Ogilvy’s Digital Influence team held another Open Room, titled “Journalism’s from Mars, Social Media’s from Venus” and after tonight, I think it’s clear that the problem they have is the problem everyone (businesses, schools, non-profits, the music industry, etc) is having. They were sitting on a model that was working for the last 50 or so years, have been blind-sided by the sudden tidal wave of social media and not only are they not scrambling to catch up, but they’re actually holding on to the old world for all that it’s worth.
As with panels, I was fully prepared for some of the audience to be un-accepting of some young (and even worse, enemployed) punk telling them what the world is like. And it was no different this time, which is fine with me, it makes life exciting! How awfully boring would it be if everyone just nodded their heads and agreed.
I think it was a really interesting discussion. There was as much uncommon ground as there was common, and it’s painfully obvious both sides have to learn from each other. Monetisation is not a dirty word, but neither is trusting a fellow blogger. I think we have to move away from our normal worldviews that content creating is done for passion (for bloggers) or that the man on the street (or the Tweeter on Tweetdeck) is less reliable and/or credible than the journalist.
Thinking about “journalism” from the point of breaking news and real good opinion pieces is one thing. But I think we need to think about where the money comes from. Thinking about subscription models and what not is fine (even though they won’t work), but as Thomas Crampton brought up, mainstream media has enjoyed the monopoly on reaching people and advertising for a very long time, and companies are just beginning to realise that they can bypass the “middleman” entirely, thus crippling the revenue model. Will it provide them the reach? Probably not. Will it provide them the influence? Barack Obama’s YouTube channel suggests yes (yes yes I know it worked in tandem with traditional media).
As a closing comment: someone said that old habits die hard, referring to the staying power of traditional media and being used to opening that Sunday edition of the paper over a slow and leisurely breakfast. Here’s a thought: my “old” habits from the old world started changing by the time I was thirteen, and many were gone by the time I was seventeen. Radio, once a nightly listen for the dedication show, is an afterthought, so are magazines. TV serves my purposes when I want it to, newspapers have flown out of the window, music exists in the form of mp3s, not cds. The only “old world” habit I maintain is the reading of books.
My point is this: as much as old habits die hard, to the new generation, new habits form at an alarming speed that the world has never seen before. When, if ever, has a generation been influenced so quickly and successively like from the transition to Friendster to Facebook? That’s not just the speed of platform change, but the speed of diffusion from half a world away. When and how fast did we take up texting to replace calling? The speed of change is crazy. Geographical boundaries barely exist anymore. And I would ask people who believe in the “old habits” to take a look at their children, their nephews, their nieces or anyone under 20 and tell me how many of their “old habits” they see replicated in them, and ask how different the world will be in five or ten years, and if now’s the time to think about that change, or cling on to “old habits”.
So Dorothy and I were speaking at Ad:Tech Asia yesterday at a youth panel, and there was much discussion at the panel, on Twitter and online about what was said. We decided a quick episode of GennY would be a great way to talk about our thoughts after the panel. You can check out this blog post with lots of details with what was said at the panel.
The show notes
00:00 - Daryl and Dorothy start us off, this is focused on the fallout after the Ad:Tech youth panel, 2009
00:27 - First point: Why this obssession with the distinction between “new” and “traditional” media?
01:55 - Daryl mentions that the tools are all the same and references Brian’s (@litford)’s comments in GennY #4 about the same tools having different usages, with different results. (GennY Podcast episode 004 - 22:34)
02:15 - Dorothy mentions that consistency across the different platforms is the key
02:55 - Is it about distinguishing the differences between them, or about how they can work together?
03:11 - Who do “influencers” really have to be?
05:34 - Down with “faceless” corporations on social media channels!! It’s impersonal and we can’t relate
06:55 - How about spokespeople from companies being the “faces” online?
07:44 - There are “stages” and “levels” in social media and the difficulty ramps up at each stage
08:17 - Perhaps co-ownership is the way to go. As long as there is someone available to listen
09:35 - Final point: Are youth really that different?
10:00 - Do older generations remember banner ads or TV ads?
10:18 - Marketers don’t like to hear that Gen Y doesn’t want to hear from “faceless” corporations, but isn’t it the same as receiving a telemarketer phone call or junk mail asking to sign up for a new credit card?
10:53 - Do the older generations go on websites and think “Wow this banner ad rocks I want to click on it”? Because if they don’t, why do they think we will?
11:10 - At the end of the day, would you be interested/excited about the ad if you were a consumer?
11:40 - Why would you do selective focus groups who may not even be your target group, when you could do it online with your fans and get fast feedback?
00:00 - Yin starts us off - introductions all round
00:36 - The tumbleweed crosses the alamo
01:17 - What do we expect of brands if they are involved in social media?
01:28 - Brian’s expectations are low, he just wants someone to talk to him
03:06 - If brands decide to be online, then they owe it to the customer to interact with them
04:10 - The minimum expectation is at least and acknowledgement or a reply, even if the concern or question isn’t immediately answered.
05:23 - Maybe sometimes brands shouldn’t be on social media?
06:12 - Yin suggests there’s a difference between big brands and smaller brands in terms of the scale of reaching out and interacting with customers
07:01 - Yinqi says with the resources that big brands have, she feels they should experiment more
07:29 - Brian mentions the flip side, which is that big brands have more to lose in terms of reputation online, despite the relative ease to get involved
09:17 - Brian clanks his beer bottle against the table leg for effect, before saying that brands don’t own brands, customers own brands
10:53 - Daryl brings up the local example of Starhub on Twitter and whether it opens up the opportunity to solve minor issues
11:54 - Brian brings up the reverse of that to announce anticipation of minor issues in advance so that at least consumers know
13:08 - Kris says one to one relationships aren’t always possible, especially with many consumers
16:13 - The issue really is about being painfully aware that your actions online (if you choose to be online) is broadcast to everyone
16:54 - The customer is now empowered to keep brands in check
20:59 - Yin wonders why brands still repeat mistakes, despite many opportunities for them to learn
22:04 - The tools are of equal access to everyone, it’s how your choose to wield the tools
22:24 - Brian says “nerfed”
22:56 - Daryl has the expectation (realistic or not) that brands should know the general “rules” of the platform they choose to engage consumers in
23:58 - What about companes’ expectations of consumers?
26:41 - Maybe companies need to make it clear what to expect from their online engagements
27:00 - Brian tells his Zappos story as an example of positive engagement
29:20 - Yin calls for feedback and questions and more interaction!
If you’d like us to talk about anything and hear Gen Y’s perspective, leave a comment and we’ll definitely record it if it’s within our collective sphere of knowledge.
I’m going to be at the Youth Connect! Conference on the 18th of May as part of a youth panel called “Youth Speak! - What makes Youth Tick?” that aims to “reveal what shapes their lifestyle, spending habits, what’s in & what’s not”.
So I have two questions:
1) To the organisations: What would you want to know?
and
2) To fellow youth, here’s a visual from the conference pamphlet:
Cool vs Socially Conscious
I know what’s my answer, but I’d love to hear from you! The comments are yours.
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?
If you’ve been following me on Twitter or Plurk, you may have gathered hints about a podcast coming your way.
Well, it’s here! It’s called Genny (pronounced Jenny - you have Krisandro to thank for the name) and the deal behind the podcast is that we decided to just get a handful of people from Generation Y in Singapore, and just really talk about what’s going on. Sometimes it’ll be about social media, sometimes it won’t be.
First, let me introduce the people in this podcast:
GennY Episode 1 Team
Krisandro, myself, Dorothy, Yin and Yinqi make up the people behind this episode, but it’s a revolving team and the voices will change from time to time, depending on who’s available to record the show. (Big thanks to Ingrid for putting together the graphic!)
As our first episode goes, this is pretty raw because we just sat in a room and talked into a laptop (Anyone wants to sponsor us proper podcast equipment?), but I hope you enjoy it anyway. It can only get better.
The show notes:
00:00 - Krisandro starts us off - introductions all round
00:53 - The topic: How is Gen Y different in the work force?
01:28 - Will Gen Y mindset change during the recession?
02:26 - Gen Y has no qualms with changing jobs, even in a recession
03:39 - Perhaps Gen Y feels there isn’t enough recognition at work
05:08 - Did the media influence Gen Y’s outlook on life?
07:56 - How is Gen Y different outside the workspace in peer-to-peer interactions?
09:57 - How does online interaction affect offline interaction?
10:51 - Krisandro claims he’s 19
11:01 - Are there different norms that apply online and offline?
11:58 - Maybe it’s easier for us to verify if people are weirdos online
15:10 - Blooper!
Please check out the podcast here and give us your feedback! If you’d like us to cover a certain topic, just drop a message in the comments. Thanks for your support!
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.
As a graduating student, it’s hard to go by a day without someone asking “have you found a job?” or talking to a fellow graduating student about job prospects, job hunting efforts or the like. On Monday, it hit me that I have officially eight weeks (or two months) to go, before I hit my last day of school in SMU.
I don’t know how big deal getting a first job is for most people, but it’s a huge deal for me. I’ve had friends who got a job early after graduation, or even before graduation, but find themselves in another job after a year. Some will say that’s experience, I see it as a waste of time. Call me the typical Gen Y-er, but if you’re not waking up happy to go to work every morning, why are you going to work?
As much as I’m eager to get a job and not be unemployed for moths on end, I feel it has to be the right one. Or as right as possible, given the current economic climate.
I can’t speak for the rest of my friends, but I have different expectations when it comes to work. Many of my cohort think about money, I think about fit. Many think about how fast they can get to the next pay bracket, I think about culture. Perhaps it’s idealistic, but I figure it’s better to think about these things now and aim for them, rather than “wake up” figuratively after three or five years, realising that you weren’t working for what you wanted all along.
So what are my options? Knowing my passions and skill sets, and graduating with a business degree majoring in marketing and communications (specifically, digital media) I see myself doing one of five things:
1) Working in media
It could be a TV station, radio station, record label or publication. If it deals with media, I’m for it. If it deals with digital media, music and/or youth, all the better. I did two stints at MTV Asia and at least specific to those experiences, I think it would be something I would really enjoy. Granted, people with business degrees don’t usually end up with such fields, but in this day and age, I think it’s a plus to have someone from business school who can understand the value of delivering results/ROI over artistry. Additionally, many of these traditional media channels need to adapt to digital, an avenue I could potentially add value to.
2) Working in a company interested in a social media strategy
This is a no brainer considering the content of my blog. Admittedly, I would go into this with no “real” experience as measured by conventional businesses. But I’d wager I could bring more to a social media strategy than a Gen X-er who doesn’t get what social media, community and conversation is about. The difficulty here, besides the thorny “experience” issue, is finding the “fit” with a company that is genuinely interested in embracing a social media strategy for the long run, and working in one that is truly going to bring about change, as opposed to doing it because digital is the new TV.
3) Working in PR
Another semi-no brainer. It is after all my major and I did have a very short stint at Waggener Edstrom doing digital PR. Difficulty here is similar to #2. Working in PR should be a fairly straightforward thing. Working in an agency that is truly embracing digital and not doing it for the sake of doing it, will be difficult.
4) Teaching
Teaching used to be a “long term” end goal of mine. Given the conditions, maybe I’d go into it earlier than I thought. Youth is a passion and I’ve been helping out back in SJI for four years. I know the fantastic feeling it is to bring boys from secondary one to secondary four, and the pride I took in the journey is immense. The tradeoff? Transferring back to the corporate world may not be easy.
5) Starting something myself
You may have read about Claudia’s new company, 24seven in the papers yesterday. I think doing something like that requires a lot of guts and a lot of sacrifice. I’m convinced there’s a market who wants the stuff people like Claudia and myself can provide. I just wonder if it’s big enough, and how long it would take to pay itself off.
What about you graduating students? What do you want to do? What’s more important to you in life right now? Just finding any job with the hopes of switching once the economy picks up? Or trying to find that elusive “right” one?
Just about a month ago, I got an email from Ryan Paugh, community manager at Brazen Careerist to join their community. It was a great personalised message, telling me how painless it would be to sign up, and that it would be a great place to meet other Gen Y bloggers and that I could always go to him if I had any questions. A great welcoming email.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I saw fellow bloggers Meg Roberts and Corvida Raven and figured it should be pretty cool.
After creating my profile, I submitted a load of stuff and had problems with getting my info saved, so I decided to leave it. Within a couple of days I got an email from Dan Healy letting me know I should update my rss feed so that I could pipe my recent activity to Brazen. So I did. Soon after, I got a blog post featured on the site. Although I’ve been caught up in exams and traveling after that, Brazen has been high on my Google Reader priorities and I try to comment and participate as much as I can.
Why am I blogging about this? Firstly, to share a new connection to a community that I have discovered (or rather, discovered me), which I enjoy very much and more importantly, to tell you why this matters.
One of the links I shared a couple of weeks ago was how to establish a community’s culture, with points like communicating with members, recognising positive contribution as heavily weighted actions that work. If you read my experience with Brazen, you can be sure that these elements were definitely part of it.
If you’re a company hearing lots about this “community” buzzword, learn something from this case study. Community does not equate to sending people mails saying “hi my site is the coolest ever, come join it”. And leaving the site to rot after getting 20,000 people to join it doesn’t make it a success either. If you can’t come to terms with this and aren’t going to be bothered to spend the effort, Don’t bother.
Do you have similar case studies and/or experiences to share? Are you on Brazen Careerist too? Drop me a comment!
Twitter/Brand Monitoring
Jesse Stay has an exclusive interview with the woman behind @BritneySpears on Twitter over on Louis Gray’s blog, and I found this to be a very, very interesting read. When you think about Twitter, you think about people in social media or tech people or people who live their lives online. Yet @BritneySpears has found some footing with an audience of more than 10,000 (maybe it isn’t even her audience, maybe it’s a wider audience than her usual), and the results look to be, for the most part, positive.
It just makes you think, if a female pop star with a tarnished image in the last few years can get on something like Twitter and begin to make small steps to getting back on the right track, what can your company do with it?
if you have a “spying” culture you distrust your employees’ reading habits and how they spend their time. You will therefore distrust their ability to engage with customers on your behalf or you will put so many controls over it that it will sound 100% inauthentic. Think of people willing to speak in public in dicta rial countries - they have zero credibility, as most people assume that they are shills for the regime.
If your company is one of those that blocks Facebook, all it does is signal an extreme lack of trust in your employees. And most of Gen Y aren’t going to take it (Minus the bankers. They’ll do anything for money)
Generation Y/Millennials/Digital Natives
Read Write Web tells us that Millennials Will Route Around IT Departments - There are statistics in this research, but here’s the bottom line:
This report definitely makes it clear that IT departments can either choose to adopt some of these technologies, or they will risk that a large number of their young employees will simply go rogue.
I’ve had a little bit of experience with this in the past and I can say with some certainty that whatever organisations think they’re blocking, they’re not. Whether I want my email forward to Gmail and IT won’t do it for me, or running Firefox from my USB stick because I can’t download Firefox, there are ways to get it done. Blocking IM and/or Facebook? Pretty much useless with the 3G iPhone. (not that I have one).
Just let it go and find more meaningful work for the IT department to do (like improving web analytics, for one).
Blogging
Bryan Person of Social Media Breakfast asks whether blog sidebars are useful. I think they are and I feel I could definitely utilise mine more efficiently. How do you use yours? What are the must haves for your blog sidebar?
That’s it for this week, do share links with me on Delicious.com (I’m uniquefrequency) or just leave them in the comments below!
