The SS Journal

New Year is the time for celebration  of love, of family, of friendship and of life. Treasure and appreciate every magical moments in the past years. Look forward to 2016 and make every day even more magical. Have a happy and a memorable holiday! Stanley Suen

With mobile devices and digital camera, production cost and speed is no longer an obstacle for businesses to directly produce content of the campaign for their marketing. With social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and others, even the distribution of content comes much more cheaply and conveniently. Businesses can launch powerful campaign any time and do not have to rely on costly media production and costly advertising channels.  What's left for businesses to do is to produce good content for the campaign (or you can call it an advertisement). However, doing content for online marketing is not the same as doing advertising on TV. They are more like media editorial production of a media company. In the past, because of the high cost of limited airtime inventory for TV Ad, advertisements were squeezed into a 30 sec or even 10 sec video. The end result is, usually, not something nice to watch. However, with Internet's unlimited airtime and virtually free viral c

My last post on the Number 1 tips on gaining productivity was to just ACT now! It's the momentum of a series of small successes that sustain our energy, motivate our brain and propel us to success. Today I've stumble upon an article on medium.com "I How I Became My Own Boss By Side Hustling and Doing What I Love" which I cannot agreed more. Blogger Violeta wrote about how she started her business. Her key is to overcome fear and start doing something. I have extracted couple of quotes from the article. Fear is the single biggest reason behind people not starting things. And it can hold you prisoner for years. I became my own boss because I worked hard, saved my money, and just started something. Please this article here from blogger Violeta. Enjoy, have a good day!

Psychological Obstacle for Productivity There are many tips for productivity gain. Many of them are some kinds of task or prioritisation systems. These systems are usually designed to help us to improve on efficiency. However, I find that the productivity challenge for most of my friends and myself is more on the psychological side. The psychological challenge is mostly a matter of our nature to avoid pain and failure. Let's face it, we may make big promises to ourselves to force us to do better and get things done quicker but at the end many of us procrastinate and feel totally tired to move forward. It is because our smart brain see ahead of the daunting challenge of the complex task ahead of us and subconsciously telling our body to skip to do other things that we fee more comfortable or enjoyable to do. If your lacking of productivity is really a matter of psychological issue, then no system is going to help you cause you simple will not do anything. The No. 1 Tips on P

I was often commissioned to consult corporate clients on Social Media Strategies. My clients are traditional business executives who do not have time to "play" with the mobile phone and computer gadgets. Very often I get into a situation where client simply lacks the basic necessary knowledge to appreciate the power of the strategies based on technologies. I understand that these are all very busy C level executives who are too busy to use these seemingly gadgets and toys to their position. (I still have friends who brag about he needs his secretary to print out email for him to read.) So very often I have to use old world analogy to make them to associate to the new world social media strategies. Yes it is my job to help my client and I should be happy for this. But more often I felt frustrated about the fact that my clients basically resist to accept that they are not interested in the new technologies and they are making decision on empty foundation. It's more l

The global accounting firm EY has just announced in this summer (2015) that they will remove academic qualifications from its entry criteria for new hires. They found no evidence to the correlation between higher education and the future career success in their staff members. “Academic qualifications will still be taken into account and indeed remain an important consideration when assessing candidates as a whole, but will no longer act as a barrier to getting a foot in the door. “Our own internal research of over 400 graduates found that screening students based on academic performance alone was too blunt an approach to recruitment. It found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken. “Instead, the research shows that there are positive correlations between certain strengths and success in future professional qualifications. - EY's Press Release From the figur

Just read a very good article from FiveThirtyEightEconomics  about latest statistics on how Uber is doing vs. taxi in terms of pickups in central and lower Manhattan. They have done a good report based on figures sourced from the Taxi and Limousine Commission. The end result is that Uber is NOT adding pickups to the city of Manhattan but rather replacing taxi pickups in the period of Apr to Jun 2014 and Apr to Jun 2015. We all know that Uber is a new application of technologies in ordinary life creating a better services. To the existing taxi players this is definitely terrible development of technologies. However, taxi driver can still switch and jump ship to Uber camp. To us consumer, the real downside is where will be the challenge of regulation on assurance of safety and quality standard of the Uber cap such enforcement of car check up, insurances or the professionalism of the drivers. But I do believe that consumers are aware of the risk but the statistics show that they ar

Design is an important element for products and marketing these days. Yet communicating with designer can be a tough business and often we have no idea what they are talking about. If you look at this list of 50 terms and realize that you don't know what they are, you better do some study. Fortunately this article I have found provide an excellent explanation for us non-designer! Anyway, have fun and take a look at these terms and test yourself a little before you jump to peek at the answers. 01. Typography 02. Body Copy 03. Display Type 04. Hierarchy 05. Kerning 06. Leading 07. Tracking 08. X-Height 09. Ascender 10. Descenders 11. Orphans and Widows 12. Serif Typeface 13. Sans Serif Typeface 14. Script Typeface 15. Slab Serif Typeface 16. Legibility 17. Alignment 18. Pull Quote 19. Palette 20. Monochrome 21. Analogous 22. Complementary 23. Triadic 24. CMYK 25. RGB 26. Pantone (PMS) 27. Warm Colors 28. Cool Colors 29. Color Theory 30. Gradient 3

Social Media Strategies is a highly complex and sophisticated game. I classify social media platforms into 3 major types so I can help make my strategy clear and organized. My earlier post was inspired by an article from Ian C Rogers of why he unfollows his Instagram accounts. It reminds me of my earlier thoughts on how to pick my social media platforms in my old jobs. Couple of the major challenges of doing social media are that there are so many of them and your customer (followers) relationships is owned by the social media platform (like Facebook). Social media platforms are evolving everyday with new rules of game. We need to get ourselves update ALL THE TIME and it's very resource consuming task. And yes we can build millions of followers but they are still Twitter's or Facebook's member. So as a business we need to think carefully about converting into your own member. However, given the momentum and trend of how popular social media these days, it's hard

I unfollowed a few hundred people on Instagram this morning and Instagram blocked me. Not only do they not provide any tools to help you cull a better follower list they actually lock the feature if you unfollow too many in a short period. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of how people could get more value from their platform. - Ian C Rogers and his article here This is an interesting article from Ian C Rogers and his reasons and experiences with many social media network. I am much align with his views.

Medium.com CEO of Ev Williams has announced in his post yesterday 5 major new features. These new features are: New Apps New Editor Tool Mentions Publishing API Domains In addition to the 5 features, medium is launching a new logo (see the image above). 3 out of 5 moves in the announcement are strategic for Medium and they are redefining what Medium.com means to writers and readers: Mentions Publishing API Domains Allow me to elaborate more. Mentions – More and More Social! This is the same @mentions feature from Twitter. It is a key new social media in addition to its existing Follow feature. With @mentions, anyone can make reference to just about anyone and everyone like Twitter does. To many medium.com, this is a way to catch some other member’s attention. However, for those being “@mentioned”, it’s a way to build quantify their influential power and be able show to the world how often that they are being mentioned. @Mention further strengthen Medium

If you want to be productive, this is a very good article that sums them up rather nicely. These 7 things are indeed very things we need to stop doing, or manage them better, to become more productive in our life and work. If I may add to the topic, that these 7 things applies equally well to running business! Here are the 7 things you want to avoid: Stop working overtime and increase your productivity Don’t say “yes” too often Stop doing everything yourself and start letting people help you Stop being a perfectionist Stop doing repetitive tasks and start automating it Stop guessing and start backing up your decisions with data Stop working, and have do-nothing time Read the full article in Medium here .

We all know selecting the right words mean day and night difference, especially in the media, advertising and content marketing business. The study of the power of words date back decades ago with real life testing on copy writing in advertising. Digital marketing is no different from tradition marketing in terms of copy writing where we really need to A/B test every single words we write because they will make an impact on your campaign. This is a very good article from Buffer "The Big List of 189 Words That Convert: Write Copy That Gets Your Customer's Attention Every Time". Read Full Article Here .

One of the key issue with Twitter I found is that it's a "One-Thread-Tweets-All" overly simplified structure. For those who like to read categorized news, they will have to spend time finding the right kind of followers to obtain the right kind of news. I have always thought that if Twitter provides a more advance structure to let its huge user base to help "group" tweets up in standard categories, twitter would be far more "newsready" for new comers who don't know who to follow. I think "Moments" comes at the right time (if not should have been launched long time ago) and it's critical as Twitter's stock price is still on the downtrend as we speak. The news is covered by Mashable: Twitter's upcoming new feature, dubbed "Project Lightning," may be called "Moments" when it launches later this year. Periscope co-founder Kayvon Beykpour revealed the name of the feature, which is designed to curate li

Journalist Robert Scoble did an interesting article about why the Journalist and Celebrities like Twitter and Medium with 7 reasons. However, in light of Facebook's attack to Medium.com business with it's revamped Facebook Notes (see my earlier post about Facebook Notes here ), there is a huge challenge coming ahead of Twitter and Medium. Robert suggested 6 ways of how Twitter how to go against Facebook. Please read the full article here .

Pinterest announced this morning it’s expanding the reach of its “Buyable Pins” – meaning those pins that allow you to make purchases directly on Pinterest – to several more e-commerce platforms, including Bigcommerce, Magento, and IBM Commerce. The company previously supported Buyable Pins with Shopify and Demandware, when the feature first launched earlier this year. With the addition, Pinterest says that thousands of new merchants will be able to offer their products and services to Pinterest’s users. Techcrunch.com

The less developed the country, the more cost it takes to start business. And it costs 6 times more to start a business in India than in US.

Don't dream your life, live your dreams

Source There are nearly 1.4 billion Facebook users 47% of all Internet users are on Facebook 4.5 billion likes are generated daily Nearly 75% of Facebook’s revenue comes from mobile advertising Direct uploads of user videos to Facebook now exceed YouTube  

Source 3.01 Billion or 42% of 7.21 Billion world population are on internet 2.08 Billion or 29% of 7.21 Billion world population are active on social media 3.65 Billion or 51% of 7.21 Billion world population are unique mobile user 1.69 Billion or 23% of 7.21 Billion world population owns active mobile accounts

Source Action is the foundational key to all success. - Pablo Picasso

If you don't build your dream someone will hire you to help build theirs. - Tony Gaskins

You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.

When I was younger,  fresh out of University on the first month of my second job, I realized that the second job was not as good as the employer said to be. A voice deep inside told me that something was not right and the move to the second job was not a right one. While I wasn’t too happy about the job, a guy just called me up one day and said he wanted me to work for him and would like to meet me to discuss about the job opportunity. I was skeptical and I did not know that there was such a thing called “head hunting” back then. I thought every job was acquired by submit resume to some job advertisement on newspaper and I wasn’t sure if I should meet some stranger who just called me up on the phone. Anyway, I thought I was only on the first month of my job and I should stay put for a bit longer. Therefore I have politely rejected the guy’s telephone call. Anyway, on the second month on the job I realize that I had to move before the probation ends so I called the guy up. To cut the

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media network. I recall when I first discovered Pinterest in around 2010 (not sure if I recall the time correctly), there were so many Chinese ecommerce site revamp their look and feel to look alike Pinterest. A few years since then, Pinterest has received much success in attracting traffic . The highly product and image oriented design makes Pinterest one of the best digital media to drive product focus referral. And data from BI Intelligence shows much a lot of traffic from Pinterest in 2014. BI provided sample data from Etsy: BI Intelligence Report Traffic Source from Social Media When it comes to which social networks drive the most shoppers to e-commerce sites, Facebook is the clear leader; the social networking giant drove 67% of all socially referred e-commerce traffic last year, according to SimiliarWeb. However, when we look at where Etsy’s traffic comes from, we see that Pinterest is also a major referrer. Pintere

If you want something you never had, You have to do something you've never done.

I have changed my job functions and industry many times in my career. Actually almost every time I changed job, my role and industry background changed as well. A few days ago, a confused friend asked me he couldn't think of what to write on his CV where he is applying for a job he has no experiences or relevant industry background. Here are my experiences in writing my "CV" when I applied for new job: 1) Your Proposal, NOT CV. Cover Letter is probably more important than CV. Why? Cover letter let you write with style, sincerely and, most importantly, focus on the few main points that can help you to stand out! 2) Your Deliverables, even if you are new. Make immediate promise of what you can achieve for the potential employers in your cover letter. It would be best if you can quote some kind of numbers such as "number 1 market share in 3 years" or "double digit growth for next 5 years" and so forth! This is a very huge challenge to yourselves'

As an online media site operator, my team promote our website articles to our Facebook Page everyday, post by post. The Facebook Page has became an important distribution channel of our website. To get even more result, we buy ad from Facebook to boost post performance. I place these ad everyday by myself. The reason why I do so instead of delegating the task to other is due to the needs to mind and discover the good performing article which then feed back to our editorial team. Also, the physical work of placing an ad only takes like 10 minutes per day but the analytical process of picking the right article to be promoted will take much longer time. As management I want to gain as much insight for decision on what contents are welcome by the market and how we should promote these content. Through the review of our Facebook Page post viral performance as well as advertising promotion performance, I can tell what type of articles are good for sharing and other are good for click th

One thing about being in the IT and Digital Marketing industry is that I am constantly learning, thinking, innovating and "strategizing" for business. There are trillions of new and exciting things to come all the time and it seems my mind is never really at rest. I think this is why I have burned my hair away significantly. I often joke about it that I myself is evolving from cat-5 cable to wifi connected! (sadly laughing at myself in the mirror). Anyway, it is far too often that I cannot sleep at night. So I try to mediate to help my mind to slow down. However, for a guy like me, when I close my eyes, I have tons of ideas that burst out from within that meditation actually create more wishes or projects that I want to do compulsively. With these crazy things happening in my mind, I increasingly force myself to relax during meditation. It's helpless with a personality like mine! However, I've discovered that the solution to a better, more focus and qualitatively

It is not uncommon that we have seen marketer just post their print ad or TV ad on social media and gets no traffic or viral effect at all. In some cases, they get a lot of embarrassing negative comments that everybody can see. In some worst case, the poor Ad or content get copied and posted on forum or other social channels which get to be a second life as a laughing stock. Such poor performance comes from copy and pasting traditional marketing and promotion strategies onto the new internet and social media platform. Internet and Social Media based platforms are very different and the consumer behaviors are very different from traditional media. If the marketers are not careful and they just mindlessly copy and paste they (or other) have done in the past (on traditional channels) and paste it on social media channel, the campaigns are destine to fail. It's not like that they are lazy or not thinking but they first have to be aware of the issues before they have a solution. Many

Infinite Number Of  Video Channels Internet is meant for Interactive MultiMedia. It's not a surprise to see the incredible widespread of Online TV everywhere we go. The entry barrier of producing a video is as cheap as your mobile phone and may be even as small as your SmartWatch. On the other hand hosting your video is free on YouTube, Vimeo and other Online Video site. Even the software needed to create your own private video site are available basically for free via open source software. Everyone will be able to a video production and a online video channel company. With bandwidth and storage cost increasing cheaper and available, we can only see that more and more online videos websites will pop up around the world. If you are in the space of social media marketing, you may be aware that there are more and more Loyalty Free media readily to be search and re-use in your video production. Just search "Creative Common" on Youtube or even on your google search e

This is an interesting chart where we see the "trendy programming language" to learn. A few years ago when I as starting my online media site, my technical partners were all very eager to discuss what development tools they were going to used. At one point everybody was talking about Python and a few developers were suggesting Ruby. After a few months, Node.js were mentioned more and more.  I eventually used the same old Content Management System (Drupal based on PHP) to build the site and override my developers' suggestion to learn a new language (Python) and develop a commercial site instead.  My business is in Hong Kong and the supplies of technical talents in the latest and greatest programming language and framework is simply not as great as in US silicon valley. I believe my decision was correct and we were able to launch the site early enough (just to say it nicely). As a ex-programmer, while I have the tendency to learn the latest and great programming languag

Just read an  article from TechCrunch.com regarding Facebook is revamping its Notes feature and getting ready to take on the Blogging business taking. The new look highly resemblances the medium.com, which is much more classy and elegant then the traditional look and feel with a heavy ugly looking sidebar.  The feature is being tested and not yet open to public. However, you can take a look at this sample page: Facebook has been, and still is, a great platform for sharing content and driving traffic to your website. However, with the newly revamped Notes, I am anticipating that Facebook wants you to move (or at least copy) your content from your website onto Facebook instead of on your own site. In May 2015, Facebook also announced a partnership with nine content companies such as BuzzFeed, New Your Times, NBC News and others. This is a clear indication that Facebook wants content on its platform and not want to redirect its traffic to outside of Facebook. While the May partn

Check out Twitter's Post Here . If you’ve checked your Direct Messages today, you may have noticed that something’s missing: the limitation of 140 characters. You can now chat on (and on) in a single Direct Message, and likely still have some characters left over. Just heard from Twitter that they are lifting the 140 characters limit in their direct messaging. I believe it's a big move for Twitter to make a come back to compete with Whatsapp, Facebook Messaging and Google Hangout. It's something that they should have done a long long time ago.  I am eager to try it on my own Android App and Twitter.com web account. Sadly the 140 characters limit is still there. I guess I have to wait a bit as they did mention that they are rolling it out in a few weeks time frame. We’ll begin rolling out this change today across our  Android  and  iOS  apps, on  twitter.com , TweetDeck , and  Twitter for Mac . It will continue to roll out worldwide over the next few weeks.