The internet is very small. A simple Facebook search of your name and personal details like your job, address and mobile number can be revealed if you do not have the right privacy settings.

What can hackers do with these details ? They can potentially hack your credit card details or use these information to scam those around you. These hackers have violated a law :

“Only use Sensitive Information for marketing purposes with the consent of the consumer concerned.” – Association for data-driven marketing & advertising (2018), Code of Practice

How easy can your data be found? Lets talk about the application Zenly. When I heard about it, I couldn’t believe the functions it provides. Zenly allows you to constantly be able to see the location of the friends you add, and you would know whether they are at home or they are out partying. It also shows your phone’s current battery percentage. While this maybe a handy application to have, I felt disturb when people started sending me question such as ” Late for school? ” and ” Remember to charge your phone” and have since deleted the application.

We must be careful with whatever information we share, so here are some tips for you to better protect your personal data :

1. Add only your friends on social media
2. Do not post pictures of sensitive information such as your credit number and NRIC number
3. Use a complex password for all account made over the Internet
4. Do not click on any suspicious links
5. Privatise your accounts for maximum security on social media

Next, we talk about influencers.

I’m sure that most of us follow at least one influencer on social media. Influencers are people with a high number of followers—some in the thousands, and some in the millions. High followers counts are critical for so-called influencers, a budding market of amateur tastemakers and YouTube stars where advertisers now lavish billions of dollars a year on sponsorship deals to reach out to their huge follower base.

But did you know , that there are fake “influencers” ? While these “influencers” on Instagram have a high follower count, these followers usually have gibberish sounding names and do not have any photos. These followers are called bots and “influencers” purchase them in bulk. Just how many of these accounts are there out there?

Facebook disclosed to investors that it had at least twice as many fake users as it previously estimated, indicating that up to 60 million automated accounts may roam the world’s largest social media platform.

Why do people purchase these followers? According to data collected by Captiv8, a company that connects influencers to brands, an influencer with 100,000 followers might earn an average of $2,000 for a promotional tweet, while an influencer with a million followers might earn $20,000. Imagine making that much money just buy typing something under 280 characters—a very tempting offer for many.

The bottom line is, not everything on the Internet is real, and not every person you come across social media is an actual human being. It is of paramount importance to thread carefully while browsing the Internet and do not trust anyone you do not know personally. What are your thoughts ? Comment down below !!

JUST TAKE A LOOK AT THE AMOUNT OF MOBILE USER !!! This has caused new media to overtake traditional marketing in the recent years. These tools are associated to social media, emails and videos that we may come across on a daily basis.

Do you remember the “Old Spice” commercial with its catchy tagline—”The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”? This is one of the most successful ad campaigns till date, garnering over 57 million views till date and even trumping over Obama’s victory speech on Youtube.

And that’s not all. Old Spice’s Twitter’s followers increased by a whopping 1000%, and over 600 thousand people have liked the ad on Facebook.

How did the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy achieve such exponential growth for Old Spice?

Here’s the answer—Integrated Marketing Communications. IMC is the combination and coordination of varying promotional methods, across a multitude of media channels. This reinforces the message of the campaign to target audiences and by being consistent and clear, this message reaches these audiences in the most effective way.

In Old Spice’s case, they achieved this not only by hosting their video commercial on  mainstream channels for video streaming such as Youtube and Facebook, but they also delved deeper and engaged with audiences on social media.

Over a period of 24 hours, the Old Spice man responded to tweets with personalised Youtube videos. By personalising messages, not only does the brand get engagement with the target audience, they are able to build rapport with them.

With technology rapidly advancing, and the world becoming more interconnected through the Internet, social media has been an integral part of IMC. Social media encourages openness between the brand and the consumer—take Facebook for an example. Facebook allows users to like, share and comment on posts. Because of the transparency of Facebook, brands are constantly aware of the consumer’s thoughts and feedback and this can lead to an improvement in product innovation profitability.

In Old Spice’s campaign, they did not have to entice viewers with special sales or discounts—all they did was ingrain a single thought in the viewers’ minds, yet it achieved mindblowing results because they followed through the campaign and reiterated the campaign’s message through social media.

Sounds good ! IMC is not all rainbow and sunshine. In order to achieve success with IMC, the campaign message first and foremost must be powerful if not the resource and time will be wasted because while u may have the reach, your advertisement is not attractive enough for consumer to click through and ultimately purchase the products.

Now we will be talking about the cons about IMC :

1. IMC takes a long time to build up but with a negative comment it can go down easily, negative comments will chase away customers from your business  to your competitors. Research shows that one negative review drives away 22% of prospects, around 30 customers.
2. The ROI is hard to measure. When you’re doing marketing, you definitely want to know the ROI of your campaigns to see how effective or successful it is. But unfortunately, it is difficult to measure how effective it is.

IMC is a powerful tool for both businesses and ad agencies, and has the power to make an already strong ad campaign even more powerful. By utilising IMC, not only will you have a wider reach, you will have wider engagement with your target audience and a campaign message that is more influential and impactful. What do you think about it ? Leave your comments down below and we can understand more about IMC together.

It has been an ongoing match between these two SEM (Search Engine Marketing) for years.

Before I even started this blog, I had no idea on how to create a blog or even which website do i start on ?

My first instinct to solve any of queries that i encounter is to search Google. Among all the search engine, Google provide higher-quality results for each user by understanding the search intend and finding the most relevant website that match each query.

According to the latest Net Market Share report, it reviews that Google is the top search engines among other search engines with an outstanding of 81.5% market share.

So which is a better tool ? SEO or PPC ? Let’s analyse these two techniques by searching for property agents in Singapore.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is use to increase the visibility of the web page through a search engine’s unpaid result. Ranking up your site requires continuous optimisation of webpage to strengthen the position in these naturally occurring search results. Therefore, the web must be clear what content does the business have to offer thus the search engine “spiders” can crawl and relate possible consumers. SEO takes time to generate returns as it takes time “climb” the ranks. Hence, it is better for business in the long run.

PPC

These paid advertising usually will appear at the top of the search thus allowing to quickly leverage search engine traffic by paying or bidding for keywords that are related. As the name suggest is Pay-per-click ads thus companies only pay for it when they are clicked on. However, pay per click marketing costs can add up at a fast pace which might be costly for some companies. PPC will allow campaigns to be published and be seen immediately. It is good for short term marketing tactics as it can be very costly. Unlike SEO, once payment stops, the links will stop as well.

It is my personal opinion that the more optimal way to improve your company’s online presence and visibility is through SEO rather than the pay-per click method. Although SEO is significantly more tedious as it requires you to establish your visibility first in order to appear at the topmost position of the results page, you will eventually get there. Once you achieve this, not only will you have visibility and presence, you will also acquire the skill of updating your website for relevance which allows the up-keeping of your website to become a piece of cake. This is also more cost efficient as you would not have to constantly fork out money to keep your website’s position on the page. Instead of investing resources each time, it is wiser to invest the beginning and build up the skill of maintaining the website for relevance.

By optimising the website for SEO instead of paying per click, it gives users a feeling of reliability and accuracy. This is why, whenever I use Google, I never click into the sponsored websites that appear at the top of the list as I feel like they are giving me the hard-sell. I choose to scroll down instead, as more often that not, organic searches provide me the answers that I need.

What do you think? Which of these methods do you feel is more reliable ? Do share your thoughts with me! Are you exactly like me when you see advertisements?

Have you come across advertisements about things that you have recently look for? You must be thinking how does your computer know? Do not worry, it is not a stalker, instead it is Big Data & IOT doing the work.

The Internet of Things, or IoT, refers to the billions of physical devices around the world that are now connected to the internet, all collecting and sharing data.

IOT computes devices in our everyday products that are connected via the Internet, allowing them to send and receive data about us. Let’s now talk about BEKO Smart Home.

Beko’s Smart Home allow us control home appliances such as lights and blinds through an application on your smartphone, meaning if you choose to wake up at 7am, they can automatically open your blinds and off the air-conditioner. They have information of almost your whole house, for example the amount of ingredients you have in the refrigerator. So if you choose to cook a lasagne today, they will inform you the ingredients missing and proceed to place an order for you. This can help increase security and connivence at home which is so beneficial for consumer like us.

So how big data are beneficial to marketers? By consumers purchasing and using their products, marketers are able to collect data of consumers buying habits, how often product is being used. These information are beneficial for marketers as they are able to invest correctly for their research and development. They also can detect new trends in the markets thus acting to their advantage to keep up to the trends. These data can fetch a good sum of money when sold to interested party thus if the company chose to leave the industry, they are able to sell the information for a good amount.

With convenience rising, there come risk where our data are easily accessible, hackers can easily obtain our credit card details as we store them in our phones or laptops for future use. Personally, i have been a victim of a hacker and i would say is a huge hassle to try to obtain my money back.

What do you guys think about smart homes or are you already living in one? Share with me your experience in the comment section down below, I would love to hear more about them!

“If you love something, let it go mobile: Mobile marketing and mobile social media” was published by Andreas M. Kaplan in 2012

People used to only surf the internet through their laptop but after evolution of technology, smartphones have became so convenient thus causing society to be so reliant to them. Even before i was typing this post, I am enjoying the convenience of watching Netflix on my phone instead of using the laptop in front of me.

Statistics shows that there are 4.3 million active mobile social Singaporeans. Smartphones are the most used device to browse the internet, spending on average of 2 hours 6 minutes on social media. This is why mobile marketing is the best way to market their products.

Mobile phone has evolved so much, it used to be only for calling and messaging. From games, to shopping applications, to travel applications that teach you the fastest way to get from one place to another. Even now, they have application where you can store credit card details to make payment at shops which allows phone payments. There are other applications like PayLah!, PayNow, WeChat Pay and AliPay where they can send money to each other instead of the old school way which is heading down to ATM to transfer. Below is a photo of how Apple Pay look like :

Marketing tools that brand use are to place advertisement on gaming application where gamers are required to finish the advertisements before continuing with their game This forces these players to watch the advertisements and potentially, capture their attention and hopefully, convert them into potential consumers!

Kaplan may have foreseen such situations and came up with the 4I’s of Mobile Social Media Advice for product differentiation and ensuring that the apps delivers to their potential.

Lets take a look at Shell’s Application to better understand the 4I:

Integrate – Using this app, consumers can find the shortest route to their destination, how much fuel consumption is being used and any traffic difficulties they may encounter during their journey. Best thing is it shows the nearest Shell station, which allow them to save time finding a petrol kiosk. Thus this application provide functions with different needs.

Individualise: Selected customers who receive extra promotional code to encourage them to encourage consumers to frequently return to their application for better convenience and encourage consumers to return.

Involve: Through their application, consumers can also get updates on the latest product offerings, discounts and loyalty cards. A feedback section has been inserted to allow Shell to understand consumers needs and requests.

Initiate: The application encourage customer to leave a review on the service provided thus is good user-generated content, data that can help improve their service.

I personally think that this is the future and the most effective mode of marketing. Do you agree? Now i post you a challenge, try living without your phone without a day. Comment down below if you successfully completed the challenge!

Going viral is not easy! The odds of your content going viral is only ONE in a million of what is being posted online!

One example of going viral will be the “KiKi challenge” from Drake Song, ‘In my feelings’ that got so many people on their feet and dancing. Before we begin, we will watch a short clip on celebrities doing the KiKi challenge including Kevin Hart, Will Smith and Lala.

So, how did these viral videos break through the clutter of overwhelming content on the Internet and stand out? Are there any ways to increase the chances of achieving viral success?

Despite the many different ways to achieve viral success, one that really caught my eyes would be Jonah Berger’s Six steps in which are commonly found in viral content.

These six steps are what Jonah Berger believes causes certain thing to go viral. Let’s go through some of them so we understand how it works.

First we will talk about social currency, where people care on how they appear to others. Lets be honest, who do not want to look good in front of others ? There was glow up transition challenge on Tik Tok where everyone posted photos of themselves growing up, showing their change of appearance over many years, some of which were astounding and even admirable.

Due to their huge change in appearance, they receive many compliments in the comment section over the globe, letting them feel good about themselves. Thus causing more people wanting to jump on the bandwagon, causing this challenge to went viral.

Applying it to marketing, advertisements which lead to social approval are the ones that will be more of a hit as compared to those that contain no engagement. 

Next we will talk about emotions. Most human are empathic and when they come across a post where evoke their feelings, they will share it with their friends and families. An example is this advertisement of anti-gambling where a father persuaded his daughter to give the piggybank to him, saying that he will return her when he win.

In marketing, brands that have inspiring backstories usually resonate well with the public as their stories inspire those who read them and be impacted by it. With emotions evoked, they will share the brand with others.

The last step we would be going through would be practical value, it would be things that are value for money and useful that would be largely spread around. This video shows the founder of the Dollar Shave Club advertising his product in a interesting way which make his video very entertaining to watch. This video has reached a total of 26 million views !! An advertisement of a product which reached that amount of views would be considered a huge success.

All men need shave to trim their facial hair thus whoever come across this advertisement would introduce to their male friends or family member. After watching this, who would want to spend $20 over bucks on a branded shaver when they can acquire it at only $1 ?????

Being contagious is the key to good online marketing. A good example would be dollar shave club, where with a good advertisement, even a mundane item like a shaver could reach out to many.  With that, I have no doubts that thousands or even millions would be talking about it, sharing about its amazing features with one another.

Are you able to identify the STEPPS leveraged in video by the creator ? The next video that goes viral maybe yours ? WHO KNOWS ? Comment down below to share your thoughts.

There are many different business model but the one that entice me the most would the model of Freemium. Most of the phone apps that we own are free of charge but to further improve experience of the application, add ons are available. For mobile games, these add ons either upgrade your character to be stronger or to be more attractive.

An example would be a game i have been playing for 3 years, Mobile Legends Bang Bang, it is a free to play game, but in order to obtain more characters and make your character more attractive, you would be require to buy “diamonds” using cash.

Everyone would like to look better even in game character thus games would release new character skins to constantly let gamers upgrade themselves. Personally i upgraded a few of my characters from the mundane characters to a more attractive character by making in app-purchase.

One of the biggest application upgraded that happened late last year would be YouTube improving their service into having a premium, which known as YouTube Red. Some of the services provided includes blocking advertisements, watching video offline and switching of apps without worry.

Friends around me have been complaining about the non-stop advertisement on Youtube. It’s definitely bearable if you just have to wait for 5 seconds and skip it but definitely not for those that is 25 seconds long. People go to YouTube expecting to watch a video immediately, no pause no waiting. Why not pay a few dollar to save time? With the new Youtube Premium that, they will not see any advertisement at all. I believe that is why many people are willing to pay a small amount just to enjoy the video they love to the fullest. Besides, YouTube offers student price where students pay $6.99 per month instead of $11.99. This greatly engage students to pay a small amount every month to get the maximum experience of YouTube. Not only that, YouTube Premium covers everything! Downloading videos up to 1080p resolution and watch it offline , also switching apps without worrying your song will be cut off. It combines all services in one app, how convenient?

I certainly believe that everyone have a few applications that they cannot live without, it not only brings entertainment and also keep them connected to their love ones. I personally subscribed to Youtube Premium, Spotify Premium and Netflix to experience better quality and I feel that paying a few dollars to achieve all these conveniences is worth it. What about you guys? Have u guys subscribed? Why not? Feel free to share feedback thus we able to understand more about freemium model.

Business noticed the value of social networks in our daily life, they are using different technique to promote their products. Social media marketing is cost effective and brands have a huge audience.

In March 1 2018, Owndays Singapore decided to hold a marketing campaign that allow customers to get discount either getting likes on post that includes owndays spectacles or having alot of followers on their Instagram account.

This marketing campaign garner a huge response from the public, sparking many teenager’s interest in attempting to own a pair of new spectacles without having to pay for it. Due to the overwhelming response from the public, the campaign was forced to come to an end even before their intended dateline. It resulted in a backlash of comments after the post on Facebook stating that the campaign will come to sudden stop.

It was mentioned by one of Owndays employee that during the campaign, more than 3,000 pairs were redeemed from stores islandwide, inclusive of 2,000 pairs that were given totally FREE OF CHARGE. Participants are not limited to any amount of spectacles which results in them collecting more than a pair making it unfair to other participants.

Hashtags were going around the social media; #owndaysfollowerdiscount in exchange for the likes to help gain more discounts for their own pair of spectacles.

Initially, I didn’t think that this campaign would be a success as people would delete their post after getting their free pair of spectacles, which will result in zero exposure and advertising for the company

However due to the quality product produced by Owndays, customers are willing to make a second purchase and share it with their circle of friends. This will help the company gain extra exposure and advertise to the general public whom are unaware of the brand.

All in all, social media is definitely capable of influencing the public and increasing the number of sales for a company. However, it is an approach that has to be controlled and specific to prevent the company from suffering a loss.

My suggestion would be that Owndays should set a limit in order to control the amount of giveaways. For example, they could limit the number of winners to ten each day and choose the participant with the highest amount of likes or the most creative photo taken with their products. Giving consumers a discount would be more ideal in this scenario as the objective of this campaign is to merely advertise and gain exposure for the company to the consumers.

Making it complimentary would not be an ideal plan as it would cause a loss for the brand, given how they would be losing the sales of 2,000 potential customers. Perhaps instead of making it complimentary, they could come out with attractive discounts that would be capped at $100. This way, they are still able to gain exposure for their business, as well as minimizing their losses.

What do you guys think can be done to improve social media marketing? Feel free to give your feedback and we can learn better together!