Benjamin Koe

Apple's Red Friday deals are better in Malaysia

If you're in Singapore and looking to get an Apple product from today's one-day only sale on selected items, I'd suggest if you have friends or relatives in Malaysia, to try there instead. They have the exact same sale, only cheaper!

For example, the 13" MacBook Air on the Singapore store is now S$1,808 (was S$1948). Not a bad discount. But in Malaysia, it's RM3,968. That's S$1,671 for a 13" MacBook Air!

Happy shopping!

Singapore Sports Council tries social media contest for new cheer

via singaporesports.sg

I just found out that there's a contest going on about a new Singapore cheer (following the JJ Lin one) called Go! Go! Singapore by the band Juz-B.

What SSC wants is for the public to create a music video for the cheer (Listen to MP3) and upload it to YouTube before 16 October 2010. I'm actually curious to see what entries they'll get.

Internship available at JamiQ

Jamiq_logo_libero

My company JamiQ creates software that helps organizations monitor the social media.

JamiQ is offering a 10-week structured internship program. We are seeking two (2) social media-savvy, measurement-oriented interns who enjoy working and learning in a startup environment. Positions are available from 26 July 2010 onwards.

You will construct regular analysis of a brand's reputation on the Internet. Depending on your aptitude and interest, you may be involved in other aspects of the startup. You will learn about the business of public relations, advertising, marketing, social media, and data processing technologies.

Interns will dedicate half of their internship time in the design, pitch and the full implementation of one research or marketing project. You may also additionally participate in existing research projects with leading universities in Singapore.

JamiQ is a social media monitoring company based in Singapore led by a team of entrepreneurs, public relation consultants, media buying professionals and developers. For even more information, see other job postings and research.

In addition, you get:
  • Above Average or Performance-Based Internship Pay
  • Design Your Own Research or Marketing Project
  • Central Business District Office Location
  • Startup Environment
  • Two (2) Positions Available from 26 July
  • Work with Awesome People
To apply, send in your resume to jobs@jamiq.com as soon as possible. For more information, please call Kelvin Quee at +65 9177 3635.

ION Orchard on par with Takashimaya in Singapore searches

Chart_singapore

Taking Takashimaya as a benchmark being one of the most popular shopping malls (actually it's the name of the departmental store in the Ngee Ann City Mall), the newly built ION Orchard has done well to create a significant spike and maintain its trend close to Takashimaya which has had many years to prove itself.

Chart and data was taken from Google's 2009 Zeitgeist which is always fun to look at.

Kozak's sexy (and funny) local online campaign

via youtube.com

This is both funny and effective. If you are Singaporean, you'll definitely appreciate it. At first glance I thought it was just a local vendor trying too hard. But on hindsight, it looks like it was well researched. He clearly wanted to reach a local car-owning male audience, and there's nothing better than a sexy girl washing a car.

What's also interesting is that this video would never make it on to local TV as a commercial, but on YouTube, it's a hit!

SGnews

I was inspired by the use of Twitter by news agencies such as CNN, BBC, and even our local ChannelNews Asia and wanted to take this innovative usage to the next level by adding multiple sources of Singapore news in a single Twitter stream.

Since there wasn’t a consolidated Twitter stream of Singapore news, I decided to create http://twitter.com/sgnews with the help of TwitterFeed and a collection of the best RSS-able Singapore news sources.

How it works:

  1. I collected a good bunch of RSS feeds from The Straits Times, ChannelNews Asia, The Business Times, TODAY, Tomorrow.sg, and Topix.
  2. I put this pump these RSS feeds into TwitterFeed which automatically and periodically updates http://twitter.com/sgnews with a nice clean stream of the most current news.
  3. Each news story's webpage is shortened and tracked with SnipURL.
  4. Users can follow http://twitter.com/sgnews to get the most up-to-date news on Singapore from the best local sources.

I created SGnews as a personal tool to get the news I wanted, but if you like it and find it helpful too, feel free to Follow SGnews on Twitter. Also, if you believe there are other good feeds to add, do let me know in the comments.

Have fun and tell your friends!

(This is a repost of my original, but since I've moved blog, I thought I'd recreate it here so users of SGnews can have an understanding of this project)

The Blogathon's success

Bthonsucks

To have trolls come out and attack a marketing gig is a clear sign that it's being noticed. Having worked in PR, I've seen my fair share of campaigns and to have such a troll is rare. If you told any other agency that you have to do a campaign with Tangs, Lenovo, and Intel with bloggers in Singapore, I wonder what they'd come up with. I admire Ogilvy for making this happen because it's an experiment. Did it improve sales for any of the clients? Probably not. Did it get noticed, most definitely.

This seems to be a mindset found in advertising. Examples such as Cadbury Gorilla are totally out of the norm and didn't make any impact on sales really, but it did get noticed. It is refreshing to see creativity pumped into the PR industry.