World's Smallest Bento Box: Lessons in Content Marketing & Mindfulness

Four artists (a watch maker, a chef, a surgeon and a diorama artist) collaborated to create the world's smallest bento that fits inside a wrist watch.

I watched in awe the video on how an entire bento was made to fit inside a watch so that a man can eat his lunch on the go.

This is actually an advertising campaign by Takii, a Japanese agriculture company focused on making high-quality seeds for nutritious fruits and vegetables.

The message is simple. The Takii Phyto Rich vegetables are so packed with nutrients that all you need is can be packed into a wrist watch!

Not only is it innovative, it communicates the message clearly.  It is so interesting that everyone wants to share it and talk about it!  That's how great content is!

Watch the "making of" and the video on the world's smallest bento in a wrist watch:

World's Smallest Bento Watch (Ad & Making of the Ad)

As I look at the Bento Watch, I am reminded of how many amazing elements can fit into a watch and how cleverly each element was selected to fit in.  That is how much we too can cram into our infinite brain.

Take only those elements that give you the nutrients and that's all you need - love, compassion, creativity, courage, etc. Let go of anything else that does not give you nutrition - stress, ego, fear, excessive logic, etc.
If we all had a beautiful mind in a watch, what would we want to put in there?

For your reading pleasure, here's the story as narrated by Johnny Strategy, a blogger on Japanese graphic design and art.
"A watchmaker, a surgeon, a chef and a diorama artist are sitting around together. Each is a master of their trade and together, they’re attempting to create the world’s smallest bento. One that fits inside a wristwatch yet is packed with all the vitamins and nutrients that a busy worker needs to get through the day.

The watchmaker designs the box and chopsticks for the bento. The surgeon slices the meats and vegetables. The chef prepares the food (note the adorable miniature wok at the 47 second mark). Finally, the diorama artist pulls it all together to create the bento watch: the world’s smallest bento.

Making a bento to fit into a wrist watch
Eating a bento from a watch

Time to clean out & let go

Take heart that you are not alone.  2016 February is a clean out month.  Everyone's true nature will be out and it's time to clean out and let go for the new to come.

In astrology, although mercury retrograde ends 25th January 1:50pm.  Its shadow period will last until 14th February.  We will continue to revisit our work, be clear of what we want to be, get organized and connect with key collaborators that support our goals. Jupiter is in retrograde from January until 9th May and its shadow will linger until 8th August. Jupiter signifies a time to hone our skills and connect with ourselves.

In Bazi, we enter the year of the Fire Monkey on 4th February at 17:48.  This is a fire sitting on a metal monkey year where fire will burn and melt the metal.  This creates conflicts so issues will surface but will melt away what does not serve us.  If we have the strength and courage to go through this fire, we will have our break throughs.  This is a time where we have to be like water, to go with the flow, to be gentle, flexible and creative to make a path for ourselves.

This Febuary, the theme is "Letting go".  We are asked to:

• spring clean our lives,
• assess what matters to us (to decide whether to live 3-D three dimensional lives or multi-dimentional beings that we are blessed to be)
• let go of things that do not add to our growth or resonate with our new vibration
• renew trust in ourselves (to connect with ourselves, especially our higher self, connect with our divine lineage, believe in our calling) to exciting new possibilities and opportunities
• hone our skills (learn, equip, focus on developing our gifts and talents)
• renew our attitudes (reflect on ourselves, the good bad and ugly, give vs take, be humble, appreciate, render servce)
• re-define ourselves (our vision, purpose, what we stand for, a new us)

Here are some examples of how people start to show their true nature and we realize we have not seen that side of themselves.

• Someone who felt insecure tried poison the minds of others against you
• Someone bit your hand that fed him
• Friends who showed their true nature in social bantering and self-serving cliques
• Someone whom you looked up to failed
• Someone you teamed up with forgot his commitment to you

This is also a time when we see a mirror reflection or how we react that show up our own ugly sides which we need to clean up. I learn these precious lessons.

• External opinions are just opinions, they should not affect me
• I do not need encouragement, praise and attention to feel good about what I do
• Trust in the divine to guide me to success despite the obstacles and ill-intentions by others

It would be nice to pause and count our blessings. I am grateful to be blessed in many ways:

• A family that is re-united
• Three lovely fur kids that remind me of a lion, bison and goat from my past lives
• Friends who understand and encourage me
• A new spiritual family that is on a similar journey
• Revealing of my divinity, royalty and lineage that is most powerful and sacred
• My continued growth to be my higher divine self
• Opportunity to share and render service to others, that they may be relieved of worldly issues and grow in their journey of self realization

So this is the time of testing, and we must continue our journeys. I resolve to...

• Continue my daily intention and affirmation and mediation
• Persevere to keep doing what I have been asked to do with unconditional love
• Know that everything will be accomplished in time
• Have patience, trust and belief in myself

Here is a good advice from Michelle K, "Financial wealth is created when we know in our hearts and our minds that our in present circumstances our needs and dreams are already fulfilled. When we are able to tap into our deepest resources and become aware of our true power and limitlessness, all that is ours by divine birthright can flow effortlessly to us."

Five planets in alignment

Five planets in Alignment: Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus & Mercury

For the first time in a decade, Singaporeans will be able to view a rare astronomical sighting.  Five planets — Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus and Mercury — will align in a straight line and will be seen together in the skies.

Astrological Phenomena

The Science Centre Singapore said the celestial conjunction will last from Wednesday 20th January until the end of February. 27th January will offer an extra special view as the Moon will also come into alignment with the five planets.

Usually, we see the five planets in the night sky at different times of the night. It is thus a special event to observe all five planets in the night sky at one time.

Mercury is also hard to view as the planet is close to the Sun and is faint due to Singapore's sky not being very dark. 

Best Times To View The Alignment

The best timing to see all five planets will be around 6am, especially when there is a high and unobstructed view to the eastern horizon.

Each night at around midnight, Jupiter will be the first planet that will come into view. Jupiter’s sighting will then be followed by Mars, Saturn, Venus and Mercury.

On 27th January, when the Moon comes into alignment with the five planets, Jupiter and Venus will be the brightest of the planets. Jupiter will be more or less directly overhead at 6.30am, and Venus on the eastern horizon. Jupiter and Venus can be used to locate the other planets. Mars will be halfway between Jupiter and Venus, and Saturn will be approximately halfway between Venus and Mars.

Another good opportunity to get the best view of the planets will be on the weekend just before Chinese New Year. This will be when Mercury, located near both the Moon and Venus, will be the easiest to spot.  These are on  6th February 6:30am and 7th February 6:30am

How to distinguish planets from stars

One easy tip to distinguish the planets from regular stars is to close one eye, stretch out your arm and slowly pass your thumb over a bright dot in the sky.  Jason Kendall, a member of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York, told the New York Times. If the dot slowly dims out when your thumb passes over it, it’s a planet. If it quickly blinks out, it’s a distant star.

Saturn can be found above Venus. You can use your hand as a rough guide - hold your hand at arms' length, and spread your fingers apart as far as possible. You should see two points of light above your thumb. The right most one will appear reddish - this is the star Antares, in the constellation of Scorpius. Saturn is the brighter point on its left, and will appear cream-white.

Mars will appear overhead. The Moon will also be a good guide to finding this planet. You will also likely see the star Spica, in the constellation of Virgo. To tell the two apart, look at their colours - Mars is reddish and Spica is white. Both will appear equally bright.
 

Next Sighting

The Science Centre Singapore said the astronomical alignment is likely to happen again in August this year. According to the UK’s Royal Astrological Society, the five planets will then not be seen together again until October 2018.

 Photo: Science Centre Observatory Facebook

Marketing Creates And Captures Markets

We recently won a Global Innovation Award for our Asia Pacific efforts to grow and capture the market.  It was a recognition of marketing in our true profession of strategy, management, multi-channel and integrated marketing across content, social, digital.

Code named CAMP (Create A Market For Power), marketing lead the initiative with understanding the market dynamics, being creative to develop a programmatic approach, daring to do things differently and making an impact to the business.

It helped us achieve several consecutive quarters of year on year growth. Here is the story of how marketing led the way to this transformation.

IBM Power Systems in Asia Pacific is the market leader in the Systems of Records for IT infrastructure requirements.  With the shift in infrastructure consumption to solutions for big data, , we needed to take a hard look at our business to assess what we needed to do differently to win. We started by understanding more about the market place.

Understand The Market. Use Analytics.
The market had developed besides Systems of Records to Systems of Engagement, Insights, etc.  This new area was a fair fight with many market players who were trying to make the shift.  We assessed our position of power, who we needed to work with to extend into the new solution areas and what was needed for the shift.  This was done by using analytics, social and other listening.

Appoint Champions. Lead The Business Plan
Within the business, we needed champions who could prioritize and focus on the growth areas. The champions were needed to pitch the propositions, drive capabilities and align resources. We then mapped out the business and marketing priorities and what the game plan was. Resources included budgets, facilities and people across sales, technical, marketing from both internal and external. 

Develop The New Approach. Make It Simple.
We clearly defined the business problem as “How do we generate revenue for Brand with Who for What Solutions in Where".  The plan included considerations for conditioning the market, recruiting key players, training to develop skills, developing joint go to market, creating the market demand and generated business opportunities.  The approach had to be systematic and scalable, easy to understand and execute, convincing for investors and worthwhile for the time and effort spent.

Choose The Battle Field. Define Success
We chose to test the approach in a region where the opportunity was the largest but adoption was the lowest and in another region where adoption could match up to the pace of the opportunity growth. The approach yielded great results against the targets. In the first market, we grew our revenue by over 400% year on year.  In the second market, we achieved grew almost 200% of our target.

Determine Success Factors. Learn As You Go.
Through this initiative, we learnt that there are critical success factors that made a significant difference.

1. Quality over quantity: creating an impact helps to then ramp up the volume
2. Standardize and simplify: making things easy to speed up go to market.
3. Leveraging others' ability: Each party is better positioned as advocates and have greater influence to their segments, and it would greatly accelerate the results where we can overcome resource or capability limitations and creates self-sufficiency
4. Ownership & team work: Strong collaboration across each activity phase across the various stakeholders is crucial.  Often, one of the team members will just step up to lead beyond their role to ensure success.
5. Integrated marketing: A 360-degree engagement is required - internal and external communications, digital and off-line, business and technical, social and content, etc.

Marketing truly creates and captures the market.  While this winning initiative is being replicated across the business. The principles of how marketing can lead in business transformation can be applied to what we can create to make a difference.

This is the awesomeness of marketing!

Time to Amplify The Power of Marketing

As some of you may know, I was awarded #2 Social Seller by LinkedIn in November 2014.  It is now November 2015 and I wonder about how well I now stand with my social media ranking.

The good news is that in 2015, our IBM Power blogs are being pumped out almost on a weekly basis with "We Believe - Power Wins" and "We Amplify - Power Marketing" blogs, and responses to the many global and regional Systems and Marketing blogs that we actively contribute and respond to.  I have lots of re-tweets, re-posts, shares and comments on IBM on all my social media platforms - Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linked In.  I would like to think that besides the great work from our brand, technical and sales team, marketing and our social efforts has helped us turn around our business to several consecutive quarters of year to year growth since I have joined the Asia Pacific team.

Looking across 2014 and 2015, there was a significant change in my personal social engagement. In 2014, I was in ASEAN Systems Marketing and had to manage the System x team which had the challenge of enduring a year of uncertainty before they eventually transitioned to Lenovo.  Blogging had become a way for me to share my thoughts about the industry both tech and marketing.  I had hoped that my raw and honest view helped to provide an objective perspective amidst rumours and nay sayings.  It was my way to inspire my team, encourage my fellow colleagues, business partners, customers and the industry.

Many who were inspired or touched by my blogs reached out to me to share with them and their teams.  So in 2015,  I began sharing, training and mentoring many who were willing to learn about digital and social.  I was invited to share my expertise on how to build social eminence with general managers, directors, managers, staff and students.  These included universities, trade associations, government boards, human resource organizations, manufacturers, marketing forums and public events.

As I spend time mentoring and coaching, coupled with ramping up our IBM capabilities, I had somehow neglected myself and when I forget to share "me" to the world, those who followed me have lost the opportunity for inspiration.  Several followers recently commented that they have been following me and been missing my blogs.  So, it is time to really amplify the power of marketing by re-awaken my social identity and re-vitalize my blog. 

I will share as I learn.  As Tim Cahill says, "A journey is best measured by friends than miles."  Come and follow me on this journey.

Social Media Is Indispensable & Personal

Earlier this year, I was invited by Jason Chu, the Chairman of the Asia Pacific Customer Service Consortium to speak at the Customer Relationship Excellence round table hosted by DHL on my views on Social Media as part of the O2O customer experience.

The first step is to recognize that Social is Personal and that is is indispensable as part of a customer experience.  The more involved you are, the more you can capture those moments to make it an awesome customer experience.

Being someone active in social media, my behaviour is typical of what customers are like, and companies should embrace and care about being engaged in social media.

Here are 5 why the Chief Customer Relations Officer should care:
1. I have 4000 followers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, Linked In
2. I wake up and reach for my phone to check my social accounts and that's the last thing I do before I go to sleep
3. I am great at multi-tasking: I am active on my social accounts at work or at play
4. I shoot, post, tweet, share and answered the responses before I finish my meal or leave any social event
5. I share everything - the good, bad and ugly. I am vocal. Hear me express myself!

In 2010, only 25% will share their negative experience on social media.  That has risen to 75% in 2015.  Capturing the negative is not all.  It has also become a sales generation tool.  Gartner's research suggests that by 2015, businesses around the world will get 50% of their sales from social media.

Looking at Gartner's Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing, we have already experimented on many elements from all the various stages.  We are definitely already on a journey in a new way of marketing supported by technology from real-time marketing, to data-driven marketing, to commerce everywhere, to web analytics, and so on.

But why are we not seeing the results of our technology and digital marketing getting exponential results?

Gartner thinks that only 80% of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.

From the response around the audience, while many have acknowledged that social media is here to stay and the customer engagement needs to evolve, many are still hesitant due to fear of backlash of negative comments going viral.  While the desire is there, the management focus, processes, policies and skills may not be ready.

Let's look at how well our top leader, the CEO is doing in embracing social media. IBM's CEO Study estimates that only 16% of CEO use social media as a tool to connect with customers.  This is expected to grow by 3.6x to to 57% by 2018.

The social transformation must start with setting the strategic goals and culture, strong executive sponsorship, integrated orchestration across the organization with new processes and roles, governance and policies, and then technology and standards.  Will the CEO drive this change?

B2B Content Strategies: Content is the heart.

It was a great gathering with a couple of panel speakers in "B2B Content Strategies: Lessons From The Trenches" with the world of content creators, aggregators, clients, agencies and communications professionals. 

Catch the interview: http://youtu.be/S0RJN6AIUUM via @YouTube

 
Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Understand B2B Content World. In the B2B world, targeting different job titles, industries, roles in decision making process, technical jargon and technology life cycle make content seem more complex than B2C.  However, if you think about it, the same targeting, segmentation and consumption patterns is studied and applied. Your target audience is human too.

2. Segment with precision. I am known as a guru of segmentation using analytics to better understand my customers and potential customers.  The reason why the marketing programs that are run by my teams are so much more effective is the precision of message and approach based on segmentation. 

3. Content can drive ROI. We have done such a great job in delivering pipeline for the business that sales believe in the power of marketing in lead generation. Demonstrating return on investment still remains an important part in getting budget and resources to focus on content.

4. Content is the heart of persuasion.  Today, there is a lot more content in multiple forms but are they the right ones? Content is the heart which transmit the right messages at the right time to the right person. Content is about how we can engage someone to develop a deeper relationship with the customer.

In the B2B world, we need professionals who are willing to invest time to understand the portfolio and pitch the appropriate content mapped to the customers' journey.

Here are some of my quotes:


“To break through the content clutter is to really understand customer and then bring the right content" 


"What do love and dating have to do with B2B content marketing?"
 
“Ultimately, when it comes to convincing internal stakeholders of the investment, IBM Asia-Pacific’s Director of Marketing for IBM Power Systems, Anne Phey, suggests “showing that conversion rates and revenue” are increasing over time. 

It may even be a case of sitting down with the business leaders and CFO to explain what marketing does, how conversations on social media help us gain insights on customers and content trends, how online activities such as web traffic, downloads, etc are monitored against targets, as well as showing the opportunity pipeline for conversion to wins. 

Adds Phey: “Our  business leader understands that content doesn’t have to generate revenue straight away. It’s like having a relationship. You’ve got to start dating and wooing the prospect before he becomes a customer. As of 2015, we’ve appointed content marketing managers. That’s a breakthrough for us.” 

Read more from Gracia Chiang's at

http://www.kingcontent.com.au/creating-emotion-in-b2b-content-marketing/