Social networking websites like Friendster, Myspace, Tagged, etc, and especially Facebook, have significant implications for business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs. To keep your business current, you should at least be familiar with the latest conversational marketing techniques and viral technologies, including Facebook and its powerful features.

10 reasons to use Facebook for Business:

1.    Meet friends. Now Facebook is not just for school kids. Members are typically older and more mature than on other sites, and there are more professional users.

Let’s take a look at some of most popular websites and the proper methods for selling things via the Internet in Malaysia.

AUCTIONS

Auctions are a great way to sell things as you sometimes get more than you expect.

• eBay

The most recognisable website for online buying and selling is, of course, eBay. The online auction site has been available in Malaysia since 2004 and has been gaining in popularity over the years.

Registration is free and eBay Malaysia does not charge insertion fees or final value fees. However, the site will charge you if you want to add an extra picture or subtitles for the item you are selling.

• Tip!: It is important to have multiple views of any item, particularly for expensive products where it is best to have high-resolution pictures from different angles to increase the chances of finding an interested buyer.

eBay owns PayPal and it is one of the more popular ways to pay. PayPal allows the buyer to transfer money from his credit card or bank account (note: In Malaysia only credit cards are allowed) to a PayPal account and then send payment to the seller’s PayPal account without exchanging sensitive financial information.

In Malaysia, however, once the money has been transferred to the sellers PayPal account, the money cannot be withdrawn from a bank and can only be credited into your credit card account.

Other payment methods include bank transfers and cash on delivery.

Advanced users hoping to start a side business online may want to consider signing up for an eBay store.This allows users who meet the requirements to create their own customisable eBay page and even gives them the option of selling fixed price items. Setting up a store will incur an extra monthly fee and only users with a fixed number of ratings and verifications will be eligible to rent one.

• Lelong.com.my

Another auction site that is popular amongst the local audience is Lelong.com.my. The site is fashioned much like eBay and even has a similar user rating system.

Established locally, it is a lot more Malaysia-centric as there are options to pay specifically via Maybank2u and shows which state in Malaysia the item is in.

Lelong is also pushing its virtual stores to people who meet its rating requirements. You pay a small yearly sum for your own page and store logo as well as an inventory mechanism provided by the site. Again, this is for advanced users looking to take online selling to the next level.

Lelong also does not charge fees on items sold on its site. You are only charged if you wish to add more than one picture.

• Tip!: The best way to get around paying too much for extra pictures on eBay and Lelong is to take several photos and merge them into one picture as effectively as possible.

FIXED PRICES

There are websites which allow you to sell things at a fixed price to any interested party. The difference here is that you have the prerogative to sell to whomever you please, not necessarily to the highest bidder who may not have hiked the price to a satisfactory level.

• Lowyat.net

Arguably the most popular fixed price website is Lowyat.net. This website deals primarily with electronics such as computers and computer parts, MP3 players, speakers, and essentially anything that requires some form of electric energy to operate.

The site is free to sign up and it is probably the most straight to the point for selling stuff. It is forum based so you can ask questions immediately and a private messaging system for more detailed inquiries.

The site offers trade at no cost at all as there are no charges for extra pictures, (although the quantity is limited) or a final value fee. Reputation as well as amount of items sold will be taken into account in assessing a user’s reliability.

• mySimplifieds.com

A relative newcomer to the realm of online trade is Digi Telecommunication’s mySimplifieds.com.

Launched in February, it hopes to offer Malaysians yet another venue to buy and sell their items. Advertised as a classifieds website, this site allows users to advertise a wide range of products and even extends to property. Many houses, apartments and rooms are up for sale or rent on Digi’s site within months of its launch.

Currently, registration and usage is completely free and it remains to be seen whether that is subject to change. The site offers some interesting services such as a built-in Facebook feature designed to notify your friends about your posting. Also, links to YouTube will be allowed for further product or property demonstration via video.

Internet marketing is a very broad subject. If you understand how broad offline marketing and sales is, it is the same for online or internet marketing. Therefore, in order for your online marketing campaign to be successful, there must be a group of marketers that truly focus on doing it. It is complex and the methods are variety. Fortunately there are few distinguished techniques for you to start. While the others, they can be implemented later accordingly.

1) WEBSITE - Why having a properly designed website is very important to optimize your online marketing?

The purpose of marketing is to create leads.  Once you have leads, then it is up to the sales team to close the deal. Among the leads, there are people whom you can close them right on the spot. For others, there must be some leads nurturing effort before they are convinced to engage on your products or services.

The campaign that you make to get people to visit your website is called marketing. It can be via both ways; online and offline or just one at a time. Once the visitors are at the home page, your website is taking the role of a salesman. Therefore, it is not wrong to say that your products’ website is your online sales men. That factor alone is a very good reason for you to invest for a well designed website.

Now, you’ve understood the function of your website. Let’s get to understand in brief about what are the visitors’ expectations and behaviours about any website:

• People come to web sites to satisfy goals, to do tasks, to get answers to questions.
• They come for information, for the content that they think (or hope) is there
• Answers a question or helps them complete a task
• Information is easy to find and easy to understand
• They expect the content to be accurate, up to date, and credible
• They don’t read much, especially before they get to the page that has the information they want.
• Even on information pages, they skim and scan before they start to read.
• They want to read only enough to meet their needs.

Let’s discuss about the vital points to consider….opps! I’m sorry. I have to catch an appointment now. We’ll continue later, ok?

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 eliminated thousands of middle managers as a result of these changes.

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…

There are 2 tools to help the firm to identify and build its core competencies.

• 1st Tool: consists of 4 specific criteria of sustainable competitive advantage that firms can use to determine those capabilities that are core competencies.
• 2nd Tool: is the value chain analysis. Firms use this tools to select the value-creating competencies that should be maintained, upgraded, or developed and those that should be outsourced.

In this article, we will only discuss about the first tool only.

4 Criteria of Sustainable Competitive Advantage 

1. ValuableValuable capabilities allow the firm to exploit opportunities or neutralize threats in its external environment. By effectively using capabilities to exploit opportunities, a firm creates value for customers.

2. RareRare capabilities are capabilitiesthat few, if any, competitors possess. A key question to be answered when evaluating this criterion is, “How many rival firms possess these valuable capabilities?” Capabilities possess by many rivals are unlikely to be sources of competitive advantage for any one of them. Instead, valuable but common (i.e., not rare) resources and capabilities are sources of competitive parity. Competitive advantage results only when firms develop and exploit valuable capabilities that differ from those shared with competitors.  

3. Costly to Imitate Costly-to-imitate capabilities are capabilities that other firms cannot easily develop. Capabilities that are costly to imitate are created because of one reason or a combination of three reasons:

a) Unique historical conditions. As firms evolve, they pick up skills, abilitise and resources that are unique to them, reflecting their particular path through history. A firm with unique and valuable organizational culture that emerged in the early stages of the company’s history may have an imperfectly imitable advantage over firms founded in another historical period - one which less valuable or less competitively useful values and beliefs strongly influenced the developmentof the firm’s culture. An organizational culture is a source of advantage when employees are held together tightly by their belief in it. 

b) Causally ambigous. This occurs when the link between the firm’s capabilities and its competitive advantage is causally ambigous. In these instances, competitors can’t clearly understand how a firm uses its capabilities as the foundation for competitive advantage. As a result, firms are uncertain about the capabilities they should develop to duplicate the benefits of a competitor’s value-creating strategy. 

c) Social complexity. Social complexity means that at least some, and frequently many, of the firm’s capabilities are the product of complex social phenomena. Interpersonal relationships, trust, friendship among managers and between managers and employees, and a firm’s reputation with suppliers and customers are example of social complex capabilities. 

4. NonsubstitutableNonsubstitutable capabilitites are capabilities that do not have strategic equivalents. This final criterion for a capability to be source of competitive advantage is that there must be no strategically equivalent resources that are either not rare or imitable. Two valuable firm resources (or two bundles of firm resources) are strategically equivalent when they each can be separately exploited to implement the same strategies. In general, the strategic value of capabilities increases as they become more difficult to substitute.The more invisible capabilities are, the more difficult it is for firms to find substitutes and the greater the challenge is to competitors trying to imitate a firm’s value-creating strategy. Firmspecific knowledge and trust base working relationships between managers and non-managerial personnel are capabilities that are difficult to identify and for which finding a substitute is challenging. However, causal ambiguity may make it difficult for the firm to learn and may stifle progress, because the firm may not know how to improve processes that are not easily codified and thus are ambiguous. 

Enterprise systems also known as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, solve problems by collecting data from various key business processes in manufacturing and production, finance and accounting, sales and marketing, and human resources and storing the data in a single central data repository. This makes it possible for information that was previously fragmented in different systems to be shared across the firm and for different parts of the business to work more closely together.

Enterprise systems speed communication of information throughout the company, making it easier for businesses to coordinate their daily operations. When a customer places an order, the data flow automatically to other parts of the company that are affected by them. The order transaction triggers the warehouse to pick the ordered products and schedule shipment. The warehouse informs the factory to replenish whatever had depleted. The account department is notified to send the customer an invoice. Customer service representatives track the progress of the order through every step to inform customers about the status of their orders.

Enterprise systems give companies the flexibility to respond rapidly to customer requests while producing and stocking inventory only with what is needed to fulfill existing orders. Their ability to increase acurate and on-time shipments, minimize costs, and increase satisfaction adds to firm profitability.

Enterprise systems provide valuable information for improving management decision making. Corporate headquarters has access to up-to-the-minute data on sales, inventory, and production and uses this information to create more accurate sales and production forecasts. Enterprise systems provide company-wide information for managers analyze overall product profitability or cost structures.

The exhibition during SMIDEX 2008 was a huge success. Thanks to everyone who visited our booth. Below are several pictures from taken during the exhibition.

Meet the Aidan Freaks during SMIDEX 2008!!

Yes, you’ve heard it. Aidan Technologies will take part during the upcoming SMIDEX 2008 & East Asia SME Convention.

Date: 4-6 June 2008 (Wed – Fri)
Time: 10.00am – 6.00pm
Booth No: B47
Venue: Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre

SMIDEX 2008 is the 11th SMIDEC Annual Exhibition aimed to provide an avenue for Malaysian SME’s to network and market their products. Companies can explore new market opportunities and technologies, all under one roof.

And as one of the emerging technology provider company, Aidan Technologies will be showcasing its latest products and services at booth B47.

Bring along your friends, family and your business partners. See u there!

E-commerce means business over the Internet. It’s a new way of doing business without the physical limitations of business location or operating time. So why is it different? Here are 7 unique features of e-commerce:

1. Ubiquitous - it is available just about everywhere a computer can connect to the internet.

2. Global Reach – permitting commercial transactions to cross cultural and national boundaries far more conveniently and cost effectively than is true in traditional commerce.

3. Universal Standards - it operates according to universal standards shared by all nations around the world, whereas most traditional commerce technologies differ from one nation to the next.

4. Information Richness - enabling an online merchant to deliver to an audience of millions complex and rich marketing messages with text, video, and audio in a way not possible with traditional commerce technologies, such as radio, television, or magazines.

5. Interactivity - it allows for two-way communication between merchant and consumer and enables the merchant to engage to consumer in ways similar to a face-to-face experience but on a much more massive, global scale.

6. Information Density - vastly increase the total amount and quality of information available to all market participants, consumers, and merchants alike.

7. Personalization or Customization - merchants can target their marketing messages to specific individuals by adjusting the message to a person’s name, interests and past purchases.

Give us a call now to turn your business into e-commerce now!

If you’re a veteran retailer, you know the problem: Your inventory doesn’t match your tallies. Sales are going unrecorded. Your staff is spending far too much time chasing mistakes instead of tending to customers. Something is seriously wrong, and you’re just not sure what the problem is.

Here are 7 reasons to use a point-of-sale system.

1. Record-Keeping
POS not only record all sales and provide timely and accurate sales tracking, POS also lets you readily identify inventory levels at anytime, even when your books do not match your stock.
2. Discount Management
POS allows specific pricing model for specific items and automates discounts introduction, so POS knows which item has been discounted and records them accordingly.

3. Promotion Management
POS manages and reconciles short-term specials like coupons and special offers, so POS can track and tell you exactly how well each promotion perform.
Read rest of story…