We are expanding and need to find good people to help our agency grow. The qualities that we are interested in are initiative, creativity and integrity. We believe that people can learn new skills, but not change who they are, and so we like to meet people that take challenges and have desire to take on new responsibilities.

It’s an old adage but a true one, that in small companies people have more chances to do a variety of jobs and be an important player in the team quickly. Think about it, if we have 10 people and you join, we just increased our company by 10% – you make a difference.

One of the ways the we select candidates is to ask them to answer some simple questions – this way you can see if you really want to be in PR, and we can see what you know already about what we do, and how you can add value. Download this form, spend some time thinking about the answers and email them to people@eastwestpublicrelations.com.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Current Openings:

1) PR Coordinator (Singapore)

Updated: August 30, 2010

Overview:

The overall role of the PR Co-ordinator  is to support the Associate and other members of the team to ensure that correspondence is kept up to date with the client, and in doing so learning the various aspects of client management from a mentor. The role is an entry level position which will lead to training and development to become an Associate within 12-18 months.

Job description:

Research

• Assist with the development of editorial calendars and media briefs
• Media monitoring & news clipping
• Media database maintenance (Update and/or develop targeted media lists )
• Research and develop speaking opportunities & other events.
• Assist with developing promotional ideas for events and campaigns

Writing

• Effective proof reading
• Production of meeting notes

Production

• Creation of press kits and other industry tools
• Video editing
• Media liaison
• Delivery by email/fax/mail/show of press information

Job requirements:

• Degree in Media /Public Relations
• Excellent command of English
• Internet savvy

If you are interested in building a business instead of taking instructions, then please see our site www.eastwestpr.com and download the ‘Get to Know You’ questions – think them through as quickly as you can and then send them back, along with your CV, to people@eastwestpublicrelations.com

Location:

Beijing CBD – Blue Castle International. View Map

Singapore – Purvis Street. View Map

Timing:

The opportunity is starting now.

Below is a reprint from Wired Magazine on what this might mean.

The Oxford English Dictionary Definitions of ‘Print’ And ‘Digital’

The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary is the bibliophile’s equivalent to the movie geek’s high-end home theater setup. It’s a mighty, totem-like symbol of mystical multiple-shelf-spanning lexicographic power. But when the third edition is completed sometime in the next decade or so, there might not be anything physical on the bookshelves to show off.

That’s at least what Nigel Portwood, chief executive of the Oxford University Press, told the Sunday Times of London. “The print dictionary market is just disappearing; it is falling away by tens of percent a year.” The Times asked if Portwood thought the third edition of the OED would be printed. “I don’t think so,” he replied, adding that he thought print dictionaries in general might vanish completely within 30 years.

On Monday, an OUP spokesman walked Portwood’s statement back, issuing a statement to the Oxford Times:

No decision has yet been made on the format of the third edition. It’s likely to be more than a decade before the full edition is published and a decision on format will be taken at that point. Lexicographers are currently preparing the third edition of the OED, which is 28 percent complete. No final completion date is yet confirmed….

Demand for online resources is growing but large numbers of people continue to buy dictionaries in printed form and we have no plans to stop publishing print dictionaries.

Now, while this statement is designed to slow down alarmed chatter that the print OED will soon be no more, it’s also completely consistent with what Portwood told the Times. Oxford publishes many print dictionaries apart from the OED, such as the one-volume Oxford Dictionary of English, a two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, and even a microprinted Compact OED that ships with a reading glass, plus many others. They could continue to print any or all of these well into the future, even if the 3rd edition of OED goes digital-only. Indeed, Oxford University Press already offers a basic free online dictionary and subscription version with extra features.

Nor is it possible to say precisely so many years out in which digital format(s) the full OED might appear, even if a print edition is published. The online version of the second edition has offered subscriptions for 10 years, and does a brisk business appealing to both institutions and individuals. They’re even relaunching the site this December, creating a new interface and incorporating material from the new Oxford Historical Thesaurus.

But just as few publishers 10 years ago could have predicted today’s mosaic of electronic publishing options, Oxford can’t know with any certainty what format, print or digital, will be best suited for tomorrow’s readers. You could be reading the OED on your 1TB Kindle or sitting inside a virtual 3-D holograph generated by your AwesomeBox MagicLantern, for all we know. So saying “no decision has yet been made on the format” means the opposite of “we will absolutely publish a print 3rd-edition OED.”

If the OED does go digital-only, we could imagine a scenario in which the 2nd edition print volume becomes a still-used legacy reference set for institutions who don’t want to upgrade, like Windows XP’s been for desktops. It might even take on additional cachet, like a vintage record collection and analog stereo system. These are all good things. A new printed edition would be wonderful, too.

I think, though, that when subscribers see the new web version, already augmented by data that can’t be found in the printed 2nd editions, they may not think that the OED’s digital future looks bad at all.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/the-oxford-english-dictionary-definitions-of-print-and-digital/#ixzz0yH2DkXQW

By Zhao Qian, Global Times

“My new car has problems,” “My PC keeps burning out,” “I’m worried that the baby milk power will affect my daughter’s hormone levels…”

Consumer complaints and discussions such as these abound on Chinese social media sites ranging from blogs, bulletin board system (BBS) communities, and social networking services (SNS) similar to Twitter and Facebook – but what users may not suspect is that some are being monitored – and not by government censors.

In an effort to put out publicity fires caused by shoddy products and services, or to quash rumors, both Chinese private firms and foreign-funded companies are engaging in public relations crisis management by hiring consulting companies to analyze the Internet word of mouth (IWOM) and suggest solutions if needed.

Demand increasing

CIC is one such company. It was China’s first corporate provider of Internet intelligence and insight based on IWOM. It goes through social media platforms including mini-blogs, BBS and SNS sites such as Kaixin001.com (similar to Facebook) to meet corporate demands for collecting consumer complaints.

“We gather nearly all the posts related to our target customers, and classify the information via semantic analysis into several groups, such as complimentary and derogatory clusters,” Gu Jiaqing, research and consulting account director of CIC, told Global Times.

“The demand for the Internet users’ feedback information on social media has recently increased fast,” Gu said.

In a case of a consumer complaining about a well-known car brand on an auto BBS recently, CIC “detected” the post, and suggested that the automaker contact the author to offer him a satisfactory solution. In doing so it prevented the critical post from becoming more widespread, according to Gu.

At a round-table conference hosted by East West Public Relations last week, Chen Chen, East West’s executive associate, showed the Global Times a table illustrating dozens of Chinese social media as its monitoring targets.

“We monitor and analyze the public opinions on various social media in order to offer effective suggestions for our customers who ask for help in dealing with their public relation risks,” Chen said.

Positive replies

“The social media have made company risk management more complicated because it is quite difficult to communicate with and contact millions of individuals who pass on negative news,” said Zheng Yannong, general secretary of the China International Public Relations Association. “But a company’s reputation can be revived if it is timely about telling the truth and/or apologizing via the social media.”

Some companies establish their own SNS websites, so as to better understand and react to customers’ demands and complaints, said Chen.

Corporate blogs are another possible choice for the companies to publicize their replies to critical incidents, such as asking detailed questions about the complaints and replying to posts via BBS. Still other businesses also post positive news on their mini-blogs, Chen said.

“Some of the cases need to be dealt with quickly, while sometimes you need to let some cases calm down by themselves for several days. Replying to blogs or BBS posts with positive, honest answers to the complaints is another solution,” Chen added.

Unethical solutions

But not all the public relation crises are settled in a professional and ethical way. A batch of so-called “public relations management companies” that offer to delete critical blogs and posts have also sprung up.

When the Global Times contacted one such “public relations company” called Guanghuideqidian (“Brilliant Start”) at www.fumianshanchu.com, the reporter was told, “we can delete any posts according to your demands, except for the news on government’s websites.”

Customers are told to send Brilliant Start the URL links to the posts they want deleted, then pay via online. The fees vary according to the difficulty of the deletions.

Another company named Beijing Tianlang Plots Institute at www.tlsk.org also told the Global Times that virtually all deletions were possible. On Tianlang’s website, customers can choose categories that include “BBS deletions” and “blog deletions.”

“Those deletion companies are definitely banned within the country’s public relation industry,” said Feng Chunhai, who teaches for public relation department with Communication University of China. “The Chinese modern public relation industry has a history of around 20 years, and we have set up a series of guidelines to regulate it. Violators such as those are not permitted.”

“Deleting posts is a short-term solution, and may cause more problems once the deletions are exposed,” said Zheng of the China International Public Relations Association.

Watch the video to learn about the key points of the discussion.

New Media rountables are organized every month in Beijing and Singapore to discuss the latest developments in online/digital/social media.

Click here to register to the next roundtable!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The 4^th Roundtable Meeting

Guest List

顾佳庆Robin Gu
Research and Consulting Account Director
CIC

高月梅Angela Gao
Marketing Manager Asia Pacific
Survey Sampling International

蒋馨 Claire Jiang
Senior Media specialist
Koelnmesse China

钱倩Qian Qian
Product Strategy Consultant
Oracle China

乔杕Darren
Business Development Executive
Dow Jones & Co., Inc.

孙小雨 Xiaoyu Sun
Channel Sales Manager
HP China

赵倩 Qian Zhao
Business Journalist
Global Times

戴露 Amelie Dai
Media Specialist
Koelnmesse

Founded in 1997, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC)  operates under China’s Ministry of Information and Industry (MII), an agency that oversees telecommunications, multimedia, broadcasting and satellite transmissions across China.

What are the principles for registering .CN domain names?

You may register a CN domain name with not more than 63 English letters containing A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and hyphen (-). Capital and small letters are equivalent.

How to register a .CN or a Chinese domain name

CNNIC accredited Chinese Domain Name registrars responsible for providing Chinese Domain Name registration services. Namerich is an example of registrars that can provide with these services
(www.namerich.cn). Based on the principle of “first come, first serve”, you may select one of them, and go to their website to proceed with the online registration.

Any business or organization, worldwide, can register a .cn name under a new liberalized policy that no longer restricts .cn registrations to  Chinese. Currently the registration is not yet open to individuals.

About .CN domain names

.CN is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for mainland China. It is currently the sixth most common top-level domain, after .com, .de, .net, .uk and .org with over 7.62 million registrations.

Second-level domain names include generic second-level domains such as com.cn, edu.cn and gov.cn, and second-level domains of provinces such as bj.cn, hn.cn and sh.cn.

• AC for academic institutions
• COM for Industrial, commercial, financial enterprises
• EDU for educational institutions
• GOV for government departments
• NET for networks, NICs and NOCs
• ORG for non-for-profit organizations
• MIL for military

About Chinese domain names

Avnet Technology Solutions, Asia Pacific – In a video interview, Michael Costigan, Director of Marketing and Business Innovation, speaks about Avnet SolutionsPath™. Michael said, “Being a solutions distributor it’s pretty natural for us to think about solutions, but more about bundling up IT solutions and making them solutions that can answer and solve real business challenges for our partners’ customers.”

For more information, please visit: http://avnetts-apac.blogspot.com/

http://oe-menshealth.blogspot.com/
In a recent video interview, Professor Peter Lim, Medical Director of Andrology, Urology & Continence Centre at Gleneagles Hospital Singapore, speaks about the various treatments for testosterone deficiency. Professor Peter Lim is also the president of the Society for Men’s Health Singapore.

EASTWEST PR designed a Social Media Release (SMR) for Orient Europharma to create awareness about the newly launched gel-in-sachet treatment for testosterone deficiency (Hypogonadism / Andropause / Male Menopause). We interviewed the experts on-site, edited the video, created a micro-site, published the content, and syndicated it all over the internet (in various discussion groups and social media networks).

Key elements of a typical SMR would include:

• A clean, simple layout
• Video/Photo/Sound-bite
• Spokesperson(s) Biographies
• Media Contacts
• Transcript/Press Release
• Links to corporate website / external resources

Once you’ve created and published the content,what comes next is marketing it to various online and offline channels through a direct mailer, email media pitch, LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Pages, Twitter, Social Bookmarking, Blogger relations, YouTuber relations, etc. Through this laborious process, we are able to reach circulation figures of over 100,000, which can possibly compete on the same level as the readership of some trade magazines and small publications.

However, that does not mean that we do not reach out to offline media journalists, as the value and credibility of getting covered in the Wall Street Journal or Forbes, still outweighs the viral reach of online channels. The SMR holds the potential as an interactive pitch that can be used to engage journalists and the media. In a world that is becoming increasingly bombarded by audiovisual and multi-dimensional content and experiences, why should your engagement with the media remain 1-dimensional?

For more information on Social Media Campaigns, please email us at pr@eastwestpr.com

In a recent video interview, Michael Costigan, Director of Marketing and Business Innovation, shares his views on cloud computing in the Asia Pacific region. “Because of the more mobile IT environment here in Asia, you’re going to see cloud computing really take off quicker here than those other geographies” said Michael.

For more information please click on the Avnet Technology Solutions Social Media Release microsite, where there is a full transcript and company description.

To find out more about social media campaigns please send us an email

EASTWEST had responded a lot of social media proposals lately, and having a lot of discussions with our agency partners and clients about how to approach social media. Time and again, the conversation confirmed that the social media marketing in China is still immature. The lack of ROI standards and established authorities unnerved many clients, preventing any form of experimentation until their questions and concerns were addressed.   

During the third social media roundtable organised by EASTWEST Beijing team, participants had a brainstorming meeting together to develop a framework that could help the social media marketing consultants and clients with a simple approach to do the review and measurement of the campaign.

Click here to view roundtable video.

Participants include  

Yongchao Duan, Strategy Consultant, Ziff Davis Media Group

Xiaojie Lv, Marketing Manager, Hesine

Di Lu, Marketing Executive, HRH Communications Group

Chunxia Qi, Corporate Blog Trainer

Ann Jie, Associate, EASTWEST

Planning & Goal setting

Before embarking on any social media marketing campaigns, it is essential to first hammer out your objectives and determine approach and resources. From agency’s perspective, it is also important to ensure the budget and time frame is appreciate for what your client wants to achieve. Otherwise, you will have to work on resetting expectations or ‘educate’ the client with an alternative set of objectives.

During the roundtable discussion, participants identified 3 types of objectives which are shown as below.

Marketing objectives

• Attract new customers
• Increase market share
• Raise brand awareness
• Establish brand loyalty
• Encourage customer engagement

 Financial objectives

• Drive sales growth
• Leverage marketing KPI & ROI
• Achieve better budget allocation towards greater profitability  

 Social objectives

• Engage customers for a social good such as non-smoking campaign
• Recruit new supporters
• Raise money
• Draw public attention to specific issues such as food security, green tech & clean energy

ROI Measurements

Once the objectives are determined and clear, you need to prioritize your efforts, focusing on those that will bring the greatest returns. In additional, you also need to plan the use of metrics and analyses to measure the success. For example,

Marketing measurements

• Visits / Page views
• User’s comments/mentions/trackbacks
• Inbound links
• Followers/ Friends/ Subscribers
• Tags/ Rating/ Ranking
• Total referrals

Financial measurements

• Number of leads/period
• Ratio of qualified to non-qualified leads
• Sales enquiries
• Lead conversion

Social measurements

• Downloads
• Tone of comments (positive, neutral, negative)
• Authority/ influence of contributors
• Time spent on site
• Followers/Friends/Subscribers

Yongchao Duan criticised that the use of self-promotion content is now rampant in social media, and as a result the role of SMM consultants are becoming more like people pasting advertising stickers on the street. Thus he argued that by focusing on SMM and metrics, we should not be distracted from the primary objective of building relationships and cultivating dialogue.

ROI evaluation

With defined measures, you can track awareness of the product, users’ attitudes and perceptions, user experience with the product, and behaviours (new and returning). Also you might want to know an estimate of cost and return on investment for the efforts in SMM. Possible evaluation criteria include

• Cost per click
• Cost per action
• Cost per contact
• Cost per responder
• Cost per buyer
• Cost per staff hours per week for social network campaign
• Cost per follower who participate your campaign

 However, the actual impact of the social marketing program is often difficult to assess accurately. This is where you must go back to your campaign objectives and set realistic and appropriate measures.

ROI monitoring tools

In our previous blog post, we have shared a bunch of Chinese monitoring tools helping companies and organisations to track social media success. With one or more of these social media monitoring tools, you can easily gauge how well your efforts are working.

Free tools include

• Baidu Index
• Qihu
• Youdao
• Google Analytics
• Sina Microblogging Search
• Baidu Blog Search

 Paid tools include

• SinaBuzz
• IWOM Master.

Jim James, Managing Director of EASTWEST Public Relations said, “Ann has joined EASTWEST with a solid background in the media in China and has proven herself on day one that she has the flair for all of the exciting work we are currently undertaking for our clients. I am extremely excited to have her on board and even more excited for our clients as they will have Ann at their service.”

Jie is a former editor for the Metropolis Times and a graduate of the City University of Hong Kong with a graduate degree in Communications. Given her background, Jie will assist clients though media relations and new media work. In addition to media relations for clients, she is instrumental in producing the monthly roundtable discussions for the Beijing office.

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About EASTWEST Public Relations

EASTWEST Public Relations Ptd Ltd is a privately held company with offices in Singapore and Beijing. The company provides consultancy to business-to-business clients in a range of industries including technology, finance, mobile, and healthcare. Founded in June 1995 as EASTWEST Communications the company was incorporated in February 1997 as EASTWEST Public Relations Pte Ltd and is a GST registered company. In 2001 EASTWEST became a non-equity partner of Brodeur Worldwide, an Omnicom company. In 2006 a Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise was established in the Chaoyang district of Beijing, China. In 2008 the company acquired an interest in Eggplant Digital Pte Ltd, a digital development agency in Beijing. http://www.eastwestpr.com