If you think your job is hard, wait till you try theirs! (Courtesy of College Life)
One of the most misunderstood concepts in social media content generation is that it is easy.
All it takes is just a couple of minutes (or perhaps an hour or so) of your time each day, and voila! Another insightful/interesting/ingenious work of art is published or uploaded, ready to be savoured by the world.
Before I talk about the great opportunity for bloggers, I must first declare that I’ve been selected to be a judge of the 2010 Omy.sg blog awards. Spearheaded by bilingual news portal Omy.sg, the awards have always been well received by the blogosphere year after year.
Anybody who has been in the field of marketing would be familiar with the term customer champion. However, few have truly understood what it means in the context of today’s organisation.
Being an advocate for customers doesn’t merely mean spending all your days (and nights) at your client’s offices, or conducting an endless round of surveys, focus groups and tea sessions. It isn’t just about understanding what customers want and desperately trying to fit one’s products and services into that itty bitty space called “consumer desire”.
Despite the dreary rain and drizzle that morning, the crowds still thronged the museums. I saw queues in front of the National Museum, and many families popping into the Singapore Art Museum with kids totting their Circle Line balloons. As I’ve been to both museums recently, we decided to make a bee-line for the Peranakan Museum and the Singapore Philatelic Museum.
Following the tip-off of a friend, my family and I visited the wonderful MPH Warehouse sale at Singapore Expo and hauled back about 40 titles. Admittedly, most of the books were for my son as well as gifts.
I picked up a total of five titles covering digital culture, grassroots/evangelistic marketing, socio-psycho trends, social media marketing, and related topics. Beyond Buzz is actually a loaned copy from the wonderful National Library of Singapore’s public libraries.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I will spend more time reading and less time surfing…. Yeah right!
There is an age-old saying that you cannot make a leopard change its spots. Or teach an old dog new tricks.
Habits, especially deeply ingrained ones, die hard. Sometimes, they can be so addictive that they not only fail to perish, but linger on. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year.
Every now and then, you come across a nice marketing idea that not only catches the eye but changes conventional perception of how advertisements should look like. As I was flipping TODAY newspaper this morning, the following job advertisement caught my eye.
What I like about this ad is that it chooses not to adopt a conventional job advertisement format which lists down the various job requirements in bullet points, and is often written in a more straight forward manner.
The use of the visual provides a nice touch, and the use of colours is balanced in a harmonious manner while highlighting certain text which needs special attention. What’s more, the copy is beautifully written and pitched at the right level for the premium world-class restaurants that the Marina Bay Sands will be opening.
It would be great to see more organisations take the plunge by investing in creative and innovative job recruitment advertisements. People are the most important resource in any company, and it is absolutely critical to ensure that you hire only the best that your money can afford.
One of the insights which I have gleaned in the hectic past few days from Steve Rubel and his thoughts on digital curation was this:
We should all be curators. Every single one of us in the fields of marketing, public relations, and advertising. And not only in the digital realm, but all others too.
Just in case you don’t know, uber digital strategist Steve Rubel from Edelman was in Singapore (he just flew off this morning at 5.45 am) in the past few days. I had the rare privilege of meeting him personally at the kind invitation of Edelman and also to hear him speak at the MICA-CSC Public Communications Conference 2010.
Steve’s latest thoughts on what goes beyond Web 2.0 were certainly refreshing. His latest analogy likened the current information revolution to that of a bursting fire hydrant. We are all bombarded with multiple streams of data, information, contacts, video streams, tweets, photos, applications and what have you.
How should board directors carry out their duties as arbiters of public trust? What should companies do to boost performance while ensuring that sufficient safeguards are in place? In an age of increasing dissatisfaction over how companies and charities are governed, how does one balance the need for innovation with control?
To find out the answers to these questions (and more), I signed up for a talk organised by the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry yesterday by Mr JY Pillay, Chairman of the Singapore Exchange, who spoke about corporate governance and its implications for both public-listed firms and Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Mr Pillay is one of the movers and shakers in Singapore, and has helmed various leading organisations as the former chairman of Singapore Airlines, Temasek Holdings and DBS Bank, amongst others.