Wednesday I went to Beijing for the advertising event of the year as it came through China on its last stop.  Everyone was very receptive to the idea of Clickboards.  I handed out seventy five business cards and then just got tired of saying:

Who do you work with? What do they do? Well I’m here today representing Clickboards. Clickboards is a new type of Internet advertising that connects the web to feed to mobile.  The reason it is called Clickboards is because they are like banners but you can click on them more than once (making a clicking motion with my hand) and you can enter information into them like your phone number.  Then without leaving the site you are on, the information is sent to your personal coupon feed.  Then those discounts on the feed can be accessed at the point of purchase with your mobile.  The discount is then verified for the vendor and is erased from your feed.

I told a lot of people I was based in Tianjin and why Tianjin was such a perfect test market for the fact that most retailers have no register or computer in the stores and that I was at a point where I just need to start spending money to get it started.  Most people were a little shocked I was from Tianjin.

So…………………. I met a lot of great people from really cool companies. I guess the conclusion is that I am successfully beginning to brand the term Clickboards and I’m still number one when you Google Clickboards.

I did get to thinking if some of these guys wanted to start this in more developed markets, and I tend to believe that having oversimplified Clickboards to get to this point, that it wouldn’t work.  So I am in the clear as far as broadcasting my message.

Next post is about Smart Kiosks and how they are already being installed, and in the beginning of creating Clickboards this was part of the conclusion to the future development of Clickboards.  So now how do I leap frog?

I’m going after mGuanxi.com now.  Check it out.  I’m sending my resume and proposal tomorrow.  It is the exact same proposal I gave to Richard of Jin Magazine that he rejected.  Now the two want to partner which could squeeze me out.  But I am still after a job with them rather than here.  I am being treated too much like my job is a common commodity here in Tianjin which it is not.  I hope to approach mGuanxi with the fact that I was able to make this magazine recognizable throughout the community and I want to do the same for them.  This is my email to them tomorrow:

Dear Ken and Jessy,

You may not know me directly but I believe you have been talking with Don Stewart and now my boss Richard Zhang is in Shanghai soon to have a meeting with you.  I want to put forth a proposal for you.  I am your man in Tianjin.  I have been the Chief Editor of Jin Magazine for over a year now.  I am responsible for putting a ‘famous face’ of Tianjin on the cover every month as well as find the multiple stories and contacts for these stories together for the writers each month.  If you like I could send you a copy of the magazine from before I started and our most recent so you can see the drastic improvement that has happened under my supervision.  I have been able to carry out every task that Richard has put forth and I have added elements to the magazine that generates response from the readers.

I wish to do the same for you.  I am extremely interested in your mGuanxi and believe I am one of the most beneficial people you will need to make this web and mobile service successful in Tianjin.  I’m excited about the possibilities and wish to give you a business plan that could incorporate advertising into your site.  This would take your site from being a social and savings  media to a social savings networking utility.  I proposed this to Richard and he could not see the finer details.  But RMB100,000 at base is something I think worth pursuing.  I’ve attached my business plan for Clickboards geared toward facilitating mGuanxi, as well as my resume for your revue.  Regardless of your wish to accept my plan I would still like to take the same opportunity I did with the magazine and really add some real impact to your up and coming web portal and mobile media which is emerging in Tianjin.  I have already begun to invite my friends to join my contacts on mGuanxi.  

I know all the clients from Jin Magazine and deal with them directly.  I am in charge of getting coupons and discounts to many places.  My frame of mind around advertising is the financial aspect as I got my MBA here in Tianjin.  I look forward to helping you and quite possibly introducing Clickboards to your web portal and mobile media. 

For the best of your consideration,

AC Grindl

Chief Editor 

Jin Magazine

JIN MAGAZINE
Six month Outlook
The overall objective is to combine all our medias into one package.

Newsletter

With the advancement of our Newsletter we can now incorporate more into this giving more reviews and news that we cannot otherwise in the magazine.  This also allows us to concentrate more on giving deeper information in the magazine that we cannot otherwise in the Newsletter.

The future of the Newsletter is to provide quick promotions to our clients as well as encourage them to interact with the magazine.  For example a current project I am working on is to have Newsletter recipients to write reviews for our Website and to promote our Survey and Subscriptions.  Rewards will be given in the form of Coupons for their participation.

Coupons

In the next six months it will become fairly important to collect Coupons and Gift items that we can give away to stimulate activity on the Website and Magazine.  The Magazine will act as the initial stimulus to any promotions we want to promote.  For example at the end of the summer there will be a party (probably at the Sheraton) where we will give away the prizes for the writing and photography contest currently underway.  Prizes have been sponsored by Hyatt Hotel Jing Jin City.

Coupons can also be used to stimulate activity on the Website.  Daily, weekly, and monthly prizes can be given away for the most involved.  Other contests we can have include tickets for concerts, dinners for special occasions at hotels, drinks at bars for special events, DVDs and CDs for new releases, talent contest prizes, best weekly news about the foreign community, and more; all of this will be funded by the Magazine promoting these reward programs for the various venues.

Radio

We will begin working with the local radio stations that have English hours.  We will invite the people in our focus stories to come to the radio with us where we will interview them on the air.  If there is a band that we focus on in the Magazine we will invite them to play.  The Radio also allows us to sell advertising on our show time and to help promote our sponsors and contests.

Website (jin-emag.com)

The Website’s main new focus will be to stream the Radio programs that we create.  Again we can sell advertising before and after the streaming of the shows.  We will modify the website to be a true emagazine and we also need to change the name to jin-emag.com because Tianjinexpats.com has bought jinmagazine.com and this redirects people to their website.

Also using a new service I have found we can sell advertising on other websites for our sponsors that will drive them to our website.  We will promote our sponsors through local advertising on major Internet sites that are frequented by foreigners.  So our Website alone does not limit us to the amount of web advertising we can supply.

JIN MEDIA
JIN Goal
To create interactivity in the community

JIN Card

In the next year we want to work towards making the JIN Card.  This will allow users to redeem any promotions that they hear on the Radio, see in the Magazine, or browse on our Website or the promotions we display through other local online media outlets.  The discounts will be easy to redeem and collect and I want to just bring this up at this point.  The JIN Card will be unlike other cards that only get you standard discounts like 10-20% at participating vendors.  Actually discounts can be quite varying depending on product and time the clients want to put something on special.

As I have recently read, people do respond quite heavily to numbers in the discounts rather than flat rates.  This is a promising market and I believe with the combination of these five factors we can put much greater value into the Newsletter, Magazine, and Website, as well as our Radio portal on the Website.

This of course would include my Clickboards especially with the coupons and the redemption process through the Website and using the JIN Card.

Facebook and Google are scary.  In this time of economic downturn it is no time for hustlers. When information is at stake, security is a key component to peoples trust and when you abuse this, we could start fighting a long uphill battle in the months to come.

My example here is with advertising. People are still going to have to spend money to get back on top and get their businesses back up and running. The first cuts in budgetary plans are usually at the advertising budgets. But these are also the first to be replaced.

Many people these days are wondering where to put their ad dollars. Print media is said to be dying. Everything is apparently going online, and why not, you really get more specific information that way. But what about the targeting of these ad dollars and the amount you pay. This is starting to create real concern. Google is running a monopoly and adjusting prices based on ‘falsification’ of Adwords’ performance. And sites that have over a million visitors a month are getting the rod because they have to put ads on their sites that only pay them when they get clicked on, greatly devaluing their site.

The real scare comes in when Google and Facebook hide certain critical points that concern your rights in their ‘terms of use.’ By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. Facebook recently said the same thing.

This selling of personal information for any use under the sun is not what I intended when I signed up for these programs. With Facebook I get to choose my friends and who sees my photos and stories. Now that Mr. Matt Zuckerberg says any advertiser can buy anything on my profile, it doesn’t feel quite as private. That is pretty scary to one day run across myself in some book about people in Tianjin.

I for one am not using Facebook anymore. I have had about enough of it anyway and only get on 30 seconds a day to read the feed. Google I am attached to still though. I am even thinking to get the new Google phone. But there is a difference.

Google is an ad agency and they use the information themselves. There is no need for them to sell off their inventory; it does more good in their own hands. As for them being a monopoly, that is probably true, but at least I can still get my mail.

So what about Clickboards.net?….

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