The Chung Wah Magazine - Vol.11 of March 2013 Issue is now freshly off the press. This issue features the 2013 Perth Chinese New Year Festival which held in early Feb 2013. The colourful festival is filled with fun events, performances, and gourmet foods. Articles and writes up from all walks of Perth filled this issue, making it a memorable event. 

This is also a milestone issue for my involvement as the magazine's visual designer, ten issue of this bimonthly magazine which I had pinned me down for 20 months. The bitter-sweet of layout and design changes, working along with Chief and others thus earn me lots of valuable experience.

It is a  great challenge for me to layout tones of photographs in this issue. The regular columns and articles are now an easy cruise in terms of design. But now a new year, a new page in my design career. May this magazine continue to prosper and my greatest memory.

You may view the online copy from their website.

More packaging works discovered on display at local stores. These packaging were designed here but production by printers in China.

Swag-tags are convenient branding tools for products that does allowed purchasers to touch and feel its material and texture. Having just enough space on a piece of card for all product details (pricing and bar-code) for transaction to be done. Also image features on the tags describes how this tools being use.

Same thought were behind the design of this box packaging for the drying mat. A die-cut hole on the box allowed purchaser to feel the surface of the mat, yet covered the rest of the mat for dust and hand stain. The box design allowed products to be hang on a rack for display, for maximum shelf exposure on this relatively light item.

Packaging design not only attracts consumers' eyes, but also provide sufficient info to push forward the purchase. It protects the products during transportation and extend shelf life.  

It had been a great pleasure working with them and both of parties are delighted to see the result. For those who interested to have a browse of their website, you may visit them at 'www.perthtangoclub.com'

Do you need social media management?

Due to the increase popularity of social media in todays world, many businesses start jumping onto it without thinking. It is indeed to put a paw onto it to secure your presents, but without proper management it is not going to generate any benefits to the business anyway. Do you ever think if your business need social media management?

Social media, aka. Facebook as so to speak had become the most accessible marketing medium for a lot of retrail business. Dispite the nature of the business (products, services or consultation), it is easy to spread your words out via social media. But it is riding on the network of the individual (aka. self fame of the business owner) to attract the awareness.

Tagging Images

Product retailers trying to tag all their friends onto images of their products, gaining people's attention via friends networks to push the sales. Some told it had been quite effective, but with the ability of ones forbids (Well, I do too) anyone to tag them on photes, this sometime do not works. Further more, tagging creates dislikes and this thus ruin one's original healthy network of friends.

Some creativity to go a step further using the method of image tagging. Mid last year I attended a fun-fair and there were photographer taking pictures of patrons. Those who being photographed will be given details of a facebook page to look up their image later. I find this method does works (for me at least), and this create opportunity for nextworking with strangers. Some night-clubs and bar had been using such method to push their 'sales' via networking through their patrons.

Status Updates

Friends would pay attention to your status updates, especially if your words appear to be meaningful to them. So does a business, they need to have substance that would benefits the reader. For an individual to post a status updates is easy as daily life of a human being thus full of suprises, but how about a business? A routine business running is profitable, but it is boring for customers.Status updates for marketing campagin on the other hand thus do the trick: eg. participants update of a competition run by a business. Keeping the family and friends engaged on social media, watching their love one progress on the ladder of the competition, this thus allowed accessiblity to participants' network of friends to push forward your marketing.Status updates thus create trends within social media it self, especially when a meaningless catch phrase of a business climbed on the trending "keyword" ladder. The same tricks work on other popular micro blog platform too, when keyword is trending to propagate the ripple effect of re-posting the status.

Creating Post

Some business shared information depected from other resources, such as news media or video clips that are related to the business, aiming to engage their followes to be intellectually enhanced. This is far most the effective method of soft marketing strategy.

The source of the information can also be original too (well, I'm writing this up myself), and would benefits followers from the perspective of the business, again this a marketing strategy in enchancing the value of a business.

How to manage haters?

 Many business fear if their name would be stained if there are haters posting up complains onto their page, hence they are reluctant to get onto social media. Even they do, they often fall onto two sorts: Delete haters message all together or only allowing admin monitoring of customers feedback. Are these sound familiar to you?I am always agaisnt the idea of deleting bad or hate comments. This practice although silence those who dislike, but word of mouth from the 'silenced' personals will continued. Counter the complain or bad feedback with a solution, or at least allowed them to call in for an action to be taken. Many big corporation did it this way and prove it is far more effective when you do good to people. The words of mouth that followes thus counter back the damage prior.

Strong minitoring of feedback to be posted on your social media or even website is a very authoritarian doing. Most website would have testimonial from their present customers to endorse their business, but a feedback from customers on social media are free-form testimonial and it should be allowed to be on it's rough form. For example, many of us would look up for product review online, in forum or youtube prior to purchase, and we would never read testimonial from the corporate page of a product as we know it can be 'made up'. A good feedback can be lifted as testimonial, but should never delete any.

So what's next?

 Accept the fact that social media is one of a good marketing tool that should be put in good use. We should all learn to tame this 'beast' to make it works to prosper the business, rather then cage it. Seek advices from people who use them everyday, may it be your children or a friend (Or ME).Remember "practice makes (anything) perfect", you will only need a little guidance to start with. To make your social media management to prosper your business is all in your hand (for small business, large corporation would have a team of trained personal to do work for them). Be your own social media champion!

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"All write up are based on my personal knowledge and experience, shall there be any part of this write up you feel that had in-fringe your right, please feel free to contact me to discuss. All comments and feed back (may it be good or hate) are welcome." - Carl ONG 

Stakrax is a WA designed product, produced and wholesale by WineX Pty Ltd. This is a packaging design to be suitable for shipping, as well as pallet display on shop-floor. The external sides of the box are required to demonstrate the content, and be aesthetically attractive towards its potential customer.The design were accomplished in-house and printed overseas on medium corrugated box with gloss surface finish.