Traveling Mind: Have you got a copy yet?
I write for a living. I'm not a writer but I do write quite often. The reason is simple. Nowadays people read a lot! Before you roll your eyes, I never said books. A lot of people are surfing the Internet in search of something. Some like to do online shopping, some like to Google information, some like to view pictures, some like to find friends, and the list of virtual activities continue. Google articles, Facebook notes, Twitter links, blogs, tumblr, etc are amongst the most popular Internet reading pleasures. The pieces don't have to be thesis-worth long to gain interest; they just need to be fascinating in some sense. A tv personality said the word "Perspection" on live national tv! was seen on Twitter and the rest of the nation talked about the event where a TV personality was seen asking a Swedish astronaut, "What is your perspection about the event tonight?" The rating for that event shoot up to 3.2mil viewers.
A recent news published that Malaysia ranks first for most online friends, and the trend duplicates in other countries as well. It's apparent that soft marketing in the Internet world in crucial. Soft marketing is the term used to describe when marketing your products without invading individual space or they called it marketing under the radar. To do this, writing is essential. Again, you don't have to seek your professor's approval; you just need to have good idea of what your brand is all about and not to go against your brand value.
What do you see when you watch Fernando Alonso's F1 car? You see Vodafone, you see Shell. That is soft marketing. What do you see when you watch the good looking Fernando Torres trying to score for Liverpool? Standard Chartered on his chest and Adidas on his pants. Well, those are expensive marketing venues; product placement on strategic spots during airtime. Seeing Simon Cowell sip on Coke during American Idol made me crave Coke in the middle of the night. That’s soft marketing and the effect is ridiculous! I drove to the nearest 7-Evelen for a bottle of cool fizzy tasty CocaCola.
How do we do it at a lesser cost? Spend some time to write and publish it regularly on strategic spots. Most business websites that I stumbled upon have very stiff business writings and are mostly not updated regularly. Many also make efforts to join the social media wagon but after some time, fall off of it because of decreased updates and no follow ups. The idea of newsletter is not new, people have been using it for ages but the trick is to do it regularly so that your audience is kept updated with what's going on with your brand. Companies usually have missions and visions on their websites, which mostly are cookie-cutter phrases borrowed from other business sites. Yawn! Yawn! The audience needs more than that.
FingerTec's Tagline Contest on Facebook has just ended and that for us is soft-marketing. Something fun that gets the crowd to know the brand. We blog about our brand and we hope you do too. We want to tumblr as well. We create FingerTec games. And definitely we want to do more in the future. FingerTec is not a consumer product and it’s even tougher for us. Therefore, we treasure your ideas if any. Please do contact us at editorial@fingertec.com. In the meantime, it'd be great if you could soft market FingerTec too. Thank you.
by Norana Johar, COO, FingerTec HQ
