Mal Chia – Southern Soapbox

Well Marketing Week is over for another year and despite my earlier missives, I thoroughly enjoyed and learned plenty from the sessions I attended.

Michae Ebeid (@mikeebeid), Malcolm Auld (@MADmarketing) and Jenny Williams (@ideagarden) were thought-provoking and entertaining with their presentations. Malcolm in particular surprised me with his insight and intelligence despite being a Liverpool supporter. » Read the rest of this entry «

You’ve probably heard the old adage that everyone in an organisation from the mailroom to the boardroom is in some way or shape is a marketer, but what about sales? Is everyone also a salesperson, or in fact, do marketers also need to be salespeople?

As a marketer, I’ve always hated the generalisation that marketing equals sales – something I’ve experienced in many organisations I’ve worked at where Marketing, by default, is driven by Sales.

However, as a digital marketer in a city as stubbornly traditional as Adelaide, I’ve found that it has become really important for me to know how to sell, especially if I’m pitching an idea that isn’t just about a website. For most marketers, sales is a dirty word, but now more than ever it is important for them to know how to ‘sell’ if you’re going to get the job done.

» Read the rest of this entry «

I originally wrote this article in 2006 for Tranzfusion (now threedworld.com.au) when the Adelaide club scene was going through considerable turmoil and was losing ground to a re-emerging rock scene. It managed to stir some controversy when it was first published, and since I now have a shiny new blog to call my own, I thought it might be worth transposing this over. Some things in the article have changed, but from my (now, admittedly outsider) perspective, much has remained the same…

Something is amiss in the dance music world.

While innovation and invention have been crucial to civilisation as we know it (without it, the combustion engine, microprocessors or house music would never have been conceived and you wouldnt be reading this column), the creativity and imagination that were once its foundations has been usurped by anathema.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Following on from my post last week, it seems I am not alone in my ambivalence towards Marketing Week’s handling of social media.

Seems that I wasn’t the only one who noticed how poorly Marketing Week was handling it’s own social media campaign with no Twitter presence (hello, @marketingweek ??) and a lonely WP blog entry.

» Read the rest of this entry «

If you really want to get noticed in your market, you need to do something different.
Don’t follow the competition.
Make your own rules.
Think outside the box.
Deliver over and above what your customers exepct.
Do something no one else in your catergory is doing and there’s a better chance that people will remember and come back to you.
Be like Johnny Drama and order a Welch’s Grape Soda.