Business for Downtown Business Seminar Series - 3rd Event

Topic 2

How to Generate Hot Leads Not Through Cold Calls and Spam Mails

Ifay Chang, Ph. D.

CEO, IPO2U.COM, Inc.

POB 944

Yorktown Heights, N. Y. 10598

Email: IFC@ipo2u.com

http://www.mi-card.com

Abstract

No matter what products or services a business wishes to offer to the world, marketing is the crucial process defining the ultimate success of that business. After all establishing a market share is the proof of business success. Marketing takes all forms and styles; and supposedly, marketing encompasses public relations, advertising, product/service innovation and 'sale' activities to achieve the common objective - creating a significant market share for the business' products and services. To achieve that objective, a business must reach out to clients and potential customers and turn them into buyers. Branding and advertising through TV, Radio and Print Media are effective but expensive; the results are still far from 'buying' transactions. Recently, telemarketing and massive mailing (especially emailing) have been employed by many businesses as more cost-effective or just less costly marketing methods. Unfortunately, these methods produce marginal results at the expense of damaging public and customer relations. In this presentation, we describe an unconventional marketing approach and employ an innovative medium to achieve the ultimate business objective. Exploiting the technology savvy of properly integrating several Internet, multimedia and software tools and taking advantages of low cost digital media and communication infrastructure, extremely inexpensive yet direct, persistent and effective marketing medium is created. This medium, complementary and compliant with web technology such as web server and hypermedia, can be used to perform PR, marketing, sales, product support and customer relation management in a consistent and concerted manner. Enabling product and service offerings with utility applications and Internet supported communication tools such as forms, email and telephony in this medium, hot leads are generated automatically - that is customers will appreciate the value and exploit the communication tools to reach the business and possibly to conclude a transaction. The more content value is put in this magic medium, the more hot leads it will generate. Because of its low cost, this marketing approach is extremely effective for small and medium businesses. Examples will be discussed to illustrate how Hot Leads can be generated without making Cold Calls or sending Spam Mails!

Professional Vitae of Ifay Chang

Dr. Chang is currently the President of TLC Information Services, an Internet information service company and President/CEO of IPO2U.COM ( www.ipo2u.com ), a technology company focused on delivering productivity enhancing solutions for e-commerce. Dr. Chang has over 30 years of working experience as a scientist, an inventor, designer and architect of technology and complex information systems. He started his career at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, worked as Research Staff Member, Department Manager, Senior Manager and as an IBM Director on international assignment to Singapore establishing and managing a research institute of 100 international researchers. His accomplishment was represented by the Intelligent Public Information System built in 1985-88 under his leadership, a system very much like today's World Wide Web system. In his IBM career, he performed research in several disciplines, published over one hundred technical papers and authored over a dozen patents. He held several responsible positions in building organizations including as the founder and manager of Application Solutions Institute leading IBM Research Division into application solutions research. He created OS**2 – One Stop Solution Development Process for developing complex systems such as Clinical Information System.

In 1995, Dr. Chang joined Polytechnic University as an Industry Professor and served as Executive Director of Polytechnic Research Institute for Development and Enterprise (PRIDE) with responsibility of technology development and technology transfer and later served as the Dean of Westchester Campus and Graduate Center of the University. Prof. Chang has devoted his post-IBM career to Internet technology and education. He is the creator of the world-first comprehensive on-line education system, I-CARE ( www.icare4learning.com ). He pioneered the first Internet real-time conference system, created live monitor camera on the web, developed an intelligent search engine ( www.mwsearch.com ), built a fully interactive and operational distanceless authoring, teaching and learning system and invented a software based Internet telephony solution ( www.codecphone.com ). In the past few years, he cultivated entrepreneur development and led a spin-off from Polytechnic University. Presently, he is devoting full time in converting Internet technologies and applications he has developed to commercial products and solutions.

Dr. Chang received his B.S.E.E. from National Cheng Kung University, M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island. He is a Fellow and Past President of SID, Senior Member of IEEE and Life Member of APS, recipient of Beatrice Winner Award, SID, IBM Outstanding Contribution Award, IBM Technical Achievement Award, Eleven Invention Achievement Awards and IBM Research Award.