CoRpoRate BloGging : A New Marketing Communication Tool for Companies

Corporations are increasingly looking for opportunities to make them stand out in order to maintain a competitive edge. Although traditional media serves a medium to disseminate company message to the world but it ain't not enough as it lacks the ability to directly connect with a company to its customers. Thus, here comes the CORPORATE BLOG which represents the company's values, beliefs, philosophy and direction. Corporate blog can be categorised into 2 types; internal and external.

Internal Blog

A weblog whereby all the employee can view and accessed through the corporation's Intranet. It encourages employee participation. All the employee may also free to discuss any issues as well as to build rapport with one another. Besides that, it also may encourage collective intelligence. This is crucial for an organisation as employees are able to generate their own point of view which in turn may help out the organisation for improvement. In addition, it may be a source of direct communication between various layers of an organisation.

External Blog

A weblog where company employees, teams, or spokespersons share their views. It is often used to announce new products and services to the public. From here, company can get feedback and suggestion from customers about the new product being introduced. The blog is also flexible enough to allow a conversation and sharing of idea about the company products. Next, corporate blog creates opportunites for the company to meet its prospective customers. In short, corporate blog enables company to connect with their customers, to build trust, and resulting in strengthen the relationship between customers and company.

As a conclusion, corporate blogging is crucial for a company. It can expand a business to the entire world through blogging. However, there are some drawbacks where the company has to be aware of.

Top 10 Corporate Blogs

1. Google

2. Adobe

3. Flickr

4. Facebook

5. Yahoo! Search

6. Dell

7. Digg

8. Linkedln

9. Ask

10. General Motors

Related link :

A Guide to Corporate Blogging

E-Government in Malaysia: Its Implementation So Far and Citizen's Adoption Strategies

When we first mention about e-government, I believe that most people will connect and associate it with the new online income tax return system, namely e-filling. Nonetheless, the term e-government actually encompasses a much broader scope in which the government strives to improve its internal operation, provide information and services to the public more conveniently and efficiently, enhance the accessibility and quality of interactions with the public in all different kinds of departments. Since the launching of Malaysia Super Corridor (MSC) in 1996, the implementation of e-government in Malaysia has jumped start and gathered pace as it is seen as one of the seven flagship applications of MSC to move Malaysia into the Information Age.

Briefly, the 7 pilot projects of our nation’s e-government flagship applications include:

1) Project Monitoring System – Monitor the entire lifecycle of the country’s national developmental programs.

2) Human Resources Management Information System – provide consolidated HR data such as best global HP practices for Malaysian Public Service

3) Generic Office Environment – a powerful web-based office management tool providing users the solutions to effectively and efficiently manage their office environment.

4) Electronic Procurement – enable suppliers to advertise, present pricing, process orders and deliveries and ultimately to sell goods and services to the government.

5) Electronic Services – allow public to conduct transactions with government agencies such as Road Transport Department and utilities companies such as TNB.

E.g. http://www.myeg.com.my/

6) Electronic Labour Exchange – one-stop-center for labor market information.

7) E-syariah – a case management system to improve the services of Syariah Courts.

During the early years of e-government implementation in Malaysia, as in accordance to a survey carried out by market information group TNS in 2003, citizen adoption is growing but at a slow pace. For instance, as shown in the study, about 15% of Malaysians have used online government services in 2003 as compared to 12% in 2002. Furthermore, Malaysia is ranked 25 out of 32 countries in terms of e government usage growth. Such slow growth rate can be attributed to inhibiting factors such as lack of public awareness, IT literacy, and citizen’s perceived security and privacy risks. Specifically, citizens are generally concerned about the security of e-services transactions as they are fearful that their credit card or banks account details are intercepted. In addition, privacy concern is also a major issue as citizens are worried that their specific personal information would be exploited by companies, government agencies and so forth.

Nonetheless, in the past few years, the government has been undertaking various initiatives to overcome the barriers of e-government implementation. For example, several cyber laws such as Personal Data Protection 2004 and Electronic Government Activities Act 2007 have been introduced to mitigate the security and data concern. Besides that, numerous advertisements on services such as MyEG have also been rolled out to increase the public awareness about the availability of online road tax renewal, driving license renewal and so forth.

Example of myeg online tax renewal form:

As a result, citizen’s adoption of e-government has been growing positively as according to survey done by Brown University in U.S in 2007, Malaysia was ranked 25 out of 198 countries in terms of international e-government ranking, leapfrogging from 157 in 2005! As evidence, Inland Revenue Board has announced that e-filing of income tax return has increased by 30% to 1.25 million in 2009, gradually increasing from 78,718 (2006) to 538,558 (2007) and 881,387(2008). Source: TheStar

If you’re interested to know more about income tax returns and e-filing, click here.

A discussion on E-learning offered in Malaysian universities: Pros and Cons from the students perspective

This week I would like to share about e-learning or sometimes we call it distance learning. E-learning is a modern process of education whereby the learning process is supported by computer technologies. In other words, it means that, instead of attending traditional instructor-led classes, students can complete his/her courses by studying online. From the students' perspective, e-learning bring the advantages as follow:

a) Convenience and flexibility
E-learning which available 24x7 allows the students to study anytime, anywhere as long as they have access to a computer and Internet connection. Besides, they even can pause the learning session at their convenience.

b)Lower cost
E-learning can helps to reduce the cost of study as the students are not required to travel to campus everyday and this tends to save the travel cost and travel time as well. Additionally,just as what we know, almost every computer available in the today's market are equipped with free browser software. This indirectly help to reduce the setup cost of e-learners.

c) Improve interaction
Based on empirical studies, we observed that students are more actively interact with instructors or other students via e-learning. This is because of students can email to others students easily, pose comments on message boards or use videoconference to communicate with them lively.

On the other hand, there are some disadvantages as well, such as:

a)Lack of face-to-face communication with teachers
E-learnig which promotes home-study has reduced the oppurtunity of students to face-to-face communicate with their teachers. Furthemore, when they face any problems, they might not get instant reply from their teachers as well as their teachers might not available anytime. Thus, this tends the result that students sometimes may get confuse with their study.

b) Technological problem

Computer and Internet connection are two critical components for distance learning. If a student does not possess these two components, he/she is not able to experience this modern process of learning. In spite of this, if a student has an old model of computer or low Internet connection, he will face the trouble too. This is because low Internet connection or old computer will make the students unable to donwload new version of reading material or make the assessing of reading material frustrating.

Review on A Post on Legal from My Ecommerce Blog: Online Beauty Product Fraud

According to The Star, at least 66 people were cheated approximately RM73,445 when they were buying skincare products via a website named "BigPussyCat". The website offered products such as facial and eye masks.

Some victims have made reports and claimed that they were lured by the advertisement because the price of the items offered was cheaper than those off-the-shelf or market price. Further, they said that they had made their payment via the Internet, but they did not received the products after waiting for few weeks.

The post reminds the people should be caution all the time when they are performing online purchases.

The features of Internet have been abused by many users. MyCERT has published a statistic that shows the fraud cases are increasing from year-to-year especially in 2008. There are various types of online fraud can be easily found such as email forgery, e-commerce, and e-banking. Normally, the scam to arrive via bulk email in buyer's email boxes. And, the case has been mentioned in above is one of the scam examples. In a famous types of scam, people will receive electronic verification congratulation because they have have been "specially selected" for a big prize. Then, they will ask people to contact them and to make a deposit into their account for getting the prizes. However, the selected people will never receive their "prizes" in the end.

How to avoid scams? There are some ways use to avoid scams. For instance, check the background of the company to ensure the existence of the company. A reputable company will be pleased to reply additional information and provide as many references from satisfied customers as people want.

People should be skeptical in order to avoid scam and be the next victim.

Related link

• http://ecommerze.blogspot.com/
• http://www.mycert.org.my/en/resources/fraud/main/main/detail/515/index.html

Prepared by Carrie Hon