Courtesy of Naked Singapore
After a long and tiring day at work, I had my dinner at a coffeeshop in Chinatown and was waiting for my usual buses back home. The bus stop was pretty crowded with weary commuters.
While waiting for my bus, I noticed something unusual.
Through the kind assistance of Coca Cola Singapore’s June Kong-Dhanabalan, Ethan, Tina and I caught the opening ceremony of the inaugural Youth Olympic Games in Singapore.
Touted as the more extravagant show ever staged in Singapore, the close to two-hour event featured the 3,600 athletes hailing from more than 200 International Olympic Committee (IOC) member countries in 26 events over the next 12 days.
Check out Singapore HeritageFest these two weeks!
Feeling bored this weekend? Don’t!
There are tonnes of activities to do as the inaugural Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games (YOG) opens today, with a smorgasbord of 26 sports, culture & education, and outdoor activities awaiting. Other than the Marina Bay area which is teeming with free concerts and programmes starting today, you can also check out the various shopping centres like Suntec City Mall where the Singapore HeritageFest is happening.
That was my first reaction when invited by June Kong-Dhanabalan from Coca-Cola to hop on board their Happiness Mobile (Coke is the official worldwide sponsor of the games). Offering a bird’s eye view of the Journey of the Youth Olympic Flame (or JYOF), I will feel what it’s like to be a teenager hollering my lungs out, waving my hands in the air, and cheering on an open-top “Hippo” bus. Of course, I was heartened to know that the blogfather mrbrown has already experienced this.
Here’s the custom-fitted Happiness Mobile
Held in conjunction with the upcoming Singapore Youth Olympic Games (YOG), the Singapore leg of the torch relay sees some 2,400 torchbearers (including June herself) conveying the Youth Olympic Flame through all the five community districts and ending in the heart of the city. Participants hail from the 500 odd participating schools, sponsoring organisations, as well as government agencies.
Courtesy of NDPeeps (on flickr)
As we celebrate our 45th year of independence across the island in many different ways, I thought it’d be interesting to see how this is being done in the digital dimension. Gauging from the amount of national day related posts, Facebook updates, tagged photographs, videos and other User Generated Content (UGC), we are certainly not lacking in patriotic spirit here!
A good place to start would be the official National Day Parade 2010 (NDP 2010) website, which looks like it is a website, UGC aggregator, and social media portal all rolled into one. I was immediately wowed by the clickable mosaic of different citizen-generated content on the home page, which brings you to short posts complete with photographs of what Singaporeans and residents feel about our national birthday.
There are two schools of thought in marketing.
The first school teaches us to focus and concentrate all our energies and resources on one (or perhaps two) key strategies. I call them the snipers.
Don’t ever assume that your customers are the exact duplicate of you. Chances are, they aren’t.
There are so many reasons why they may be different. Human beings are such complex creatures that entire disciplines like anthropology, sociology and psychology have evolved in desperate bids to understand their behaviours.
Corporate Storytelling should be as alluring as the Dance of 7 Veils (courtesy of rjg329)
One of the things which I have been wrestling with lately is this:
How can I keep my customers continually keen in my products and services beyond a short-lived campaign?
More importantly, can we sustain their interest over a longer time span and find different ways to build on it?
Yesterday evening, as I was going home from work, I was handed a packet of free tissues outside City Hall MRT station along North Bridge Road. Considered one of the oldest promotional gimmick in the book, it came from QB House – famous for its 10 minute haircut costing $10 – which recently opened a branch at Basement 2 of Raffles City.
Despite the small rectangular area of the tissue, the company has cleverly done a few things right:
Last night, at the kind invitation of Liana Tang (@spoonrabbit on Twitter), I participated in the first #nlbmeetup (issue #1) organised by the National Library Board. Happening at the lovely Esplanade Library, the Meet Up was a good chance for me to catch up with social media buddies and to witness the evolution/revolution of Singapore libraries from Paper Books to Facebook.
Of course, our libraries aren’t strangers to social media, as my buddy Rambling Librarian (aka Ivan Chew) would testify. They have blogs for almost anything under the sun, a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page, an electronic encyclopedia (Infopedia), as well as other social media tools. Being a great fan, I can attest to their extensive efforts in using web and social technologies to improve the entire book borrowing, reading, fine paying (it happens!) and information gathering experience.
It was great to know that Siva (or @sivasothi), a long-time friend, former biology tutor, Friend of Yesterday.sg, and eco activist extraordinaire, would be speaking about his experiences as one of the pioneers in embracing social media for teaching and other purposes.
