Creative Commons: Create The world of Sharing

What is Creative Commons?

Creative commons is an international nonprofit organization, working to create and encourage people to share their creative work, which includes text, story, image, video, sound, etc; Free of charge!

How does Creative Commons work?
Basically, Creative Common will provide creators Creative Commons licenses (CC) for their work. Creators can decide the level of copyrights for their work from 'All rights reserved' to 'No rights reserved'.

Some rights reserved
The concept of some rights reserved allows creators to share their valuable work to other people while having their works partially protected under copyrights law.

Get a CC license and start sharing!
Go to: http://creativecommons.org/choose/
You just need to answer few questions that will specify your level of rights reserved. Then copy HTML code to your site, so your visitors can see CC icon and click it to learn more about what licenses apply to your work. It's easy!

Experiment of CC licenses
The below icon and text is what you get from applying CC licenses, and embedded the code into your site.

Title of work by (write 'Attribute work to name' here) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at (write 'Source work URL' here).
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at (write 'More permission URL' here).

Short Thought on Creative Commons
Creative Commons is truely one of the parts that make our world better. I never heard about Creative Commons before; also I didn't get what it is when the prof. mentioned it in the lecture. First, I visited the site because it is mentioned to be a place to get free pictures, just that! Then I found out later that it is something much more than that! I'm so impressed, really want to explore other creative work, collect some ideas to create my own, then share them to the world!


Link
There are several interesting video about Creative Commons
1. http://creativecommons.org/about/what-is-cc
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_commons
3. You can find a lot more in Youtube

IBM's social computing guidelines

Source: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/07/top_brands/source/3.htm

One of the interesting topics this week is corporate social media policy. The number of people participates in online communities, such as blogging, virtual world, and social media, are increasing every day, and chances are, of course, your employees are the ones who are active in online communities. One of the controversial issue is how should business deal with this growing communication technology. IBM is one of the company that has a written policy about how should its employees, called IBMers, comment about IBM in their blog, social media page, and other online communities.

The list below is IBM's 12 concise social computing guidelines:
[http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html]

IBM Social Computing Guidelines: Executive Summary

1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. IBMers are personally responsible for the content they publish on blogs, wikis or any other form of user-generated media. Be mindful that what you publish will be public for a long time—protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself—name and, when relevant, role at IBM—when you discuss IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
4. If you publish content to any website outside of IBM and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: "The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don't provide IBM's or another's confidential or other proprietary information. Ask permission to publish or report on conversations that are meant to be private or internal to IBM.
7. Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval. When you do make a reference, where possible link back to the source.
8. Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, or engage in any conduct that would not be acceptable in IBM's workplace. You should also show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory—such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging or publishing on the topic, and cite them.
10. Be aware of your association with IBM in online social networks. If you identify yourself as an IBMer, ensure your profile and related content is consistent with how you wish to present yourself with colleagues and clients.
11. Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
12. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective. IBM's brand is best represented by its people and what you publish may reflect on IBM's brand.

Source: http://www.fredcavazza.net/2008/06/09/social-media-landscape/

In my opinion, there are three main points about this policy.

The first point is about IBM business conduct policy. from my understanding, the guideline emphasizes that IBMers should follow general policy even in online community; for example, employees should not publish customers-related contents without customers' approval, or they should not discuss about confidential information, such as financial report or IBM's future plan wheher in real-world or online community.

Second, it suggests the best practices of how should people write a blog or make a comment in the internet. People should act under laws, respect other people beliefs and differences, avoid commenting on political and religious topics, be the first to collect their own mistakes, use proper references, etc.

The third and most interesting thing of this policy is that IBM communicates trust to its employees. It states that employees should use their best judgement of what should and should do. And, surprisigly, the company also encourages its employees to identify themselves as IBM employees in thier blog and other social sites. I personally think that it might help remind an employee to act properly online if he identifies himself as the company's employee, but, on the other hand, the fact that IBM emphasizes this identification issue first is what I consider a powerful way of communicating trust to employees.




Link
IBM's Social Computing Guidelines
http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

Thailand's interesting mobile marketing

In Thailand, mobile marketing is one of the new marketing venue that has been growing rapidly in the previous years. Although the competition is much less severe compared to the US and Japan, where mobile phone has a high speed internet connection, many Thai businesses are aware of the new potential of mobile phone in Thailand. For example, many websites have developed their mobile version.

What I think is interesting is the promotion AIS (Advance info service), a phone service provider, offer to its customers. In 2008, AIS starts its new promotion giving customers discount at various locations, including boat fare discount, free pie at Burger King, 20% off at restaurants. What customers need to do to get the discount is typing some code to receive a discount message then show it at ticket counter. For example, customers can call "545646#" to receive a discount message then show it to the cashier counter to receive a free pie at Burger King.


Another example (see the picture below) is a free movie ticket opportunity in which AIS users need only call '*175#' to join the promotion.



Traditionally, for most Thai businesses, customers will have to use a 'real' paper coupon to get some discount at participated stores. I personally think that AIS's promotion is really easy-to-use and effective for many reasons. First, customers don't have to bring solid coupon everywhere they go. Second, I bet this kind of campaign is cheap. Think about it, AIS uses its own network to provide discount message; also it doesn't have to promote all the discount. What AIS does is only put a small poster at participated stores, telling what code should be use. Third, it's fast; it required only 3 seconds to end the buying process. Forth, I would say the promotion boosts AIS's brand awareness and recall, since every counter at participated stores is AIS branded.

I myself have experience using this promotion as well. Although the discount or advantage of the promotion is just small things, such as 10 baht discount for boat transportation fee (might equals only 25 US cents), I personally think that sometimes this little thing is really a big deal.


Link
-AIS current promotion details.

http://www.roaming.ais.co.th/privileges_1.html

3 Reasons why ads fail & how to improve it

One of the most interesting topic I learnt from MKT595 week6 is internet advertising. The topic reminds me of what I think about advertising. There are studies about shrinking advertising market all over the place, and many people have been finding ways to make their advertisements work effectively to generate sales; of course, many of them yet get the answer. I personally think that there are too many advertisements in forms of TV commercial, poster, full-page in magazines, ad banner on webpage, you name it; consider the number of ads, it is natural why consumers want to avoid it as much as possible.

In the article “why advertising is failing on the internet”, Eric Clemons, a professor at The Wharton school of university of Pennsylvania, describes that advertising fails because of three reasons; Consumers don’t trust ads, don’t want to view ads, and don’t need ads. He says that researches show that ad banner has the least creditability; people almost always do something else while ads are on-air; and he cites his own research to confirm that people don’t need information from ads but rather they go to professional websites that give them reliable information. The author that these three problems (don’t trust, don’t want, and don’t need) will occur in every means of advertising; thus, to fix these problems is not about to find new mediums but rather create messages that are relevant to people.

Another interesting part in his article is when Clemons mentions that “…simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail. It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information. We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising. We will find out what we need to know, when we want to make a commercial transaction of any kind.”


I personally can’t agree more with Clemons’ idea, though, I’m a little bit disappointed that he didn’t give a solid solution of how internet business who depends its revenue heavily on advertising will survive. So I come up with my own suggestion of what internet business could do to survive in shrinking internet ads environment:

1. Be relevance. Fundamentally, like what many internet marketers said, advertisements have to match with content of the particular websites.
2. Minimize advertisement space on their webpage, maintaining only those that are in relevant and outstanding positions on the page, in order to make viewer feel less annoyed. My theory is that if we can restrict the number of ads to one or two per webpage, viewers will be less annoyed and don’t need to use ad-blocking technology.
3. Restrict the number of advertisers in the websites. One of my hypothesis of why internet banner is not effective is that web visitors are bombarded with TOO many brands, so they are overloaded with information and possibly cannot remember even one of the ads. Thus, if we can restrict the number of brands appear in a site, reducing information and competition among ads, it will help generate more brand awareness or so forth for each ad.
4. If the suggestions above work well, website should measure the success rate, such as click-through rate, click-to-buy rate, and click-to-call rate, and use these information to charge more on advertising in their websites. Basically, sites will focus on few ads to boost their response rate and charge higher price for limited space rather than, what they are doing now, minimizing ad pricing to maximize the number of ad which we all know that it generates a very low response rate.



Link:
1. Why advertising is failing on the internet by Eric Clemons http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/
2. 1st picture from http://i.ehow.com/images/GlobalPhoto/Articles/4481740/internetadvertising-main_Full.jpg
3. 2nd picture from http://images01.tzimg.com/cache/h3w4/500_1187720922_219626_8890.jpg

Google Keywords tool

There are many interesting things I learn from my internet marketing class this week. Usually free useful application is what I'm interested, so "Google Keywords Tools" somewhat capture my attention.

First, I find a VDO on Youtube about the tool from ClaudePelanne [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpEw_npG3qQ&feature=related] which is interesting and easy to understand. Then I go to the site [www.google.com/sktool] and try it myself. Since I have a friend in Thailand who wants to start selling an accounting software for small business online and the Google keyword tool is capable for Thai lanuage (Wow!), I choose "โปรแกรม บัญชี" (which is "Accounting program" in English) to be a keyword for my first try. I found quite a couple different words that people uses when searching for accounting program. I record those words since they might be useful to for boost my friend ranking on search engine sites.
What I do next is click the word "accounting program" and choose to see the data between 2004 and present. The tool shows me the trend of this keyword "โปรแกรม บัญชี" which is kind of scary since the curve is falling.

Since Google keyword tool also has a list of popular keywords, my second query is "โหลด โปรแกรม บัญชี" (which is "download accounting program"). The curve surprises me with its climbing up trend.
Some takeaways from my Google Keywords tool exploration is that:
1. It provides you a set of popular keywords you could use to create your content or website to boost your search engine ranking.
2. It provides you partial view of industry. For example, the climbing trend of keyword "download accounting program" could imply that online software market is growing.
3. The tool has options that you can choose to restrict data to only some regions/areas or a certain period of time. In this case, I restrict the search to only Thailand.
4. It estimates the cost of Google Adwords for each set of keywords, so if you want to do some Adwords you can get an idea of how much it will cost.

Site Search Engine

How search engine, like Google, work is what I learn from my class this week. On the outside-in, it is important to know how to bring your website to the top rank of search engine. However, on the inside-out, another thing you need to consider is how your users or customers find something within your website.

Site search engine helps your customers find what they want within your websites. Basically, it is a search engine that works specifically on your websites. Think about when you looking for a marketing class on Depaul’s website and don’t know where to start; there you go to the search box on the top right of the screen and type “marketing class winter 2010”. Then all the pages about marketing class in winter 2010 are brought to the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).

I think most medium and all large companies in the States has this site SE runs on their website, but what about small business and companies in other countries. After I have looked for some site SE companies, I found some site SE that you can install for free in some websites. The other companies, such as Google site search, Picosearch.com, coveo.com, wrensoft.com, offer their basic version for a price range of $100-$200 per year.




I personally suggest small company to utilize site search engine and will convince my uncle to do the same on our website.



Note: Of course, you can learn more about site search engine by using Google and Youtube.

Social media as a mean to build reputation

Social media is the topic that really catches my interests in MKT595 week 2 class. The discussion on how businesses use social media to promote their brands recalls me of news about Hollywood celebrities started using Twitter as a mean to communicate their activities to fan. Nowaday it is quite usual for famous persons to use Twitter or Facebook to tell their fans about what they are doing or thinking. Thinking about this, it would be interesting to share story about social media trend in Thailand.

In Thailand, though the majority of Thais do not actively participate in social media, many people have started using them rightnow. In political field, Abhisit Vejajiva, prime minister of Thailand, is currently using facebook and have around 40,000 followers. The ministry use Facebook as a mean to communicate the prime minister's activities and build supports. Also, the number of supporters or "like" could be the popularity indicators among new generation.

In entertainment field, I have already become a fan of a Thai comedian DJ, which now she has about 20,000 fans. Also, a friend of mine, who just released her first band album last year, created her band's Facebook page quite a couple years ago and used it as a mean to post her concert videos and tell people about where and when will be the next concert.

As I started searching famous people's name, I found their page on Facebook, though I never see Thai brands on any social media sites. I don't have knowledge about how much it cost to start a page on social media or create an application that has a brand merged in it. Compare Thai market to Western market, I would expect Thai companies that particularly target at youngster will do something more than pasting banner in social media sites within 2011.