The speaker list for Podcamp Singapore is finally out so I can plug them in full!
Podcamp Singapore is happening this weekend on the 1st of November 2008 at SMU. And the speakers so far are:
- Melvin Yuan, Director of Digital Strategies Group, Asia, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. (Also aka my ex-boss)
-Walter Lim, Acting Director, Corporate Communications & Industry Promotion Division of National Heritage Board. (Also aka great partner with Social Media Breakfast | Singapore)
- Allison Lim & Charlie Pownall from Burson Marsteller
If you’ve been involved in the social media scene, why don’t you consider speaking at a session as well? There are so many of you who have been involved with Social Media Breakfast | Singapore, I’m hoping you guys can volunteer to share your views too! I wish I could attend Podcamp Singapore. It would be a great opportunity to test drive a few presentation ideas I’ve been thinking of..
To register, head on to the Podcamp Singapore Wiki, you can also follow their progress on their blog, or follow them on Twitter. I didn’t get a reply what the hashtag is for the event, someone attending please let me know so I can follow the action from over here!
Should bloggers be rewarded? Payment isn’t the only way… free schwag? Review units to keep? What do you consider ethical and what do you not?
Do famous bloggers deserve star treatment, and star rewards? People argue that objectivity is lost with payment, but should companies leave the option open for bloggers who wish to go down that path?
If you pay a blogger to do an advertorial blog post, does anyone read advertorials anymore? Do they think its a waste of time, a sign of selling out and a turn off?
I’m going to speak generally and say that most people who took part in the conversation are concerned about objectivity being an issue when money comes into play, and rightfully so. Cullen puts it very well:
For me, I think the bottom line is when money starts to trump honesty then the money’s influence is unacceptable.
My personal point of view is that compensating bloggers is fine. I don’t necessarily like the idea of money changing hands, but I think freebies or trial copies with the option to purchase at a discounted price are okay. After all, bloggers are spending their precious time and effort (not to mention valuable blog real estate) to talk about you. There is opportunity cost involved!
I also feel the problem is the “expectation” that reviews should be good. No one has come out straight to say it, but inherently, if you get a review, it shouldn’t be saying bad things. That’s why ad-pull became an issue with magazines. Company X would pay for a couple of pages of ads, but the writers of the magazine might criticise them over something in another section of the magazine, and next month Company X takes their advertising elsewhere.
I think this has a mindset that has to be fixed, especially when it comes to bloggers. When you get involved with them (regardless of whether anything changes hands), it is a partnership. One where you (the company) takes the good and the bad. And if partnering with a blogger means getting feedback on what’s not fantastic with your product, it’s an opportunity to improve it, rather than an excuse to switch to another blogger who only says good things about you.
The discussion is far from over, there’s much more that can be said about compensating bloggers, it might be a great time for you to head over to the forum and chime in!
In the meantime, thanks Farinelli, Daniel, Brian, Hillary, Cullen, Claudia, Relax and Nicholas for really bringing some momentum to the topic! Looking forward to much more.
In re-reading my earlier post, and certainly from some of the comments, I realise some parts of it may be sending the wrong message, so I’ll use this post to clarify some points.
1) Agendas are fine
I don’t have anything against practitioners coming with a set goal in mind. In fact, if you’re waking up at an unearthly hour to attend SMB on a Saturday morning without an agenda, you’re better off staying at home and sleeping two more hours. Go to network, to “seed” your ideas, ask people what they think about your brand, meet other people in the field and find out their obstacles, figure out which blogger you want to invite to your next event, whatever.
Hedirman asked me what I would do if I were on the other side of the fence, a company figuring out what to do and attending SMB. My response:
If I were a company trying to get my way into the scene, I think there’s no other way than to just jump head in. Definitely research. I wouldn’t just come to SMB and “observe”. I’d want to know who’s going, what they blog about, who’s relevant to my vertical, who should be a top priority to introduce myself to, so on so forth. Then I’d want to go back to the office and tell my boss “I’ve met x number of bloggers, their audiences read them because of y, I think we should do something.” I mean otherwise, I think Saturday mornings can be better spent sleeping in!
2) Sleazy corporate agendas are not
Note earlier I said “ask people what they think about your brand”, not “tell people about your brand”. There’s a difference, and most of the people who are reasonably familiar with the space will be able to tell the difference. If you want to give a spiel, save it for the proper circumstance. If you’re a new startup and someone asks you to tell them more, that’s a different story.
3) Don’t come thinking 2.5hrs at an event makes you part of the community.
This really irks me. If you really want to be involved, be involved. Meeting 20 people in the span of an afternoon and getting their namecards or a Facebook Group address, doesn’t mean you’re entitled to spam people. It’s about making connections and relationships of quality, not quantity.
4) Don’t come thinking a $500 food sponsorship is your “buy in” into the community
I’m not going to dwell on this, but I know how this works. A $500 sponsorship sounds excellent to get yourself the names, email addresses, blog addresses, twitter and plurk accounts of some of the top influencers in Singapore. Sorry, no. You want to build a houselist, go be a gold/platinum/whatever sponsor at one of the trade shows and spam everyone there.
5) How long are you going to let “new” be an excuse?
As Dorothy puts it, how long are you going to be a “curious spectator”? It’s true, you can’t jump in and be familiar with everything at once, but it doesn’t take years and it isn’t rocket science. Jump in and get your feet wet, or get out of the pool.
6) SMB shouldn’t be your only outlet
And this was the point I was principally attempting to drive across. I would like to see more corporate-led initiatives for sharing/collaboration. Something along the lines of Verge or Web Wednesdays or Third Tuesdays.
When you think about it, SMB was started by a student, a model/actress and someone who wasn’t even in the army or legal to drink at the time. Not by the people supposedly “working” in the space.
What I’m saying here is I find it a little bit strange, bordering on outrageous, that the corporates/agencies who are supposedly “in the space” are relying on an initiative driven principally by people not in the workforce to get together. Even Podcamp Singapore is driven primarily by the academic field.
It’s like if we were scientists, we’d be waiting for kids playing with “my first physics set” to organise something and go for that.
What happens if we sit up in 2009 and decide we’re too busy to continue with SMB? Or it evolves into a “bloggers only” event? Social media in Singapore crawls back to the dark ages?
Put another way, I look at the people I consider my “mentors”, though perhaps not from direct influence, the Mitch Joels, the CC Chapmans, the Joseph Jaffes, the Christopher Penns, the Brian Solises, the Andy Sernovitzes, and wonder why there are no such people in Singapore. They’re practitioners, we have practitioners. They’re out there building up the space, we’re….. not.
As I’ve been reading the blog posts (and more importantly, comments) about Social Media Breakfast, I’ve come away with two thoughts:
1) We Aren’t Perfect - And That’s A Good Thing
I appreciate feedback from Su Min, Coleman, Brian and everyone else who contributed to let us know the panel wasn’t as balanced as it could have been, that we should’ve added a blogger on it, that we needed more audience interaction, to be conscious of the level of involvement of corporate entities.
It’s great because it prevents us from resting on our laurels. Not that we would, but arguable each SMB has been an improvement on the last, and it would be easy to say “We improved!”, but it’s comments and feedback like this that reminds us that improved we may have, but there’s always room for more.
We always learn from the events, and with your help, improve. From SMB2 we learned we needed structure, from SMB3 we learned structure doesn’t come naturally, so we need to “artificially” introduce it via a panel, now we learn a panel is not the be all and end all, but the execution needs to be worked on. I remember one of the “P”s from Dorothy’s live blogging: perpetual beta. That’s exactly what SMB is and it’s your feedback that helps us improve that beta product.
As we’ve said time and time again, it’s everyone’s not ours.
2) Where Are The Agencies/Companies Taking The Lead?
This is a very cynical view, and you can feel free to disagree with me, but where are these agencies and companies? I may be putting my future career on the line by calling them out, but I think it needs to be said.
Ben Koe has a list of case studies of social media marketing examples in Singapore, and I see some action going on, but nowhere in the proportion to the talk I hear about social media and Web2.0.
I’ve said this before in an audio podcast for For Immediate Release, as reported by Michael Netzley: It’s as if everyone is sitting back and waiting for someone else to jump in first, show results, and then everyone is going to be like a lemming and follow.
There are more than enough corporates attending SMB to plead ignorance anymore. By some attendees accounts, there are too many corporates attending, that it’s affecting the social. There have been suggestions of breaking SMB up to a “corporate” track and “social” track.
You know what? Not going to happen. The agencies and companies out there have hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions in budget, hardware, software, resources, connections, tools, networks, people and skills, to get a similar “corporate” version of this going around. If you don’t want to because you’re afraid that by sharing you’re losing your competitive edge or actually benefiting your competitor, then that’s the landscape we will have to deal with.
And no one benefits with that kind of landscape.
i also commented on Pat Law’s blog that the idea of sharing our “fishbowl” ie attendee list with marketers who would be interested, is not something we would do. The traditional way to get such a houselist is to go sponsor something like a huge IDC event or pay for money at an Ad:Tech booth and get it from there. Maybe some companies are looking at SMB with a lightbulb going off thinking “Hey these are the alpha consumers, the innovators and early adopters, maybe we can cheaply leverage that somehow”.
So that’s my frustration. If attending SMB is your company’s cheap way of doing some “research” into the shiny new object that is social media without actually getting your feet wet, I’m afraid to say you’re not going to get very good results. Sometimes we get someone approaching us with a “partnership” deal, it usually stinks of “let me leverage your network so I can shove my brand in people’s faces”. Sorry, no.
In short, I look at the current social media scene here and it’s driven by organisations like E27, TDM and us. Us being six people, half of which are still in school. Look at the podcamps worldwide and the SMBs worldwide, they’re organised by people who work in agencies, blog, podcast and live the social media life.
Is that the best Singapore and all the “top agencies” can offer? I really want to hear from you, bloggers, entrepreneurs, agency, corporate people alike. Is this a fair critique of what’s going on? Or are there things I’m not seeing? Love to hear it.
I’ve been following up on Social Media Breakfast | Singapore 4 (SMB4) from Canada, and I’m glad that the general sentiment is that everyone had a good time and found the discussion meaningful. I want to just quickly blog about the team and how we evolved to where we are today.
You might remember me mentioning how we literally started out as strangers from SMB1. It was just Derrick posing an idea to me, and Sheylara joining us out of nowhere (neither Derrick and I had any idea who she was at the time. Oh how times have changed).
By the time SMB2 rolled along and with it came our brand new logo, courtesy of our designer Shermeen, the first “unofficial” addition to the “team”.
Claudia came on board with us for SMB3, and as you will know from attending SMB4, has been crucial in getting our website up as well as the forum and really tying together the threads that we missed from SMB3. In many ways the current manifestation of SMB has really been her work, especially with the three founding members essentially MIA at this period of time (I’m in Canada, Derrick is in the army and Sheylara is juggling multiple blogs AND work!).
Finally, Dorothy, was overseas for SMB1-2, but appeared for 3, and we decided to con.. er… convince her to join the team. You can tell what a difference the manpower made from the liveblogging of SMB4 that occured (that, by no means insinuates that all Dorothy will contribute is liveblogging).
When we were at five members, we debated over whether to get anyone new. On one hand five is “just nice”, on the other, six will provide us with additional manpower to cover missing personnel. So with six we went, and I think it’s a comfortable number for the foreseeable future.
Our criteria for taking on new people for the team? We don’t really have any, except that they live in the world of social media and fundamentally understand what it’s about, and what SMB stands for.
Why am I writing this post, you may ask. Am I necessarily revealing anything you don’t already know? Maybe, or maybe not. The key message for everyone is these guys have “day jobs”. It may be conventional like Shermeen and Claudia, unconventional like Sheylara’s, or school for myself and Dorothy, or army for Derrick, but we have them. Yet, every two or three months, somehow the time gets dug up from somewhere to organise Social Media Breakfast | Singapore, and no one gets paid for it.
So If you haven’t yet, do drop by their blogs, or the SMB blog or the SMB forum and drop them a comment, start a discussion, word of encouragement, and do keep supporting us with your enthusiasm, attendance and kind donations.
I think we’re in the middle of a social renaissance both in Singapore and globally, but this is only the start. Only by coming together and building community and forging bonds and relationships can it happen, and I hope you will continue to join us and grow from the sharing that goes on, develop from the networks you form and learn from the mistakes we, and others, make.
So Social Media Breakfast | Singapore has a Facebook Group, and while it’s meant for sharing and posting news and conversations, inevitably there are people who aren’t aware or are ignorant of the guidelines of social media, and insist on being an insurance salesman.
At the bottom, you can see me telling someone that we don’t appreciate the spam in the SMB Facebook page, and in the middle you can see her reply. Now here’s the thing. It’s easy for her to call me “prissy” because I’m someone who’s still in school. But there are 140 other people on the Facebook Group who can easily click on her name and check out which agency she works in.
Or in the future, if she keeps it up, somebody will blog about it revealing all the details (including name and agency), and if your company is doing their research on this person and/or agency and this comes up, would you still want to hire the person/agency to take care of your business? Do you want this agency to take your brand name and shove it into people’s faces? (It’s not a trick question, the answer is no).
Let’s look up further for the second example. The sad thing here is that website, firstaidcorps, actually has a decent blog with interesting content. But doing this isn’t going to get people interested and engaged. Sure, you might get a few clicks, but you think they’re going to come back or think of you as anything other than spam in the future?
At the end of the day, it’s not rocket science. How would you like your firstaidcorps page to have a comment from someone else saying “check me out here” or going to your agency’s campaign and commenting “check me out there” (assuming the campaign in interactive enough to even leave comments). It’s just rude and it reflects badly on you and your agency’s understanding of the social media space, so stop doing it.
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.
So I’m not trying to re-tell you why this analogy works, but an instance locally (ie back home in Singapore), that I feel it was done well.
The salesman at a party analogy is used a lot in blogger outreach and social media. The idea is if you’re at a party and everyone’s talking about the latest episode of Lost (and why wouldn’t they, it’s awesome), then if you’re the salesperson who jumps in and starts giving your insurance pitch, people generally get turned off.
I have to say, I am flat out impressed by what I saw. A decent venue, engagement, no “in your face” stuff, a contest that was fun and not overly campy, and what I feel is most important: generating media (and by that I mean real world media) out of something like this.
Photos the bloggers took remain on the Samsung wall. (Picture from Nadnut.com)
So the man behind this is Daniel from Samsung, who came from Social Media Breakfast | Singapore 2, but I didn’t get to talk to until Social Media Breakfast | Singapore 3, which in itself says a lot about not being pushy. When you consider the time it was from SMB2 (May) till the first Samsung Social Media Night and the effort put in to attend two SMBs (on Saturdays, no less), I think it’s safe to say they did their homework, worked on those relationships, and reached out properly.
I’m going to put it right out there: I don’t own anything from Samsung, and I don’t know if I ever will, but the fact is by reaching out to bloggers (and make no mistake, they are influencers), there are a few positive effects for the company, delivered through the readers of their blogs.
At the very least, you’re spreading the word about your new product launch that they might otherwise not read (don’t forget, we’re not reading the newspapers).
Even if they aren’t a current consumer of your product (like me), you still gain mindshare.
Even if they don’t necessarily buy your product, they can certainly talk about it to someone else who might be looking for, oh, I don’t know, a new phone.
One thing I also need to bring up, is that when I last talked to Daniel in August, he told me he was doing all this independently, without an agency. I don’t know if that’s still true, but if so, it says a lot about the state of agency work back home.
And on that note, you may have noticed that this blog post starts with “doing it right”, rest assured I have a “doing it wrong” case study (from an agency) to share. I’m just in the process of deciding whether or not to reveal names.
In related news: Social Media Breakfast | Singapore 4 is happening tomorrow morning. Are you missing an opportunity to meet people interested in your brand?
Although two members of the team are semi-incapacitated geographically, Social Media Breakfast | Singapore 4 (or SMB4) marches on this Saturday, the 4th of October!
There are two big changes this time around which I think are worth talking about:
1) We have a panel!
Unlike previous events, we have managed to secure five people for our panel. We realise it’s difficult for any spontaneous social media discussions to get off the ground and so have decided to give it a little nudge! The full lineup can be found at our Facebook Event page
2) We’re accepting donations!
Although the “recommended” donation is $2, it would be great if you guys (especially the working folk) can donate more to keep us going, because $2 barely covers the food. We’re running largely on “angel” money right now, and while accepting corporate sponsorship may happen down the road, we’d like to stave that off as long as we can. So please help us! All the finances will be kept on an open ledger at the Social Media Breakfast | Singapore blog.
While obviously I cannot be in attendance because I am in Kingston, I hope everyone will give Claudia, Sheylara, Dorothy and Shermeen your support, and let’s build this community together.
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?
The speaker list for Podcamp Singapore is finally out so I can plug them in full!
Although two members of the team are semi-incapacitated geographically, 