Most of the social media projects I deal with at Ogilvy are for global brands, it’s interesting to learn from local successful cases like this one. It’s a cafe in Mong Kok with a wide range of comic book collections called Ease House Cafe, where they target mainly to young comic lovers.
As a small cafe located on the 25th floor of a building, 21 year-old owner realized it would be hard to spread the message out if he used traditional marketing tactics, so he went digital.

They use Facebook as a channel to grow fan base and increase loyalty by keeping their fans updated on news and special deals, also partnered with a local cafe directory site up4cafe to offer readers coupons.
Recently, they are having this “Blog for free dinner” campaign, where they encourage bloggers to write about their Cafe, they will search on Google every month with keyword “Ease House Cafe” and pick a blog that’s index high enough on the search, sounds like a small scale blogger engagement, a very smart idea to get themselves quality organic search results, but personally I would also go for keywords like “comic books”, “hong kong” too. (in Eng & Chinese).

With limited resources, many local small & medium business owners in Hong Kong are afraid to invest time and money on this new media, but with all the recent success here in Hong Kong, I think business owners should really reconsider and make a move soon!

Ads are all over the Internet. Recently, status updates/ micro-blogging have become popular, some people even use status updates to express themselves in an artistic way.

Status Update advertising basically means to pay certain profile owners and get them to talk about a brand/ product/ service.

After PayPerPost and other networks for blog post advertising, I knew status updates would be the next new thing. Status Plug is one of the ad networks that bring status update ads to work. I personally think that Status Update Ads could be quite powerful if the right “buzz leaders” are chosen, reasons are as followed.

• Buzz leaders effectively target the audience. (e.g. classical Music Lover would not follow Snoop Dogg’s twitter).
• Easy and short = attract more attention. In social media, only small portion of people in a target segment like to read all the articles and posts. Status updates are short and noticeable with a link, which can attract people who are not “True Lovers” of an interest.
• Lower cost for advertisers comparing to other advertising media
• High viral potential
• Online buzz leaders can bring positive image of a brand

What do you think? Would you use it as an advertiser?

When I first learnt about direct marketing, it was all about envelopes and mailboxes. Then email marketing came out. What’s now?

I’m sure many of us are aware of the push and pull concept in marketing these days. Direct marketing doesn’t have to be “direct” anymore. The whole point of DM is to customize the ideas/ messages and send them to the segmented targets directly, with a call-to-action most of the time.

Blogs and Twitter can do almost the same. Interested targets can subscribe to a blog, or follow a company’s tweets, so that companies can “direct” the customized call-to-action to these segments. As I said on my previous post Spam and Junkmail killing Direct Marketing, people start to care less about what they recieve in the mailboxes. Instead of spending money on printing or costly email databases, companies should start migrating and allocate more resources on these newer kind of “indirect” direct marketing tactics.