Ricky’s Internet Marketing Blog

Consider this case study. You own a company in Malaysia selling a kind of machine to factories and industrial customers. Most of your customers are within the country.  But recently more and more buyers are from overseas such as India, Pakistan and Vietnam. These buyers are middlemen who buy on behalf of their customers in respective countries. They come to know you through word of mouth.

Now, what can a web site do for you, especially to help expand your reach to overseas? The normal answer would include:

• Establish presence online - Many customers do research on the Internet to make purchase decision.
• Increase your exposure - Have another channel to reach your customers. What if some buyers don’t get to know you by word of mouth?
• Give good first impression - They look at your web site and form an impression before even contacting you.
• Show your products online - They can look at photos online so that you don’t always need to email them.
• Contact you online - Now they can have another channel to contact you instantly - email, instant messaging or even SMS.
• Eliminate intermediaries - The end user customers can deal with you directly without the middlemen.
• Give technical support - Save costs supporting and servicing your customers by doing it online.

Now these are the common reasons why you should have a web site. But the Internet can potentially do much more wonder than we can imagine. It can be a strategic tool to change your business model, rewrite the rules in the competition, give you unfair advantages over your competitors and even lead you to a blue ocean.

Furthermore, the Internet is not only a new medium, but also a revolutionary one. Its benefits lie in its interactivity, community building and “word of mouse”, among others. It is different from other mediums such as print and TV. You will under utilize the benefits of the Internet if you merely apply the old model to a new environment.

Imagine your customers can design the product they need online using Flash. Imagine your customers help to build a knowledge base online through Web 2.0 technologies so that they can support themselves. Imagine you use a blog to build and maintain your brand online. Just imagine…

Recently I have to miss a joint venture offer to promote Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) by using a web site. The MM2H program was initiated by Malaysian government to attract foreigners who want to come and live here for extended period. As I understand, there are nearly 200 licensed agents, through whom only the customers can submit their application.

The competition among travel agencies and tour operators is already very intense. Do a search on Google and you can see the online marketplace is crowded too. It may not help much to do another conventional web site or portal to compete with many other sites. It will be just another me-too web site.

But blogging is different. If someone in the field can dedicate some of his or her time to blog about the country, MM2H, travelling and investment opportunities and other related topics in Malaysia, I’m sure it can generate a lot of traffic, especially when blog is very much under utilized by MM2H companies at the moment.

Blogging builds up personal or company credential. It can bring in genuine visitors who are interested in Malaysia and MM2H. It is not only a new way of promoting MM2H, but also an instant one, especially when any new blog post is updated by Google search engine almost instantly!

But blogging is a new phenomena not readily accepted especially by companies. Some may ask why rock the boat while their conventional channels are working fine? Furthermore, blogging takes time and committment from the blogger. The blogger needs to blog regularly and consistently to be effective.

If you are involved in MM2H business and would like to explore blogging for MM2H, please drop me an email at ricky@rickysoo.com.

Recently I served in the organizing committee of a grand annual sports event held on Labour Day in Matsushita Sports Complex, Shah Alam. We received compliments that the sports event has been held more smoothly and systematically. However, we didn’t expect much less crowd turned up this year compared to last year.

Anyway, I learned something important that, relationship is equally, if not more, important that the results we strive to achieve, be it in business, office or social work. Through working together in the committee, we not only worked together to achieve our organizational goal, but we also developed friendship and relationship.

As I heard from a speaker before, we can know how many seeds there are in an apple.  But we do not know how many apples can come out of one seed.  Our relationship with others is like the seed.  We may do great things together for now.  But without a good relationship, we may not be able to do great things together many times.  It is no use that we do great things now but our relationship with colleagues deteriorates as a result of working together.

When I was younger, I tended to go for results no matter what, even at the expense of relationship with others. When working for one company, I remember being a busybody to always give suggestions to reform the business process of the company, to the extent of hurting relationship with others especially my boss.  As a result, I lost out in office politics and was nearly fired from the job.

Good relationship is vital in our life.  Let’s turn a committee into a community.  Let’s turn our office into a fellowship of humans who love and care for one another.  Of course, oftentimes we need to start from ourselves first.