Doing business at the comfort of your homes!

Shopping online? Shopping on taobao.com when you’re right here in Singapore? No problem!

All this is made possible, with the invention of “E-commerce”, and also the increasing trend in online shopping in Singapore.

According to a research by Paypal, the size of the Singapore online shopping market reached S$1.1 billion in 2010 and is forecasted to hit S$4.4 billion in 2015. Of course, a prediction back then in early 2011 would not be a good representation, for it could be less or even more with the rise of many E-commerce startups in Singapore over the last five years. 

Source: https://www.techinasia.com/the-stats-and-facts-of-online-shopping-in-singapore/

With increased Internet access over the past few years, many shoppers like you and me have been taking it to the Internet for deals, or would I say “lobangs” in our local lingo.

Source: https://vulcanpost.com/14559/online-shopping/

Here’s showing how much we have “invested” in E-commerce over the past five years, and it is continuing to grow!

We are constantly on the Internet for various reasons, to surf, to research, to explore, and to shop.

E-commerce covers a wide variety of goods and services, from travel tour packages to buying clothes online. The key feature of e-commerce is that, ALL transactions are done ONLINE (without paper documentation).

Source: https://vulcanpost.com/14559/online-shopping/

We cannot deny the fact that we now find our air tickets and accommodations online, rather than going to tour agencies to sign up for packages over the counter.

Taobao.com and qoo10.sg has become our best pals, functioning in a similar manner through a B2C (Business to Consumer) model where businesses sell their goods to consumers like us.

But what about our local rising peer-to-peer E-commerce platform Carousell. While I assume most of you would have heard of it or probably have used it to buy or sell items, it was a surprise to me when I found out it was a Singapore creation. (It was founded in 2012 and the first item sold on it was an Amazon Kindle e-reader)

Even though it has been in the market for three years, I had only heard and used it only at the beginning of this year.

 Guess what! The first thing I got from Carousell was…. a textbook for Communication Theory (Not the usual ‘wow’ stuff that people usually get from Carousell)

Though branded as a P2P e-commerce, I feel that B2C is possible on this platform.
I’ve seen instances of brands with physical shops having item listings on Carousell (though I think the place of transaction would most likely be in the shop itself), where they actually use it as a form of promotion for the products that the brand has. Though transaction does not occur over the Internet, it reaches out to consumers and through the “Chat to buy” functions or the prices listed on the item listing, consumers are able to make informed choices about getting the product or not, just like the usual e-commerce websites Taobao and qoo10.

While Carousell is perhaps the next big thing in e-commerce. It is definitely not a guaranteed viable options for businesses to tread on if they want to make it big in terms of sales and figures. Carousell, ultimately, is suited for peer-to-peer where (usually single) items are sold to or bought by individuals. Here are some drawbacks for Carousell if businesses want to use it to further rake in profits.

1. Categorizing of products
We all know that the number of products on Carousell is something we both cannot imagine. What more to actually look through them, in the case that we do not have the specific name of the item that we are looking for. And looking through the searches one by one is like telling you to look through google results whenever you type something on the search bar.

2. Typically low pricing
Though the prices can range from thousands to a few dollars depending on the value of the item, prices of items sold on it can are relatively low and similar products may sell at a relatively competitive price. The price war game is strong here!

3. It goes item listing by item listing

This goes to say that you can only deal one item at a time. Compare that to your usual shopping pals Taobao and qoo10, where you have a shopping cart to check out at the end of your (impulse) purchases. That goes to say NO for bundle deals, unless you really ask the sellers for it. Such a hassle. And the deals may not be all done through bank transfers, most of the time through meetups.

Guess we still have to give our local budding Carousell a little more time to develop a relationship with us, to become close pals like Taobao and qoo10!

Marketing through Social Media - the new normal

Last week, I introduced a new function of Facebook -- Facebook mentions.

This week, I am still going to talk about social media, but it will be narrowed on how companies are able to make use of social media to market their products and services further to the vast consumer audience.

While I always knew social media was just another platform for companies to reach out to people, I did not think much about the great impact and influence it could achieve through social media alone. In addition, I had also come to learn of some social media managing software that can assist companies in data collection and analysis.

But the first question,
WHY DO BUSINESSES NEED SOCIAL MEDIA?

The reason is fairly simple and can be explained in the video below:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDA864UskXc

The younger generation are part of the Internet generation, and occupy their free time through engaging in social media. Hence, to extend the reach to a wider consumer audience (including the younger generation), businesses must also keep up with the times.

Traditionally, it takes word of mouth or paid advertisements for companies to gain exposure in public. With social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram, they can now share information about their products and services as and when they like, and reach out to users worldwide.

However, this is not exactly a good deal after all. When things crop up, backlash always happens first on social media platforms as netizens are quick to turn to such platforms to give their earnest feedback or even raging complaints. It is truly a challenge to attain the best of both worlds on social media.

But how so you might ask. How can businesses be able to handle so many various platforms at a time (and respond to them accordingly)?

The class activity on social media marketing was indeed an eye opener. At least for my entire Internet life, I had completely no idea about the existence of social media management software, needless to say the top few. I always thought employees of the company had to analyse them as part of a weekly report or something, it was such a absurd thinking that I had.

And so, I found out about Hootsuite!



Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHHQoNCFWuw

Cool, isn't it? It's like having a dashboard where you can look at what is happening on the various social media platforms and they can have them analysed for you!
Businesses can make use of this analysis to decide which social media platform to focus on, or buck up on to make their company a more well-rounded one to advance the company's profile further.
And there's also the part about scheduled postings, that pretty much saves the time of ordinary employees who might probably have to wait till the specified time to just post that message. This also puts forth the idea of concurrent message transmission where messages are dispersed at the same time on the different platforms.

Bringing marketing to a new level, Hootsuite itself has a blog where they write about tips, statistics about various social media platforms, and how you can use them to your advantage!
It also features success stories from using social media, further proving the point that social media is becoming a necessity for businesses to grow and move forward. Read more about the three small business success stories here!

Being part of the generation ever so reliant on the Internet and now social media, I think that it is necessary and beneficial to know more about social media marketing strategies and the tools that we can use for future use. Who knows we might be leading a company and we all know that things get across faster through social media so that might just be the primary focus in years to come.

But wait, now who manages the social media platforms of Hootsuite? Figure that out!

Facebook Mentions? Wait a minute… mention what?

No, you got me wrong. Facebook isn’t mentioning anything.

Facebook has come a long way since 2004 when it first began to take over the world. Just last year, it celebrated its decade milestone.

Source:https://www.whizsky.com/2015/03/5-impactful-social-media-infographics/

I'm pretty sure that we all have a Facebook account, right? 

Many of us would have known Facebook for many years now, and gone were the days of growing crops on Farmville and running a virtual restaurant on Restaurant City. In fact, many of us might have abandoned Facebook and moved on to other platforms like Twitter or Instagram, making Facebook looking more and more like a dead town.

Source: http://www.blogcdn.com/blog.games.com/media/2010/11/fv.jpg

Being someone who still sticks onto Facebook to a leech, I realized there’s more to making more friends and sharing statuses, photos, videos. In everyone’s mind, there will definitely be a celebrity that appeals to you at a certain point in life. And owing to the advancement of technology and social media, many of these celebrities have a Facebook profile. But as Facebook claims, it is so easy to create an account you could possibly impersonate someone famous and get away with loads of followers. How do you make sure you are following the authentic account?

Here’s where Facebook Mentions come in, where verified public figures are able to interact with fans through responding to tags and comments. In July 2014, it was only made available to celebrities. By having Facebook mentions, it would also serve as a recognition that the account is indeed verified by Facebook to be authentic and that posts that come from that account would be coming from the celebrity himself or herself.

Currently, in the application’s latest update, all verified users (with a blue tick) are able to make use of Facebook Mentions and even do livestreaming for fans all around the world. Call this a marketing strategy, call this a way to communicate and lure back Facebook users. I wouldn’t refute all these claims. Indeed, having the option of livestreaming brings the personal connection to fans. It allows users to follow the daily lives of the celebrity in real-time, as compared to status updates or mobile uploads from time to time.

It is definitely something Facebook can be proud of, having such a feature on their platform, making it a one-stop platform for users across the globe. This also puts them on par or even at an edge over sites like YouTube which strict offers video sharing and streaming. As a user of Facebook, this is certainly a good feature for celebrities and popular figures across the globe as it helps to increase their popularity. In fact, it could be used as a marketing tool for them to promote themselves further to the vast audience on Facebook.

Who knows, in the future press conferences could be livestreamed through the singer's Facebook account, instead of media coverage and external platforms like YouTube? And reporters can just post their questions on the comments while in livestreaming, and the singer will reply in real-time through the livestream. What can companies do with such a function, is something that remains an unknown at this point of time. Technology slowly unfolds, and humans like us have to adapt quickly to be able to manipulate it in our favour...

And back to the topic of Facebook mentions, how do we qualify.

Before you can think about doing stuff like livestreaming, verification is key. And the key lies in Facebook giving you that sacred tick to prove your identity (and perhaps popularity).

It starts with……
getting the BLUE tick

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dQq5CzhYek
Although the current protocol is to write in to Facebook, subject to approval here's some ways that you can go about getting their approval:

1. Uploading photographs with famous celebrities
Probably shows some "proof" that you're actually someone real and known?
2. Changing your designation in your profile description to "Artist/Musician" 
I've seen most people with this label with blue ticks, really.
3. Continuously posting updates for seven days.
Okay this sounds a little extreme but let me know if it works! (Then I can try it myself maybe, - smirks-
(However, how true is this is yet to be verified, see...can't even verify to know how to get verified...)

EDIT:
IT IS TRUE! *throws confetti*
Let the rather amusing yet amazing story begin.

Here we have this guy, an audio engineer of Taiwanese rock band Mayday. He's also a cousin of one of the members of the quintet.
So few days before he actually started the seven days tip (which he heard from somewhere too), he changed his title to Artist/Musician as suggested by some people previously.

(Note: imaginary refers to what I was thinking about him thinking about posting that, thinkception hmmmm...)

On the first day,

imaginary: Maybe I should give this a try

imaginary: Let's do an straight line acrostic poem with one of the members of Mayday. Perhaps they will see that I'm good friends with them! Let's start with the guitarist Stone!

imaginary: Continuing with another guitarist! How can I forget about my cousin! (Shang Yi, is the name of his cousin, and Ni Zhuan Sheng is the name of the movie his cousin is starring in)

imaginary: Since I'm already on the members, think I should continue with the rest right? Here we have bassist Masa!

imaginary: and here we go again, just one more member left for this one! Seven days, 1 introductory,  5 members of Mayday, it's nearing the end! Here's the drummer of the band Guan You!

imaginary: Oh crap, I really don't know what else to say for this one. Let's do a diagonal one for the lead vocal Ah Xin then!

Imaginary: Judgement time, it's now or never. Give it to me~ give it to me~

And eventually............

Imaginary: Finally, should have done this long ago, now to go and annoy those without the blue tick (including his cousin) *tears of joy*

And there you have it, one successful story of getting the blue tick! Seems like it IS possible to get it easily after all?

Perhaps, you could give it a try?

Till we meet again next week!

Reference::

Mangalindan, J. (2015, September 10). Facebook now lets all people with a verified account use Mentions app. Retrieved September 13, 2015, from http://mashable.com/2015/09/10/facebook-mentions-verified-account/

Looking back at the Internet

We’ve been using the Internet all our lives, or at the very least a good two decades now. While the Internet first came about in 1969, the web in 1990, it has definitely come a long way till now.

Why do I say so?

How many of you all get onto your mobile devices to do the following:
- Check your emails
- Scroll your Instagram feed #ootd #nofilter #tgif
- Or just surfing the web normally?

And all these are done through… the great beginnings of the internet. (ARPANET, pronounced in the Singlish way: ARH PA NET)

As you’re reading this post, here’s what’s going on ON THE INTERNET RIGHT NOW.

Click the animation to open the full version (via Penny Stocks Lab).

Cool, isn’t it. Perhaps you’re thinking of updating your social media platforms just as you’re looking at the real-time statistics.

BUT.
BUT.

Have you wondered about the future of the Internet?
What can we do on the Internet with the growing amount of traffic, and the overwhelming amount of content?
How have our lives changed with the appearance of the Internet?
1. More time-efficient
Everything is just one search bar away, just consult your best friend since you had known the Internet i.e. Google. Trust me, even filtering results is easier than looking up a book in the library.
2. Transitioning from Print to Digital
Books to ebooks, video tapes to online video sharing sites like Youtube, Dailymotion. Everything under the sun is on the Internet, and it is slowly replacing the traditional way people obtain information
3. Reliance on technology/Internet
We’ve become so accustomed to using it, that we don’t even think about what happens in the event that if fails. But here’s what may happen if it really does die on us:

Source: http://visual.ly/what-do-when-internet-down

Let me share a little about my experience with the Internet. Back in the days, before Facebook came about in 2004, people didn’t leave short status updates, but wrote blog posts as if they were writing a diary. Looking back, somethings I laugh at the immature thoughts that I had back then, but that was learning memories I guess?

Back then when blogging was a hit thing, everyone would be on their blogger layouts, editing the codes to change blogskin colour, width etc. I actually wonder how I made it through editing blogskins in the past… And for the record, somehow blogskin codes from blogskins.com don’t work anymore. I have no idea how to fix, hence using a rather standard template here as I’m not proficient in coding!

But you get the drift, things change. “hypes” die down after some time. As the Internet comes about, some things are gained, while some are lost. As the Internet continues to progress past Web 2.0, or even 3.0, more new things await us but at the same time deprives us from some things that we have it in our physical worlds right now.

Stay tuned for more next week!