Remember the marketing textbook from University? There were all these marketing principles, rules, and graphs, marketing funnel must be one of them.  I don’t think we need further explanation on the tradtional marketing funnel with Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, and Loyalty.

This graph by Forrester explains the new marketing landscape, most of us rely hugely on recommendations before purchase. With the help of social media and other communication platform, recommendations, peer reviews, and user generated content really play a really big role during consumers’ purchase decision. As the graph suggested, the landscape these days is more complicated than ever!

Google has developed tons of services and some of them are very valuable but not as widely used, Google Moderator is one of them. It is a very straight forward, easy-to-use service that allows a group of people to brainstorm, share ideas, questions, and opinions.

Google Moderator is more powerful than Google form in many cases because it allows participants to vote on other people’s ideas/ questions. Barack Obama’s transition team created a public Google Moderator series called “Open for Questions” which allows people to ask questions, give suggestions, as well as voting for the best ones.

How I’ve used Google Moderator:

Ask people to submit questions during a presentation

Send out a brainstorming session to colleagues

Venue ideas and voting for events

Live questions and responses during a webinar

Below is the official description of Google Moderator:

• Let your audience decide. Get to know your audience by letting them decide which questions, suggestions or ideas interest them most.

• Everyone’s voice is heard. The voting box at the top of page focuses attention on submissions recently added and on the rise, making it simple and easy to participate.

• Be creative. Include people in your preparation for lectures, interviews and hard decisions or work together to organize feature requests and brainstorm new ideas.

Google Moderator Homepage

Me and the the 3 special guests at Tweetup

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Thanks everyone for attending the Tweetup from last Tuesday (March 2nd), also hope our 3 guests Brian Giesen, Tom Smith and Jenny Armshaw-Heak had fun. More than 20 people joined the tweetup and I’m glad most of us had a chance to meet each others. Would also like to thank the venue sponsor RED SoHo and @GeoffTwitchen for arranging the “Tweetup Corner” for us!

I will be hosting my 2nd tweetup of 2010 on March 2nd. This tweetup is going to be a little different from the previous ones, we will have 2 special guests (actually 3) this time.

Brian Giesen

@bdgiesen is my colleague in Ogilvy who’s based in Sydney Australia,  he’s is an award-winning, founding member of Ogilvy’s 360 Degree Digital Influence group and passionate word of mouth marketing practitioner. Brian is extremely experienced in the field, he will be in Hong Kong for one night and we will be lucky enough to have him in the tweetup. (Here’s his bio)

Tom Smith

Tom Smith (@tomtrendstream) is the founder of a technology and social media trend research company Trendstream. He’s also the project leader of the Global Web Index and created Wave @ Universal McCann. He will be in Hong Kong for the FutureWebAsia Event for the Asia launch of Global Web Index. Tom will also come along with another speaker from the event, Jenny Armshaw-Heak (@globalwebasia), who’s the Business Development Director of Lightspeed Research.

Join Us!

Venue Sponsor: RED SoHo (2/f, Kinwick Centre, 32 Hollywood Road, SoHo Central)

Date: Tuesday, March 2nd 2010

Time: 8pm

Admission: Free  (drinks not included)

Register Here: http://twtvite.com/ixvugx

Space is limited, registration is required, please secure your place now!

The annual Public Relations report card by Media magazine was out yesterday. Ogilvy Public Relations ranked 9 (10 highest) with an “Outstanding”. The team that I’m in, 360 Digital Influence, which is under Ogilvy Public Relations practice is also highlighted on the report.

It looked outside the PR world to hire former journalist and blogger Thomas Crampton to head up social media as director of 360 digital influence.

The digital shift may bring PR into competition, both for clients and tal- ent, with agencies from other areas. The digital sphere promises to be- come very crowded, as Thomas Crampton,OgilvyPR’sdirectorof360 digital influence notes: “Competition in most markets still comes from small start-up agencies run by three guys who wear black turtlenecks and know how to create Facebook fan pages.”

Download the Full Report here.

These are some of the great apps that have “changed my life”, hope you find it useful. Apologize to PC users, you should perhaps consider getting a mac to make your life easier.

Evernote

I use Evernote mainly for Blogging, collecting ideas, and work connections.

Blogger: Since my work is very relevant to my passion, it often gives me ideas on what I should write on this blog. With Evernote, I can quickly use my iPhone to save all the key points under my “Blogging” notebook while I’m in a meeting or trying to meet a deadline. Then I can go through them when I blog.

Collecting ideas: Ideas come at me all the time, I mean from business ideas to a drunk prank ideas, I save them all in the “Idea” notebook. I use Notes (on iPhone) and TextEdit (on Mac) before, but Evernote helps me organize them.

Work connections: This is a very important one. I get business cards all the time, I use Evernote to take picture of each one I receive, and place them in “People” folder. Evernote can recognize text on an image file, so I can just search for a contact easily.

Official Site

Cooliris

For people who work on presentations, using Cooliris Firefox plugin is the most effective way to look for images for your slides. Instead of going page by page on Google and Flickr, type the keyword in Cooliris and just drag it until you see image that fits you.

Official Site

Yousendit

There’s always a file size limit in email, gmail is 10mb, work mail is even worse. All I have to do is to drag this large sized file to the Yousendit icon on my dock. Yousendit keeps the file in their server, then provide you a link which allows recipients to download it in 7 days.

Official Site

Scribefire

This is probably @thomascrampton‘s favourite. It is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to blog within the browser without having to login to your blogging dashboard. It’s a great time-saver for bloggers.

Official Site

Apple Preview

I know it is not even an “app”, but some people might not know how powerful Apple Preview is. I use it to resize my images for my blog posts, adjusting colours quickly and rotate images, also a very light weight PDF reader.

Handbrake

It is a free app that convert almost any windows format videos into .mov, mp4, and other useful online video formats. Very straight forward, easy-to-use.

Official Site

Google Offline Mail

If you are a gmail, google app user, this App downloads all your emails and attachments to your computer and make them available for you when you’re not connected to the Internet. Best for frequent travellers, they can spend the whole way replying to all unread emails.

Official Site

Currency Converter Widget

I don’t know why so many people use the XE online currency converter, it’s a good online tool, the Currency Convertor Widget is so much easier. I just need to type in the amount of the currency, and it converts them into all currencies in no time.

Official Site

Merlin

It is a project management software, very easy to use and it creates timelines with great graphics.

Official Site

Coda

I’m not a scripter or anything close to it, but Coda is a very light-weight coding software. Worth giving it a try if you haven’t yet.

Official Site

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Below are the tweeps who attended:

More people from outside twitter joined as well, please remind me if I didn’t get your Twitter handle.
Thank you all for joining, we had a great night and let’s meet again in 2010 for the “First Tweetup in 2010″?

Also if anyone has more pictures from that night that you would like to share on here, please let me know.

As many of you might already know that I’m currently in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia till this Saturday night. We are also lucky enough to have Brian Giesen, Regional Director of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence APAC, coming up to KL at the same time.
We would love to meet up with all the social media lovers in KL, and from what I was told by colleagues in KL office, word “Lepak” is a slang in Malay means to Hang Out, so I decided to use it as the name of the meetup .

We will be having this meet up event in La Bodega in Bangsar Mall at 7pm local time tomorrow (Thursday 10th Dec). Please feel free to invite others who might be interested in meeting Brian and I.

Most of the locals should know where it is. But here’s the map just in case you are a foreigner like Brian and myself.

Please sign up here:

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Everyone!

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The last tweetup in 2009. Let’s all drink, meet the people behind the avatars, and celebrate! @dda and I have also been talking about having “dirty noodles” (Hong Kong local noodles) in Wanchai before the tweetup, feel free to contact me for more info.

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9:00pm. Monday 7th December 2009

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Canny Man in Wanchai. (Venue Confirmed)

W:

1. 2009 has been a great year
2. 2010 will be better
3. I will be traveling after Monday
4. @Tortue will be visiting Hong Kong for the first time after he abandoned us for Taiwan
5. @AndreMartin will leave Hong Kong for a year
6. Our Hong Kong Twitmaster @JayOatway will leave Hong Kong for Christmas Celebrations soon
7. Why Not?

RSVP Now!

Our full page colour ad is on page 30 of Wall Street Journal Asia today! My teammates and I are very excited about it. We are hosting the third webinar in our “Executive Guide to Social Media” series.
We will have John Bell, Global Managing Director for Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and Jamie Moeller to talk about Social Media for Crisis Management.

Registration is now open to the public! Please join us next Wednesday (December 2) at 11am Hong Kong time.

Overview of this Webinar:
The best time to respond to a crisis is before it happens. That is a communications fundamental. Now in age of Twitter, mobile phones, blogs and Facebook, the speed and style of our response has changed dramatically.

Brands that are used to tightly controlled messages are thrust into the back and forth of social media. Detractors are savvy with the ways of YouTube and inciting crowds. Customers and stakeholders often demand that their brands be more transparent and engaging than ever before.

This webinar will include concrete examples and action plans answering numerous questions, including:

• How can you prepare for a crisis today?
• How do you rally your Marketing and Communications team to use all of the resources of the social Web and effectively manage a crisis?
• How should you assemble a plan?
• What NOT to do in a crisis

We will also answer questions on Twitter during the webinar, so get your crisis questions ready!
Register now!