Date: 6-7 March 2010 (Saturday & Sunday)
Time: 10am – 4pm
Venue:
NSTP Seminar Room
Jalan Riong, Bangsar (map)

Registration Fees
RM400 per participant

Note: You must bring your own laptop. Registration fees include handouts, materials, internet access and refreshments

Everything You Need To Know About Using Free Social Media Tools To Get More Customers And Kick Start Your Online Marketing

Social media is changing the way consumers interact with businesses. Previously, only big companies with big marketing budgets had access to mass audiences. But social media has leveled the playing field so that anyone can build an audience, a business and a brand for zero dollars.

No matter if you’re a big or small business, you can use social media to help you:

  • Form and nurture profitable relationships with your customers
  • Get more referrals through online word of mouth
  • Improve customer loyalty and repeat sales
  • Be more cost effective with your marketing
  • Increased your findability through search engines and other online channels
  • Be recognised as the person or brand who can provide solutions

REGISTER NOW

Workshop Programme

The workshop not only tells you how to do it, we’ll show you how to do it too with hands-on practical instruction. This includes exercises that will help you form a social media strategy that you can begin using immediately after the workshop. [click to continue…]

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Following up from last month’s post on social media predictions, this time around I asked my friends in major brands and agencies to contribute their insights. The contributors to this article are:

  1. James Yeang, Product Marketing Manager at DiGi Communications
  2. Cynthia Seow, Senior Manager of New Media at Packet One Networks
  3. Derek Tan, Social Media Specialist at AirAsia
  4. Biresh Vrajlal, PR & Marcom Manager at Tune Hotels
  5. Cheah Hsu Jen, Senior Marketing Executive at New Zealand Natural Malaysia
  6. Rachel Foong, New Media Executive at Sunway University College
  7. Niki Cheong, Journalist at The Star
  8. Karen Hoh, Managing Director at Edelman Malaysia
  9. David Lian, Social Media Strategist at Text100 Malaysia
  10. Gan Mei Lian, Client Service Director at Euro RSCG Malaysia
  11. Nizwani Shahar, Associate Brand Director at McCann Erickson Malaysia
  12. Alex Lam, Managing Director at Integricity

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the above are their personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employer or clients.

Executive Summary

Here are the social media trends and insights for Malaysia that I extracted from their responses.

  • Malaysian brands are relatively immature with regards to social media. While there has been an increase in participation recently, many are doing so for the sake of jumping on the bandwagon. Majority of the respondents agree that social media maturity will require more time. Takeaway – brands have an opportunity to crush it if they can get ahead of the curve of their competitors.
  • There are many challenges facing brands in social media (strategy, expertise, perceived loss of control, etc) are causing brands to be very cautious. For the front-liners, the challenge is educating management and being able to engage and be transparent. Takeaway – many of the stumbling blocks are caused by lack of experience, therefore it’s extremely important to jump in and learn by doing.
  • 100% of the respondents are planning to increase investment in social media. From the tone I guess that some may give social media a bigger slice of the marketing budget moving forward. Takeaway – be sure to measure and track results from campaigns to justify the investment in the channel.
  • Facebook and Twitter rule.. but brands are cautious and cognizant of the fact that the next big thing are right around the corner. Takeaway – don’t put all your eggs in the Facebook and Twitter basket.

Soundbites

Below are the questions I posed to the contributors, with some highlighted responses. You can view the complete responses at this Google Spreadsheet. [click to continue…]

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Video is a great way to provide customer education and support sales and marketing activities. With the growing penetration of broadband and the dozens of video hosting services, it’s easier than ever to publish and distribute your videos to your market.

Unfortunately, not all video hosting services are created equally. For example, many of these services are based in USA and so videos can take longer to load when viewing them here in Malaysia. Now that I’ve started producing more videos for Buzzmedia (see my first one here) I’ve had to do some research on the different options we have here in Malaysia.

Video hosting comparison

It wasn’t as simple as I thought and I wanted to share the pros and cons of each service. In my research, I looked at YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv and Facebook video and weighed them against the following criteria: speed, video quality, terms of service and upload limitations. [click to continue…]

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The sheer number of social media sites and services make keeping up with mentions of your brand a real challenge. Fortunately there are a number of social media monitoring services that have emerged to solve that problem. Benjamin Koe, co-founder of JamiQ provides a quick overview of social media monitoring and how to make use of it in the video above. Ben also tells us a little bit about how his product works.

JamiQ is a Singapore-based company that provides social media monitoring services, specializing in Asian markets and languages. As a user, I can vouch that Radian6’s coverage of Malaysia and Singapore can be hit or miss, so if you’re based in this region, definitely give JamiQ a try.

P.S. Thank you Ben for taking the time to speak to me!

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Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index

21 January 2010

Edelman and Brandtology have found that Twitter is now the ‘Buzziest Channel’ in their latest Digital Brand Index study (DBI 2.0), which was conducted across eight Asia-Pacific markets (Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan).
For brands, Google remains the most talked about brand, edging out Microsoft and Maxis. Here’s the Top 10 [...]

Read the full article →

Buzzworthy: How blogging demonstrates thought leadership for FusionBrand

21 January 2010

Marcus Osborne is co-founder and Managing Director of FusionBrand, a brand consultancy headquartered in Kuala Lumpur. He’s a friendly chap that I got to know through Twitter (follow him at @brandconsultant) and in addition to providing interesting commentary on Malaysia as a Brit living in KL, he also publishes a blog on branding in Asia.
Marcus [...]

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Social Media Predictions for Small Business and Startups: The Malaysian Perspective

14 January 2010

I’m sure you’ve read lots of predictions for marketing and social media in the past 2 weeks (I offered my own predictions here), but how many have been specific to Malaysia? I asked a few of my friends who operate businesses here in Malaysia for their predictions, and here are responses.
Colin Charles, open source software [...]

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Online Trends For 2010 That Will Change Marketing In Malaysia

14 January 2010

2009 was a watershed year for paradigm-changing online technologies. Technologies like Facebook and Twitter not only became household names last year, but are on track to change business and marketing as we charge on into 2010.
As a marketer and digital native who’s practically grown up on the web, here are some personal observations of mine [...]

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Buzzworthy: Billshrink piggy-backs Nexus hype into consumer consciousness

11 January 2010

Google made a big, highly-anticipated announcement last week about it’s Nexus One mobile phone that set blogs and Twitter abuzz. Being an avid gadget freak, I followed many of the conversations and posts about the Nexus One and found one that stood out – Billshrink’s comparison table of the total cost of ownership between the [...]

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Happy 2010 from Buzzmedia and Level5

11 January 2010

Yes, I know I’m a bit late.. but I’m early for Chinese New Year no?
In any case, I also have some announcement to make.
Buzzmedia Bulletin Mailing List
My resolution in 2010 is to stay in touch more with my friends and associates. Therefore, I will be launching my mailing list this 2010. It will contain exclusive [...]

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