It’s been three weeks but the next episode of The GennY Podcast is finally here! Full disclosure: This was actually our first recording, but we felt that the episode we released first was better suited to be our first, introductory podcast. Coincidentally, some topics actually touch on what was said at Social Media Breakfast | Singapore 6, but in slightly more detail.
Once again, this episode was brought to you by the same people behind episode 1 (Krisandro, myself, Dorothy, Yin and Yinqi), but we hope to shake that up for subsequent episodes.
GennY Episode 2 Team
The show notes:
00:00 - Daryl starts us off - introductions all round
00:55 - Yin starts us off on the topic: How can we get traditional companies to start slowly on the social media path?
01:35 - Social media allows you to know what your consumer wants, what trends they’re picking up, and hence customise your communications/marketing
03:02 - Why don’t companies go where their audience is?
05:42 - Is there a perceived credibility problem with social media?
06:48 - How well received would brands be on Plurk?
07:50 - Maybe if they talked about things other than just selling, they might be better received.
08:31 - No messages from unknown faces please!
11:46 - Should employees reach out from their own identity, or create one aligned with a company?
13:02 - “Dear All” = Fail
15:03 - How about Facebook Groups?
15:39 - Facebook Groups more as personality “labels” rather than a communication channel
16:40 - Maybe Facebook Groups would work if the creators made an effort to communicate to the group
16:47 - But this can be overdone too
18:20 - Is this an intrinsic problem because Facebook Groups have no RSS?
1) No one seems to really know what responsible participation means. Does it mean different things depending on context? For example, does “responsible participation” take on different manifestations in a B2C context as contrasted with a public-sector context?
2) Responsible participation, regardless of the context, needs to be two-way. I’m astounded at the sentiment on one side of the fence that calls for, or demands responsible participation, without even being engaged and participating themselves in the first place. Reciprocity is a global norm, no?
John collecting opinions
As a side note, I had a subsequent class visit to Edelman the following week, and the topic of discussion was “Crisis communication”. Before any of us could bring up the Wal-Mart example, the speaker brought it up first as an example of how they had to deal with it and it’s nice to see them openly acknowledge past mistakes and use them as a learning experience.
All in all, it seems like Edelman is genuinely trying to tap into the community to aid them in their social media efforts and this is only the first of such discussions. I’m looking forward to see what comes next.
I’ve been volunteering at my secondary school scout troop with a few of my friends since 2005 and among “management”, we’re the most junior, the rest being school teachers. The difficulty that plagued us forever was that we were very scattered. Some were in school (and within that group, different schools), some teachers, some working adults. As a result, with the exception of physical meetings, it was very hard for us to share information that required decisions to be made.
The one singular thing that got on my nerves the most, was how documents (and meeting minutes in particular) were continuously sent via email. Some people had multiple email addresses, when the documents were updated people frequently referred to different versions thus creating a lot of confusion.
Thus in April, 2008, our wiki was born, primarily to deal with the issues of documents. A file dump, if you will.
I had to sell the idea upwards, but luckily there was little to no resistance to it. The problem though, only one other person and myself were actually using it.
Fast forward to 2009 and now we have a full-blown “Project E” (that stands for electronic) team, with the mission to fully digitise everything within the unit where possible. It’s a great feeling to see the team (most of whom are 18 or 19) embracing the tools and really realising that it is a hugely beneficial alternative to anything we’ve used before.
So we’re having proper meetings now to work out the kinks. How should the pages be used? Are we going to develop a template for our “project” pages?
And the biggest question of all: How do we get everyone - not just the Project E team - to really use this as an organisational tool?
It’s interesting to see how the wiki has developed from a file dump to an actual tool. Just having one practical usage has led to further exploration and incremental usage.
I’m going to keep blogging about this story as it progresses. Right now we’re trying to get everyone from the Gen Y segment on it, next stop, the “older” segment (aka the teachers). I can’t wait to see if it will happen.
I think our wiki is deserving of a nomination (and a win) because it is the epitome of crowdsourcing and collaboration, the very things that inspired wikis. It’s been maintained for over a year by over 100 students, but not by their efforts alone. We’ve reached out to the prominent figures all over Asia to get their input and integrate it into a comprehensive wiki for anyone to find out more about different social media usages across Asia. I daresay it is the most comprehensive resource for anyone looking to get a quick primer on social media in Asia.
Coming here to Canada for exchange, I’ve met people from all over Asia - Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, China, etc - and it’s amazing to see that our collective research really does mirror what actually goes on in their lives.
If you’ve seen or used our wiki, or even just like the idea of the wiki as a central informational tool, do give the wiki your support and drop a link to the Edublog Awards page and support the nomination!
[Disclosure: I am a contributor to the wiki as part of a course (Digital Media Across Asia) in SMU. I will also be teaching assistant for this course in January, and as such feel tremendously involved in this project and nomination!]
Our criteria is simple: If we are likely to use a particular brand on an average day, we’ll include it in. So for example, even though I may only use my Flip Mino once or twice a week, I include it because the probability I use it on an average day is about even.
While originally, this was organised by timeline (i.e. at what time would you interact with which brand), I’ve decided to do it by category because I think it says more about my consumption patterns that way. Does it mean I use all of these brands everyday? No. But it’s fairly representative in that if I feel like a coffee, Tim Hortons is my destination.
Social Media/Web Apps
Social Media/Web Apps
So I’ll start, obviously, with social media and web apps. This is fairly straightforward, but the one thing I noticed when I started to list down the brands I’d include, was that Windows Media Player was an app I particularly wanted to list due to my immense dislike of iTunes.
Technology/Gadgets
Technology & Gadgets
Pretty straightforward here, so I’ll leave it as that.
Apparel
Apparel
This was just about the hardest category to do. For each of the brands listed up there, I have only one or two products from them: Zara (jacket, coat), Nike (sneakers), American Eagle (wallet), H&M (jacket, scarf), Guess (jeans), Levis (boxers, jeans).
This by no means indicates clothes aren’t important to me, just that I’d rather find some obscure shop and find a “slogan” tee, rather than head to the Gap or wherever to purchase one. However, the brands I do purchase for clothes (particularly Zara, Guess and Nike), I’m particularly loyal to.
Hygiene
Hygiene
Hygiene was fun to do because I have so many products. The ones I’m listing here are only those I’m using here with me in Canada, and I’m sure I have plenty more back home. I’m going to say hygiene is one area where I’m most susceptible to advertising.
Oral B from the whole “more dentists use” ads, Colgate was on all the time growing up, Axe from all the cool male advertising, Gillette is everywhere as well. I also want to say I actually have a strong dislike for Adidas as a brand, but only use their deodorant because it complements the cologne.
Interests
Interests
This was another really hard category because you don’t have brands for “books” or “music” or “Heroes” or “Lost”. So I included the brands of graphic novels I’m likely to read, as well as MTV (the TV channel I’m most likely to watch) and EA Sports which is the brand of the game (FIFA ‘09) that I’m playing now
Food
Food And Drink
This was not surprising at all. I generally don’t care about the food I eat, but I do like my drinks. The interesting thing here is that none of these brands would exist if I was blogging about this from Singapore. Tim Hortons would be Starbucks, Molson Canadian beer would be Corona, and Vitamin Water doesn’t exist. In other words, my brand preference is rather flexible and easily changed. Prior to coming here I hadn’t tried either Tim Hortons or Molson Canadian, but they’ve displaced my usual brands pretty quickly.
Finally, one miscellaneous brand:
Equality Logo
This is Equality, which is, from what I can tell, the house brand of Canada. Easily 20-40% of the stuff we buy here for the house, is from the Equality brand. Microwave food, toilet paper, eggs, canned food and much much more is all Equality.
I guess this is meaningful because when we first came here and went to the supermarket, we didn’t know what brands to get, but the mere pervasiveness of Equality made us gravitate towards it. Also, even though Equality easily accounts for a large portion of our weekly expenditure, I couldn’t find its’ logo online, and had to take a picture to get it. An overlooked brand, perhaps?
My takeaways from this exercise?
1) I experiment with a lot of brands. Nikon, HTC, Molson Canadian and Vitamin Water didn’t exist in my mind one year ago, but they do now.
2) I consider myself part of the “tribe” of some brands than others. Skullcandy, Nike, Flip, Sony, Axe, and MTV just to name a few.
3) Old habits die hard. I don’t think I’ve ever used another toothbrush except Oral B, or toothpaste except Colgate. Even if I did see products from other brands on the shelves, they don’t even register. It’s also very hard for me to use other social bookmarking tools like Twine because I’m so used to Delicious.
4) Word of mouth influences my purchase decisions a lot. Skullcandy, Sony, Nikon, Axe, Firefox, HTC, Flip, Versace and Tim Hortons are all word of mouth brands, that are now favourite brands.
How about you? What are the brands you feel passionately about? How do they fit into your daily/weekly/monthly behavior? If you were to do one of these by category or by timeline, how would it look?
ps: I’m sure I left out some brands of stuff that I use but just didn’t take note off, please excuse that.
I’ve been following up on Social Media Breakfast | Singapore 4 (SMB4) from Canada, and I’m glad that the general sentiment is that everyone had a good time and found the discussion meaningful. I want to just quickly blog about the team and how we evolved to where we are today.
You might remember me mentioning how we literally started out as strangers from SMB1. It was just Derrick posing an idea to me, and Sheylara joining us out of nowhere (neither Derrick and I had any idea who she was at the time. Oh how times have changed).
By the time SMB2 rolled along and with it came our brand new logo, courtesy of our designer Shermeen, the first “unofficial” addition to the “team”.
Claudia came on board with us for SMB3, and as you will know from attending SMB4, has been crucial in getting our website up as well as the forum and really tying together the threads that we missed from SMB3. In many ways the current manifestation of SMB has really been her work, especially with the three founding members essentially MIA at this period of time (I’m in Canada, Derrick is in the army and Sheylara is juggling multiple blogs AND work!).
Finally, Dorothy, was overseas for SMB1-2, but appeared for 3, and we decided to con.. er… convince her to join the team. You can tell what a difference the manpower made from the liveblogging of SMB4 that occured (that, by no means insinuates that all Dorothy will contribute is liveblogging).
When we were at five members, we debated over whether to get anyone new. On one hand five is “just nice”, on the other, six will provide us with additional manpower to cover missing personnel. So with six we went, and I think it’s a comfortable number for the foreseeable future.
Our criteria for taking on new people for the team? We don’t really have any, except that they live in the world of social media and fundamentally understand what it’s about, and what SMB stands for.
Why am I writing this post, you may ask. Am I necessarily revealing anything you don’t already know? Maybe, or maybe not. The key message for everyone is these guys have “day jobs”. It may be conventional like Shermeen and Claudia, unconventional like Sheylara’s, or school for myself and Dorothy, or army for Derrick, but we have them. Yet, every two or three months, somehow the time gets dug up from somewhere to organise Social Media Breakfast | Singapore, and no one gets paid for it.
So If you haven’t yet, do drop by their blogs, or the SMB blog or the SMB forum and drop them a comment, start a discussion, word of encouragement, and do keep supporting us with your enthusiasm, attendance and kind donations.
I think we’re in the middle of a social renaissance both in Singapore and globally, but this is only the start. Only by coming together and building community and forging bonds and relationships can it happen, and I hope you will continue to join us and grow from the sharing that goes on, develop from the networks you form and learn from the mistakes we, and others, make.
I wanted to blog about this last week but in the hassle of packing and flying it slipped my mind until I was listening to a Jaffe Juice podcast while wandering around New York today:
Blogging is not about planting magic beans and expecting beanstalks to sprout up. Your blogs are probably not going to affect activation on a large scale for weeks or months! You’ve got to work at this. You’ve really got to work at this. So if you’re not planting those seeds right now, and you don’t have a plan to grow and promote and nurture and join a bigger conversation, then really what are you doing?
I first thought of this while walking past the Raffles Place train station and saw the Xbox/Sheylara poster I’ve been hearing about over the last week. Think about it: to move from a social media channel (a blog) to getting paid mainstream media publicity at one of - if not the most - heavily trafficked train station in Singapore. How does this happen?
With lots of hard work and patience, that’s how.
And that’s the one thing you should keep in mind when you’re blogging or dabbling in social media, be it as a company or brand or individual. You’re not going to make a hit overnight, but if you stick with your passion, you just might.
The earliest archives I can see on Sheylara’s website is December, 2005, but I have no idea if she was blogging before that. In other words, at the very least it took almost two years to really get established in the Singaporean blogosphere and established enough to be picked up by a big company like Microsoft.
There are probably many more reasons, but I can think of at least three that have contributed to this success outside of just “working at it”.
1) Being relatively focused on a niche.
Be it posing with guitars, talking about the latest Xbox games, pictures of she and her friends playing Rock Band and Gamer Girl Fridays, there’s no doubt that Sheylara is one gamer girl. Heck, when I was trying to tell a friend that at least one person in Singapore is playing Rock Band, I showed him her website. She doesn’t blog only about games, but there is a consistency in it that is hard to ignore.
2) Reaching out beyond offline interactions
I also previously blogged about Sheylara “cold e-mailing” to offer her help when we first started Social Media Breakfast | Singapore. I don’t think that got her the Xbox Xpert role per se, but it probably helped people sit up and notice that this is someone to be taken credibly in the local blogosphere. And as we all know, credibility is everything.
3) Being absolutely professional
Unlike certain other female bloggers I shall not mention by name, Sheylara always deals with her detractors with a touch of humour. In fact, I think more often her community are the ones who fight fire with fire. (The company parallel here is letting your antibodies work for you) Again in the social media space, there’s little to no tolerance for bitchfits. Either you can work things out like adults, or you prove to the world you never mentally graduated from kindergarten.
On the flip side, I give absolute credit to Microsoft and their agency for what they have done in this space. One, for moving into the space at all. Two, for selecting a good choice, and three, for taking time to determine that this choice is the best for them. I don’t think the Xbox Xpert happened overnight, but it was a relationship and mutual effort that was slowly worked on and cultivated, as I mentioned in a previous post. Let’s note also that the three points about Sheylara’s efforts online easily extend to a company like Microsoft too.
Again I emphasise that this is an effort that literally can take years to work. I’ve been blogging seriously for about eight months and still haven’t passed the 100 subscriber mark. You just gotta keep telling yourself you’ll reach it some day.
Maybe I should blog about something else for a year and get some company endorsement deal eh? Just kidding, I probably couldn’t tear myself away from this blog if I tried. Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a picture that can act as a metaphor for whatever your brand, company, or individual blog is trying to achieve.
(Full disclosure: Sheylara is a friend of mine and we work together on Social Media Breakfast | Singapore. I also do not know the exact details of the Xbox Xpert deal, but am commenting on the process as an observer of the social media space)
You might have read that the Social Media Breakfast | Singapore team had a meeting last week and one of the big issues we discussed (and are still discussing) various ways of partnering up with companies, agencies and organisations for future breakfasts.
The reason why we’re taking so long to come to a conclusion, is because it’s not an easy one to make. Walter mentions the concept of “fit” and that’s something that’s important to us. How does the company view social media? How do they view the community? Is our network something to be leveraged on, or developed? What’s their interest and/or agenda? How transparent are they in revealing this interest/agenda? Does aligning with them discriminate against other brands, companies or agencies?
Lots of tough questions, all not easy to answer. So here’s the challenge: If you’re one of the commercial entities who are looking at partnering with us - send us something that will not only convince us it’s the right move, but leave no shred of doubt that it’s a good move for us, for you and for the community. If you understand social media and community, it shouldn’t be all that hard.
For the bloggers, podcasters and others in the community, how do you deal with this issue? Does any partnership/sponsorship do? Or are there deeper questions to ponder? Comment below!
1) It’s a good thing
Think about it. If you’re organising an event and people are actually bitching and being sore about not being invited/attending, that says something. People hating you isn’t a bad thing. People being indifferent is the worst possible thing that can happen. I would’ve felt much worse if no one turned up for SMB3, compared to people thinking it was so exclusive that there was a blacklist in effect.
2) Stuff like this will happen
ie: Be prepared. If it’s going to happen, it will happen online, so you should be monitoring what’s going on. How you react to it, in what manner and via which medium should be decided too. Sometimes it may not even be worth acting on, depending on the credibility of the bloggers involved.
3) When stuff like this happens, trust your “antibodies”.
I don’t do much to monitor my blog besides checking my inbound links and having a Google Alert set up. Invariably I’ll miss something, but like the person who sent me the email, other people in the community highlight it when people are starting flames. It’s the same for any organisation getting involved online. There are going to be people who jump at any chance to launch an attack, but there will be those who will defend you. I personally feel the most important thing is to trust your supporters or “antibodies” because they will be your first line of defense, and probably the best line of defense.
4) The earlier you realise you can’t please everybody, the better.
No matter what you do, there are people who are going to find fault with it. Is it worth your time placating them, or should you spend the same amount of your time building relationships with your supporters? It’s really your choice. Again, not every instance of a disagreement and/or attack warrants a reply. In fact, sometimes silence may help the situation even more.
That’s it for today, what other concerns do you think companies would have entering this space? Tomorrow: How do you decide which bloggers are “safe” to align yourself with.
In a month, Social Media Breakfast: Singapore 3 will be happening. The tentative date is Saturday, 16th August at the Asian Civilisations Museum. I finally got to meet up with Walter at Ogilvy’s Verge event, and pitched him with the idea a week later, and it’s worked out pretty well. We’ve got verbal confirmation from ACM about the venue but the date is still tentative.
What’s going to be different this time? Well first of all, we’re going to dedicate maybe 45mins to an hour to focus on discussing about social media. The topic is up in the air right now, so feel free to throw something in. Hopefully it won’t be something covered 73529573 times before (like should we pay bloggers to review products), but something different. Just to manage expectations, don’t expect the names or turnout like you see at other “conferences” because at the end of the day we’re a four man team with no budget!
Speaking of a four man team, another key difference is that Derrick will be taking point on this one, primarily because myself and Sheylara are going to be pretty swamped with work. We’re also welcoming Claudia into the mix, who’ll help with working out what exactly that social media topic should be. Who better than the community manager of Yebber who deals with social media every day to take up this job right? Shermeen, our masterful logo designer is unofficially on board helping us with what ever design stuff/torture we can throw her way as well.
While we’re on design, Sheylara and I have been discussing about getting a full-fledged domain for SMB:Singapore, so stay tuned for that.
And finally, everyone who comes gets free access and a guided tour of the Museum, and we’re in the process of persuading them to relax their photography rules for just one day so that as always, our bloggers can go crazy with their photo-taking.
More updates as they come in! We really want your feedback on how SMB should evolve. It’s not our “baby”, it’s everyone’s. So please comment below!
ps: In case you don’t know what SMB is about, read up on the first and second ones here!
In a month, Social Media Breakfast: Singapore 3 will be happening. The tentative date is Saturday, 16th August at the Asian Civilisations Museum. I finally got to meet up with 