Online Reputation Management is something you and your company can not do without these days. It’s because the need for brand and reputation management continues to increase in importance as consumer time spent on the social web replaces traditional media. Furthermore, let’s not forget the fact that :

· Customers are online – Customers who find products and services via internet channels have various experiences. Many consumers blog, write reviews, make comments and share opinions on social networks. It’s important to have a good handle on customers that are publishing both negative and positive information so the brand can monitor and engage in the right way.

· Journalists are online – Public and media relations is an effective marketing/communications channel for merchants, networks and in some cases, affiliates. Journalists are increasingly researching stories online and the way companies represent brands can influence whether a particular one is considered for a story or not.

· Competitors are online - Brand monitoring online and within digital media provides companies a real opportunity for competitive research. Discover what other brands are doing to be effective and whether they publish negative information about your brand in order to attract sales from products and services.

However you choose to look at it, it means one thing and one thing only : that the future of your brands are also online. It does not necessarily mean that you will kill your brand if you don’t engage in these activities, – but rather that you may hurt your real-world business if you neglect to nurture your online reputation management. Take some time to study it. As usual, followings are a couple of good articles about it for you to dig further :

· Basics of Online Reputation Management

· PubCon : Online Reputation Management

At this point, it may not be necessary to explain what blogging is. You should know, you are reading one of them. Yet, corporate blogging is a whole different game to personal blogging. This blog is an example of corporate blogging.

Depending on the direction, corporate blogging is classified into 2 groups :

• Internal : Accessible only to employees, internal corporate blog is very similar to company bulletins or newsletters.
• External : Meant for public consumption, many times it involves PR efforts and soft-selling writings.

Focusing on external corporate blogging, let’s pose a question : Do my company needs a corporate blog ? There really is no easy way to answer this, but some issues you need to ponder are :

• The Nature of Your Product / Service : Is it something that requires a lot of information ? Is it something that can be used in many ways, – and thus, has interesting tips and tricks ? Is it something that needs a heavy PR strategy ?
• Your Company’s Ability to Blog : Contrary to popular belief, corporate blogs are NOT the place to dump your PR essays and press releases. The most successful corporate blogs are the ones who shares some interesting news and insights about their fields. If you’re not sure that you do have someone in your company that can write about interesting issues ASIDE of your product, – then maybe it’s best to forget about the idea.
• Consistency : I keep on stressing this. Interesting topics are not enough when you don’t have consistency. It is as true in the world of corporate blogging as in the personal one.
• Control Method : Corporate blogs need a supervising editorial team. The word “team” is defined loosely. It can consist of you only as the CEO, or maybe a specially-paid group of 6 people. The key point is, you have to have a feel as to what your writer posts about, – and develop some methods to have them stay in the company’s directions.

Those are issues at the very basic level. There are many dimensions that you need to at least be aware about before you decide to take the proverbial plunge. To help your research, the following references may be particularly helpful :

• Wikipedia page of Corporate Blogging
• Sitepoint’s List of 15 Good Corporate Blogs
• Jeremiah Owyang’s Essay on The Many Challenges of Corporate Blogging
• Practical Guide To Starting A Corporate Blog by Jason Falls

A couple of days ago, we discussed about the basics of RSS. While a lot of people know about it already, we still need to touch on some basic points to help those who don’t. Once we got on that, now I am going to suggest some ways to utilize RSS to help your business.

Here they are :

• Subscribe to feeds that you read often or daily

This is just a practice based on a common sense. By doing that, you’ll save huge chunks of time from your typically-busy day.

• Find some feeds from a field that’s relevant to your business, – and subscribe to them

If you are in the tech business, you should subscribe to TechCrunch, Mashable and other prominent tech blogs out there. If you’re into news, catch the feeds of CNN, New York Times, and the likes. It goes similar way in whatever field your business in.

At first glance, this is also a sensible practice. Yet many of us ( – including me back then ), missed doing this because they can’t see the point. Please refrain from doing the same mistake. It will help you heavily in staying abreast of the most recent development in your particular business field. It will help you catch the newest trend and fad in the way you never thought possible.

There are 2 ways of doing this :

· If you already knew what sites are relevant to your business, you can go to their URLs, and subscribe manually. The process is elaborated in the first post of the series.

· If you are not sure, then Google is your friend. Find the best sites there is, and subscribe to their feeds. Alternatively, you can go to Google Blogsearch, and search for your topic. On your result page, just click the “RSS” link under the “Subscribe” menu in the left side of the page. You will then be asked to enter your preference of Feed Reader, – and you’re done.

• The last point you really need to consider has something to do with your business online activities. Does your business have its own website / blog ? If yes, then by default it will provide an option for people to subscribe to its own RSS feed. In this sense, you are a feed publisher.

What I will recommend for a serious feed publisher is : signing up for a feed optimizer service. The most well-known ( and so far has proven to be reliable for me ) is Feedburner. Acquired by Google in 2007, you can sign up for their service for free. Once registered, you can optimize your feed by customizing it in such a way to fit your readers’ needs. For example, you can include a menu below each feed, where any reader can bookmark your post to social bookmarking sites like Delicious or Digg; – all without going to your site. There are many other features to browse and use. Bottom line : better publication for you and your business. Try it.

There you go. I don’t pretend to be an expert on this matter. That’s why I said I “offer” some suggestions. One thing I do know : RSS is a very powerful thing to use, – both for personal productivity purpose, and as a platform to help growing your business. Have fun !

Before we start, let’s look at some definition quoted from Wikipedia on what RSS ( Really Simple Syndication ) is all about :

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader“, “feed reader”, or “aggregator“, which can be web-based or desktop-based.

Quite a lengthy definition by itself. When simplified, RSS basically means a way to publish / send a content to the reader without requiring him / her to visit the source site. Hence the word “feed”. Think of it this way. If you’re a busy business person, but still need to keep yourself abreast of the latest updates from the news sites, you’d relish a way to have all the updates sent to you. It saves your worthy time.

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The way you do this is by using a feed aggregator / reader. It’s a small piece of software ( desktop or web-based ) that acts as as if it’s “pulling” all the contents you subscribe. For easiest adaptation, you can try the web-based Bloglines. All you have to do is signing-up and start to subscribe for your preferred feed. If you prefer a desktop application, Snarfer would be a good choice too. Download the software, install it, and there you go.

Next, is the part of subscribing to the feeds. Both Bloglines and Snarfer have their set of feeds that you can browse and pick. For most users, these are enough to start with. I myself only added less than ten feed to my selected ones in Snarfer. Don’t make the beginner mistake of subscribing too many though. If you do, it will be very easy to get yourself lost in thousands of unread contents on a daily basis. You wouldn’t want this to happen, as this may mean that a particularly useful news for your business gets lost in the pile. Be selective.

Also, chances are some regular sites that you frequent are not there in the default subscription list. This is the point where you have to go to the site itself and find its RSS link. For example, I really like to read The New Yorker. What I need to do is going to its site, and finding a link / icon / menu where it says something about “RSS / feed”. In this case it looks like this ( look for the right area where I made a red circle ) :

In most cases, any RSS link from any site will look similar to this. It may mention only the link text ( “RSS” ) or even maybe just the icon ( the orange RSS icon ). Familiarize yourself with the way they look. The rest is easy enough. All you have to do is clicking on it, they will give you some links where you can copy and paste to your feed reader. Give it a few minutes and you should start seeing their updates in your aggregator.

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To sum it up, RSS is a handy way to stay updated on important contents scattered all over the web without visiting the sites themselves. A powerful time-saver, it’s easy to use by some simple steps:

• Pick your choice of a reader.
• Sign-up for its service ( if web-based ), or install it ( if desktop-based ).
• Pick your choice from its default set of RSS feed.
• Add to your subscription by visiting the site you frequent, and copy/paste its RSS link to your reader.

That’s basically it. It is proven time and time again that RSS is a very powerful method to utilize the web to your advantage. Why not taking part and join the crowd ?

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P.S. :

ZDNet has a good video on the basics of RSS that you can view here.

Next, I will be talking on how to utilize RSS for your business. Stay tuned.

First of all, let’s take a look back as to what ICT is. According to Wikibooks, a collection of open-content textbooks in the Net, ICT stands for “information and communication technologies and are defined, for the purposes of this primer, as a “diverse set of technological tools and resources used to communicate, and to create, disseminate, store, and manage information.” These technologies include computers, the Internet, broadcasting technologies (radio and television), and telephony.”

By this definition, it is largely supposed that a lot of what ALL companies do must involve ICT in whatever degree. From simple filing systems to sophisticated e-commerce implementations, no business can afford to ignore ICT if they are to exist at all in today’s world.

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Reading TechCrunch post today, it is a bit frightening that in ICT field alone, there are about 18,885 layoffs in the world this week. This is closely related to the ongoing global financial crisis that is happening. It is saddening, – especially for us ICT professionals, because although it may sound morbid, yet the fact remains and cannot be denied : we are in a crisis.

One question begs to be answered, though. Should you, – as a business owner, blindly cut back your ICT spending and erased it from your next financial year’s budget projecting ? By all means no. This was clearly argued by Sol. E. Solomon of ZDNet Asia in his piece titled “Global Crisis Hits Asian Finance Tech”. Drawing on authoritative sources like Ben Watson ( managing director of project management company, PTS Consulting ) and Malcolm Lister (CA’s Asia-Pacific and Japan vice president of alliances and industry solutions ); it’s hard to ignore his systematic arguments.

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Lister clearly made the point when he stated that what the crisis means is that the global financial sector is heading into an increasingly regulated climate. Banks will be battling with a number of key issues, including issues related to governance, risk management and compliance (GRC). According to PTS Consulting’s Watson, three common traits will be heightened in terms of governance, risk management and compliance: – need for information to be shared in a transparent fashion; – need to manage information flows; and – need to provide an audit trail of information flow, and any subsequent approval or rejection of that information.

Further, “Ensuring the correct technology is in place to facilitate these requirements will be key, and IT departments’ interaction with the overall business will need to be as close as ever to understand these changing requirements and deliver upon them,” he said.

Granted, this may have some limited applications to banks and financial institutions only. But the lessons are clear : ICT has become an inseparable and indispensable part of whatever business you are in. You owe it to yourself to bear this fact in mind.

What you can do is maybe striking out any large-scale IT projects for immediate cost-savings. Yet you cannot just leave it altogether because ICT is a platform where your business must stand to rise itself above the crisis tide. To do otherwise is simply unwise.

If you ever think about building your persona online, and build a business from there, there are some things that you can not afford to neglect. If you’re like me, you will feel unsatisfied at some point. I mean, back then I wonder, – OK, I’m on Twitter, Facebook, and I blog, – now what ? How do I use my profile to my advantage ? How do I build my online credibility to the point where I could gain something from it ? This is the point where I sat back and consider the best lesson there is : the Internet celebrities, – so to speak.

You see, when we consider the most prominent Internet personas and the way they market their respective credibility, the first character trait that comes to mind is consistency. From the larger-than-life Robert Scoble, the calmer proto-blogger Dave Winer, web strategist Jeremiah Owyang, or marketer-cum-writer Guy Kawasaki with his Alltop portal; – they all have consistency as the main key and leverage of their success. What they do may differ dramatically, – yet they agree on that one single important point.

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First, let’s take a look at some definition. Taken from Merriam – Webster online :

Main Entry: con·sis·ten·cy

Pronunciation: \kən-ˈsis-tən(t)-sē\

Function: noun

Inflected Form(s): plural con·sis·ten·cies

Date: 1594

1 a archaic : condition of adhering together : firmness of material substance b: firmness of constitution or character : persistency 2: degree of firmness, density, viscosity, or resistance to movement or separation of constituent particles <boil the juice to the consistency of a thick syrup>3 a: agreement or harmony of parts or features to one another or a whole : correspondence ; specifically : ability to be asserted together without contradiction b: harmony of conduct or practice with profession <followed her own advice with consistency>

Taken as our starting cue, this definition serves us excellently in trying to comprehend what consistency is and apply it to what we do. The goal of this post is to underline this.

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Now, I believe there are several dimensions involved when we talk about the concept of consistency. I am going to offer two of them for you to think about.

First, consistency applies to your own credibility. You need to be consistent in building your online existence to help you gain audience and influence. Do your homework. Examine closely your strength and weakness as a person. You might even need to ask your self this question : How do I want people to know me ? Define your USP ( Unique Selling Point ), and be consistent on that. Scoble, again, is a fine example of this. He knows that his particular strength is in technology, – having spent some time working for Microsoft. And that’s what he built. Successfully.

Secondly, consistency also is closely related to the concept of perseverance when the going gets tough. I am talking about the daily grind of blog writing here, among several things. Sadly, this is where a lot of very potential person fails. They build their “brand” as a person strong and loud, – only to disappoint us in the end because their most recent blog entries is 6-months-old, – for example. Never let daily activities hinder you from maintaining what you did before. Learn from Guy Kawasaki. Devoted to his portal project alltop.com, he painstakingly keep it updated with new sections. Of course, let’s not forget how he tell the world about the new section afterwards.

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Of course, consistency is only one of the key values that you have to acquire. However, I strongly feel that it probably is the most important core value to adopt if I’m to succeed in what I do. Back to the context of this post, being consistent will help you build your online existence to the point where you gain some advantage for it. Be it a business, new client, or some other intangible benefits, – it’s your choice. Good luck !

Across on my mind that it will be very nice to build distributed API so eventhough merchants already have their online webstore, they still can be merchant member in 40sale.com.

this feature connect their product page to their account in 40sale.com seamlessly. Users can query discount from the main page of 40sale.com and registered users can add to their wishlist while they browse merchant webstore. Bhinneka.com and glodokshop.com will take advantage from this feature.

Into web services framework:

• Development Model
• Operation
• Business and Marketing Model
• Marketing Operation

Development 2.0
(a proposal for a discussion with Ardy, Andi sama, CenCen, Rizky and Catur). BOP (Bottom of Pyramid) Principle applied in web technology. Web Services go to consumer.
is about how to build today’s web services platform
- original concept then up to customer (user)
- database structure again and again
- visual imagination modeling
- perpetual beta
- always platform with user space on it
- should be the easiest as possible to set up and use
- explore the live navigation possibilities
- system scalability design

Services Operation:
- Server – network performance maintenance and administration
- Statistic Production
- Technical Support
- Perpetual Activation
- Vendor, Agency, Partner management
- general administration

Business and Marketing Model
- paid services –>> Revenue from specific user
- free services –>> Revenue from ad agency and direct client

A. Paid Services:
- Define distinguished services (comparative and competitive)
- Define Charging Model
- Define Specific User segment that will charged (market)
- Define Financial Projection including Monthly BEP
- Evaluation and back to top

B. free Service:
- Define distinguished services that drive user to
- Define Products (sponsored links, banners, channel etc)
- Define Segmented Client
- Select Agency Partners
- Define charging model combination (best for BEP) through statistic data optimization

Marketing Operation
- Maintain best statistic feed
- Evaluate trends through creative queries (geo-segment, behavior, etc)
- Promotion: 80% internet and 20% other
- Sales: 65% online and 35% offline (direct marketing)
- Creative Presentation Updates (Marketing Kit)
- Business Development: Partnership and New Product/Services
- Customer relationship Management
- General administration

My concern today:

10yearsfromnow.com
- finish the basic concept of 10yearsfromnow.com
- establish framework for operational-development
- establish business plan for 10yearsfromnow.com

ibudananak.com
- operation today! Need another program before 2.0
- build ibudananak 2.0 concept
- establish business plan for ibudananak.com

on project bases
- establish sales cycle and project management framework
- establish outsourcing model, resources database and build partnership
- establish sales force and customer relationship model
- establish standard legal and administrative works for projects
- establish NET generic platform for website service (product)

on financial and business strategy
- consolidate and RUPS
- business strategy creation: capitalize and form alliances
- establish NET business plan (projections)
- find alternative funds
- go low — cut off budget

on ongoing projects
- deliver and close fast –>> create deadline
- consolidate profit-loss for every project

on Bapeda
- leadership! Bayu promotion
- stay low but control

on others web 2.0 initiative
- create photo album service
- create a web-store service
- create a recipr.com (local and worldwide)
- create a discount info service

Thing that irritates me all the time is that our production seems can not produce such application until next two year. Because of these and that…
Project lah… ini lah… itu lah…