As we kick off 2009, one thing is crystal clear: We’re entering an entirely new era for marketers. Let’s call this the year for building relationships. Right now, prospects want to make every purchase a safe one. That means they’ll rely on companies or brands they know and trust. Closing sales will require a stronger emphasis on tactics that let you relate to customers one to one. And it’s never been more important to craft a set of effective letters that you can customize for individual prospects.

Writing a great letter takes a bit of time and know-how. Whether you use it to follow up a lead, close a hot prospect or introduce your products and services, a well-crafted letter will be one of your most powerful marketing tools in the new year.

These six rules will help you write letters that motivate your best prospects:

Rule 1. Set a Measurable Goal
Every good letter must be written to make something happen. Focus on that goal before you begin, and decide what your letter must contain to produce the desired result. Make reading your letter worthwhile for your prospect, and it will reward you by advancing the sales process. If you’re sending letters just to provide prospects with more information, you’re wasting your postage and opportunity to move prospects to the next level.

Rule 2. Have a Strong Hook
Your letter has to immediately grab the reader’s interest or it’ll be discarded as junk mail. Depending on the type of business you’re in and what you’re marketing, your hook can be a special offer or a lead communicating a unique benefit. When your letter follows a phone call, highlight the benefits your prospect desires in the first paragraph.

Rule 3. Convey a Unique Message
Have you ever received letters from competing companies with virtually identical offers? Chances are you tossed them because you couldn’t tell one company from the other. Take a look at one of your old letters. If it could have been sent by any of your closest competitors, rethink your approach. The message, pricing and offers contained in your letter must be unique to your business and tie into your branding.

Rule 4. Keep the Reader in Mind
Imagine you were face to face with your prospect, reading your letter aloud. Would you be comfortable, or would the tone be all wrong? Your letter is a one-to-one communication with a real person. Don’t come on too strong or overpromise. Use simple, direct language, not flowery prose or impressive vocabulary. And because you won’t really be face to face with your prospect, the look of your letter alone must convey your professionalism, so double-check for errors.

Rule 5. Write About “You the Customer”
Great letters are –directed outward. That means they stress what “you the customer” will get and not what “we the company” provide. Highlight benefits front and center, and use the body of your letter to describe the features. Then summarize the key benefit once again, and close with a call to action that gives the prospect a reason to move to the next step in your sales process.

Rule 6. Make Responding Easy
No matter what type of marketing letter you’re writing, close by providing a clear and actionable next step. In some cases, the responsibility for that action–such as sending a written proposal or contract–will rest with you. When a special offer has been made, your letter should make it quick and easy for the prospect to take advantage of it via phone, e-mail and postal mail. The fewer hurdles your prospect must jump, the more likely you are to close the sale.

Resolutions are easy to make. The problem is, they’re even easier to break. Nevertheless, making New Year’s resolutions is a must for business owners. In our never-ending quest to make things easier for entrepreneurs, I’ve come up with five resolutions that shouldn’t be that hard to keep and that should help all of us. What follows may not seem like typical New Year’s resolutions. But that’s just as well, since this isn’t going to be a typical year. The sunniest predictions for 2009 say the economy will start to turn around by the third quarter of the year, but that it will still take at least another year before we’re back to where we were. I’m not saying this to sound discouraging; it’s just the reality we must now face.

Resolution #1 is to think smarter. Apply new solutions to old (and new) challenges. Stop doing what you’ve always done and ask yourself, What else you can offer with what you’ve got? “Do more with less” may be a clich?, but it’s a good mantra to adopt in 2009.

Resolution #2 is to be resourceful. There are lots of ways to spend less and achieve the same (or better) results. Audit your business. Check for inefficiencies.

Resolution #3 is about technology. Old hardware sucks time and can literally slow your business down. Outdated software is just inefficient and can easily affect productivity, which of course will likely impact revenues and profits. There are bargains aplenty out there (that’s including Aidan tech services), so it’s actually a good time to upgrade your technology.

Resolution #4. Speak up. Ask for what you want. Nearly every business is in the same dire straits these days, so everyone is negotiating. Don’t buy anything without at least asking for the best price.

Resolution #5 is to open up. Let your employees know how things are going so they can help if you need it. It’s better to tell the truth than to hide it. Uninformed workers are often immobilized by fear of the unknown, so sharing the state of your business keeps everyone focused on what is, rather than what may be.

Let’s make 2009 the year of the small business. Resolve to start a business. Or to grow the one you have. That’s the best way to help the Malaysian and global economies grow.

How can information system be used to achieve strategic advantage at the industry level? By working with other firms, industry participants can use information technology to develop industry-wide standards for exchanging information or business transactions electronically, which force all market participants to subscribe to similar standards. Such efforts increase efficiency, making product substitution less likely and perhaps raising entry costs-thus discouraging new entrants. Also, industry members can build industry wide, IT-supported consortium, symposium, and communications networks to coordinate activities concerning government agencies, foreign competition and competing industries. Looking at the industry value chain encourages you to think about how to use information systems to link up more efficiently with your suppliers, strategic partners, and customers. Strategic advantage derives from your ability to relate your value chain to the value chains of other partners in the process. For instance, if you are Amazon.com, you want to build systems that:

• Make it  easy for suppliers to display goods and open stores on the Amazon site
• Make it easy for customers to pay for goods
• Develop systems that coordinate the shipment of goods to customers
• Develop shipment tracking systems for customers

In fact, this is exactly what Amazon has done to become one of the Web’s most satisfying online retail shopping sites. The Interactive Session on Technology discusses how Amazon.com developed and executes this business strategy. It also shows that Amazon.com had to revise its strategy several times in order to remain competitive. Internet technology has made it possible to create highly syncronized industry value chains called value webs. A value web is a collection of independent firms that use information technology to coordinate their value chains to produce a product or a service for a market collectively. It is more customer driven and operates in a less linear fashion than the traditional value chain.  These value webs are flexible and adaptive to changes in supply and demand. Relationships can be bundled or unbundled in response to changing market conditions. Firms will accelerate time to market and to customers by optimizing their value web relationships to make quick decisions on who can deliver the required products or services at the right price and location.

Large, bureaucratic organizations, which primarily developed before the computer age, are often inefficient, slow to change, and less competitive than newly created organizations. Some of these large organizations have down-size, reducing the number of employees and the number of levels in their organizational hierarchies. Behavioral researches have theorized that information technology facilitates flattening of hierarchies by broadening the distribution of information to empower lower-level employees and increase management efficiency. IT pushes decision-making rights lower in the organization because lower-level employees receive the information they need to make decisions without supervision. (This empowerment is also possible because higher educational levels among workforce, which give employees the capabilities to make intelligent decisions.) Because managers now receive so much more accurate information on time, they become much faster at making decisions, so fewer managers are required. Management costs decline as a percentage of revenues, and the hierarchies becomes much more efficient. These changes mean that the management span of control has also been broadened, enabling high level managers to manage and control more workers spread over greater distances. Many companies have elimnated thousands of middle managers as a result of these  changes.

The poor use of English on the National Registration Department (NRD) website has been rectified following public complaints. The department’s public relations officer Janisah Mohd Noor said the mistakes were an oversight.

“We are checking on this and assume that someone has taken the initiative to upload the content without going through the necessary procedures first,” she said.

Earlier this month, a reader forwarded a copy of the atrocious content in English on the website to the media, expressing concern that it would taint the country’s image. Below are the original contents of the said pages. Note, these pages have since been amended by NRD.

http://www.jpn.gov.my/BI/4_5_kadpengenalan.php (edited)

1. I’m 17 year old, when should I change my identity card replacement?
A person whose had got first-time identity card namely during old 12 year, are required change again his identity card when have reached the age 18 year. If this change made within life time 18 - 25 year, no any penalty imposed.

2. I already 25 year old and still not have my own identity card. What shoul I do?
To them not yet own identity card although already aged more 16 year are advised to come to any nearby NRD to apply identity card past record. Applicant and promoter must showed up together to be interviewed, bringing with together following documents.

3. I a foreign citizens and have gotten permit of entry from Jabatan Immigration Malaysia. Whether I qualified to apply identity card? What is conditions for I apply identity card. Read rest of story…

AidanTech’s sister company, ArdentEdu, has just succesfully registered the ArdentEduKit brand (”ardent edukit“) and tagline (”fun science in a box”).

Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd American president, was also the first US patent commissioner. He spoke of patents as “locomotives that run industry“.

Mark Twain once wrote “a country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab and couldn’t travel anyway but sideways or backwards“.

With a patent, an inventor can control the design, manufacture, licensing, distribution and copying of his inventions. Patents can prevent your competitors from practising your invention.

Simply put: The purpose of patents is to keep others from duplicating your invention.

Benefits of a patent
• Marketing. Customers are always looking for the “next new thing”. Patents represent “newness” as “novelty” is the key to successful patent applications. Patents also represent “R&D”, which everyone likes. Patents are also third-party endorsements as they need to be vetted by the unbiased officials in patent offices worldwide. Read rest of story…

It’s on an O’Reilly blog, so it must be true: Facebook has lost some users’ email settings. The company had to send them an apology, and a request to reset things. Let me explain in geek jargon: That’s effin. Not because Facebook’s engineers failed at Backups 101, but because by now the Marketing department has figured out they can reset all our email preferences to “Spam Me Like Crazy” by pretending to lose them again in January. Laugh while it’s still funny.

We tend to think the security threats to a business originate outside the organization. In fact, company insiders pose serious security problems. Employees have access to previleged information, and in the presence of sloppy internal security procedures, they are often able to roam throughout an organization’s systems without leaving a trace.

Studies have found that user lack of knowledge is the single greatest cause of network security breaches. Many employees forget their passwords to access computer systems or allow co-workers to use them, which compromises the system.

Malicious intruders seeking system access sometimes trick employees into revealing their passwords by pretending to be legitimate members of the company in need of information. This practice is called social engineering. 

Both end users and information systems specialists are also a major source of errors introduced into information systems. End users introduce errors by entering faulty data or by not following the proper instructions for processing data and using computer equipment. Information systems specialists may create software errors as they design and develop new software or maintain existing programs. 

Can’t stand CNN? Don’t want to keep Googling for news? Pop open a browser window and leave a Twitter search for “mumbai” running. People are posting photo links and group-sulking, rather than the usual sort of “if only they had used Twitter more in Mumbai, none of this would have happened” chatter. You can always go to Poynter for that stuff.

The most basic distinction in communication networks is that between analog and digital signals. There are 2 ways to communicate a message: either an analog signal or a digital signal.

• An analog signal is represented by a continuous waveform that passes through a communications medium and has been used for voice communication. The most common analog devices are the telephone hand set, the speaker on your computer, or your iPod earphone, all of which create analog wave forms that your ear can hear. Oh yes, your ear is an analog device also.
• A digital signal is a discrete binary waveform, rather than a continuous, waveform. Digital signals communicate information as strings of two discrete states: one bit and zero bits, which are represented as on-off electrical pulses.

Computers use digital signals, so if you want to use the analog telephone system to send digital data, a device called a modem is required to translate digital signals into analog form. Modem stands for modulation/demodulation.

Now, I guess all of us understand why the heck we need the streamyx modem, huh?

Suppose you wanted concise, reliable information about the current operations, trends, and changes across the entire company. If you worked in a large company, obtaining this might be difficult because data are often maintained in separate systems, such as sales, manufaturing, or accounting.

Some of the data you needed might be found in the sales system, and other pieces in the manufacturing system. Many of this systems are older legacy systems that use outdated data management technologies or file systems where information is difficult for users to access.

You might have to spend an inordinate amount of time locating and gathering the data you needed, or you would be forced to make your decision based on incomplete knowledge. If you wanted information about trends, you might also having trouble finding data about past events because most firms only make their current data immediately available. Data warehousing addresses these problems.

Read rest of story…

AidanTech website design service, Slvridge, is proud to have served the national armed services. Our clients list recently includes a trio of military organizations, locally and internationally: the Malaysian Armed Forces Veterans Council (MVATM), the Malaysian Royal Ordinance Corps Veterans Organization (VEKOD) and the World Veterans Federation (WVF)

Maybank will launch its new Maybank2U website.

Called M2U 2.0, the major revamp created a new look and feel from the previous Maybank2U website that had its major revamp 7 years ago when it was first launched in year 2000, making it the first internet banking site in Malaysia.

The new themed however was build on the same technical platform. Maybank catalogued all 3,000+ pages on Maybank2u.com, consolidated and reorganised them into groups that were more intuitive based on usability tests conducted with Maybank2u.com customers.

The page templates were designed specifically for the different types of content across the portal, which more effectively highlighted the site content and assisted users in learning about Maybank’s products, finding a product or to conduct internet banking transactions.Maybank2U.com currently has 4.5 million registered user with 1 million active users. It handles over 30 million monthly transaction with a value of RM3.3 billion and has a monthly page view of 157 million making it the leading internet banking portal in Malaysia.The new site will go online tonight replacing the older site and will be launched tomorrow (15 October 2008).

Aidan Group together with their business contacts and circle of friends cherished a successful buka puasa event held at the Pusat Perubatan Universiti Malaya (PPUM) . Close to 20 kids who suffer from various types of cancer were visited and nestled with raya cards, candies, toys, books, and duit raya.

The hospital was later handed some monetary contribution for the kids’ future expenses. A huge thanks to everyone who helped to contribute, organize and attend the buka puasa event.

The event reminds us to be thankful and syukur on how fortunate we are to have good health.