This past couple weeks, I was involved in a couple marketing initiatives for BookTeller.com. First, there was an event for a Chinese School association that I had to prep for since we had a booth there. That took up most of my time for the past three weeks. Second, there was a write-up I wanted to do for the Drupal Showcase on Drupal.org. Drupal is a CMS that both BookTeller and Wopular use. It's two different types of marketing - marketing to a live audience, and marketing to the internet. Judging by my low Facebook status updates, you can probably tell I was kinda busy.

ASSOCIATION OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA CHINESE SCHOOLS
The ANCCS event took up most of my time for past three weeks. We started talking about it a month before the event. I thought I started early enough and shouldn't require any crunch time by the time the event started. How wrong I was. You can never prepare early enough. Stuff always take unexpected turns. The Taiwan/Shanghai office was supposed to supply me with CD's and brochures. Since this event was attended by mostly Chinese educators, parents, and kids, the PR material from China would have been be fine.

Shipping CD's in Large Quantities to the U.S. Problematic
The problem was we weren't sure if they would be shipped here in the U.S. in time, especially the CD's. Because of piracy issues, the CD's would have trouble clearing customs in time, so we decided that I shoud just download the iso file and cover art and print them here. Luckily, our printer insisted that he thoroughly test out the CD before printing. Turned out the CD's only work with the Chinese BookTeller website and not the U.S. version. If he hadn't checked, it would have been time and money wasted.

Brochures
This took up most of my time. There's a Taiwanese version, but I wanted to convert that into a poster instead. I decided on a tri-fold brochure. They had to be in traditional and simplified Chinese and English. Binh and I drafted a version that was translated into both Chinese versions by his wife Gladys. We sent those over the Chinese team for review. I had an outline and a layout planned, so we were all able to work simultaneously. I design the brochure while Binh & Gladys did the write-up and translation, respectively.

Now & Then
Back in the day when I was still using 386's to do print work, it was a nightmare. Designs intended for print had to be in really high resolution - 200 to 300 pixels per inch. What you see on your monitor is 72 pixels per inch. High resolution equals huge file sizes. You had to put a grid on your design, break it up, and save each box into its own file. You then work on each box in the grid. When you're done with all of the boxes in the grid, you stitch them all together at the end. To transfer the files to a print shop, you either zip up the file and divide it up into many floppies or put it in an external harddrive and take it with you to the print shop.

Now, it's much simpler. Computers are much faster and powerful, so you don't have to divvy up your file, you just work on the whole thing at once. You can also just email the entire file over to the printer and use an app like drop.io to attach huge files (up to 100MB). Mine were 80MB for each side of the brochure. Multiply that by 3 - Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and English - and you end up with about half a GB. So in total, I attached 6 files, each about 80MB. With Comcast cable modem, it took about 10 minutes to send each attachment. Not bad. I was using Yahoo! Mail which had a built-in drop.io app. It's one of the few reasons I still use Yahoo! Mail.

We used a shop in San Jose called Tech Printing. They did a great job for us. The brochures and poster turned out great. They look very professional and magaziny. Despite the language barrier - they speak broken English, I speak broken Cantonese - we got everything done on time and on budget.

Backup: Plan B and C
I wasn't sure if the place had wifi internet access, so I did two things as a backup plan. First, I installed WMWifiRouter on my HD2, which turned my cell phone into an internet wifi hotspot and allow my other laptops to connect to it. It's a pretty cool Windows Mobile app. Second, using FireFox, I cached every page of the site for offline use by clicking on them. Just in case T-Mobile's 3G network becomes flaky. As it turned out, there's no wifi internet access, but I have plan B and C in place, so no worries.

I also enabled guest accounts on each laptop/netbook to prevent users from deleting files and installing unwanted software. I'm running Windows XP and Windows 7.

A Decent Crowd
The turnout was pretty good. There's probably about a thousand people there. The kids, as expected, loved watching the animated books. I downloaded about 20 of them to my local harddrive and showed it on a second monitor with a 23" screen. On my laptop screen, I had the offline website. Kids just huddled around the 23" screen and watched the animated books. The books looked amazing on it. I got to see first hand how our users use it, and got some good useful feedback from parents and educators. They were amused by my story of how, despite attending 5 years of Chinese school, I still couldn't read or write chinese. The problem was the Chinese school was built next to an arcade. When our parents dropped my brother, my cousins, and I off, we just go through the school entrance, exit through the back door, cross the street and into the arcade. I regret it now, but it's tough to tell a kid attending school full time to do two more hours of school three times a week.

DRUPAL SHOWCASE
When I did a showcase for Wopular on Drupal about a year and a half ago, it got me some much needed traffic. Drupal is one of the most popular CMS's on the internet. The learning curve is steep, but it's probably the most flexible and extensive content management system on the web. If you don't have any programming skills, WordPress is probably easier to set up and get going. Drupal.org has an Alexa ranking of about 668, and an estimated 535,000 unique visitors in the U.S., according to Compete.com. Just to compare, Rotten Tomatoes's Alexa ranking is 678, and according to Compete, it has 2.6M unique visitors/month in the U.S. Drupal is huge, but not quite as large as RT yet. Tech sites tend to rank higher on Alexa, that's why despite having similiar Alexa rankings, Drupal only has 1/5 of Rotten Tomatoes's monthly uniques. The great thing with doing a showcase for Drupal is, you'll get to be featured on their homepage with a link and image that goes directly to your site. Free promotion that businesses in the past had paid RT $10-100K to do. All you have to do is spend a little bit of time crafting a 5-6 page write-up and have a couple of Drupal's site maintainers to approve it. When I did a showcase for Wopular, I got about 1,500 visitors from them per day for a couple weeks. It's a pretty good way to give you site an influx of visitors. I'm seeing similiar referrals for BookTeller too. It's by far the site's best traffic day. The community is pretty positive, gives good feedback, and will often offer some good advice.

THE AFTERMATH
I wasn't the only one working on these projects. For both marketing projects, Binh was the editor. He took my outline, the BookTeller team's Chinglish, and turned them into something presentable.

As far as traffic goes, the Drupal showcase will bring in a whole lot more traffic than the booth. Even with Rotten Tomatoes, we found that internet marketing always drove a lot more traffic to the site than other marketing platforms - tv, radio, print, and events. The effects are more tangible too; all you have to do is look at the traffic stats. Going to events have other benefits. You get to network, interact with REAL people, and see how your product is being used.

I'm still kinda recovering from the past 2-3 weeks. I pulled in long hours to make sure everything came together ok. I also had to update Wopular on a daily basis, but didn't have any time for feature development.

EDIT: Much thanks to Simon Chu, master chemist and representative of the Berryessa Chinese School, for setting this entire thing up and doing most of the talking/representing during the event.