But before we go into that, I feel this year’s conference lineup is exciting! The theme of the event is about Driving Asia’s Digital Development and there were tracks of breakout sessions covering from Fundamentals of Digital Marketing, Digital Trends, Tools and Technologies, and Digital Adoption And Execution Trends of Emerging and Developed Markets, as well as an Exhibition Seminar Theatre in the Expo Hall.

The topics which the speakers are covering are really close to the ground. With breakout sessions like “Integrating Mobile Marketing Into Your Overall Business Strategy”, and interactive workshops like “Optimising Your Social Media Marketing”, I really see how the attendees can walk away with actionable insights that can be applied immediately in their digital marketing.

The press conference this morning featured a panel of 6 speakers to share their insights. Here are my insights!

1. Enrique Baizas – Digital Marketing Champion, Zone AOA for Nestle touched on the idea that the strategy for marketing in social media needs to be different from one for the regular traditional media. The key difference in that, even when brands stop advertising or promoting online, conversation will still continue on the various platforms. It is therefore important for companies not only to have their content grid and marketing plan, but also be flexible enough to adapt, remix and engage with the responses they get from the different social platforms.
2. Michael Lazerow, CEO and Founder of Buddy Media emphasised that it is the content that powers the connections, and it is in the human networks where the power lies. With right idea and great story to tell, digital marketing need not be complicated.
3. Greg Dale, COO of Comscore Inc talked about the the trends and evolutions in Digital Advertising. Mobile is big, especially in Singapore. In fact, Singapore leads the world in terms of non-computer traffic! E-commerce, while slower to pick up in Singapore, are also still seeing positive trends.
4. Jeffery Cole, Director, Centre for the Digital Future, USC Annenberg School touched on a point that is near and dear to almost everyone connected to the Internet – that nobody really wants to give up the Internet! But, many of us are tired of having it define our lives. The lines between and work and personal time have blurred and even though the Internet is supposed to make us more productive, we end up working more hours, working late at night and on weekends. There is a need to find a balance.
5. Ranji David, Executive Director for Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Singapore told us how IAB has been doing to educate, enable, inspire and elevate digital marketing in Singapore. She also touched on some very important statistics – that as of the 1st half of 2011, only 8% of the advertising budget is spent online in Singapore, comparatively, the mature markets like US and the UK are seeing figures in the 30-odd percentile. More talents are hired today than ever, and Singapore is also getting a lot of support from the government in this industry
6. Loren I. Shuster, Country Director, Singapore and Emerging Markets at Google spoke about the acceleration of everything! Soon everyone and everything can and will be online, and with the availability of the Internet on mobile and other platforms, consumers are becoming hyper-informed and they do a lot of their research online before they make purchasing decisions.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to drop in for some sessions tomorrow so I’ll be able to provide you with more insights!

The post Ad:Tech 2012 at Suntec Convention Centre (13 – 14 June 2012) appeared first on Blog Marketing Tools and Strategies for Business.

All these comments came in within 2 minutes last night. And they all went into the spam folder. SEO effect? Zero – at least for my blog. Of course, they have probably spammed a thousand other blogs in the same fifteen minutes, and been lucky enough to have hit one or two that didn’t have their spam filter on.

Another surprise came when I realized that many of these spammy comments had URLs pointing to Singapore related domains or .sg domains. A couple of them were horrid looking “made for Adsense” splogs (they still exist!), and some were legitimate company websites.

What was common was that all these sites pointed to one SEO company in Singapore – one that sold packages of “5000 Facebook Invites for USD$39.90″ and “100 Facebook Fans for $49.90″!

Frankly, I feel sorry for the legitimate companies who probably paid good money to this SEO consultant to market their website. On the other hand, I think there is a need to educate some business owners and marketing professionals on how to choose a proper SEO company – what do you think?

Blog Commenting for SEO

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that blog commenting does not work for SEO. In fact, from my own observations and experience, these blog comments still work very well, despite the fact that most blogs still have the rel=”nofollow” attribute for their comment links.

However, for the comments to go through and SEO to really take effect, the comments need to be insightful and valuable to the blog owner, not random phrases submitted by a piece of software. Like many things in life, its not what you do, but how you do it that matters.

The post Mass Blog Commenting Services by a Singapore SEO Company appeared first on Blog Marketing Tools and Strategies for Business.

These IT shows are getting bigger with each exhibition – this time, there is over 350,000 square feet of exhibit space, taking up 5 entire show floors in Suntec! I guess I will be visiting this the exhibition this year early – first to find out about my much needed home broadband Internet connection plans (I heard from a friend that they will be giving out MacBook Airs for 2 year contract broadband plans!), as well as to get myself updated with the latest gadgets!

During the previous SITEX show in 2010 which was held in Expo, I bought a Canon MG5270 Multifunction Printer for $299 – it was not cheaper than what you could find at the retail stores, but at the IT fair, they give out more freebies like a pack of 4″x6″ photo paper. Maybe its time for me to head back and check out the price of the ink tanks.

Challenger Matches IT Show 2011 Pricing

As a member of Challenger member, I receive their regular emailing – and this year they are really going all out to grab the market share!

Exclusively for Challenger members only, they will match any show pricing for the products they have, as long as you present a valid IT show flyer! Of course, like everything else in the world, there are “terms and conditions”, but I think this would be a good alternative location for shopping for people who don’t like to shop in the sardine packed Suntec city mall or wait hours in the traffic jam.

So, what are the deals you are waiting to get at the IT Show 2011? Or are you going hold your horses (and wallets!) and wait for the next IT trade show in Singapore – PC Show Singapore 2011, from 9 to 12 June 2011?

The post IT Show 2011 at Suntec Singapore appeared first on Blog Marketing Tools and Strategies for Business.

Dr Jacques Attali is the founder and the first President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and named by the US Foreign Policy magazine as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the World.

This topic is near and dear to many of us, whether you own a business, or you are employed – even though the the Asian countries were less affected by the international crisis.

So, what of the future, in a world where there is little prospect of growth in the large economies of the US and major European countries? Can Europe provide economic leadership for the future?

Come pose your questions and get them answered by Dr Jacques Attali, at this public talk organised by ASEF! Registration details can be found on the ASEF website.

The post Is the Global Economy Still in Crisis? appeared first on Blog Marketing Tools and Strategies for Business.

The one day workshop opens the doors and takes you into the world of social media, and how your business can leverage on it for marketing and outreach.

What I really loved about the course is that is a good balance between the platform specific techniques and the strategic concepts. Some of the concepts are potentially very powerful, like changing your “instructions” to “conversations”, identifying to leading social tribes, learning the 6 keys to writing content for social media, and the 3 key phases (and what activity to focus on in each phase) when marketing on any social platform.

Afterall, while Facebook and Twitter are now the hottest platforms where everybody is clamoring to put their business on, it is hard to say if this will stay the same 2 years from now. The social media and web community scene, in just the past decade, has seen many usurpations – since the good old days where we were still forming eCircles and the Friendster logo was still blue.

If you are reading the inside stories, you will know that many of these huge communities died or got bought over not because people didn’t like them, but because they didn’t make enough profit to sustain! So the platforms are always going to change, whether you like it or not!

Having a good social media marketing master plan is essential.

You need to go where your target audience is, and learn the technical stuff quickly so you can focus on building your tribe, rather than spend time beautifying your profile.

So if you are looking to get your business started on social media, you need to choose a social media workshop that gets you to think about your master plan and has enough material on the strategic concepts, rather and one that just teaches you how to set up a Facebook account and fan page.

Makes sense?

The post Choosing a Social Media Marketing Workshop appeared first on Blog Marketing Tools and Strategies for Business.

Not with Aweber, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, or Intellicontact.

I didn’t blast out 7000 emails.

I sent 7 personally hand-crafted emails just from my Gmail account, asking for referrals from existing contacts and clients.

Guess what? Within 24 hours, now I have at least 5 potential deals lined up and I’ll be meeting up with some of these business owners tomorrow and on Friday to discuss their web design and SEO requirements… and that is not taking into the “broadcast” which one friend offered to help me do when he gets back from his holiday – to his colleagues, over on the other side of the world in Austin, Texas.

I was very surprised with the response and I’m so glad I have so wonderful clients and associates. I really appreciate their help!

The Money is in the List?

In the Internet Marketing arena, they always say that “the money is in the list”.

While that is true to an extent, I feel that what is more important is for you to have a good relationship with the people in your “list”. Many small businesses read too much into the idea of building a massive list, and really fail to focus on building those relationships.

Then we end up with “lists” that are so void of relationships that when we email out we need to track “open rates”.

I’ve certainly fell into this trap myself, and the short marketing exercise yesterday was a good wake up call for me to focus back on relationships. This will not be easy for me, since I can really be a total woodblock when it comes to socializing.

But I think it will be worth it.

How about you? When was the last time you sent a really personalized email?

The post Email Marketing appeared first on Blog Marketing Tools and Strategies for Business.

1. Know Your Purpose – Before you craft your first HTML tag, decide on the purpose of your site. Are you going for sales, leads, market awareness, or just to inform?
2. Keyword Research – Especially if you are targeting local traffic, most popular “keyword tools” are secondary as compared to a good empirical subject matter research.
3. Ranking is Dead – With Google Personalized Search in effect today, SEO is not only about ranking on page one, but also getting the clicks from the searchers when you do so. Ranking doesn’t mean traffic and traffic doesn’t mean conversions.
4. Build Links Naturally – Even as you do your link building campaigns, strive for a consistent growth in link popularity and equity.
5. Internal Linking – Half the war is won by linking the pages on your site correctly. Plan your site well so that you can achieve a good internal linking structure.
6. Build Link Baits – Search your industry for examples, or think of something newsworthy, informative, humorous, or controversial. A well promoted link bait can give you thousands of links!
7. Google Webmaster Tools – Check your account regularly so that you have a good overview of how Google sees your site.
8. Analyse Your Analytics – Your analytics is your gold mine for SEO. Consult your analytics data regularly to uncover more keywords you can easily rank for.
9. Write for Humans – Even though you need to include your target keywords in your web copy, don’t compromise human readability to cater for search engines. Write naturally.
10. Don’t Make Your Visitors Think – Web design should be predictable, consistent and simple.

Finggle will be conducting their next workshop in mid-September 2010. Check out the out their SEO Workshop page for more details!

The post SEO Tips from Finggle SEO Workshop appeared first on Blog Marketing Tools and Strategies for Business.

If you want to learn to use your analytics data for marketing, here are some snippets of information worth gathering and some questions worth asking yourself, when you view your web analytics reports.

1. Keywords – What are the keywords that lead people to your site? Which ones of these keywords are converting into inquiries or sales? How are these keywords already ranking on the search engines this month? How can you get these keywords to rank better?

2. Bounce Rates – What is the bounce rate for your website? Benchmarks these rates with similar sites in your industry. How are you doing? How do you improve your bounce rate?

3. Time on Site – What is the average visitor time on site for your website? Is this reasonable, considering the type of content on your site? If not, how can you engage the visitor better so they spend more time on your site, or how can you help your visitor perform their transaction faster, so they spend less time on your site?

4. Geographical Traffic Sources – Are you getting to the countries that you want to target? If not, what factors can you change in your website configuration (hosting, domain, content, marketing) to make sure you be more prominent in the search engines for that country?

5. Top Content Pages – Which are the pages that are most viewed on your site? Look at the top 10 pages – what do they have in common, and how can you create more pages that are similar to the top 10?

6. Screen Resolutions and Web Browsers – What are the screen resolutions used by your visitors? Is the current design of your website catering well to these visitors, or do they have to scroll horizontally in order to view all your content? Are your visitors coming to your site through a mobile phone browser? If so, are you catering to that segment of visitors by offering a mobile version of your site?

When you have your analytics tracking code installed correctly to track events and virtual pageviews – that is where the fun comes because you can not only track which pages of your site gets visited and for how long, but also what your visitors do on each page (to a certain extent).

Remember, the inferences you draw from your analytics data and the decisions you make can make or break your site. Take time to answer these questions as you look at your analytics reports.

The post Analyzing Web Analytics appeared first on Blog Marketing Tools and Strategies for Business.

You see, web platforms like these are just… platforms. Platforms are useless without content. Having more blogs and forums for your web visitors to collaborate and connect and discuss is useful only when you HAVE sufficient visitors in the first place. Slideshows and videos are useful only when you have something to say, an experience to relate, or a story to tell. Content is and will always be king.

Follow the WHY -> WHO -> WHAT -> HOW method in your web assets creation strategy.

#1 Why

First and most importantly, WHY do you want to create a new web asset in the first place? Examine this. Will this really bring more profits to your company bottom line… or are you doing this because “XYZ company has it?”

#2 Who

You need to know WHO you are targeting. As they always say, targeting everyone is equivalent to targeting no one. Go niche. Identify the “ideal visitor”. Describe him with as much detail as possible. What does he do? Where does he live? When does he surf the net and end up on your site?

#3 What

Now that you have identified the WHO, you will decide WHAT kind of content appeals to him. Does he prefer videos, or text? How-to guides, or conceptual articles? Does he like to interact with others, or is he more of reader? What content can you present to him so he will take action?

#4 How

The HOW phase is only where the web platforms come in. If there is minimal need for interaction between visitors, don’t use a forum. If you want feedback and comments, use a blog. And if you just need a plain old information page with an enquiry form that emails you, a simple 3 page website can do the job faster, without fuzzing over plugins that don’t work or pulling your hair out over incompatibility issues.

… plus it’ll cost you cheaper.

Remember, technology is a tool. It is a means to an end. Listen and follow Stephen Covey’s principles – Begin with the end in mind.

Know your WHYs, WHOs and WHATs… and the HOWs becomes much easier for you to implement.

The post The WHY, WHO, WHAT, HOW web asset creation strategy appeared first on Blog Marketing Tools and Strategies for Business.

Soon, you’ll be able to point an Android phone at someone and have his name pop out (together with his favourite food, lifestyle habits, and how many girlfriends he’s juggling – photos included)

That’s Google’s mission – to organize the world’s information.

I must say, this is amazing technology.

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