What is Toluu?
Toluu is a free service for sharing the feeds you read and discovering new ones.		 Get Invite

The eOK .network

A technologist disguised as a PR consultant


Social Media Marketing Examples in SingaporeYesterday

I was inspired today to follow the lead of Peter Kim and publish a list of brands that have been using the social media for marketing. This is a great exercise that has given me a good picture of what’s been happening. Unlike Peter’s, my list isn’t as long and it’s focused on Singapore.

What’s interesting is that in Singapore, there’s such a lot of blogger relations/events going on. Also, the oldest use of social media for marketing is NHB’s Yesterday.sg back in 2005! Well done Walter!

My list definitely isn’t exhaustive, so if you’ve got other examples to share, do send them my way or add them to the comments. I also plan to incorporate this into Ming Yeow’s Wiki soon. Hope you find it useful too.

HBO Asia

HP / Waggener Edstorm

  • Blogger Trip: HP Hong Kong (September 2008)
    Coverage: Estee,
  • Blogger Trip: HP Berlin (June 2008)


Remember to engage the fansOctober 4

This morning I was at Social Media Breakfast 4. It was my first time to SMB and I have to congratulate the organisers on getting a great crowd. I loved the fact that there were so many people from PR agencies and corporations there trying to pickup on new ideas and network with bloggers.

Today’s session focused heavily on blogger relations, for some strange reason because the topic was “Corporate Adoption of Social Media”, and while listening to the discussions something was bugging me about what was being said.

Everyone wanted to find out which were the best bloggers, what bloggers wanted, how to treat them, what to expect from them, and what they wanted to do at events/engagements. It them occurred to me that the reason all that sounded strange was because the fundamentals were missing.

No one said: “I engaged a blogger because he/she bought my product, loved it, and blogged about it”.

This I found quite funny because anyone who’s been doing social media marketing knows that to start you need to listen. And if you’ve listened right, you


New PR KPI: the spreading effectSeptember 27

I’ve been thinking about the way PR folks measure their success. In Singapore and most markets I’ve worked with, the standard KPI is clippings. But I have a problem with that. Yes it is easy to count, but as a boss or client, what is my influence?

You see, the mass media is dead. By dead I don’t mean out of business, but dead in terms of influence. Before the age of the Internet and cable TV, it was easy to communicate your agenda and news to the masses. Just get into the newspaper (most cities/towns in the world have only one) and get on TV or Radio.

But today, with hundreds of cable/satellite/IP TV channels, approximately 200 million blogs, millions of online news sources, and not to mention endless hours of uploaded video, there is no media that reaches the masses. All that’s left is niche media and highly distributed media.

This shift affects the PR industry the greatest and it really calls for a different game plan. I feel that most PR agencies, at least in Singapore and Asia, still live in denial and continue to sell the “we have great friends in the media” pitch to prospective clients.

In our social media age where a single obscure blog post can turn into a whirlwind of influence (remember the HD DVD key issue?), calling the editor-in-chief of the newspaper your best buddy isn’t exa


Think of the ripples in your social media marketingSeptember 25

Last Friday I spoke at an workshop hosted by the certain government organisation. My portion of the workshop was about using the social media as a marketing and communication platform. I approached the topic in an allegorical fashion by looking at the impact of the social media as the ripples in a pond produced by dropping a stone in.

Here are some the points I made regarding approaching the social media.

1. Bloggers aren’t always the best way to go
Most people look at the social media like a shopping spree. They run right into the mass of bloggers and grab randomly a couple of popular ones who they think will blog about their product or service and wine and dine them in hope of a blog post. While this approach can be useful for certain popular consumer products which do end up spreading like wildfire, what impact does this approach really have among the approximately 200 million other blogs worldwide?

2. Start by leveraging your existing stone
Most corporations forget they already have an existing ripple generating platform (read stones). It could be a website, a product, or even what the public are searching for. By grabbing the random bloggers to pitch to is like creating multiple tiny ripples with limited influence. No one knows where the impact came from, and the influence can be easily forgotten. With a little bit of research using Google Insights, for example, you can easi



The high-tech way to travel MalaysiaSeptember 15

I thought I’d write about my bus trip from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur and back over the weekend since there was actually interest expressed on Twitter. What’s most fascinating for the technorati is that this is a high-end luxury coach that provides power sockets for laptops and free WiFi as well as a personal movie/games-on-demand on a swivel 11-inch LCD screen. For readers who are not from Singapore or Malaysia, travelling from Singapore to KL and vise versa is a common occurrence in these parts with the road trip lasting between 4 to 6 hours depending on the traffic and how many speeding laws you break.

This was my first time on an Odyssey coach. It cost S$110 a person (return). This could possibly be the most expensive bus service for this route and competes very closely with Areoline. I have to admit, the money spent on it was worth it because it was definitely my most comfortable trip to KL. I actually prefer this to flying.

OK, no point me rambling on here, let me show you some pictures and explain along the way.

This is what the bus looks like from the ou