Archive for July, 2007

Malaysian writer and director Zona Marie Tan is about to marry the blogger she met via blogging. She blogs under the monicker Midnite Lily. She summarises her story on her blog:

“The Love story

The “Online Relationship” category on my blog will take you to snippets of my little love story that began in 2006. Lee and I had been reading each other’s blogs for over three years, which we found through Blogshares. It wasn’t until April ‘06 that we started talking to each other. First through email then subsequently on YM and Skype. It was love at first click… Heh… The first time we ever met in person was when he came to visit me in Malaysia in August, and I was then in Sydney with him for five months. Now, we’ are engaged and in the midst of journeying to joining our lives.”

Congratulations, Zona and Lee!

Blogging is about communication so it’s not so surprising to come across a romantic story like this. When you get to know someone through their writing and daily updates, it’s a great way to make a lasting connection. I’ve got to know a number of great people whom I would never had connected with were it not for blogging - they’ve become email and Facebook friends and I’ve also met up with a number of them. In particular, Malaysian bloggers are particularly friendly and open and whenever I’ve met up with them after getting to know them on their blogs, it’s like meeting long lost friends. In many ways, I feel closer to them than to some non-blogging friends who live in the same city - mainly because I know more about what’s going on with my blogging/ social networked friends than about my non-blogging friends with whom I may or may not speak on the phone every few months.

Do you know any other blogging love stories? Let me know!

The UK Department of Health has launched www.privatedickmovie.com, a website where you can watch short films that look like old ’70s porn flicks. You can create your own version by using your name and those of your friends as characters in the movies. After personalising the film, you can then send it to your friends.

A government department promoting porn - is this another example of the degenerate West? No, it’s part of a campaign to encourage safe sex. On the official campaign website Condom Essential Wear, it says: “Sex is great. But if you don’t protect yourself, it could soon stop being as much fun.” The aim is to “make condoms a fun and essential part of your sex life.”

Sex education in the UK really has come a long way since those TV ads in the early ’80s that featured a big monolith in a thunderstorm and a doomsday voice warning about AIDS. I recall being mystified by that ad, which told you nothing directly about AIDS or what to do to protect yourself - it seemed to be the darker, meaner version of the Monty Python “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” sketch.

This new campaign is cheeky and fresh and is clearly aimed at a very modern audience that would not give the time of day to being preached at. It’s in the same vein as the Colgate Smile campaign (discussed in my other post of today) in that it aims to make something rather dull and dutiful fun - and even a bit sexy.

Colgate, the toothpaste giant, is going online with a viral marketing campaign to promote good dental health, according to BrandRepublic.com

The viral solution is a send-a-smile generator that allows parents and kids to upload pictures of their kids face and customise the picture with a range of funny and clever accessories under the themes of cowboy, fairy, pirate and princess.

There is a competitive element to the campaign and prizes include kids parties and smile-card packs.

You can check out Colgate Smiles to have some fun for yourself and your kids.

This is a great way of engaging customers - and potential customers. The competitive element with a great prize also draws people into the fun. And fun is the key - it can transform something rather dull and dutiful into an engaging activity that involves everyone in the family.

Staying with the fun and health themes but at a completely different end of the spectrum, in my second post today, we can see how the Department of Health is trying to make safe sex fun…

Photo: thanks to greefus groinks on flickr.com

Following my plea for help the other day about businesses that blog in Malaysia, I got some helpful suggestions from a range of different sources. In addition to the business blogging landscape in Malaysia, I have added a section on the political blogging landscape there, in particular in the light of the recent government iniatitive to recruit a blogging squad to counter the claims of political bloggers. I’ve now completed my article for Communication World - which is hopefully going to be useful for its international audience of PR professionals, marketeers and business communicators.

I’d like to say thanks to the following people who generously contributed their suggestions, links and views for the article:

Richard for telling me about Wiley Chin at http://www.ximnet.com.my/thelab

Sharon Bakar at Bibliobibuli

Eric Forbes at the Book Addict’s Guide to Good Books

Kenny Sia at KennySia.com

Francis Ho of Kuching Kayak, who blogs at FH2O: Kuching Kayaking

Kevin Anderson, the Blogs Editor at The Guardian, UK who blogs at Strange Attractor

Asohan Aryaduray, the New Media Editor of The Star, Malaysia

Due to space/ word limitations, it’s not been possible to include in the articlea reference to all the suggestions and links that everyone gave me but I’ve squeezed in as much as I could.

I hope to be able to share the article with you on this blog when it is published in Communication World in a little while.

Someone asked me the other day if she needed a blog since she already had a website. It struck me as we chatted that there are probably many people who are not clear about the differences between a website and a blog and what some of the advantages of having a blog are, over and above the benefit of having a website. My friend is a writer but the advice I gave her is also useful and relevant for solo professionals and small businesses so I thought I’d share them with you here:

A website

• A typical brochure-style website gives you several pages with your brochure information on it. This can serve you very well as it gives you clients/ readers/ customers all the factual information they need to know about you and your business/ books/ services

• A website like that is pretty much static. Once people have been once and read whatever is there to read, they don’t really need to come again unless they need to be reminded about something eg your office address when they are coming to visit you

• It can do well with search engines provided your designer has included search engine optimisation within the design

• You can update the website yourself fairly easily once your web designer has shown you a bit of HTML. This can be useful for a “Latest News” page. But you usually have to delete the old text to make room for the new text unless you’ve got the capability to add additional news items and additional pages.

• A website is not interactive - you are stating your message to your audience and they can’t interact in any way although people can usually email you via the Contact page.

A blog

• A blog alongside your website enables you to update content easily - as easily as writing an email using a web-based email account.

• You never lose the old content from a previous “post”. This is particulary useful if your latest “latest news” item is a follow up item to your previous “latest news” items. eg. Last month your news was “I’ll be appearing at the Hay Literary Festival…”; this month you can write “When I appeared at the Hay Literary Festival, we had a lively discussion about the publishing industry…”

• You can archive your posts according to date or subject eg “Book Events”, “Current Novel”, “Publishing Industry” and eventually build up a body of work

• Search engines LOVE regularly updated pages. They are likely to throw you up near the top more often and you’ll start appearing all over the internet as you write more and more. Your posts that are never deleted from months ago will be found by someone searching on a particular topic and that will introduce them to the rest of your blog. For example, my post on Malt Loaf on my arts blog Fusion View keeps getting picked up by a range of people from France across to South America even though I wrote it around a year ago - and hopefully, that means more and more people are discovering my blog through atypical searches (ie not by a typical searching like “Malaysian/ UK writer”, for example)

• And that is exactly the reason I started blogging as a writer. Almost two years ago, my presence was disappearing off the internet - my books website itself was just not enough to keep me active and live on the web. Traffic to my site was pitiful. Since I started blogging, I’m all over the web and my arts blog Fusion View has over 8,000 unique visitors a month.

• A blog is interactive and you can easily engage with your readers/ customers, building up loyalty and trust

• You can add multi media such as pictures, audio podcasts and videos very easily

• A blog has what is called an RSS feed that sends out notifications (like radio signals) to the rest of the web whenever it is updated so you don’t have to sit and wait for people to come and find you, it automatically tells people about your latest update.

• For solo professionals and small businesses, it may take time to blog but after the initial set up costs and some training, it’s a very cost-effective way to promote your presence online - which is very important if you have a limited budget.

Both

If you don’t already have a website, discuss with your web designer using the blog platform - you can create numerous static pages for the brochure part using the same blogging software: you don’t need to pay for a website plus a blog. Traditionally, some web designers charged you by the number of pages because the old technology meant that they had to hand code and link each new page. If you incorporate your website as part of your blog, once the blog is designed you don’t have to pay extra for the number of additional pages - that’s all part of the package.

My books website www.yangmayooi.co.uk is actually part of the Fusion View blogging platform - when you arrive at www.yangmayooi.co.uk, you’ll see the URL is in fact www.fusionview.co.uk/yang-may-ooi/. The brochure pages - click at the top of this page on the various links to Who We Are and What We Do etc - are all part of the pages facility in this blogging platform for ZenGuide, included at no extra cost.

And finally…

Yes, it’s true that I’m a blog evangelist, especially for smaller enterprises. It’s such a great way to make a big impact on limited resources that in my mind, you’re really missing a trick if you don’t take advantage of this great interactive web tool!

Photo: thanks to serc.carlton.edu

Last week, I wrote about the Heinz user-generated video campaign that left the company with some egg (or ketchup?) on their face. Today, I’d like to look at the Yahoo! user-generated video campaign that appears to have been more successful.

Nick Chavez, Director of Corporate Marketing in Cool Stuff at Yahoo! explains the idea in this video posted on YouTube:

The key differences for the Yahoo! ad campaign compared with the Heinz ad campaign, I think, are these:

• Yahoo! has a maverick brand image that could comfortably encompass any weird or wacky or irreverent takes on its brand in contrast to Heinz which has a family-oriented “clean” and respectable image. In fact, a large part of the impact of the ads is the suggestive double-meaning around the word “Yahoo!” itself.

• Yahoo! seeded the campaign with an initial competition for videos made by film students, all of whom would have a personal stake in the success of their creations in terms of their career in film and advertising. They then chose the best dozen or so to seed the wider campaign, showing by the standard and quality of those films the high benchmark that others should be striving to better

The take home message from these two ad campaigns is about knowing your audience and your brand and how to leverage those two aspects to work together instead of against each other.

You can check out the various Yahoo! user-generated ads for yourself via the links below:

New Yahoo! Campaign

Videos submitted to the New Yahoo! Campaign site.

The health club student film mentioned by Nick Chavez in the video is shown below:

Here are a few more that particularly caught my eye (ear?):

Mother and daughter talking about “the change”:

What does your Yahoo! look like?

My boyfriend is always playing with his Yahoo!

If you’re a web fan and blogger like me, the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse must surely be the one smashing up the servers and hard drives and wires that keep the internet going.

The satirical website The Onion has this very funny news report on what it might be like if there was
a Web Crash 2007. You’ll need the sound enabled on your computer to get the jokes.

—

UPDATE: In the light of the outage in the San Francisco Bay Area yesterday 23 July 2007, perhaps this satirical news report has actually come true? The Scientific American has the scoop.

This is a cross-post from my arts blog Fusion View

Do you know any Malaysian businesses that blog or use social media? Or are you a business-owner, corporate executive or professional person in Malaysia who blogs as part of your business? I need your advice!

I’m writing an article for Communication World, the journal for the International Association of Business Communicators, (IABC) about business blogging in Malaysia. I have a couple of businesses in mind that I will focus on in the article - businesses based in KL who are actively engaging with bloggers and who have blogs themselves.

But I am keen to discover other Malaysian businesses that blog or use social media to promote their enterprise or to engage with their customers.

If you live in Malaysia or have a connection with Malaysia, can help me flesh out the article with some of your thoughts:

# Are there businesses or professional people (eg lawyers, architects etc) do you know of that are engaging with bloggers eg via their own blogging or by making contact with local bloggers?

# Are there any businesses using other types of social media to connect with their clients and customers eg podcasting, video, social networks?

# Do you have any advice for businesses wishing to engage with Malaysian bloggers?

If you are a blogger and you think that your community of bloggers around your blog could help with these queries or may have any experiences/ ideas they can add, please do blog about this query.

Communication World goes out to around 14,000 professionals in PR, marketing and communications around the world as a glossy magazine and also, some of its articles are available as pdfs online. IABC also has a Malaysian chapter. This will be a good opportunity for Malaysian innovation in the blogosphere to be seen world-wide and a good platform to showcase MPH and local litbloggers. I will give full credit to you - and any of your blogger contacts whose information I use in the article.

The deadline for my finished article is the end of July so I hope you’ll be able to let me have your thoughts as soon as possible eg in the next few days so I have a chance to write them up into the article. (Sorry for the short notice - I only got the commission to write the article a couple of days ago!)

Please add a comment or you can email me via the Contact link at the top of this page.

PS. I am going to keep mum about the two businesses that blog that I know of for now as I would like to get fresh ideas from you

Photo: thanks to kleinmatt66 from flickr.com

User-generated content is all the rage at the moment. It’s cheap, and often free, for the average person like you and me to create content eg by blogging, podcasting or uploading videos to YouTube. There is also a social networking element in that others can read/ listen to / view that content and comment or create other content in response. For example, when you watch some YouTube videos, there’s a sidebar on the right where you can see other people’s video responses to that video. On blogs, other bloggers may be inspired to write something on their blog about what you’ve written - and they may agree or disagree with you.

So it seems a great idea for companies to involve their customers and everyone else in creating content relevant for their brand. It creates a buzz around the product or brand. It brings people together around the brand. It taps into people’s creativity and desire to be noticed and rewarded for their endeavours. That’s the theory.

Heinz launched a competition inviting anyone to submit a 30-second video ad for their ketchup. The New York Times reports:

“Heinz has said it will pick five of the entries and show them on television, though it has not committed itself to a channel or a time slot. One winner will get $57,000. But so far it’s safe to say that none of the entries have quite the resonance of, say, the classic Carly Simon “Anticipation” ad where the ketchup creeps oh so slowly out of the bottle.”

So what kind of entries did they get? Some examples given in the New York Time article are:

• a teenage boy cleans his teeth and shaves with ketchup

• another kid rubs ketchup on his face and puts pickles in his eyes

Videos that have been rejected by Heinz have ended up on YouTube anyway.

Heinz have also been criticized for trying to get cheap advertising by looking for user-generated campaign although they say that it has actually been more expensive in terms of managing the process and sifting through all the entries.

There are concerns that the campaign has damaged the Heinz brand by its being associated with “gross-out” video images of its product being used in inappropriate ways - and appearing in cheap, home-produced, badly uncreative images.

You can view the Heinz ad competition and the videos on YouTube for yourself.

Here’s one involving a toilet….

I think that the idea and the intention of looking to the public to create content around a theme relevant to your brand or product is a sound one. The issue here is the management of the particular project or campaign. In the old days, when a company launched a competition eg to choose its new logo or tagline or the image that most represented its brand or some such, it controlled the process entirely and no-one would see the rejected entries. These days, the bad, irrelevant, scurrilous stuff gets circulated anyway by the very tools that makes this new form of advertising possible. It’s worth doing a full risk assessment on any social media project - as in any big project - assuming the worst case scenario in human nature. Perhaps Heinz - naively? - just expected more of the people they were bringing into the video conversation…

But it’s not all doom and gloom. On Monday, I’ll look at a user-generated video campaign that worked.