Thursday, May 7th, 2009
I was listening to Jaffe Juice #127 a couple of days ago, and it was an episode featuring Mitch Joel from Six Pixels of Separation, two of my favourite podcasters for the “price” of one!
Amidst the many things they talked about, what really caught my attention was how they’re both doing new things. Mitch with his book and Joseph with Jaffe Juice TV. And it really got me thinking about one point:
1) If you don’t experiment you’ll never know, and if you never know, you shouldn’t be in a position to talk about it
Joseph mentions that a prerequisite to work at Crayon (his agency) is that you have to blog. And awhile back , Pat Law asked “if you ran an agency, I would…” and my response was hire people who blog. I just think you really need to know about the medium before being able to advise anyone on what they’re doing.
And sometimes the point of experimenting is just to give it a go and figure out whether it’s an avenue you want to go ahead with or not. With The GennY Podcast, we don’t even have metrics or anything, but I think just us getting together and bouncing around ideas really at least gives us an understanding of what podcasting is, and if it would make sense to bring it to work, school, whatever.
Right now, giving that organisations and companies are so far behind the social media curve, it’s the best time to start “dabbling” in it, maybe just a few hours a week, because that’s the only way you’ll know what works and what doesn’t. Just because something has been working for the last five years, doesn’t mean it’ll continue to work as well as it has been for the next five.
I guess the same lesson goes to all the people jumping on the Twitter bandwagon and just using it as a broadcast medium. Because they never tried and experimented with it in the beginning, they’re late, catching up, and as a result, using it wrongly and plain wasting resources.
Tags: agency, crayon, dabbling in social media, genny, genny podcast, jaffe juice, jaffe juice tv, mitch joel, pat law, podcasters, Podcasts, six pixels of separation, twist image, twitter, twitter bandwagon, wasting resources
Posted in social media | No Comments »
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
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)
Tags: blogging maturely, blogging niches, blogging takes patience, jaffe juice, magic beans, magic beanstalks, podcast, raffles place mrt, sheylara, social media breakfast singapore, xbox xpert
Posted in Blogs, Media, Podcasts, Singapore, collaboration, community, social media, social media breakfast | 6 Comments »
Monday, June 16th, 2008
I had a very belated listen to Joseph Jaffe’s Jaffe Juice #109 last night while crowding around with a million other people at the PC Show in Singapore, and was moved by the social media miracle experienced by Keith Burtis, who was auctioning his wood turning artwork to the online community to get an engagement ring for his girlfriend.
It really got me thinking about the generosity of people I’ve met thus far in my social media journey. Within the first couple of months of jumping into social media, Sheylara drops an email volunteering her help for SMB, Caleb volunteers to sponsor SMB while absolutely getting nothing out of it, Tania of The Open Room helps me score an additional two tix to Marie Digby even though the initial tickets she had were gone, Sherms designs a SMB logo which took time and effort which frankly, she could’ve put into something that would actually make her some money.
And those are just the tangible ones, not including the help I’ve gotten when trying to find a place to stay in Canada or looking for specific case studies or news, and I am sure that I am forgetting a few more instances and I apologise for that!
There is something about people engaged in this space. A natural desire for community and exchange and sharing, even if the person giving doesn’t get anything out of it. Sure, there are people who I would call shit-stirrers within any community, but so far, it seems like they’re the minority.
What are your experiences with giving/sharing in the social media space? Is there anything I could help you with? Just ask and if possible, I’ll definitely help!
Tags: community giving, community sharing, jaffe juice, joseph jaffe, keith burtis, pc show singapore suntec city, sheylara, social media miracle, the open room
Posted in Blogs, Singapore, collaboration, community, social media | 8 Comments »
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
The biggest compliment I can give to Joseph Jaffe’s new book, Join The Conversation (currently #37 on Amazon’s business books list), is that I took so long to finish it despite receiving it in late February as part of the UNM2PNM initiative. I whiz through fiction fairly quickly, but when it comes to non-fiction, specifically marketing, communication or social media specific, I need to read the book with an open notebook and pen next to me so I can take notes and review them later. Obviously, this means more time because doing that on a bus can be a hassle, so many hours of camping at Starbucks and Borders later, I’ve finally finished the book and what can I say, it it any surprise I love it?
The first thing I need to tell you, is that if you’re already well immersed in this social media fishbowl, then as Joseph has said many times on the Jaffe Juice podcast, this book isn’t really meant for you. It’s less of a “how to” book and more of a “why you should” book, which you should probably pass on to your manager or CEO to read, and get more buy in for your social media experiments.
What I really enjoyed were all the case studies. I’m almost embarrassed to mention that I didn’t recognise most of them. I’ve realised more and more that case studies are important when trying to sell your social media idea. Showing the best examples of initiatives that worked, and the worst examples of ignoring the consumer (the latest comes from Joseph Jaffe himself with Delta Airlines), can work wonders in getting execs stuck in their prehistoric ways to wake up.
If you’re currently struggling with implementing a social media experiment, or even thinking about it, give the book a read. Learn from some successes and failures and do better! If you don’t have the time to read it, try tuning in to Jaffe Juice (the podcast). I’d recommend starting with #105 which is a nice roundtable discussion with executives from different companies talking about their initiatives and the results, or check out the Join The Conversation blog
Tags: book review, case studies, jaffe juice, jaffe juice podcast, join the conversation, joseph jaffe, social media experiment, unm2pnm
Posted in Books | 7 Comments »
Friday, April 11th, 2008
This is late so I’m going to jump straight into it. My choice for the March podcast of the month goes to Six Pixels of Separation for the interview with Seth Godin in #93. I also listened to #94 – #97, and #97 is the episode where Mitch talks about Social Media Breakfast: Singapore, so you might want to check that out as well.
Other podcasts that I really think you should check out:
I really enjoyed listening to CC Chapman on Managing The Gray where he responded to Intellagirl’s challenge on how to get non-social media people into social media, as well as his coverage of SXSW.
With that said I also enjoyed Shill’s thoughts on SXSW coverage happening literally everywhere else, and how that feels from people not at the event. I really felt their point of view because I was one of those people getting bombarded non-stop on Twitter about SXSW. Probably something everyone will have to figure out for the next event.
Joseph Jaffe also weighed in on the SXSW coverage and Intellagirl’s challenge in Jaffe Juice #107 as well as facing outward from the fishbowl. An observation which I think is spot on.
Marketing Over Coffee was also good this month with an episode on what to do with your house list, two parts on the state of search and talking about the power of free.
Two new podcasts I picked up are For Immediate Release which comes out so frequently I can barely keep up but some good, thought provoking content in there, as well as Inside PR, whose discussion on ethics in PR to be very enlightening in #103 and #104
As always I am open to any and all suggestions for new podcasts to listen do. Just drop me a comment! While you’re at it, why not check out the podcast of the month for February and January as well?
Tags: cc chapman, facing inward fishbowl, facing outward fishbowl, fishbowl, for immediate release, great podcasts, house list, inside pr, intellagirl challenge, jaffe juice, joseph jaffe, managing the gray, march podcast of the month, marketing over coffee, marketing podcasts, mitch joel, podcasts worth listening to, power of free, pr ethics, pr podcasts, seth godin, shill, six pixels of separation, social media, social media breakfast singapore, social media podcasts, state of search, sxsw, sxsw coverage, twitter
Posted in Podcasts | 4 Comments »
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
I’ve been sitting on this post for awhile, but was motivated into action by Mitch Joel over at Six Pixels Of Separation on his post regarding Technorati Authority.
Background: Technorati authority is simply a measure of how many other people are linking to you from their blogs. ie If 10 people link Unique-Frequency, my Technorati ranking is higher than if 2 people linked me. (This isn’t a new metric of “importance”, Google’s PageRank uses a similar system)
Thinking about this over the last week or so, I have to respectfully disagree with Mitch on the issue because I don’t think it’s a good indicator of whether a blog is “successful” or not.
The reason? Technorati doesn’t discriminate between links. I could have been scraped by a spam blog, just added by someone’s blogroll or mentioned in Joseph Jaffe’s UNM2PNM new marketing and they all will get picked up equally and add to my authority.
That said, of course it’s nice to have a higher authority, but does that really, tangibly mean anything? For example, Mitch has an authority of 550 on Technorati, but Jaffe has about 685. Should that mean I automatically take Jaffe to be more credible? Certainly I have learned a lot from both bloggers and would not say they should be almost 150 points apart.
Conversely, the JaffeJuice group on Facebook has 626 members while the Six Pixels Society more than doubles it at 1325 members. Does that mean anything?
Both are instances where bloggers or Facebook users have a choice whether to link or to join the groups. Some choose to, some don’t.
Here’s what I feel is the inherent flaw: You have to own a blog or be on Facebook to add to the Technorati authority or to the Facebook group’s numbers. But the number of people who are actual content creators (ie bloggers) is somewhere in the region of 13% according to a study shown in social media class. In other words, the other 87% are by default, excluded.
Now I’m not saying this is a bad metric. Obviously I love it when my authority goes up (I’m at 13). But I also know that while I have certain nice mentions by people like Louis Gray in an actual conversation, it also contains spam blog links and links on people’s blogroll, whether or not they read my blog. This difference makes me take the Technorati authority with a pinch of salt.
The system isn’t perfect, but then perhaps no system is. But personally, until this tension between discriminatory and non-discriminatory links are reconciled, I’m hesitant to place a strong emphasis on Technorati authority.
Tags: blog rankings, facebook, google pagerank, jaffe juice, joseph jaffe, louis gray, mitch joel, six pixels of separation, technorati authority
Posted in Blogs, social media | 2 Comments »
Monday, February 18th, 2008
Admittedly I didn’t listen to many podcasts in January, but I’m still going to do this for the month, and there are a few conditions:
- I must have listened to the podcast in January (regardless of when it was actually released)
- The selected podcast can be the most entertaining/informative/educational. Anything goes.
So the winner for last month goes to Jaffe Juice #101 for an excellent Winners and Losers segment covering the whole Scrabulous fiasco by Scrabble and Mattel, as well as Target’s blatant disrespect to the blogging community. On top of that, it was this episode that motivated me to take part in Joseph’s UNM2PNM (Use New Marketing To Prove New Marketing) initiative, where he sends me a copy of his latest book, Join The Conversation, and I provide him a review in return. Sounds fantastic? It is.
Other notable mentions this month:
There’ll be much more nominees for February (I’ve already listened to about 10 podcasts so far), so keep reading for that, or if you’re feeling nice, why not subscribe to my RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss it?
If you agree or disagree with my choice, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below, and alternatively, if you have a podcast you’d like to recommend me to listen to, leave me a comment as well.
Tags: across the sound, comic pants, hasbro, jaffe juice, january podcasts, join the conversation, joseph jaffe, mattel, mitch joel, podcast of the month, Podcasts, randy lander, scrabulous, six pixels of separation, target, twist image, unm2pnm
Posted in Podcasts | 4 Comments »
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Yahoo! laid off some workers earlier this week and one employee gave a step-by-step account of his ordeal via Twitter. Some of his posts:
Y! layoffs today, I’m “impacted”. I’m heading into work to pack my desk, get my severance paperwork and hand in my badge…more to come. about 10 hours ago
On the plus side, my commute just got a lot shorter. about 10 hours ago.
Walking around saying good bye to some great people and good friends. about 9 hours ago
Waiting for the call from HR so I can go pick up my paperwork….C’mon, c’mon! I’m busy here! Let’s get this over with. about 8 hours ago
Thanks to everyone sending the positive tweets. I’ve got plenty of free time now so just let me know if you want to meet up for lunch. about 8 hours ago
I first read about the whole story over at Jaffe Juice, head over there to read the rest of the tweets.
While undoubtedly it’s a sad instance in which Twitter was used, I can’t help but wonder if this really does help portray how useful Twitter can be in certain settings. What would we have heard if a someone two buildings away from the Twin Towers was on Twitter on 9/11? There’s still decent amount of debate online whether or not Twitter is useful. I’d love to hear what you think. Largely useful? Somewhat useful? Not useful? Don’t know? Give me a shout.
On the upside, I noticed that my Twitter 201 coverage got almost double the views than of the Twitter100 series. I really hope that that’s benefited you and helped you use Twitter a little better. New articles on Twitter are coming up literally every half a day, but I’m going to move on from covering those stories unless it’s something original that I come up with. If you want to follow me on Twitter, my username is uniquefrequency.
I’ve been playing around with both AssetBar and LinkRiver for about two hours today and I’m beginning to get a pretty good feel of them. I’ll probably be directing some attention to them this week.
Both creators were kind enough to post responses to my posts on them, and I really think you should check them out. They’re both not as fun without people on them, because they’re meant to be social! So far I only have Louisgray for company. If you do sign up, add me as a friend: uniquefrequency
Tags: assetbar, jaffe juice, joseph jaffe, linkriver, louisgray, twitter, twitter 101, twitter 201, yahoo firing, yahoo layoffs
Posted in social media, twitter | 4 Comments »
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008
Jaffe Juice #102 was released with perfect timing, on a day that I had lots of driving around to do. The beginning, a Scrabulous introduction is hilarious and well worth listening to, though of course, not the only thing you should listen to.
Early in the podcast, there’s a conversation about whether you would prefer 10 good relationships or 5 million impressions. Just one person in a room full of professionals voted for 10 good relationships. Perhaps some reason can be attributed to the fact that the numbers really are very far apart, and I suppose even for someone who wants to go down the relationship path, it might be hard explaining why you’d want to spend so much money on 10 relationships vs 5 million impressions, especially to a boss who’s well stuck in old marketing.
That said, I’m actually pretty curious about what number it would have to be before people start agreeing with 10 relationships. 3 million? 1 million? I was thinking to myself the other day that I wish I had done my Advertising module later, because I know so much more about new media and new marketing now than I did 4 months ago, and I have no doubt the new ways can be equally if not more effective. However, I’m reminded that unfortunately, the client and to some extent the professor, still graded very much on old marketing, which is sad.
What could be a worse situation than having the knowledge of how to make things better, but have people around you who don’t realise or recognise it?
Tags: advertising, impressions, jaffe juice, Marketing, new marketing, new media, old marketing, Podcasts, relationships, scrabulous, social media
Posted in Marketing, Podcasts, social media | 5 Comments »
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
I’ve been suspecting that Facebook’s been seeing a decline in activity for sometime. Just about half a year ago, the ‘home’ section with updates from my friends would be flooded hourly. Now I can login after 8 hours, and find that almost nothing has changed.
Suspicions have been confirmed with this article from ReadWriteWeb (once again picked up by Readburner, have I convinced you of its usefulness yet?), which says
There are now 15,422 apps on the Facebook platform — how many of them are truly useful? Anecdotal evidence would suggest that the novelty has worn off and users are finally starting to demand more of the applications they install.
The article also has statistics about the number of Facebook app users at their peak, and now:
|
Peak |
Today |
| Funwall |
5800 |
2500 |
| Superwall |
4800 |
1800 |
| Top Friends |
2900 |
2200 |
| Likeness |
821 |
181 |
| Super poke |
1500 |
500 |
| Movies |
814 |
500 |
| Compare People |
1000 |
471 |
| iLike |
941 |
372 |
| Causes |
469 |
110 |
| Superlatives |
320 |
110 |
| |
All figures in 1,000s |
There have been criticisms of Facebook in recent weeks: Marketing Pilgrim discusses a partnership between Facebook and the Wall Street Journal signalling desperation from either/both parties, and Jaffe Juice #101 has a comment on how disappointing it is that Facebook is not engaging the new media enough moving forward.
Applications are seriously beginning to rub some people the wrong way, and Facebook isn’t exactly providing the innovation that people want, but I don’t think that’s making people tired of Facebook, or making them want to jump aboard the next new platform when it occurs.
Personally I think even with most apps stripped away, the Facebook interface is still superior to Friendster (for sure), and at least for network externality reasons, more popular here than MySpace. There are statistics to prove that MySpace is still dominant, but given that it never really caught on in Singapore, it’s not that relevant.
It would be great to hear what people here think, and maybe get a general idea of how the social networking scene is like in Singapore, and then publish some thoughts on that. My guess on where it’s going is the more frivolous applications (Grow a plant, hatch an egg?) will slowly die off, and the real social applications like iLike and Feedheads will gain popularity, as users begin to realise that Facebook can and should act not just as a Friendster clone, but a place to share information and interests in one central space.
Tags: applications, facebook, facebook applications, facebook fatigue, feedheads, friendster, ilike, jaffe juice, marketing pilgrim, myspace, readburner, readwriteweb, Singapore, social media, social networking
Posted in Singapore, Social Networks, social media | 7 Comments »
