Do you have any Sony product at home or at your work office? Computers? Televisions? Headphones? Or their most famous product – PlayStation??? For me, I don’t have any Sony product except my old cell phone (Sony Ericsson). That’s why I was quite upset when I heard that Sony divorced with Ericsson! I guess there will not be anymore Sony Ericsson cell phones 🙁 What makes me curious is that the company has been making decent profits over the years, why would Sony like to pay US$1.37billion to divorce?

It’s all about e-marketing!!!

Sony is famous with its technology investing into hardware developments, and they had never put a lot of focus on doing internet marketing. BUT now, they want to make some big changes! Choosing to pay US$1.37 billions to withdraw from the investment in Ericsson Company means Sony is really putting much more focus on online marketing. Its new gaming console ”PS Vista” connects to its US PlayStation Online Store. This a combination between hardware and e-marketing. However, this kind of strategy is not new. The Internet Big Five compete and benefit with each other gave the best example to Sony that e-marketing is fairly important in the marketplace.

The Internet Big Five

Google – Searching Engine

+bookstore (compete amazon)

+net working (compete Facebook)

+hardware phones

Amazon – Services

+hardware, kindle fire (compete Apple)

+server business (compete Facebook)

+online banking industry

Facebook – Networking

+online banking industry

Apple – Hard-ware

+sell phone, computers etc

Microsoft

+Business software

Any thing special happened in reading break? Hmm, though I am not a big fan of NBA, I watched FIVE basketball games in a week! If you have some interests in sports, you would have definitely heard about this name – Jeremy Lin. Over the past 2 weeks, the basketball world or I should say the whole world, has been captivated with his success. Jeremy Lin is the new point guard for the New York Knicks who has lead the team to a 7 game winning streak, set NBA records, and won NBA player of the week. He has officially taken over nearly every major media and news source at some point in the past five weeks.

Jeremy Lin’s impact is immense, with millions people glued to TVs and researching his story online everyday, even for people not even watching the game. Terms like “Linsanity,” “Linning,” “Linderella,” and “Linternational”have been flying across headlines everywhere from newspapers to SportsCenter. Everyone shares videos about him on Facebook and Twitter. And yes, that’s where I first heard of his name!! I can foresee that he will be the next hot prospect for marketers of many large businesses in the world like Nike and Sprite! Somehow, this Linsanity inspired me about the concept of social media.

1. Value your partners and customers. When Jeremy Lin was given the chance to step onto the court, he was not just looking to score points himself. Sure, He was the one making all those buckets and fancy passes, but he also understands that without teammates he’s not going to accomplish very much. Indeed, he does a fantastic job of seeing opportunities for his entire team, and distributing his resources and skills throughout the whole game. In marketplace, especially on the internet, share stories with your partners and customers will drive them pass your message along to another crowd you may not have known existed. It is always important to let others know how much they mean to you success. And this is social media marketing!!!

2. There is always opportunities to improve. Despite all of Lin’s success, he has also set the record for the most turnovers in a player’s first 7 games, including a NBA season high of 9 in his first loss. For digital marketers, no matter what marketing we are doing across any channel, there will be an opportunity to improve. Optimizing keywords, creative, or anything, there is work to be done. Don’t be too persevative. Keep optimizing, and stay agile in all your digital marketing efforts.

3. The Bounce effect. According to social media analytics too Topsy, Lin’s on court heroics spawned more than 3,000 tweets in a 12 hour period. In four days the number of people following @JLin7 surpassed 190,000 and is projected to net more than 400,000 within 15 days. Is he the only person who benfited from it? NO! In fact, not every tweet was centered around his basketball prowess. The topics varies from the Knicks toward Ivy League basketball, Harvard, the stereotypes of Asian males in American society, and even Tawianese nationalism. In other words, the subject bounced around to almost every and any topic Jeremy Lin can be identified with. Don’t you think social media has the same characteristics? People are connected, the world is connected. So as social media.

If you own a business, what kind of social media you would choose to setup you company profiles and pages on ? Do you know what channels are best used for which type of interaction? I’ve found some great insight about many popular social media platforms shared by Grovo.

• 40% of people like brands for discounts and promotions
• 51% of active Twitter users follow companies
• 8% of all Huffington Post traffic comes from Facebook

The above infographic tells us the best channels to interact with the world are probably Twitter and Facebook (well, at least it is correct at this moment..!) They serve as a platform, a communication channel between not only people but also between companies and businesses. One interesting forecasting: Facebook’s 2012 Ad Sales to Top $5B

With ad revenue expected to increase by 2 billion year over year, this social media giant Facebook is expected to reach 5.1 billion in ad sales revenue in 2012. That’s right, over $5 billion! Of that 5.1 billion, 2.6 billion is expected to come from display ad sales while Google is expected a 2.5 billion ad sales revenue in this year. With increasing users for Twitter, I think companies will invest more and more in display ad on Twitter. And it will soon become another giant in the social media marketing!

One day when I was doing some research about our client for the e-marketing project, I bumped into a COOL Youtube video! It is a marketing rap video recorded by SEO Rapper. In his 3 and a half minutes rap, he describes how web standards and proper design can affect the ranking and conversion of pages on a site. I can’t believe someone can actually combine e-marketing with Hip-Hop music together! AWESOME way to learn!!

In this video, SEO Rapper talked about the importance of have a good navigation, appealing graphics, animation etc, he also explained the reason of doing all these actions. For example, having a nice navigation is importance because people may feel frustrated when they can’t find what they are looking for. He also reminded website owner to check if the website is valid on all the browsers since people use different browsers such as Firefox, IE and AOL. It was actually really helpful to me when I realized our client’s website is in flash and couldn’t be browsed using smartphones like iPhone, Blackberry. Our initial idea of creating a mobile Google AdWords was not applicable.

Looking for more marketing rap videos? SEO Rapper has did a whole butch of marketing videos on topics like social media marketing, page rank, paid search and many more. The interesting thing is that it’s not any random video that you would forget the details easily, in fact, you really learnt something when you watch these catchy videos! Try it out and ENJOY!

Lyrics:

Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration
a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation use with moderation
cause search engines can’t index the information
display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation
every page that they click should provide and explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination
but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time
make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat,
tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css

now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate
check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox
title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong
when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
design and code right man I hope you get the picture

what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter
if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it