Category Archive

I hate to admit it, but the word of mouth marketing (WOMM) and the peer pressure to be a Web 2.0 amateur photographer is too great for me to resist.

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Even after my horrible, horrible experience with Flickr, I have finally conceded to sign back on and upload away…even though the process is still slower than molasses (2-3 minutes per photo, if not longer…..this sucks if you have a lot of photos).

BACK STORY: Last November, I forgot my Flickr account password and it took customer service two days to manually reset it. Apparently the merge with Yahoo/SBC Global prevented me from resetting my password via e-mail because of the confusion over whose jurisdiction it was to help me. After making multiple customer service phone calls and e-mails to all three parties, I got an apology and a link to reset. However, after that annoying ordeal, I angrily blogged about my dissatisfaction on my discontinued Xanga (entry is titled “Fuck You Flickr!”) and vowed to never sign on to Flickr again.

REALITY: Unfortunately, when so many people that you know have a flickr account that they update and engage daily, it is really hard to be the odd ball and use something else. So for a trial period, I am going to take Flickr back, but if you piss me off again, so help me………just don’t expect me to purchase a Pro account anytime soon!

So what crazy PR/Marketing campaign brought on this sudden interest in becoming a picture person? Thanks to my photo-taking and design-savvy friends and family who sent me links via IM to two cool new web-base applications and services (see below), I now want in on all the fun.

• Blurb - Scrapbooking for people who hate scrapbooking. Basically, it’s a publishing service that lets you design and print you photos into nicely bound soft/hard cover books with dust jackets. I am currently working on my first book, but it might take me a while to finish as my artistic gene is a bit under developed (the result of a liberal arts education and two years at The Agency).



• Photoshop Express - Photoshop for people who can’t justify buying the real thing. This is a very cool web-based version of Photoshop that’s free and allows you to edit your pictures with Photoshop tools that have been simplified for people like me. Now I too can adjust lighting and clean up a pimply face.

Now for all you newbies and oldies to marketing who are still scratching their heads at how to run a proper WOMM campaign on-line….the IM technique is how it has been done, but for a more cutting-edge way to do it, I suggest that you look into Twitter and master it. So on that note, please stop with the direct mailing pieces and get with the program.

Today is my blog’s two month anniversary and I am happy to report that as of today, over 5,000 visitors have came to my site. For sure, this would not have been possible without Edison Chen –So to really highlight his impact on my site, I’d like to share some interesting statistics

While it seems that people have taken a liking to my “public relations notes” on life and news/gossip, my first post about Edison Chen continues to be a very tough act to follow, though my second post about Edison Chen is equally popular. So this leads me to conclude that I either need to follow Edison Chen’s every move until I am bored out of my mind or to seek out the next big thing on the Asian tabloids and write my P.R. heart out……any thoughts?

But seriously, I think that this just means that I need to refine my blog and focus its content and themes. If I learned anything at the BlogHER Business Conference, its that the most successful blogs are not personal blogs (unless you are really ready to bare your soul to the world without any misgivings like Heather B. Armstrong of www.dooce.com). Instead they have a consistent theme and a community around them. So stay tuned as I do some spring cleaning.

Have you been to the circus and thought that the flying trapeze would be fun to try? I have and yesterday I fulfilled my dream to fly at the Trapeze School New York.

While you might thing that this is a strange “thing to do” as a NY tourist, it was definitely one of the top highlights of my trip. A special thanks to the wonderful lady who help me capture my experience on video!

Video #1: Here’s a video of my second try on the flying trapeze where I swing and hang upside down. (My first attempt wasn’t captured on film unfortunately).

Video #2: Here’s a video of my first successful back flip after swinging and hanging upside down.

Video #3: Here’s a video of my first catch, which I did on the first try! Woo-hoo!!

PR Notes: The Trapeze School New York is a perfect example of successful public relations. Not only do they have a long list of media placements, but they also have some rather unique and very strategic placements that lead me to sign up for my first class.

I first saw the school in action on an episode of Sex in the City, where Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw is taking a class at the school for research for an article that she’s working on. My first reaction was “OMG, they have a trapeze school in the middle of New York City! I want to do that.” Shortly afterwards, I forgot about it. Then a few weeks ago, I find the school listed on a tourist guidebook I bought and the light bulb flashed in my head and I said to myself, “I have to try this out when I go to NY!” Soon after, I signed up for their Saturday morning class and the rest is on YouTube.

So, I am finally home and it is 7:33am PT / 10:33am ET. I realize that I have not blogged since I left the airport going to NYC, but that’s partially due to a rather poor a Wi-Fi connection at the conference (especially for Mac users) along with a rather costly in-room Internet connection via Ethernet cable (I’d only consider paying if I could at least go online from bed rather than be strapped down to a desk).

The other reason is that I kinda wanted to spend my free time before/in-between/after the BlogHER conference exploring the city, eating new foods or sleeping.

But now that I am back, here’s what you will look forward to reading once I finish unpacking and re-cooping:

• BlogHER Conference: While I won’t be providing a detailed recap (there were live bloggers who took care of that), there were definitely a few good points worth noting.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Loved the Costume Institute, but I was very disappointed at not being able to see the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters (long story why).
• The Museum of Sex: Interesting and surprisingly educational
• Flor de Mayo: Cuban/Peruvian Chinese food and Chinese people who speak Spanish, who knew?
• SOHO: Only two set destinations here, Muji and Uniqlo
• Trapeze School New York: How I fulfilled my dream to fly

Stayed tuned….

At the current time, pacific standard time is 10:06pm. I should be aboard my flight to New York City right now. But no, no, my plane has been delayed and I have been stuck at the Oakland Airport for almost two hours and will continue to be stuck for another hour or so…..about a three hour delay total.

Although this does not even compare to the beginning of my business trip to Chicago two months ago where I woke up from bed exactly one hour before my flight was scheduled to leave—in rushing to the airport and making a mad dash to the gate, I left my glasses at home and left my laptop o the security conveyor belt, –it’s nevertheless yet another bad start.

I have been robbed!! Some no good thief in Emeryville stole my car’s front license plate.

Before I left to visit friends on Friday night, I had a front license plate. The following morning, after driving to my Saturday kick-boxing class, I discovered that it was missing. After careful inspection of the remaining license plate holder, the tears and scratch marks made it very clear that the plate did not just merely fall off as some have suggested. No, no, it was taken by force.

Now the real question is —Why the hell would anyone want my front license plate. It would make more sense if this no good thief had stolen my registration sticker or my back license plate as indicated by the two news articles that I found below.

• ABC News: This article indicates that in areas where you pay for gas after you pump, people are stealing back license plates so that they can steal gas without getting into trouble. Basically, the thieves will attach the stolen license plate to their cars, go to a gas station, fill up the tank then drive off without paying. I suppose this “strategy” insures that if a video tape or camera captures their license plate number, the no good thief will not be caught since they are using a stolen plate. However, since I live in the state of California where every gas station that I have ever patronized has been a prepay pump, this surely can not be the reason why I was robbed.
• Santa Rosa Press Democrat: A few days a go, a man accused of stealing car registration stickers in Sonoma County (which is a part of the San Francisco Bay Area) was caught. In this case, the man stuck the stolen sticker on his own car. Unfortunately for him, a local police officer was quite diligent when he looked up his license plate and found that the car’s registration was last updated in 2006 despite the 2008 sticker. Lucky for me, I still have my 2008 registration sticker. However, this still does not explain why my front license plate was stolen.

So what’s the benefit of stealing a front license plate? Clearly, it is worthless without the registration sticker (Any cop that notices a missing registration sticker or an out of date sticker will quickly pull you over for that offense, especially since they have their ticket quotas to meet.) Whatever the thief’s intentions, my poor front license plate is now probably an unwilling accessory to crime.

Or another hypothesis that I have is that some stupid artsy kid decided steal my front license plate to make a map of the U.S.A with stolen plates or some other worthless art project.

Public Relations Notes: In publicizing this crime that has been committed against me, I am hoping to find other victims so that we can all rally together and find this SOB, beat him and leave him covered in tar and feathers in the town square……or not. No really PR notes on this, I am just complaining.

So after days of being sick (mixed with being tired and laziness), I quickly had to switch gears into study mode for some power studying. You see, for the past few weeks, I have been taking a Japanese class at Soko Gakuen (which by the way is a great place to learn Japanese if your not in college and live in the San Francisco Bay Area) and I had a final. Eleven weeks worth of material in three days for a three hour final.

Now that that’s done, I can get back to blogging. Stay tuned, while we return to our regularly scheduled program.

Just in case anyone was wondering why I have yet to write anything on former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer and Tang Wei (or anything for that matter), I have been in denial of my cold until today. I called in sick and have been sleeping for 14 plus hours. After this post, I’ll be off to sleep some more once the TheraFlu kicks in.

On another note, the big question that my cold raises though is how is it possible to fall ill when the weather has been just lovely (very sunny and bright) and the office plague has long since passed!?!?

Additionally, the only contact that I have had with sick people has been through the Internet. So unless a report comes out that human viruses can be transmitted virtually, I’ll just remain at a loss of words (literally….I have a horrible sore throat).

As a cautionary note: Stock up on real Vitamin C and not AirBorne or Emergen C. So far, nothing has been reported about Emergen C having had mislead the public through false advertisement, but having noticed that people at The Agency who believed in these two miracles the most were the ones with the most compromised immune systems. Still ain’t no cure for the common cold yet, no matter what they say on the box.

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It has been confirmed. I’ll be heading to New York City in early April on official company business to attend the BlogHer Business 2008 Conference.

Wow. I really feel lucky to be paid to travel, learn more about blogging & social media for businesses and meet fellow bloggers. FYI: BlogHer is a very large and influential network of women bloggers. Since 2005, this organization has hosted an annual blogging conference. This is the first year that they will be hosting a conference especially for companies looking to learn more about applying blogging and social media to their businesses.

While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that this is how it is when you work in-house (it really depends on your company and their PR budget and initiatives), it does dispel any myths that “you don’t have any opportunities to learn anything new” because you are supposedly doing the same thing everyday.

That being said, I’ll be blogging about the conference in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

On the subject of fun on-line games, I recently discovered FreeRice (www.freerice.com) and I maybe one of the last people on Earth to have heard about it. See below.

Me: btw, here’s a game that i think you’ll like www.freerice.com
Cousin: ahh i love that site, i got addicted to it a few months ago
Me: haha, am i really the last person to jump on the bandwagon?
Me (in my head): damn.

But for anyone who yet to hear about this site, allow me to make the introductions.

About: FreeRice is charity site aiming to eliminate world hunger and improve English vocabularies everywhere. Launched on October 7, 2007 by John Breen, a computer programmer from Indiana, FreeRice is the sister site to thehungersite.com, therainforestsite.com and Poverty.com.

The Game: Upon entering FreeRice, visitors are presented with an English word (usually a very sophisticated and rare word often found in old novels or in SAT books). The user must then decipher the word’s meaning and pick from four options presented. If correct, twenty grains of rice will be donated through the United Nations’ World Food Programme. If you keep playing until you reach a donation of 100,000 grains of rice, you will be presented with the following message: “You have donated 100,000 grains of rice, may you have a lifetime of happiness…..” Afterwards, your donation reverts back to 0 grains of rice.

Who pays for all this rice? Advertisers, whose banners are located at the bottom of the site. When I read this detail, I thought that FreeRice is truly ingenious to have created a viral marketing campaign for world hunger awareness and on-line advertising opportunities that then successfully provides an actual charitable donation. More companies that engages in cause marketing and PR agencies with specialties in on-line outreach should take note and start brainstorming.

Possible Scam: For the skeptics and cynics out there that might be inclined to think that this site is a scam, please read the verdict by Snopes.com (an Urban Legend myth buster site).

PR Notes: For anyone that doubts FreeRice’s connection to the United Nations, it should be noted that the press contact for FreeRice is the international team of communications specialists (aka PR people) from the World Food Programme.

Additionally, for anyone wanting to know how to gauge the success of a viral marketing/on-line PR campaign/blogger engagement program, I would say that generating coverage in top-tier print, broadcast and radio is a good sign that you’re doing something right. As the team behind FreeRice can attest, they have been pretty successful so far:

• The Washington Post
• BBC News
• Christian Science Monitor
• Los Angeles Times
• USA Today
• NPR National Public Radio
• CBS Evening News

Special thanks to my former colleague from The Agency for introducing me to FreeRice and to everyone else whose been offering me story ideas and feedback. It’s nice to be on the receiving side of the pitch for once.

About a week and half after starting my blog last, last Friday (2/15), I have now reached my first significant milestone as a blogger. My blog has been viewed over 1,000 times!!

Thank you for reading and a big thank you to Edison Chen. I couldn’t have done it without you. Because of your sex photo scandal and the many intrigued and possibly perverted individuals looking for up-to-the-minute gossip and the actually photos, my blog jumped from about 2-3 total views to an impressive 210 views in only 8 hours after I posted my second entry about the Edison Chen scandal (which, by the way, is very impressive by my standards, though rather very insignificant compared to more established blogs). Incidentally, my number of views again jumped today after I did a follow up on Edison for my eight entry.

Thanks again everyone, please come back and read even after Edison is not hot news anymore. Also, please leave me a comment. I would be most grateful, if you would weigh in on any of my random rants and raves.

Note: My excitement stems from the fact that all my previous blogs (Xanga and Blogspot) probably did not amount to more than 100 views total. I’ve had the Xanga blog since about 2002 or 2003, but I would post about 2 a year.

To start off, let me introduce myself. Hello, My name is Daisy and this is my blog. Growing up, it was unusual for me to find any other kids named “Daisy”….not that this was a bad thing. Though interestingly enough, I did find that many of my classmates’ families (even one family member) would name their pets –dogs, cats and cows, “Daisy”.

My online alias is dayseye, which was based on my name’s definition (see below). I have used this name for as long as I have blogged, which first began sometime before blogs were called “blogs.” That blog has long since been abandon (plus the blog server/platform no longer exists either) along with its other not very successful reincarnations. Hope this new venture will stand the test of times.

Daisy \da(i)-sy\ — Old English origin, and its meaning is “day’s eye”. A name for a flower with white petals and yellow disc at the center, much like the sun.

On another interesting but unrelated note, the name “Daisy” is on the rise among parents of new babies. As you can see from chart 1, “Daisy” has slowly been gaining traction since my birth, but hopefully more so among humans than pets.

Chart 1: Popularity of the name “Daisy” from 1880 - 2000

Other notable Daisy(s):

• Princess Daisy: Character from Nintendo’s Super Mario Brother Series
• Daisy Duck: Long-time girlfriend of Disney’s Donald Duck
• Daisy Buchanan: Adulteress from “The Great Gatsby”
• Miss Daisy Wertham: Title Character of “Driving Miss Daisy”
• Daisy Dukes: “Dukes of Hazzard” Character, famous for her hot pants