Google has just released Local Business Center to enable business owners to analyze their company online listing through Google data in a dashboard.

Introduction to Google’s Local Business Center

▲ Official Introduction Video of Google’s Local Business Center

▲ Google Map Listing of Pizza Hut Restaurant in Taikoo Shing, Hong Kong

Customers have already search products, services and places through search engines like Google, while a nice business listing which is informative and with postive review in Google Map definitely bring more customers to you.

Local Business Center it the web analytics tool you can extract data from Google, which is impossible before accessing their data, to optimize your listings as well as for business development.

In Hong Kong, thanks to OpenRice.com, there are many restaurant listings in Google Map. Not only those chain restaurants should adopt Local Business Center immediately, individual restaurants should also take online medium as an effective channel to promote their business with analytics results as well.

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According to Nielsen Online’s latest AdRelevance press release, Hong Kong internet display advertising spending remains steady at HK$172MM in the 1st quarter of 2009. This fact confirms that brands and marketers still keep spending their budget for interactive campaign, while advertising budget is declining as projected  by HK2A during the current econmic recession.

Fashion Brands Spent A Lot in 1st Quarter

From the report, fashion sector increse their online adspend 163% from HK$2.2million to HK$5.8 million from the same period last year. The top 3 brands are H&M, Nike and Cartier, of which they launched large advertising campaigns in many major local Hong Kong websites like Yahoo! Hong Kong to drive the figures up.

Hong Kong Government Spent More Too

It is observed that Hong Kong Goverment is ranked as the 2nd largest advertisers in the period. It had large campaign to promote the GovHK portal offered by OGCIO in major websites like TVB.com and Yahoo! Hong Kong. It’s wise for Hong Kong Government to take the advantage of this effective channels, and it can take the lead to move on to new media marketing as well.

Research Data by Nielsen Online’s AdRelevance (2009 Q1)

▲ Hong Kong Online Advertising Activities (2009 Q1)

▲ Hong Kong Online Advertising Spending by Sectors (2009 Q1)

▲ Hong Kong Top 10 Online Advertisers (2009 Q1)

Extended Reading

• Online Advertising Holds Ground in First Quarter with Advertising Valued at HK$172MM by The Nielsen Company
• Online advertising stays flat in Hong Kong by Media Magazine
• Online advertising flat in first quarter by Marketing Magazine

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Hong Kong Association of Interactive Marketing (HKAIM) held a coffee break session last week for digital marketing fellows to share ideas and connect in a relax atmosphere. Volkswagen was very kind to host this event in their Volkswagen HK Center in Wan Chai, and its topics focuses on digital marketing for automobile brands.

Digital Campaign is More Effective

Mr. Till Scheer, Managing Director of Volkswagen Hong Kong Limited, gave an opening speech of the event. He stated digital marketing has enable them to carry out more targeted and effective marketing campaign for Volkswagen in Hong Kong last year and looking to increase their market share by 3% in 2009.

Digital Word-of-mouth Intelligence

Mr. Ralph Szeto, Business Development Director of CMRS Digital Solutions Limited, shared his experience and findings about online automobile market with digital word-of-mouth (WOM) intelligence. The WOM intelligence platform is called ezBuzz, and it found that Honda was the most discussed brand in Hong Kong cyberspace in the past 6 months. He also stressed netizens are more active in forum in Hong Kong while people have more conversation in blogs about automobile in other major countries.

Volkswagen Believes in Digital Marketing

Mr. Sam Hui, General Manager of Next Interactive Limited, moderated an open forum to discuss “All About Automobile Market in Hong Kong” with Ralph Szeto, joined with Ms Anna Au, Marketing Director of Volkswagen Hong Kong Limited. Sam stated Volkswagen is relatively much aggressive in and relies on digital marketing to increase their market share in Hong Kong. Anna also agreed Volkswagen will continue to explore more marketing campaign idea in cyberspace, especially after Ralph’s sharing in WOM intelligence.

It was a wonderful event and I met a lot of poeple too, many photos are shared here. Special thanks are given to HKAIM for making this happen and Volkswagen for supporting with such a great place.

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Nike has recently launched the《踢出火》(“Ignite Your Game”) marketing campaign in Hong Kong just before the end of 2008/09 football season. Its incredible Arsenal vs Manchester United TV commercial frequently appears in major TV channels as well as on the homepage of YouTube geo-targeted for Hong Kong visitors. There are ads in print out-of-home media, but it is digital media making the integrated campaign more engaging to raise far more brand/products awareness for Nike.

Video Worth a Thousand Words

Comparing with standard banner ad, display ad with stunning video is much more effective in building brand awareness and delivering the campaign message to audience. This incredible Arsenal vs Manchester United match video shows how players, featured by Fabregas and C. Ronaldo, ignite their game during the remaining additional time. Video worth a thousand words in online marketing too.

Interactive Campaign Site

To convert the awareness into engagement and make it more viral, this Nike Football Ignite Your Game campaign mini-site is really stunning. There is a lot of trainings and challenges hi-res videos demonstrated by many football stars how they get ready to ignite their game, and so do the audience. Its interactive complement what standard and video ad cannot achieve.

Targeted Football Fans in GoalGoalGoal.com

Nike Football also partners with GoalGoalGoal.com, a local soccer forum, to create an individual section for “Ignite Your Game”. They publish latest soccer news and updates about their Nike 5 Football competition in Hong Kong.
Besides the interactive campaign site, GoalGoalGoal can effectively attract the targeted group of football fans and create more awareness of “Ignite Your Game” campaign among them. It makes the whole campaign a more integrated one.

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Pixazza launched a service similar to AdSense for images on March 24, 2009, it prompts relevant product details and listings onto the images. Google is also one of the biggest investors for Pixazza, and it once again helps bloggers and long tail participants to turn their photo into money after providing contextual advertising in text by AdSense.

Pixazza inserts tiny yellow-and-blue tags onto the images, and detail product listhings show up once users mouse-over these tags. You can see the available offerings by different retailers, and just a few clicks away from purchasing the products.

More than just AdSense for Images

• Crowdsourcing. Unlike AdSense which analyzes the content on a web pages, Pixazza relies on its crowdsourcing platform to enables groups of volunteer and paid experts to identify the products in the photos and tag them.
• Visually Trigger Buying Intention. AdSense provides content-related advertisements in text and hope to get users’ attention, while attrative photos can trigger immediate buying intention and Pixazza can increase the conversion rate by directly pointing users to the retailers.
• Rewarding Consumer-generated Media. New media enables people to create and publish their own graphics and photos easily, Pixazza can turn their creativity into cash if they drive sales to any related products. It creates a new win-win affiliate marketing network of photos besides the text and banner ads.

You can check Pixazza out in I’m not obsessed, and see if you’re interested in those designer brands worn by those celebrities. If you’re publishers, sign up to give Pixazza a try and share your reviews here. Perphaps I should bring Pixazza to this blog some day.

Extended Reading

• Pixazza “Product in the Picture” Service: AdSense for Images by Business Week
• Google Invests in Pixazza, An AdSense for Images by Mashable
• Pixazza開站策動三贏革命，把每張圖片自動變成廣告賺錢 by Mr. 6

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HSBC Hong Kong has just launched their new homepage on April 1, 2009. There are noticeable minor changes to the main content section on the right in the homepage, but it definitely lags far behind in Web 2.0.

HSBC new homepage is still old fashioned

Compared to the old homepage above, the new homepage does offer users with the followings:

• A more interactive layout
• Timely promotion updates and exclusive offers
• Introduce commentary video on HSBC website, which it is the very first time I’ve seen in local consumer bank.

HSBC has not started to leverage the power of social media to benefit itself in viral marketing, nor enabled users to share and discuss the information more easily through any Web 2.0 applications. As one of the biggest corporations and the largest online service provider in Hong Kong , I am quite disappointed to see HSBC has not taken any step to adopt Web 2.0 in their online strategy.

HaveMyBank.com – Social Media Marketing Tryout by Citibank

It reminds me about a recent social media marketing tryout by the most active online advertising giant, Citiank Hong Kong. It has worked with Publicis to launch a digital campaign, HaveMyBank.com, in December, 2008. They experiment the use of social media to promote their latest mobile banking service by publishing video clips of Vivek Mahbubani, Fu Wing (苦榮) and Siu Hak (小克), and hope people are convinced and will share them with their social networking platform.

Seems like either they have not carried on with idea or the campaign does not go well, there was no comment for 5 weeks on the website and just moderate video views on YouTube. But at least we have a start for both advertisers and agencies to try out a social media marketing for financial institutions. I look forward to seeing  more Web 2.0 usages by banks and hopefully some Banking 2.0 ideas in Hong Kong soon.

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