I hope you are well. And you are still interested in reading my blog, laughing and learning those little touch points of your life. I have been moving my blog to evyfindstheway.com where I have more control over gadgets and settings.

My latest post is about Steve Jobs and his impact to me. Check it out and let me know what you think

Peace! Hope to see you at evyfindstheway.com

Evy

Today is a day dedicating to Hallmark cards, chocolate, and bundles of roses. Yes?

Today is a day expressing your affection to those you’re in love with. Yes?

Well, sort of. But not exactly.

I’d say today is a day making people around you to feel your love and appreciation, for being who they are.

And it’s never too much to say “Thank you, I love you” (or “I appreciate our relationship”) even Thanksgiving was only 3 months ago. After all, we all want to be loved.

Think about what you and I can do to make a sweet Valentine’s day (without filing a chapter 11 tomorrow morning).

• What are the most valuable items of your recipient?
  Oftentimes we create surveys or ask questions to understand people we care about but then we miss the opportunity to take actions by showing these people “yes, we hear you and understand your needs.” I gave my boyfriend a pair of workout gloves because he once told me that he got callus by lifting weight on a regular basis. Even though I totally let off the secret by asking his hand size, I know that is something he will find it useful. And I guess we all want to deliver the same value by providing what our recipient wants the most.
• What is your delivery method?
  Have you every given something but did not get the expected feedback from the recipient? If so, consider how you deliver your message. For any type of appreciation, you want to make sure you find the right voice. If you’re in a B2B company and you would like to wish customers a Happy Valentine’s Day, utilize your staffs who are constantly in contact with customers. Your best delivery channel is your staff.
• Are you creative enough?
  Let’s face it. We are all information overwhelmed. If you start typing “Valentine” on Google, you will find thousands of queries suggesting thousands of things whether it’s about dining location or gift selection. Among all the information we receive, only creative one stands out. I am often intrigued by creative messages coming from someone I’m totally not expected, and this year International Sign Association’s email message totally caught my intention. Do you have an event coming up? Do you have a new product launch? Consider utilizing Valentine’s Day to give your customer a sweet surprise!
•  What’s beyond an exclusive Valentine’s Day?
  I have seen some sites taking a step further and embracing the “pay it forward” idea by providing charity services or some very neat cause-marketing campaigns. (Read “Re-Booting Valentine’s Day for Good” from Fast Company) In a nutshell, Valentine’s Day is about love and making this world a warmer place. Yes?

I had the fortune to meet with the EVP of Yaffe Group, Michael Morin, to discuss how people adopt social media in countries like Taiwan or China. As we chatted along, there are several insights I would like to share:

• Different Internet user behavior
  With increased amount of Internet users from China or any other Mandarin (or similar dialect) speaking countries, the whole world is giving more emphasis on this huge opportunity-land has yet to come. However, many companies have ignored the fact people use Internet differently than how we use it here in the States (or Europe). For most of the people in the States, AIM & MySpace is probably a high-school thing to be addicted with, but in Asian countries there are still many types of chat rooms and forums such as MSN, QQ, and even a unique terminal-based bulletin board system (BBS). Those platforms are very popular among people aging from 16 to 40 years old. They use online channels to chat, listening/downloading music, playing games, or reading news and blogs. That whole different user behavior is likely to change how companies / brands utilize Internet channels and to format their messages. (Source: 

  Chinese Internet Habits vs. the US)

• Platforms & channels aren’t connected & integrated as much as those in the States.
  Nowadays you probably have seen Facebook or Twitter icon popping up everywhere from print materials or TV commercials. As the rise of social media, marketers who are used to traditional channels have to learn how to embrace and utilize these new channels and start conversing with customers. In Asia, however, things are seemingly different: each communication channel is still exclusive in its own purpose and content. Take one of the largest BBS in Taiwan, PTT (telnet://ptt.cc), for example: the site currently hosts 150,215 visitors, with the diverse user coverage from current students to graduated alumni. The user number might be far less than that of major social media sites likes Facebook or Twitter. But imagine 90% of the universities have their own BBS, and almost every student is active in more than one forums on BBS, the power of this channel can easily be multiplied. However, companies and brands rarely get the chance to get into this channel and I believe part of the reason is topics discussed in BBS are students-oriented (whether being tips of certain classes or information about studying abroad). Information covered can still be broad enough for individuals but too narrow to get in for advertisers or marketers. In short, I think “localization” & “exclusiveness” are still very common phenomenon in many communication channels in Asian countries. And that is why they aren’t integrated with one another.

• Branding & engagement is still an undefined expertise.
  Many of advertisers or marketers in Taiwan or China might disagree with me on this, but in general, I do not believe local companies (whether as big as Foxconn or as small as mom-and-pop shops) understand what PR / marketing / advertisement is about. Let alone social media, branding, or engagement with customers. Yes, you might still see fancy TV commercials or shiny billboards in municipal cities like Taipei, Beijing, or Shanghai. But look more closely, the majority of brands advertised are global brands like Sony, Pepsi, or McDonald. You can get a glimpse of what I am talking about by this Top 10 Chinese New year TVCs (http://www.campaignasia.com/Article/246863,top-10-chinese-new-year-tvcs.aspx) and you can probably tell the difference of messages delivered in Asian countries (China, Taiwan, Singapore…etc) between those here. “Families and friends” are more emphasized in commercial messages (“exclusiveness”, echoing my second point above), and less focus on corporate images or brands. Creativity is another factor influencing how companies or brands portray themselves. According to Tim Broadbent, AdAgeChina, that “Ads are mainly used to convey product facts. They are more likely to show a demo of the product composition, together with multiple product messages. They are less likely to use humor or music, and, crucially, fewer appeal to the emotions. “

The usage of Internet and the number of people with higher purchasing power in Asian countries might be increasing, but to engage with customers with various social media channels, companies there still have a long way to go.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not supporting any governments’ interference of information nor do I want to work in a country where I have no access to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. I simply believe there’s a better way of resolving the issue without using “free trade” excuses. And if Google can’t put itself in Chinese Internet users’ perspective to adjust its business model, Google should take its own responsibility, not urging other forces to make everything more complicated.

Is censorship the only reason causing Google’s failure in China? No. I think Google ignores the fact that Chinese searcher behavior is very different from Americans’. According to China Internet Watch, the first Internet application Chinese searcher use is online music. Unlike American use Internet to gather information, users in China go online more for music, gaming, and entertaining purposes. And when it comes to information sharing, chat rooms and forum dominate the majority of searches in China while Americans like to go to blogs and individual websites to gather information.

With such a difference in searcher behavior, I still believe Google should look at the whole situation as an opportunity to collaborate than to compete with other Chinese language search engine provider, like Baidu. I don’t appreciate Baidu’s CEO, Robin Li’s comments about Google leaving China in Web 2.0 Summit and I believe web users, whether being Chinese or Americans, should have equal opportunities to use different channels for information. My hope is that big companies like Google and Baidu will consider partnership rather than buy-out, and focus more on understanding and respecting the market difference rather than forcing the other party to change.

1. Fast Company “Google calls on the west to tackle Chinese web censorship”
2. Baidu’s market share
3. TechCrunch 420M people in China have Internet access, 99% use Baidu for search”

Based on Forbes article & AdAge case studies, I came to this conclusion:

Most of us agree social network has tremendous potential whether promoting brands or driving sales. (not just a bunch of geeks connecting with each other in cyberspace and give those platforms some fancy names. But if you do, you can stop reading now ) The challenge is, it’s still new for marketers or digital strategist to develop some metrics measuring the value & the cost or each platform.

So which platform is better than the other? To answer this question, I don’t think we should merely look at individual case studies or numbers just because there are way too many variables. I suggest that you ask yourself these questions first:

• Who is your target audience?
  If you can confidently give me an answer, then ask yourself:
• Where are your they? Are they only use social networks to complain about bad customer service or are they avid adopters of the technology or applications?

 

In my opinion, Facebook and Twitter are two vary different network with very different types of users. To tackle your promotional campaign successfully, you have to at least understand who those users are. While Facebook may have dozens of games & applications to use entertaining or attracting visitors, your customers may not use Facebook for entertainment purpose or simply have no interest “liking” a brand via Facebook over a Farmville reward.

After figuring out your customer behavior & properly segmenting them, you can then look at your offer to see if that would be a relevant draw to the customers.
Personally I like to keep a list separating Facebook & Twitter and matching my strategy towards the uniqueness of each platform. You can try making one yourself.

For some reason these 3 words annoy the crap out of me.

Maybe it’s because I take things/words too literal (because English is not my native language) or maybe it’s just my stubborn personality that I would rather take responsibility than kick it somewhere else. In short, I think I care.

I have been reading Seth Godin’s book “Linchpin” and a very big part of his idea of being indispensable is to ship and to deliver. And for me, caring about something means you want to take the ownership and you want to deliver the project/mission, whether finishing up a no-brainer project or figuring out everyone’s schedule to make a social event happen. Whether big or small, caring about something is the first step of being an artist, or, a linchpin.

For a while I was convinced that I don’t care. But I realize as I stop putting my heart and effort into projects or life circumstances I become less happy because it feels like I am not even making an impact to either work or life. I was confused, struggled, and frustrated; then I say to myself, “maybe I do care or maybe it’s time to start caring and getting my hands dirty.”

There’s no excuse for not caring. Because once you stop caring, you lose the strength to make a difference or even to find the meaning of what you are doing. Aren’t we all trying to find a “meaningful life”? A meaningful life doesn’t exist in billion-salary-jobs, doesn’t exist in gigantic mansion in Manhattan, and certainly doesn’t exist in times when one sits there and whines about “I don’t care.” A meaningful life resides in the moment you & I start to put our heart into trifle things we do, pleasant or not. Nobody said it will be easy, but by being passive and not caring, one forsakes the opportunity of being an artist to make something better happen at the very beginning.

So from now on, start to care.

If you haven’t had a chance to read this Canadian guy’s marvelous insight about social media and modern communication, please read on my takeaways from his presentation last night. Scott is great, sharp, insightful, and…hilarious. And he absolutely shake my head with his ideas of social media and how to communicate.

Here are some ideas Scott threw at Detroit last night:

• Social media ROI – “Forget about ROI. Social media sucks in conversion but rocks in building relationships & engaging conversation.”Takeaway: You have to watch Scott’s animation when he talks about ROI. Besides laughing at the idea of companies or #sm gurus using statistics to prove how important this new communication medium is, I was sort of relieved the concept Scott proposed, that neither Twitter nor Facebook is a shortcut for relationship. The 140-words-limitation might force us to make content more effective, but the key lies in how you use these social media tool, not to sell, not to blast, but to engage and talk.

  But again, as an in-house marketer, I get freaked out while being told the ROI is going to suck at any tool or medium being used. So there, I contribute to one of my favorite article about social media analytic tools http://www.dailybloggr.com/2010/03/social-media-monitoring-tools-analytics/ (sorry, Scott!)

• All the social media channels should enhance one another. Build platform first, and establish individual stream for each platform.Upon writing this, I can still hear Scott screaming in my head, “Please, do NOT feed your tweet with Facebook status!” The difference between each platform (limitation of words & how people use it) reflects the complexity (and beauty) of communication. Some people like to read concise & straight-forward messages, (Scott’s recommended tweet length: 120 words) So when the person sees the unfinished tweets and has to click on the link, then being directed to facebook status, the communication flow has been interrupted.

  Takeaway: create unique content & feed the platform on purpose. Nobody likes to go through more than one platform to have a normal conversation.

• Consistency is the secret of success in social media
  
  Again, among all the content frequency myth, Scott points out he hasn’t blogged for more than a month (confirmed. His last blog is back in Aug 2010) and he doesn’t want to blog for any of the SEO purpose. “Want best SEO for your blog? Then write awesome content!” Hopefully my blog about UnMarketing book tour is qualified as a half-awesomeness

• Sometimes you just have to polarize
  
  I guess the concept scare lots of people as we all try our best to manage our online reputation. As we cater to more readers, customers, the core value of products or services gets diluted. This is a scary part for me too but I guess practice makes perfect. If you have some advice taking a stand and embracing all the feedback, please do share

• Liking auto-tweets? Please don’t.
  
  We all want others’ attention or feedback but that doesn’t mean we can manipulate the way how communication works. True, if you set up your tweets to go out 3AM in the morning, people in the other side of the world more likely to read your blog or even comment on it. And chances are they will retweet or exchange ideas. But what happens after 5 minutes (action taken time after a tweet)? Nothing. (because obviously you’re asleep) This kind of communication drop does more harm than help to your content strategy because it ruins the flow. You may still be able to follow the stream and answer the questions, but the vibe has already been missing.

Overall, quite an eye-opening experience hearing a successful tweep talking about his strategy and passion. I remember times I tweet like a maniac and then just wait to count followers or Klout. Those times have gone, gone to the fundamental idea Scott has been pounding us on, again and again, that social media doesn’t speed up the purchase cycle, doesn’t all of a sudden win you a thousand new customers, it’s simply a great channel to start relationships.

How do you like to use social media engaging your readers?

I believe we all have different reasons. While some people, like me, use it for information and engagement, others use it for a better cause. Like Mark Horvath (@hardlynormal) use his TV blog & tweets to shout out voices in our society that are rarely heard or gotten any attention.

Quite a few media & companies like Ford and YouTube have already jumped in sponsoring Mark’s roadtrip. Hoffington Post yesterday wrote an article about Mark empowering homeless people with social media. Mark’s presentation at Metro Detroit also had tremendous feedback. All in all these responses meant one thing – people, including you and I, are using social media for a good cause – to make the world better. 

While few are as talented as Mark, we can still contribute our efforts or influence for a good cause

• Food Banks: There are quite a lot of food banks around. The one I started going to is called Gleaners– they bag hundreds or thousands bags of food each week and distribute them to families who can’t afford buying food for their children. Use your foursquares checking into these places and invite your friends to serve.

• Retweets: Mark has now set up a site called “We Are Visible”with a list of “How To’s.” Read his article, RT those invisible people’s voice, and spread the words.

• Slow Down, and Explore: There are many things / people in our society that need our attention. And you’d be surprised how much impact our little effort can bring if we are willing to explore and listen. So next time, instead of rushing into metros heading home, try to take a walk in the neighborhood and talk to people. If they have a story that needs to be multiplied, write a blog about it or tweet it. For social media is more than just a channel, it should be a connector bringing people’s distances closer. 

Well, I do.

And we’ve always heard something like this: “you have to know your client / business” or “previous experience in xyz industry is a plus.” Professionals with experience are always considered adding value/ credibility into the project. But I can’t help but to wonder: what if we walk into a situation like a newbie?

Newbie doesn’t have to be someone totally have no idea what the situation is. Newbie can be like your first day to work and you have all the aspiration and passion about what you want to do & are capable of. You walk into a situation with minimum assumption, minimum expectation, and maximum enthusiasm, and you listen, without any prejudice nor “professional package.” And I feel, correct me if I’m wrong, that is when you get the most knowledge about what the project really is and what your client really wants, when you put your mindset away and embrace the new challenge like a newbie.

I try to travel as much as I can just to reset my mind but apparently I don’t have much luxury to do so every weekend. I take walks, doodle, or simply crawl into bed and shut my eyes. But I find it hard from time to time to really open up my mind like a newbie. Or maybe there’s no such thing like this, as you and I have years of experience, we just leverage our experience to make decisions. So my question, to all of you, is: have you ever tried to be a newbie? And if so, how?