Coping with social media go digital to progress with changing market

CEBU, Philippines - As digital technology continues to transform the marketing landscape, businesses need to adapt to change to cope with the ever changing consumer online spending habits.

Most of the traditional businesses fail to realize that with the increasing population of digital media users, it is only wise for them to do digital marketing to meet customer needs, said Johnn Mendoza, chief executive officer of Cebu-based Reminisense Corporation. It is a group of creative people that produce cloud-based solutions.

Technology resistance among traditional businessmen is the biggest problem to face, he said, because it is reality that consumer attitudes and their preferences are constantly changing.

This as the mobile market--the smartphones--now makes up majority of social network engagement. Digital media time has been spent using smartphones and tablets instead of the usual desktop computers.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have also been shifting towards mobile and are seen to grow further in terms of traffic.

When the smartphone industry has made a “boom” in recent years, companies have to forcibly create a mobile version of their websites to adjust to the changing lifestyle of the people.

“We want businesses to learn more about how they can establish an institution in the internet,” Mendoza said in an interview, adding that some who do social media campaigns still fail to please online users because of wrong practices.

Dialogue in social media

Although saying that there really is no actual key to success in making online presence, the CEO emphasized that in social media communication “it’s not a monologue but rather a dialogue”.

“I’m not here (social media) to announce, to preach or whatever,” he added, “but I’m here to talk, to make a conversation with people. I want people to interact--let them do. That’s the essence of success.”

Online marketing should be done in a way to involve customers in a conversation by asking their suggestions and insights rather than telling them plainly what a business offers, he noted.

Today, people don’t just want to listen but they want to talk more and that marketers should understand this and always try to have connection with their consumers. “That’s how businesses should be done.”

In addition, Mendoza shared that their family hotel business in Cebu has been so successful in applying digital marketing which helps them “connect to the world” and to potential hotel clients.

When their operation started in 2012, the hotel actually had zero occupancy however when the family realized they need to be present digitally the occupancy rate had eventually grown.

“The idea is with so little amount of money, we were able to yield large amount of results,” said the digital marketing advocate, adding that they used available Google tools such as Google Plus and AdWords and partnered with some digital partners to achieve their goal.

These tools and other online means could help the enterprise better market its products and services and campaigns.

Small enterprises must be guided as to how they can run online campaign and know what channel to use to reach the market.

In recent years, traditional marketing models have evolved rapidly because of the digital phenomenon which is seen to challenge the industry more than ever.

Internet of things still unlikely in Phl market

Objects that are connected together and linked to the internet too?

Yes, that’s the whole idea of the so-called Internet of Things which is a type of computing system characterized by new technologies implanted to devices to interact with internal states or external environment.

The apparent goal is to reduce the need for human involvement, said Elvi G. Suficiencia, executive vice president of MDR Microware Sales, Inc., an information technology supplier.

The IoT is the network of physical objects accessed through the internet; meaning, that these objects can sense and communicate.

Interactive objects

“Just to be layman about it, today we have the internet of information--the people to people,” Suficiencia explained in an interview with The FREEMAN on the sidelines of MDR’s Redefining Personal Computing event last Friday. “Now, we have things to people. The IoT are things that are digitally connected. With this, things become smart and sense the interstate of their being.”

These objects have the ability to communicate information to human beings through their smartphones for example and to sense and transmit data about the environment.

“So the information from these things are channeled through the internet to a data center where there are analytics to reprocess it again,” he further explained. “And these can be communicated to the people.”

For instance, a refrigerator can talk to a person’s smartphone to inform it that it is running out of fruits or a door telling the house owner through his tablet that someone is waiting outside.

Sensors are stuck on just about anything and plug these into the electronic network of the people.

IoT is seen to be an enormous transformative development in the way people work, businesses are done, productivity and efficiency are boosted and other aspects of human life, Suficiencia said.

The system is also designed to connect people, data, processes and things, Suficiencia noted, saying that “If objects can represent or communicate itself digitally to people, it can be controlled anywhere. Thus, improving daily living, increasing efficiency, improved safety and security for the community.”

Traditionally, computers are considered to be the tool for productivity, home computing, research and development, education--and worst was gaming.

However, the MDR official said the outlook of the PC business has been transformed into a much new way of freedom, the “Personal Computing”, which he described as a “lifestyle”.

He said there is a significant paradigm shift on the PC business, from the mere computer unit that processes systems and applications into more interactive objects.

‘It may take years’

While there are nations that are bracing the IoT already, he noted that the realization of this kind of network in the Philippines is still a big challenge and may still take years.

It needs the support from the IT industry, the government and the people of course: “First, the IT industry has to be united towards one direction. It has to be communicated through LGUs because the organization should be lobbying the government to do that. It’s different in the U.S. because it’s the government mandating the people. So, here we really need political will.”

The kind of education that the country has now does not really produce innovators and people who create content, he continued. Instead, it is designed just to mold people who consume content and become professors--and not innovators.

Meanwhile, Wowie Wong, market development manager of Intel Philippines, dispelled beliefs that the IoT will only make people more lazy, saying this is purely an innovation and make connectivity more advanced.

He said that after all, people should try to understand that “technology is a journey and not a destination.” — (FREEMAN)