Postscript: Where Are Corporates In Taking The Lead?
October 10, 2008 – 3:15 am | by Daryl TayFirst, I’d like to direct you to Dorothy’s excellent post questioning corporations engaged in social media on what they really want. While my previous post was a personal critique, hers includes research.
In re-reading my earlier post, and certainly from some of the comments, I realise some parts of it may be sending the wrong message, so I’ll use this post to clarify some points.
1) Agendas are fine
I don’t have anything against practitioners coming with a set goal in mind. In fact, if you’re waking up at an unearthly hour to attend SMB on a Saturday morning without an agenda, you’re better off staying at home and sleeping two more hours. Go to network, to “seed” your ideas, ask people what they think about your brand, meet other people in the field and find out their obstacles, figure out which blogger you want to invite to your next event, whatever.
Hedirman asked me what I would do if I were on the other side of the fence, a company figuring out what to do and attending SMB. My response:
If I were a company trying to get my way into the scene, I think there’s no other way than to just jump head in. Definitely research. I wouldn’t just come to SMB and “observe”. I’d want to know who’s going, what they blog about, who’s relevant to my vertical, who should be a top priority to introduce myself to, so on so forth. Then I’d want to go back to the office and tell my boss “I’ve met x number of bloggers, their audiences read them because of y, I think we should do something.” I mean otherwise, I think Saturday mornings can be better spent sleeping in!
2) Sleazy corporate agendas are not
Note earlier I said “ask people what they think about your brand”, not “tell people about your brand”. There’s a difference, and most of the people who are reasonably familiar with the space will be able to tell the difference. If you want to give a spiel, save it for the proper circumstance. If you’re a new startup and someone asks you to tell them more, that’s a different story.
3) Don’t come thinking 2.5hrs at an event makes you part of the community.
This really irks me. If you really want to be involved, be involved. Meeting 20 people in the span of an afternoon and getting their namecards or a Facebook Group address, doesn’t mean you’re entitled to spam people. It’s about making connections and relationships of quality, not quantity.
4) Don’t come thinking a $500 food sponsorship is your “buy in” into the community
I’m not going to dwell on this, but I know how this works. A $500 sponsorship sounds excellent to get yourself the names, email addresses, blog addresses, twitter and plurk accounts of some of the top influencers in Singapore. Sorry, no. You want to build a houselist, go be a gold/platinum/whatever sponsor at one of the trade shows and spam everyone there.
5) How long are you going to let “new” be an excuse?
As Dorothy puts it, how long are you going to be a “curious spectator”? It’s true, you can’t jump in and be familiar with everything at once, but it doesn’t take years and it isn’t rocket science. Jump in and get your feet wet, or get out of the pool.
6) SMB shouldn’t be your only outlet
And this was the point I was principally attempting to drive across. I would like to see more corporate-led initiatives for sharing/collaboration. Something along the lines of Verge or Web Wednesdays or Third Tuesdays.
When you think about it, SMB was started by a student, a model/actress and someone who wasn’t even in the army or legal to drink at the time. Not by the people supposedly “working” in the space.
What I’m saying here is I find it a little bit strange, bordering on outrageous, that the corporates/agencies who are supposedly “in the space” are relying on an initiative driven principally by people not in the workforce to get together. Even Podcamp Singapore is driven primarily by the academic field.
It’s like if we were scientists, we’d be waiting for kids playing with “my first physics set” to organise something and go for that.
What happens if we sit up in 2009 and decide we’re too busy to continue with SMB? Or it evolves into a “bloggers only” event? Social media in Singapore crawls back to the dark ages?
Put another way, I look at the people I consider my “mentors”, though perhaps not from direct influence, the Mitch Joels, the CC Chapmans, the Joseph Jaffes, the Christopher Penns, the Brian Solises, the Andy Sernovitzes, and wonder why there are no such people in Singapore. They’re practitioners, we have practitioners. They’re out there building up the space, we’re….. not.
Tags: dorothypoon, no corporate buy in, sleazy corporate agendas, social media breakfast singapore, verge
5 Responses to “Postscript: Where Are Corporates In Taking The Lead?”
By Vincent on Oct 10, 2008 | Reply
I believe Singapore companies look at social media as an extension to bloggers (or the blogosphere). The thing is (I might be wrong), Singapore bloggers fall into 3 general categories (the more interesting, or lucrative ones): personal, technological and political.
The technological bloggers write about gadgets, software and the latest tech news. I’m not going into the political bloggers. Then there are the bloggers writing in the original web log format, the personal diary. Given that most bloggers combine those topics together, their blogs effectively become just personal blogs.
It’s about perception. I believe the companies can’t easily tell one blogger (or social media practitioner) from another. So they use the only metric they know: influence.
To them, we’re just a big herd of cattle, indistinguishable from each other. So they just look for the cow with the most number of cows following. As Seth Godin puts it, we need to be remarkable; we need to be Purple Cows.
From some of the comments I’ve read about SMB4, and in defense of the corporations, I feel we need to stop being so self-righteous about the whole thing. I hear you about the engaging-blogger part. I was recently approached via email by (it appears) a German company. I stopped reading after “Dear webmaster”, even though my name’s plastered all over my blog.
We want the corporates to join in (right?). They’re thinking of return on investment. We’re thinking of openness, relationships and engagement. Here’s the thing: we’re the open ones. Let’s invite them as far as they’re willing to go (the conservative nature of Asian (companies) doesn’t help), and we meet them halfway. Let’s market to them how social media is worth their while, how blogs are worth investing, how _we_ are worth communicating with.
About your point on the social media adoption of other countries, I say we’re not up to that standard yet. We need to step up _our_ standard. The people you’ve mentioned are all respected professionals in some form. Companies respect professionalism. Perhaps we need to write better, conduct ourselves better (and respond to insensitive, in-your-face sales pitches better).
I can identify with some of your angst. This is a great article.
By Daryl Tay on Oct 11, 2008 | Reply
Hi Vincent, thanks for dropping by and for taking the time to type out such a long response!
I’ll add in two, maybe three more categories for the bloggers: fashion, food and photography. But I’m willing to bet if companies search hard enough, there will be those for music, books, maybe aeroplane models and more obscure stuff. That’s the beauty of the long tail of the web.
Your mention of the purple cow is a very interesting one. If I’m hearing you correctly, you’re saying for bloggers to stand out from the millions out there to be noticed, we should be purple cows? I find it interesting because we’re always thinking of the companies to be the purple cows, not necessarily the consumer (and bloggers are consumers), but it’s a good point.
I’m not sure I’m in entire agreement with you about inviting the corporations and us championing the use of social media in a corporate setting. The truth is, and maybe people will agree, that the openness, conversations and relationships are going to go on with or without their involvement. If they don’t want to get their feet wet, why should I care?
Or to put it in a very cynical way, why should *I* the consumer, do anything to help the business? What’s in it for me? Especially when I can easily turn to the competitor? I mean the reality is that even people like us (I mean the SMB team) have “day jobs” or at least “day lives” and our free time is spent on our own side projects and passions like SMB. I’m not going to spend 2hours a week going to random company X and telling them why they should be involved. (If they ask, however, that’s another question.)
Finally, is there really any difference? Two years ago would we have heard about them? Would most of North American have heard about them? The difference is they have embrace the new world of social media and the digital world, to become those people. And that’s what I’m saying to our practitioners and our companies: It’s about time you embrace it and BE that person and a leader.
By Vincent on Oct 11, 2008 | Reply
Oh yeah, long tail topics. Forgot about them. I’ve only really been following some local (Singaporean) blogs recently.
And I didn’t mean to actively go market to companies. As you said, the conversations will go on, with or without corporate involvement. If companies want to survive or even thrive in this new landscape, it’s up to them to figure out if they want in or out.
When I said “invite them”, I didn’t mean literally spending effort to coddle them and ask them to join (I too have better things to do with my 2 hours). Like I said, I’m not too familiar with the Singapore blogosphere/social media scene. My first impression was we’re just a tad stand-offish (I’m probably wrong). Given the size of our population, there’s probably not enough long tail effect to spread that. Defending our rights to be us is fine. If it’s to the point of bordering on hostility (which was what I felt), then that’s bad. There are better things to have strong opinions about…
About the only local bloggers I know are Mr Brown, Xia Xue, miyagi (?). Their topics, tone, style of writing forms my impression of the local scene. Perhaps companies see the local scene similarly myopically as I do.
Couple that with the general conservative nature of local companies, and I believe that is the reason for their hesitation. Which might ultimately become their downfall if they don’t pick up soon.
Economics and capitalism taking over, some other competitor (maybe even a smaller company) is going to come in and dominate that market. And _we_ will benefit! Muahahaha…
By Daryl Tay on Oct 21, 2008 | Reply
@Vincent: Thanks again for the comments! It’s definitely up to them, but somehow I get the feeling they have to figure it out sooner rather than later.
I think bloggers are more than willing to be open to companies, the problem being that companies aren’t used to getting critical feedback. They’re used to being the ones who “know” stuff, instead of admitting for once that we, the consumers are ahead of the curve. Until they overcome that issue, I feel they will be dealing with a little bit more hostility, especially when they continue to engage in social media with either ignorance, arrogance or both.
Thanks for the great comment =)