Dear Friend, I hope you had very enjoyable festive holidays during Chinese New Year! May you have a prosperous and great year ahead! I am excited to inform you that our first engagement with Tradelink (www.tradelink-ebiz.com) to offer the first course about “Building OBM Business Online” (中國內銷到外銷 ~ 網上創建OBM營銷策略~) on Feb 16, 2012 has a very good response.  To date, there are already 24 people registered. After seeing the overwhelming response in 2011 on Adams popular e-Marketing & Social Media course, we are re-launching the same series again starting on Feb 29, 2012.  If you have friends whom maybe interested to attend, please help us to forward this information to them. We have recently launched an interesting campaign for Kikkoman on Facebook萬字廚神大挑戰, if you are interested, feel free to test your cooking knowledge! It should be fun! The key challenge of our world today is about attracting the “eye-balls” of our customers.  With overthrowing information and messages pushing to their eyes, what is differentiating your products from others is the question we have to answer.  More and more customers are expecting to get customer care through Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and other social media.  So how ready are you to connect with your customers through Social Media?  Instead of telephone and e-Mail, do you have the dedicated customer service personnel to respond to customers’ needs through Social Media?  But the fundamental question is have you opened these Social Media channels for your customers to contact you?  If not, then you are probably losing the competitive edge in this Internet Age! One great example was how Virgin Australia won over so many customers during Qantas’s crisis with their extensive twitter coverage a couple months ago!  Another great example is to look at how KLM Airline to engage their customers using social media making their trips different (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqHWAE8GDEk). There is another very important area to look into, that is how “mobile-ready” is your customer service.  It means can your customers contact you through their mobile devices including iPhone, Android Phones, iPad, Tablet PC’s and more.  When you visit most of the company websites these days, they are still using resolution suitable for PC viewing.  However, researches are telling us, the number of Internet users are going to grow with mobile users and to surpass the number of PC Internet users in 2013 in China, the largest Internet users country in the world!  Imagine, your customers would never find it user friendly if they have to resize the screen for every page they visit on your website using their mobiles phones.  The likelihood is that they will eventually shifted other competitors who are offering their services and customer care with a mobile device friendly website.  The long term impact is HUGE!! Above are just some basic considerations when you plan to improve your Social Media and Mobility engagement with your customers.  There are other concerns when you are really try to launch your customer support services through these media.  Operationally, how to track your support logs in your customer relationship management system is going to be a challenge as there are not many options that are currently enabled with social media integration.  If you had to develop it in-house, there would be a cost to it and would it be justified?  Nonetheless, these are some issues we need to address quickly as the Internet world is not waiting for us! It is great to connect with you again and I look forward to meeting you soon next time!   If you are interested to find out more, please do not hesitate to contact us anytime on +852 2723 9977 & email: admin@adamshk.com. Best regards, Matthew Kwan

Dear Friend,

It was such an exciting and privileged occasion to interact with over 30 Sales & Marketing leaders in different industries at Adams e-Marketing & Social Media Training Course on Aug 4, 2011.  I personally found the contents and case studies are so interesting to generate some very good ideas for our promotion & marketing programs.  With the overwhelming responses, we have decided to re-run the training again on Sep 8, 2011.  If you have friends who maybe interested to attend, please feel free to ask them to register on http://www.adamshk.com/events/course20110908.htm or they may find out a bit more on http://goo.gl/DkfXU .

Today, we are bombarded by promotional e-Mails, overflowing advertisement web banners, unknown Facebook invitations and wall posts… Personal Touch is one of the most important success factors for any e-Marketing and social media campaigns.  In our own experience, by addressing the recipients’ individual names in an e-Mail, the eDM open rate can actually be increased considerably.  However, in order to do this, one needs to diligently collect and update the distribution list on a better eDM platform.  The eDM platform should be good enough to cater multiple languages including Traditional Chinese & Simplified Chinese as well as SMS Text Messaging with programmable follow up actions to create a tailor-made user experience.

In order to win over the e-Marketing & Social Media game, you need to dare to share as a person.  We have seen many e-Campaigns running in the past couple of years, though Think Virally will always be the best way to win, the traditional Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing is the basis for Viral Marketing.  WOM is based on personal relationship and trust, if you cannot build up this personal trust, you will never get very far!

Personal Touch is also about the language you use, in a lot of cases of Social Media Marketing, you really have to use colloquial language to get resonance or echoes from your target audiences.  We often have  arguments and clashes with our clients about using colloquial language versus formal written language, for example, on wall posts of Facebook.  Corporate Communication Managers and PR Managers do not like us as they have very restricted guidelines on the tone of communication.  However, they really have to tune their mindsets and maybe have a new job position open as Social Media Communications Manager to be more socialable!

Responsiveness & interactive conversation is another area of the challenge if you dare to share on Social Media.  The question is do you have dedicated staff to respond to the “happy” problem when your target audiences/customers are really responding to your invitation and comments and how quick can you respond?  A typical answer I give out often is 24 hours at maximum you shall respond to the comments.  Well, you have the choice to do it yourself or to hire some consultants like Adams to do for you.

By the way, we have a new logo created for the Small & Medium Enterprises website (www.sme.gig.hk), there is a new special offer on the free trial of  Photocopier from a well-known brand on the site.  You can get a prize of iPhone 4 if you successfully sign contract as a customer.  Enjoy the chance!

I look forward to connecting with you again soon!

Best regards,

Hope you are enjoying the hot summer despite the unstable weather in Hong Kong in the last 2 weeks!

t has been a great honor for me to have the chance to present at The Entrepreneurs’ Network last week in Hong Kong on the topic of “Think Virally to Expand Your Business!”.  We have an overwhelming crowd of over 50 successful entrepreneurs from different businesses gathered at the event.  It is my belief now that if you want to be winning in this Internet Age, you have to Think Virally!!

Think Virally is not natural to many of us even if we have many years of experience in Sales & Marketing.  However, if we are back to basic, it is only about building a mass network of Word Of Mouth (WOM) marketing.  The question is HOW to build this network.  Facebook is definitely the easiest to access network on the face of the earth with over 500 million users but we are not talking about single way of communication!  So we need to think of ways that you can leverage what existing community you have on it (or any other social network) and try to come up with sales/marketing programs that will attract people to spread the news for you through their own networks of communities.  You really have to think of (marketing) messages that is asking the audience to take action for other people/friends’ sake!  It always has to be Win-Win, nobody is going to take your message to their friends if they are not winning themselves!

We have seen many different successful and famous brands are putting a lot of efforts on social media these days but they are not really thinking virally.  A lot of the campaigns we see today are still at the pre-social media stage of just using social media as merely another advertising channel but nothing else!  In the last 2 years, Adams has collaborated with different clients to build Facebook campaigns to reach favorable results based only on one single idea,Viral Effectiveness.  If it is Viral Effective, it will help you to grow Brand Awareness, Sales and Customer Database at an exponential rate!  For example, we helped a sportswear chain during FIFA World Cup period to create a game for people to tag friends on Facebook to form football team to get prize/gift/discount at their chain stores.  Imagine the Multiplying Effect of forming just a team of 7 people and the 7 people to form another 7 teams…!  I think, by now, you should have got my point if you want to be successful in your sales & marketing campaigns, then you have to Think Virally to Expand Your Business!

Three weeks ago, we launched a training course called “Strategy of e-Marketing & Social Media Marketing” which to be held at the beautiful and modern hotel The Mira Hotel Hong Kong.  The response was overwhelming and the class was full within the first few days of registration and we had to arrange a bigger room to accommodate all the attendees.  Hence, we decided to arrange one more additional class on September 8, 2011 at The Mira Hotel Hong Kong again.  If you or your friends are interested, please feel free to register on http://www.adamshk.com/events/course20110908.htm.

I am not sure how many of you are having problem in managing the post 80’s employees, CAPITAL is collaborating with McDonald’s, Sony Computer…to come up with a wonderful 2-day course to cover how to motivate and manage post 80’s employees on July 29-30.   In the last few days of registration, you may enjoy 5% discount by registering through Adams on http://adamshk.com/events/capital20110729.htm

Finally, I have written another article on “Giving up is a way to gain!” for a professional institution in Hong Kong which you can find it on our slideshare page http://www.slideshare.net/adamshk.  A number of the prioritization and planning skills covered in the article are the essence of what I have learnt throughout my career!   Hope you will enjoy it.

Thank you for your continued support and I look forward to connecting with you soon!

Best regards,

Matthew Kwan