6 crucial steps to making E-marketing a success

1. Build Engagement
• Getting to know prospects and customers extremely well

2. Create Contagious Content
• to gain the attention of prospects and to help spread your ideas to others who have yet to identify themselves
• focused on your prospect's priorities and perspectives to quickly promote recognistion of value
• Educational content focuses on what buyers need to know
• Expertise content showcases the value your company provides in addition to your product or solution
• Evidence content is the stories of customer successes, media coverage, analyst opinions and, increasingly, word of mouth referrals and social conversational exchanges

3. Evolve Nurturing Programs
• includes a collection of marketing content that is tuned to address the specific problem-to-solution scenarios of each market segment
• buyers choose you over your competitors because they trust you to understand and solve their problems

4. Increase Momentum

5. Empower Sales• step into conversations with qualified sales opportunities in parallel with a buyer's expectations

6. Integrate Social Networks
• social networks help maximize the value of investment while creating inbound demand
• with no participation, you would be forgotten soon

Top 10 E-commerce failures

Since a long time ago, people have been trading for a living. They roamed around the streets to trade for olive oil, pottery, food, and even slaves, almost anything under the sun. Some traders gained more advantage over others because the goods were not given an actual price. Also, people who were able to bargain and argue well took the upper hand. Trading was not fair. Today, people continue to trade, but at an upgraded level. They do not need to do it face-to-face, neither would they face unfairness because all goods are labeled with their prices and all transactions are done via a systematic method. Since everything has improved and seem so great, why did people still fail? In this post, we will take a look at the top 10 dot-com flops and learn about why they failed.

1. Do not grow too fast too soon even if you have a good idea
Online grocer, Webvan made this mistake by raising $375 million in an IPO, expanded from the San Francisco Bay Area to eight U.S. cities, and built a gigantic infrastructure from the ground up, in only 18 months!


2. Unsustainable business model
Online pet-supply store, Pets.com’s popular talking sock puppet mascot failed to give pet owners a compelling reason to buy supplies online. After ordering, customers had to wait for a few days to receive their goods, which they needed immediately. In addition, Pets.com lost money because it had to undercharge shipping cost to attract customers. Eventually, it collapsed.


3. Think twice about your idea before you start - it might turn bad and cause you to lose more than what you earned
Online store and delivery service, Kozmo.com provided good services such that customers could receive the goods they ordered within an hour, rain or shine. Unfortunately, it took Kozmo.com some time before it realized that this idea would cause it to lose a lot of money on delivery, especially when customers only ordered a pack of sweets or a DVD.


4. Consider better ideas that might overtake your good dot.com idea
Flooz.com was an online currency designed to replace credit cards, had boggled the minds of many as to in what way is this alternative better and safer than actual credit cards or gift cards. Eventually, it went bankrupt in August 2001 along with its competitor Beenz.com.

5. Spending outweighed the company's income
Like Pets.com, eToys spent millions on advertising, marketing, and technology and battled a host of competitors.


6. Do not employ more than what you need and use only the resources that you have
Online fashion store, Boo.com’s website relied heavily on JavaScript and Flash in the days of 56k modems, thus users had to wait a long time for it to load. Also, they employed 400 people when they only needed 30.


7. If product or service is no good, no promotion or program will make it work
Microsoft live search launched two programs to entice users to use Live: Cashback and SearchPerks. Both did not have a significant effect on traffic numbers because Live's search results were very poor. Live search has 10% of the search market.


8. Ensure than what you spend on promotion does not exceed what you earn
Disney was never able to make Go.com popular enough to validate the millions spent on promotion.


9. Running out of money
Kibu.com, an online community for teenage girls, ran out of money and closed the site 46 days after the launch party.


10. Internal conflict can cause you to go bust
Personalities and egos clashed during long work hours, one partner was ousted, technology was stolen, and they never got the software to work as it should have. A competitor eventually took over GovWorks in 2000.

Experience the RSS and Podcasting

To access information, we have two ways. The traditional way requires you to go out to look for the information you want, while the new way is to wait for the information to come to you. Wait a minute, did I say wait? No, the Rich Site Summary (RSS) would not require you to wait. In fact, the information that you might be looking for is constantly being updated to make sure that you receive the latest news. RSS is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.


RSS feed icon

So this is how you do it:
1. Set up a Google account at Google.com/reader
2. Go to your favorite sites
3. Copy the url
4. Go back to Google reader and click on add a subscription
5. Paste the url
6. Add
I did it! And now whenever I want news from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and information about Ellen Degeneres’s latest show, all I have to do is to log into my Google Reader and I get everything (maybe more) that I need to know.



A podcast is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and downloaded through web syndication. The RSS feed icon is commonly used to indicate the Web feed for a podcast.

Web 3.0 (Semantic Web) – your new guide and personal assistant

Imagine you wanted to watch a comedy and take some Chinese food after that. You turn on your laptop, open a Web browser, and Googled for theater, movie and restaurant information. You spend some time reading the synopsis of each film and customer reviews for the restaurants. You also want to look for a Chinese restaurant that is close to the theatre. In summary, you visited a dozen of Web sites before you are ready to leave the house.

Web 3.0 will make these tasks faster and easier. Instead of multiple searches, you can type a complex sentence or two in your Web 3.0 browser, and the Web will do the rest. For what you wanted to do, you could type "I want to see a funny movie and then eat at a good Chinese restaurant. What are my options?" The Web 3.0 browser will analyze your response, search the Internet for all possible answers, and then organize the results for you.­

The Web 3.0 browser is also a personal assistant. As you search the Web, the browser LEARNS what you like. The more often you use the Web, the more your browser learns about you and the less specific you'll need to be with your questions. Eventually you might be able to ask your browser open questions like "where should I go for lunch?" Your browser would consult its records of what you like and dislike, take into account your current location and then suggest a list of restaurants.



“In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.”

- John Markoff, The New York Times

Social Media - a path to becoming anti-social

Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content”. In simple terms, social media refers to tools and platforms people use to produce, publish and share online content and to interact with one another. These tools include blogs, podcasts, and videos, etc.

According to Wikianalysis, News Corporation (NWS) owns Myspace and Photobucket, a photo-sharing website. Yahoo! (YHOO) has been attempting to enter the social media segment via Flickr photo-sharing website and 360 social networking sites. Google (GOOG) purchased YouTube. Microsoft (MSFT) announced a minority $240 million investment in Facebook in late October, valuing the company at an estimated $5 to $15 billion overall. AOL announced on March 2008 the $850 million purchase of Bebo. At that time, Bebo was the third largest social networking site behind MySpace and Facebook in terms of page views and unique monthly visitors, both key metrics for online advertising.

Some examples of social media software applications include:

Communication• Blogs: Blogger, LiveJournal, Open Diary, TypePad, WordPress, Vox, ExpressionEngine, Xanga
• Micro-blogging / Presence applications: FMyLife, Jaiku, Plurk, Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, Yammer
• Social networking: Bebo, BigTent, Elgg, Facebook, Geni.com, Hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Skyrock,
• Social network aggregation: NutshellMail, FriendFeed
• Events: Upcoming, Eventful, Meetup.com

Collaboration
• Wikis: Wikipedia, PBworks, Wetpaint
• Social bookmarking (or social tagging): Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google Reader, CiteULike
• Social news: Digg, Mixx, Reddit, NowPublic
• Opinion sites: epinions, Yelp

Multimedia
• Photography and art sharing: deviantArt, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, SmugMug, Zooomr
• Video sharing: YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo, sevenload
• Livecasting: Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Stickam, Skype
• Music and audio sharing: imeem, The Hype Machine, Last.fm, ccMixter, ShareTheMusic

Reviews and opinions
• Product reviews: epinions.com, MouthShut.com
• Business reviews: Customer Lobby, yelp.com
• Community Q&A: Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, Askville, Google Answers

Entertainment
• Media and entertainment platforms: Cisco Eos
• Virtual worlds: Second Life, The Sims Online, Forterra
• Game sharing: Miniclip, Kongregate

Other
• Information aggregators: Netvibes, Twine (website)
• Social media monitoring:[clarification needed] Sysomos Heartbeat
• Social media analytics: Sysomos MAP




One example that really caught my attention was Second Life.





http://static-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/en/Second_Life_Quickstart.pdf

This is the site where a manual guide is provided to TEACH you how to control your avatar. Second Life (SL) is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab that launched on June 23, 2003. A free client program called the Second Life Viewer enables its users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world (also call "the grid"). Second Life is for people aged 18 and over, people aged 13 to 17, do not fret, Teen Second Life works just as well.

After I know the existence of Second Life, Facebook seems perfectly meaningful to me. Really, why are people so dissatisfied with their real life that they have to adopt an avatar to try out a second life? Is it not tiring? Would you not get confused by your own identity? I personally find this absolutely ridiculous. Mum has colleagues who told me that they have an adopted son. At first, I was really happy for them, but when I found out that the son of theirs come from a different world from us, my heart sank. Why? Yes, you get to fly and do a lot of things that you cannot do in real life, but when you wake up (log out I mean), it is the reality that you have to face. Yes, you may have no troubles in that world, but similarly, it is the real life that you have to face at the end of the day. To me, users of Second Life are escapists of problems. If there is an aspect of life that you wish to change (except your gender), gather your courage and do it. If this is what you want, continue, if not, quit. You will never have the same experience if you do it only online. This is the real life, you need to experience it to feel it.

Google earth, Third Voice, and Facebook

Google earth, the new application Mr Choy introduced to us during the second lecture. And so I am checking it out now. It is SO COOL! Mum was standing right behind me while I was searching for a picture of my house and TA DA! I found it! “Which stalker took all these pictures?” she asked. I laughed and explained that, “This is Google earth, Mum, and how long have you been standing here?” “When I saw a picture of the Earth”. This is what she is talking about.

As I searched on and zoomed in, this was what we saw.



And soon, I found my house! (I do not want to post a picture of it up here)
Besides Google Earth, COM125 provides me with MANY interesting (not really) information. Heard of the Third Voice? It is a free browser plug-in, created in 1999 by Eng-Sion Tan and colleagues, which allowed Web surfers to share comments about websites using “sticky notes”, to induce "inline discussions" among Web users. However, Third Voice soon gathered more enemies than friends and was called the “Web graffiti”. Really, who would enjoy seeing their websites being “vandalized” by constructive or unconstructive comments and opinions of strangers? 2 years later, as expected, Third Voice finally surrendered due to financial issues, and went boomzed!

Reason for the fall: Third Voice failed to generate adequate advertising revenue to raise consumers' awareness of its free service, and it also could not generate enough consumer awareness to raise the advertising revenue it needed to stay in business. It all boils down to the lack of communication and money.

If people are not able to accept this form of “freedom of speech”, why is facebook still so hot now? Yes, I do have an account, but I still find it a complete waste of time, simply because the games are too addictive! Facebook does have its plus points; at least it gave me an opportunity to gather all my long-lost friends.



Facebook, like any other application, did face financial crisis and it actually had a net loss of $3.63 million in year 2005. However, Facebook was much luckier than Third Voice such that it received investments from several companies due to its population of more than 350 million active users worldwide. Therefore, to all entrepreneurs, capital is not the most important factor in business, the popularity of your product or service is.

To gain popularity, you need to learn how to improvise all the time. This is how Facebook does it. The Interface evolution.

Profile shown on Thefacebook in 2004.

Facebook profile shown in 2006.

Facebook profile shown in 2007.

Facebook Lite shown in 2009.

Why Am I Blogging?

Honestly, I hate blogging. I mean, why sit here and type when the world is so big and there are so many people out there who can lend you a listening ear? Well, perhaps to most bloggers, blogging might leave a greater impact on the people around them. You know what I mean.

However, we cannot deny that some blogs, like our local bloggers’, Xia Xue’s and Mr Brown’s are really entertaining. Their intentions? I do not know. Perhaps just to be famous or maybe to make money out of advertisement? But sometimes it is great to know that the world is made up of different kinds of people, some like me, who find it ridiculous to type out how I feel and share it with everyone, strangers or not, well, I mean who really cares? Also, how do you (whoever is reading this) know exactly how I feel right now while typing this, and how genuine am I?

Enough of how I feel about blogging, back to reality, I have to catch up with technology and do this for COM125. Who knows at the end of this semester I might be addicted to blogging (highly unlikely)?
It took me quite some time, before writing my first entry, to figure out the “blog language”. Blogging is supposed to be relaxing, but Mr Choy, I know you will be reading this, so well, I wrote drafts! This is so much worse than writing academic essays, but trust me, I will get the hang of it in no time. Sometimes, videos do help a little.



COM 125, introduction to the Internet. You must be kidding, some said to me. Why of all modules did you choose such a silly module, trying to find out what you already know? My question to them, you know how to use it, but do you really know what it is and how it works? That is when the knowledge and the theories come in.
What is Internet? This question may seem silly to people who use it almost every day, like us. However, besides knowing HOW to use it, do we really know WHAT is it and WHEN it is created?

The greatest thing about the Internet: NO ONE OWNS IT

Basically, the Internet is a collection of computers connected to form a global networked environment. There are several ways to connect to the Internet. We can do it via the Internet Service Provider (ISP) by modem, Internet ready cable, Digital subscriber line (DSL), or turning on a computer or notebook, which is on a network at work or school connected to the Internet. The Internet connects everyone everywhere!

Web 1.0 VS web 2.0

Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

Terry Flew’s description of the difference between Web 1.0 and web 2.0:

"move from personal websites to blogs and blog site aggregation, from publishing to participation, from web content as the outcome of large up-front investment to an ongoing and interactive process, and from content management systems to links based on tagging (folksonomy)".

Web 1.0 was the first ten years of the Internet. It consists of websites which contained a one-way flow of information or "read-only" material. Web 2.0’s content, on the other hand, is decentralized, with many users not only being consumers but also contributors and producers of information.

According to Reed Hastings, “Web 1.0 was dial-up, 50K average bandwidth, Web 2.0 is an average 1 megabit of bandwidth and Web 3.0 will be 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time, which will be the full video Web, and that will feel like Web 3.0”.



Web 3.0, in short, is a "semantic web", where the Internet KNOWS you.

Web 4.0, in short, is when the Internet OWNS you. AVATAR!!!

I shall stop for now and start pondering about my next entry.