Corporate Blogging : A new marketing communication tool for companies.

A corporate weblog is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. The advantage of blogs is that posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads. All current browsers (including Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer 7) support RSS technology, which enables readers to easily read recent posts without actually visiting the blog, which is very useful for low-volume blogs. Although there are many different types of corporate blogs, most can be categorized as either external or internal.

Internal Blogs --> An internal blog, generally accessed through the corporation's Intranet, is a weblog that any employee can view. Many blogs are also communal, allowing anyone to post to them. The informal nature of blogs may encourage: employee participation , free discussion of issues ,collective intelligence, direct communication between various layers of an organization ,a sense of community.

Internal blogs may be used in lieu of meetings and e-mail discussions, and can be especially useful when the people involved are in different locations, or have conflicting schedules. Blogs may also allow individuals who otherwise would not have been aware of or invited to participate in a discussion to contribute their expertise.

External Blogs --> An external blog is a publicly available weblog where company employees, teams, or spokespersons share their views. It is often used to announce new products and services (or the end of old products), to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. It also allows a window to the company culture and is often treated more informally than traditional press releases, though a corporate blog often tries to accomplish similar goals as press releases do. In some corporate blogs, all posts go through a review before they're posted. Some corporate blogs, but not all, allow comments to be made to the posts.

External corporate blogs, by their very nature, are biased, though they can also offer a more honest and direct view than traditional communication channels. Nevertheless, they remain public relations tools.Certain corporate blogs have a very high number of subscribers. The official Google Blog is currently in the Technorati top 50 listing among all blogs worldwide.

Marketers might expect to have product evangelists or influencers among the audience of an external blog. Once they find them, they may treat them like VIPs, asking them for feedback on exclusive previews, product testing, marketing plans, customer services audits, etc.

The business blog can provide additional value by adding a level of credibility that is often unobtainable from a standard corporate site. The informality and increased timeliness of information posted to blogs assists with increasing transparency and accessibility in the corporate image. Business blogs can interact with a target market on a more personal level while building link credibility that can ultimately be tied back to the corporate site.

A list of externally available corporate blogs is available at The NewPR/Wiki.

The Corporate Blogging Book is now available in Mandarin Chinese on amazon.cn.

A review on a post on e-tailing from My E-Commerce Blog

Review on 1st Dell physical store in Malaysia!

There are two distinct categories of e-tailers are pure plays and bricks and clicks. A pure play e-tailer uses the Internet as its primary means of retailing. Examples of pure play e-tailers are Dell and Amazon.com. A brick and click e-tailer uses the Internet to push its good or service but also has the traditional physical storefront available to customers.

U.S. computer maker Dell Inc. on 23rd, Jan 2007 opened its first global business centre outside the United States to provide 24-hour engineering and technology support to its branches worldwide. Chief Executive Officer Kevin Rollins opened the 200,000 square foot (18,580 sq. metre) centre in Malaysia's high-tech city of Cyberjaya. Dell says the centre will employ 600 people by year-end and 1,000 within five years. more

DELL office in Cyberjaya

Dell is famous for selling it PC and laptop directly to their customers through the direct sales online which proved to be a very successful business model. However, Dell is slowly shifting away from this successful model when the growth of PC sales slowed. As Dell continue to strengthen their brick-and-mortar presence worldwide with especially in US and Europe, the computer vendor opened its first retail store in Malaysia at the Mid Valley Megamall's IT World section on 22nd Dec 2007.

Dell Direct Store
2nd Floor, IT World, Lot 15
Mid Valley Mega MallKuala Lumpur





It used to be that you could only go online to browse Dell products and the only way to order one was through the Internet or over the phone. That's changed. Dell has just arranged to have its products on display in 10,000-odd stores worldwide; some are Dell branded stores while others are joint ventures. The Malaysian store is a partnership with TecAsia, the retail arm of FTEC Resources Bhd, which also distributes its own range of notebook PCs.

Dell said the move was brought on by its aim to regain its lead position as the No 1 computer maker in the world from archrival the Hewlett-Packard Co. HP took the lead about a year ago. Dell has operated a manufacturing operation in the northern city of Penang since 1995, producing notebooks, desktop computers, servers and storage systems.

In 2005, Dell products accounted for 28 percent of Malaysia’s electronics equipment exports and currently employs more than 5,000 people in the country. Dell is vying with Hewlett-Packard Co. for dominance in the global personal computer market. For all of 2006, the two companies each registered about 16 or 17 percent market share, according to tallies by IDC and Gartner Inc. But in the fourth quarter, HP had a 17 to 18 percent of the worldwide market compared to Dell's 14 to 15 percent. more

E-tailers who take part in pure play–type business have the opportunity to turn higher profit margins, due in part to the fact that many of the overhead expenses associated with a physical retail space, such as labour, retail space, and inventory, can be significantly alleviated. Pure play allows for a retailer to be able to reach customers world wide, whilst still only maintaining one location for each and every customer to visit, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Many studies have shown that e-tailers are failing to meet the needs of online customers and that they generally only have one chance to make a good impression if they want their customers to return. It is said that the three most important things that e-tailers today must work on to ensure profitability are "search, support and promotion."

Credit Card debts: prevention and causes

Holding one card and paying off the balance on time helps establish your credit history. And you may need a card for travel expenses or emergencies. Aside from those cases, however, you should keep your credit card spending to the absolute minimum.

Following just five easy steps can keep consumers from falling into the pit that is credit card debt:

1. Establish a budget and then follow that budget exactly. In other words, don't be tempted to charge that plasma TV to your credit card on a whim when you haven't budgeted for it this month.
2. Carry a credit card balance for no longer than six months. The compounding of simple interest can produce a very expensive balance to pay off. If it helps, think of your credit card balance as a snowball that grows larger as it rolls downhill.
3. Know what you're doing with reward credit cards. Holders of these can end up spending more than the reward itself is worth if they don't pay attention to the fees and interest associated with their credit card.
4. Get a low interest credit card if your credit card's interest rate is excessive. The better your credit, the lower the rate for which you will qualify.
5. Be aware that balance transfer credit cards' teaser rates won't last forever. Six months is common now. The "normal" rate will return sooner than you think, so use that interest-free period to aggressively pay down balances.

Prevent Credit Card Debt Default Judgments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVvTJ56oEsU

Electronic currency

Electronic currency (also known as e-money, electronic cash, digital money, digital cash or digital currency) refers to money or scrip which is exchanged only electronically. Typically, this involves use of computer networks, the internet and digital stored value systems. Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) and direct deposit are examples of electronic currency. Also, it is a collective term for financial cryptography and technologies enabling it.

Bitpass is a micropayment service that facilitates online content access transactions by integrating the processes involved in buying and selling content, and making it practical to charge very small amounts of money. In the BitPass system, transaction fees are paid by the content provider. For payments under $5, the charge is 15% of the cost. Micropayments are by definition very small sums, so the fee is usually just a few cents.

For the content buyer, the BitPass system works similarly to a pre-paid telephone card: you sign up for the service and put money into your account using a credit card or PayPal, which gives you credit towards the purchase of content. When the user agrees to pay the cost of access, their account is charged automatically rather than through a link to an external Web site for payment.

Although the micropayment concept has been proposed for several years, it's been a hard sell. After all, most online content has always been free, and people are naturally opposed to paying for anything they might reasonably expect to get for nothing. However, at least part of the reason that content has been free is likely that no one's found a viable way to get people to pay for it to this point.

On January 19th, 2007 Bitpass announced that they were shutting down, and operations officially closed on January 26th, 2007. No immediate reason for closure was given.