Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

 Since this is my first article post on this community, I'll give a short introduction about myself. My name is Duncan Leung, and I am the Social Media Marketing Manager/PR Manager for the Beijing branch of MeshTop - there's actually more to my story in how I joined the MeshTop team as their Social Media Marketing Manager (I originally joined the SagesGroup company as a Search Marketing Analyst intern with adSage) but you can read more about that on my blog.

Everyone in digital marketing seems to be an expert in Social Media Marketing (SMM). Digital Marketing professionals are generally telling the clients, "You can’t afford not to be doing social media.  You can’t simply dismiss Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn as fads".

But is this really true? Are we (as digital marketers) overestimating the  importance of this channel? Does SMM  complement your traditional media efforts or is it a new replacement for them?

How long do you think it will be before FanFou (饭否), TaoTao(滔滔),  Jiwai (叽歪),  Komoo or  Zuosa (做啥) introduce a geo location API to their platform?

I am guessing that at least one of these Chinese micro-blogging platforms will announce within a month… but this is pure spectulation. Why? Because their Western inspired product, Twitter has just come out with such functionality. Although most of these Chinese micro-blogging platforms remain blocked, the internal development is still being undertaken. So this prediction is premised on the Chinese Government unblocking the sites and these products starting to be used once again.

It will allow people to switch from tracking messages based on individuals or topics to following by neighborhood,  city or country… this will have some interesting ramification and will now doubt be useful for some marketers wanting to promote more on a location basis.  Take for example, the marketing needs of coffee shops chains…. research suggests that people make up their mind for a coffee and decide on a location within 200m of a coffee shop… so innovative social media marketers using twitter to micro target based on a latitude and longitude will certainly be able to leverage this buying dynamic and influence purchasing decisions.

Currently, Twitter is developing an API that will allow third-party platforms like Tweetdeck and Tweetie to indentify users’ latitude and longitude. Eventually it will be an opt-in option on Twitter itself.

With  geo location features the natural extension is geo targeted ads…. a powerful feature for marketers.  However, given the rapid uptick in Twitter spam I think this is a proxy for general agreement for the potential for influencing potential prospects. But this huge increase in twitter spam needs some moderation and I would hope that our Chinese counterparts can recognize this and also include spam filtering and auto filtering technology to improve the online experiences of the Chinese micro blogging platforms. The risk is micro-blogging spam will create the resentment we saw (and backlash) as in the eDM domain.

I just recently heard about a new internet browser, alternative to Internet Explorer, Firefox etc.. called Flock which I’ve been playing with for the last few days. Here’s my opinion of it.

Flock, powered by Mozilla, is labeled a “Social Web Browser” due to its ability to incorporate multiple popular Social Networking sites within one interface.

Firstly, It was easy to download the browser. It determined I was using a Mac and allowed me to simply download the file. At home on my PC it was equally easy to download the exe. It seems to support a large number of languages, importantly for me Chinese and English was covered.

So as well as doing all the usual things a browser should do such as browsing, searching, bookmarking, etc.. it also lets you interact with your social networks without having to go to multiple sites, login etc..  While Flock does include most of the standard features it doesn’t have parental controls, a smart toolbar, or at a glance security.

Flock has plenty of tools built in to help you if you want to share photos, news, or simply your life story. Plus you can easily drag and drop to share videos, text, or favorite links (however not so many extension’s yet)

Flock has a Blog Editor which can handle most of the main Blogging platforms including, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal and self hosted Wordpress. I have yet to use this feature but seems fairly easy to setup and use. Appears to support multiple blog accounts. The biggest problem here was that many of these sites are currently blocked within China and reduces the advantage to integrated predominately Western social networking sites.

The Social Networking tabs are conveniently and tidily located in the sidebar and your logins are remembered once you visit the sites and login. You can view and update yours and your friends statuses on all the sites directly from the browser as well as upload photos using the dedicated Photo Uploader application which allows for resizing, rotation and tagging.

RSS feeds are supported by default but there’s also a Feed Reader built in.

There’s a Media bar also which shows media streams at the top of the screen from various sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Bebo and Photobucket, Delicious, Facebook Chat and Gmail

There’s a very cool Web Clipboard which can take multiple content/pastes from various sites including both text and images and make them available for use later. The sidebar is very useful but it’s hard to be deep with every feature set such as the RSS feature and the Twitter integration.

Where I think Flock falls down is in it’s resource footprint, it seems to be a little slower to me in comparison to Firefox. I suggest that if you want just a simply, fast performance and don’t care about all the other stuff then Google’s Crome maybe better suited. However, if you are China based you will find most sns and blogging tools blocked and therefore Flock will be less attractive. However, if you are anywhere else and want a single tool for all your Web 2.0 needs you can probably save some time with Flock but you suspect that you will need some extensions to make it meet all your needs. There does not seem so many themes or extensions yet but I am sure that this will change quickly.

Check it out at www.flock.com