Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers — and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling.

© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple

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A social media landing page is a hub on the brand.com site that highlights all the social media platforms the brand is on.  Similar to other landing pages, it’s a page tailored for a specific user group that is indexed by search engines. However, unlike landing pages for paid search or display banners, a social media landing page (SMLP) offers very different calls-to-action. They typically include the usual suspects such as engaging the brand, joining the community, and reaching out to other social platforms, which place more emphasize on social conversion instead of traditional sales conversion.

With the key benefits in mind, a well designed SMLP can effectively integrate the brand’s social media assets into the corporate website. Below are some examples of brand’s SMLP with quick assessments-

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© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Assessment, AT&T, BestBuy, Jeep, Landing Page, Microsoft, SMLP, social media hub

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]]> http://viewpointorange.com/2010/03/why-you-need-a-social-media-landing-page-key-benefits-and-examples/feed/ 2 http://viewpointorange.com/2010/02/10-reasons-why-i-recommend-hootsuite-to-businesses/ http://viewpointorange.com/2010/02/10-reasons-why-i-recommend-hootsuite-to-businesses/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:53:14 +0000 Yuki Chow* http://viewpointorange.com/?p=174

To clarify, HootSuite didn’t pay me to write this post. I am recommending their service simply be’cuz I’m a happy user. I’d like thank my fellow co-worker Sarah Gay @sarahgay for introducing the tool to me. This note is written for all the social media community managers who are deep in the trench managing multiple social network profiles for their company.

Without further do, here are the 10 WHYs:

1. Multiple social network profiles, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn All-In-One
I coach and work with many brand social media managers, one of the questions I receive frequently is “how do you jiggle multiple social network profiles at once?” With HootSuite, you no longer need to waste time “sign in, sign out.” One account login will give you access to viewing multiple Twitter feeds, the Facebook news feed, your Fan Page wall and your LinkedIn Network Updates without ever leaving the application. AND, you can update all of them at once if you’d like, just make sure you select the correct profile(s) before you hit the “send” button!

2. Multiple editors, different levels of control
Want to invite a few others to tweet with you but keep the Twitter password to yourself? If you are the ultimate keeper of your brand social media properties, you can simply add “editors” on HootSuite while maintaining control of the profiles. Basically, there are two types of users on HootSuite – level 1 “admin” is the account owner who can add/remove social network profiles and invite other users to participate on selected ones; level 2 “editor” is capable of tweeting & viewing but has no visibility to the social network credentials. I find this feature very useful for organizations that feature occasional guest Twitters or event reporters. After they are done chiming in, “admins“ can easily remove the “editor” access.

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© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: HootSuite, time management, Twitter client

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A Must Watch Forecast by TrendHunter, these top 20 Consumer Trends shall keep all the designer, marketer-types going back for more.

20. Tangible Personalization – Last year, we saw personalization entering the phyical realm with personalized bobbleheads, custom dresses and crafts.  This year, the credit crunch is accelerating this trend with a shift away from luxury products and a desire for personalized gifts.

19. Unservice Forward – Thinking businesses are getting customers to service themselves.  From nightclubs and pubs where you serve your own beer to self-serve hotels, unservice not only saves you money, it lets customers get a sense of independence and creative control.

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© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: behavior adoption, crowdsource, design, tech

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]]> http://viewpointorange.com/2009/12/top-20-consumer-trends-to-watch-in-2010/feed/ 1 http://viewpointorange.com/2009/12/location-location-location-2010-heading-towards-%e2%80%9chyperlocal%e2%80%9d/ http://viewpointorange.com/2009/12/location-location-location-2010-heading-towards-%e2%80%9chyperlocal%e2%80%9d/#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:22:21 +0000 Yuki Chow* http://viewpointorange.com/?p=130

Over the past two years, the most powerful broad trend in media is fragmentation and while mass media remains, it is becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of the overall media landscape. Audiences have become fragmented – and they have more choices in a fragmented media landscape. Today, our informed customers aren’t happy to blindly consume what mainstream media is feeding them. Instead they want: participation, openness, conversation, community, connectedness & all of that in real time!

The upcoming year we will see increasing opportunities because of this world of fragmentation and the proliferation of media channels. Along with the continuous technology advancements, LOCATION is becoming more important than ever.  In 2010, I think there are 3 “hyperlocal” trends that will grow and re-shape the social & mobile business -

1. Local advertising becoming ubiquitous

WHY: Advertisers have been constantly evaluating and experimenting with new models to bring more relevancy and context to the online ad kingdom. After behavior-targeting & social-targeting getting their debut in 2009, location-targeting advertising models start to emerge. There is a future in hyperlocal, and advertising certainly is a big part of it.

WHAT TO EXPECT: New ad-generating application such as Place Local will get more traction as it automates the ad creation, sales and management. Since local restaurants, retail outlets and entertainment venues are the most popular search categories, we will see local business owners jumping on the bandwagon first. As more companies seeking to take advantage of the growth in local ad dollars, more widgets and apps will be available, creating location-based ads will be easier than ever.

2.  Local media replacing big journalism

WHY: Traditional news organizations faced cutbacks or closures in 2009, by contrast, small and local publications are doing pretty well by serving niche markets. Although the market is smaller, the community is much tighter.  Additionally, Twitter just bought Mixer Lab in an effort to pinpoint the locations of people posting messages on its service. Biz Stone believes that when current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge – everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses can be dramatically enhanced.

WHAT TO EXPECT: Those who understand the fragmented media landscape and know how to reach customers cost-effectively will thrive.  Highly entrepreneurial sites that are a blend of community-building and a focus on tech expertise such as Oakland Local will look to fill the gap in news content. On the Twitter side, location-aware tweets will simply be the main source of future breaking news. Remember how Twitter beat CNN on reporting the plane crash over Hudson River? Expect the real-time location-aware updates to substitute big journalism, very often.

3. Local on-the-go searches

WHY: As we know, the majority of smartphone owners in North America are the younger consumers. According to Forrester’s latest Technographic survey, Gen Yers and Gen Xers are 4-5 times more likely to perform local searches than Boomers and Seniors. Those GPS embedded devices have enhanced the mobile search experience tremendously.

WHAT TO EXPECT: In 2010, GPS embedded handsets will become a necessity while mobile-based local search process will continue to evolve.  More web 2.0 sites will translate into the mobile channel; more mobile apps will incorporate maps/destination-search function to extend the usefulness of their core offering. More attention on the location-based social networks and mobile games  Foursquare & Gowalla? You bet,  their service is proving to be more useful by the day. The possibility is endless!

As the location-battle rages on, what you do you keep an eye on?

© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AR, foursquare, gowalla, mobile search, Twitter

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This multinational fan-based crowdsourced music video had just made my day! I can’t begin to imagine how much coordination it takes to synchronize all those webcams all over the world. It’s eye-opening and jaw-dropping guaranteed, take a look yourself.

For more info on the artists and lyrics, please click here.

© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: crowdsource, SOUR, video

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© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: behavior adoption, WOMMA

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© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: behavior adoption, experiment, Twitter

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Many of you probably have heard of FriendFeed, some of you might have registered, but very few of you have spent the time exploring the possibilities FriendFeed has to offer. I wasn’t part of the early adopter crowd either, but recently I learned what a powerful & unique communication platform FriendFeed could be.

• First thing first, what exactly is FriendFeed (FF)?

Founded by a handful of ex-google employees, FF is a cross-platform aggregator that continuously lifestream the various social activities of those individuals you follow and allow others to follow what you’re doing on the socialweb. It currently supports feeds from more than 60 social sites, ranging from the well-known Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, youtube, Google reader, del.icio.us, flickr to the less well-known Disqus and Zoomr. Pretty much any social media service that generates a RSS feed can be imported. Friendfeed is a way for you to connect with other people through their posts and discoveries on various social websites: you can read the stories they have submitted to Reddit, tune in their favorite music on Last.fm and learn about what they recently updated on Facebook status all in one web page. Additionally, it’s also an interactive network itself where users can comment or reshare people’s stories to continue the conversation.

• Why you should consider using FF?

Back in March 2008, Mashable conducted a poll to learn how people are reacting towards this newly established conversational platform. Near 80% of participants stated it was adding noise to the social fishbowl; only 20% argued that it enriched the conversation. Fast forward 11 months, I’m sure this number is no longer true, proven by the steady growth of the user base and increasing volume of FF evangelists. However, the question remains that in a era when you constantly experiencing information overload, why would you bother with another social site? Hmm…it’s a not an easy case to make, but let’s take a closer look at what FriendFeed can do for you.

If you are a casual user or social media wannabe – FF provides you the most comprehensive way to observe how your friends and those social media thought leaders cruise the social web. Instead of simply subscribing to their blog and following them on Twitter, it gives you more opportunities to interact with them dynamically. If nothing else, at least it’s a stepping stone to relationship building with those you find genuinely interesting or trustworthy. Also, you can join FriendFeed “rooms” which are like mini FriendFeed channels for a specific niche or subject matter. Whether it’s social media or movie reviews, FF enables you to stay tuned by getting realtime streams, opinions and even make more like-minded friends while tracking the news.

If you are a twitterholic – FF might very likely become your new addiction once you give these tips a try. Under FF’s new “find your Twitter friends” feature, subcribing to your Twitter pals is only one click away. Not only can you extend the Twitter dialogue on FF, you can also send the comment back to the Twitter community so the thread is continuous and lives on both platforms. However, I agree with xx , FF is not much of a threat to Twitter, it is actually more comparable to Facebook’s news feed due it’s capability to stream activities to one centralized location. FriendFeed will increase in value as its user base (near 1 million now) expands and may potentially become a competitor of Facebook Connect.

If you are a small business owner or a team lead who is looking for a collaborative tool – FF allows you to easily set up your own private room and replace the traditional mailing list approach of knowledge sharing. The private chat room could be used for brainstorm, sharing links, relevant search feeds, or even broadcast service announcements and the like. Here are some more use cases from Chris Brogan. If you are seeking an integrated knowledge sharing wiki without pulling away from all the social sites your team has been comfortable using, then FriendFeed is the FREE one-stop solution you should consider.

Like all things in social media, you have to swim in the fishbowl in order to truly “get” it. Give FriendFeed a try, I believe you will find its service to be more valuable than what you originally think.

© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook Connect, FriendFeed, Twitter

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Last black Friday March 13th 2009 was the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. While many of us take this information-sharing protocol for granted like it has always been there, it’s rather difficult to believe the fact that the social web is merely 20 years young, a year away from its legal drinking age. Of course we need to thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee for his incredible vision on this “play project,” which should have earned him an international holiday. But more importantly, 20 years after the inception of the World Wide Web, companies have just started treating their presence on the Web more seriously than an online brochure. It’s about time, companies! Although the learning curve is steep, the cost of change is high, it is still absolutely necessary to participate in this intangible revolution. Why? Here are two basic facts about the Web that might help you understand why.

• The Web is a lively place where people connect & converse, it is not an extension of media channels

Does communication technology have to roll out incrementally? Many people seem to assume so. If TV is radio + visual stimulus, then Internet should be Television + something else! But what is that “something else?” Cheaper ad spaces ? Infinite channels ? A “buy” button ? Companies and marketers desperately tried to fill in the blank in order to superglue the Web onto the back of the TV’s history. That way this online market can be monetized, advertising can thrive again, everybody can go back to do their business as usual. Such wishful thinking didn’t go far at all, because the Web is a whole different beast that challenges everything we’ve experienced for the past 200 years. It is a global conversational space where everyone on it can have his/her own voice without any hierarchical management and control. So far it has attracted close to 1.6 billion people in the world, and it’s continuing to expand. t is a real place where people can learn from each other, debate, argue, comment; connect to those who share the same interests, form communities; access information, exchange knowledge; look for business vendors, do business with each other, and the list of activities goes on and on.Sounds different from what TV can do us? Ask the early founders of the Internet, it was intended to be a revolution. What does it mean for companies and marketers then? If TV was the perfect medium for advertising, then the Web is the anti-advertising medium by nature. If TV was the glamorous broadcasting tool for big companies, then the Web is the free playground for ordinary you and me who longs to have a voice. So before developing your next marketing communication plan, think again, 1.6 billion of us are no longer the same passive couch-potato audience.

• What’s the solution then?

Listen to the little voices, mock yourself if you dare & most importantly, get closer to your customers! We will reciprocate your effort by linking you, digging you, tweeting you and talking about you…After all, the most successful form of advertising is word-of-mouth, isn’t it?  Luckily, the technology available today can amplify the “word-of-mouth” effect that goes beyond your wildest dream. One thing to keep in mind though, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Many savvy marketers have recognized that technology is not leading to a new way of doing business but rather to an old way of doing business based on social need and human touch. It’s going to be a long and arduous road to go back to the old-fashion way after you have indulged in benefits coming out of mass production and mass media for two centuries. But we are in this revolution with you. We are not expecting you to be “perfect,” we just want you to be honest and try to be “better.” You can start by talking in our language , showing us who you really are (not your brand positioning statement, but the actual employees behind the firewall), sharing your resources and knowledge base. As long as making money is not your only incentive, the Web welcomes your participation!

© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Mass Media, Revolution

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