Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

My Brazen Experience

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

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!

Tags: brazen careerist, communicating with members, community manager, corvida raven, dan healy, establish community culture, Gen Y, google reader, meg roberts, personalised invitations, recognizing positive contribution, rss, ryan paugh

Posted in Gen Y, case studies, community | 1 Comment »

Blogs Worth Reading: May

Monday, June 9th, 2008

I’m beginning to feel the load of reading a lot of blogs right now, so every month when I subscribe to new blogs, I put them on a “probation” list, look at them at the end of the month and then decide which are worth keeping. Here are those that I’ve added to my Google Reader permanently this month, as well as one post I loved recently that I would like to share with you.

1) Colin Walker

• A brand is a promise – What’s yours?

2) Deirdre Breakenridge – PR 2.0 Strategies

• The Twitter addiction – Something I could identify with (back when Twitter was up)

3) Hutch Carpenter – I’m not actually a geek

• Do companies need social media managers? – Frequent topic of discussion in the blogosphere, I like Hutch’s take on it more than most.

4) Jason Falls – Social Media Explorer

• Bloggers misunderstand PR and vice versa – Not a big deal in Asia yet (probably because the PR firms are slow in catching on), but an interesting insight to both sides of the coin.

5) Jonathan Wong – Armchair Theorist

• Top 10 tagging best practices for anything web 2.0 – A great post on tagging guidelines. Interesting enough that I had to clarify a couple of points, but I came away learning something new.

6) Corvida – Shegeeks

• What college students can’t get from blogging – A nice contrarian view from someone who’s also gotten an internship from blogging, but a good reality wake up call for students who may think blogging is the solution to everything.

7) Pat Law – Blankanvas

• The holy trinity of blogging – So much comes out of this site that I don’t follow it all, but those that I do, are good. Like this post. Or free Plurk badges.

8 ) Meg Roberts – PR Interactive

• Building brand you – I try to read as many PR students/fresh grads as possible, Meg is one of them I really like. And she watches Lost!

9) Sherms – Design is ________

• Social Media Breakfast logo V1 – Great, great design work by one of my oldest friends.

10) Ellie – The PinkC

• Geek Girls software pack – The introduction of MediaMonkey into my life. Heaven.

11) Julian Baldwin – Notes, thoughts, ideas and responses

• What college students can get from blogging – A nice contrast to Corvida’s post.

That’s it for May, if you have new blogs to recommend, feel free to plug it in the comment box. Let me know if you liked these recommendations as well.

Tags: armchair theorist, blankanvas, blogs worth reading, colin walker, deirdre breakenridge, google reader, hutch carpenter, jason falls, julian baldwin, meg roberts, patlaw, shegeeks, sherms, the pinkc

Posted in Blogs | 13 Comments »