of one’s personal branding strategy. Your links are now more meaningful and may even be useful in some aspect of SEO too.

Have you gotten yours?

Using facebook profile pic as a campaign driver

// June 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // Digital Campaigns

3 simple steps to designing an effective banner ad

// June 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // Digital Marketing

Frame 1 – Product Visual
Frame 2 – Promo Message
Frame 3 – Call to Action

If this has been your design strategy for banner ads, think again.

Designing a banner ad can be as simple as above, and at the same time, be as complex as you can imagine. I use the 3Rs to help my designers remember:-

1. Relevance

Banner copy, call to action and visuals need to be relevant to audience’s needs as well as the webpage content that the banner resides on. If the product is about sport injury treatment, the webpage is a mountain biking online magazine that is talking about stunts, a relevant Banner Ad message could be “Still feeling that ache from your last stunt?” instead of “Cutting edge technology in sports injury treatment”.

2. Reference

The banner message should be able make references to people, incidents, events, equipment, etc to the target audience. Using the same mountain biking banner ad as an example again, “Benefited by mountain bikers around Asia since 1999″ or “Used by the Singapore mountain biking team”.

3. Relate

Allow target audience to be able to relate to the message, creating the thought – What if it is me? Consumers need to be able to relate what you are trying to communicate to themselves on a personal level in order for you to create that motivation for a ‘true click-through’.

Bottomline is – When designing a banner ad, it is not about what you want to tell the consumer. That’s Marketing 1.0. Change your mindset in your design strategy and ask yourself, what does the consumer wants?

To reduce or not to reduce?

// June 7th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Agency Management

If you are in client servicing, part of your job will require to prepare proposals to clients. More than often, you will have to face requests to reduce the fees to meet budgetary limitations. So the question is – To reduce or not to reduce?

Honestly, it is not about thee fees. It is about the agency’s base costs. Just like any other businesses, there are costs to run the business. Only by knowing these costs can the agency derive a formula to calculate it’s base cost for taking on each project. This is how I have done it.

1. Establish daily rate of each headcount
Assuming>> CD – $8,000/month ; AD – S$6,000/mth ; AM – $4,000 ; AE – $2,500 ; Programmer – $3,000
The formula to calculate daily rate is [(monthly rate x cpf rate x 14)/12]/22
CD’s daily rate = [(8,000 x 1.15 x 14)/12]/22 = $488

2. Estimate each headcount’s involvement
By scoping up the requirements, you should be able to estimate who should be involved in which part of the project and how long it will take. The amount of man-days required per headcount should be based on working on the job full-time. Seek help from seniors and even the respective headcounts to get a more accurate estimate.

3. The Base Cost
Add all headcount costs and that’s your Base Cost. This Base Cost gives you an indication that your project fees cannot go lower than this. Base Cost already exceed client’s budget? – Go to Pt 6.

4. Margins
With the Base Cost derived, multiply it with margins at 1.6x. This 60% margin is added for creating a buffer for miscalculation of man-days, underestimation of scope and clients’ change of specs. If the client’s budget is tight, stay at 1.6. If there are rooms to play, go all the way to 2.2.

5. Use this to monitor profitability
Assuming the project is awarded, PMs need to use the estimated man-days as a gauge to monitor productivity / profitability. Remember – overruns will erode the margin!

6. Be Flexible
There are many occasions that Base Costs already exceeds client’s budget. Be flexible to review the man-days estimation, evaluate the importance of this client vs margins, explore alternative development methods and sources, reduce scope with client, etc. There are many areas that can be trimmed so Base Cost can be reduced. Key is to be flexible and make a continuous effort to everyone’s expectations.

So you see, only when you know how much it costs you to take on the project can you then decide how much to charge, and then know how much you can earn. The question is not really about to reduce or not to reduce.

LinkedIn made easy

// June 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing

photo credits : Binkiexxx

One of the most asked questions from my clients – What’s LinkedIn and how it can benefit my business?

If you use Facebook to connect to friends, you can use LinkedIn to connect to business associates. LinkedIn is a social networking site where an individual creates an online profile of his/her professional resume. With that profile, he/she then connects to someone in LinkedIn and through that network, establish new job opportunities or business opportunities.

Within your network of business contacts, you can recommend or as to be introduced to other contacts. LinkedIn allows users to also create and join groups. Within these groups, users can discuss and share ideas on the specific topics.

Here are some ways that you can use LinkedIn to leverage on your career or business:-

Join groups and get involved in discussions

Participate in discussion within groups that are related to a your industry. It is through this participation that you inherit new ideas and also made yourself known. In your discussion, you have the opportunity to be heard, make relevant references to your blog posts and even use case studies in your business to reinforce a point you are making. If you are doing it right, you will be able to increase the visibility of your business and brand, generate sales leads, drive traffic to your websites and even enhance your SEO efforts.

Set up a company profile

A properly crafted company profile page will open your company to attract potential candidates. Add links to your company’s blog, facebook group, twitter account, etc. Your digital footprint is something that you can leverage on to attract talents, at the same time, give your potential clients a feel of your corporate culture.

You may want to know before jumping in…

There are a few issues you may want to keep in mind before launching a campaign on LinkedIn.

Confidential corporate information – Similar to any online social media networks, the risk corporate information leaking is real. That risk is multiplied if there is a huge number of employees in LinkedIn. You may want to communicate some simple house rules for employees to aid them in understanding what’s considered ‘confidential’.

Poaching – It is known that recruiters use LinkedIn and other professional networking sites to headhunt potential candidates for their assignments. You may also want to know even without LinkedIn, poaching and headhunting still exists.

You are want you posted - Again, like any social networking, you are what you post. Your corporate culture is also reflected based on how you ‘behave’ on LinkedIn. Be mindful that you are being watched by potential employers, clients and more importantly, your BOSS!

Have fun!

Is having a huge number of twitter followers that important?

// May 25th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing

photo credits : brajeswhwar
_

If you are a twitter user, you probably will have a couple of people following you every week. You visit their twitter page, realized that these ’social media celebrities’ has tens of thousands of followers. You think to yourself, I should reciprocate and follow back. You are not alone.

Many marketers believe that it is important  to have many twitter followers – as many as possible. It helps them create a channel to broadcast, to establish their online reputation as “I am important” or it simply makes they credible. I beg to differ.

The method of mass following is common. Many ‘twitter gurus’ make a business out of this by teaching others how to increase the number of followers in a very short time. Their tools include softwares that automatically follows people, hoping that they will reciprocate. I am not saying it is wrong. I just don’t agree.

It is about your content

In my earlier post in Social Media Optimization, I talk about quality and not quantity. I also talk about social media as 2-way communications and it is about establishing a relationship. The number of followers is irrelevant if most of them don’t even know who you are, what you do and what you are saying. Would they care a sxxt what you are trying to ‘push’ them when you have a product to sell? I don’t think so.

We heard about the success of dell using twitter to market its products, reaping in a million dollars.  They did not do mass following. They offered twitter exclusive offers instead. Dell creates a reason for followers to follow them. In this sense, it is 2-way. There are ‘contents’ that the followers are interested.

It is about commitment (time & resources)

Social media marketing requires commitment. It is time, money and manpower. It requires sustained efforts. I relate that to real-life socialization where you need to dedicate time and money to get out there and know more people, and be known at the same time. If all these sounds a lot to you or your boss, social media marketing may not be your cup of tea.

Social Media Optimization

// May 20th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Digital Marketing

photo credit – oneredpanther
_

We heard about SEO – Search Engine Optimization all the time. How about ensuring your digital strategy is social media optimized too? SMO should be a natural part of your digital strategy. The challenges that we face in embracing social media as marketing tools is uncertainity in results. Here are some principles that I subscribe to when working with social media.

It starts with 2-way conversation.

Social media is about establishing a relationship. A relationship that is built from conversations – 2 way communications, to be precise. Ask questions, answer questions, share thoughts, discuss, co-create. Relationships are built like this offline too. This is the key difference between traditional media where it is 1-way.

Forget about quantity. Focus on quality.

I am sick of followers on Twitter that follows you, hoping that you will reciprocate and follow back. They are doing this just to increase the number of followers. The question is so what you have 10,000 followers? Can you boost that you can influence them with your thoughts? Sway them into making a buying decision? or simply that you can reach them with whatever messages that you think you want them to hear? That’s using marketing 1.0 methods in a web 2.0 world. It beats to have 10 followers that engages with you on a constant basis that to have 10,000 whom never even care to read about your tweets. Quality please.

Forget about viral

Viral is a natural product of correct content for the correct audience. Having ’share this with someone wouldn’t work if your content does not connect at all. Don’t harp on viral. Work on what your audiences want. Viral will come.

Set realistic goals and take little steps at a time

Social media is not the gateway to reach out to entire online population. Don’t expect phenomenon results like what you read in the papers about how successful Dell has used Twitter to increase sales of their boxes. They probably take much more time in planning, executing and tweaking before it works for them. Take little steps and keep the team motivated.

Be patient & enjoy.

When is my job done?

// May 20th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Agency Management, Web Design

It struck me hard that most of the time, digital agencies believe their scope of service ends at the launch of the website. The team’s just dying to move on once the site is launched and little attention is spent on it thereafter.

To me, the launch of the website marks the beginning of part 2 of the job. It is when real users start interacting and consuming contents that we have created. This engagement will need to be measured through properly defined tracking metrics so we can learn if the information architecture is doing its job, if we are really getting that conversion we want, or simply put, if we are meeting our goals.

It is only through this form of tracking that the team (and the client as well) can learn and make changes. That’s the beauty of digital. Track-n-Tweak!

The mindset shift that we need to do this remaining 50% job so that we can really deliver an experience to the client’s audiences and eventually, deliver results to the client impacts a number of things. It changes the way the team works, in terms of scheduling and tasks allocation, it creates the need to think deeper in terms of tracking metrics & it changes the way we do our costings.

More importantly, it changes the way clients see the agency. Which client will not be appreciative of an agency that follow-through the entire campaign, constantly on the lookout for potholes and proactively making tweaks to make sure we see results.

I believe the first step is a mindset change from the top. The rest will follow suit.

Online Campaigns – The legal part

// May 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Digital Campaigns