Jason Lim, Ramen Business Consultant, Interviewed by NHK Global

See the interview here - http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/movie/feature201111242113.html

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook from Alex Trimpe on Vimeo.

The web is finally ‘humanized’ after all these years and that’s how we want it to be. Consumers expect brands to listens and if that happens, they are more willing to start listening to brands as well. Blogging or micro-blogging will help brands and businesses to start engaging the consumers on an authentic and personal level.

Viral

As I have always said to my clients, if your products or services suck, social media will not fix it. On the contrary, it may help to amplify those flaws. The key is to understand from the conversions and learn why consumers think your products and service sucks. Fix it! On the other hand, if your products or services rocks, you may jolly be hitching a ride on the bandwagon, getting leverage from the word-of-mouth that can be generated from social media.

Be found

The corporate online newsroom are seen as an online depositary for press releases. The fact is most journalists research using the web and if the online newsroom is search optimized, you are on your way to being found. Apply SEO techniques and best practices to your newsroom is key to standing out and being found.

Build an audience, herd a community

When brands get out in the web and start to engage consumers authentically, they can start building an audience. As that conversation grows, the audience evolves into a community. Over time, when trust between brand and consumer is forged, you get people that are willingly listening to what you have to say. Wouldn’t that beats email blasting content to an unknown base and hoping for click-throughs to happen?

It takes a mindset shift for companies to be able to engage authentically with consumers on the social web. The effort is ongoing and there aren’t shortcuts to building a loyal and satisfied community on social media. But the fruits of labour will be equally sweet.

Old Spice Social Case Study from Digital Buzz on Vimeo.

I shared a video sometime back on how Old Spice uses the social media in their digital campaign – “The man your man can smell like’. Now check this case study out.

A cheeky yet clever facebook campaign that I came across this morning.

First, it uses facebook’s founder Mark Zukerberg as the subject since facebook is one the most popular social networking site whom huge datacenter infrastructure consumes a whole load of electricity that was generated by the dirty old coal. Second, it drives the message across strongly using the concept of ‘befriending’ and ‘unfriending’ in facebook to challenge users to exert pressure on facebook and leading organizations to switch towards environmental-friendly energy sources.

Greenpeace has been working on the IT sector for the last 5 years and according to Greenpeace, based on current growth rates of data centers and telecommunication networks, the two key components of the cloud Facebook depends on, will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatts hours of electricity in 2020. That’s more than triple their current consumption and more than the current electricity consumption of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined.

Let’s see if social media can help this meaningful cause.

An interesting application of Facebook Places in digital marketing by Nike Sportswear. Probably one of the first few campaigns that uses Facebook Places.

With Facebook places, marketers can now explore location-based campaigns such as checking-in to a store to enjoy discounts or freebies. Developers can also leverage on the Facebook Places API to integrate their apps with Facebook Places to pull information about people, locations, groups and more. At this point, only a couple of apps like Foursquares will integrate with Fb places.

Looking forward to see this being launched in Singapore soon. For Businesses, remember to ‘Claim your business’ on Fb Places the moment it is launched here so early adopters can start checking-in @ your location.

Digital campaigns that I worked on require some form of measurement so the client and I know what worked, and what did not. I am inclined to measure effectiveness of each campaign based on the level of engagement and interaction in each campaign. Here is a list of metrics that I used in some of the campaigns:-

The only logical way of measurement, to me, with a lack of statistical data over a significant timeframe, is to measure the above metrics over a period of time (3-6 months) and peg the statistics to actual sales figures or revenue. With that, I can correlate revenue growth vs metrics. This shows what worked, what do not. Again, I stress that the expectation in measuring success of a digital campaign needs to be worked out with the client so both digital agency and client is on the “same wavelength”.