Tim Ho Thoughts, ideas, and a bit of everything

I am not a Bottled Water fan, I just don’t see the value in paying for a branded bottle of water to cover their marketing costs while I can easily get water for free. However, I’m always interested in seeing how these brands try to position themselves among the others.

Here’s a very funny one by Evian, targeting baby-boomers (and parents).
Technorati Tags: Evian, Advertising, water, marketing, branding

Many people do not own a car in Hong Kong for many reasons. Firstly, Hong Kong has convenient public transportation, there’s no practical need for owning a car just to travel to places in Hong Kong. Secondly, unlike buying a house, or a good watch, the value of a car keeps dropping every mile you travel. And at last, in a very recent research, Hong Kong parking rate tops Asia Pacific and Ranks 4th Worldwide!

We discussed about the importance of Twitter Avatars on here. So, I decided to put togther a list of remarkable avatars from my “Following” list. These avatars are the ones that attract my attention right away, the real “Twitter Eye Magnets”. But of course, content of their tweets are part of what made their avatars good.

Tell me what you think about them, and follow them if you haven’t yet!

After the Dobblr lunch from Island Shangri-La Hotel, I had to quickly rush back home, get casual, and went back to Ogilvy office where they had buses there picking everyone up and took everyone to the venue which was at Gold Coast Hotel Hong Kong. It was a fun evening that gathered almost everyone from the office to relax and have fun while celebrating for David Ogilvy’s birthday on 23th June.

Before the release of the official pictures, I have some unofficial ones taken by Jean-Francois Amadei, Ada Leung, and myself. Also, Ada Leung has more pictures from this event which she uploaded to her Facebook Album.

[View with PicLens]

I’m glad to have a chance to be at the lunch with Marko Ahtisaari (CEO, Dopplr), Stephen J Marcopoto (President, Turner International Asia Pacific), Yew Ming Lau (Senior VP, Turner International Asia Pacific), and of course, Thomas Crampton, Jean-Francois Amadei, Sean Rach, Adam O’Conor from Ogilvy and other great people from Shangri-La and CNN. Took away some interesting insights from the lunch!

“Site” doesn’t have to be an online “website”, it can also be a camp site. The advertisement above is by Coleman outdoor company that has over 100 years history of bringing people together with their outdoor products. This video has high potential for going viral, very clever for positioning themselves as a “social networking site”.

Many new business owners ask me what to do with their new brands, they ask me if they should invest in search engine optimization for their websites so that their new sites can be more “visible” on the online world. Here’s the sad news for them, SEO doesn’t mean anything at all, SEO shouldn’t be a noun, and it shouldn’t show up on people’s name card as a job title. Because “content” is the only thing that matters.

There was a huge discussion 2 weeks ago on China blocking Twitter and other social networks for June 4th Tienanmen Anniversary 2009.

I don’t think we need further analysis and opinion on that issue, but today, Thomas Crampton, Jean-François Amadei and I were lucky enough to meet Chinese journalist and political blogger, Michael Anti (Chinese: 赵静 or 安替), who gave me a new angle on the social media environment in China and how Chinese behavior on Twitter different from most of us.

I would use Twitter to…

1. add local Twitterers, get to know about them, and kidnap the “profitable” ones.
2. track local tweetups, then team up with a few friends and steal laptops.
3. see what Twitter agents people are using. Find out all the iPhone and Blackberry users from my “following” list, track where they are with the real time conversations, and steal the phones.
4. follow the local “hot” twitterers, track where they’re heading for parties during the weekend, go to the parties, drug them, and…

Also, the common ones…

1. Telling you how “rich” I am, but still trying to convince my 100 (or less) followers to buy my get rich quick tutorial ebook at 3 in the morning.
2. Upload a sexy picture of some unknown erotic ladies to my profile, write 3-4 meaningless updates, having 1453 following and 2 followers and try to convince people to “see me naked” on this webcam site where I get $15US for each signup if they are actually stupid enough to do so.

Like any other communities, the bigger it gets, the more concern has to be raised on it’s security. There have already been a few criminal cases where offenders used Twitter as the tool to help them easily locate people. So, tweet wisely, my friend!

Everyone has been talking about the launch of Facebook vanity URLs this Saturday. While blogs are expressing their views on how FB vanity URLs will affect the marketplace through words, I created a simple graphic below showing why Facebook decided to do so. Money doesn’t buy taste…