SUNDAY BRUNCHTales and sales

Besides helping bloggers get started, Katika Saisenee has advice for them on making money through online businesses

Katika Saisenee, 32, nicknamed Keng, has lately emerged as one of Thailand's most popular coaches for those who want to join the world of bloggers.

"I've focused on this topic for the past two years, as writing personal diaries on the Web on a regular basis is still quite new in Thailand," says Keng, the owner of Keng.com and also the IT director for Mode 2 (Thailand) Co, a Japanese-owned marketing and ad agency.

Keng started his blog in 1999 and currently updates his site about four times a week, attracting 500-600 daily visitors who are keen to start their own blogs to share their world view with others via this new mode of communication.

"Blogging is now quite easy for virtually anyone. With tailor-made software, you can start your own site with just a few clicks. At my site, we also provide all the back-up and related services," says Keng, a graduate of Assumption University.

Many youngsters start writing blogs simply to share their stories with friends and relatives. In Keng's case, he started by posting light-hearted pieces on his site, coupled with lots of photos and, later, video clips.

Besides topical issues, stories about a nice holiday or newly-discovered destinations are among the favourites.

"In fact, it could be any topic but, in the long run, you need to find your niche. For me, it's blog coaching. I'm also compiling my content in a pocket book, which should come out in the middle of this year," Keng says.

"Another example is Vinegargirl.com, started by one of my friends. She focuses on fashion, beauty and other women's stuff. This one-year-old blog attracts 700-800 visitors per day. It has the potential to compete with magazines or women's sections of daily newspapers.

"In other words, blogs allow you to publish at a very low cost, with little set-up or lead time. Yet blogs can reach a very large and diverse audience, local or international, especially the younger generation," says Keng, who has also been pushing for more e-commerce in Thailand.

In mid-2006, Keng sold off his earlier Web-design business, Hostify Co, to Japan-based Mode 2, as the latter wanted to expand its international marketing and ad agency into Thailand to especially serve Japanese clients.

"Now, marketing communications is about websites, SMS, the so-called viral marketing in which e-mail forwarding can be a powerful tool to advertise. It's already here in Thailand, thanks to video clips posted on YouTube," he says.

"The cost of viral marketing is very competitive and in some cases it could be free, but it's effective.

"This method was adopted for the marketing campaign of a major Japanese auto firm here, which recently launched a new model. You can visit the site, load your personal video clip and then write a short story about the product and your experience.

"In short, viral marketing is video clips plus YouTube plus e-mail forwarding. A popular message could effectively reach tens of thousands of people within a very short time, as happened recently here.

"The growth of e-commerce is unstoppable. The marketing and distribution of music CDs, for instance, has shifted to the Web. A Japanese cosmetics firm is also planning to start catalogue sales on the Web here shortly.

"Soon, we could have synthetic scents on an Internet device. Small guys can also tap the potential of e-commerce. In fact, there are abundant opportunities to make money by selling niche products," Keng says.

"For instance, a guy I know makes money from selling skate shoes on the Web to kids online in the provinces. It's a sideline, as the guy also has a full-time job. When he's free, he checks to see if there are orders for the products advertised on the Web.

"Usually, he'll get quite a few. Then he goes to the wholesaler and places those orders, so there is no need for inventory. The products will be delivered to customers by mail.

"There're many people making money from e-commerce this way. The trick is that you need to focus on niche items for which traditional suppliers cannot yet tap the demand or for which the demand may be too small for big suppliers," Keng advises.

To blog or not to blog?

First there were plain websites showing information on companies. Then they got more complicated with fast digital technology, allowing viewers to download millions of pages and ask questions and give responses with text and simple photos.

But today, a new development in the cyberworld - blogs - is getting strong and catching the attention of marketers.

"Blogs emerged over the past few years and became big because of YouTube's popularity among Thais, which was about last year," Mahithorn Pongsarat, CEO of Digithais Network Co Ltd, the digital media agency arm of Carat Media Group, said last week. Surfing the Internet, anyone can find weblogs from both blog operators and brand-owners.

Some top weblogs today are xteen.com, BlogGang from Pantip.com, Storythai, GotoKnow and www.oknation.net from Nation Multimedia Group.

Adisak Limprungpatanakij, president of Nation Broadcasting Corp, calculates that oknation.com has already signed up over 10,000 bloggers with almost 60,000 entries.

It gets 3,000 new bloggers each month. Each blog records 17,000-20,000 visitors, based on unique IPs, and 130,000-150,000 page views per day.

With these numbers, blogs have inevitability surfaced on the radar screens of both media consulting companies and marketers. They are now salivating over the thousands of people who remember a weblog's name and keep visiting it to share common topics.

"Having their own weblogs is like owning a specific wide area on the Internet where bloggers can write everything they want, show pictures and broadcast video clips. Then others see them and share their views. And if they grow frustrated with the contents, they can clean up the entire thing and create a new one," Mahithorn said.

"About 40 per cent of our corporate clients show strong interest in the channel and want to keep their own weblogs," he said.

The challenge is that they have to spend big bucks to set up a separate department to oversee all contents to ensure nothing improper is posted and viewer interest can be maintained. Weblog operators can't control bloggers unless they start with an environment that invites cooperation.

"We have created a culture of sharing views on many topics without posting improper words, and all bloggers automatically take care of that. If improper bloggers really exist, they face social sanctions, and I have witnessed cases in oknation.net," Adisak said.

Digithais recommends corporate clients join a weblog that has already earned a good reputation rather than try to create their own, as it can save a lot of money and guarantee a wide audience. Companies have to be very clear in their objectives for owning weblogs. If it's worth it, do it; if not, join others.

However, they have to be very good at disguising themselves as normal bloggers and not use a hard-sell approach.

Successful cases abroad that come to Mahithorn's mind are Nokia and Adidas, which run blogs in MySpace.

Another choice for marketers is to be a part of weblogs.

They can choose popular weblogs and negotiate for space, mainly for banners, to advertise their products or brands.

NMG's oknation.net has already experienced that. Both Nation Group and Digithais confirm that blogging is not just a fashion. The trend will continue for as long as we are in the "user-generated-content era".

Life and times of a 95-year-old blogger

She Is Billed as the world's oldest blogger. At 95 years old and with a worldwide following that has seen more than 340,000 hits on her blog, Spaniard Maria Amelia Lopez has achieved the kind of status that millions of younger Internet chroniclers can only dream of.

Lopez, who was introduced to the world of blogging by one of her grand children just eight months ago, has become such a global hit that she receives posts in languages as strange and impossible for her to understand as Russian, Japanese and Arabic.

"My name is Amelia and I was born in Muxia [A Coruna - Spain] on December the 23rd of1911," she wrote as her first post on amis95.blogspot.com. "Today it's my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog."

With a mix of humour, warmth optimism, nostalgia and feisty out bursts of left-wing polemic, she has won a regular readership of people keen to find out just what this Spanish great-grandmother is going to say or do next.

"You have to live life," the silver haired blogger said in her most recent post. "Not sit around in an armchair waiting for death."

Her blog tracks not just a nonage narian's day-to-day battles against aches, but offers musings on everything from politics and religion to broadband and death.

Among her chief hates are old people's homes, which she criticises for drugging their clients so they spend their final days snoozing quietly in front of the television.

"I blame the children, who don't want to help them," she said yesterday from the house beside the Atlantic Ocean in Muxia, in the rugged northwestern corner of Spain, where she stays during the summer. "Internet has given me a new lease of life, but I don't see any old people's homes offering their residents Internet," she said.

Lopez, as the recent pictures of her shaking maracas in a Brazilian hotel prove, lives as far as you can get from the "do-nothing and wait-to-die" culture that she regularly lambasts.

Her grandson Daniel, with whom she lives, taught her to navigate the Internet after she pestered him to download biographies of poets and politicians. The blog was a gift from Daniel, who had no idea what he was unleashing into cyberspace. He has become her chief assistant: Lopez navigates with the mouse while he types in the words she dictates.

"Now so many people write to me that I can't hope to reply to them all, though I want to," she explained. "My grandson complains that he has to work as well, he can't spend all his time typing."

Much of her traffic comes from Spain and Latin America, but newspaper and television interviews, with YouTube links given on her blog, have spread her name beyond the Spanish speaking world. Lopez tells stories of her childhood and youth in Galicais. She recalls, too, the terrors of the Spanish civil war, and how her brother was sent to the front aged just 16 and came back with one leg shot off.

She was fined for refusing to show support for General Francisco Franco's National Movement."I must be the oldest socialist activisit in Spain," she said. "I've been socialist since I was 16, but my father would never let me actually join the party."

Her dislikes include daytime pillpopping, crude language and telephone companies that are slow to install broadband. Her main loves are poetry, politics, childhood memories, her native region of Galicia, a Jesus Christ who dislikes wealth and, she says, "the workers".

She has acquired readers in such far-flung places as Alaska, Australia, China and Nigeria.

Some people have suggested that she cash in on her popularity by getting paid-for advertisements placed on her blog, something she rejects. "I did this to amuse myself, not to start competing with people or making money," she said.

Net bloggers break through government censorship

Savvy young bloggers in Burma are breaking through the military junta's tight Internet controls to past photos and videos of swelling anti-government protests, experts said yesterday.

The government blocks almost every website that carries news or information about the Southeast Asian country, and even bars access to web-based email.

But an army of young techies in Rangoon works around the clock to circumvent the censors, posting pictures and videos on blogs almost as soon as the protests happen.

Many of these images have been picked up by mainstream news organisations, because bloggers have managed to capture images that no one else can get. When Burma's detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi stepped outside her home in Rangoon to greet marching monks and supporters on Saturday, the only pictures of the landmark moment were posted on blogs.

Mizzima News, an India-based news group run by exiled dissidents, picked up one of the photos of Aung San Suu Kyi and said more than 50,000 people accessed their website that day.

"People were saying they wanted to see more pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi," said Sein Win, Mizzima's managing editor. These bloggers are mainly young university students in Rangoon who have made it their mission to post messages and pictures since the anti-junta rallies broke out there on Aug 19, he said.

"We have many volunteers in Rangoon. They are mostly university students and they keep sending us messages, pictures and video clips about the demonstrations," he said.

Messages on blog have applauded Buddhist monks, who have led the protest movement. The movement has grown into the biggest challenge to the junta since a 1988 uprising that was crushed by the military, killing at least 3,000.

"Many people were thanking monks for their courage, and were rallying support behind monks," Sein Win said from Chiang Mai.

"The censorship is very tough, but many people want the world to know what is happening in Burma," he said.

The California-based Mandalay Gazette also said young people in Rangoon were supplying pictures on the protests.

"It's encouraging to see message of support coming as far as from Russia, and some message said monks were correcting the junta's 'wrongdoing,'" said a US-based editor, who declined to be named. A Thai-based Burmese reporter from the Democratic Voice of Burma, a Norway-based broadcaster, said it had received video clips and photos from "many volunteers" in Rangoon since the protests began last month.

"The quality of pictures from Yangon [Rangoon] is very good. Many young people were helping us, and the junta cannot control our freedom of information," said the reporter, who operates anonymously for safety reasons.

The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders has called Burma a "paradise for censors" and listed the military-ruled nation as one of the world's most restrictive for press freedoms.

Since the protests, the regime has cut off the mobile phones of prominent pro-democracy supporters and of some journalists representing foreign media.

State media yesterday accused the foreign press of stirring unrest.

No foreign journalist has obtained a visa to enter Burma, under military rule since the start of the anti-junta rallies, rights groups said.