The Best Format for Case Studies

I am the kind of person who doesn't like to read a long case study to understand a company's capabilities. So I found the most effective format of case studies as follows:

First, list the client name and industry.
Secondly, use 1 para. to describe the situation before the client seeks your help.
Thirdly, use 1 para. to explain your solution to this client.
Fourthly, use 1 para. to paint a visual picture with numbers and stats of the result
Eventually, don't forget to get a testimonial from the client - better someone high-level so it can add some third-party endorsement power.

A good example I saw today is from an iContact case study at Updata's website.

iContact
iContact's Situation
In 2007, four-year-old iContact was growing rapidly, with a proven product and customer acquisition model. Management saw an opportunity to expand market share more quickly in the SMB email marketing solutions space, and needed working capital to finance their aggressive growth plans. iContact looked for an investor to fuel expansion while helping to navigate the challenges of steep growth, leading the Durham, N.C., company to team with Updata Partners.

Updata's Solution
Updata faciliated iContact’s increased investment in sales and marketing, and helped to augment and counsel the management which has since generated significant value, including expanding a customer base of 55,000 to more than 500,000 users just two years later.

Result
Revenues more than quadrupled from 2007-2009, and today iContact has solidified its position as one of the top two of email marketing solutions providers in the SMB market.

CEO Perspective
“Many investors are financially oriented. It is rare to have investors with operational experience. That they have...experience in the software as a service area gives us added faith in their advice. Their prior operational experience has been very helpful to us. With their help we have been able to grow and scale our business much more rapidly than we would have without them. And we definitely have good chemistry with them."

- Ryan Allis

Pretty neat, right? I took me only 2 minutes to read and get the point of Updata's capabilities. I recommend this format.

Google Analytics is a Magic Tool!

Lots of people are using Google Analytics to monitor their websites, and we all know something about it because it is well-designed to be intuitive and easy to understand. Today I picked up a few terms and learned in depth about how to best interpret Google Analytics results.I will try to explain in the simplest way as possible so I can remember.

1. Bounce Rate:
(in my word)
So basically, if someone click your website link but soon realizes they are on the wrong place and leave your website, GA tries to track them down and tell you these clicks are "bounced". So you can have a better idea how many people are REALLY viewing your page for good reason out there.

(from wikipedia)
It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

(I love formulas, so) Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing Only One Page / Total Number of Visits

A visitor can bounce by:

• Clicking on a link to a page on a different web site
• Closing a open window or tab
• Typing a new URL
• Clicking the "Back" button to leave the site
• Session timeout

Google Analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated: "My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying. I stress that this is my personal analysis...."

So now the question became "how to lower the bounce rate if your website bounce rate is high"...So I kept on searching and found some answers as below:

First I read about how to measure bounce rates - not just overall bounce rates but to see how individuals land on different pages to view content. Here it is:
How to Measure Your Website's Bounce Rate
http://www.elated.com/articles/measure-your-website-bounce-rate/

And then I got some advice from the same author on how to reduce the bounce rate:
http://www.elated.com/articles/reduce-your-website-bounce-rate/

Web Browsers: Chrome and Opera

Google Chrome
Actually I haven't used Chrome till late February, 2010 when a friend told me all the great features Chrome provided. Without any doubt, Google constantly produces wonderful ideas and great applications to make our life easier. Well, I am not talking about Buzz here:-P.

Chrome is a great web browser I would recommend you to try. It carries Google search engine toolbar, enables full-text history search, remembers zoom level by site, and opens everything in a new tab for you. It is easy to use, though I cannot speak for Mac users due to lack of that experience.

Opera
The second one I recently find helpful as I learn HTML language, is Opera. This web browser has one feature I really admire. Opera displays the value of TITLE in a small box when the pointer is over a link. Most browsers have ignored this useful attribute. Yet it is helpful as I am one the people would feel reluctant to click on a link without knowing what's in it first.
Opera also uses the value of TITLE as the subject line in email links. So when you click on the email link, it automatically helps us fill out the subject of the email as something like "response to XX". Isn't it great?

Market Share

Below is the market share of different web browsers. Apparently Chrome and Opera don't take a large piece of the market cake. Still good to know about their features.
I don't know if you are interested or not, but html code tutorial is a helpful web site.

How to Evaluate Social Media Use for Nonprofits Part II

Various organizations use social media to help with their products and services. Nonprofit organizations especially tend to rely on social media since they are for free. When they use social media, they will wonder about the same question: how well does the organization use social media.
The following are several social media metrics (some in my last post) and how to evaluate social media use with these metrics.

Volunteers

You may let people in your social media communities learn about the wonderful volunteer experience, which will not only build your organizational image, but also help you secure new volunteers through utilizing social media.

Event Attendance

Holding events on a regular basis will help you keep your supporters and donors updated about your nonprofit. But that is not enough. Using social media, you can spread the word out easily and people will likely interact with you before the event on the social media venues.

Testimonials

Clients, supporters and donors may leave a comment on your organization's facebook/twitter/etc., don't let it die on the page. You may include the testimonial in your newsletter, event brochure, and everything else that represent supporters' voices. They like that, and you win a good reputation.

Facebook Comments and Twitter Mentions

This is hard and boring to track but definitely rewarding if you keep doing it. It will show how successful your social media plan is. If your organization facebook gets few comments and is seldom mentioned, you may need another social media plan.

Fans, Followers and Friends

To keep a high social media ROI, the quality of fans/followers/friends is important too.

How to Evaluate Social Media Use for Nonprofits Part I

Various organizations use social media to help with their products and services. Nonprofit organizations especially tend to rely on social media since they are for free. When they use social media, they will wonder about the same question: how well does the organization use social media.
The following are ten social media metrics and how to evaluate social media use with these metrics.
First of all, nonprofits need to keep an eye on their website traffic. You may wonder why you spend a lot of efforts on designing the website and updating everything, yet you get few responses. That's when you will need to track your website's traffic logs and visitors from month to month. You will need to see the change as you branch out to a larger and larger community.

Another important way to evaluate social media use is blog traffic. Nonprofits may find it hard to update blogs on a regular basis, yet this turns out to be a tremendous help to the organization.Blogging may have been a missing piece in most nonprofits' social media strategy package. The nonprofit I work for---InterAct---keeps blogs on community websites like ShareTriangle, MyNC, and GOLO. InterAct was very specific about what web hosts they chose to start blogs. ShareTriangle, MyNC and GOLO are basically the three major event and information sharing community websites that everyone can post blogs and respond to one. This gives some leeway to nonprofits in terms of sharing their events and fundraiser schedules, educating the public about a social issue, and asking for support from local communities. Also, monitoring blog traffic will be necessary in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a blog. To simply put, you may not only count how many replies you get for each blog post, but also how much traffic your blog generate for your official website.

The last one in this post is e-letter tactics. E-letter will help people who are captive audience become voluntary. In other words, people are 'forced' to read your e-letter and get the information, and if they are interested, they will dig more. That's how e-letter works to help promote website traffic, webinar registration, event participation, and even donations.
Content of e-letter is important. Nowadays people are fed up with sales spams, so your e-letter must be personal relevant. If your audience are women with younger children, then your organization e-letter may want to touch several topics like parenting, early schooling, etc. They will attract the audience and thus convince them that your organization will be of some help.
If nonprofits manage this tool well, they will likely see more and more people signing up for their e-letters.

Good PR for Google：A nicely designed Google Analytics Blog

As a web analysis tool, Google Analytics also utilizes different social media for its brand and PR. As you can see, analytics.blogspot.com is Google Analytics' blog for GA users.
In its blog, GA team talks about tips that makes websites work better like a post called "make the web faster". Also included are the training videos and several tutorials for using GA. A good point about having a blog rather than keep a website alone is that, it will allow interactivity and information exchange. From the blog, GA team can learn what their customers are looking for, where they are stuck with GA, and what they did well to help. With all the interactivity, it can tremendously help the customers to answer their tough questions or long-time concerns that are not able to be addressed with an official website only.
Web metrics are getting more and more important as more and more professionals start recommending them to their management team. Instead of putting tons of hours of job in vain, people are willing to monitor and see what's going on. GA provides a perfect venue for that. GA's blog helps fill the gap of new users and keep an eye on the technology change that their old customers need to be aware of.
This is a successful social media application for Google. What do you think?

Add Value to Stand Out: Job Tips from Last Weekend's Local Career Conference

A local organization called Asian Focus held a career conference last weekend for local Chinese community. The conference invited a few seasoned professionals to talk about how to find a job, how to impress an employer/recruiter, how to polish your resume/cover letter, and how to use social media to land a job offer.

There was this speaker called Neal Hill that really impressed the audience. Neal Hill talked about how he got into starting up his own consulting business. He discussed how job seekers should avoid wearing the "I'm seeking an employment" hat, on the other hand, one should try to offer value to the organization before they even consider to help you. Neal Hill found most of his jobs through providing help to the organizations or people. Networks also helped his job search scope. 

Recommended by Neal Hill, one should think about how to add value even before your potential employer think about hiring you. Ask what they are dealing with, and tell how you can provide your second thoughts and help. 

These tips are not directly related to social media. This post is to tell you that searching jobs is not just about posting your resumes on LinkedIn or updating your Twitter status. It is about strategy as well. 
P.S. Wanna share something fun I saw from Guy Kawasaki's retweet...Make your usb cords in line...

 

Chatroulette, where a book is officially judged by its cover

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.
After watching the video from Casey Neistat regarding Chat Roulette, I realized why Chat Roulette has been such a struggle for me since I knew about its existence the first day. 
It is officially providing people a place to judge other people by the way they look. The Appearance outweighs wisdom, knowledge, personality, and pretty much everything else. That explains why Casey as a guy can keep Chatrouletters there for less than 2 seconds, while his pretty female friend can keep people there for more than 2 minutes.
Living in 2010, we have many rules to obey. We are not supposed to discriminate people by the way they look or what they are wearing. Chat Roulette, however, brings us back the old time where we were free to judge people.
Is this a benefit of Social Media too? I doubt it. This may add another point to my previous post about why Chat Roulette is not marketable.

Facebook Fan Page: Best Way for Groups To Get Together?

 It is the first time in my life to hear that moms nowadays may choose to breast feed their babies off-breast. The Times article discusses how moms feel lonely, uncomfortable, or inconvenient to breast-feed their babies, instead, they choose to pump breast milk and feed their babies with bottled breast milk.

Later I checked one of the web sites the article mentioned called Got Breast Pump! The web site provides products related to breast pump, tips to get more breast milk, and so on. Appalled by the many options women nowadays have, I also found the web site had a Facebook Fan Page: GotBreastPump.com

Then the question became, what kind of groups or organizations is Facebook Fan Page best way for?

Some underrepresented groups like GotBreastPump? 

So I kept on reading other articles and found Fan Page fit best the needs for non-profits, some acting stars, activist groups, and small organizations. 

Then I kept on thinking the differences Fan Page makes over other Facebook applications.There are heated debate over Facebook Fan Page and Facebook Group. Which is better and how is one better? According to Ann Smarty's post, Fan Page is better to be used to build and maintain a long-term relationship with customers or supporters. That seems to be an ideal way for non-profits or smaller organizations like GotBreastPump to manage.

Bad news for Facebook Fan Page is a recent annoucenment by Facebook.com that they will plan to have a new tool to replace Fan Page(Facebook To Announce Plans To Take Over The Internet With Facebook Pages)

Before Facebook Fan Page is long-gone, let's talk about it here. What are some of the good stories Fan Page leaves us? 

Mobile Marketing Should Be Easy for Consumers To Take Action

As mobile marketing becomes more and more popular, ad and marketing agencies gets heated competition. Oglivy Interactive did some quite impressive accounts. One that I really like is Dove 'Campaign for Real Beauty.' 

Dove erected a large billboard of a happy, fresh-looking older woman with a text-to-vote number so that pedestrians could choose between 'wrinkled' and 'wonderful.' The billboard's live ticker showed the combined results from both text and online voting.

The campaign turned out to be a successful one. 

Christine's net analyzed the following reasons:

• Relevant to the consumer
• Welcome invitation to participate
• Entertaining
• Drives a specific action
• Integrated where appropriate
• Connects what was previously disconnected
• Simplicity

Among all the above reasons, I found "drives a specific action" and "integrated where appropriate" as the two most crucial ones. The billboard ad apparently leaves people with two options---whether to think the woman in the picture is "wrinkled" or "wonderful". The message itself calls for a specific action---to choose between the two. When people text messages to vote, it probably won't occur to them other things or words. People will tend to choose between the two words since that's what is given. This makes it easy to make a decision and make the action easy to take too. 

In other words, a good mobile marketing campaign should not leave all the questions for the target audience to answer. A good campaign should be specific and make the action easy for the target audience to take. If the target audience only needs to type a eight-lettered word (wrinkled) or a nine-lettered one, they won't feel bothered.It's just easy. Again, marketers shall find an easy way to have the audience's voices heard. Mobile marketing needs to be highly interactive than treating text messages as a mass outlet, or asking the audience to passively receive discount information. It needs to be two-way. Get their voices heard, and the marketers will gain more awareness and eventually profits.

The second reason I agree on is "integrated where appropriate". Mobile marketing will be dead if marketers only use it to promote their products or sending out discount information. It should be actively integrated with other promotions like a billboard ad. Marketers want to connect dots together for the target audience. In this case, the idea of real beauty should be viewed on a billboard, and should be documented by one's text message. Once the marketers make the target audience to move their fingers and type the word out, the target audience will have a higher chance to remember the message and accept the products coming with the message. People will recognize Dove products as for women with real beauty.

I think mobile marketing should integrate with other forms of marketing, and should be easy to interact. What do you think?

Where Did Capital One Get My Information?

I've been struggling with the Capital One promotional letters for months. I still did not figure out where they got my contact information and send me the annoying credit card mails. Did you have the same problem before? Got spammed by some company you have no idea about?
This is what I learned from Leah Betancourt's post---How Companies Are Using Your Social Media Data? It is almost incredible how people's conversation over the social networking sites are documented and used for some business reasons. Can companies do that without violating media ethics and all? I knew that Google used your emails to determine what kind of ads to put on to each individual's gmail page, but I don't see things this worse coming.
I think I know why my information was acquired by Capital One. My facebook account, my twitter, and LinkedIn, they are selling me to strangers with business agenda. I hope y'all won't encounter similar problems. So why don't we take a look at some of the tips Leah Betancourt offered? 

1. Determine whether you want to go public or private with your social media profiles. I

2. Eliminate people and sites from your social networks that you don’t need.

3. Pay attention to your friend, invite, and connection requests. 

Twitter Is Not The Panacea For Customer Service

As many Fortune companies take the lead and adopt Twitter for customer service, social media is considered as the panacea for customer service by many organizations who are thinking of using it. However, social media is not the cure for bad customer service. Complaining over tweets doesn't help the customer service people to give prompt feedback. There is no Twitter magic. It is just people working behind their laptops trying to satisfy angry customers. Introducing Twitter will not change the customer service quality and timeliness, yet management and corporate policies will. "If a company's DNA is not truly dedicated to listening and responding to customers in a genuine and timely manner, no technology will provide a solution," Lloyd Trufelman, president of Trylon SMR once commented. That also explains why companies hesitate to open accounts on every single social media platform. It is too much for them to handle. Easier said than done. Below is a list of companies that provide off-hours service over Twitter. It is not a good idea to over-work the customer service staff. And this is a world that not all will be happy anyway. What is your opinion? Do you believe that Twitter can improve customer service?  It doesn't hurt to make your voice heard. So please leave me some insights. Thank you!

What Social Media teaches us:Facebook Shows 145% Growth in 1 Year

Almost 3 years from now, Facebook has a mere 20 million U.S. users.  Today, over 103 million Americans use Facebook, let alone the big number of its users world-wide. The following is a graph showing the growth rates of various user bases in Facebook from 1/4/2009 to 1/4/2010. All data comes directly from Facebook’s Social Ads system.

While I was appalled by this incredible growth of a social networking site, I realized it was not just a web site or service that got popular and successful. Social media sites are changing everyday life. They change the way we talk, study, work, and live. This change should wake up all those traditional marketers and businessmen that the old-fashioned sales and marketing are not working exclusively now. There are better tools, and they need to learn how to use them. I believe what we learn in this world will help our future. I also got to understand this when I watched Desperate Housewives Season 5. Tom Scavo was interviewing for a job when the interviewer guy asked him if he was experienced in marketing though twittering. Tom felt devastated by the fact that he was old and left behind by the times. I hope we won't. 


Source: Istrategylabs. http://www.istrategylabs.com/2010/01/facebook-demographics-and-statistics-report-2010-145-growth-in-1-year/

How to Make Chatroulette Profitable: Chat To Win

In my post few days ago, I talked about why Chatroulette will hardly make any profit for its creator. Now that this is interesting to many of us. I want to discuss some ideas to commercialize Chatroulette. Here is an example of people responding to the famous Brooklyn cat. (I experimented with my yellow kitten, and people reacted exactly the same.)

 (Credit: Chatroulette)

The blogger of Life Before Moon, Rachel talked about Chatroulette with me after class. We thought there might be ways for corporations to utilize Chatroulette and make a profit. I'll just pick Doritos as an example since the company is very into social media. So let's say Doritos wants to start a campaign using Chatroulette as a medium. We've got two 'sketches of plan' for it:

Idea No. 1: Scavenger/Treasure Hunt Party!
Rachel suggested that companies can start a scavenger hunt event on Chatroulette (CR) which asks CR users to look for clues that can be found in strangers' cameras. There are several websites providing cool hunt clues for companies to use. So, for Doritos, they can start a scavenger hunt to look for many clues related with food (not necessarily Doritos) or lifestyle (clothes, home settings, etc.). That will encourage people to click through CR to find strangers that meet with the requirements. The idea of having a scavenger hunt without explicitly involving the product or brand name in it, is similar to what Megawoosh did for Office 2007. We want to attract people's interest and further lead them to find out about the product.

Idea No. 2: Who Shares My Doritos?
This event is aimed to turn the spotlight to the product. CR users are asked to put a bag of Doritos chips in front of their camera. Whoever puts the same flavor, size, etc. forms into a team. That team should keep looking and expand their team. Within a certain time limit, the winner is whichever team with the most people in it. This event will not only promote the products but also help people to connect and find the common interests.

Of course, the ideas above are just some rough ideas to commercialize Chatroulette. I believe there are many other cool and great ideas to do so. Want to share yours? Please leave your comment below.

Social media Etiquette: What Is Adding Value?

What is adding value to the community? We hear social media gurus talk about it over and over again, and yet we don't know exactly what is value and how to add value. In this interesting post called "The Top 10 Reasons I Will Not Follow You in Return on Twitter", the author listed "not at all adding value" as No. 6. He put it as: I will not follow you because "your updates clearly indicate that your Twitter activity is always, only, about pushing your own service/product".

In this information age, it is important that you get your key message out, but in order to accomplish that, you have to contribute your value to the community. Simply selling the products or services using social media is a dead end. People don't buy that kind of stuff any more. Now that your stakeholders take the initiatives to decide whether to hear your messages, it's time for corporations to take a step back and think about how to add value.

In other words, when you decide to use social media as online marketing tools to sell something, you will never want to make this intention "glaringly obvious". When social media users find out about your real purpose, it takes them no time to block you/unfriend you.

Instead, you want to sound helpful and charming. By that, I mean providing useful information, advice, sharing interesting posts and ideas, contribute to discussions, and engage your followers/friends into the conversation.
Now, let me know what's on your mind.

Will Chatroulette Be Profitable?

The site Chatroulette.com was founded by a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow. His vision is to establish a U.S.-based company to run the site. His ambition was so familiar to what I anticipated in a 17-year-old boy. I don't want to sound like I am the professional or whatsoever, but let's be realistic, will Chatroulette make a profit?
I have three reasons that it hardly will.
1. It only drives people to Chatroulette because of the novelty and curiosity of meeting a total stranger.
It will take many ideas to keep these folks on the site. I've tried Chatroulette for a few times, and I really enjoyed seeing people's responses when I put my kitten in front of my camera. But that's it. Any sensible people will find Chatroulette as a way to kill time rather than making friends or exchanging information. The fever will be gone soon, and people will find other ways to entertain themselves. It is a good media phenomenon, but it will not last long.
2. As a social networking site (what I assume it to be), Chatroulette has limits and boundaries.
Providing merely nothing but video camera chat functions, I don't know how far Chatroulette can go. While big figures in the IT industry are thriving to collaborate everything (e.g. Google Wave), Chatroulette offers limited communication channels and thus leaves the users with more needs to meet.
My other wild guess is, even if Chatroulette links everything together, people will feel reluctant to use. God knows who you are REALLY talking to. S/he could be totally a bad person or a warm-hearted philanthropist. I doubt if our netizens will want to continue the conversation after a random encounter on Chatroulette. This also reflects my third point that:
3. Chatroulette is a dangerous place to go.
Communicating with strangers is potentially dangerous. If you ever checked out websites like National Sex Offenders Registry, you have some idea about how dangerous the real world is out there. Are you going to be comfortable letting your kids/siblings communicate with total strangers on Chatroulette? There may be people shouting out "Show me your boobz" or revealing their private parts via the camera. No matter how romantic movies tell us about meeting a stranger and starting a new life, there are traps and baits that people may fall into anytime.
Soon, people with evil thoughts will take advantage of the site and make their own profits, pornography for example.
Based on all above reasons, I doubt if Chatroulette can last long and make any profit for its creator. It is after all a "place for fun". Let me hear your thoughts.

Why On Earth Did Guy Kawasaki Become Famous On Twitter?!

I followed Guy Kawasaki on twitter after I created my twitter account. I knew him because I searched "people to follow on twitter" via Google. One web page caught my attention:

Ten People All Twitter Beginners Should be Following

Guy Kawasaki is No. 1 in that list who had 21,000 followers within 9 months. Plus, he has a very special name. So I followed him and I never regretted doing so. Guy Kawasaki posts interesting or helpful tweets about everything all the time. He updates fast and all his tweets look fun.

After watching Dr. Waters' lecture, I wonder how on earth did he became so well-known on twitter? I happened to watch this interview video talking about his 'tricks' of getting famous on twitter. (The lady in the video cut Guy off a few times, which is super annoying. But the content is good.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2peIwg86w4M

So, Guy summarized three main reasons for his popularity.

1. fame and fortune don't happen overnight. "It took me 25 years to get famous," Guy said in the video.
2. one should tweet often. One will hardly get popular if he simply uses Twitter to promote himself.
3. answer your emails. "I answer my emails, all my directs and replies," he said. "That's the cost."

I personally think of his second point as a good reason to explain why I followed him. It is hard to decide who is the person that "adds value", yet it is easy to say "oh, this guy is interesting, and I want to see what he will say next time". It is the fun and interest that brought people together to follow someone like Guy Kawasaki.

This golden rule applies perfectly to organizations. If you think all you have on twitter and other social sites are "hard information" about your products or services, you are SO wrong. You need to please your stakeholders/followers, and give them what they want to hear, and what they want to hear next time.

Microblogging In China, The New Cultural Buzzword

Link to the article: Microblogging spreads in China, even without Twitter - USATODAY.com

Microblog is a cultural phenomenon. With more celebrities creating their micro-blog accounts, Chinese netizens use microblog as a way to connect with others.

Han Han, China's famous blog writer and representative of the Generation Y, opened his personal micro-blog not long ago. His first micro-blog is only one word---“Hi”, which soon attracted hundreds of thousands of netizens to respond. When asked about the first post, Han said, "I meant to type 'Hello' to test the micro-blog, but I accidentally hit 'Hi' and that's it." People predict that micro-blog may lead to a new round of revolution among the young people.

As the micro-blog becomes more and more popular, the voice of the grassroots is being heard much more. Like the article mentioned, the Chinese twitter service provides the public a platform to get their opinion heard.

"With this new tool, there will be more citizens supervising the government," says Min Dahong, a new-media researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

I think it is a good start.

Off The Point:

Maybe censorship did shut down the door to free speech before, but the situation in China is improving as the emergence of more social sites like Microblog. We are getting there, even though it has to take a long time before the free speech right can be fully given to all people.

Toyota Mass Recall Leads To A 'Made in Japan' Crisis

With Toyota's escalating safety crisis, media and the public started to question other products 'made in Japan'. A WSJ article written by Jeff Kingston discussed the poor crisis management of most Japanese brands. Instead of apologia, they generally chose to use denial, and then mitigation. Here's what Jeff Kingston said in the article:

Over the past two decades, I cannot think of one instance where a Japanese company has done a good job managing a crisis. The pattern is all too familiar, typically involving slow initial response, minimizing the problem, foot dragging on the product recall, poor communication with the public about the problem and too little compassion and concern for consumers adversely affected by the product.

Under the big umbrella of the Asian culture, Toyota's corporate culture (and those of other companies as well) has been deeply impacted by the belief that crises should be solved asap w/o losing the company's face. Face work here is a big deal. Even with modern technologies and management models incorporated, Japanese corporations kept their traditional values in issue management process. Toyota eventually made a good gesture to apologize. Yet I am not optimistic how the European and American customers will say.

Social media here works as an agent for Toyota. By communicating through media conference, the video clip got distributed all over the world through news websites, YouTube, Twitter, and all. This bridged the communication gaps between companies and consumers.

In the end of the video, Toyota's President Mr. Toyoda used his not-quite-fluent English to express his concern to the customers, "so please believe me, we always customers first, customers first priority..." Despite the incredible delay of the apology, Toyota made its way to spread its messages to its stakeholders and to express their concerns of consumers.

With a gloomy future ahead, the Toyota fiasco should have taught many Japanese companies, as well as corporations worldwide, a good lesson about crisis communication.

Toyota's Apologies through media conference [Video]

Vlogging Era: New entertainment for the Public?

This video below brought me several 'good' old memories about YouTube videos, which were also considered as the 'kickoffs' of the new vlogging era.




Several researches studied the new media phenomenon, and I can recommend this one about gender differences. Research claimed that men checked YouTube videos almost every day, and they were found to be more active than in responding to video comments. On the other hand, women checked YouTube videos only once a month. (http://www.acjournal.org/holdings/vol10/01_Spring/articles/molyneaux_etal.php)
The media phenomenon triggered my different thoughts:this vlogging culture is part of the 'Amusing Ourselves to Death'? Neil Postman's book 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' discusses how the television medium caters to the public need for entertainment. Postman asserts the presentation of television news is a form of entertainment programming.
Despite that the work was done in the 1980s, Postman was far-sighted enough to depict a future of electronic media dominance for us in the 21st century. Information and messages are turning to be entertaining rather than rational. 'Age of Reason' is long gone, while 'Age of Fun' is here now.
I don't know if this is a good call though. We are hoping to become MORE 'fun' with LESS questioning and challenging.
Hmm....Reminded me of a conversation with a girl friend:

Mandy: Jing, is your bday this month?
Jing：Yes. 16th. Will turn 24. Yikes.
Mandy: Why? We are getting more mature and smart.
Jing: Wish we could be mature and smart without putting new numbers to my age.
(Both of us laughed...)

It is just never possible for us to both young and smart. Then can we be both 'smart' and 'fun'?

Ethics shall start with e-mail marketing first!

E-mail is the most important one in daily communication. Quote from a post, "e-mail is the glue that holds the social web together". A simple example is, you cannot sign up for any social media without using an email address. The memory of signing up for a gmail account remains fresh to me. That was when I decided to apply for graduate studies in the States, and I found out nobody at the other side of the world knows what mail.163.com is. With a gmail account, I signed up for several online forums, submitted my application materials, and so on.

It is hard to talk about ethics without thinking about e-mails first. While social media marketing is a hot topic, e-mail marketing takes a big part in the marketing mix. As social media and PR practitioners, we need to spend our time thinking about guidelines and codes of ethics for social media marketing, with e-mail marketing a focus.

Here is what I think PR practitioners should follow:

1. Respect your stakeholders and try not to bombard their e-mail box.

If you are a marketing/PR professional thinking about email marketing, you want to respect the people you will be sending your emails to. Most people don't like receiving boring and repetitive sales messages. You would want them to open the email b/c they felt comfortable to do so. Why would they open your emails? The good answer is, your messages are helpful. Something fun, useful, or thought-provoking. Their time is valuable. Pay attention to your mail 'load'. No one wants to get 20 messages a day from the same forum/mailing list they subscribe.

2. Be sure to offer an "unsubscribe" function.

If someone truly want to get away from your messages, I would appreciate if you give them the option to do so. That "unsubscribe" may not lose a customer---he/she will think of you when he/she needs the service; while not giving the unsubscribe button will annoy some people and help you lose them forever. It is also respectful to give people options. A very important ethical practice for professionals. For the most of time, we are selling our ideas, not forcing people to buy it, aren't we?

3. CAN-SPAM

Similar to what I mentioned in No. 2, CAN-SPAM is another thing practitioners need to get familiar with. CAN-SPAM means that you are free to spam as long as you follow the rules of the law.
Here's a rundown of the law's main provisions:

• It bans false or misleading header information.
• It prohibits deceptive subject lines.
• It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method.
• It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender's valid physical postal address

I quote the following paragraph from another post to explain (The Ethics, Laws and Tips to Success with Email Marketing ):

"In theory, you could buy a list, harvest email addresses, steal them from others or do whatever you need to do in order to collect email address as long as you let people unsubscribe, don't deceive the recipient and provide your valid postal address to spam them under the law. The law isn't useless by any means as most people who spam are trying to deceive, can't provide legitimate physical mailing addresses and don't honor unsubscribe requests. There have been prosecutions already under the law. However, simply complying with CAN-SPAM laws can't protect you from having your Web site shutdown by your provider and not hurt your company's credibility by being labeled as a spammer."

4. Follow writing etiquettes and avoid mistakes/grammar & spelling errors.

Be polite and appropriate. Also as part of the respect topic, practitioners will want to show respects to their prospects by using good grammar and avoiding spelling errors. From my intern experience, companies usually proofread a few times before they send anything. It is due to the respect and also brand reputation.

Please leave me a line with your thoughts and ideas. Thanks!

Terry Moran's ethics

I digged some old news but related with the ethics topic we covered this week. It's about Terry Moran tweeting about President Obama's off-the-record comments to his followers. To me, that is very unethical for a media worker/journalist.

Terry interviewed President Barack Obama, and during the interview, they talked about Kayne West off the record. Maybe Mr. President gave his comment about Kayne West by calling him a jackass for grabbing microphone from other singers (Taylor Swift). Terry, however, tweeted this off-record comment to his 1-million followers.

This "news" later became a hot topic. Like Chaofan's post, this is a good example of social media being a drama queen. There's news titled Obama Calls Kanye West a 'Jackass' and even Obama Caught on Tape Calling Kanye 'Jackass'. I cannot believe journalists being so mean to a up-front, honest president.

Of course there are ethics and rules you need to follow even in social media world. This platform supports open, free speech, while at the same time, journalists should keep their ethics of traditional media---no plagiarism, tell the truth, and most importantly respects other people's human rights.

Also, we want to leave a tip for the president: in such a dramatic social media world, watch your language will be the safest way to protect yourself.

SNS: virtual world

Social networks bridge communication gaps by engaging more people to interactions regardless of their ages, genders, locations, time differences, culture backgrounds, and so on.

However, one interesting fact about social networking, also discussed in Groundswell, is the virtual worlds provided by the groundswell.

Teenagers are obsessed with SNS. I asked students from the sessions I taught, and more than half of them said they checked their facebook page every day, if not more often. Some boy/girlfriends may break up over Facebook messages or status updates, which seems crazy to us living in the 'real' world.

Recently, I noticed people of their 40s (or older) turn to SNS during their 'down' time. In China, there is this popular game called 'Happy Farm' (Farmville cloned from it, and Happy Farm claims to come to the U.S. market in near future: http://www.pcworld.com/article/187444/china_online_game_companies_plan_us_games.html). I saw my friends' moms play Happy Farm and they had a fun time being in the virtual world created by the game. That is when I realized that social networking and the virtual worlds it established are not far away any more.

Like Li & Bernoff said, SNS shifts power from institutions to people. It allows people to interact in new ways.

Social Media Marketing Thoughts for Small Businesses

Link To Article: 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Posted using ShareThis
I am very interested in how to promote small and medium-sized business. Although they are not as powerful and influential as huge international companies, they have their own market share, they run in their unique ways, and they make profits just as their big peers do.

The other reason for small business to use social media is, social media costs little money. If you know accounting, you will understand how much money a company is expected to spend on marketing and PR alone annually. And often times these efforts don't add up. If a crisis occur, the reputation may go down in no time.

Grunig's theory talked about building and maintaining good relationships with stakeholders. For small business owners, social media is their magic to help build reputation, relationships, and corporate images/culture.

In social media, there will also be a group of loyal twitter followers, facebook fans, as well as youtube watchers. The above link leads you to 5 effective strategies to use.

1. Is your business visual?
This is fairly important since the information age blocks people from comprehensive reading and learning. All everyone wants to do is to skim, to watch, and to get as much information as possible in no time. So visuals are ideal for a small business owner to attract followers/customers/attention.

2.Real-world interaction still needed!
Even if you move most of your marketing efforts online, you have to admit that offline interaction with customers and prospects is very, very important. That is a way to connect virtual reality with reality. You may not need to spend much, but definitely do something to keep your messages consistent. Say you can make these koozies, cups, T-shirts to spread the same messages as in social media. This can enhance the messages.

3. Be visible in your consumers' areas
A best way to do that is to stay aware of your competitors. One simple thing is to check what kind of social media they are using. If you want to sponsor an event to build some reputation, you also need to know where to start. For Triangle small business owners, they may want to check Share Triangle, GOLO, and MyNC to keep up with local activities. Be visible, but also be smart. No one wants to waste money on some useless ads that can never get to their target audience.

4. Go paperless.
The last tip in the "Strategies" article talked about discounts and contests. I want to elaborate on discounts. Social media provided a good interacting opportunity for business dealers and buyers, yet we may want to start from another perspective---environment-friendliness. If discounts can only be printed to use, business owners may stick to print ad to do the job. This will cost almost the same amount of money, and you save some trees. So I would suggest, instead of coupon, we can customize them into personal PIN numbers. Anyone who types in their name can get a unique PIN number for discounts. They just use IDs to get the discounts. Isn't that a better choice? Maybe we can call it "paperless coupon".

New and the last semester...

Ha, new semester's coming.Also the last semester here. Time flies. Time flies.