Singapore, February 3, 2012 – Buddy Media, the social enterprise software of choice for eight of the world’s top ten global advertisers, announced the appointment of Singapore-based Rice Communications as its PR partner for stakeholder outreach in the Asia Pacific region, supporting programmes in Singapore, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

“Asia is a dynamic social media market and key to Buddy Media’s growth plans,” said Joe Ciarallo, Vice President for Communications, Buddy Media. “We see a strong demand for strategic initiatives among brands as they engage with their customers through social networks. Rice’s wealth of experience in digital media makes it a strategic partner to support Buddy Media’s outreach in the region.”

Buddy Media recently reported record growth in 2011, fuelled by signing up over 300 customers that include some of the most recognizable global brands such as Citibank, IBM, and Volvo among others. To meet global demand, Buddy Media has opened new offices in London, San Francisco besides Singapore, and has doubled its workforce from over 100 employees in January last year to 225.

“Social engagement is considered a critical cornerstone in customer engagement today. Brands and their agency partners need to manage multiple touch points seamlessly, which is exceptionally hard keeping in mind the cultural mosaic that is Asia,” said Sonya Madeira, Managing Partner at Rice Communications. “Buddy Media is uniquely positioned to deliver results to global brands with its full suite of social marketing solutions and we are delighted to be chosen as its partner in this region.”

“We are excited about contributing to build Buddy Media’s brand equity and presence in the region. As digital marketing continues to pick up pace, this partnership bolsters Rice’s growing digital media practice and client portfolio,” added Madeira.

Rice Communications has carved a niche in strategic communications for companies interested in targeting brands and agencies across Asia Pacific’s diverse markets. With key clients such as the Mobile Marketing Association, InMobi, Out There Media, Interactive Advertising Bureau, e-Dialog, BluGrapes and others, Rice continues to strengthen its status as a strategic communications partner. Rice has also managed media outreach for regional events such as Festival of Media Asia 2011 and the Mobile Marketing Association Forum Asia Pacific since 2009.

About Buddy Media
Buddy Media is the social enterprise software of choice for eight of the world’s top ten global advertisers, empowering them to build and maintain relationships with their consumers in a connections-based world. The Buddy Media social marketing suite helps brands build powerful connections globally with its scalable, secure architecture and data-driven customer insights from initial point of contact through point of purchase. Buddy Media is the most awards winning social enterprise software company, winning the prestigious TechCrunch “Crunchie” Award for Best Enterprise application, named to the Advertising Age 2011 “Digital A-list,” and CEO and Founder Michael Lazerow was selected as 2011 New York Entrepreneur of the Year® by Ernst and Young. For more information, visit http://www.buddymedia.com.

About Rice Communications
Rice Communications was established in January 2009 to provide strategic, insightful and customized professional communications services. Based in Singapore, Rice caters to companies seeking to strengthen their profile across the Asia-Pacific region. With a zealous team of consultants, Rice is committed to raise the bar of the Asian PR and communications practice through value-oriented partnerships with clients, industry associates, suppliers, stakeholders and influencers, and the media. For more information, please visit: www.ricecomms.com

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Media contacts for Buddy Media:

[written 15 Jan 2012]

As I write this, I am sitting in a bus full of RICE people – all being very quiet, pensive perhaps. If you know us at all, you’ll know that situation is very rare and unusual. It’s the last day of our company offsite to Macau, and we’re heading to the Macau International Airport on Taipa.

Macau is made up of three bits, or what used to be three bits. Macau itself is a peninsula, an almost-island connected to the mainland by a strip of land. Then there are the two islands, Taipa and Coloane. Three long suspension bridges connect Macau to Taipa, and Taipa and Coloane are now effectively one island, because the space in between them has been reclaimed. It’s now called the Cotai Strip (Co from Coloane, and Tai from Taipa) and it’s where the famous Venetian hotel and casino sits. I am full of all sorts of Macau-related trivia, because we’ve just spent three days here.

We do a company offsite once a year, for about four days. It’s a reward for a year of hard work, it gives us all a little break, and it lets us interact in different ways than we do in the office. Most of all, it is the time when we have adventures. Last year, we went to Beijing, and this year, we spent four days and three nights in Macau. Now some people say that there isn’t anything to do in Macau besides go to the casino. Not true. Aside from enjoying the food and going on a full-day tour, we managed to spend a day at the Venetian and generally had (as I said) adventures.

Shruti bungy-jumped from the Macau Tower, tallest jump in the world. Donna did a Skyjump from there, which is like a bungy-jump, only it’s a controlled descent so it took 17 seconds for Donna to get from up there to the ground. Edwina managed to almost lose her phone. John fell completely in love with the pork chop buns at the local eating house (I did, too). Debbie won a little prize. Shireen clobbered the slot machines. Grace took photos of everything. Sonya got hit with the flu almost as soon as we got there, but bravely soldiered on. We all got rained on a lot, and I found the not-so-secret upstairs bit of the Starbucks at Senado Square, which is now my favourite Starbucks ever.

See? Adventures.

Now we’re at the end of our trip, and maybe a little tired. The Macau International Airport is supremely scary, since the runway is basically a long, narrow island, so let’s hope that there aren’t any more adventures, and that we get home safely.

In looking at China’s economy, one of the notable trends in recent years is that it is increasingly looking outside its national borders for new growth. But such ventures hold new perils for China that it needs to manage.

China has had considerable success with two forms of globalisation – becoming a global exporter, and more recently by undertaking overseas direct investment (ODI) through which the next wave of Chinese companies will embrace corporate globalisation.

Chinese companies will need to overcome four major challenges in pursuing this type of globalisation. First, they will have to develop world-class financial skills and risk management; second, they have to develop the human skills needed to manage information flows in horizontal organisations which currently are not recognised in their hierarchical command and control systems; third, the new firms will have to compete through product differentiation, not only on low costs; and fourth, they will have to overcome political barriers to global acquisitions since outsiders perceive the real owner of the Chinese firm to be the state and so will be reluctant to cede control to a foreign government.
Peter Buckley, a British professor, undertook a persuasive analysis of the behaviour of Chinese firms. The results may seem critical of China, but are not meant to be; they simply reflect the fact that China is distinctive from other emerging economies due partly to many of its multinational enterprises remaining in state hands – even though they are corporatised in order to focus on commercial objectives.

State direction means that these firms still align their operations, whether at home or abroad, with the country’s five-year plans and national imperatives. This is a model that is not prevalent in any of the other leading emerging economies.

Noting this fact, critics point out that Chinese firms are able to enter markets deemed risky only because they have ‘infinite’ financial backing from the state. At a recent meeting organised by Horasis in Valencia in early November, we heard that the manner of Chinese ODI is sometimes unsettling to African managers. They note that the Chinese essentially offer a barter plan – for example, building roads and hospitals in return for extracting raw materials.

There is also a lot of angst about the fact that Chinese firms tend to employ mostly Chinese workers instead of helping develop local skills.If the Chinese use equipment that is dismantled at home and re-assembled overseas, it is highly likely they need Chinese operators to do the job, especially if the instructions are written in Chinese. Nevertheless, the deployment of too many Chinese operators is meeting with opposition in host countries.

In some industries, such as banking, where there is considerable local talent, the reliance of Chinese entities on Chinese staff is a matter of particular concern to locals. Françoise Nicolas, a French professor, concluded from a study of Chinese firms in France that ‘ . . . Chinese enterprises are still at a trial and error stage in their foreign ventures’. ‘They are still learning, sometimes the hard way, and cross-border acquisitions remain daunting to many Chinese companies. Most of their executives have little experience with M&A, and even less trying to manage across cultures . . . they also lack experience in assessing the potential costs and benefits of a cross-border acquisition.’ And Valeria Gattai, a professor from Italy, found that Chinese companies in Italy ‘. . . lament (the) cultural distance, bureaucracy and the lack of flexibility in the Italian market’. Thus, successful ODI is not simply a matter of money. The human side is also important, as is the capacity to adapt to local cultures. As Buckley noted, the Chinese ODI seems to concentrate on regions that have similar characteristics to China – which are unconstrained by the ethical and governance obligations that are expected of western firms investing abroad.

However, unlike western firms, Chinese firms are comfortable operating in highly regulated and controlled local markets (as they do back in China). While Chinese firms are in many ways successful with their ODI, they need to be more sensitive to the fact that they cannot ride rough-shod over local systems and cultures simply because a host country is looking for inward investment. Their ventures abroad are joint ventures and need to be pursued in a spirit of partnership in which both Chinese firms and their hosts are winners, and seen to be so.

The writer is founder and chairman of Horasis, which hosts the annual Global China Business Meeting.

This article first appeared in Business Times on December 14, 2011.

This is one of the perils of working in public relations or associated fields like advertising or marketing. People stop believing you. It’s particularly bad for those of us who have widely-established social media presences. When the possibility exists that your opinion has been bought and paid for, then how do I know whether to trust you or not? The same suspicion could just as easily be applied to me. There’s a reason why people are so distrustful of bloggers in Singapore – when you know that someone has received some sort of remuneration for their reporting, then the positive opinion that they have becomes tainted.

This is why newspapers and magazines are so zealous in upholding their ethical position. A food critic from a major newspaper who pays for his own meal seems much more trustworthy than one who has had his dinner comped. When I was editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly (Singapore edition), all the free review copies that I received were logged with HR, and were returned to the distributors or publishers once the game had been reviewed. No chance of graft there.

So what can the rest of us do to establish our credibility? How do you set standards that make it clear that your opinion is not being unreasonably biased?

The simple solution is to not be paid for your opinions. My job pays the bills, my clients pay for my work, and if I enjoy an event that I am attending on behalf of a client, then I’m free to say so – or not, as the case may be, because my personal opinion on my blog or Facebook or Twitter is not for sale. Doing the same would free local bloggers from a great deal of suspicion.

If there are benefits, be upfront about them. This will at least help to show that you’re honest. I get to attend the Mobile Marketing Association Forum every year free, for work, and I always say so. Sure, I’m working while I’m at MMAF, but if I tweet on the side about the interesting people that I meet or if I share a video of an interesting mobile marketing campaign that I’ve seen, that’s a side benefit for me, and something I share because I want to.

Draw a line between work and personal life. I don’t think it’s strictly possible to separate work and personal life completely: frankly, my Facebook page (for example) is a reflection of both. My work is a part of my life, and goodness knows that writing and reading and being a big geek is part of both my life and my work. Having said that, it is useful to make distinctions between them so that there is no confusion. When I’m live-tweeting an event for Rice Communications, then I do it from the Rice Communications Twitter account, not from my personal account.

Be consistent. Those of you who know me personally will know that I have a wide range of interests, but they’re all interests that follow a particular theme. It wouldn’t surprise my friends to see me getting excited about meeting someone from a social media company, say, because I’ve always been interested in social media. And my fondness for clever ads is a natural outgrowth of my lifelong interest in storytelling and the media … one that even extends to my degree in communications studies: I have a First Class Honours that I got for writing a thesis about storytelling in comic books. If I suddenly started writing about something out of the ordinary, like how great my fridge was, I think people would get suspicious, even if I admitted that I had gotten the fridge free in return for my review.