Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

Archive for the ‘twitter’ Category

The “Right” Way To Use Twitter

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

There isn’t one.

If I follow you because you’re having personal conversations – that’s the right way to use it for you.

If I follow you because you’re telling me about where you’re eating and because of that I find new places to go – that’s the right way to use it for you.

If I follow you because you share social media links that help me learn something new – that’s the right way to use it for you.

If I follow you because you tweet about Lost and believe season six is going to be the television equivalent of the second coming – that’s the right way to use it for you.

And if I don’t follow you because of something you’re doing (or not doing) – then I’m just the not right follower for you. It’s like choosing clothes – just because I prefer skinny jeans over baggy ones doesn’t mean no one want to buy baggy jeans. Make sure your focus is on them.

It’s okay to have 100 followers who are right for you than 10,000 who aren’t.

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Thoughts On Teachersday.sg And #tday09

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Today Coleman tweeted that the Ministry of Education’s teachers’ day website was a risky move, and coincidentally at the time when I clicked on the link the one and only “careless” tweet appeared (screenshot courtesy of Coleman):

Teachersday.sg

Teachersday.sg

Yes, I give MOE credit for trying something new and for experimenting, but there are still points to be made/lessons to learn:

1) It may have been the only negative tweet, but I think we need to think about these things. Who else will see these tweets besides the teachers? Other kids? Parents of kids? It’s entirely possible to get on to a service like Pheed.me and remove foul language in advance. And I think we need to be keenly aware of our target audience.

2) I understand that the purpose of keeping it uncensored was to maintain authenticity, but looking at the tweets that came out.. I’m not sure how many were just set up for the sole purpose of tweeting this one hashtag.

3) As Daphne points out, this web portal wasn’t largely publicised and therein lies why this was the only “careless” tweet. If more of the general public got to know about it, I bet it wouldn’t be long before tweets like “Miss Lim from [whatever] school I remember you for being such a b!tc# 20 years ago and I hope you’re still single #tday09” start appearing, and this turns into a #skittles fiasco – where people tagged on racist/malicious comments to the #skittles hashtag for everyone to see.

So for a moment, let’s forget this is the Ministry of Education (MOE), let’s forget that the people tweeting are predominantly kids, and let’s think about it in the real world:

First, while I don’t think the people who are involved are inexperienced or ignorant of social media, I think they jumped on the shiny object bandwagon without thinking it through. From their blog post:

If Facebook was the vehicle that brought social media to the mainstream, Twitter is the shiny new Ferrari F70 of the online space

Accurately said. I shiny new Ferrari isn’t an everyday, run-of-the-mill car. It’s like re-taking your drivers’ licence test again and making sure you understand the vehicle and can control it under all sorts of conditions, sunny or stormy.

Second, I know I’ll get some flak by being critical of something like this where there’s one negative post in a sea of hundreds. But that’s not where I’m coming from. It’s not specific to the case. It’s specific to the understanding, usage and application of social media that I think we have to be aware of. Those of us who are fortunate enough to work in this space really have to be conscious of this. If you did this for a client, or your CEO of an MNC and they saw this happen. What do you think are the odds you’d get budget for your next “social media experiment”? Slim to none?

Basically, I think you have to be careful how much risk you take with your brand. It’s great to hand over control to the consumers, but you gotta know your audience. Have you already been in the community cultivating “antibodies” for awhile who will come to your defence when someone steps out of line? Or are you jumping in cold? Just because you introduce a platform for one, noble purpose, doesn’t mean it will be used that way by everyone. And you have to take the good and the bad.

Back to the specific case, although the boy managed to delete his tweet and seemed quite embarrassed afterwards, I really hope he doesn’t get punished or anything because of this. It was a conscious decision to make this platform public, and therefore consequences that arise of it being public comes from that choice to be public, not the user.

After all, he just served as a reminder to us that anybody can be made aware of anyone’s social media efforts at any one time, and they’re not always going to be in sync with your organisation.

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Hyper-Localising Twitter: Going Beyond Event Hashtags

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Tommy Vallier from Kingston, where I lived for almost five months, talks about a great idea of local hashtags to make local tweets even more searchable and relevant:

It’s been hard, though, because while big events have dedicated hashtags, smaller going-ons never do.

Because long hashtags don’t make sense thanks to Twitter’s 140 character limit, and over-general hashtags like #singapore would generate too much noise, Tommy suggested breaking up Kingston the same way Canada Post does, by postal code.

Kingston and Singapore have a lot in common. We’re both very small (although Singapore’s population is something like 45x on the same landmass), and we’re quite easily broken up into zones. The problem with hashtags like #sgtweetup and #smbsg and #openroom is that they can only be found by people who know what they’re looking for. The chance of serendiptous discovery is slim to none.

So what if we added in hyper-local hashtagging? Districts like #amk or #cck are too local (I feel) and too limiting (what’s the hashtag for Simei?). Perhaps the answer is in separating it into 5 parts:

#sgn – north
#sgs – south
#sge – east
#sgw – west
#sgc – central

An extra four characters to keep it short and sweet and easy to add on. Of course this isn’t fullproof (I don’t know where I’d put Sengkang), but if we imagine the rough outline of where the MRT trains go, we could possibly give a close to subjective hashtag to add more relevance to our tweets.

What do the Tweeters in Singapore think? Too troublesome? No one cares about local tweets? Or would it help tell you more about events, traffic, weather, news etc? I want to know what you think.

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The Open Room: Journalism’s From Mars, Social Media’s From Venus

Friday, June 26th, 2009
Mars & Venus

Mars & Venus

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”.

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There Is No Undo Or Go Back In Social Media (Especially Twitter)

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

A couple of days ago I was particularly bugged by bad communication and tweeted this:

My Tweet

My Tweet

Of course it should read “written and spoken english” instead of just “written and english”. Was totally in my mind, but somehow didn’t get translated to the keyboard. The result?

replies2

So the lesson here is really, be careful what you tweet, but if you do make a boo boo, try to see the humour in it! It happens!

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Responsible Participation: A Discussion At Edelman

Monday, March 30th, 2009
Michael starts on the beer

Michael starts on the beer

I got invited by Mark a few weeks ago for a discussion at Edelman regarding responsible participation and what it means. Also present was Phil Gomes, John Kerr, Michael Netzley, Ben Koe, Preetam Rai and Eastcoastlife.

I’m not going to say too much about the discussion itself, as Michael has written a very comprehensive post detailing the discussion, but I will make two quick comments:

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

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.

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What Kind Of People Are Following You On Twitter?

Friday, February 20th, 2009

I came across this cool app called
Twitter Sheep, which scans your followers’ bios and comes up with a cool little tag cloud. Here’s mine:

Twitter Sheep

Twitter Sheep

What’s yours like! Post your link in the comments!

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Measuring App Popularity – Difficulties

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Yesterday I gave some qualitative reasons to supplement quantitative numbers by Hitwise to suggest that Plurk has had more traffic than Twitter in Singapore since July, 2008.

One thing that I’m wondering, from what I’m gathering from the data, is how the visits are measured. Plurk is automatically updated, Twitter isn’t. Twitter can also be accessed from desktop applications like Twhirl, Tweetdeck and many others. Are these factored in? How about mobile apps for Twitter like Twinkle and Twitterific? Similarly, how about mobile access for Plurk? The Plurk app for iPhones and iPod Touches?

In other words, are there “hidden” traffic sources that we should be looking at?

Secondly, looking at Prof. Michael’s blog post that points to Hubspot releasing a report that lists Singapore as one of the top 30 Twitter cities worldwide, I’m wondering this: If Plurk has more traffic in Singapore than Twitter, and Twitter is in the top 30 Twitter cities, what does that say about any city that is not in the top 30? Are they by default, even less than Singapore’s Plurk traffic?

What are the implications of these statistics on people looking to use microblogging as a communications tool? Is it far from being mainstream if a top 30 city is a small one like Singapore?

Granted, neither of these data points are concrete and conclusive. The Hubspot data uses about 500,000 Twitter users as a sample size. This seems to be the problem most of us are dealing with. It’s not a complete lack of information, but imperfect information. Should we just take what is available and work from there because it’s better than nothing? What are the alternatives? Would love to hear from those struggling to answer these questions just as much as I am.

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Why Plurk Is More Popular Than Twitter In Singapore

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Prof. Michael blogged yesterday about a Hitwise article pointing to much higher (1.5x) more visits to Plurk than Twitter recently in Singapore, and has attracted more traffic since July of 2008.

This data (though I do have some questions about it which I will blog about tomorrow) seems to validate what I’ve been feeling intuitively over the last six months or so. If I had to point to reasons, I have broadly speaking, two:

1) Twitter failed us
Looking back, my very first post on my switch to Plurk was on the 3rd of June, 2008. The blog post even leads with

Twitter’s downtime over the last couple of months has really pissed off a lot of people, most of all me.

With that timeframe in mind, let’s look at Hitwise’s research:

Plurk vs Twitter Visits

Plurk vs Twitter Visits

The image clearly shows the surge in visits occurs somewhere around the 28th of June. A reasonable enough time for a technology to diffuse down the adoption curve.

2) Localisation and Intimacy

When I first wrote about the switch to Plurk I had four main reasons:

Now that I’ve been using Plurk for awhile, these reasons have compressed into two: intense localisation and intimacy. My theory is Singaporeans don’t need the wide reaches of Twitter. Because of our relatively smaller size as a country, we’re used to smaller interactions, which is perfect for what Plurk achieves. I think most people have less than 100 friends, which makes following easy. This is different from the Twitter “power users” in the US, as following 5,000 friends on Plurk would probably literally send someone insane.

The second theory is that by nature of Plurk consisting of small, threaded, intimate conversations, it lends itself naturally to a very high level of localisation. When you join Plurk and realise the Singaporean users are talking about local places, local weather, the movie releases in Singapore and what’s on television, it has a much more relevant feel than Twitter (were you on Twitter during the recent Superbowl?) and as a result presents a very, very low barrier to entry.

Recently a few people from SMU joined Plurk, and while I would never have imagined them on Twitter, I think Plurk works perfectly, especially when there are friends you know using the service already.

In closing, I think Singaporeans are terribly practical, and have no issues with community migration on a small scale (let’s not talk about migrating 500 friends on Facebook). The first factor, Twitter failing, led to the search for an alternative. What many of us found, is the second factor – a level of relevancy and community that Twitter did not offer. In short, the new application provided a better alternative, and most of us have never looked back.

If you’re a Plurk user in Singapore, do you agree? How about if you’re a die-hard Twitter user? Let’s hear it!

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Links For The Week: 18th January 2009

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

When Prof. Michael and I were discussing what to include into the Digital Media class this term, one thing I thought we should make compulsory is Twitter. Even though it had its downtime in 2008, I think the service definitely has potential, and so this week, it’s almost all about everyone’s favourite (or “favourite”) microblogging tool, Twitter.

If you’re lazy, Steve Spalding has the Essential Twitter Guide ready for you, which is a collection of the best Twitter-related posts and guides around the web.

From the student’s point of view, Studentlinc has a post on Figuring Out The Benefits Of Twitter.

Steven Hodson is doing his Twitter and Friendfeed spring cleaning, and he points to Twitter Karma as a way of discovering who’s a mutual follower, who’s just following you, or if you’re just following them. One sneaky trick that some people use is to follow you, wait a couple of days to see if you follow them, and then unfollow you so that they can artificially inflate their follower number. This helps safeguard against that.

Finally, the one non-Twitter related link for the week, is the question “What’s A Community Worth?” over at Social Voice. It’s a fairly long article, but the real world examples/case studies of how community can be beneficial to an organisation.

I have a whole chunk of Twitter-related posts generated over the last year, (including a small Twitter 101 segment) feel free to check them out!

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