Walk Your Brand

The concept of brand is not as highly sophisticated or far-fetched as what many brand consultants and branding agencies have been trying to make business community believe. They ought to rake the dough while many are still in the blur of the subject matter.

Personally, I don’t think there is a specific formula for a company to follow in order to produce a successful brand in a specific time period. Of course you could set aside an awesome budget and plan for over the top branding activities to highlight your brand but don’t confuse advertisement and marketing activities as brand, it’s part of building a brand but it is not the brand itself.

How do you feel when you see Apple products? What words come to mind when you see Dell? What feeling do you relate when Coca Cola is mentioned? How about Honda? It’s all about feelings; it’s all about human emotions. That is what branding is, in my humble opinion.

For me, Apple products are stylish and reliable. Dell is cheap if you know DIY but lacks user-friendliness. Coca Cola is fun and full of memories, Honda is dependable. 

Brand is totally about consumer perception. No matter how much brand awareness activities are being carried out to make your customers believe what you want them to believe about your brand, when you don’t deliver your brand’s promise, negative perceptions start to form in your consumers’ minds. And if this perception is not corrected instantly but further strengthened by constantly failing to deliver the promise, the brand is still forming – just that it’s not to your preference.

Every brand has its personality and personality is best described with human terms. When you deliver what you want people to believe about your brand, then you are on your way to having a promising brand.

FingerTec’s brand essence has always been about making things easy for our clients. And trust me that on our side, the tasks have never been easy. Nonetheless, we take the pleasure knowing that FingerTec is easily implemented and support is available everywhere to help our clients the world over. Occasionally, there are some glitches we need to rectify and the respectful teams are always dedicated to deliver. At FingerTec, the objective of delivering “ease of use” has been communicated throughout the company and everybody is aware of what we have to do.

Taking things a step forward, soon FingerTec will be making things easier with the T-box package for TimeTec Web.  The T-box will simplify implementation of TimeTec Web where we have pre-configured everything for you to ease your work. We’ll offer packages that make system deployment easy and hassle-free. One package solves it all.

Say what you want about a brand, pepper it with great slogans but at the end of the day if you failed to deliver the talk, you fail. Walk your brand.  

by Norana Johar, COO, FingerTec HQ

Taking Attendance to The Cloud

I have a BSc degree in Psychology but never once in my life have I had someone lie on a couch, paying me to listen to their problems. That would be nice while I'm having pistachios and a cup of coffee on the side and money pouring in the bank, wouldn’t it? Kidding! The truth is, I've been working in time and attendance technology for more than 12 years now, right from the time fingerprint technology was still a novelty. But the focus has always been on the fingerprint or biometrics technology, and it was transparent in the way we strategically positioned and marketed our products worldwide. Over the years however, not only did the technology improve in leaps and bounds, the time attendance technology also has evolved to become a vital tool to measure workforce’s efficiency against costs spent.

The importance of the time attendance software is apparent and it has taken over the focus from the hardware itself. TCMS V2 is deemed as one of the powerful time management softwares in the industry and from merely being a complimentary software with a few basic features, it has gained such popularity and importance that we are now bringing it to another level, up in the cloud.

Attendance on cloud via TimeTec Cloud gathers all workforce data in a remote server to be accessed by relevant people through the Internet. Subscribe to the service to get ahold of the transaction data and the reports at any time. This concept is not new yet it’s not widely available in various industries. We want to offer it for office automation. TimeTec Cloud lets you take charge of your employees via TimeTec Mobile and Web Check-ins even when they are assigned with assignment outstations. Casually keeping track of your staff, so to speak. 

Why attendance via cloud? Because at the end of the day, you are not concerned about the hardware that you installed in your premises, it’s the quality of the time spent by your staff in completing the company’s plans and goals is your priority. And TimeTec Cloud gets you to manage your team of employees better at minimal costs, less maintenance hassle and through a user-friendlier system.

I’d love to have someone on my couch paying me to listen his problems but it’s also a fact that he would have to pay me extra if he takes 10 more minutes of my valuable time. Time equals cost/money and if you could better use the time of your employees, I’m pretty sure you’d like to subscribe to the latest TimeTec Cloud we offer. It's be up and running pretty soon but first, you could learn more about it more in www.timeteccloud.com and for those who want therapy, you know where to find me. 

Again, put down that phone, I’m kidding!

by Norana Johar, COO, FingerTec HQ

Write for your brand

We don’t have summer holidays in our country because apparently, we are blessed with summer all year long …and that’s potential a joke, if you hadn’t noticed. Now is the two weeks school holiday in Malaysia and parents take time off to bring their kids away for a short break and us included. We flew to Penang last weekend for a short weekend getaway and for that 45 minutes flight, instead of taking an interrupted nap because some kids in front my seats wouldn’t want to be strapped in seat belt, I took the time to read the inflight magazine, Travel 3sixty by AirAsia.

It’s not like I didn’t bring my own magazine but since the magazine was in front of me I just grabbed it. For that effort, now I know who’s who in AirAsia, I learned about their staff’s past activities and opinions, I know that AirAsia fly to Manila and Kerala, dived into their plans and aspirations, and I feel closer to the brand just by flipping over that simple magazine. The effort is not new, you would say. Other airlines also have done it for so long. And how would the same effort apply to other industries, which are not service-oriented?

Your concern is valid because time is an essence and not many people are ready to spend their time reading about trivial things that are irrelevant to their lives. Hence, the key to this strategy is ‘relevant’. I believe that if the pieces are relevant, writing could be one of the best strategies you could use to approach your customers or potential customers in this time and age, in various industries. We’ve been preaching about writing for quite sometimes now. It’s not like we are asking for a novel; anecdotes would suffice. It’s definitely not academic or expert opinions but having your brand stories written post-event, and save them somewhere, at the end of the day you have your brand history written in sequence. With the availability of the social media that could help you spread your news viral, why not?

You would never remember that time if you don't start writing about it!

We launched our Beyond Biometrics early this year and so far we have distributed close to 10 thousands to our clients and during exhibitions. Many are worried about who’s going to read, whether the pieces are newsworthy, I would say, don’t think too much. As long as the stories are not damaging and it represents what your brand/company is doing, go ahead and write some.

Why is it important for us to tell our stories? It’s simple, because people could relate better with the brand. By reading that we had a birthday party, you know that humans work in FingerTec.

Again, less worry about whose gonna read what you write. Concentrate on producing informative, fun and cool articles and trust me, nobody is gonna grade you.

And if you have stories to tell us, click here! We are thrilled to hear from you. 

by Norana Johar, COO, FingerTec HQ

Riding the Waves of Social Media Marketing

Today I was at the JW Marriot hotel in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, attending Social Media Marketing Master Class from Mr Luke Brynley-Jones, one of the UK's most experienced and best known social media consultants. A trip if during weekend would only take 15 minutes from my house, on a sweet Monday morning like this, it could simply surpass an hour mark with no traffic police sighted along the way. Oh, how I dreaded the early morning jam but at the same time I was so thrilled to explore the opportunities that social media could bring to our brand and our business.

We started with Facebook and Twitter some years ago with doubts in our heads. Would this work? Who would Like us? Who would follow? Would the industry take us seriously? I understood all the concerns but at the same time, there was something about the social media that just couldn't be ignored. Exposing our brand to a large number of targetted audience via a cost effective measure and it is permission marketing, it is just too good to pass, isn't it?

But the question remains, how could FingerTec be in the social media when we are not a consumer brand. We are not selling toothpaste, we are not a brandname of a snack or fizzy drink, we sell hard stuff industry products. Many of our clients have question marks on their heads and even now some are still raising eyebrows with our involvement in the social media channels. These platforms are meant for social, not business.. so they say.

This seminar convinced me that we are on the right track. Even though we understand the power of social media marketing to businesses, we still lack of understanding on how to strategically plan the social media marketing to get the best out of the audiences in these platforms. There are a lot of ground to cover to stay active and effective in this marketing mix. Selection of channels, the question of ROI, the reputation we need to maintain and manage, strategies to plan, etc.

FingerTec Facebook likes are now approaching 19K and counting. We have gathered our fans from around the world though our efforts and through our partners' Facebook pages. Though compared to Coca-Cola, our number can be considered miniscule, we are proud of where we are through the efforts that we've put on so far.

One interesting point to note about our target in social media marketing is that, FingerTec is not here to hard sell our products, we are here on these platforms to connect with all FingerTec users around the globe who have been using the products for attendance and for their office security. Positive or negative feedbacks, we accept them. And we warmly welcome your presence on our social networking space, to be a part of our lives.

Join us at www.facebook.com/fingertecworldwide

by Norana Johar, COO, FingerTec HQ