I’d always thought of the “other” stuff that goes on in lifestreaming as a complement to blogging. They fill in the gaps but they’re not always the main content. Snacks in between meals, if you will. But in this day and age, who really has time to read a 700 word post anymore? Even a 500 one? Especially when it can be done in 140 characters. I fell ill a week back and didn’t have the energy to blog about it, but I did Plurk about it. By the time I was well enough to punch a blog post out, I realise everyone knew about it via microblogging, so it didn’t serve any purpose.
There will be “long form” bloggers as Sarah mentioned who will need to blog just as a way of capturing the content. But how about the average personal blog? If you look at the examples on RWW, my gut feel is they could work.
2) Is there a culture difference
Friendfeed is the epitome of lifestreaming. I know it’s hot, I know it has its’ uses, but it hasn’t caught on here in Singapore yet. Without any proper research, I’m going to guess that culture has a part to play. As a society we’re not that voyeuristic yet (some are, but it’s a small sample), which maybe accounts for some of it.
There’s also the element of privacy and collectivism that exists here which might result in self-censorship when it comes to lifestreaming. For example, it may not be the best thing to flag a certain controversial book you’re reading because it may not be socially acceptable in this setting.
3) It’s already happening
Prior to publishing this post, I asked aloud on Plurk (not that you could ask silently) what people thought about the article and got varied responses. In a sense that’s what lifestreaming is about isn’t it? Come across something in your life, share it quickly, get short 140 character responses back and then everyone moves on to the next item.
It’s all very interesting. I don’t know if it truly replace blogging per se, but it definitely will be exciting to see where this fits in in the next 6 months to a year. And more importantly, if everything (blogging, content, attention spans) are getting shorter, how do companies engage and connect?
In addition to being away last week, I also fell pretty ill, which pretty much took up any and all time and energy I had to do anything, much less blog.
One thing that I found interesting was that the Magnum advertising post generated a lot more talk than I thought it would both here and on Plurk. It surprised me not because I thought it was a bad post (though I worked on it on a weekend while away), but because it came out of nowhere, from the simple act of my colleague buying a Magnum. Just goes to show you can’t predict what people will talk about on the internet.
Working at a multi-million dollar TV channel (which is as mass media as they come) for the last month has been very interesting for me. On one hand it reminded me of my passion for music and youth, on the other hand the nature of the environment meant I was thinking a lot in the “mass media” setting than in the niche, web2.0 setting than I normally do. Is there a way to merge the two? Surely there is. I don’t have the answer to that (and maybe no one does yet), but it was definitely a very exciting month. The least “social media” month in 2008, to be sure.
Moving ahead, I’m leaving for Canada on the 24th of August and will be there till the end of the year on exchange. I’m really looking forward to checking out how their social media scene is like and meet some people, maybe attend a conference or two. If you have links to people or bloggers or companies embracing web2.0 there and wouldn’t mind sharing, do let me know. Greatly appreciate it.
The great news is I managed to snag both “Most insightful post” and “Most insightful blog”, so thanks to everyone who voted for me, and the people who nominated me in the first place.
It’s obviously nice to walk away with something and I’m glad the blogosphere in Singapore is beginning to read and recognise that blogs aren’t just Meepok Blogs about what I had for lunch. One thing I do wanna say is let’s be clear that the awards were only open to people in the Ping.sg community. By default that leaves out other great insight blogs like Michael’s and Priscilla’s. Let’s also not forget other content blogs like Vanessa’s, Kevin’s and Walter’s who post great stuff, but maybe don’t always have the time to engage with the people on ping.sg. After all, voting always boils down to a popularity contest.
Still, I hope this means more people are going to recognise the impact of social media and start bringing it into their lives, work and play, and hopefully we will see a much needed change locally in the near future.
(ps: The pictures and “fun” stuff will be up on my personal blog later. Stay tuned!)
Yesterday I tackled how bloggers are open to company contact, and knowing that, today I’ll explore what the research says about who should contact the bloggers, and with what content.
Fig 5: Who should contact the blogger?
There seems to be a preference for the PR person, though the score for the company executive scores just over 50% which isn’t bad in my books. I personally have no explanation for this difference. I’m not entirely sure bloggers can tell between a PR rep, comms rep and company executive in the first place. What I like about the findings here is the verbatim quotes on the right, particularly “what they talk about should be relevant to my blog” (sounds like something I would say), “Prefer to talk with active bloggers or those prominent in the blogger community“.
This tells me three things:
1) Please be relevant
2) For people looking to be hired by a PR firm or in-house communications department, your network can be a huge asset. If you’re a well-known, well-liked person in the blogger community, people are going to listen.
3) Companies who don’t have this well-known, well-liked blogger in their office, it’s time to start a blog and become one
Fig 2: Should there be prior contact?
From Fig 2, we see that 78% of the respondents prefer initial contact to be made before shoving a press release down their throats. 78% across all respondents and countries suggest it to be pretty significant, so I’d pay attention to this. What should the initial contact comprise of? Show us you read our blog with responses to our blog posts (Fig 3)
Fig 3: What content appeals?
I find for me, if someone sends me a message demonstrating he/she has read what I’ve blogged about, even if he/she disagrees, I’m more likely to be receptive to the message. Research is not Googling “social media” and emailing the top 10 searches, it’s reading their blogs too.
Note that “corporate news announcements” scores the lowest by quite a wide margin. Simply put? Bloggers don’t want to hear about your quarterly earnings or the usual stuff we can read in the papers. Give us something with a story, something to be excited about, like a new product.
If you’ve made it that far, knowing bloggers invite company contact, and you’ve sent the right representative and made contact in the right way, what should you send them that’s related to you? The response seems to be overwhelmingly video (Fig 4)
Fig 4: What content appeals to bloggers
It’s no coincidence that in my first post, I chose to upload the four videos supplied to me as a primer to the research results. Video is fairly painless to upload (unless you’re using Wordpress) and very easy to view. A word of caution: if you are going to use video, please use one that doesn’t insult the intelligence of the blogger and his readers.
Tomorrow: Should you bother with a social media release and some blogger comments
Yesterday I posted up four videos (which didn’t work), but I promised to get into the Text 100 survey results further in detail today, so don’t worry, you’re not missing much without the videos.
Before I start, I want to say that while the absolute number of bloggers surveyed is actually pretty substantial (n=125), the numbers per region are actually pretty small (Fig 1), so I would advise caution in saying this applies to everyone (the survey says this too). However, I do find the aggregated results to be quite interesting. The first one that comes up that I’ll deal with today is that bloggers are generally open to contact by companies (Fig 2)
Fig 1: Respondent breakdown by country
Fig 2: 84% of bloggers welcome contact from companies
Not terribly surprising if you ask me. At least locally with the bloggers I know, you can’t throw a stone and not hit someone who has been in contact with a company.
Bloggers like to be contacted via email, or a comment on their blog (Fig 3), with those coming out with the highest 2 mean scores.
Fig 3: Preferred method of contact
What I find interesting is that “face to face meeting” scored 30% on “third ranked method of contact”. That means 30% of the respondents chose face to face as their third preferred communication method. At first glance that might tell us that we maybe should initiate a personal meet up with bloggers, but then another piece of data comes in
Fig 4: Face to face preference
On the importance of face to face meetings (Fig 4) you can see the mean score is almost right in the middle at 5.4. First thing that jumps to mind? The data tends towards the extremes, which is why the average falls in the middle. Interesting stuff (and kudos to them for picking this out). What I’d like to see is whether the importance scores particularly higher in certain countries and maybe lower in certain countries. That might help us understand culturally, where the differences are.
My conclusions from this so far: bloggers in Asia are open to contact, digital means should probably come first, with the invitation/option to meet face to face if the blogger desires. So far, very much in line with how I view company contact.
Tomorrow: who should initiate contact, what you should do before contact and what kind of content bloggers probably want.
Edit: By the way, research is not really my field of study in school. So if I’m interpreting some results wrongly or there is another way of viewing the data, I’d really appreciate if you point it out! Thanks!
I must really apologise for not blogging much this week. I think it has been the least I’ve blogged since I’ve started the blog, but work has really been tough (though incredibly enjoyable).
The 2nd Ping.sg blog awards (blog aggregator in Singapore with about 3,500 blogs) have their nominees and I’m nominated in three categories:
Thank you to those who nominated me. If I’ve ever talked to you (in person) about why I blog, you know it’s not for the “fame” or money (I don’t even have ads!), but it’s really just me trying to share my love for this fascinating new digital space with you, and hopefully help spread the word about social media and how it can help you in your personal life, academic life or professional life.
I didn’t nominate myself for anything primarily because I thought it’s be a good gauge to see what the community finds valuable. I think the fact that the community has chosen two posts in particular that are aimed at convincing businesses that bloggers are indeedinfluencers and fostering conversation and community tells me that locally, the people who’re reading are listening and finding some value in it, and that is very, very encouraging.
So do check out the awards nominees page and vote for who you like. I’m not going to ask that you vote for me because looking at the nominees across the board, I think the community has already won.
Everyone wants something “viral” these days. But the thing is you never really know when something is viral and truly will catch on.
Let me say it’s been two days after the HP TouchSmart PC Blogger’s Nite, and the song for the TouchSmart “Do You Wanna Touch?” has still been ringing in my head. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Check out this 1:29 video.
I’m going to be a little bit candid here. Of all companies, would you have expected one like HP to come up with something this catchy? Melvin blogged about it from Berlin and I hadn’t experienced it first hand and wasn’t convinced how “catchy” or “viral” it was until the blogger’s nite and how everyone is still talking about it:
I have to say, speaking as a social media blogger, that I give HP Singapore full credit for going all out with their blogger outreach programme. The first time they did it I wasn’t invited, but still gave them some praise, the second time they did it I was a part of it (full disclosure: I work with the PR firm that handles HP’s digital strategy and helped conceptualise and organise the event), and the second time I could really see first hand how the HP execs were willing to engage freely with bloggers. There was no “we are executives in the real world and you are bloggers” mentality.
My blog coverage with many many photos is up over on my personal blog if you’re interested. The one thing I wish could be better was to credit the band that did it, or make it available for download. Tying this in to my thoughts on social media in the local music scene, the right social media/digital tie up could just really make your song take off like wildfire. Do you like the song? Let me know!
More on the IDC Web2.0 Conference yesterday (attendees aside), there were some great insights that I’d love to talk about.
Prof. Michael brought up a point that I personally identify with. He says sometimes he has a guest in the class room and the guest is talking to the class, but the class is talking to each other via IM (or maybe Twitter), in other words, we’re having multiple levels of conversation.
Sarah will tell you they won’t even read this far down a blog post. Ian will tell you we have the computer on talking to 7 friends with MTV in the background and alternate-tabbing between games while stopping once in awhile to sms someone.
And that’s the truth.
Marketers are not going to get our full attention. And they certainly can’t demand it. They’re going to have to fight for it, not by interruption, but with darn compelling content. Does this mean we absorb less if we’re doing five things at the same time? Without empirical proof I’m going to say maybe. But I feel it also makes us aware of more. I can’t walk out of a movie these days without picking up at least one or two brands featured in the show, and more often than not the conversation becomes a “hey did you see that BMW insert?” after the movie.
Speaking as a Gen Y consumer myself, I love it when brands make the effort to connect, and seem like they’re genuine. (not some scammy thing). I’ll talk to you about Sony, about EA Games, about Bluehost and about HP because I know that they’re at least recognising the new presence of the new consumers and trying. They may not be fantastic at it, but it’s better than pretending we don’t exist or are a “fad”. (full disclosure: my office does PR work for HP)
Speaking of listening, I wanted to talk about this yesterday and am further prompted by this comment. Dear Yahoo!, I love that you sponsor stuff like the Web2.0 conference, but Jonathan is right. Does it make sense to sponsor it when people don’t get what you’re about? I love the “social” ymail and I love how it was presented in a non-intrusive way together with the goodie bags. But wouldn’t it be cooler to connect with say, 60 people who are in the space, in the know and can really appreciate what your product is about? Or give them a chance to try it and be bought over?
If you’re willing to listen to a proposition (not for me, but for the local Singaporean blogosphere), let’s start a conversation!
Haven’t done this in awhile, but I really wanted to direct you to two resources which I found to be extremely valuable just yesterday.
Word Of Mouth Manual II Dave Balter who co-authored Grapevine (which I remember reading two years ago) has a new book out called the Word Of Mouth Manual Volume II. Since focusing more and more on social media, I had actually thought in recent weeks about re-visiting the book and seeing what is still relevant today. I first came across the link from Mitch Joel and I don’t want to copy and paste the URL here because it’s a unique URL (excellent for measurement), so head on there if you want to download the book for FREE! (otherwise it costs you $45 on Amazon).
Also, the way the news got out was great, targeting a few key influencers online like John Moore from Brand Autopsy, John Bell from the Digital Influence Mapping Project, Todd Defren at PR Squared and of course Seth Godin among others. Given that these posts appeared in my feeds alone, I’m sure spread out over the targeted blogs, many more people interested in communication and word of mouth would have come across it as well. And appearing numerous times in numerous blogs also sends a strong signal: These many people have found it worth their time, it’s probably worth yours too.
Feedly
As always, Louis Gray brings the best in all things feed-related. I’m not going to just scrape the details from his blog because his write-up is so thorough, there’s probably nothing more I can do but to help spread the word by directing you to his coverage. I’ve just installed Feedly and am finding it a lot to get used to, but I can see certain elements I like.
Geek Goddess TV has a new episode out, featuring Social Media Breakfast: Singapore 2 with myself, Sheylara and Derrick being interviewed. If you’ve never attended one of the SMBs before, this is a great video to find out what we’re all about!
I’m glad with the recent hoohah surrounding Podfire, they’ve just stuck to what they do best, create content for the web and being picked up around the web as well. Good way to put Singapore’s social media scene on the web.
Little teaser for Social Media Breakfast: Singapore 3 - We have the venue locked down, and it’s an awesome one. Here’s a hint: Not only will you be attending breakfast, but will get free access to one of Singapore’s attractions as well. Let the guessing begin!
I'm experimenting with different themes right now! If you have any to recommend (preferably 3 columns), please leave a comment! In the meantime, please bear with the frequent facelifts =)
