XM Asia Pacific powers social partnership for the Audi Fashion Festival Singapore.

Campaign, Campaign Brief and Marketing magazine broke the news on this yesterday, but we’re so excited about this new launch that we wanted to share a bit more of the story behind the story.

In brief, XM Asia has created an online platform and social media strategy that’s helping power the Audi Fashion Festival (AFF), which is Singapore’s premier annual fashion event, attracting top local and global designers, as well as international top models. Taking place from 15 – 19 May, this year marks the festival’s fifth anniversary and will be its first at a new, bigger location at Marina Promenade.

But we’re not just the AFF’s agency, XM Asia is also the official interactive partner for the festival.

“We are incredibly proud that we were appointed both the agency and the Official Interactive Partner for the show. It gives us tremendous ownership over the project and makes us feel even more connected in our thinking and strategy,” said Paul Soon, XM Asia Pacific CEO. “Our staffers would kill to work on a fashion brand. With the Asia Fashion Exchange’s Audi Fashion Festival, we get to work on all of them.”

A key consideration in developing this new interactive platform for AFF was to not simply promote the festival, but, as Campaign Brief observed, to “connect Singapore fashion fans with the show’s headline designers, including Carolina Herrera, Collette Dinnigan and Hussein Chalayan.”

Central to achieving this connection was the creation of an engine for “instafashion feeds” that consolidate all online conversations by the AFF and its headline designers into one dynamic stream of social content. This will enable Singapore’s super-wired fashion fans to easily keep up with the festival’s ongoing and upcoming events, ensuring that they don’t miss a beat. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Ernest Kim

XM Asia Pacific launches innovative new online experiences for Maxis, Malaysia’s leading telecom provider.

We’re very proud to announce the launch of our latest project, the completely re-concepted, re-architected, re-engineered and re-designed Maxis.com.my—the online home for Maxis Berhad, Malaysia’s only integrated communications service provider.

Maxis has a clear vision: To bring the future to its customers’ lives and businesses, in a manner that’s simple, personalized and enriching. And the company has worked tirelessly to bring this vision to life, having launched Malaysia’s first high-speed network in 2005, Malaysia’s first 4G LTE network earlier this year and, today, offering the nation’s largest high-speed network.

But Maxis recognized that its Web site was no longer delivering on this commitment, so the company partnered with XM Asia Pacific to conceptualize and implement an entirely new online experience.

XM Asia Pacific created Maxis's new site using responsive Web design principles

Built from the ground up around responsive Web design principles by the XM Asia team, the new Maxis site renders beautifully across the range of devices in use today, from phones to tablets to traditional PCs.

“Maxis wanted to break away from the typical telco Web experience,” recalled Hema Thiagarajah, Consumer Experience Director at XM Asia Pacific. “The norm for the industry is to list products and services based on an internal org chart, and to sell using telco-speak that most consumers find perplexing. But Maxis felt it was crucial to connect with their customers and reach them in a way that would be familiar and useful … to have a conversation.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Ernest Kim

Just say no to “bullshit metrics.”


Just say no to BS metrics!

Had to share this fantastic piece from AllThingsD published early last week: Andreessen and Mixpanel Call for an End to “Bullshit Metrics”

The Andreesen in question is Marc Andreesen, co-creator of the Mosaic browser, co-founder of Netscape and now general partner in the hugely influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreesen Horowitz.

Here’s a snippet from the story:

Some people call page views and the like “vanity metrics,” but Marc Andreessen and Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi have decided they want to raise the shame level by calling them “bullshit metrics.”

“We and other investors need to get more vocal,” Andreessen said … “Page views and uniques are a waste of time.” Bullshit metrics do a disservice to the companies reporting them, Doshi said. When companies focus on numbers that are not meaningful, they aren’t optimizing their efforts for what could really help their business.

So what should marketers be focused on? Doshi has a proposal that’s so simple it should be self-evident: “Every business has a natural goal that correlates with its success. For instance, Yelp benefits most when it has more reviews, and Instagram when it has more photos uploaded. Measuring that ‘one key metric’ can lead to insights that are particular to that business, and optimizing for it can give the company an edge versus competitors that are not so fine tuned.”

It’s exciting to see recognition grow that the metrics most frequently touted by start-ups and the digital marketing community as a whole are largely meaningless. As discussed in a recent conversation with Campaign Asia (which should be published in next month’s issue), we believe 2013 will mark the beginning of a more sober and pragmatic approach to digital—an approach that will start with marketers recognizing the need to measure the behaviours and actions that actually matter to their businesses.

This is the gospel we’ve been preaching for some time now, and we’re excited to see industry sentiment begin to shift our way. A call for less bullshit and more substance is a great way to start 2013!

Note: Illustration remixed from a photo by MigGroningen.

Posted by Ernest Kim

Breaking the Marketing Sound Barrier

by Paul Soon and Gerard Lim

As sure as Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, the near future will see brands surrounded by authentic consumer dialog without being poked, prodded and cajoled by hired ‘guns’ such as bloggers and community managers.

The future is a society where brands and consumers form a behavioral bond of mutual trust; where the former listens and transforms to meet the needs and desires of the latter. In return, consumers will allow brands to be part of their lives and share personal data readily.

The future will see big and small data being utilized with greater transparency. Brands and consumers will have a shared goal of building ever-improving, personalized experiences to enrich and fulfill daily lives.

Watch our CEO, Paul Soon, talk to Campaign Asia-Pacific about the future of brands and marketing communications.

The biggest challenge every CMO faces today is to continue to build and preserve relevant brand equity in the face of higher consumer expectations amidst the complex digital evolution that marches on even as you read this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Ernest Kim

Three simple, but powerful lessons for marketers from Obama 2012.

With the 2012 US presidential election finally coming to a close, I thought it was worth exploring the role data and technology played in the outcome. There will be many, many stories in the weeks ahead that dissect the ins-and-outs of the two campaigns and seek to explain Barack Obama’s victory by a margin wider than most pundits had predicted. The two best I’ve seen thus far that take the digital perspective are a piece from Bloomberg Businessweek that was actually published back in June and a fantastic, peek-behind-the-curtain story just posted by Time magazine.

Here’s a prescient quote from the Businessweek article: “The unspoken hope in Chicago is that superior strategy and a shrewd use of technology can make up for Obama’s diminished stature and more formidable opponent. So [Obama campaign manager Jim] Messina has spent 18 months studying and building.”

President Barack Obama hugs his campaign manager, Jim Messina

From Whitehouse.gov: President Barack Obama hugs his campaign manager, Jim Messina, during an unannounced stop at his campaign headquarters in Chicago, Ill., Nov. 7, 2012.

And the results speak for themselves. I highly encourage you to read these two pieces if you want to understand how digital platforms can drive real world behavior. But, if you’re in a rush and need a summary, here are my three key takeaways for marketers:


1. Set meaningful goals.
In this case, winning the election was obviously the ultimate goal, but feeding into this were subsidiary goals including concrete fundraising and volunteer recruitment targets that directly supported that primary objective. Too often in the digital space, marketers confuse metrics such as visits, Likes and follower counts for meaningful goals. And, so long as this is the case, Chief Executives will view marketing as a cost-center rather than a business driver.


2. Understand your audience.
Specifically, segment your audience to enable more targeted, impactful engagement. Quoting from the Time piece:

Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn’t just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign’s most important priorities first … “We could [predict] people who were going to give online. We could model people who were going to give through mail. We could model volunteers,” said one of the senior advisers about the predictive profiles built by the data. “In the end, modeling became something way bigger for us in ’12 than in ’08 because it made our time more efficient.”


3. Build, test, iterate, rinse and repeat.
Our industry loves to talk about testing and optimization, but so few of us actually follow through. Either there’s not enough time, or not enough money or, by the time the data is analyzed, we’re already on to the next thing. But success in the digital space comes to the iterators. Again, quoting from the Time story:

A large portion of the cash raised online came through an intricate, metric-driven e-mail campaign in which dozens of fundraising appeals went out each day. Here again, data collection and analysis were paramount. Many of the e-mails sent to supporters were just tests, with different subject lines, senders and messages … Michelle Obama’s e-mails performed best in the spring, and at times, campaign boss Messina performed better than Vice President Joe Biden. In many cases, the top performers raised 10 times as much money for the campaign as the underperformers.

And, finally, I just had to include this fascinating bit from the Businessweek article—though Apple is not known as a company that necessarily ‘gets’ social media, this anecdote from Messina suggests that Steve Jobs had a deeper understanding of our modern media landscape than was widely recognized:

In two long, private conversations, Steve Jobs tore into Messina for all the White House was doing wrong and what it ought to be doing differently, before going on to explain how the campaign could exploit technology in ways that hadn’t been possible before. “Last time you were programming to only a couple of channels,” Jobs told him, meaning the Web and e-mail. “This time, you have to program content to a much wider variety of channels—Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Google—because people are segmented in a very different way than they were four years ago.” When Obama declared for president, the iPhone hadn’t been released. Now, Jobs told him, mobile technology had to be central to the campaign’s effort. “He knew exactly where everything was going,” Messina says.

Posted by Ernest Kim

What do Facebook’s recent EdgeRank updates mean to marketers?

XM’s Ernest Kim recently spoke with Campaign Asia about Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm and what recent changes made by the social network mean to brands. That article can be viewed on the Campaign Asia-Pacific Web site. For XM blog readers who’d like even more detail, here’s a full transcript of Ernest’s interview with Campaign.

Q. Facebook’s recent updates to their EdgeRank algorithm—what does it mean to brands? What is the impact?
A. It might help to first step back for a minute to talk about what EdgeRank is. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Ernest Kim

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