Online Influence

Not every company has the budget to invest a fortune on advertising and marketing. Startups, those with cashflow issues or just business who want to take a cautious approach may benefit from a low-budget approach. While it may be hard to believe it in our relentlessly mercantile modern marketplace, free and cheap methods of advertising above and beyond tightening up your SEO do exist. They cost little more than your time, and while most lack much in the way of impact, they can easily draw enough attention to get your…

Think you know what does PR mean for your website? “PR” is probably the most over-used, over-abused, over-confused and just down-right misleading abbreviations in the whole Internet Marketing field. So what is PR? It doesn’t mean what you think it does. What it used to mean didn’t mean much anyway. And what it means now is something entirely different. But it is still critical to the success of your online marketing efforts, that hasn’t changed. And once you understand where it is at you can leverage website PR to take…

Journalists get frustrated with PR Professionals. You see it in blog posts and on social media — journalists frustrated with generic, relevant pages and irrelevant material. Pew Research published an analysis of the gap between PR and journalist income, and the relative number of PR professionals to journalists (there are a lot more of the former). With the advent of digital journalism, it is journalists who find their objectivity scrutinized more often than before. It’s not a surprise that many journalists harbor some misgivings for the PR industry. But how can…

The approval by China’s State Council for the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Connect three months ago on August 16 is the latest step implemented by the Chinese government to further liberalize mainland markets.  The long awaited stock trading link which started a three-week system test in October is likely to go live as early as November 21.  Another test of global investors’ appetite for Chinese shares, the new tie-up and its predecessor – the Hong Kong and Shanghai Stock Connect which was launched in late 2014, are currently the only direct accesses for…

No matter how savvy and experienced your social media team is,  mishaps can happen in the world of social media.  Most of the time, mistakes are harmless, such as typo errors or misspelling of a  name.  It will not be elevated to become a crisis if your followers are sympathetic and when the mistakes are forgivable. Sometimes if they make a mockery of the incident, the tweet might even go viral and generates some branding opportunities (however, exercise with great cautious). On the other hand, if brands offended their followers…