Azrin's Info Web

One of the major mistakes is to entask the wrong type of agency to handle your advertising needs like if you always deal with say Satchi & Satchi for your billboard advertising and print media which they are especially good and creative at what they do, don’t normally do a brilliant job at penetrating the New Age Media such as Blogs, Websites, Google Adsense or even those text messaging means and from my own experience in the field, they sub contract the job to another agency which does good at that medium but do not understand the need and locale restrictions of the business involved due to non disclosure agreements and such.

I am voted the worst blogger of all time outside the US for 3 years running by non conventional media ( Internet Based ) which my only competitor is only the likes of Perez Hilton and from my own experience in the media industry, having the wrong game plan cost dearly to the advertising budget.

Let’s just point into Electronic Means Advertising which covers the Internet, SMS – Text Messaging and E-Mails where there are over 1.5 billion users with nearly 3 billion having a cell phone. A very harsh way to blow your Google Adsense or Yahoo Ads budget is overbidding your keywords. Keywords are what weigh in the relevancy of the article or webpage to show the respective ads. Just like in this article, advertising keywords formed may be like Advertising which is not that expensive in normal times but if you add “Computers” “Web Hosting” and other hot keywords such as CHEAP, FREE and alike will drive up a standard bid from 20 cents to over $100 for webhosting where the Earnings Per Click or EPC is double or triple of the keyword bid. Major brands and events like thanksgiving will drive the cost higher and by placing the wrong sets and subsets of keywords will blow your $100,000 budget within a day!

Another mistake done is incorrect demographic mapping where you misplace your targets to the wrong zones, say if you only want California, specifically Los Angeles visitors for your Congress Election campaign but you fail to properly research the ISP and ZIP CODE GeoIP zoning will display all your ads all over the US or worst still, whole world and getting crappy traffic which are not converting.

Mass Mailing are a thing of the past and it will be gobbled up as fast as you send it out as fraud and heuristic programs built in place at mail servers will kill off and inform the other servers of your spam pattern. It is also ILLEGAL in many states and countries with criminal penalties of over BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in the case of a Facebook Spammer.

Going into the Print Edition, wrong type proofing, incorrect details and such costs money and reprints are time consuming and not to say more money especially due to a small error on a page of the magazine, you have to reprint the entire magazine which costs anything from US$1.20 onwards depending on your quantity and complexity. Typos and such must be compensated and those will eat into your budget too.

Whatever it is, plan for all contingencies as otherwise, you will cuss and swear at that tiny mistake which may even cost your business to belly up in these difficult times. I bear it all, as knowledge from events observed makes me mindful of those small tiny costly errors which we normally take it for granted.

You have arrived in Singapore and maybe you are on a stopover or will be here for the next few days. So what to do when you are in Singapore? Singapore is an island state with only about 25miles end to end and pretty much a bustling working city. But for less than $10 a day, you can travel in Singapore using the public transportation , namely the SMRT, SBS Transit and Trans Island Buses within normal service hours which is far cheaper than the London Underground travel card and works like an Oyster or Touch & Go card in Malaysia where it is the integrated payment system.

Starting off from Changi Airport, the trip down the train downtown runs through many housing estates and the Singapore Expo Hall which is located at Tanah Merah station where you connect to the East West main line. Depending on the time of the year, the Singapore Expo hosts many shows and trade events such as the Broadcast Asia which recently utilized the entire 12 halls. But if you want to hit the beach, a good place to hang out and chill out is actually next to the airport, Changi Beach.A real sandy beach with the fishing cove at Telok Paku where great fishing grounds lurk within the cove overseeing Singapore’s neighbour, the state of Johor , Malaysia. With over 5 miles of clean sandy beach to sun tan and swim, it is a place for the family. To get there, a taxi ride from the airport costs about S$20 due to the airport surcharge, otherwise, it is accessible from the Tampines or Pasir Ris Bus Terminal / Train station taking the local bus there using your Tourist Pass. It is free and open to the public all day and night.

If you fancy more classy place to chill, Sentosa Island is the new place to hang tan. A bustling Genting Resort World & Casino in Sentosa is there, opening in early 2010 with a Universal Studios theme park. Entry fees are about S$100 per adult. To get to Sentosa Island, take the train or bus to Harbor Front station. Many bus services run through downtown to this what was formerly the World Trade Center. If the theme park is too pricey, the entry fee to the island is just S$3 per person and you can either take the monorail or the bus from the Harbor Front terminal (North East MRT Line). It hosts many other small parks like the large underwater aquarium and a large scale sculpture of the Merlion which shoots out laser works every night at 8pm.

Of which, local foods are a must for the thrifty as Singaporeans are known to live to eat and getting Halal foods are quite easy, by hopping to the local food center or food courts. Avoid the tourist hot spot like Newton Circus and Bugis Street as touts and expensive prices will mar your memories. Local food fare costs from $3 onwards for a decent meal and you get many kind of foods adapted to the local taste. Do be warned that the foods may be spicy and drinking hot milk tea will cool the spicy after taste and alcohol especially beers will land you a short trip to the local A&E.

A nice scenic food area to chill out at night is the Boat Quay and Clarke Quay area where night long entertainment with food and beverages served. Prices are within the ability of even the locals. Call it the local watering hole of the expatriates and locals alike. A short walk from Boat Quay is Lau Pa Sat which literally means old market which has been converted to a street food fare in the business district.

Another thing you must do is to go for the night safari which is in the Mandai Zoo. There, you can see the nocturnal animals living and going about their business which is not common in many zoos, unless you take a night trip to the tropical rain forests and getting bitten by the mosquitoes. Insect repellents are not a necessity during the trip.

Just don’t forget that if you are totally bored in Singapore, you can always hop over to Malaysia and get yourself worn down with more activities. One tip while in Singapore: Make sure you don’t bring many credit cards as you will regret it when you see the bill when you are back home. Prices are so cheap that it cannot compare to anywhere in the region. The shopping belt of Orchard Road stretches for over 7km with malls stacking up over 5 floors and more from Orchard Road to Suntec City to even Clarke Quay. Personally, a colleague of mine went there and bought numerous gold jewelery and ornaments on top of the consumer goods that it cost her more than 10 months of her paycheck.

A website is the forefront of your presence to the web, and like many business tycoons always say “First Impressions Count” and they are spot on. Many business website designers made the greatest sin in the industry when they try to impress the untrained business managers by proposing a very splashy web page as a forefront to the visitors. However, the main importance is to being accessible is to be friendly to the human and robots alike and at the same time, being disabled friendly.

Core aspects are to follow the KISS method which is Keep It Short and Simple ( or Keep it simple silly ) and by placing a layout which is pleasant and being user and computer friendly pays good return. One of the major mistakes are embedding applications or plugins that are not just browser unfriendly but also spider robot nightmare. One of the problems also caused by poor formatting or Cascading Style Sheet errors ( CSS Format Errors) are that what they see is not what the user gets, when encoding in one format of HTML for a browser like Internet Explorer comes up like the blocks are all over the place in Navigator, Chrome or even Safari. A major fault lies that a format designed in Linux may not even be compatible in Windows or Mac based browsers as the formatting errors are incoherent to the robot.

One method is to try and test out the design by print format and then emulating the view in many browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari and even for the mobile like Blackberry and iPhone which will definitely draw more visitors and sales to your site when it’s accessible.It’s the same issue when you go visit a nice webpage of a company only to be drawn by irritating errors and pop-ups such as to the demise to even huge companies like Microsoft’s inner pages.

One thing to avoid is designing the wrong resolution of the webpage, since there are many IAB formats for webpages and typically, a webpage should be fitting a resolution of 600 x 800 being the leader board advertising standard is 768 x 90 pixels and a skyscraper (tall span of a webpage) must be able to fit a 160 x 600 pixel frame space. Many designers will try fit into a 1080 x 800 pixel page resolution resulting in the common type-over misalignment of the images and block spaces when viewed in a lower standard resolution.

Another aspect that is commonly made is illegal image and anchor linking, where the links and images are not described carefully to the the system, so when a visually impaired visitor comes in, the image is unavailable to them for description. One way is to describe the picture in the ALT tag of the image. Similarly if the ALT tag is properly described in the hyperlink, it will be weighed heavier than others in terms of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO and when it all gets calculated into the heuristics, it will be sent higher in terms of search returns when a certain key phrases are being looked into.

One thing you can do is use a simple web page design software and if it all fails, Wordpress is a fully optimized blog system where the look and feel can be made as if it’s a very posh website, just like a CMS based one. The ease of use is put forward with a WYSIWYG MICE editor so the need for a web editing software is eliminated. Plugins are all integrated into the web server and not pulled into the client except for Adobe Flash and Shockwave players and in recent updates, Microsoft integrated Silverlight which boasts sleek streaming of videos and feeds of the web through cloud computing.

If you are still in doubt, make sure your site is W3C compliant and there are plain tools to check it over the web. A screenshot can be viewed so that if any formatting errors crops up, it can be rectified.

Being a business, is all about making money and becoming more socially responsible is all about getting more money into the coffers of the company. Charities too in the UK and many countries are registered as a company and while they go on with their mission and vision, and raising funds for their causes are part and parcel of an incorporation.

Likewise, being socially responsible cuts a little bit into the community, and yet the returns far outweigh the cost involved in becoming socially responsible company as opposed to being a pariah by the local community.In a matter of fact, social responsibility is actually required in many religions, including Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

One of the aspects of social responsibility is waste reduction.” For a person who waste is a friend of the devil ” as the words of wisdom goes is much true to the ethical conduct of any company and employee alike for if one waste resources, it will just equate to wasting money. In terms of resources may not just limit oneself to just material but also time and effort. In the new era of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, the karma of life kicks in as reducing the need to use or produce materials reduces your money wasted. One good example is the utilities and things like paper and items that can be reused for later on, like packaging materials. Recycling returns some sort of profit back to the employees such as contribution to the pantry or sports activities.

In other aspects of social responsibility is to support the local community for the local community are the ones who will stand up and fight for the survival of the company as somehow or rather, the liquidation of a company will somehow reflect into the community in terms of loss of income and jobs, disappointing the many families that rely on that account. So by contributing back into the local community, it also serves as a kind of advertising and endorsement for the operations and in many countries, localised grants are made available to companies within the community in the commonwealth states, even to aspects of advertising and business matching and grants for overseas market penetration.

On the company side, putting aside part of the operational expenses or savings into supporting the local charities or causes help alot in terms of public relations. Here we see in the UK, that banks and building societies actively engage in their local community activities and more acutely by the local credit unions with support to the local games such as football (soccer). Even big companies such as TESCO does support local activities and this in turn returns a far better exposure to their goodwill activities by the local press and even regional media. Even bloggers who are prominently critics of their normal stance such as the poor animal welfare will support the activities. Think of it as a right cancelling the many wrongs committed by the corporate governance.

Different companies in different countries takes different aspects of social responsibilities but basically, being charitable far outweighs the costs involved in comparison with the returns in sales and profits, not to mention these activities are tax deductible and in some nations, deductible against tax due. It all comes to the management of the company where they determine how responsible they are to the social aspects of the company. In many aspects, getting the workers to engage in the community breaks the daily mundane routine and helps the good well being of them by applying a healthy living way of life.