Even though I don’t live in United States, I have learnt a lot from Steve Jobs! His presentation skill is probably the best… It is world class! He showed me how to present everytime I need to… I did that by going to YouTube to see and learn from his past presentations.

He taught me how to deal with crisis when iPhone4 faced reception issue. One thing that amazed me is that he actually shows the world that this problem is common by demonstrating other phone brands such as Nokia and Blackberry. He even posted them up on Apple website. All these things made all the phone brands seemed panic and retaliated with their press releases.

He taught me how to work on product creation when I read books about him. The single most important factor is that he sets the vision of the products, and gets his hands dirty by testing the products himself. He does not believe in doing product survey because the potential customers do not know what they want. It’s like when Henry Ford (the car inventor) asks what the people want and they can only answer that they want a faster horse because cars don’t exist back then.

He also taught me about marketing communications. When the shop owners want to sell Apple products, they must set up the standard Apple environment inside. It is so clean and tidy. We all know this is an Apple corner and nothing else! All collaterals are very standardised, and even their prices. I also like their website as it is very simple and well-aligned across different countries. Most importantly, branding is something that the CEO must take charge of personally.. And Steve Jobs had done them all. Whereas for the rest of the companies, they are too consumed by the lame reasons of being MNCs themselves that they can’t do this or that, and excused themselves that these are the things that only small companies can do.

I have no idea how the logistics and supply chain works for them but I believe it must be superb since I guess Tim Cook was the man behind, and he has been highly recommended by Steve Jobs to take over his CEO role.

Also, I admire his entrepreneurship when he was out of Apple. At that time, he had actually started up two companies which eventually become very profitable and were bought over by Apple and Disney.

Lastly, I have ever thought of starting up a music online store. The path was super difficult as different sings are owned by different companies. And the kind of dedication that they want from me basically needs me to pay upfront tens of thousands of dollars! When Steve Jobs wanted to start iTunes, he managed to convince the companies to sell as such a low cost. He had magically went past the difficulties that I had!

With so many things to learn from him, it is such a pity that he has to go. Perhaps the heaven needs his help to revolutionise the apple tree that Adam and Eve have eaten… There is no reason why God has called for him to be home at such a young age. But whatever it is, I felt privileged to have known such a legendary person on earth – Steve Jobs. Thank you!

Are you ready for an advanced course?  Generally, social media should be used but the truth is that social media can actually be ignored if you are doing certain things correctly. What are they and how?

Traditional media may not be as cost effective and efficient as the online media, but they are still quite safe to communicate this way where they don’t want people to give feedback. Though receptiveness may not be as good in traditional media than in social media where you can build brand advocators, you still can get your message out. If you are not looking at growing your company from a million dollar business to a billion dollar business, traditional media is for you. Don’t expect yourself to grow by leaps and bounds through traditional media while ignoring social media.  The reason is simply because more people are now spending their time online than on TV and newspapers.

So what can you do to ignore social media?  In short, you can actually continue to improve your product quality and customer service so that you don’t have to create your social media presence.  By being the best quietly, you are able to create a viral effect between the users.  By improving your whole customer service experience, you are teaching the social media how to tell the world about your products and services.  As you can see, it always voices down to your actual products and services whether you are participating in social media or not.

So, you can see that it is really possible to ignore social media marketing, provided that you are already using traditional marketing.  If you are really not ready for social media because of manpower issue or because of lousy quality, I would suggest you to focus on making your basics right first.

And if you were to set up your social media presence as your next step, you are actually gathering all the testimonials to further affirm the potential customers out there.

Just think about it… A customer is receiving a lot of attention and love from the company simply because he keeps on complaining.  In the end, he gets a lot of freebies out of being a bad customer.  How about a customer who keeps on paying you money faithfully and not wanting any of your attention?  In the end, the obedient customer gets nothing for being faithful while the noisy customer gets rewarded for threatening to make a switch to use another company (probably… this is just an example).

I have not really heard of any company who rewards their obedient customers.  And the funny thing about these obedient customers is that they don’t really participate in any of the customer loyalty reward programmes because they just want to pay and forget about it (that’s probably because they have better things to focus on, rather than complaining to get cheapskate things).  Why is there no such company who rewards obedient customers?  Probably it’s because their customer relationship management system is not in place to identify the obedient customers?  Companies will usually need to start a customer loyalty programme to attract non-loyal customers (who actually act to be loyal to get some freebies out of it…)  Can’t the companies just reward the truly loyal customers directly without asking for their participation?  It gives a good feeling for the loyal customers and it will definitely make them want to be loyal in the many years to come…

I think it voices down to 80/20 rule here.  If we can focus our attention on the 20% of our customers (our best customers), our profit margin should improve by 80% or more!  On the other hand, if we focus on 80% of our customers (handling the complaints and all the troubles) we are likely lose our best customers in that 20% and together with the 80% complaining customers!

So, how do you treat your customers?

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In many businesses within, the marketing people are always not on good terms with the salespeople.  It is simply because the salespeople think that they are the ones who bring in the bread and butter for the company while the marketing people are just doing their job in a routine fashion.  Yes, they do bring in the bread and butter directly but they can only do it within their means one day at a time.  What marketing can do for them is to set up a system and a brand perception for the people to be sold even before the salespeople are selling them.  Marketing can be phenomenon because it creates an automatic system of generating profits without the salespeople selling to them.  And with the rise of Internet, the end customers are almost as knowledgeable as the salespeople to make a wise choice of buying their products by themselves.

What it means here truly is that the past sales figures may not necessarily be telling us a story of how much they can forecast their sales targets.  They can easily set a forecast within themselves that they want to make more money than previous years.  But if they can truly understand the market trends and even to forecast the trends, this forecast will be even more meaningful.  An example could be when you ordered a quantity of 10,000 products based on the last year’s trend, but there could have been a news release about certain issues which give rise to the demand of your product.  So, you are not going to make the kind of money that you should just because you are only forecasting based on last year’s sales.

With that in mind, can we really reduce our marketing budget just because of the past sales figures or because of economical situation?  If you look at an even bigger picture beyond just sales figures, you will notice that you can have a greater results of marketing efforts with the same amount of money simply because the advertising media is also lowering down their price due to economical situation.  By lowering down your marketing budget, you have really fulfilled the sales forecast by making lesser money…

In conclusion, numbers don’t tell you the whole story… What do you think?

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If they can understand this simple meaning, they will put in more manpower to focus on this online media more.  Instead of parking the huge amount of money on the traditional media and wooing the same crowd every time, money could be spent once and we can market to the same group of people again and again (while the group keeps on growing larger and larger!).  And the online media is measurable for its Return-Of-Investment because we will be able to understand the traffic conversion rates, and seeing how many people actually become customers. In the traditional media, we can only guess a rough figure of how many eyeball impressions it receives (nobody knows if the traditional media is bluffing, anyway they can’t get the real figures) and yet we don’t know how many people are actually interested before they gave up.

Needless to say, it is even more powerful if we can combine both offline and online media.  Bringing in the traffic from the traditional media to the online media, and converting them.  But my experience was telling me previously that the likelihood of someone to take note of your URL on the website in traditional media is very small because they are reading too many things at the same time (information overload).

Generally, it is difficult to justify in a company that they need a team to focus on online marketing initiatives mainly.  They will usually employ one person to be fully in charge of the websites, or to get someone – who is working mainly on other things – to work on the websites on the way.

Well, it sounds logical for any company to do such a thing.  It’s because their main business is usually from the traditional brick-and-mortar shops.  And it seems to them that it doesn’t justify the reason why a team of two (or more) is needed.

No, it is actually nothing to do with manpower issue really. It is an issue that every management team needs to address. And the reason is simple.  They are more focused on direct sales which is very straight to the point. If you ask any salespeople, they can only tell you that they make money by approaching strangers or vice versa.  Whether it is a door-knocking approach to the strangers, or strangers coming for a big event, you can actually feel it… touch it… and explain it if the potential customers are not familiar.

But when they wanted to start a fresh new online campaign, it will usually be killed because of the lack of manpower in this focus.  All of them have other things to do anyway.  Who is going to focus on the online campaign?  Even if there is a full time employee (not a team) working on the online marketing, it wouldn’t be a full focus because this person has many other things to do as well.

Let me explain why it is not possible even if there is a dedicated person in charge of the websites.  It is simply because this person is always being treated as a data-entry clerk who knows about web design. Data entry is also a full-time job by itself! It is nothing of an executive role, and is a very boring job of its own as time passed.  If the company is recognizing the importance of online marketing, it will not dedicate 1% of its manpower on the website, and 99% on everything else.  And interestingly, 99% of the manpower always have something to update and they depend solely on this 1% to work for them.

It is not easy to convince the management unless they are looking at it from the operations point of view.  Somebody got to explain it clearly how things work, but it is never easy to explain because nobody (even myself) is able to see the merits of having a team to work on the website from the management point of view since it has been like this for many years.  And for many years, all of us can understand that the websites are nothing more than an online brochure to update contents only because social media wasn’t really established at that time.  Today, the websites need a team of data entry clerk, community manager, and an online marketing executive.

What do you think about this?  Do you think the website is still one part of the marketing communications department in the company?  Is sales department also needed to be involved in the website?  How about dedicating more than 1 persons to work on the websites?  Do we really need a team?  Or just 1 person is good enough?

I think we should learnt from those people who had burnt themselves before because there must have some fantastic lesions that we can learnt from them. At least they know how to attract millions of dollars to be invested in them, and I don’t.

But looking at the direction that we are going, if there is going to have another internet bubble burst, this time is going to be so much bigger than ever before.

Looking on the bright side, the supply and demand are on the right time…

Demands: A lot of devices have been geared towards internet access.. The evolution of IPhone that had huge effect on enabling the normal users to start using internet while on the go… The upcoming competitor Android software that allows the rest of the companies to compete with Apple effectively… Tablets are also finally on the rise… Netbooks that allow the users to be able to access internet at an affordable price and yet at the comfortable usual Windows operating system..

Supplies: With the rise of facebook that allows end users to come to a common media to network… Google and bing allow the users to search more effectively… Twitter allows everyone of us to have a say in just 140 characters and yet it can have tremendous effect… Friendfeed that allows all sort of social media to come together… Blip.fm that allows us to share our thoughts through our favorite songs… Google docs allow us to work on documents easily… Digg to allow us to share and see interesting information…

The internet media is maturing for sure… But the only question is whether the users are matured enough to use or not. When I say users, it can mean both individuals and companies… Because of this, the internet agencies’ tend to be more profitable… The clients are mostly not educated simply because they have never attended such courses before in the past.. And the power is now with the end users… All of a sudden, they are not sure of how to handle a media because it is always the job of media owners… Now, it belongs to them… And it is always not a good idea to outsource to someone who is not specialised.

Hence, if the internet hype is really going at a ridiculous rate, all the inexperienced business initiators are going to be the black sheep…

We are in the midst of expanding the usability of this Facebook community that we have built from scratch.  It all started when I bought my HTC Desire in July 2010 and I found that there are a lot of people out there who are very enthusiastic about Android related topics.  I thought it might be a good idea to start a community out of this topic and to expand it further to talk about this together!

We started this community in July 2010, and we have grown to more than 10k fans today.  The contents in this Facebook page are not created by me, but by the community within.  What I am doing to contribute is to create the mechanism to gather all the android fans together.  And with the help of a friend, he has helped me built up a new facebook application that allows the community to see the most anticipated questions that they wish to know from the rest of the android fans around the world.

Because of the uniqueness of this Facebook page from the rest of the pages, we have faced different problems along the way.  Problems such as this question posed by one of the fans “why are the tips provided by the fans, instead by the Facebook page creator”… Facebook has almost converted this page into a self-running page which I have to explain that it is still run by myself… Facebook blocking me because they need to authenticate that I am the owner of the page… and so on… and so on…

We are now bringing this page further with the help of my two friends – one developer and one designer.  Both are really good of their own scope of focus… All of us have our own respective full time jobs, but I am glad that we are still able to work systematically as a team with the help of the basecamp software (created by 37signals).

It is always advisable for any one of you to have a domain name simply because of branding.  Having a common name consistently in the social media is a necessary step so that your social media users will be able to identify you wherever you go.

The start of a new case study

I decided to start a new web presence about Android phone tips since I have just bought myself a HTC Desire.

Tools used:

1. Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Android-Phone-Tips/140369539324334)
2. Twitter account (http://twitter.com/androidphonetip)
3. Tumblr (http://androidphonetips.tumblr.com/)

This is a case study that I will use to understand myself how a website can operate without a domain name of its own.  I will want to see how far this android phone tips can go, and to see how much value it will bring to the world of Internet.

Different brand names

In this case study, you will notice that I have not consistently put in the same branding. i.e. “Android Phone Tips”.  Instead, it has 2 different brand names of their own.  One very obvious reason is that I have not been able to get the same consistency name across the three platforms.  Twitter cannot take in the whole name as “AndroidPhoneTips” because there is character limit.

If you are an Android phone user, do support my small little android project!

Please let alone about the thought of any attractive business opportunity.  The person who wanted to share with me something is actually annoying… Or in another word, he’s very irritating…

And if anybody asks you for a business opportunity and yet keeps you in suspense, I think it is better to give up about that opportunity.  The reason is because it is very suspicious, and that person is bound to find ways and means to brainwash you in that very long “1 hour” of meeting.  I will find it very annoying because it is so irrelevant and interruptive to me.

Because of their desperation, it looks to me that they are looking for customers rather than asking for a business cooperation…

In my opinion, business opportunity should be restricted to non-customers only.  Meaning to say that this money opportunity should only be beneficial to the business partners, and not the customers.  But the customers must be benefited from the product or service that they have purchased.  By asking your customers to help you to sell your products, it’s like having a double-edged sword in your hand… It not only irritates the people around from buying your product because they still have to work for you, it also hurts yourself when the people are simply not appreciative of what you are doing in their interest.

Photo by: floridapfe

Business opportunity voices down to two factors: Time and Money.
It only means that you can invest your time and/or money to make even more money for yourself.  For sure, nobody can ever buy more time for themselves.

If I were to spend my time in a business opportunity, it is as good as asking myself to be “employed” to that business opportunity.  What this means is that I have found a job for myself… But I will only get paid if and only if I make a profit for myself.  It doesn’t matter if we are talking about which type of business model here actually… It matters most when we tell ourselves if we have the invisible money to survive through the tough times before we start to make money!

And if anyone who is sincere in giving a business opportunity, I always think that it is good to tell that person what industry it is and what business model it is adopting before he or she comes down for your business opportunity.  It is so irritating if we found out that this is not what we are interested in… And I think this is what the investors are looking out for to spend their money on to make even more money…