360DigitalInfluence

Why Tweetup?

Some of you might have seen tweets about the Ogilvy’s APAC Digital Influence Summit lately. Ogilvy’s DI Summit is an internal event held by the Asia Pacific Regional team where all the digital experts from around the region will be attending a 3-day event in Hong Kong to exchange digital knowledge, connect and bond with other team

Although the event is not open for public, we would like to offer you a chance to meet our team, head of the global digital influence team John Bell will also be flying all the way from Washington DC! It is a very rare opportunity for you to meet all of us at once, in the offline world!

When?

Tweetup will be held this Sunday, June 27th at 7pm. Not the perfect timing for tweetup but due to the World Cup schedule, this is the only time when venues are available.

Where?

Tweetup will be held in RED Soho as usual.

Address: 2/f, Kinwick Centre, 32 Hollywood Road, Soho Central. (Right next to the escalator above hollywood road)

How to sign up?

Here

See you there!

This article is republished with express permission of Media Asia, which originally published it on April 1, 2010.

Debby Cheung, group managing director of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide/China, shares her insight on the highly anticipated, six month extravaganza known as World Expo 2010 Shanghai, and gives advice on how marketers can make the most of this monumental opportunity.

1. Bring your A game.

192 countries and 50 organisations will take part in the Shanghai Expo – not to mention the brands that will jockey for position with guerilla marketing. Competition for media and consumer attention will be fierce, and the battle will play out both on the ground and online. All involved in the Expo will be scrambling to reach out to consumers to reinforce the faces and personalities of their brands. To be heard, brands will need to pull out all the stops and create bold, determined, decisive and cross-discipline strategies. There will be no room for the faint or half-hearted.

2. Prolong the hype.

The Olympics comprise of 16 days of intense and enthusiastic campaigns that are more easily sustained due to the short duration of the event; but Expo is a whole different animal. This event spans six months, making sustained hype key to the success of campaigns. Without recurring, innovative and ever-changing infusions of activities, campaigns will get lost in the crowd.

3. Non-sponsors get on the bus by thinking green.

The theme, ‘Better City, Better Life’ means that anything sustainable and environmentally friendly is your ticket to an association with the Expo. Sponsors are not the only ones who can leverage this event – all brands should be thinking green to piggyback on the Expo theme. Moreover, the Shanghai government, Expo and organisations will continually look for new partnership opportunities so non-sponsors will have plenty of chances to take part. With 20,000 events in Shanghai, both on and off the Expo site, opportunities to contribute to the green theme are endless.

4. Think beyond Shanghai.

This Expo is expected to generate the largest number of visitors in the history of the event, and only 5 per cent of them will be from outside China. Domestic visitors are estimated at 70 million, with 75 per cent of them coming from second and third tier cities. As Shanghai is simply not equipped to accommodate so many visitors, the government has already secured the support of surrounding cities to help accommodate the overflow. As a result, effective marketing campaign strategies need to think beyond the borders of the already overcrowded and extraordinarily competitive Shanghai market.

5. Expo goes mobile.

3G and the connectivity of Blackberry phones and mobile devices mean visitors will be constantly on the lookout for the best and most interesting places to go and both positive and negative reports will travel at the speed of light. When mapping out Expo strategies, marketers need to capitalise on these channels and not shy away from them. The sheer size of the Expo will make targeting the right audience with traditional marketing a challenge, but mobile and online strategies will level the playing field.

Our Shanghai office is having fun promoting our internal training system, Social Media Belt.

Thanks everyone for attending our webinars! We’ve just finished our 4th training yesterday and would like to give a quick summary of these trainings.

Facebook for Business

Link to Training

Facebook is so far the biggest social network that helps people communicate with their friends more efficiently. Facebook for Business is our first social media training of series that explains how this can channel can be used for businesses by establishing the suitable strategy.

Moderator: Thomas Crampton

Speaker: Brian Giesen

Twitter for Business

Link to Training

Twitter has been growing rapidly, many companies started to think about jumping on to it. However, one of the key suggestions we made in the training Twitter for Business is to go through the process of “Listen, create and Engage”. The training also featured a few local companies for their great use of Twitter.

Moderator: Thomas Crampton

Speaker: Brian Giesen

Social Media for Crisis Management

Link to Training

Social media is an open area where most conversations happen publicly, companies have no control of what people are saying online. This training will guide you on how to set up systems that can help companies deal with crisis online, it also provides you with great case studies on crisis management.

Moderator: Thomas Crampton

Speaker: Jamie Moeller, John Bell

Social Media for B2B companies

Link to Training

Many people have the misconception of how social media is only relevant to the B2C world, this training will explain how social media can benefit B2B organizations.

Moderator: Thomas Crampton

Speaker: Brian Gieson

This article was originally posted by MEDIA

Shenan Chuang (pictured), chief executive at Ogilvy & Mather Group China, shares her insights on marketing to Chinese consumers during the rapidly approaching Chinese New Year period and gives advise on how brands can capture a bit of the holiday magic.

1. Planes, trains and automobiles. In China, each year’s ChunYun, or Spring Festival travel season, sees hundreds of millions of people crisscrossing the country to reunite with their families. During this 40-day frenzy, three distinct groups of travellers can be spotted based on their choice of transportation. Migrant workers and students flood the trains; office workers, expatriates and overseas travellers form the core of the air travel segment while short-distance travellers take to the streets in automobiles. This mass migration means most consumers deviate from their normal media consumption habits and channels for up to a month or more – not an insignificant amount of time. Buses, transit zones, and outdoor media often become the primary communication channels for a country on the move.

2. Know your (often unlikely) brand ambassadors As scores of migrant workers and students temporarily trade in the bright lights of the big cities for their hometowns in the countryside, they arrive loaded with gifts, products and information from their big city lives. Viewed as successful returnees, their attitudes and opinions on brands and products are very influential on old friends and family. For brands seeking to penetrate lower tier Chinese cities and rural markets, word-of-mouth endorsements from these (often unlikely) brand ambassadors are your best – and most effective – bet.

3. The New Year’s Eve dinner. The New Year’s Eve dinner is always a highlight of the holiday celebration and family reunions. But the format has changed over the years. First it was a must to gather at home for the annual feast. That tradition eventually gave way to eating out as many families chose restaurants for their convenience and ambiance. Nowadays staying at home for the once-a-year indulgence is back in vogue – but with a twist. Rather than slaving over a hot wok or battling for a reservation at a hotel, more families are choosing to order ready-made meals that can be enjoyed at home without the hassle of fighting for a taxi only to be stuck in holiday gridlock. This shift signals big business potential for brands that can enhance those dinners at home with tableware, gift sets of holiday spirits, sweets and snacks or even jumbo family packs for the three generations reuniting over this special event.

4. CCTV New Year’s Gala – who’s watching? The CCTV New Year’s Gala (or ChunWan) is the premier mainland Chinese television event of the year, comparable to the Super Bowl in America. As the most influential and highly rated TV show in China, the Gala attracts marketers eager to buy airtime at any cost. But be forewarned: audience ratings drop as you move from the north of the country to the south. The highest ratings can be found in Northeast China where 85 per cent of residents tune in. This percentage drops to 70 per cent for Beijing and Tianjin, 60 percent for Shandong/ Shanxi/ Henan/ Shaanxi, 20 per cent for Shanghai/ Jiangsu/ Anhui/ Hubei/ Sichuan, 10 per cent for Zhejiang/ Fujian, and below 5 per cent for Guangdong/ Guangxi/ Hainan. So before you burn through your budget, think hard about your target audience… and where they live.

5. Home (and nowhere else) for the holidays. While some sightsee during the holiday, others prefer to “ZhaiNan,” which essentially means hibernating at home doing three things: eating, sleeping and surfing the web. Surfers are primarily engaged in online shopping, SNS and gaming. In 2009, online retailer Taobao.com reported a 195 per cent increase over 2008 in the number of products exchanged by consumers during the CNY period. Bestsellers were mobile phones, digital products, household appliances and gift packs with health supplements. Another trend of recent years is the younger generation’s preference for sending New Year greetings by SMS rather than paying a visit to relatives and friends.  As the internet and mobile applications make their mark on millennia-old traditions, it’s time for marketers to make inroads into the CNY “ZhaiNan” phenomenon.

I was lucky enough to have the chance to interview the CEO and founder of the SC Storage (時昌迷你倉), Kevin She. SC storage was founded in 2001, the first storage company in Hong Kong, it is also one of a few Hong Kong successful cases using social media.

Kevin is passionate about social media himself, he doesn’t use social media as a channel to generate sales, instead, he chose to engage with local people who are active on Social Media, using Twitter and Facebook Page as main channels to develop real friendship with them.

As I mentioned in my presentation Social Media Basics for Executives, companies should never buy coverage on social media (e.g. pay per post), they should actually engage with targets to build long-term relationships. No matter how much Kevin’s competitors invest in advertising, I would still go for SC storage when I need storage spaces because I’m connected with him personally through social media, and that’s the true power of social media for SMBs.

Link to the video we talked about during interview, the TV ad that went viral on Youtube:Cantonese Only

Brian Giesen, Regional Director of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence APAC, and Tim Ho, Regional Digital Strategist will be holding a “lepak” (malaysian slang: casual hang out) session in Kuala Lumpur to share their views on Social Media in Asia.

If you are in KL and would like to have some interesting conversations with our regional experts, please join them in La Bodega in Bangsar Mall at 7pm local time on Thursday 10th Dec.

Below is the address for the venue:

Please sign up here:

Most of the social media projects I deal with at Ogilvy are for global brands, it’s interesting to learn from local successful cases like this one. It’s a cafe in Mong Kok with a wide range of comic book collections called Ease House Cafe, where they target mainly to young comic lovers.
As a small cafe located on the 25th floor of a building, 21 year-old owner realized it would be hard to spread the message out if he used traditional marketing tactics, so he went digital.

They use Facebook as a channel to grow fan base and increase loyalty by keeping their fans updated on news and special deals, also partnered with a local cafe directory site up4cafe to offer readers coupons.
Recently, they are having this “Blog for free dinner” campaign, where they encourage bloggers to write about their Cafe, they will search on Google every month with keyword “Ease House Cafe” and pick a blog that’s index high enough on the search, sounds like a small scale blogger engagement, a very smart idea to get themselves quality organic search results, but personally I would also go for keywords like “comic books”, “hong kong” too. (in Eng & Chinese).

With limited resources, many local small & medium business owners in Hong Kong are afraid to invest time and money on this new media, but with all the recent success here in Hong Kong, I think business owners should really reconsider and make a move soon!

In online content creation, Korea has been the biggest in the world. They have the highest portion of Internet users who enjoy publishing web content, more than 55% of the Internet users have uploaded articles, photos, music, videosand other digital content.

Lately, company Playstreet created this mapping site, which breaks Seoul into 29 areas, users can pick the area and virtually walk on the street. The map shows you exactly where you are, and in terms of accuracy, I think they have done a better job than Google Street View since Google sometimes messes up the numbers on some streets.

Also, as shown on image above, the map shows names for each building/ shop, which I think it’s something Google Street View can learn from.

Now Playstreet has partnered with Web Concepts (NZ company) and working on ShowStreet; a map for New Zealand, and it will be launched in Australian soon. Would be great if they add social media elements to the map in the future.

Play around with it now!

Many people have great ideas, but not all good ideas have demand in the market; research is the only way to learn if the ideas can be executed. Research has always been the key when starting new projects; companies try to figure out their targets everyday and marketers have been trying to think like a customer in order to compete with others in the same industry.

In traditional marketing research, people hand out forms and “ask” people to fill in the information; gathering primary data this way not only can cost companies a fortune, but the data might not also be accurate.

I’m sure you have been asked to fill in annoying forms, most people don’t really take forms too seriously. In psychology, human beings always tend to avoid giving too much information to others (although you try).

Thanks to social media! data is everywhere these days, you just have to know how to get it, where to get it and how to analyse it. It’s like having hidden microphones on everyone around the world (of course without violating privacy policies), and listening to them at the same time about one single thing.

There are many free tools out there that can get you started, feel free to email me tim.ho@ogilvy.com or Thomas Crampton thomas.crampton@ogilvy.com to learn more about the power of “listening”.