Sohn Conference Hong Kong 2015 – Focusing on Asia and Reputation Management

CGlU1E7UcAEY4Jg[1]In early June my colleague Yakir Hyman and I had the opportunity once again to participate as sponsors in the Sohn Conference in Hong Kong presented by the Karen Leung Foundation.

The Sohn Conference is a high-end NY-based investment conference that attracts the top minds in investment to share specific recommendations on investment with all of the proceeds of the conference going to fight cancer.

The Karen Leung Foundation was founded with a similar goal – a charity to raise money for critical research and action with a goal of reducing cervical cancer and its impact on families in Hong Kong. It also attracts investment professionals from Asia and around the world.

Five Blocks is proud to support the efforts of the Karen Leung Foundation and, over the years has gained a great respect for the kindness and professionalism of the Foundation’s staff.

This year much of the investment discussion centered around opportunities for investment in Asia – notably Japan. There were recommendation’s regarding Kyocera, Airbus, and Electric utilities in Japan.

For Five Blocks the opportunity was especially great. We provided assistance in the Search Engine Optimization and Social Media campaigns leading up to the conference. We also live-tweeted the event on behalf of the Karen Leung Foundation to ensure the best online real-time impact.

It was an opportunity for us to meet with several of our Hong Kong–based PR partners as well as to check in with all of our China and HK clients.

In conversations I had with various attendees one recurring theme was that in addition to seeing the need to curate reputation for their won names and firm names, there is now a greater understanding of the direct impact on stakeholders of having an optimized online presence.

There is no question that when I go to invest $100M in a steel mill in China, it will be easier for me to write that check when Googling the brand yields a positive even curated variety of web results including a robust wiki page, the corporate logo, a video for the brands accomplishments, info about key execs etc. third party validation etc.

Many industries in the US seem to ignore Asia – I believe we cant afford to do that any more!

Sphinncon Israel 2010

Sphinncon SMX Jerusalem 2010
This past Sunday afternoon Barry Schwartz hosted a mini-SMX in Jerusalem, Israel. Vanessa Fox joined him from the US as well. A short, relaxed version of SMX. Nice event – loved that it was so close to our office! It was good seeing my friends and colleagues from various places in Israel who made their way through the mountains to Jerusalem on what turned out to be a beautiful springlike day!

I spoke about Reputation Management Pitfalls and I will share the main points.
Note: when I say reputation management I mean getting negative results for your keyword out of the top 10 in Google.
1) Understand what your client really wants – it’s not always what they tell you at first. Dig deeper.
2) The goal is to “own” the top ten in Google and other search engines by working with Google – create and promote sites full of relevant content and get authoritative and/or topic-relevant links.
3) Don’t confuse Rep Management with SEO – it’s not a good idea to overdo the linking process – you will end up making your job more difficult – you will need to compete with yourself to move more sites into the top ten.

I will post the presentation on Slideshare soon.

CES 2010 in Las Vegas – identifying naïveté

First time at CES – I decided to go in order to understand better what I can do to expand our offerings on YouNeverCall.com and our other cell phone and tech websites. We get huge amounts of visitors but dont manage to turn enough of them into customers – yet. We think this is for two reasons.

1) The site needs a major upgrade – which we are doing.
2) We dont have the products that people want – many people just want to buy a cell phones.

In any case the show was interesting and I saw a lot of interesting technologies. – especially related to 3D TV in the home.

But the event also made me feel old. I could see so many young companies banking their future on what could best be summed up as a cute idea. Reminded me of my first few tech jobs.

Some examples: a ball-shaped mouse, various iphone stickers to personalize your iphone, plastics to put on your TV to make it appear to have more depth etc.

I feel like I have a much better sense of how likely a company is to succeed than I did some years ago…

So I feel like I have been around the block a few times – enough to identify other people’s naïveté about projects that will fail. Interesting that I still get into projects of my own that are bound to fail!