HBO Asia is about to launch it's Golden Globe award-winning series, True Blood, in Singapore on 9 April 2009 on Max (previously Cinemax). Last night HBO Asia hosted a blogger event to preview the show at Ink Club Bar, Fairmont. HBO Asia has been actively engaging the social media and it appears that they're getting better at it. Apart from an evening with local bloggers, the company has a great microsite with heaps of incentives and even a Street Fighter-style game called Fang Fighter. They've put good effort into this campaign and spared no detail. The site has an active blog, loads of info on cast and the show, viral elements like prizes and tell-a-friend mechanisms, and even wallpaper downloads and buddy icons. I thought the buddy icons were a nice touch since every profile from IM to Twitter could do with a funky 96px image, the exact community they're trying to reach out to. The blogger event was simple but well executed with a great theme. Everything was red, of course, and we were even served with a "True Blood" cocktail which we ended up learning to make. OK, I kinda failed at making it. But the door gifts were nicely inline with the theme which was a lovely touch.
Freebies for us bloggers: Comes with a mixer, t-shirt, calender, CD of photos, and the mug I won at the event.
I think my friends at HBO Asia have done a great job. Previously they engaged the social media with a campaign for Flight Of The Conchords.

I feel that it is especially helpful if your product's webpage has a single paragraph, no longer than 1,000 characters, describing the product. Not only is it helpful and simple for a new customer to find out about your product, it fits perfectly in Delicious's notes. I do a lot of bookmarking and I'm really lazy. More often than not, I'll copy a chunk of text from the site I'm bookmarking for the Notes box instead of writing my own. This gives me and my readers instant appreciation of the newly bookmarked product. Here are two lovely examples of product sites that have got this spot on:
Boxee has a 233 character Delicious paragraph

Drop.io has a 231 character Delicious paragraph
This is how it fits in Delicious: Having your site bookmarked on Delicious is important. Having it appreciated by those sharing it is priceless.

I'm going to be upfront here. I love Dropbox so much, I want more disk space on my account. If you sign up using my referral code, both you and I get an additional 250MB added to the 2GB default disk space. Dropbox is free by the way. With my greedy ambition out of the way, here's why I'm totally sold on Dropbox. Its concept is simple: You get a folder called Dropbox and whatever you files you throw in it gets encrypted and incrementally synced over your Internet connection to their servers and your other computers. In other words the document I'm working on right now gets synced to my colleagues, can be downloaded from the web, and is replicated on my other computers the very moment I hit the Save button. Yes, when you hit Save. Not at the end of the day, not on some ridiculous schedule in the wee hours of the morning. Immediately when you hit save. It's backup, sharing, collaboration all rolled into one amazing free package. The world's simplest backup Backup has always been one of my biggest dissatisfaction with modern computing. I've tried everything from RAID hard disks and rsync, to Apple's Time Machine and Carbonite. None of these beat Dropbox. Dropbox sits quietly in the background doing all the hard work for you. No prompts, no reminders, just quietly syncing all my files. Today, I don't use a Documents folder, I have everything in my Dropbox folder. This way, the moment I save my work it's well synced to the cloud. Perfect. No more attachments The other thing I'm beginning to like about Dropbox is how it's putting an end to attachments. I often meet new clients who want our slides, or case studies and instead of attaching a new copy to every single client, I give them a link to my file on Dropbox. While Dropbox keeps all my files secure and private, it allows me to keep a Public folder which is open to everyone. Every file in this Public folder is given a unique URL from which others can download from. The concept here is very similar to what can be achieved on YouSendIt and Box.net, but since I'm already on Dropbox, it makes it all the more seamless. Putting your mind at ease Using Dropbox is like using Gmail I feel. It puts your mind at ease knowing that you'll always be able to access your files from the cloud. Dropbox is only free with up to 2GB of space, which is enough for me now, but a 50GB account only costs $99/year which I'm inclined to get when I'm out of space. Try it, I'm almost sure you'll like it as much as I do. If you do, I'll appreciate you using my referral code so we both get a little more of this wonderful service. (While this post sounds amazingly positive, I swear that no form of compensation was given to me. I'm just a very happy fan.)

I spent my day checking my own sites to get other people's content.

• I log into Twitter to check about 200 other people's Tweets
• I log into Facebook to check about 400 friend's updates
• I log into Google Reader to read about 160 websites and blogs
• etc...

If your site can't be plugged into another, you're missing out on a growing trend.

Apparently, for me (in Singapore) to reach this blog, the data has to travel approximately 13,878 miles across two major continents. Starting with my local ISP, it hope over to Lake Mary, FL in the Southeast of USA, then travels over land to Los Angeles, CA on the West coast before making its final stop in Dallas, TX in the middle of the country. How I wish it was I who travelled and not the data. That would be quite a fun trip don't you think? =) Try mapping your trace route here.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xVsYc-y7IY] Last week this video clip (above) from the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC calling global PR consultancy Burson-Marsteller (BM) "the PR firm from hell" did its rounds across the Internet. According to the video, BM was hired by AIG, who has taken government bailouts, to spruce up its corporate image. The producers of the show dug up lots of history about the firm and eluded to the fact that BM was an expert on covering up "evil". Clearly this is bad for any company, let alone a PR firm specialising in corporate image protection. When that video passed by me, I thought that was it. The damage was done and it's time to pick up the pieces. But amazingly, round two (below) is currently making its rounds, with the help of YouTube, simply because BM's CEO accused Rachel of getting her facts wrong. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iilO6QeNIXk] This PR fiasco made me realise that the social web truly empowers the media. Before the days of YouTube, it would be very unlikely that we in Asia would get to watch a clip like this and thus would not have a negative perception of the global firm. The Internet brings every story of bad reputation within a click from anyone. PR Watch is a good example of what's been going wrong in the world of PR.

What I want to know is who convinved the CEO? If you visit skittles.com today, you'll notice that there's not much of a Skittles site save a floating widget. The rest of the site points directly to Twitter's raw search results of "skittles". This publicity stunt is amazingly daring and has definitely got a lot of people talking about it. But from the tweets I've seen, people are talking about the marketing stunt more than the brand and its products. What's also interesting is that people have been generally nice about this without anyone abusing the situation to deliberately bash Skittles. Maybe Skittles was confident enough to embark on such a daring endevour because it doesn't really have haters. It could have become a Chevy Tahoe incident if they did. I'd like to see more brands be this open. It's refreshing and exciting. And now I want to eat Skittles.

I've realised that most of my daily necessities exist and reside in the cloud. My Email - Gmail hosts my personal and work emails. Yahoo is my backup. My Documents - I used to have a Documents folder where I keep all my work, but now that folder is replaced by one called Dropbox. Dropbox syncs all my documents to the cloud and across all my computers. My Contacts - All my contacts exist on my Gmail account. Ever since they've turned on Exchange sync for the iPhone, there's no more storing of contacts locally. My Calendar - I use Google Calendars. Syncs with the iPhone over Exchange too, so goodbye iCal. My IM - In the past, you used to export the files that contain your buddy list when you setup your IM client on another computer. Now you just login and everyone appears. My buddy lists live happily in the cloud. My Social Networks - I use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all the time. Nuff said. My Photos - All on Flickr. My Blog - I used to get my own server, install my own CMS, and update my blog from there. Now I've pointed my domain to Wordpress.com's DNS servers and it's hassle-free hosting. Sure there are limitations, but I prefer blogging to coding and system administration. But there are still things not on the cloud that could possibly be: My CRM system - I use SugarCRM on my own server because it's free. Maybe one day I'll shift over to the likes of Salesforce.com when it makes sense and the cloud's still trusted. My Office Suite - This one is half on the cloud. While I love Google Docs for sharing and collaboration, I won't be giving up Microsoft Office any time soon. I'm happy for my documents to live online, but doing complex pivot tables through AJAX on a browser is something I'm not yet ready to move to. My Creative Suite - Photoshop.com is definitely a good start, but processor intensive creative apps like Photoshop and Illustrator prefer the raw power of my dual-core to bandwidth for now. Thinking about it, I'm actually quite happy about this arrangement with the cloud. While the cloud is just another bunch of computers, at least its a bunch. The chances of my single computer crashing on me is a whole lot higher and I'm certainly not keen on losing protions of my personal and professional life to a coffee spill.