meiling
This user hasn't shared any biographical information
Posts by meiling
Social Media for Business
Feb 19th
The prediction for 2010 is that more businesses will embrace social media marketing in one way or another. As a marketer myself, I see businesses who are not really ready to embrace social media simply because they are more keen on quick results. Social media are not quick fixes to every marketing challenges, in fact they are the short, medium and long term solutions that require strategy, planning and proper execution.
Here’s a list of activities that every marketer (including myself) should take extra attention of when crafting a social media marketing campaign:-
Objective of Social Media Marketing Campaign
Social media cannot deliver results like online advertisements, so it has to be made clearly understood that social media marketing has got different objectives. Amongst them are increasing fan base, a personalized engagement with users/fans, additional tool to deliver messages and more.
Deliverable
What the campaign can deliver, in what intensity and timeframe needs to be spelt out carefully and cannot be over-promised. The bosses expect deliverable with every of their investment (with our without monetary investment) and its important to use some statistics & mathematics before commiting to a deliverables. This is especially if your deliverables are leads generated or total sales generated. Be honest and truthful, there is no point over promising if you already know its impossible or if you are completely not sure of the results.
Monitoring the Results/Deliverable
Any marketer knows that every campaign needs to have ROIs, so make sure that you are fully aware of how your campaign is performing. Some of the items you want to monitor include total clicks on the links you posted, total retweets, total followers/fans and others.
Consistent Plan to Increase Followers/Fans
I always believe that I need to increase followers/fans because this equals reaching deeper and further into the already established base. So, there must be a consistent & persistent plan to increase the total followers and fans. While it is ideal to churn out huge figures to impress the bosses, it is also important to be very level-headed when it comes to commiting such figures.
Daily Monitoring
Its ideal to have tools to monitor the social media for keywords and your business name. Not only will you be able to do damage control if anything negative is being said about your business, but at the same time you can also know what is being said about your competitors or about the industry in general.
Twitter Bulk Unfollow Tools
Dec 19th
I’ve been so busy at work lately that I don’t have time to tweet or manually select those whom I want to follow and unfollow. I set an auto-follow via a twitter tool that I talked about previously, Socialoomph.com. One good thing about using this tool is that it automates the task of following those who follows me. For me, its a courtesy gesture to follow those who follow me. However, there are also those who are following others by the bulk to ‘jack up’ their follower list and those who are plain spammers. So, it gets quite a bit of work when I try to weed out those who really tweets and those who are just blasting endless useless advertisements.
This morning, I searched for tools to do bulk unfollow because I have close to 1,000 followers and going through all these one by one is going to be a very time consuming task. Here are the few that I found :-
Twitter Karma
URL : http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
This tool shows you the whole long list of those whom you are following & whom are following you. You will instantly know whom you are following that are not following you and vice versa. You can tick boxes beside the names to do a bulk follow or bulk unfollow. Oh yes, you need to key in your twitter ID and your password to get this done. Its simple, fast & easy.
Friend or Follow
URL : http://friendorfollow.com
You only need to key in your twitter ID and they will show you a list of (1) FOLLOWING – Those whom you are following but is not following you (2) FANS – Those whom are following you but you are not following them (3) FRIENDS – Those whom are following you and you are also following them . From this list, you can then click on the respective icons that brings you back to their twitter profiles and you can make a decision to follow / unfollow. Ok, so you can’t do a bulk unfollow or follow but you have instant information on your fingertips to make a decision.
Untweeps
URL : http://www.untweeps.com/
With this tool, you can see whom has not been actively updating their tweets. This tool allows you to specify the total days of inactivity ~ so your report is customized according to your own criteria. They call it ’stale tweeps’. With the whole long list, it is by default checked so you can just click on bulk unfollow if you want to. I had a long list, and I was thinking to myself.. if they are not updating their twitter for 30 days, I believe they have permanently abandoned it? If you have a long list of people you are following, you’d be surprised how big this pool of inactive tweeps can be!
Buzzom
URL : http://www.buzzom.com/
Once I key in my twitter ID, it gives me an option to Flush, Grow or Reciprocate. The idea behind it is quite similar to the rest – follow those who follow you stuff. An interesting add on is that it has a Twitter Statistics to measure your influence, retweet efficiency, retweet rank.. etc.
I used Twitter Karma and Friend or Follow to keep my list ‘clean’.
On the other hand, I’m now using Qwitter [URL: http://useqwitter.com/ ] to be notified of whoever is unfollowing me. I just signed up for this service, whereby I only need to key in my twitter ID and email address to be notified of those who unfollow me. I can stop the service anytime by clicking on the link that has been emailed to me.
For now, I just want to keep my Twitter list clean. 
Dinner in the Jungle
Dec 6th
Yes ~ it really was a jungle. Those following me via Twitter would have noticed me saying that I was having dinner in the middle of a jungle. I tried to use geotagging but my Twitter client just couldn’t locate my location even when my Google Map & GPS was working fine. hmm…
In fact, when we first spotted the signboard, it reminded me of those eerie movies whereby you bump into a rundown motel beside some highway. The location is off the Hulu Langat highway, somewhere about 1km away from the famous Ampang Look Out Point. The best part of it all is that it has no proper signboard and just a dingy looking “Open” signage lighted dimly which was clearly visible in the darkness of the jungle.
As our car went past the “Open” signage through a gate, it was entire darkness and we felt not-so-right because there was no lights, and nothing was visible in front. The road is not tarred and bumpy all the way. Its a village road by passing some private lands (according to the signage) and you are charged RM2 upon arrival at the carpark. If not for the advertisement that said that there is a restaurant inside, you would have to literally kill me to drive into such place for dinner. To illustrate what I meant by how scary I felt, refer to the location map I plotted using Google Map below. Its really thick jungle and its something like one kilometer into the jungle before you can see some lights. *phew*
As we approached the restaurant, there was something like 40 cars parked in the darkness and the restaurant was full house! Unbelievable!! We ordered 6 dishes in total excluding the desserts. The food is good, I took a pic of four of the dishes and forgot about taking the remaining two when I got into eating. Its always like that ~ once I start to get into the mood of eating, I forget the pics. Hahaha… One thing to note, as soon as we ordered, the food arrived in 5 minutes which was timely since we were already starving.
I snapped some photos but it was really too cold to even have non-shaky hands. Because it was really really dark (it was close to 9:00PM when we arrived), so you can’t really see much from the pics. The restaurant is built around a fish pond and is really breezy and cooling.
Its a unique experience ~ having dinner in the middle of the jungle. This restaurant has a nice ambiance & “feel” but would be almost impossible to locate if you have no proper directions.