Month: November 2010

Heard from a friend that Facebook got partnered up with Skype and soon you can do webcaming with friends with fb chat. (@ http://mashable.com/2010/11/28/skype-facebook-video-chat/ )

To me, fb’s move into the ‘online webcaming’ marketing is kinda aggressive and totally putting the other exsisting online chatting tools at risk (google-chat, msn, skype etc.) Utilizing its tremendous database/friendbase with instant status or profile updates, the addition of video chat is just another fancy tool combining more daily social activites into 1 dashboard – your facebk page, and accelerating the speed of information transfer from one end to another.

In my point of view, this ‘new’ feature would definitely secure the current no. of active facebk accounts/users, and would possibly bring in a prominent raise to its no. of users + daily web flow.  However, privacy could be an issue again since the exposure of information is so wide that you can never estimate the aftereffect of it. (Heard that facebook later on might even have facebk email too, but then I personally don’t think that would be successful, since gmail is kinda established in the market with its great email features and google-doc’s integration). So it would be awesome if google can somehow purchase facebook, and with youtube under the same umbrella, that would be purely awesome. (Oh, and i just realized i was talking within the field of PC, not mac. Hmmmm… adding on Apple’s interface+apps would be crazy too. 😉

Christmas is always a delightful festival where we celebrate and to commemorate the birth of Jesus (@wikipedia), having familiy gatherings, taking breaks off school and work, doing someting that we enjoy like shopping and attending public christmas events etc.

Just last Friday on Nov 12th, a couple of my photographer friends and I went down to Richmond Centre Mall at the evening carrying our dslr and flash with us. Why? Because we want to snap a few great shots of Santa as it was the Santa Welcoming Event at RC where Santa and his wife, apparently arrived in a white limo, ‘officially’ arrived at Richmond Centre.

Speaking of marketing, shopping malls always know what to do to increase shoppers flow for upcoming festivals/seasons. From planning, surveying shoppers’ taste, shops floor planning/relocating, interior decorating, scheduling on-site promo functions, coordinating with shops for seasonal sales, beforehand advertising etc. , to implementing the whole marketing plan & supervising it over the season, this is truly a fun ‘game’ to play.

So for this Christmas holiday (obviously after exams), I have already planned to go to Vancouver Christmas Market with my friends to ‘enjoy’ the crowd and the festive atmosphere. We might also do christmas dinners and sleepover or some sort too!

So whatcha gonna do during Christmas Holiday?

Check out the Market video below and come out with your family and friends if you are interested!

I actually forgot to blog about my thoughts on/internship experience at Vancouver Fashion Week which was  held from Nov 3rd to 7th 2010 at Empire Landmark Hotel, Downtown Vancouver.

Before blogging about that, it definitely worths a bit of your time watching some awesome videos and photos below produced by several professional crews.

Roni McIlveen at Vancouver Fashion Week 2010,
by Blackout Productions

Roni is a cancer survivor who is still fighting for her life, and being a great support to several local cancer foundations including the Canadian Cancer Society. As VFW had partnered with Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation for Spring/Summer collections, a cancer survivor wore a garment designed by the corresponding designer and walked all together on the runway at the every end of each show. And please join me to take a look at the video below, which touched me for a bit when I was watching it.

For Photos, visit Peter Jensen’s Photography & Daniel Jolly’s Photographer/Official VFW flickr albums for their awesome photos.

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Now when I am thinking about partnership with charity, I think this was actually a very smart move for VFW to partner with charities. (And i think this counts as a corporate social responsibility too right?) This is because 1. it creats a gimmick that enriches VFW promotion/publicity 2. it kinda ‘giveback’ to the community where it help in raising the awareness of ‘fighting cancer’ through the eye of fashion in the general public 3. it widens the door into fashion as people are more easy on charity/non-profit organizations than general corporate companies 4. partnering with charities definitely made VFW’s brand look good.

-And i just remembered, Nestea the Recruit also partners with a charity too – BC Children Hospital (Foundation) too, where one of its challenges is to establish a text-a-thon for each txt to donate $5 to BC Children Hospital. And as far as I know, many teams from different universities across Canada have successfully done it! (And that obviously includes 3 of the UBC teams! ;D  Team-V , UBC Create & Team OnFoot)

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I will briefly talk about my interning experience in VFW at a latter post about facebook marketing, since after VFW I continue to work on/help out social media promotions for a local candidate election campaign.

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As usual, much more shows videos @ here. And let’s end this post by watching a delightful video of Eva Chen’s Spring/Summer Collections at VFW.

Wow, at first sight, I was surprised to hear that Canada ranked 1st out of all other countries in the aspect of ‘country branding’, when i saw this news heading. (Full article: here by The Province)

Coincidentally clicked into this video when i first saw it from a friend’s post on facebook.

– What do you feel / think about it?

I personally favor theatre/musical-ish/singing-related stuff, and I definitely found this fascinating. Having no idea what is T-mobile, I once thought that maybe I should switch to T-mobile, since I believe T-mobile can bring me the awesomeness that they showed in the video too.

I scrolled down to check out comments that utubers made on the vid, and I saw quite a few doubting ‘What does this vid have to do with mobile service?’ and some just simply complained saying their service sucks. These comments made me hesitant for a while, wondering why some people can not relate this video to the corresponding brand, and hence arriving at the ultimate question that how effective is it to the general audience.

On surface, it is an extremely unique ad, and I believe the video budget was quite economical too since they utilize the real life situation and setting, with the addition of hired professional actors/singers + not-so-professional filming crew. And finally + people’s natural &  honest reaction to the scene. It’s definite influential……….. But, the thing is, will people add this happiness emotion into the T-mobile brand too?

-Another thing is, during the shooting of the video, it was a (happy) surprise to the people involved; however, the involved people have no idea why did this happen/what is this for. In other words, the video production’s targeted audience are those who have a chance to watch it on tv/internet later on, but not for those who are on-site. All i’m saying is that, to even enhance the effect of the happiness/ surprise, i think it would be great to have some sort of ending wrap-up and let people realize ‘Oh! This was done by the T-mobile!’, and even have a booth on-site to capture/remain the happiness + further deliver T-mobile’s key messages/provided services to the affected people there.

After watching the above video a few times, I seriously thought of switching to T-mobile, since my current phone plan (n my phone too) is crap. Hmmm, is T-mobile available in Canada/Vancouver? lol. will do more research later. But, in recent years, especially this year after the winter olympics, I found so many new cellphone service provider putting their ads up across the lower mainland (like Koodo, Wind Mobile, Chat-r wireless …) Cell phone network industry is getting way more intense than it ever happened in the Canada history. Weeeeeeee~ Consumer is gonna be benefited from all these competitions!