Reading the comments for the last couple of posts really got me thinking more about this subject. I feel like the “this is new media and there are new rules” excuse is quickly wearing its usefulness thin, and there is no excuse for people not to know these things anymore. Even if they don’t know, there are tonnes of places on the internet to research, like this one:
Are You Willing To Invest The Time?
It’s taken from Beth’s Blog and the primary focus of the blog post was how much time it takes non-profits to use social media, but I believe it applies pretty much across the board.
A quick note to the people who have been spamming the SMB Facebook Group and other groups? Social Networking comes last. If you’re not willing to spend that 20hrs/week investing in all the steps, then maybe social media isn’t for you.
I commented on this blog last week and said “I guess to some in the social media world all the steps are sometimes done simultaneously, but demonstrating them in increasing commitment levels and in a “linear” format will definitely help people just coming into it to understand it better!”
So take note of this. You start from listening, not plunging head on to creating content and “spreading the word”.
The Photography Analogy
I draw parallel to learning how to understand the technical functions of a DSLR camera for the first time (a situation I’m in). I came across this post from Digital Photography School which says:
ANY friend of mine who comes to me early on in their photography “career” asking for lessons is forbidden from shooting in any mode other than AUTO for at LEAST 3-6 months. In my mind that’s enough time to get your framing style down to the point where it’s just, for lack of a better word, automatic. . . second nature. When that happens, THEN you’re ready to explore other settings.
As someone who bought a Nikon D40x last December and is still shooting in auto and only just beginning to understand terms referring to manual settings like “exposure”, “aperture”, “ISO settings” and the like, I identify with this completely.
Similarly, if the fundamental concepts of conversation, feedback, community, partnership and dialogue are not understood by you or your company, leaping ahead to more complex ideas like blogger outreach or community management or setting up a Twitter account is probably not the best move for you.
In Closing
Take the time to familiarise yourself with the social media scene that is relevant to you, and don’t jump in expecting to yield results. More often than not it will frustrate the people you’re trying to reach out to, and yourself.
While a lot of thoughts here at Podcamp Montreal have been personal, a fair amount of them relate back to the social media scene as a whole back in Singapore as well. I do have a couple of observations comparing the different parts of the world:
1)Singapore may not be as far behind as we think
I’ll be the first to say I’m constantly bewildered about why companies don’t use or experiment with social media enough back home, but from what I’m seeing, the business questions are only just starting to be raised here and even then, not the tough questions yet. Maybe it’s the lack of people back home talking about the space or social media is more common in the tech or social aspects of the web that makes it seem like it’s more quiet than overseas, but it’s not necessarily the case.
I will say this though. I feel like people here have been dealing with social media as a passion for the last year or two, and are now moving into the business aspect of things, whereas back home, people are jumping the first stage, and immediately looking at results and implementation. I’m not necessarily saying it’s wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s going to yield very different results and have very different implications.
2)Social Media usage may not be as different as we think.
Again, maybe because there are just so many more social or Meepok blogs back home, we tend to think that it’s just us who are really into using the web as a social tool, but I do see a lot of Seesmic users who are here purely for social reasons with minimal business or personal applications. And that’s alright. Everyone gets something different out of the podcamp.
3)No one’s really an expert
Maybe what people at home need to learn more than anyone. No one is really an expert in all aspects in the field. Different questions go to different people, some are better suited to answer some questions than others, and depending on what field you’re in, the answer actually changes. It’s more important to get someone who understands your niche and how it works, than someone who is a self-declared “expert” in all things social media
4)These events don’t have to be a big affair.
Compared to the events in Singapore, Podcamp Montreal is almost simplistic in its setup. Three rooms for talks and a hallway is all we have. The value is created in the interactions, not the venue.
5)Sponsors are largely invisible
This was an observation made by someone else. There are pretty big sponsors here (not huge corporate identities), but they aren’t putting up booths or waving pamphlets in people’s faces. They’re just here to interact with people and see where that leads. This, combined with point #3 really gets me thinking about Social Media Breakfast | Singapore, and all our sponsorship/venue issues all over again.
6)It’s strange being new
I’m not naturally an outgoing person, but it’s easier to deal with that back home at events because people know who I am and what I do. Here it’s a bit different. I know who they are in most cases, but it’s not always two ways. And that’s a little bit intimidating. I didn’t push myself totally out of my comfort zone, but I did go around meeting a couple of people, and had very, very awesome conversations.
7)Gen Y is startlingly missing.
I asked the question “Where are the youth” in my video yesterday. And I’ll ask it again. I don’t understand how I’m the youngest person here at all. Exchanging stories here I hear how the misconception is “Let the person in her 20s handle it because they understand Web2.0”, but the managers who are supervising these people will tell you that’s not true. In some cases, they know more than the younger person does.
Call them Gen Y, millennials, digital natives, what have you. I think there is a very large distinction between living in the digital world, and understanding it. I cannot imagine how anyone in school right now can think they don’t need to know how the digital world works to get by later in life.
If you were at Podcamp Montreal, do let me know if you agree or disagree my thoughts, or if anything particularly stood out for you, or if any of these differencesI mentioned make sense to you at all. If you’re reading this from Singapore, do you think the similarities exist? Or are there truly cultural differences that we need to think about?
Van Tan has a very very good post on feedback to PR teams from a blogger’s perspective this week. So good it earned a share on my Google Reader. (Reader Trends tells me I’ve done this exactly thrice in the last 30 days).
I’m not going to rehash what she said here (you need to check out her post), but I will give a few additional points that I’ve noticed having been on both side of the coin (albeit very briefly for the PR side).
#1: Personalisation Is Shitty, But Necessary
Van talks about this in her post and I’ll elaborate on it from a PR person’s point of view. When we organised the HP TouchSmart event, it was absolutely laborious and took half a day to send personal emails to over 40 people. But it had to be done. Maybe with those bloggers you’re close with you could send a two-liner over Facebook, but for those you’re reaching out to for the first time, don’t expect a run of the mill email to get any attention.
#2: Blogger Public Relations Is Still About… Relations
I don’t normally name companies, but one company that does handle the relationship angle very well is Text 100. Whether it’s casual chat about Social Media Breakfast or highly personalised emails with invitations to blogger events, I really feel like I’m being invited to a friend’s event rather than a “company’s” event. Even when I can’t make it, they still make an effort to update me on what went on and direct me to a few links.
It’s a long process, but it definitely creates a difference. And that difference is crucial. Just because a blogger attends an event once, doesn’t mean they are branded yours like cattle. Like it or not, #2 is one of my ways to see how “actively” a company is involved in the social media space. If you’re all talk talk talk about social media but have no visible relations with bloggers, it doesn’t count.
I’d like to hear about this from bloggers and PR folk. What are your pet peeves? Other advice for the companies? Biggest difficulties from PR folk approaching bloggers? Let’s hear it!
Saturday’s conversations at SMB3 was about blogger outreach programmes (the theme was set way before I received the email) and I think it’s apt. I’ve had conversations with people from various companies asking “How do you decide who to invite?” or “How do you decide who are influencers?” or “How do you quantify influence” and such questions. Clearly who the companies are associated with is a key priority by people both on the agency and the client side. The trust issues in the local blogosphere just means that companies who dare to venture into it, need to take note of some things.
First to the companies: It’s scary but this is not new. Any decision from which newspaper you associate yourself with to which celebrity endorses your product, runs the risk of external events happening and aversely affecting your company by association. Be cautious, not scared.
Here are a few steps you might want to take when deciding who to reach out to or associate your brand with:
1) Credibility & reputation over reach
Reach is an old metric. It doesn’t matter that a blogger (or for that matter, a publication) can reach tens of thousand of people, if no one takes that particular source of information seriously. In fact, associating yourself with a blogger who has a bad reputation that reaches out to tens of thousands online, may do more damage than good to your brand. In essence, you’re much better off finding a fledgling blogger with a solid reputation and small following, and allow the following to grow.
2) Follow the blogger for a decent amount of time
Seeing as how a blogger is viewed in the community can change literally overnight, it would be prudent to follow their blog for awhile before deciding if he or she is a good fit. A couple of good product reviews doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Consistency is the key.
3) See how he/she deals with conflicts
Issues and conflicts pop up every now and then, the important thing is to see how the blogger deals with it. It could range from name calling and personal attacks to open honest discussions resulting in agreeing to disagree. I don’t need to tell you which is preferred.
4) What does the community say?
Ultimately, I find this to be the true litmus test. It’s not really about what the blogger posts, but the community’s reaction to it. What they say in the comments, what they say in the forums, what they say in outbound links. It’s the easy and lazy way to just read a blogger’s content and gauge, but doing proper research means looking at what others say too.
These are just four points that came off the top of my head, I’m sure there are more so feel free to add on in the comments!
SMB3 broke huge new grounds yesterday at the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) thanks to great partnership with the National Heritage Board (NHB). I was getting messages all Friday long about people being excited to attend SMB at the ACM and I heard about the River Room from the NHB folks and saw the pictures at the website, but I was completely blown away when I stepped into the venue. It’s a HUGE space that looks like a swanky ballroom rather than a location for an informal event like ours. In fact when I met Claudia to set up, I said “Wow, maybe we should’ve gotten a smaller room so it won’t look so empty if less people turn up.”
The reception table
NHB!
Enter… the River Room
Huge, classy and stylish.
I needn’t have worried because this was the most amount of people we’ve ever had at an SMB for sure. When people were sitting the chairs were full, if not there were throngs of people standing around. It was really quite something.
I felt the vibe this time round was a little more “intense” than previous SMBs. Maybe it was the more official looking venue compared to the previous cosy cafes, but I definitely sensed a lot more interest and enthusiasm and mingling this time round compared to the previous two. It was as if everyone knew they were in a room with bright, like-minded people and wanted to make the most out of every minute and maximising their time there.
One thing that didn’t go too well, was the discussion topic. We wanted to have a panel but that didn’t work out so we thought going ahead with “table discussions” would work. But I guess they didn’t. We’re still experimenting with the format, but SMB is the community’s not ours. We just organise it. So if you felt the topic was too serious, too trivial, too boring, needed facilitators, needed moderators, let us know! We’re going to figure out a way to make this work for SMB4.
Walter from NHB sharing with us NHB’s social media efforts.
For me, the biggest thing at any SMB is the people. And I was incredibly excited that I didn’t know about half the people there! It’s amazing that almost six months after the first SMB, it’s still generating interest among people who are willing to come for the first time. I particularly enjoyed meeting Pat Law in person after so much communication on our blogs, Twitter and Plurk, Todd Murray from Active Channel who I only met online the day before on LinkedIn, Willy Foo from Live! Studios who provided great fun with his photography, and many many others who are too many to list here.
I really love how SMB is becoming this melting pot of people literally from everywhere in the social media space. Bloggers, podcasters, videocasters, in-house people, agency people, casual enthusiasts, academics, entrepreneurs, tech people and everyone else. It’s great to have Miccheng from Podfire filming Geek Goddess TV at SMB2, and the Tech 65 crew recording live at SMB3. It’s truly bringing together the best of both “social” and “media”.
Tech 65 recording live!
Admittedly right now SMB does not have a firm “mission” to drive here in Singapore, but we started off wanting to provide a platform to get everyone together to mix, share experiences and learn from each other, and I think it’s doing just that. Not necessarily at the three hours during brunch, but all the connections and conversations that happen after that. As much as I was delighted to see so many new faces, I was equally ecstatic to see so many returning faces who have been consistent supporters of social media in Singapore in general, and SMB in particular.
At this point I’d love to hear from everyone how you felt about the event. Be frank, be critical. After all if you’re waking up on a precious Saturday morning to come to SMB, it should be worth your time. Let us know what worked, what didn’t work, what you’d like to see more of in the future, etc etc.
Finally, I’d like to thank Walter, Wei Chong, David and Kenny from NHB for agreeing to partner up with us. I cannot state enough what a great help they were with the venue. It was really good knowing that we secured a great venue and not having to worry about it for the last few months. I completely forgot about signage but they had all bases covered with great signboards everywhere ensuring that no one got lost. Thank you so much. Of course, it wouldn’t be possible without my co-conspirators as well: Sheylara, Claudia and Derrick.
Willy has great photos up on Facebook. I’m going to insert two of the group pictures here. Memories of a good Saturday morning well spent meeting great people.
As always I’ll be posting a full rundown of all the blog coverage sometime next week, do let me know if you blogged about it so I can include you! Tagging your posts as “social media breakfast singapore” and “smb singapore” would be greatly appreciated!
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!)
You might remember my “Why Students Should Blog” post in response to HackCollege’s contest. I finally caught up with episode 26 of the Hack College Podcast today by Chris and Kelly, and was thrilled to find that I made the final four to win a Hack College t-shirt!
The segment starts at about 18 minutes and I think the collection of answers are really good. I appear in the episode as a tweet. I know people go on about how social media and blogging and whatnot in North America doesn’t always apply here, but this one does.
In any case, I didn’t win that t-shirt, but dammit I’ll keep trying. Failing which I’ll just buy one for myself when I head up there later in the year. (But that’s not an excuse to not let me win, HackCollege!)
If you want to discover more, check out “The Case For Student Blogging” by HackCollege, I think it’s pretty good stuff. If you’ve been agonising over the perfect phrasing of your resume since forever, why not take a look at this and find a better way to supplement your case for future employment.
I’ve decided to take a page out of Louis Gray’s book and highlight six blogs (in no order) that have really caught my attention in April, as well as one link that I feel is a recent notable read.
The amount of new blogs I’m subscribing to monthly is decreasing (I suppose there’s only so much information I can process), but if you know any great ones, recommend them in the comments space below!
I’m a fairly young “serious” blogger. By that I mean my blog has only existed for about 100 days, though I’ve had a “webpage” as they called it back then, since 1996.
In the past 100 days, I’ve loved it when people drop me a message to say they’ve read my blog and find it interesting or they’ve heard about what I’ve done at Social Media Breakfast: Singapore or stuff like that. It’s lead to great conversations, new networks, new friends and even a couple of internship offers. I’m glad that at least some people within my niche feel like I’m adding value to this community, and are willing to talk to me about it.
In last couple of days, though, the ugly side of social media has begun to rear it’s ugly head with people I don’t know adding me on Facebook (without even telling me how or why they know me) and one person demanding for stuff on Twitter, from his/her very first tweet to me.
Needless to say, I categorised these instances as spam and just ignored them.
But then, yesterday took the cake.
Two separate journalists talked to me, one in person at the IDC conference and one over the phone. The first simply came up to me, did not introduce the topic she was writing about, did not ask if I knew anything about the topic she was writing about, or if I would like to say anything about it and just leaped straight into asking me questions.
The second called me while I was having dinner, didn’t ask if it was a good time to talk, but at least identified how she got my number.
Firstly, isn’t this communication 101? You’re calling someone you want to get something out of. The very least you can do is be courteous.
Second, both these journalists clearly have no idea who I am, and what I blog about. I know because both their pieces were on topics with absolutely nothing to do with what I blog about. Why would I be a relevant person to get a comment from? I told the second journalist that I had no idea whatsoever about the content she was asking me about and I didn’t feel like I was the best person to comment. It’s like asking an engineer in to comment on the latest healthcare procedures.
Did they bother to do their research? Or was it just easy access to a blogger - any blogger - that they could milk for a comment for tomorrow’s news? Are they presenting a proper quote with proper representation to the public that actually pays money for that paper?
What happened to the journalistic ethic and the grand claims that journalists are different because they actually research their stories and get independent confirmation of the facts?
Reuben, who I was having dinner with, heard my side of the conversation and clearly knew I had no idea what the phone “interview” was about, and told me I should have just said “I’m sorry, I’m having dinner”. On hindsight, I should have, but I didn’t want to be rude.
But I am very certain, that in this case, my extended courtesy to these journalists were not reciprocated in any way whatsoever.
So let me get this out of the way: I do not blog for publicity. I do not need or want to be quoted in the press, especially when it is in no way related to me. I don’t do this for money, I don’t care about fame. I’m here to add value to my immediate community and to spread the word about social media, be it in personal or business use. My goals are community, awareness and education.
Now I’m not a big shot in this space. And I don’t need anyone to treat me like one. If anything else I am astounded by the appreciation people have shown me so far. But I do ask that you show me the basic courtesy when it comes to contacting me.
The one thing I am conscious of in my blog is my personal brand. Yesterday I made the mistake of commenting on issues that I probably shouldn’t have. I don’t know how the articles will come out It could be good for my personal brand, it could be bad. For all I know i come out sounding like a genius in tomorrow’s papers. It doesn’t matter. That’s why I feel the need to post this at 5:20 in the morning, so that you know I’m not writing this in response to whatever comes out in the press later today.
I would like to think these were isolated incidents, and that we have many, many professional journalists out there who hold themselves to a professional code (which apparently is something they pride themselves on). Either way, this has been a learning experience for me, albeit one that has left a bitter taste in my mouth, and it’s not going to happen again.
If this incident means taking some backlash from the journalism community, by all means. I could’ve easily sat on this and kept quiet, let the articles get published and just wait it out, but I think bloggers need to be aware of this.
I personally find it marginally amusing that for all the concern about “control” and “responsibility” and “messaging” and “amateurism” etc in social media, I find these exact things lacking in mainstream media.
Or am I being naive to believe they should exist there in the first place? Because my takeaway from these two instances is that they don’t care about the story, much less me. Grab a contact, get a quote or comment, publish that piece of text regardless of the accuracy, reliability and credibility of the article or the source.
Related Links:
The whole discussion about blogger outreach is in For Immediate Release #336 at around 18 minutes. I think everyone who is considering connecting with any blogger needs to listen to this carefully before going down that path.
In the interest of full disclosure, another reporter who I met at the IDC Conference was fairly decent and asked if I would be interested in contributing to that particular newspaper. Whether or not that actually happens, I want to lay this out publicly so that other bloggers out there can read this and learn from it.
If you use social media in any way (blog/podcast/use Youtube/use Flickr/use Facebook/etc), come for Social Media Breakfast: Singapore next Saturday, 29th of March 2008!
This is a little experiment that Derrick Kwa (from Adventures in Social Media #1) thought of doing, and was generous enough to invite me along for the ride. The objective of the breakfast is simply to meet like-minded people who are into the social media scene, expand your network and of course have fun. It doesn’t matter whether you’re interested in social media from a business standpoint or a social standpoint, everyone’s invited because you never know who you’d meet!
Currently Derrick and I have two rules:
Everyone’s equal. When it comes to Social Media Breakfast, there’s no difference if you’re a CEO or a student. Everyone has something of value to contribute and everyone should be treated that way
Law of Two Feet applies. If a particular conversation or discussion is not getting you what you want, feel free to move on.
Both are nods to PodCamp rules and we’re sure they’re not hard to follow!
Finally, we will be borrowing an idea from Jeff Pulver regarding personal tagging. I’ll let the man explain it himself:
The venue we’re looking at is either going to be TCC at SMU or Frujch. Either way it will be in the SMU area, so it’s pretty convenient. Also, because it’s our first time trying this out there are no sponsors involved, so you have to pay for your own breakfast and we hope that’s not too big a problem! We’ll clarify the final date and time within the week.
So if you’re coming, leave me a comment or drop me an email: uniquefrequencyATgmailDOTcom or message me on Twitter and we’ll see you on the 29th!
‘
