All Entries in the "Comment" Category

I see a lot of award bashing all around. Some people are calling them retarded and some have listed down logical reasons why they don’t work well or are unfair. I love advertising awards, having won 2 recently. Here is a list of reasons that would convert the most determined of naysayers.

I am surprised by the recent RSS feed bashing. A few blogs and magazines have commented on how in the era of Twitter and Facebook, RSS is no longer relevant.

I am officially tired of all the fluff going around in the name of Social Media marketing. The next time you want to hire some one to run Social Media marketing for your brand, run through the following check list first.

Lots of brands talk about investing in their customers. Very few talk about encouraging their customers to invest in the brands. Even fewer actually do. I don’t have much invested in Google. The moment a better search engine comes along, I will switch. I have a lot invested in Facebook. Many hours have gone into [...]

What is the ROI for this Social Media campaign?
The more things change, the more things stay the same.

This nifty little application adds a FB like button to every Google result and lets you know how many people and how many of your friends have already liked this link. I am sure however that Google is not attaching much importance to the number of ‘Likes’ as of now in choosing which search results to throw up.

The SEO industry exists because Google is inefficient.

Interesting Facebook Statistics from the last month

In all of this excitement, Linkedin has sort of been treated like the poor cousin (Linkedin is valued at a paltry $3 billion), not worthy of so much hype and definitely not worthy of being talked about in the same breath as Facebook.

Having watched the Egyptians and the Tunisians effect a revolution in their countries from the sidelines, Indians are ready. It has taken a 73 year old follower of Mahatma Gandhi, to galvanize a nation for a common cause. India has risen against corruption like never before. Anna Hazare has triggered of what many hope will [...]

Singapore is Facebook country! Almost half of the population is on Facebook and of the 2.4 million eligible voters (Singaporeans above 21) and there are more than 1.7 million people in Singapore above the age of 21 who use Facebook (some of these ‘resident Facebookers’ may not be Singapore citizens but the point still holds)

Once upon a time there used to be three pipes. The first pipe was called marketing. One one end of marketing was the brand and on the other end was the customer. The pipe itself passed through TV channels, magazines, newspapers and other forms of traditional media. The flow was guided by advertising agencies, digital [...]

For a very long time communication agencies and the media owners/ organizations have been key for marketers looking to reach out and connect with customers – both current and potential. In the new world no one need to rely on The Straits Times and on CNN to be able to reach out to the world. [...]

All of this is about to stop very soon. Social Media is dead. Social media is/ will become such an integrated part of everything that we do that the concept of treating ‘social media’ as a separate division / department/ company will make no sense.

The old spice campaign is a rage. Here are some of the funniest responses from the Old Spice man! Good bye message? Message for Perez! Message for Huff Post! The first one! The complete play list! Enjoy!

Creativity has long been looked upon as an activity behind the closet. No wonder many myths have developed around the creative process. Not to be left behind, there are many myth busters out there as well!

Myths have a way of perpetuating themselves. There are quite a few related to training and learning too. Everyone seems to believe in them. So much so that they have become sacrosanct and no one even bothers to question them.

Our attitude towards failure gets formed very early in life. Usually in school…and it never just goes away. All through school, we perhaps take hundreds of tests, exams, assignments etc. And we are in BIG trouble if we fail even ONCE. So we are scared of failure. But real life is different. In real life [...]

You’ve probably heard this left/right brain dichotomy before. It goes something like this: the left hemisphere of the brain is logical, deductive, mathematical, etc., while the right hemisphere is artistic, visual and imaginative.

Let us first see what stops us from making happy discoveries. We have been conditioned to see what we expect. Our preconceptions creep into whatever we come across. We don’t see things as they are but as we expect them to be.

Secondly, we force our preconceptions into whatever we do and want a task to go along predetermined lines. Too obsessed with how things should be, we don’t recognize lucky turns of events and new possibilities.

Ambiguity is not a desirable state in most situations. It typically causes communication problems and has no place in certain circumstances. For instance, an infantry commander would not want to say, “Make sure you cross one of the bridges soon or else.” This could be a prescription for disaster. Rather, the infantry commander would say, [...]

Sometimes, it is not the circumstances, but our own mind which pushes us to come up with a solution quickly. Our mind is rushed perhaps because it is lazy (or efficient!). It wants to stop working as quickly as possible or maybe because it wants to reestablish the feeling of being effective and in control [...]