I’ve recently attended a company training about the science of communication, influence, and storytelling, one of the interesting point that’s stuck in my mind is the simple facts about human’s ability in receiving (and remembering) information, so simple and common that many brands have forgotten.

The simple trick to build memorable stories

After this training, I started to pay extra attention to most of the business leaders and marketers, they all share the same skill in communication: they speak to/ into audience’s emotions. Now, this is not rocket science, but it is one of the most powerful ways to make your story become memorable, no matter how rational your audience is.

Simplest way to do it?

It takes so much for brands to convince their targets about their product features and benefits in this low-trust world, building a story that can win audience’s emotion is not easy, here’s the little trick for companies to achieve it – have a true mission.
Brands can not communicate with a top-down approach anymore, instead, they need to “recruit” people (consumers) who have the same belief, the belief or mission that a brand truly believes in. I really like a quote that I heard from a recent client meeting, “we (the brand) don’t sell to our target anymore, we just need to win handshakes”, this quote truly captures the essence of speaking to targets’ emotions.

Below is the latest video I’ve seen that does very well in speaking to people’s emotion. Enjoy and feel free to share any thoughts on this.

Dying to do Letterman — In Theaters Soon with YOUR Help from Joke and Biagio on Vimeo.

GIF and animated GIF format has been around forever, it’s one of the earliest formats of animation being spred online. GIF got less and less popular because of the rise of video sharing, when Internet technology got faster and videos from video hosting services can be streamed smoothly.

For some reasons, GIF is back! People started to create more GIF animations that are shared on visual focused blog platforms like Tumblr. Most of these animated GIF are humorous therefore people are likely to re-share.

Now that we have Google+, a social platform that allows animated GIFs, if this platform becomes mainstream, animated GIF could be a very powerful marketing format. Below is a set of good animated GIFs that I like, showing the process of making beer, although it doesn’t make a huge difference from showing still images, it does give a more lively storytelling, and people are more likely to spread content with good storytelling. There are so much space for companies to leverage on animated GIF for creativity.

Before getting into my ridiculous thoughts on how Facebook can be able to compete directly with the big Google in the close future, let’s compare their current ad services.

Google

Google Adwords (and Adsense) is very powerful, ad engine crawls all content on websites, with very complex algorithm, Google can manage to serve extremely relevant ads to the site content, idea is to get viewers interested to similar content since they are already on the site. Most internet users, with or without noticing, click on Google ads more than 12 times a week. Click through rate is quite high, and from my experience through my personal projects, return on investment is good when it’s well planned with all the help from Google’s keywords and measurement tools.

Facebook

Facebook Ads are terrible, often just stays on the right side of your page while you check out your friends’ pictures. Very targeted but ads aren’t as relevant as Google Adwords ones. Measurement tools are not as advanced as Google.

How can Facebook compete with Google?

Looking at the comparison above, there’s no way Facebook can get close to Google on online advertising services, but Facebook has been making many changes, some are quite obvious to the users, some are more “behind the scene” features and mechanisms.

The most recent one is the commenting feature. Similar to Disqus, a global comment system that allows webmasters to integrate commenting feature on their own sites (like the one of this blog), Facebook just announced that they have been revamping this plug-in to improve this feature for 3rd party sites (Read more about this feature here).

Facebook has been focusing so much on pushing Facebook Social Plugins, from a simple Like button to Facebook Connect. I think there’s only one reason behind all these hardcore development. Money!

If Facebook can launch an offering that allows website owners to place Facebook ads on their websites like other Facebook Social Plugins, these online ads would be extremely powerful. Although Google serves relevant content to the website, they have little solid data on users’ demographics/ interest/ friendships/ relationship statuses and more, but Facebook do, and Facebook actually knows the exact paths of how visitors serve the Internet with all their social plugins. If Facebook have the ability to have simple crawling on all web pages that serves Facebook ads, these ads will be way more relevant and targeted than Google Adwords.

What do you think?

Photo Credit: brizzle born and bred @ Flickr

Remember when I was around 15, I started criticizing many marketing campaigns during those times as I thought most of them were very “inside the box”. I had the most crazy ideas and I knew they would be huge if they were executed, yes, IF THEY WERE executed.

Creativity is a lifestyle
I lied when I created the title of this blog post, creativity means everything! Creativity is not just about visual, sound, or anything artists or designers do, being creative is also about how to react on things, how to solve problems, and even how to “be normal” for some people. Being creative is a lifestyle!

Translating your Creativity
Creativity doesn’t mean anything if we don’t know how to creatively “translate” your creativity into useful messages or expressions. In other words, making ideas happen. I have been working in a marketing agency for quite awhile now, I’ve gone through literally hundreds of “creative ideas” everyday because everyone can come up with good ideas, you can, a creative director can, I could when I was 15. The idea of the campaign that I’m currently working on is actually by a random friend of one of my team members, who started saying this idea as a joke. Having crazy creative ideas is easy, but how to adapt this idea and execute it is always a real challenge.

Integration and Task Management
In the complex marketing and media landscape these days, we need to make sure all talent, resources, and platforms are perfectly used. Despite the fact that all different practices in marketing (e.g. PR, advertising, POS) work very differently, each and every member of a marketing team should be equipped with great task management skills instead of relying on one project manager. I highly recommend you to read Scott Belsky‘s book Making Ideas Happen!

Image Credit: Ben Heine/

I really enjoyed watching this video, sometimes it’s difficult to realize something too obvious, something that happens to you everyday.
I have to admit, although I’m truly happy about others’ positive experiences, sometimes it’s just a better story when people struggle.

The experience of the miners in Chile is now turning into a movie, one of the best films of all times (in my opinion) Cast Away is just about a person struggling, the homeless person with the “Golden Voice” Ted Williams recently landed a job because of his “struggles”.

Keeping this human behavior in mind will not only benefit PR related tasks, in fact, if you look into some of the great marketing campaigns (both offline and digital), many of them have included the element “struggle” in the strategy. On top of that, almost all NGOs rely on people’s interests in struggle to get their words out.

Internet doesn’t make people stupid, people, make people stupid. It’s very common to see couples going out for dinner these days with them both on their own phones for the whole meal. This is terrible!

Technology is an amazing tool that helps human being learn shortcuts for many solutions, but these shortcuts can never be applied without experience, and experience comes through dynamic environment or channels, not just from a phone screen. Many people underestimate how much they can learn by just observing on the street.

Being a digital strategist (or any other tech focused career), one of the biggest challenges is to keep reminding myself how much I “can’t” learn from the Internet, and the social abilities that we all meant to have.

Watch this wonderful ad by dtac, and never play Angry Bird at dinner again!

Businesses are supposed to be built around, or even within consumers these days, that’s why research is becoming more and more important when it comes to any kinds of business development, but should companies trust their customers?

Polls, surveys, and focus groups are what most companies use for consumer insights, I don’t doubt the accuracy of the surveys and I know companies and agencies are getting very good at conducting them. The problem is, do consumers know what they really want themselves?

In the world that’s driven by creativity and innovative ideas, it’s tricky to just rely on consumer research. If Apple developed products based around a survey on whether people would want to have a phone with only one button, iPhone would never exist. If Mark Zuckersburg built a platform based around a school research on whether people would want a space where everyone can “connect”, Facebook wouldn’t be created.

Numbers don’t lie, but people do, even when we don’t mean to. People tend to respond in ways to reflect what they want/ hope to become subconsciously, instead of what they really think.

Companies should make sure they know exactly what insights they can expect through research, it’s surprising how multinational brands trusted well-conducted research blindly and failed without knowing the reason.

Working in an agency, and being in the leading social media team in Asia Pacific, there are a few common questions that I always get. “How to make my video viral” is one of the most popular ones that comes up all the time, clients even tried to pay us for a “formula” to make things viral. I’m about to give you the answer, for free, which might not answer your question.

The word “viral video”

I was in a discussion with Thomas Crampton and John Stauffer few weeks ago about viral videos, they both made a really good point about how people slowly think that “viral video” is a noun or a category of video, videos that get easily spread around the Internet. Truth is it’s the other way around, they are called viral videos because they went viral, not because they were produced viral. “Viral” is the adjective used to describe a video that went popular.

My Formula

I don’t have the formula to create viral effect, no one does. Videos don’t go viral by luck, but no one can promise “viralness” before it happens. It’s like parents wanting their child to be the world’s champion for swimming, they could do whatever to try, spend tons of money to get the best trainer in the world, but the trainer can not say that he’s training a “World’s Champion Child” until he actually becomes the world champion.

Although I don’t have a formula…

Below are some of the important elements I found in previous videos that went viral for your reference:

Unexpected (but at the same time viewers can relate to their daily lives): Popcorn with Cellphones

Extremely Cute: Bob Marley Baby

Extremely Funny: The Sneezing Baby Panda

Doing certain things that viewers can’t/ wouldn’t do: Will it Blend

Stealing fame: Re: @aplusk | Old Spice

Cool or sexy or Environmental – helping viewers to reflect the personalities they want to become: Agent Provocateur

The favorite girlfriend

A man can have multiple girlfriends, but there’s always a favorite one or the wife who they want to (or have to) pay most attention to. This man would try his best to satisfy this one woman, he would put this woman in the centre and make plans around her. This woman is just like the biggest client in an agency that the team has to make sure they deliver the most out of all the clients.

Timing

Guys with multiple girlfriends (especially the married ones) have to have the best time management skill. Time slots have to be perfectly planned otherwise they won’t get to see any of the girlfriends. Getting too many girlfriends without a proper “project” management strategy will also easily end up with breakups. Similar working in marketing agency, too much client work without a good workflow system might end up getting nothing done. Greatest marketing agencies are not the most creative ones, they are the ones that can make the creative ideas happen.

Dating ideas

When a guy try to make plans with one of his girlfriends, he would make sure the locations don’t overlap with where the other girlfriends usually go, at the same time they would try to recycle the ideas/ lines they use. Just like how agencies try to leverage on existing work/ content while they have to avoid executing similar ideas on different clients.

Memories and Lies

Guys with multiple girlfriends need to have great memory skills too, they need to remember every girlfriend’s personality, favorite color and favorite food without mixing up with other girlfriends, just like marketing agencies having good client servicing and manage to learn all details and project progresses of all clients.

Pitch

There are also moments when the woman meet another guy. Similar happens when agencies try to pitch a client and the client is not convinced, the agency would go, “Is there another agency?”

I wasn’t too impressed by the movie Inception, maybe I set the expectation too high because of all the great buzz online and offline. This movie, however, reminded me about how social networks are structured these days.

Many people said that the Internet is like their second life, they can’t live without it and it’s nothing eventful for them to be on it.

What social networking sites do are actually designing a layer beneath the Internet, to try and group the most Internet users in one place, they do so by planting the idea and make users believe that everything on this layer allows us to do certain things like how we do traditionally, or sometimes, better than offline communications, very similar to the first layer of dream in the movie Inception.

More interesting thing is how more and more “designers” are actually trying to create another layer under the social network layer. These “designers” do not have the ability to create a layer with a scale as big as the first layer (like Facebook), but they still try to group as many users as possible under that layer.

Company like Zynga does a good job in designing this second layer, products like Farmville and Zynga Poker do a really good job with almost around 30 million daily active users.

Now, will there be the 3rd layer under the 2nd one?