We wish you a Happy Birthday!

Am sure everyone loves their birthday and am no exception. However my preference of birthday is enjoying it just like any other day. Grab a coffe, go to work, come home for dinner, nothing special.

Duno since when companies around us start to target on your birthday, some provide you promotions, some, simply wish you a "Happy Birthday" and some simply make you laugh out loud!

For example, I got a few emails saying Happy Birthday to me  that includes my parents, Wattpad Team, a Job Search Site, NBA All access, etc. In addition I also get an SMS form HSBC, wish me a blessed birthday filled with happiness! (Thanks All!)

Different companies utilize various ways to wish their user Happy Birthday, and personally believes the above ways may be a bit old fashion. Below are some surprises for me and they are more out of the box and fun :)

Early in the morning, walk into Starbucks and grab my coffee, check in to +foursquare and the #4sq team wish me a happy birthday and they even know I look nice today :)

During my work day, would like to seek for something online, and hop to Google to perform a search, wa~la Thanks Google!

Am flattered and when I clicked on the Google Doodle, it brings me to my Google+ personal page notification and see some of my friends had also sent me birthday wishes, clicked on it and it returns a search page under hash tag #HappyBirthday which is to me. Again am super flattered!

After all it's just a birthday and I have to say it's very nice for companies to wish their users a Happy Birthday and as a user am happy these companies wishing me a great Birthday!

However come in mind, isn't that a bit sketchy that you are getting all these emails, SMS and funky wishes from all these companies? Oh wait, I think I subscribe and tell them when is my birthday??!! or ...

Privacy is always an issue and of course beware of what you are sharing :)
A Very Happy Birthday to myself :)

Happy Foursquare Day 2012

It's April 16, 2012 if you are a Foursquare user, you might be aware of today is Foursquare day! It's a bit geeky as the square of four is sixteen hence April 16 was set as Foursquare Day.

There are a lot of Foursquare meet up around the world and last year Foursquare celebrate it with a Foursquare Day badge. This year will be the same, if you check in via the app you will get Foursquare Day 2012 badge.

In addition, if you are also a Untappd user (social beer drinking app), make sure you check in a brew with the location check in via Foursquare, you will see a surprise from your badge collection.

Happy #4sqDay !

Crisis Management: Social Media can save or destroy your brand

On a beautiful Easter Monday morning, I was not able to accessing Internet via my mobile nor making any calls due to a service outage, which I found out later on during the day.

Once I suspect the problem is on the carrier side, immediately I hop on my carrier's (SmarTone HK) web portal and Social Media Channels and hope to dig up some info about what's going on. Unfortunately I was not able to find anything regarding on the service status, instead I got posts about their promotions which was posted before the Easter holiday.

While I was surfing the net and seeking for answers, I saw a lot of postings from various Social Media channels that subscribers were complaining and it just gone viral. Throughout the day there seems to be no response from carrier's end on their official Social Media Channels (Facebook and Twitter)

In this digital age, computers, Internet and Social Media already become part of our life. If a person would like to know more about a specific brand they will go online and search for the brand. Brand's portal used to be the communication channel to customer but that's old schooled and a one way communications.

With the raise of Social Media, digital communications become more personal and instead of a one way communications, it's now a dialog (both ways). People will express their opinion or engage brand via the brand's Social Media profile. In another hand Brand can also utilize these channels to communicate or made announcement via their Social Media profile or identity.

Using SmarTone service outage as an example, the Brand itself should had made the announcement on their Social Media Profile and let their subscribers knows that the service was experiencing outage and keep updating the situation so subscribers have an idea how things are. Instead the Brand choose not to do anything and hence angry subscribers were complaining online via Social Media, which easily gone viral and hence leave a very bad reputation of the Brand.

Social Media can easily be a life saver for Crisis Management, Brands should always monitor their Brand existence online so the Brand can be aware of any negative comments or feedback and take immediate and proper actions.

In addition Brand should also take time to reply comments and communicate with their audience via each Social Media channel hence audience feels they are being hear by the Brand.

Social Media is a double edged sword which can benefit Brands if you utilize it on the right way, mean while it can also act as a viral platform that hurts your Brand BIG time if you didn't handle it well. Proceed with caution!

SmarTone announced their press release on Facebook
not till 24 hrs after the outage, why not earlier?  

The Press Release was not even on @SmarTone_HK twitter page 

Never just copy code out from any site off on the Internet

Back in the days when you are in College, remember the professor are always able to pull out students whom are copying work from each other? You may wonder how the professor do it. The answer is simple, coz there are always trails or indication of copycat. People whom copy work from each other will always result having the same / similar mistake.

Normally I do not pay too much attention to my blog analytics, I only look into certain things here and there. Recently Google Analytics had rolled out new social report and hence from my Dashboard I'm able to see a Social Action panel, which look something like below.

At first I was a bit surprise, how comes there are some Arabic Characters from my Social Action and I had to admit I didn't pay any attention to this due to busy schedule. Instead of looking into things I just went straight to my Analytics Reports to observe some general traffic info.

Earlier today I finally got sometime and would like to update some settings and clean up some code from my blog, then I start digging up abnormal stats within my analytics data.

When I look deeper into the Social Report from Google Analytics I found out a funky URL that's not even within my domain. That's how I found out someone in somewhere is doing something they should not be doing. Copying codes directly from one site to theirs without updating some important information.

The next thing I did was to look up this link and take a look at this site. It links to an article page of an Egyptian Wheel Weekly News site, within the article I see something very familiar and that's the addthis sharing widget that I had on my blog.

A quick peek into the coding and I found out something very very interesting.

Code Snippets from the other site

Above is a code snippets of AddThis Sharing buttons configuration from that site. First few lines basically declares which social sharing buttons to be displayed and the line begin with var addthis_config is where the addthis configuration being set. 

AddThis has a feature that allows user to hook up the service with Google Analytics, which can be very useful, the funky part from the above snippets is where the number begins with "UA-". That number is an unique ID for a Profile under Google Analytics account and that number look very very familiar. 

A quick comparison to my blog's and I found out someone had been copying code from my blog. 

Another quick peek to this site Google Analytics declaration code, I am even more sure some programmers simply snag the code out from my blog and didn't bother to change some important information, the Google Analytics ID that hooks up to AddThis. 

Comparing the Google Analytics ID from above, I know something went wrong

The Problem: Since my Google Analytics ID was hooked up to another site's Addthis code, that means all addthis social data from the other site is now ported to my Google Analytics traffic data and hence my data is tempered 

In another hand, the other party also missing a lot of their social data and will find out their Google Analytics data did not match up with their AddThis analytics data. 

Once I found out the above I immediately fire off an email to their general info@ email and hopefully someone will look into the problem and patch it up. 

Personally am not against anyone copying code from my blog (provided I did some customization on it),  however if you do copy it, ensure you change the code to proper values instead of leaving a mess like this. One interesting I found out, there are always trail to find out someone is copying things from one another. What I hope is this is the only sole case and hopefully it will not happen to anyone anymore!

My First Speed Dating Experience ... via Twitter??!!

It's Feb 14th and that means it's St. Valentine's Day! I have to say I had a wonderful experience today as I had my first ever speed dating experience in my life. This speed dating was different from any normal speed dating, in fact it's utilizing the new technology with Social Media and was done via Twitter!!

Twitter Speed Dating (dwitter) was part of the Social Media Week Hong Kong event and is co-organized with #TDHK (a social meet up group in Hong Kong that start up by @jmis and @hyperCasey). The event took place at Bisous where a projected screen were set up with and Twitter wall with hash Tag #TDHK were displayed. Since it's Valentines Day, Nokia the sponsor had also provided some beautiful roses to all the participants!

How does it work: Host had prepared some random questions with multiple choice answers. Questions were twitted out (on the projected screen) with the hash Tag #TDHK. Participants were to choose the answers that suits them the most (then tweet your answer out with the #TDHK hash tag). 

People with the same answer will gather together and form a group, the group will then have 3 mins to get to know each other. 

During the 3 mins time duration, if you and your potential match are in sync and think you are a match raise up your hand and you will get a *match sticker*. 

At the end of the night the people with the most stickers are pair up and consider as *match*, they then get the prize of free dinner at a fine dinning restaurant. Beside the lovely dinner, Nokia also offered 2 new phones as the lucky draw for the other participants (1 male, 1 female).

As one of the participants I have to say it's a very awesome (first time) experience! The idea is very innovative, love the concept a lot. It's awesome to see how Social Media can be easily plugged into speed dating, guess this is why we are having social media week. 

Wish you all a sweet and Happy St. Valentine's Day!

Dwitter 2012!