the(new)mediaslut

DK’s blue light hourly special today pushed the number of unique hits to his blog to above a 1000 when his daily average is about 400+.

Unfortunately, his emotions got the better of him as of his 3pm post when he complained about not being nominated for the Ping.sg Awards.

Same same like APLINK when his emotions got the better of him too.

However, DK did bring up interesting revelations about the sponsors for the first Ping.sg blog awards. It also brought up the argument that commercial blogs, be it an advertiser of Ping.sg or not, should not have a place in the aggregation site for the benefit of the members.

From a potential advertiser’s point of view, it doesn’t really make sense for them.
Let’s role play to see why.

Advertiser: I heard of Ping.sg and it has lots of members. Can you recommend if I should advertise there?

T(N)MS: Sure. You want to a banner ad for three months?

Advertiser: Yes, and you know we have a corporate blog to gel with the banner ad campaign. Can we be ponged?

T(N)MS: While it is encouraging to see a corporate like you engaging new media and making use of it,  you can put a banner ad on Ping.sg but your blog can’t be in the site. You see, your corporate blog is a commercial blog and it goes against the site’s T&Cs.

Do you think the advertiser would want to advertise in Ping.sg?

The New Socialite highlighted a solution for Ping.sg and the founder of Ping.sg is also looking at the same direction for a solution.

But like APLINK pointed out “so to encourage sponsors to join ping 2.0 commercial service - just ban them first from ping 1.0 - with no regard and expect them to come back happily and pay for the honor of being in the ping community once again ? Interesting strategy”.

(Updated: Advertlets up about 1500 hours)

It has affected the loading of this site. Back to ad-free site.

Notification: Internal Error via kwout

Singapore Mass Rapid Transit (SMRT) Corporation is currently running a campaign to reward commuters for traveling on their trains which ends on April 30, 2008.

The tagline for the campaign is “Ride SMRT, Celebrate Life!”. However, it seems that when flash mob group Mission:Singapore (M:SG) of 18 members threw a party on SMRT train, starting from Marina Bay, they were stopped by a station manager at Admiralty station.

Wrote Daryll Nanayakra for MyPaper,

The enthusiasm of the group soon caught on with the commuters, who seemed to like the idea…

Another commuter, Madam Polly Au, 51, an accounts executive, also liked the idea. She explained: “It’s a very fun idea, as long as the SMRT people don’t come catching them!”

And that was exactly what happened at Admiraty. The group was told to leave the train after a station manager came to investigate, following a tip-off from a commuter.

The station maanger, who only wanted to be known as Nara, 42, said: “Dancing is not allowed because users might users might cause obstruction to the other commuters.”

SMRT, you are such a party pooper!

Is election coming soon?

Maybe not in the next 3-4 years.

But it seems while Singapore Land Transport Authority is pissing off male drivers by erecting more Electronic Road Pricing towers on the roads, the same authority is wooing the female drivers by introducing Road Studs.

Not just Road Studs, Intelligent Road Studs!

“Why are you launching such a stupid product?”

Fortunately (or unfortunately), the question posed by a chinese newspaper editor was only for the ears of media who sat through the whole farce of a press con (complete with launch gambit involving kids from an orphanage) and gathered together right after to bitch about it.

The product in question is a Malaysian-branded smartbook (a kind of net top that Intel is promoting) and also heard was, “Yea lar…why are they doing it for?”

Similar in specs to the popular ASUS eeePC, this particular smartbook is instead narrowing their potential market to students and more especially kindergarten kids. The result is a toy-like 7-inch or 9-inch notebook complete with kid-safe features like rounded corners and not much else.

Not even a single parental control or some sort of guidance software.

Other features include Wi-Fi, 512MB, 40GB HDD or 2GB NAND Flash memory aaaaaand… a Linux OS.

There is option to upgrade to a very trimmed-down Windows XP Starter Edition for RM99 and when asked if the specs could support a full-blown Windows XP OS, the rep claims that it can.

If it really IS able to support at least Windows XP Home Edition, I would consider getting one. But at same time I don’t want people to mistake that I’m using my niece’s or nephew’s toy!

Such a shame.

The buzz nowadays for marketing is 360, as in X-Box 360 degree marketing. This encompasses advertising, activation, public relations, media buyings, customer relationship management, etc under one roof. Thus, clients can just go to one shop and get the whole enchilada if needed yet only deal with one account director and one billing.

It is also one big money grab.

360 is basically a way for agencies to get as much as they can from clients, regardless or not if they really need SOME let alone ALL of the services offered. Suppose clients have an internal PR division, but only need advertising help. A 360 proposal is like getting (and paying) for 16 double cheeseburgers when a single Big Mac would do.

And that’s when it gets nasty.

Since chances are clients are unlikely to spend a whole lot of money on 360, some chunks would have to be excised. And each division, eying their internal budgets and targets, would begin clawing, backstabbing, lobbying and pleading to make sure their division is NOT the one that gets amputated.

Of course, 360 is supposed to foster big agency unity and let other sections move forward if our own services is not needed. Bullshit, if money’s involved, the knives are out and its just a question WHEN you get stabbed in the back, smiley face and all.

Screw advertising, they’re a bunch of award hungry parasites that bring no value to the client’s sales. Dump PR since you can’t really measure how effective the campaign is. Take on the ground activation since our performance is determined by actual on site sales (Never mind this division is so damn expensive and watch out for their internal profit margins on third party costs!)

Yep, 360 marketing is a strength of big agencies against puney ones, which is like saying “We can do everything under one roof, one can you do?” But big agencies also have big overheads. And aren’t we going into a global recession? Guess what get cut out of a client budget first?

Finally something for Yahoo! to cheer amids the news of possible lay-offs of US based Yahoo-ers.

Marketing Magazine’s Adaline Lau wrote about that trend of ad expenditure in Hong Kong which sees ad spend in traditional media going down while online interactive ad spend going north.

Wrote Adaline Lau,

Latest figures from Admango show that while traditional TV, newspaper and magazine remain the key media, the data shows that interactive has increasingly become a popular channel for marketers to promote their messages.

Within the interactive ad spend category, Yahoo! Hong Kong dominated at 52.9%, followed by Atnext.com at 13.8% and MSN messenger with a mere 5.1% share.

Other popular portals that made it into the interactive mix include on.cc, headline, Sina, Singtao and she.

I am not surprised that MSN messenger has quite a low share.

First of all, the brand confusion. Is it MSN messenger or Windows “Live” Messenger? If it confuses the consumer, it confuses the advertisers.

Next the roll-over ads are irritating. If you accidentally move your mouse over the ad at the bottom of messenger, the ads pops out. If it is a video ad, such actions will automatically play the video at an extremely loud volume.

If you want to close the ad, you click on the close link on the ad. Sounds simple, but not really.

Most often, that mouse click opens up the website of the ad instead and doesn’t close the ad accordingly.

It would be interesting to find out in details what advertisers are spending on Yahoo! Hong Kong.

…by SmartBrain during the launch of “AMD Phenom X4 and Spider”…

What will they come up with next? And whatever the outcome, I hope our hardworking SmartBrain got her number…;)

Chris Jaques painted such a scary picture of Internet advertising in a column in Media magazine this blogger advice to him is to stop using the Internet! Really, stop using the Internet!

Chris wrote users don’t trust email advertising any more because “About 250,000 computers a day are transformed into botnets”.

250,000 computers and that’s a huge number.

But if you put the numbers into perspective, its quite a small percentage of computers that turn into botnets.

According to the CIA fact book, the US alone has estimated 164,100,000 computers. If only US computers turn into botnets, then it is a low 0.15% of computers that get infected everyday. Take the global numbers of computer and there could be zeros before the decimal point.

Here’s his other statement. “Technorati reckons that splogs - spam blog mass produced to manipulate search engines - now make up as many as 90 percent of all new blogs out there.”

So on July 31, 2006, Technorati tracked its 50million blog. If 90%, or 45million of them, are splogs, that’s a cool five million blogs which are the real thing and advertisers have the opportunity to reach out to them.

Are there 5 million radio stations in the world? 5millon newspapers? 5 million TV channels?

“And, from an advertiser’s perspective, a recent analysis proved that at least 14 percent of clicks sold by search engines to advertisers last year were fake,” wrote Chris.

Hmm.. What about the remaining 86 percent? Are they real clicks? Of course there will be fake clicks, but it isn’t 50% or more that are fake clicks!

Check out another blogger’s view on Why we shouldn’t “Stop Wasting Your Time on Internet Advertising”?

The whole experience of putting up Blog2u.sg’s advertiser Chain of Beads had this human touch to it that seem lacking from Nuffang and Adverlets.

The human touch may not be as efficient as automation, but it at least gives me, as a blogger, some control to what advertisings I want on this blog.

So Blog2u.sg contacted me about the banner ad placement for Chain of Beads on Oct 26 but I only replied the email yesterday.

Bloggers have the right to reject the ad, but Blog2u.sg has highlighted they won’t penalise you for it with regards to consideration for future ads.

Though the maximum 10 slots were fully taken, Cherry from Blogs2u.sg replied saying that Chain of Beads was interested to look at more blogs to advertise on.

An hour later, Cherry replied to highlight this blog was approved together with the code and the ad was up on this blog within minutes.

After which I replied with bank account number and the SGD3 was credited immediately.

The transaction was done over email but hey, isn’t email still communication? I hope Cherry isn’t a robot mass mailer software.

Here is a suggestions for Blog2u.sg.

Send out a fresh email with a new headline when you have an advertiser for the bloggers. Most emails now are stacked base on conversation, so when you hit the reply button, it justs stacks onto the original email. This could be a possible reason why I might missed out on the email though I accessed the account over the weekend.

I noticed a spelling error in the ad though and I was wondered if this was done on purpose.

There is no plural in jewellry.

However, when you google “beaded jewelries”, Chain of Beads hits as a result on position 4 on page 1 and position 5 on page 1 on Google.

If you put “beaded jewelery” or “beaded jewellery” or “jewellery making”, the Chain of Beads site doesn’t appear on the first 100 results of google.com.

For Google.com.sg though, Chain of Beads came out on position 3 on page 1 for “jewellery making” and position 5 on page 2 for “beaded jewellery”.

I emailed some questions to Izel Ang, the owner of Chain of Beads, but have yet to get a answer to put into this post.

I hope to hear from her soon.

A Reader’s Toolbox

Usually when one is done with courses like RH302 and VCP-101V, one is advised to move on towards 156-315 and 70-121 since these form the basis of 642-176 and 642-901.

Google Pagerank went “bonkers” recently by demoting or promoting certain blogs and some bloggers were making a big fuss out of it for fear it might affect their blog ad $$$.

It is true some online advertisers consider Pagerank as a criteria for advertising but a majority of them still see the number of eyeballs as a key to their selection of blogs to advertise in.

A high Google Pagerank helps bloggers get those “accidental” visitors who have googled certain keywords to hit your site.

You also want those regular readers and you want them to return to your blog.

So let’s get back to the basic of blogging and here are some ideas on how to get to it.

For a real estate agent it is about “location, location, location!” and for blogs, like any other medium, it is about “content, content, content!”.

Unless some alien life form is reading this entry, your human readers are creature of habit.

Try to have a regular entry every week. Yes, this blogger admits that the blog post here are rather random hence this regular BMT post on Mondays.

Its like watching TV. If you know Heros will be on Starworld on Wednesdays at 10pm, you will be seating in front of your TV on Wednesday at 10pm or be home early to catch an episode. (You can see the whole session on DVD, but this is an example, ok?)

In your regular post, write about the main focus of your blog.

If it is about posting about the media scene (both online and print), like what this blog is trying it damn hardest to do, then take advantage of it.

If your blog about life in general, summarise what you did the past week or what you are looking for during the coming week.

If it is about food, again, write a food post which can be a summary of what you found or what you expect to find in your next planned eatery venue.

By doing so, you create an expectation in the readers as they will be looking out for your blog the whole week to see if you have ate that eatery and the comments you have made about it.

Of course, the blog post that cried wolf will lose readers’ trust and their visits so if you didn’t visit the place as expected, be truthful about it.

If you find you have an entry that suits your regular column but you have to write it down immediately, use the Post Timestamp option in Wordpress, or other similar function in the rest, to post that entry the following week. By doing so, you already created something for that day and if you find yourself having a blogger’s blog, you needn’t worry much.

When creating that content, try to be a little more descriptive of the things you are going to post.

If it is about a dish, describe the taste, the texture, the presentation and even the service level of the place. I noticed that most food bloggers leave out the most important detail in their post which is how to get to the place.

Yes the address can be cut and paste, but it would help the reader if you could highlight the nearest MRT station or the bus you can take.

A photo or two helps with the post, but remember, if you can be more descriptive, it takes away your blogger’s block and makes it more interesting for the reader.

Online writing is different from writing for print which most of us have been taught in schools.

It is much more unpleasant to the eye to read off a screen than it is to write off paper.

What you can do to ease the reader’s pain to read a long post is to break up as many paragraphs as you can in your post, especially long ones.

The easiest rule is to make every sentence a paragraph. However, you can be flexible but putting more sentences to a paragraph, but leave it to a maximum of three.

To keep readers interested in your post, think of creative headlines to generate interests, especially if you are using blog aggregation sites like ping.sg.

The easiest route is to sex this and sex that, but are you getting the right readers?

Sex sells, but at what price and I will leave this for the post next week.

(See the hook to get you back next week?)

There is another trick to get your readers hooked to your post and to introduce a strong verb to your first sentence of your first paragraph as early as possible.

Remember the paragraphing trick I highlighted earlier, try this for your first paragraph.

Choose between one long sentence or one long sentence followed by a short one or have three short sentences for different entries. This helps to vary the pace of your posts and make it more lively.

Though I try not to add sub-headlines as it breaks the flow of reading, you can add one or two if you find problems trying to create that flow. But use it sparingly.

Though many of this blogger’s friend have complained about the Google Pagerank going up and down, this blog remained at a good solid five.

So far the only thing I have done is to install the All-in-One-SEO pack which can be found at Wordpress.org. What it does is that it helps to automatically generate metatags for each post which search engines can hook up easily.

At the end of it all, what you want is to bring readers to your blog so you have the eyeballs to attract advertisers. If you are not a SEO expert, generate content to generate interest. Some of the best blog sites out there have the lowest pagerank but  make the most money because they the readers advertisers want to target.

Have a happy blogging week ahead. If you have any questions or suggestion, please drop a comment.

In an interview with paidcontent.org, Henry Copeland, CEO, Founder of BlogAds shared his discussions he had with advertisers about putting ads on blogs.

The advertisers highlighted they accepted blogs as another media form but it is their readers/commentors that they don’t trust.

From paidcontent.org:

The appeal of blogs to marketers is their singular brand identity, making it possible to accurately target their ads. Copeland: “Advertisers say, ‘I know I can trust Blog X, but I also know that Blog X has 100,000 readers - and God knows what those 100,000 readers are going to say.’

This is not surprising though.

I spoke with some PR and advertising folks myself and they too often highlight that they are worried about their products being targeted at the wrong audience, or their readers will have some comments that will make their product or service look bad.

In the article, Copeland called for bloggers to control their comments, or separate their comments from the advertising.

I edit all comments to this blog because of spam and sometimes you get words that you wouldn’t want your kids to read.

However, I feel that the comments, whether it is good or bad comment about the product or service, is till important for the company or vendor.

It may sting, but if you react and respond, you create a positive image of your brand on how you deal with criticism.

These criticisms themselves can help you improve on the product or service.

Yes. Local radio station Gold FM90.5 wants us all to only listen to the good things and silence out the bad things, but that doesn’t work in reality.

I was going through Mocca.com looking for classifieds with video.

The whole idea was to highlight the top videos in this post.

However, I haven’t found any yet.

At best, some of them have photos or are accompanied by text only.

Is the TV ads that you see just a promotional piece to show that Mocca has such a service? Or are the targeted audience lack the tech savvyness or the creativeness to put up a video to promote their wares?

Have you found a video ad in Mocca? Please share them with me by putting a comment.

Bak2u entered the blog advertising space yesterday with the announcement of its Blog2u.sg service.

Is the market big enough for another player to compete with Nuffnang and Advertlets?

The folks at Bak2u definately think it is.

To attract bloggers into their network, Blog2u.sg is differentiating itself by offering an instant payment to bloggers who post their clients’ ad without the need to wait for impressions or click-through.

Blog2u.sg is also targeting the lower end of the long tail like freelancers, agents and even bloggers who sell wares on their sites as advertisers rather than the big consumer brands.

Interestingly, Blog2u.sg is looking Google Pagerank as one of the criteria for selection. This ensures that the blog is highly “googlable” and search terms end up on page 1 rather than on page 3 or beyond.

However, how does just putting a banner, a short description of the product or service and a weblink or email on a blog “deliver online word of mouth of products and services” as stated at the Blog2u.sg website?

Don’t the blogger have to try out their service or products before they can even blog about it?

I have registered for the service and this blog has a Google Pagerank of 5. But I wonder how many clients of Blog2u.sg would like to be pimped on this blog?

Disclaimer: This is pimped request from Josh Lim of Advertlets.com to post about the future of online advertising. Need some pimping of a new product or web2.0 solution? email themediaslut(at)gmail.com.

Before blogs, you had to know HTML to create a website. You had to remember to link the home page to page 3 and vice versa.

With blogs, all you had to do was focus on creating on the content. I once registered a domain, installed a blog engine like wordpress, downloaded a theme for the blog off the web and started entering the content in less than 15 minutes.

Basic HTML was needed though, but the hardest part was creating content for the blog, not the HTML.

And if you blog has a bit of white space to spare and decide to use it to put up advertising banners, you don’t have to go to the advertisers to pitch for a deal. Leave it to Web2.0 services like Google Adsense.

If you want more local ads from the region, a blogger can go to web2.0 ad agents like Advertlets and others

All the blogger needs to worry now is creating content to get more readers to the blog.

So where is the bloggers’ online advertising advantage? What is this power of one and links?

The first few days of a new blog may start with zero readers, even though the blogger put in much thought to the design of the blog, the contents, the position of the ad, etc. So where is the blogger going to get that first reader?

It is most likely that the blogger will copy the hyperlink of the blog or post and paste it in the conversation box with a friend of the Instant Messaging service of the blogger’s choice.

Once the friend receives the link and click on it, the blogger gets his first reader. If the blog impresses the reader, the reader will subscribe to the RSS feed or cut and paste the link to give to another friend. Say the other friend also likes the blog, decides to Digg the post or add it to a social bookmarking site which is open to all to see.

From this chain, one reader decides to submit it to tomorrow.sg and it gets accepted. All of a sudden, your blog or a particular post is read by hundreds if not thousands.

The one reader becomes a multiplier effect and this the power of one reader and links.

If you compare it to the traditional print medium, would getting your first reader or subscriber be as easy?

To get a print publication out in the newstand, you would have to look for a distributor and negotiate the cost of distribution. A good distributor with a good network would cost you more.

When it gets to the newstand, how it sells depends on how much the newstand owner prominently position the print magazine or convince someone to buy it. What influences the newstand owner to do this is how much of a commission he gets from the magazine or distributor. Again, this adds to the cost.

Back to the blogs.

At the end of the day, advertisers want to see a return of investment in their advertising dollars. The whole idea of an ad is to generate brand awareness and more sales revenue.

But in today’s new Internet age, there is also one element of ROI to consider and its this concept of word of mouth marketing.

As a product reviewer who once tested 10 digital cameras for a shoot out feature, anybody who wanted to buy anything from Sim Lim Square or Funan Center would ask me to recommend it to them or seek my advise on a certain brand or product.

Blogs in a way have taken concept of that word of mouth marketing. If you want to buy a particular brand of digital camera, you would ask your friend who has one. The friend would then say, if you want to see the quality of my photos, see my blog. That’s word of mouth marketing for you.

Or if a blogger visited a restaurant or a food center and blogged about the experience both bad and good with photos to add, visitor to that blog might take his opinion to try that place.

Hence, besides just putting an ad on a blog, I personally believed that advertisers should let the bloggers also be part of the experience for a product or food place.

One of Advertlets’ advertisers is The Manhattan Fish Market. Sponsored posts were offered to bloggers who have registered with Adverlets and were in range band based on the number of unique visitors to the blogs.

That’s advertising. To keep the word of mouth marketing going, maybe Advertlets can suggest this to the The Manhattan Fish Market.

Let’s say The Manhattan Fish Market has a new menu it wants to share. Instead of just putting banner ads and looking for bloggers to put up sponsored post, Advertlets and The Manhattan Fish Market should run a blog competition among Advertlets’ members to reward those who featured the new menu in the most attractive and unique way, maybe like a full refund of the receipt spend for the meal the blogger ordered.

Though the temptation to only select the blog that writes only the good things is there, The Manhattan Fish Market should look at rewarding the blog post that could help improve the menu or even the service even if means selecting the most critical of entries.

The key here is to engage the bloggers not just as another medium, but as a customer who wants to share his experience with others.

Advertlets can be found at www.advertlets.com.

Found this in a Czech newspaper featuring some new Renault over there..

Sure would make marketing a little more fun…

Nice butcher’s knife you have there! Can we be friends?

themediaslut is reading a few books on advertising lately and Bob Garfield’s "And now a few words from me " is themediaslut’s current book of the week. 

In one of his chapter, he described the used of sex as a common place in the advertising industry but highlighted that advertising agencies are prone to rubbing it up the wrong way.

A Singapore ad that uses sex as a concept caught Garfield’s eye and was noted in the chapter " Exercise regularly and try cutting back on the sex".

Read the lift-out of the text and make a guess what the advertisement was trying to sell.

From And now a few words from me :  

This brings me to one more sex-centric spot from the Xtreme reel. It’s from Singapore, and at length it follows the progress of a supremely unattractive man wending his way through the exotic dangers of a brothel, where a scary bevy of whores promise him something "hot and spicy". He gets it, too. He gets a hot and spicy sandwich. Yes, its a brothel vignette to sell a fast food meal.

And the advertiser?

No, it is not Carl’s Jr. They have not entered Singapore yet. Geylang’s famous beef noodle stall entering the sandwich market?

Nope.

It was an ad for McDonalds selling its hot and spicy burger long time ago.

themediaslut couldn’t find any youtube videos of the ad but that would spice up this entry.

Bob Garfield was, could be is, a columnist for Advertising Age.