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Showing posts from 2015

Translation function released on WeChat

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WeChat is the most predominating social media platform in China now. However most of the contents on WeChat are in Chinese. As the users are mainly Chinese people, the chat conversation and moment wall posts are also in Chinese. This made none Chinese speakers feel extremely frustrated. Even if they have the app installed in their phones, they still could not understand what's going on on WeChat. Well, some of the Chinese users do write English posts on WeChat. But that's just a small proportion of posts they created on WeChat everyday. Now here is the good news. WeChat has introduced the translation function in Moment and Chat. If you press the post copy for a while you will get the option of translation.  The translation result is still quite raw. But that's enough to give you a hint of what's going on, or ROUHGTLY what's going on there. :) The function is valid to translate moment copy, comments, as well as the chat conversation.  The questio...

Artificial intelligence could be another new species in the future

I’ve been watching films and TV series about artificial intelligence quite a lot in the recent few months thanks to the influence of my friend. The journey started from Avengers: Age Of Ultron, then Black Mirror, Ex Machina, Her and Humans. In all these films, only Avengers is with a positive ending. All the others stories looked more worried and confused. Our attitude towards artificial intelligence has been evolved over time. I remember that in the early years we were so much excited about the future when robots would help human being to complete all those labour work and boring jobs so we could all enjoy our life and live like in the communist society. Few years later people started to worry that what if one day these robots would try to remove all human being and occupy the earth with all their cognates. Robots have long last life. They are would not get old or sick (are they?) and they are much easier to be fixed or updated than human beings. They are physically stronger. ...

Pinterest - a platform for aspirations or actions?

A pinterest lady came to the office presenting her ideas around how Pinterest could help on clients’ business. I know that Pinterest is a declining platform. Therefore I went for that session with curiosity. Frankly speaking most of her presentation was not new news to agency people --  We knew that Pinterest had been used as a collage to help people organize their ideas and inspirations. It’s about people’s life in the future, therefore aspirational contents worked well. What people did on Pinterest was to discover experiences, save ideas and put inspiration into practice. Unlike Twitter and Facebook posts, pints could normally ‘live’ for a long while through sharing. Brands should consider to optimize their website with Pinterest tools. Rich pin is a good format which could including more comprehensive context for the pints. Brand should also remember to provide links in the descriptions so as to allow users explore further.   Ok, here are the bits which made me th...

Shenzhou Car service (神州专车) 'Beat Uber' campaign: a exploratory of negative reputation marketing ...

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Shenzhou Car Service is a Chinese car service company which provide a variety of premium car for people to hire in the rate that is the same as the Taxis in the market. Its drivers are professional and well trained drivers. The business model is smart from my point of view. It sits in between traditional Taxi business and Uber business. Thursday morning (25 June), Shenzhou Car Service did something “crazy” on its Sina Weibo page – it delivered a post with 9 pictures of celebrities and professionals from different industries holding a card suggesting its fans stop using Uber. Its argument is quite simple – Uber drivers were not well trained and not well managed. Therefore passengers are facing danger of health and safety risks. And even just 1% risk could damage your life seriously.  The post generated huge chaos on Weibo and WeChat. People argued whether the challenge from Shenzhou to Uber was fair. Within a day the original post got 12,390 shares, 7,099 comment and...

Nuan nan 暖男 (Translation: sweet man / sunshine boy)

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Nuan nan is a word appeared in China more than half decade years ago. The type of dream men went mainstream when the Korean TV drama My Love From The Star hit China in 2012. The leading character Professor Du (starring Kim Soo-hyun) was seen as the classic role model of the archetype. What does Nuan Nan exactly means? Baidu provided an official definition: “Nuan Nan refers to sunshine men who make the others feel warm. They are able to provide very detailed care (e.g. put on a overcoat on you when you feel cold, pass you a cup of tea when you are tired, remind you to put on your socks when you step out of the shower room, etc.), they are responsible to their families, they are good at cooking, and more importantly they put the feeling of others beyond their own interests. They often look smooth and dress smart instead of trendy. Compared to the archetype of young and refreshing boy, they have much stronger inward world. They are often named family men.” Though in mos...

Fork, the new realm of Emoji

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My x-agency friend posted some photos on WeChat just now. They immediately captured my attention. Obviously she made it on her own. According to the clue on the image I found the APP in Apple store - Fork, a APP which allows you to create comic book of your own. Aren't they amazing! To me, this is absolutely a new realm of emoji, an upgraded version of ‘emotionalized’ life story telling -- instead of mixing your text with a string of emoji icons the text box, now you can add comic icons into your photos. Through the editing, normal photos are now transformed into an interesting comic book with a completely personalized story line. Naturally I start to think about the opportunities for brands. Some of the pioneer brands have already started working with WeChat in creating emoji which are often playing around the product. A good example is DoubleMint. If the Fork APP goes well, probably brands could consider working with them by providing fans more pr...

Us

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Last Friday my wechat screen was all in a sudden occupied by friends’ photos with a common subject of ‘ 我们 ’ (we). I had a Baidu search and found the reason. (Google doesn’t work in this case. In terms of search results in China Google is far less accurate and helpful.) Fan Bingbing and Li Chen, the two film stars, leaked their status of relationship to the public early this year. Unlike most of the other celebrities, the couple has been making their relationship open to the public. They mentioned each other on Sina Weibo and interact with each other. On Friday morning Li Chen posted a photo of the couple with the headline of ‘ 我们 ’ (we) on Sina Weibo. One minute later Fan Bingbing shared the post on her Sina Weibo page with the same subject of ‘ 我们 ’ (we).  This is a high key statement of relationship between themselves and the message was immediately spread over online across different platforms. What's amazing was soon afterwards, people online started t...

Mrs Puggy Wuggy has a square cut punt

I guess you might have heard about this tong twister: Mrs Puggy Wuggy has a square cut punt. Not a punt cut square, Just a square cut punt. It's round in the stern and blunt in the front. Mrs Puggy Wuggy has a square cut punt. Yes, that's where my blog name came from. I heard of this tong twister when I was in a drama school evening class. Before we stepped onto the stage we would do a bit of tong twister to warm up our mouths. What Mrs Puggy Wuggy did totally did not make sense to me. However I remembered this funny name. I'd like to record this funny vocal in my blog URL and on the top of my blog so as to remind me that there is always something I don't know and something fun outside to be explored!