Thanks to Dorothy for live-blogging at Social Media Breakfast | Singapore, NTT and Brian for live Twittering and Plurking, and Kevin and Bryan for spreading the word on this side of the globe!
And of course, the rest of the team Claudia, Sherms,Sheylara, Derrick and Dorothy for getting SMB4 up and running. Crazy to think that seven months ago, it was just three people, no, three strangers trying to get SMB1 off the ground, and now we’re a full-fledged team who people believe in enough to volunteer their time to talk at a panel on Saturday morning. Utterly amazing, and it couldn’t be done without all of your support.
Julien Smith gave a mindblowing presentation yesterday on trust agents and social capital. I cannot believe I have never heard of him before because his stuff is nothing short of awesome.
It got me thinking back to my “Blogs worth reading” feature that ran for a few months but has fizzled out recently. There are a few reasons for this. One was that I was getting very busy in summer with freelance work and just had no time to explore blogs the way I used to, the second is that my Google Reader was already getting overloaded, and thirdly, was that these blogposts just weren’t generating much interest for my blog, traffic-wise.
But Julien’s talk reminded me that sharing these links is creating value and social capital. It’s not about me and my traffic. It’s about sharing these resources to people who might not discover them otherwise, and the value that they bring. Even if that’s just to one person.
Stuff surrounding Social Media Breakfast | Singapore and certain events have affected my love for the local social media space over the last few months, but this really made me think back to why I started the blog, why we were helping each other on Twitter, why we went out on a whim and started Social Media Breakfast | Singapore with nothing but faith that it would work out.
And it was captured in one comment yesterday: Because that’s the kind of world I want to live in.
I hope you’ll think back and remember why you got into this space to begin with, and if where you are now is a far cry from that beginning. If it is, why did that happen, and is that something you want to continue to happen? If it isn’t, what changed?
I’m attending Podcamp Montreal this weekend and so far it’s been awesome. I’ve met Mitch Joel and CC Chapman so far and hopefully many more soon to come.
Halfway through Mitch’s presentation I started wondering at the lack of college people at these events. Social Media Breakfast | Singapore may be an anomaly because it’s primarily youth-initiated, but generally, where’s Gen Y?
I noticed quite a few “business” questions today. Like how can my organisation use this, or how would this make sense for my message. People in organisations (read: our bosses) are trying to figure this stuff out, so why aren’t we? Are we safe in the delusion that learning about the 4Ps is going to get us by in the workplace? I was back in a marketing class after not taking one for a year, and it struck me how the stuff being taught is simply not relevant to my (read: Gen Y’s) world anymore.
Getting to the point, we have all these conferences back home that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend. Why don’t we have one by us students for students? And I’m not talking about people like me talking just about social media. Maybe it’s someone in a local band talking about how his blog is attracting new fans, maybe it’s someone with a fashion site talking about expanding her presence via Facebook. Sort of like the way we talked about wellness, food, photography, haikus and social media in our audio discussion.
So for the people in school going out to get a job soon. Or thinking of switching a different job because your finance job doesn’t look as glittery as it did a week ago, what do you think? Do you need social media in your job? Would you attend small gatherings to improve on them and share? Or do you think you can learn it all at work? Feedback please!
Here’s the thing for everyone who wants to partner with us for any Social Media Breakfast | Singapore: Go pick up Join The Conversation by Joseph Jaffe (my review here), and understand the idea of community, dialogue and partnership, and then we’ll talk.
We are not a business. Your venue is not the be all and end all. We don’t need to impress anyone with our venue. When you bring up money or revenue, you demonstrate that you don’t understand partnership.
You demonstrate that you are no different from any other business that wants to broadcast your message in a one way communication method.
You demonstrate an extremely myopic view on the short term, instead of an investment in the future.
You demonstrate that you don’t understand the importance of relationships in the new world.
You demonstrate that you want to be involved in this new space, but you bring the old mentality with it. And the Web 2.0 crowd sees through that.
Maybe this post will dissuade people from offering to “sponsor” future breakfasts, in all honesty, I hope it does. Companies who read this and still feel there is value to be reaped by partnership and don’t dictate terms, will be exactly the type of companies we want to partner with.
At this rate, the next Social Media Breakfast | Singapore will be a picnic with sandwiches. And you know what? I have a feeling that may benefit the community even more.
Sheylara and I were just talking about Social Media Breakfast: Singapore 3 and talking the pros and cons of expanding the team, one of the cons being politics, especially in Singapore’s blogosphere, where overnight, friends can become enemies and form opposite posses.
I got emailed by someone anonymously (the person went through the trouble of creating an email account just to send me this email), showing me the contents of a private Plurk between some people with fairly malicious content about me, my blog, Social Media Breakfast and my professional life.
I only know one person personally from that private Plurk, so I messaged the person on Facebook asking what was going on. It’s seemingly turned out to be a misunderstanding and I take it as it’s sorted out, but I don’t understand how people can have so much malicious intent inside them, especially towards someone they don’t even know personally.
One of the issues behind the misunderstanding was that the person thought there was a “blacklist” for SMB3. Firstly, I’d like to tell everyone that there isn’t. SMB isn’t my “event”. It’s a team effort between Sheylara, Claudia, Derrick and myself.
Secondly, SMB is an open event, we would never stop anyone from attending. It’s for the community! We have never ever discussed who should attend and who shouldn’t. It’s open to all.
Thirdly, I don’t necessarily like every single blogger I meet, but that doesn’t mean someone else won’t like him or her, or someone else won’t get some value from him/her. That decision isn’t mine to make. An event like SMB is held so that everyone and anyone can attend, and each person can decide who to mingle with and keep in contact with from there.
I have two big issues with this particular quirk of the local blogosphere:
1) You don’t know who to trust
I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t enjoy going to events like Social Media Breakfast and blogger outreach programmes and having to wonder who’s genuinely shaking my hand and saying hi, and who’s doing it with the figurative dagger behind their back. How do you know the next person you reach out to for help online isn’t going to take the opportunity to demolish you instead?
I think people have had their differences in the blogosphere (myself included). Some have solved it like adults, some haven’t. But regardless, I would like to think we can disagree and/or dislike each other, but we don’t have to let it devolve into outright hate do we?
2) It hurts credibility
Between this kind of behavior and that of our dear local female bloggers, is it any wonder companies are so hesitant to enter the local blogosphere? Can we as social media evangelists truly recommend a social media strategy in the best interests of their clients, knowing full well today’s “influential” blogger is tomorrow’s public antagonist number one?
I’ve two follow up posts to this (which I haven’t gotten down to writing yet):
1) How does this lesson translate to businesses involved or looking to get involved in the social media space?
2) Knowing how the local blogosphere is, how do organisations decide who to associate themselves with?
Keep checking back or subscribe to follow the posts.
We’ve finally settled most of the details about SMB:S3 and the day is going to go something like this:
1000 - 1045: Arrivals & Introductions
1045 - 1130: Discussion topic: Blogger outreach programmes are catching on in Singapore. What does this mean for the company? For bloggers? For audiences?
1130 - 1300: Brunch & free roam of the museum.
Everything you see above is voluntary. If you just want to come for the discussion that’s fine, if you just want to come for brunch and networking and mingling that’s fine too. We’re really experimenting with the format this time round, so let us know if you have suggestions and/or comments. Do note that while there is a central discussion theme, by no means are conversations meant to be restricted around them.
For people coming for the first time, it would be really good if you could come for the introduction session, which would probably make the less of the day go by much more smoothly. Don’t worry, we’re a friendly bunch =)
If you haven’t yet signed up for it, the Facebook event page can be found here.
Derrick and Sheylara have things to attend to and so they won’t be around, so it’ll really be me and Claudia holding the fort this weekend. Approach us if you need to!
1) Does aspirational advertising work?
We know what this is, they teach this in school. Subject A uses product X for benefit Y, so you can be like subject A too. Smart, sexy, whatever. Does it work? Reading through the comments it would seem that the association of Eva Longoria with being sexy and stuff works although at the same time it’s mentioned that surely we can’t believe that eating multiple Magnums gets you her figure. So what gives?
2) How much of it is celebrity endorsement?
This comes up because the comparisons between the Magnum ad, and Utt and the Brands ad came up. In a sense it’s a fair comparison. The Brands ad is everywhere and Utt is fairly popular, but does Eva have more “celebrity pull” than Utt does? Or maybe it’s just easier to reach out and buy a $2 ice cream? Or maybe again this has to do with textbook marketing: get someone “in line” with the brand so that it works.
3) Would non-traditional advertising have worked?
More specifically, would social media have worked? A plurk dialogue page? A blog? A platform for Magnum lovers to share their experiences? An “ideastorm” like page for people to suggest flavours? Or for a product like Magnum, was the best way to really throw themselves out there with traditional means?
I’m not actually trying to make a point here. Just further points that have hit me since posting and reading the great, great comments that have come in that have further inspired me to think about the issue further. Do you have more?
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!
Well LiveCrunch was asking for some of them badges and was referred to Blankanvas. This is what followed. (click for the full screenshot)
So I headed over to LiveCrunch and posted a comment basically asking what gives. Now LiveCrunch moderates its comments, and used that moderation ability to basically not allow my comment to get through and hide this ugly behavior from the rest of the world.
How do I know? Because when I checked my site stats tonight, I saw one referrer:
So I infer from this that LiveCrunch saw my comment, went to the “edit comment” page on Wordpress, and then did not approve it. I think this is really bad practice. Moderation is not meant to keep negative comments out. I moderate mine to prevent crazy stuff from appearing, but people are free to disagree with me if they wish or call me out on certain statements, and they do.
Well, since LiveCrunch won’t reply to comments, I’d like to ask everyone who reads this to drop him a Tweet at @Livecrunch or Plurk him at http://www.plurk.com/user/LiveCrunch, ask him why he literally stole Pat’s creation and did not credit her, and then did not own up to the fact afterwards openly on his blog via the comments. The online community should speak up. What trust (or lack of) does this foster among our designers who are happy to create things for others for free, and don’t even get some credit in return? Especially when it’s explicitly offered?
As for me, I have two words for LiveCrunch with the very same Plurk badge that PatLaw made:
It was really nice to see yesterday that of the 10 most popular posts on ping.sg, three were about SMB:S2, even though it was three days after the event!
As always, I think it’s great to have a central “collection” point for all the media generated around the event, so here’s the rundown:
Video: Social Media Breakfast 2.0 by Miccheng (ps another video on Geek Goddess TV should be out June 4th!)
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 
