Tag: tech and multi-cultural marketing

body building in Saigon

I have paid my first-month membership and come back for seven days straight.

The place is tiny.  I must have timed it badly: my body peak performance coincides with peak-time traffic which weaves through the front door (bikes found their short cut artery in an alley).

So I lift while listening to Michael Jackson’s CD. I feel proud, to be among muscle men, although if you get at the truth, I am more like Charlie Chaplin at the swimming pool (who pretends to get water out of his ears, while actually stays out of the pool altogether).

So here I am, in a city of roughly 10 million. People try to get home by bikes or buses. A bike front ended a Hyundai at an intersection this morning. People exchanged some unpleasantries, and went on their way. No wasted time. Lean city. Lean people.

Back to my muscle men. The owner put up whatever pictures and posters he can get his hands on: his own when winning medals, body muscle tissues poster straight from medical book and half-naked lady (but tasteful art).

He said if I wished, he could open the door at 3AM for me.  I said it would be more likely 3PM.

When your body produces endorphin, you feel less of a need for caffeine or nicotine.  I feel refreshed now, after two weeks of reverse culture shock.

The dust, the noise and the heat. There is tension in next door Thailand and earthquakes in Japan and Indonesia. China is building a huge project in the Mekong River, which might threaten the natural down-hill flow of SEA including VN.

The bodies and muscles here will need a lot of strength and endurance to withstand all that is throwing at them. And mine in particular, will need even more since I have used to working out in an A/C gym. Now,  I learn how to sweat it out among others in this steam-bath gym. I need to pick up on that: no wasted body fat, or any fat anywhere in the city of millions. Lean bodies in motion.  No wonder westerners found Saigon a great place to shred a few pounds, with or without joining a gym.

 

Me-too

It used to be “build it and they will come” in traditional Vietnamese society.

“Huu xa tu nhien huong” (if you got reputation, people will know about it).

Now, in the age of Pay per click, you have to build personal brand, to have your Unique Selling Proposition (elevator version or youtube version).

Either way, young Vietnamese are playing catch-up with Korean and Singaporean counterparts.

Image, impression and inbound marketing.  From We to Me-too, from collective self to individualized self.

Moving out and moving up. Nuclear family model.  Two-wages and one-child.

Shop until you drop.

Technology enables. Technology disables (traditional ties. Can you imagine grandma posting her younger-days pic? When I was just a little, girl, I asked my mother….Quel sera, sera).

So the We-too vs Me-too cultures are coalescing with the trajectory moves toward Me-too.

Smaller screens, mobile. I saw a student biking to school while on a cell phone. Mobile at its best.

Me-too. What’s you mobile number? Text me, load me some money, send me a clip, download me a song.

People in motion. You would think you are in San Francisco during the 60’s, except that helmets replacing flowers on their hair.

Students drinking iced-coffee milk, sitting on the sidewalk (cafe “bet”, squatting).

Self-assertion, self-promotion, self-expression. I know they love to learn, online or offline.

Good sign.  The future is in their hands: the knowledge economy.  You see, this new shift favors not the strong, but the fittest. And online, nobody knows you are a dog. As long as you can manipulate the 1’s and 0’s. SEO yourself.

Pagerank to the top.  Modesty is not a virtue, or at least, hard to discern.  And it’s no longer who you know. It’s those who know those who you know. “people who look at this profile tend to look at these recommended profiles etc….”.

Me-too, I don’t want to be left out. On line, nobody knows I was wearing shorts. As long as I put on a tie for the pic.

It’s the age of change. And Vietnamese society provides the continuity, with its thousand-year long history. Trends come and go. So have empires. People here keep up their smile, even when they have to limp along to sell lottery tickets. I bought two last night. Who knows, me-too will join the rank of noted nouveau riches flourishing the city even in the down turn economy.  The online thing just happens to arrive at the critical juncture when young students are open to learning, to experimenting and being assertive about their identity and connectivity with others.  I hope to learn a lot from people who know people whom I know.  Me-too, I want this to work for all.

Vespa in Vietnam

The brand is revitalized and resuscitated here in Saigon.  If not for the helmets, I would think it is a replay of A Roman Holiday.

Back then, the burning monk was pouring gasoline on himself and asked a younger monk to lit the fire.

He earned a memorial in that intersection.

Another Buddhist temple a few blocks away took collection to renovate. The presiding monk took off with the proceeds, leaving behind an abandoned project. Good monk bad monk. It’s Mid-Autumn Festival. Children with lanterns and adults with sweet cake. Fairy tales that had to do with an uprooted tree now replanted on the Moon. VIet Nam in the Sputnik and Space age.

The city is now catering to whatever clients demand and could afford: Gloria Jeans Coffee and Ha Long Bay tours (without Catherine Deneuve).

And back to my French coffee, Italian Vespa and USA‘s Hard Rock Cafe. You would have thought I am someplace but Vietnam.  I can assure you it’s Vietnam, with multiple English schools and exam prep “store fronts”.

Young Vietnamese design games, play games online and love watching soccer. They have street racing here too. And while doing it, they might as well feel the wind by taking off their helmets.  Electric bikes couldn’t make an inroad here, especially after they changed the regulation which required electric bike riders to wear helmets.

So forget the love for sustainable environment or the disgusting gas price. Young people zoom by on Vespa, adopt I-phone and continue to play games online. There isn’t enough open space for them to play soccer ( I notice a strange absence of basketball, US urban youth favorite past time sports).. On this Mid-Autumn day, my old neighborhood gets one less choice of temples: the abandoned Temple is still sitting there, “torn”, but not completely torn down while Vespa after Vespa zooms on by. Thang Cuoi in a Space Age. I will never look at the Moon, or Vietnam, the same way again, even with some familiar handles into the past like Vespa and lanterns on the street.

 

early imprints

I ordered my breakfast instinctively. And it’s 8 in the morning in Vietnam.

Already I feel the heat and humidity. Through the Australian school yard, I saw teachers in ao-dai. Could have been the ghost of my mom’s past.

Children are obviously better fed these days. And they have gone on to game 3.0 (playing less at internet cafe, but at home as broadband penetration has been on the rise).

There is less space between motorcycles, because the city was originally built as a French colonial city for a 10th of today’s size.

No one walks anymore, and certainly not in the heat of mid-day.

The game players keep the game designers employed.

The office workers keep the shopkeepers’

children fed. A family-operated coffee shop opens all day all night.

Three shifts in one. Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth.

But not earth. They chose cities, and not any city. It has to be Ho Chi Minh City. A few office towers got fully booked the day they let the tenants move in. Broadband was connected.  Zoom zoom.

If it weren’t for the absence of the double-decker, I would mis-take it for Hong Kong. Prepare to lose some weight here. And most importantly, stay alert when crossing the streets. My survival instinct kicks in, and not just because of the tropical storms.  I used to live here, schooled here and had my first love here. Except, we used to have more elbow room in traffic. It’s good that we wear helmet, glasses and mask.

It saves us from the embarrassment of  being stared at up close.

It’s awkward as well in Florida with the Lexus and BMW’s revving at the intersection.

But then it’s good that we found ourselves side by side as fellow travellers on our journey to work or home. Home is where someone is waiting for you.

It’s not a place geographically speaking. It’s your comfort zone. 1st place.

No more facade. Or acting up. Costume off. Hair down. And you are addressed by your rank in the extended family. Uncle Thang, good to see u.

 

Speed Shock: tale of an unintended acceleration

The chairman said it best “regulators are still stuck in ‘mechanical mode’ while the car industry has gone ‘electronics.'”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100226/ap_on_hi_te/us_toyota_electronics

And as anything else, the solution is more funding, more hiring of experts etc…

Transportation on steroid. At this rate of “unintended acceleration”, we might as well build “runway” not “highway”.

And the NHTSA will have merged under NASA (flying cars, just like my kid’s imagination).

It will be the age of flying, and not driving, thus ” make the world your galaxy”, not playground (as an earlier Ford ad espoused).

Besides the digitization of automobiles and its unintended consequences, I noticed social change during the Toyoda hearing as well.

I used to work with people who covered C-SPAN. Thus naturally, I notice camera staff in the background.

We got a chairman/woman of the hearing (person of color), then we got people of the mike (from Japan), then we got camera woman wearing of all things bright green

with headset on in the back.

Things have changed a bit since those Watergate hearings. Can you imagine a similar scene during the Oil Embargo? With Arabs being questioned about the safety of gasoline for instance? The protest that would be on the streets? Goodbye, we won’t DRIVE. Goodbye, we won’t DRIVE. The French would love this: one bicycle for every man, woman and child in America (Tour de France).

They have worried about computers in cars. How about mini-computers in the hand of drivers while driving? People smoke, text, talk, chat, listen to music or news, and eat their Happy Meal (that comes with a toy). Cars that went through Mc Donald’s drive-in used to be big and safe. Now, they are lightweight and computerized, and drive themselves. The closest you can feel this effect is at a car wash, when they ask you to shut down the engine and let the washing machine does the moving.

You feel “unintended acceleration” in reverse (the trains move past each other at 200 miles per hour, in what direction would the monk’s hair fly? Monks shave their heads. Thus, it’s a trick question).

This is not intended to be funny. With each human progress there are sacrifices (Challenger’s failure of management info flow, Hiroshima and Agent Orange).

I am glad to see hearings. Not only because it’s tax dollars well spent. But also because that is what a smart nation should question: are we going to fast, or too slow.

In which direction? And most importantly, are we taking everyone on the boat?

I am glad there is intended digitization with unintended acceleration. It slows things down for us to focus on quality vs speed of execution (get it fast vs get it right).

We all see unintended acceleration in finance (trading companies had their servers co-located right next to the office for a-few- millisecond- faster trades).

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100224/cm_csm/282709_1

They did that in the years leading to the bubble busted (WS version of “unintended acceleration).  I don’t think Washington has been theatrical enough. These days, there is no need for a conspiracy theory.

The machine does not reproduce itself fast enough for us: we want to be “up to speed”, and more speed. You see, this is nothing new. It’s been in place to replace the “mechanical mode” we were talking about earlier. We have reached the point of no return. Kids want wild online and adults Wild on E. And they are obese. And we helplessly watch our kids being ” accelerated” into the digital future, because parents are stuck in “mechanical mode”.  You see, they have earned points on those games, and obviously they were multi-tasking. What else can we ask for? Think? Isn’t that what “smart” machines are supposed to do for us?

Melanie Griffin once had a famous line “Oh, my head hurts when I think”.  Just let the pedal and acceleration system do the driving and thinking for you. If it crashed, blame it on them.

Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just pin this whole incident on one man, and let  him jump.  In pre-historic era, that’s what we would do to explain away what we now know: a mathematician (Indian) came up with “zero”. An engineer invented 1 and 0 “wax on, was off” after Marconi.  And another engineer (Asian) noticed the speed of optical transmission. Then another (Moore) about the doubling of the speed of chip. Then another (Metcalfe) about the Network effect. Voila. We have a new Age of wonder. (see more on Economist Special report on Data Deluge).

Let the Chinese do the manufacturing. And the First World stays with software design. And then we farm some of that out as well. Somewhere, it got lost in translation.

You see, you can always blame it on the translator, who I am sure , is at a loss for words to describe this phenomenon. Speed shock? Sir, I don’t have a dynamic equivalence for that concept. I am sorry committee, can we have a recess to huddle. Long flight back to Japan.

the Nguyen

In college, I could just tell when teachers got to my name: they couldn’t pronounce it. To save time, I just said “here”.

This was Penn State, late 70’s, when a name like Carter from Georgia could barely register in Washington Belt Way.

Now a random walk on the web tells me the Nguyen have finally gained some noteriety (not as popular as the Smith or Cosby but familiarity bred comfort).

If you were to google “Nguyen”, you would get Dat Nguyen (used to play the NFL for the Cowboys), Tila (Nguyen) Tequila (every other pictures) and Betty Nguyen (weekend anchor of CNN).  But you will also get Scotty Nguyen (poker face) and one-eye Nguyen (Agent Orange piece disguised under Nguyen),

Lee Nguyen (guitar player) and Colonel Loan’s war-cruelty photo.

The Nguyen dynasty has scattered to the four corners of the earth, evolving and adapting to opportunities and obstacles, not unlike Venture Capitalists, whose few bets made it while many didn’t.

Being in communication, I try to  ” see ourselves as others see us” .  And the best place to start is to Google for this sort of thing. Let’s take Tila to start our “beer summit”.

She was getting into fights while in school. Got put in “Buddhist shut-in” and from there (Texas) went to Hollywood (hopefully not on a Greyhound bus) to realize her American dream.  MTV gave her a contract, and the rest was history. She was quoted at one point saying she would want to be the US ambassador to Vietnam.

Vietnam watch out! Tila is coming (if history repeats itself, this is not the first time a well-known Hollywood actress wanted to grace Hanoi playground. Jane Fonda beat her to the punch). Or in Second Life, Tila will actually become the virtual ambassador if e-citizens elected her using their tokens.

VP Nguyen Cao Ky once said that he wanted to keep his last name so he could come back to Vietnam without sounding like a foreigner. Well, he did.

His daughter took that to the next level: keeping her father’s name in its entirety, while adding and ending it with her  first name (Nguyen Cao Ky + Duyen). She made it as a co-host of Paris By Night video series (celeb life style: got to change who you hang out with, and while at it, reinvent yourself). If history repeats itself, Brad and Angelina beat her to the punch as well (they rode in a scooter before the helmet law came into effect a while back).

So back to our Google search for the Nguyen. Back then, our ancestors weren’t originally Nguyen. The sad truth was, we adapted to the King’s demand and command (conformity and allegiance).  Nguyen has morphed into a generic code,

with mixed connotations: part Chinese, part French, part US, and now the Seven Seas.

The Nguyen are now inter-marrying (as in my families), and the third generation of Nguyen might still bear the name, but the gene mutation has morphed beyond recognition (unless kids wear “ao dai”  during Tet). My nephew and niece inter-married

and produced offerings of mixed heritage. Our Thanksgiving at times, looks like a UN Security Council, deciding on the fate

of Syrian Chemical Weapon Disposal.

Maybe someday, they will put a Nguyen in the White House. One term would be fine. Let’s see if he/she can do better than his/her predecessors.

Or the system (which according to the latest CNN poll, 86% said the government is broken) itself not only helps this future Nguyen look Presidential, but also renders him/her ineffectual. I broke my arm on my first month learning Kung-Fu. It hurt like hell. Took a long time to heal. Perhaps something broken can be healed. First: recognition of the pain. Second: be patient. Third: put on a cast to speed up recovery. In my case, it was a long summer staying indoors.

We won’t hear much about  US might or Exceptionalism in near term.

Friedman (of the Flat World) beat me to it in his op-ed “fat years, lean years”. Or like Chairman of HSBC is coming out with “Good values”, a call for reflections. It would be interesting to see the turn-out in Las Vegas Caesars (Coliseum  built for Celine Dion, whose Roman original motif was blood sports) to hear Former President Bill Clinton (who charged for a talk about “global interdependence” themes).

That broken arm the summer of my Junior High (while “tous les garcons et les filles de mon age, …se promene dans la rue) set me on a different course ever since: pause to think and be reflective . The US and the Nguyen got something in common: we both had been very ambitious to the point of having an illusion of grandeur until the crash. I and many other Nguyen knew it well: even in and through a worst-case scenario, we have managed to get PhD’s, started companies, invented products and run for office.

I still know when that slight pause came during roll call. But these days, it just my first name that they had trouble pronouncing. If only they knew that it meant “win”, as in win-win solution. At least, we got pass the Nguyen part. Just Google them, and find out for yourselves. It’s the same story you would find in NYT today about a Hasidic matriarch who came and had 2000 descendants. It’s the story that repeats itself time and time again here in America. It’s your story. It’s our story.

 

disgrace and distaste

On the news were Tiger and Elton,  one disgraceful and the other distasteful.

Tiger made a public apology, not as dramatic as Jimmy Swaggart’s, but you can feel his being tormented (by sex addiction).

Elton, however, started a bombshell, when jumping into conclusion that if God-Man Jesus can empathize with him (and others), then Jesus must be gay.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35466984/ns/entertainment-gossip/

When I watched Elton-Gaga  duo performance at the Grammy Awards, I thought the torch had finally been passed (they looked cute in their outrageous costumes and make-ups).  His pronouncement today was up there with  John Lennon’s remark (that the Beatles was more famous than Jesus Christ.)

Public figures must weigh their words carefully.

Their successes have been very hard-earned, yet the ensued fan base could vanish in an instant.

These folks need personal brand revitalizing.

In the digital age,  reputational currency are just as hard-earned as in the real world.

One customer or “friend” at a time.

Word of mouth, buzz, recommendation etc.. all work like web, spreading world-wide.

We are building the digital rail road to connect the many more millions who are yet to join us in Facebook and Yahoo messenger list or what not.

Personal branding could easily turn south (Roger Ebert’ altered photo gave him so much grief).

Many tonight are having reservations and not sure they can separate the goofing from the golfing, and the singing from the saying.

http://www.wpbf.com/sports/22618495/detail.html

It’s Your Call. But I still love “Your Song.”( “And you can tell everybody, this is your song”.)

Let’s just say, if Jesus could empathize with Elton John, then he must be one hell of a good singer-song writer, at least, in my chart.

Marketing-Google-Sales

Subtitle: the engineers who bridge the Marketing-Sales Gap.

Before Google, Sales would use shot-gun approach (and work the Law of the Average) in Cold calling.

Marketing would do research to uncover the mind and motive of consumers. But it has been more an art than science, at least not hard science, until Search. Customer’s post-purchase remorse belongs in the realm of academic exercise in postmortem (Toyota).

Now, advertisers can confidently pay-per-click, start and stop campaign with click through data to test effectiveness.

Marketing in the age of Google. Continuously improved algorithm.

Better techno/social/psycho graphic data profile for us time of click, key wording and percentage of click-through.

Verizon is letting its consumers  access Skype without using up their allocated minutes ( data channel on 3-G).

It even recycled MCI’s Friends and Families tag line.

And Skype use will drive Verizon’s stickiness while  AT&T , despite burdened down by I-Phone , keeps wasting money at ad assaults .

We are seeing a realignment of Pre-sales from traditionally engineering-driven to a more Marketing-centric model.

IT investment is on the rise, while the price of chip set declines.  Led by financials, many companies who would otherwise cannot afford to get into the IT space, now do. Everyone wants the co-lo cage closest to peering points.

Sales now looks like James Bond, armed with data, map, software, spyware etc… while marketing can spend quantitative as well as quality time to study buying patterns (increase in buying when the stores are placed closer to the food stall – hum – appetite drives purchase of non-food items – hum – we are still driven by our hunger – hum – how about our sense of smell-hum- arrested evolution, at least when it comes to shopping.

So here we go. Google rules. Let the “bots” do the crawling. For the lack of  a better word: pagerank.  May the best car win. GM got the right tag line, but its cars might not be best sellers. It’s up to the consumers who Search for key words, and up to the smart Trio (Eric, Larry and Sergey) to auction their ads.

Until their Ivy league rival in the East put the faces and names of people we are most likely influenced by. Then on top of convenience, we got trust and recommendation. Not giving up just yet, the Trio comes back with Buzz. May the best search engine win. Just don’t let Tila Tequila be the sole judge.

Winning is contagious!

If you need to be motivated as I do, watch the Winter Olympics.

You will share peak emotions, peak performance and peak mountain spots of Vancouver.

Everybody loves a winner, and the winner loves to savor and share that moment .

We empathize with their struggle, their trial and triumph. In a word, we self-project.

Their hopes, fears and dreams become ours.

Think of that Newsweek cover photo of the US women soccer player who took off her shirt on the green (Olympic 96?). Spontaneous and sweet victory.

Or at SB44, when the Saints number 22 intercepted that football (he pointed the finger at the end zone, where he was sure he would be in seconds).

No point of stopping someone on a winning trajectory.

Down in Brazil and New Orleans, the parades rage on.

Good to be alive. But it’s better to win.

Unless you were into anti-hero theme, winning has been popular in literature, film and throughout history.

Sadly, to win, you need to learn from the mistakes of others. That’s where training films and failed-business case studies come into play.

Remember that uncle in your secret family history? It’s better to whisper and leave the past in the dungeon. We all involve in mental editing, of data scrubbing to reinvent ourselves, just like the bean counters of Worldcom and Enron, to show positive P/E. There is nothing wrong with self-reinvention. But we need solid “wins” to show.

At the Olympics, sometimes, winning comes after years of training and practice. Even loss of life. But so contagious is winning . “I’ll have some of that” (Rob Reiner‘s mom said that famous line in “when Harry met Sally“.)

 

Neda rocks on!

I did not know Neda was a music student. Did you?

The footage of her dying on the street of Tehran propelled Neda to become an icon, on par with Susan Boyle.

Dreams come true for some, but fame could find its way to you in unlikely places: end of life.

Citizen news. The cult of the amateur.

We taught ourselves the use of the computer, the cell phone and the camera. And off we go, with news assignment or not.

I used to help raise those TV antenna from the WNEP-TV van so we can send signals back to the engineering room.

Now, any cell phone camera can upload images it took to the nearest cell site.

Watch out world. Behave!

The images might be grainy, the shots jiggered, the composition a bit off.

But more eyes are better than none.

And we have only just begun.

Photojournalism has always demonstrated its bravery, and integrity to show the truth.

We accept 140 characters as a new form of communication. And we can also give award to 2-minute footage of street demonstration coverage.

Gutenberg all over again! the scribes are being alarmed! What about years of training, of paying our due?

Skype moving into the wireless space, first in Britain, and now in the US?

Is everything up side down? Huffington Post vs Washington Post?

I know one more great divide: families don’t get to watch a show together anymore (at least, not since Cosby).

The days of I love Lucy, M*A*S*H and Gong Show are over.

Kids divide their time between three screens: TV, Computer and Third Screen (smaller communication devices).

So do parents.

And when we do communicate, it’s not only generational gap which needs to be bridged, but it’s also technological preference which needs to be taken into play.

140 characters.  Texting, tagging and twittering.

Neda, the content. How her name and face happen to appear in front of us (wireless video upload) speak a lot about our new century, our new decade and our new mode of connecting. I hear her sing on, like a mermaid in the far seas. Sing, baby sing.  Testing, one, two , three. You are good to go. Rock on, for it’s a free world!