Month: September 2015

Facebook recently rolled out a new feature on their social media platform which allows users to respond to status updates using emojis.

Basically, it is an extension of Facebook’s ubiquitous ‘Like’ button, where different reactions can be added to a post. The buttons are as follows: like, love, haha, yay, wow, sad and angry.

I think that having Reactions on Facebook provides marketers with the opportunity to understand what their audience truly wants. It provides marketers with the ability to see how people respond to their content on Facebook and whether these reactions will have an impact as strong as Likes have shown in the past.

Marketers will be able to take advantage in these three ways:

1. Understand the causes and factors of the emotions of customers
2. Engage with customers in more accurately and empathically
3. Improve the customer experience by making the right business changes

Overall, Facebook Reactions presents a great opportunity for marketers and businesses to understand and gain more insight into the customers’ thought processes and emotions. Using this new data, they are able to tweak their existing products and improve their customer service to better suit the wants and needs of customers.

Reference article

I found the 13th class of Comm 101 interesting, especially the rise of Dell in the early 90s. Dell was the number 1 computer manufacturer and controlled more market share as compared to their competitors. The reputation and success of Dell seemed to be increasing and no other company seemed to be able to compete with Dell. Yet, Apple, who  faced rocky sales and low market share at that time gradually rose and ousted Dell as the number 1 brand in consumer electronics. How that became possible in the short span of 10 years or so is just intriguing.

One of the main reasons why Apple became successful in terms of profit and reputation is  through the excellent use of the Direct Business Model (DBM). Although not the first to sell directly to their customers, Apple has implemented the use of the DBM efficiently, hence leading to more profit due to the double margin effect.

Apple is also known for their immensely strong customer relationship. Having friendly and helpful Apple staff, along with the inclusion of AppleCare with the purchase of any Apple product, Apple has indeed given customers the ability to engage with the company directly, leading to a higher degree of trust and increased loyalty.

There is more to be said of Apple’s rise to fame, but unfortunately I have run out of words. However, if you are keen to know more, do read about Apple’s history and also, Apple is the new Dell to gain an insight of Apple’s achievement.

An interesting read of my classmate’s (Asfvin Pugunisparam) blog post intrigued me to research more about the brain drain drain problem facing my country, Malaysia. Currently, it seems that Malaysia is experiencing a major problem with brain drain and this condition is not expected to get better any time soon.

There are many factors that could have resulted to this, mainly, having a better standard of living. As the statistics show, 76% of Malaysians who sought their future overseas was a result of them being able to have better career prospects. Better career prospects include having higher salaries, job advancements and even higher job satisfaction.

This is unsurprising nowadays as people seek to work for the companies which are able to provide them with good salaries as well as a satisfying job. When looking at the top 100 companies to work for rated by CNN, the companies sought after by employees possess a flexible organizational structure with a cohesive and dynamic workplace. Look at Zappos or Google for example, which incorporates work and play together during work hours. Not only is work done more productively, employee satisfaction is boosted along with their loyalty.

In the future, companies will want to work towards having that balance between work and fun as opposed to a traditional structure, which focuses only on the success of the company. People of today are more suited to work in the new environment as priorities and perspectives change. In order to tackle the brain drain issue in MaIaysia, this is definitely one of the factors that have to be looked at and implemented with immediate urgency.

Read more about the severe brain drain problem in Malaysia here.