Alvin Jimenez

Black Friday? I wish there was such a thing in the Philippines. We’re talking about half-priced laptops and TV’s, free gaming accessories, and REAL freebies. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a country where gadgets have a shelf life (The other day, I saw Samsung series 3 TVs still on display at Ansons). Give or take, this product line more than 3 years old! Sales in our country our characterized by free eco-friendly shopping bags and bumper to bumper traffic near malls.

If you’re planning for a holiday campaign (email or onsite), remember that not everyone like to shop during holidays.

Put yourself in the place of consumer — would you rather shop online or on an out of town trip on Memorial Day weekend? Online retailers have a misconception that long weekends mean higher sales. Apparently, there are many more factors to consider.

In the final tally, same-store sales rose 4.8 percent in the March-April period, below the 5.4 percent average expected by Wall Street. Some retailers, including Limited and Macy’s Inc (M.N), warned that a late Memorial Day could depress May sales while boosting June results.

View whole article here.

Always take into consideration current market conditions when coming up with any campaign. Were sales uncharacteristically strong during a usually weak season? Did something happen recently that should push consumers to spend or hold on to their money? These are just some of the questions you have to ask yourself and your team.

Sure, it makes sense to hold big sales during the usual holidays such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and Thanksgiving. American culture has already dictated consumer behavior this way. Why don’t you jump the gun against your competitors and hold a sale a day, a week, or even a month early?

Always remember that YOU know the behavior of your consumer best.

This ad was published in the May 2010 issue of Esquire magazine. I just had to scan and post it. Reading through this short piece has convinced me even further that the printed medium and the Internet can co-exist. I’m sure a lot of people feel the same way.

These Esquire people. Leaves me speechless sometimes.

There are about 10-12 sites I visit regularly in the morning. One is Facebook. There are about 5 resource sites I need to go through to get updated with what I do at work. I go through about 3-4 personal blogs as well. I visit Pep.ph everyday too. That pretty much leaves Inquirer.net as the only local site that I visit everyday (I can live without a TV now because of this). Where does Spot.ph fall?

For me at least, the frequency has gone up from zero to weekly, and that is saying a lot. Though Lourd de Veyra is awesome, he is not the main reason Spot is what it is now.

1. Here’s your Top 10 -  Nothing spells recipe for success more than numbered lists. If I were to point out just one reason for coming back to Spot, it would have to be Spot’s regular Top 10 features. They’re hilariously entertaining, and socially relevant. The visuals they use remind me of the collage that Esquire uses in its table of contents. What’s not to love about that.
2. Give it to me fast - Anything and everything on Spot takes no more than a few minutes to read. To put it in magazine terms, this is any site’s cover test. Short and concise articles are the way to go.
3. I’ve got eyes and ears everywhere - Within a few hours of ANY comment-worthy issue, Spot is able to post something about it. It gives me the impression that if I want to be updated, I don’t always have to go to Inquirer.net first.
4. Share me! – I know it has become standard to put share buttons on any site, but going back to my first point, an article or feature isn’t worth sharing if it’s going to take me half an hour to read through it. If you think about it, this is the only social media strategy they needed. I love the large comment counts on every post too.

Going back to my original review of the Spot.ph, all I ever wished for was for the site to make sense (those humongous ads, although compliant to online ad standards, destroyed the whole browsing experience). All they needed to make sure of was for an 8-9 year old to be able to navigate through the site.

Spot.ph has done this, and so much more.

I’m no fan of city guides. For one, I think social networking sites are more than enough to keep me informed about events that I should be attending or restaurants I should be trying. If you had to assign me to a persona, I would fall into the I-only-visit-the-site-for-movie-schedules category. I’m not saying that city guides are useless, I’m just saying that I do not need them.

About two years ago, I wrote a short piece on Spot.ph, one of Summit Media’s first forays into the city guide landscape. Two things drove me to write about it. One was because I used to work there, and since I left, I’ve always believed that they would never ever release a lackluster product. Second, and even more notable, the site was a collaboration between Summit and the new media division of GMA 7.

The second point is more interesting because content has always been a key driver when launching a media product. And anytime one of the largest TV networks in the country has your back, you know content is something you will never have a shortage of. Because of the tie-up, Summit gained better access to the news worthiest of personalities, events, and of course, multimedia content.

These benefits however, were more apt for Spot’s sister site, PEP. The Spot.ph of 2008 was too reliant on user generated information, that it forgot about the basics of simple usability. You can no longer see the old Spot on Wayback Machine, but believe me, it was a mess.

In the two years since I wrote about the site, a lot of my own perceptions about city guides have changed, along with the dynamics that make a site “sociable”. So too have the people in Spot.ph changed. In my succeeding post, you will see how these people have proven that you don’t have to talk about celebrities in order to engage your audience.

What a transformation it has been.

Though it was relatively easy for me to jumpstart my personal blog more than two years ago, I had the privilege of being surrounded by what you can call the “pioneers” in the local Internet Marketing industry. The same cannot be said about your day to day Internet browser.

Even until today, it’s an uphill challenge trying to sell an idea that has nothing to do with traditional media. Once you’re done with all the convincing, you’ll be facing an even bigger challenge — finally deciding what you want to do. During this whole process, have you ever asked yourself if your target market is ready for whatever you’re going to dish out?

I was on my way to the office today when I heard a radio plug about Medicol’s “Winning Board” campaign.

One thing I like about this, is that they go through a very detailed data collection process. One common mistake companies make when trying to run an Internet Marketing initiative, is they always use a shotgun approach (Putting as many of their banners on other high traffic sites in hopes of generating visitors). Though the value to it may not be felt now, companies should start collecting data from their consumers.

Now we can go to the negatives.

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Filipinos are slowly and surely embracing the concept of E-commerce. More than random Multiply product pages, packed Facebook Fan Pages or localized versions of the bigger online retailers in the US, what we haven’t seen are local sites with the whole package. While there are other sites that have potential, Island Rose has been fairly successful in proving that an online business can survive. What about local offline businesses that have decided to transition part of their business online?

You’d be surprised at what Toby’s Sports has been able to do in the past few months.

I’m talking about SEO friendly pages, a working product review system, a recommendation engine, a full-blown email marketing program, and social media presence. Though the pages are far from perfect, there isn’t anything on the Toby’s site that can’t be improved on experience. Kudos to the management of Toby’s Sports for taking the jump.

A more detailed review soon to follow.

I logged into my Plurk profile today and said to myself, looks like I’m going to have to let this go. In roughly a month, my “karma” has gone down from a high 92 to a measly 72. The sad thing about it, is that I really don’t care.

Plurk became popular at the workplace in 2008 primarily for planning the occasional dinner or night out. A simple “Drinks tonight?” Plurk can collect as many comments as necessary, right down to how many tables the group should be reserving. In other instances, I was able to reconnect with former colleagues, and at the same time unknowingly become updated with whatever else was happening. I’ve even used Plurk to determine who I should be working with. More presence on Plurk meant less time for actual work.

Personal experiences aside, those are not the reasons why I think Plurk will not survive the social networking wars.

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If you’re one of my friends on Facebook, then you’ve probably seen me “check-in” a few or more times in different locations the past two months. I’ve been doing it in hopes of understanding the principles of effective location marketing. I’ve also been using foursquare to plot my locations.

If you own an Iphone, Blackberry, or Nexus, you can readily download the app at here. This is basically how the process goes.

First of all, you need to understand how the technology works. Generally, people use lo-so apps on their phones to “check in” whenever they go places. Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) locate the users and determine what “venue” they might be at, giving them options to select a location or create a new listing. These “check ins” allow their friends to know where they are now, or where they frequently go. Some services allow users to leave location-based tips for friends to discover later, and several involve social competitions, or the ability to unlock digital badges, stickers, and prizes. Businesses can announce specials or promotions through these apps, so when users “check in,” they receive notifications of nearby deals.

Source: Mashable

In layman’s terms, you can say this is a bit like Twitter on steroids, though you can’t post any links, and it just tells everyone where you are. If that still doesn’t mean anything to you, imagine yourself taking a trip out of town (it doesn’t matter if the location is foreign or domestic). All you have is your backpack and your mobile phone. All you have to do is check into foursquare and see where other people have been going. Imagine having 10 restaurants to choose from, and then reading a tip from someone who was previously in the same area.

“Try out the Turkish Beef Shawarma at Jacob’s, and ask for extra lemon sauce. It’s beside the local clinic, so you might miss it.”

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I think we’re all used to it now. The whole Steve-Jobs-is-out-of-his-mind line. And yet here we are, each owning at least one of his farfetched products. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all of this, it’s that I’ll never listen to anything Michael Dell says ever again.

I was browsing through Facebook when I came across a link that was posted by a former officemate. It read “WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month, magazines to be at or near newsstand prices?”. The former publisher in me had to stop what I was doing and read.

Conversely, magazines appear set to offer weekly or monthly editions out of the gate, not annual subscriptions. Sources told the WSJ that the April issue of Hearst’s Esquire magazine (no stranger to new media) will arrive in downloadable format without advertisements for $2.99, $2 less than the newsstand price, and will include five music videos (each containing the phrase “somewhere in Mississippi,” oddly enough) to take advantage of the device’s multimedia capabilities. On the other hand, a full iPad issue of Men’s Health with match the glossy’s $4.99 price. Of course, as we heard earlier, publishers will be experimenting with advertising and pricing models to see what works so expect things to be fluid for quite some time after the April 3rd launch.

Source

Now what do I think about all of this? Bullshit.

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To kick off the year for this blog (wedding preparations not withstanding), I have decided to make a conscious effort to embrace social media. We’re not talking about collecting “friends”on Friendster, Plurk, Twitter, or Facebook here. I am talking about building one’s online reputation. Being an Internet marketer after all means putting your name out there.

Here are two obvious basics you can start with.

1. Own your domain - Even if you don’t know anything about building a website, nail that <firstname><lastname>.com domain down. All it takes is a credit card and $9.99. You can take your time learning everything there is to know, but your domain name might be gone in the next hour.
2. Find uniformity – All of us have tried searching for our names online at least once or twice, and what are the first results that come up? Social networking. I have acquired the usernames alvinj on Linkedin, alvinjimenez on Facebook, and alvinj on Plurk. I wish all of them were alvinjimenez, but someone beat me to it on Linkedin and Plurk.

Doing the above will take more than 10 minutes, and will guarantee yourself a lifetime of controlled findability.