Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
Hope you enjoyed yesterday’s rare political edition of Links For The Week, it’s back to the regular stuff.
Tribes
- There was an allusion to “Tribes” a couple of times in yesterday’s post, listen to Seth Godin talk about it for more than an hour in this special edition of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. It took me a long time to finish it because my daily commute is five minutes, but so worth it.
Generation Y, Digital Natives & Millennials
- Workplace 2.0: Motivating and Managing Millennials - Very short (12 pages total, about 8 pages of content) PDF file on managing millennials (aka: us). It doesn’t actually give much of a “how to”, but it does lead you to understanding us more. I must say he is right on about fervour, hard work and tireless labour. I’d work overtime, for free, for a job that’s rewarding in an industry I’m passionate about.
- Digital Natives are here by Mitch Joel - Again, great post to help the people in management understand the digital natives. I feel a lot of people still aren’t ready to accept that our generation is a little bit different and that being constantly connected is more of an empowerment than a distraction. But those organisations who do grasp that, are going to be able to channel us much more efficiently.
Social Media Strategy
- The Strategist and Social Media by Kami Huyse - Great slides in there that you should read if you’re beginning to think of a social media strategy, especially points about risks of social media engagement, and the Sea World case study.
Plurk
Google Reader
Music & Social Media
- MTV to MySpace: Post Our Content, Please - you might remember in my review of the book/rant Cult Of The Amateur by Andrew Keen that he called Viacom (parent company of MTV) suing YouTube a “powerful message”. I say the partnership between MTV and MySpace is a) a more powerful message b) a sign that at least one player in the industry waking up to reality.
As always, share your links with me in the comments, or you can find me on delicious.
Tags: andrew keen, apple, beth harte, cult of the amateur, delicious, digital natives, generation y, google reader, itunes sucks, kami huyse, links for the week, marketing over coffee, millennials, mitch joel, mtv, myspace, obama, Plurk, read it later, risks of social media engagement, sea world, seth godin, social media strategy, tribes, viacom, youtube
Posted in Links | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
I’m writing this with Singapore in mind, but I think it could work anywhere.
Rubin and I had a discussion tonight about bands in Singapore, whether they’re talented or not, whether they could make money or not, etc etc. Towards the end of the night I needed to blog and turned to him for inspiration and he said “write about the local music scene”. Brilliant.
So here’s social media for the local music scene.
1) Get repeat plays.
One of the podcasts I listen to mentioned recently that in the music industry, frequency is your currency. So you get people to play it as many times as you can. Give it away free to everyone on MySpace, give it free to the polytechnic radio stations, give it free to the university Campus Radio stations. It doesn’t matter if you’re making money out of it at this stage, just give it free.
I can’t say how many times I haven’t liked a song on first listen, but it grows on me after three or more listens. I’m sure it’s the same for many other people.
2) Pimp yourself.
In a lot of ways, the local music scene is like the local blogosphere. There’s a lot of crap in there, but there are gems too. So how do you get people to notice you? Make yourself searchable. That means pimping up your website, going on MySpace, maybe creating a fan page on Facebook, whatever works. When someone hears your band name and goes home to search for you, you’d better turn up on page one of Google.
Case in point: Origami. I think that’s how it’s spelled because I was only walking past, but I liked their rendition of Kelly Clarkson’s Miss Independent, so much so I wanted to get in contact with them and offer to try to get their track on Campus Radio. So I come home, Google Origami and zilch. How do I help you get your music out there when I can’t find you? Do yourself a favour. If your band name is called Hystericks Stickz, change your name to something Google-able. That advice is free.
3) Get help.
No, don’t get someone to buy you a $30k ad on national radio. There are free (or at least cheap) ways to go about doing it. There are many, many polytechnic or university students out there who would probably be willing to help put your name out there or build you a blog, or pass your cd on to three friends. What could you offer them in return? Well that’s up to you. But remember: your most loyal customers are also your best.
Finally, a disclaimer: All this only works if your music doesn’t suck. As with everything else, content is king. If the content you’re producing sounds like screeching and/or cawing, no amount of publicity is going to help you.
So, now that you know all that. You want a social media/digital strategist to help your band out? Start a conversation with me. Here, Plurk, Twitter, Facebook, whatever works for you.
Tags: blogosphere, campus radio singapore, facebook, Google, myspace, origami, pimp yourself, Plurk, self-publicity, singapore local music, singapore's local music scent, smu campus radio, twitter
Posted in Google, Search, Singapore, Social Networks, collaboration, community, mainstream media, social media, twitter | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Geek SG has an article referencing the Top 100 sites in Singapore, and the list is pretty interesting.
Yahoo comes in at #1 with Google at #8 (any relation to poor people using yahoo vs rich people using Google?)
Friendster at #2 while Facebook is at #8, Myspace is at #32 - My theory (based on personal observations) is that largely, Singaporeans are still early to late majority. I joined up with Friendster in 2003, Myspace shortly after that, and Facebook in 2006 (yes, when there was no one on it). I observed the exact same trends in the 2 years I was on Facebook as I did Friendster: At first, they’re just the people who’re trying out new things and a pretty normal. After awhile as network externalities kick in, more and more people start joining, including those who don’t use English as a first language. (not discriminating, just stating facts). Locally we might classify them as bengs and lians - I don’t even know how to classify that for the non-Singaporeans reading this blog. And now Friendster is almost completely run by them, while the early adopters have moved to Facebook, but the rest are slowly catching up.
This also accounts for Myspace being at #32. The rest of Singapore simply missed out on the trend - MySpace came and went in the time early adopters moved from Friendster to Myspace to Facebook, so the rest of the majority just makes the transition from Friendster to Facebook.
YouPorn comes in at #25, Sammyboy at #31 and Megaerotic at #35 (what do you think of that, government?)
Mininova and Rapidshare are in at #38 and #39 respectively (now we know where all that bandwidth is going) and beat this, NUS is at #22, NTU is at #40 and SMU is nowhere to be seen.
Quite a few sites I don’t recognise so I won’t comment, but I’d encourage you to check out the link and comment here on what surprised you, what didn’t surprise you, and any explanations if you have them.
All I can say is I’m glad Xiaxue isn’t on the list. That would be a kicker.
Tags: bengs and lians, early adopters, early majority, friendster and facebook, geek sg, late majority, myspace, network externalities, poor yahoo rich google, top 100 webpages in singapore, yahoo and google
Posted in SMU, Singapore | 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 »
