If you have noticed, there has been a couple of changes that I am making to this blog right now.  It has been a while since I have even touched my own blog.  I have been busy with my full time e-marketing job and my new born baby.  What’s the point of revamping this blog?

During my free time, I have started up a few social media assets for the past two years.  And because of that, I have not touched regularly on my Charles Lau dot Com website.  Hence, I am now cleaning up my posts – re-categorizing them and remove all the irrelevant and outdated information.

Once everything is ready, I will be continuing with my next review on project management software.  See ya around!

It has been a while since I last update the blog.  So sorry about it as I was preparing for the birth of my baby who came to accompany me and my wife on 18 March 2012.  I have to look into an pending blog review too… So sorry about it!

In this post, I would like to talk about this topic: Taking advantage of the situation.

This topic came to my mind when I start to see how businesses thought of using their privileged access to promote their products and services.  I personally feel that they have lost our trust when they have overdone it.

For example, when I pumped petrol for my car and was about to pay for petrol at the counter, the counter cross-sells me with rice and essence of chicken.  While I just want to pay for my petrol, the constant initiative to ask if I want to buy this and that is just wasting my time even though I may pause to think about it.

Another example is when I receive my credit card bill or even to receive my pin.  The bill tends to up-sell me with their products as well.

Last example is when I see an actor speaking about her relationship with her mum in the upcoming Mother’s Day and the massage chair.  And of course, the conclusion is to buy a massage chair for her mum.

While many of these things might be able to help in their sales, they are actually quite interruptive in our day-to-day.  But to the sales people out there, do they really care if they are able to take advantage of the situation?

2011 has been a significant year for me as I attempted to start a social media platform for Foodflag. I have met a lot of great and interesting friends, and I have learnt some mistakes in the midst of getting it started.

Nevertheless, this has helped me shaped the new year today. It helped me set the momentum and an idea of how I should tackle 2012.

I took about two months to think about and prepare for 2012. I spoke to different groups of friends to listen to their opinions. I changed my plan again and again as I need to consider the amount of time I need to spend with my wife and our new-born baby coming in March 2012. The first half of 2011 has cost me a lot of time to spend inefficiently on the partnership agreement where I could have focus on productivity of the project. A lot of time has been spent on human factors such as lack of dedication and motivation to bring this big thing forward. It took me great pains before I decided to disband everything and start all over. That’s because a lot of communications has been made and it is such a waste to put a stop to this.

This year, 2012. I have set my new year resolution.
1. Learn all the web technologies out there.
2. Apply the technologies on my upcoming project.
3. Spend time with my wife and baby.
4. Bring my full-time job to the next stage.

This is all that I am focusing on. And I pray to God as I put my focus on them…

I have been thinking about how I should set my new year resolutions.  Or I should say they are my goals for 2012.

Other than my usual full-time job that I have, I have my online hobbies (as you know): They are the Android Phone Tips, Foodflag, Singapore Profile, and a few more others.

In my last army reservist recently, I spoke to one of my army friends about how I should tackle 2012.  He recommended me to take one step at a time.  I thought so about it as well when I can also see the two paid communities that I have joined (i.e. Third Tribe Marketing and Problogger Community) are also losing track of their work as the founders are overwhelmed with many of their other commitments.  I wouldn’t want my web communities to end up like this, as they are slowly deteriorating.

I need to set my new year resolution, and to get my priorities straightened.  Some of the things that I am learning right now so as to get myself equipped are: Android development, Facebook app development, PHP object oriented development, AJAX and HTML5/CSS3.

Just now, I watched Brian Tracy’s most recent short video on time management.  It is really useful as it is all about working on the most important things and eliminating the least important ones.

It’s 27 Dec 2011… 4 more days to finalise my new year resolution…

This is one good case study for the rest of us who are learning about managing the social media.

While there could have been many reasons for the CEO to remove this event at the very last minute, this is simply a move which is too drastic to make especially when people are able to air their thoughts and reasonings on the social media which are many times more valid than the CEO’s reasons.

What’s done is already done.  But it’s the aftermath of handling the social media that matters today.

So far as I can see, they have been trying to do some cleaning up of the “mess” by finishing the unfinished work, doing some FAQs for the public, CEO giving some explanation, keeping the comments as intact as possible while removing vulgarities, CEO posting on the wall to apologise and taking full responsibilities, and lastly to focus on business continuity with the rest of the wall posts.

It is a very difficult task to handle the huge amount of negative comments which keep flowing in.  Not to ignore any of them and continue to allow the social media users to vent their anger, it is a wise choice to make as it requires a lot of thoughts and a plan to clean up the mess.  The idea is not to agitate anybody.  No amount of words can ever be sufficient to have a good reason to convince anyone why they are withdrawing an activity which costs the company a million dollar of expenses and refunding around 1000 tickets.  Seriously speaking from both the business point of view, and from the public of this highly-anticipated event.

I think they have done everything that they need in this social media crisis.  Only time can heal the rest now.

Just recently in May, I wrote a review about AceProject.  Since then, they have launched a completely revamped design recently.  Hence, they felt the time is right for them to sponsor again me to write another review here.  I will do my best to review and write them down here.

Introduction

Let me just do a quick introduction here.  This is a project planning software whereby it allows users to manage their projects.  In the above screenshot, it shows you a dashboard right after you have logged in.  This dashboard shows all the tasks and projects assigned to you, time that you have clocked, and your expenses that are in progress, submitted, approved or rejected.

Desktop Interface

I must say that the user interface looks really sleek this time round!  It looks much easier to use, and it feels good to use as well.  I think the most important thing is that it seems to complete everything that is needed by a project manager in terms of easy management of projects, project costs, expenses, timesheets, task management, documents and more.

Mobile Interface

Today, we are very used to using smart phones and tablets.  A lot of us tend to own iPhones, iPads, Galaxy Tab, and others.  Hence, we would want to update our projects on to go as well since we have access to the Internet wherever we go.  Believe it or not, it is quite unsure amongst the project management software that they come with a mobile friendly view of the project management.  I believe this shall become trendy for sure in the near future.  AceProject has a mobile version which is a web app, and I heard from them that it has become quite popular among their customers, especially because of its awesome performance and multi-browser compatibility.  To access the mobile version directly, simply add the /m to your account’s login (for example in my case, it will be http://charleslau.aceproject.com/m/).  See below for the screenshot.

Available to two types of packages

For most of us, we want to have instant gratification.  We want to start using the project management software immediately.  We would choose the Hosted Packages.  We just pay the money on the monthly basis, and we can get started immediately.  But for those of you who are just started, AceProject actually provides free basic package which allows you to have 5 active users on 5 different projects with up to 250mb of space to keep the information.

For the others who want to host by themselves, it could be because of confidential reasons or whatsoever.  If you belong to this category, you can opt for the Intranet Package where you can just purchase a licence to start using it.  This is usually used by bigger enterprises who have security policy to abide for their staff to work within.  This package also allows you to customise the software according to your needs as well.

Conclusion

As I was communicating with AceProject staff, I can feel that they are very sincere and approachable.  They are very serious with their work here as I can see a lot of changes and improvements, and I will strongly encourage you guys to give AceProject a try to see if it suits your project management.

Click here to create a free AceProject account now with all features enabled.

These few months, I have been occupying myself with my daytime job and dealing with the newbies working on my Facebook Pages. As I was doing that, I was brainstorming what I will want to do with my future websites.

Today, I happened to speak to a friend who is starting up with his own website to sell properties.  This whole idea fired me up and I tried to teach him as much as I could on how he should turn himself into a property guru to help his clients.  But when I look back at my websites, they are probably quite outdated already.  Except for the fact that I have focused a lot more on Food Flag specifically.

This reminds me a lot about teaching.  The more that you teach, the more that you get to learn as well.  It is beneficial to both sides actually.  Perhaps, I should find more students to teach so as to discover more about myself…

When I first heard the news, I was really sad about it. I have never ever seen him or known him in my life, but he has taught me many things as a role model whom I have taken as a benchmark in entrepreneurship. Unlike most of the businesses out there where they always fight in price wars, Apple does things differently from the rest. For example in the recent few IT Show, my wife bought a MacBook Pro there even though it has no price difference over, except for some really cheap freebies that the authorised resellers threw in such as a mouse with a very low quality and simulates like an Apple mouse… (I would rather throw that away!) And the interesting thing is that they can almost always sold out the Apple products! Right in the first place, we don’t really need to buy from the IT Show… But it seems to be the hot button to push them to buy…

Even though I don’t live in United States, I have learnt a lot from Steve Jobs! His presentation skill is probably the best… It is world class! He showed me how to present everytime I need to… I did that by going to YouTube to see and learn from his past presentations.

He taught me how to deal with crisis when iPhone4 faced reception issue. One thing that amazed me is that he actually shows the world that this problem is common by demonstrating other phone brands such as Nokia and Blackberry. He even posted them up on Apple website. All these things made all the phone brands seemed panic and retaliated with their press releases.

He taught me how to work on product creation when I read books about him. The single most important factor is that he sets the vision of the products, and gets his hands dirty by testing the products himself. He does not believe in doing product survey because the potential customers do not know what they want. It’s like when Henry Ford (the car inventor) asks what the people want and they can only answer that they want a faster horse because cars don’t exist back then.

He also taught me about marketing communications. When the shop owners want to sell Apple products, they must set up the standard Apple environment inside. It is so clean and tidy. We all know this is an Apple corner and nothing else! All collaterals are very standardised, and even their prices. I also like their website as it is very simple and well-aligned across different countries. Most importantly, branding is something that the CEO must take charge of personally.. And Steve Jobs had done them all. Whereas for the rest of the companies, they are too consumed by the lame reasons of being MNCs themselves that they can’t do this or that, and excused themselves that these are the things that only small companies can do.

I have no idea how the logistics and supply chain works for them but I believe it must be superb since I guess Tim Cook was the man behind, and he has been highly recommended by Steve Jobs to take over his CEO role.

Also, I admire his entrepreneurship when he was out of Apple. At that time, he had actually started up two companies which eventually become very profitable and were bought over by Apple and Disney.

Lastly, I have ever thought of starting up a music online store. The path was super difficult as different sings are owned by different companies. And the kind of dedication that they want from me basically needs me to pay upfront tens of thousands of dollars! When Steve Jobs wanted to start iTunes, he managed to convince the companies to sell as such a low cost. He had magically went past the difficulties that I had!

With so many things to learn from him, it is such a pity that he has to go. Perhaps the heaven needs his help to revolutionise the apple tree that Adam and Eve have eaten… There is no reason why God has called for him to be home at such a young age. But whatever it is, I felt privileged to have known such a legendary person on earth – Steve Jobs. Thank you!

In order for a company to grow big, companies have turned to automation so as to strive to become scalable.

When a company is still small, they can still say “Welcome Charles.  Do you still want to have your favorite drink for your meal?”  When they grew big, they forgot their customers’ name.  But they will only greet and ask about their favorite drink when the customer flashes their VIP card and they checked in their database of their customers’ favorite drink.

Today, it is virtually impossible for a company’s staff to remember so many customers and treat them as though they are their friends.  They have to use some sort of automation in order to be “personal” and “friendly” to their customers.

And to manage customer relationships, the companies are treating the customers like a number game in sales and customer service.  The meaning of number game is that if they failed to close a deal or to satisfy a customer’s need, they will just move on and look for new customers.  This is all taught by the top salespeople as their focus is on money and not on the customers’ needs.  And it seems to work very well for them, but it doesn’t work well for the customer service when they have to handle the complaints and misrepresentations by the salespeople.

This is where social media comes in handy.  Because of its common platform being used, people are talking freely to everybody about you and your company.  If you have treated any particular customer badly, don’t be surprised that the other customers know about it as well.  In fact, right from the start where you work on social media, you should already be expecting complaints and you should even plead your customers to complain so that you can focus on improving and becoming a better company to serve them!

This should be the way that the companies should be expecting when they are using social media.  Hence, the rest are all about content scheduling and marketing exciting campaigns…