This year, I can foresee my blog being occupied by two new things:
1) Digital Media Across Asia
As I’m taking over the teaching assistant role from Amelia this term to work with Michael, I can see a constant flow of inspiration arising from the class, and it will be nice to get back to working on the Digital Media Across Asia wiki again.
2) Highlighting local social media examples in business
As we’re gradually seeing more and more developments in the local social media scene, I’d like to invite anyone who wants an avenue to tell their story, to tell it here. I’d like to go beyond the usual blogger outreach story and hopefully be able to interact with a company who’s started a blog or twitter account for business purposes.
What else would you like to see on Unique Frequency in 2009?
I’m attending Podcamp Montreal this weekend and so far it’s been awesome. I’ve met Mitch Joel and CC Chapman so far and hopefully many more soon to come.
Halfway through Mitch’s presentation I started wondering at the lack of college people at these events. Social Media Breakfast | Singapore may be an anomaly because it’s primarily youth-initiated, but generally, where’s Gen Y?
I noticed quite a few “business” questions today. Like how can my organisation use this, or how would this make sense for my message. People in organisations (read: our bosses) are trying to figure this stuff out, so why aren’t we? Are we safe in the delusion that learning about the 4Ps is going to get us by in the workplace? I was back in a marketing class after not taking one for a year, and it struck me how the stuff being taught is simply not relevant to my (read: Gen Y’s) world anymore.
Getting to the point, we have all these conferences back home that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend. Why don’t we have one by us students for students? And I’m not talking about people like me talking just about social media. Maybe it’s someone in a local band talking about how his blog is attracting new fans, maybe it’s someone with a fashion site talking about expanding her presence via Facebook. Sort of like the way we talked about wellness, food, photography, haikus and social media in our audio discussion.
So for the people in school going out to get a job soon. Or thinking of switching a different job because your finance job doesn’t look as glittery as it did a week ago, what do you think? Do you need social media in your job? Would you attend small gatherings to improve on them and share? Or do you think you can learn it all at work? Feedback please!
One thing I’ve continually questioned is why social media is blooming slowly but not blossoming rapidly in Singapore. I’ve noted that we don’t have problems other countries do, but yet social media is still a very, very small slice of the pie.
Discussions with Michael Netzley, John Bell and Ridz have all resurfaced the same theme: We’re too small. ie the benefits of social media don’t translate as much when you can sms a friend and meet him/her in person in 20 minutes, compared to someone living on the opposite coast in America.
Social media events in North America bring together people who see each other a few times a year. We can see the same people twice in a week at events here!
When we all read the same papers, watch the same news and television and generally consume the same media, does new media still bring additional benefits to the table?
Tracking social media events over the last few months, it does indeed seem like the same people are going for the same events. It’s not a bad thing in itself, but it also means that options to companies are limited. Kami Hyuse’s case study on SeaWorld is an amazing one with great ROI. Attracting 22 roller coaster enthusiasts? That would be hard to replicate here. Obviously I don’t mean for roller coasters (because we have none), but for almost anything in general. It would be easier and simpler (maybe even more cost effective) to put out a print ad than to do a blogger outreach programme, just by impressions alone.
HP did a great blogger outreach programme, but does that value dilute if another company tries something similar and the same bloggers turn up?
I’ve anecdotally heard that 20 million is the magic number for social media to take off. Not in the sense that it’s an automatic qualifier (Indonesia has 25 million but that’s a fraction of it’s population), but it’s an indicator. Given that we’re at something like 4 million total population, does it mean that we’ll never get there?
That said, there is obviously a huge social media interaction on platforms like hardware zone, to some extent Facebook and others, suggesting to me that there is an audience, but we haven’t found a way to properly leverage it yet.
There are a lot of instances when I wish companies would engage the social media participants. But let’s think about it, if 5,000 people talk about your brand in a year (and I’m already stretching it), would you hire a person to monitor that and engage? Or is it easier to close an eye to that miniscule number, and focus on other things? Let’s face it, most companies aren’t Dell with hundreds of thousands of customers complaining. It’s a real question where companies only have a limited amount of resources, and have to prioritise.
Do you think our size is the biggest limiting factor? Do you have other thoughts on why social media’s influence is still limited in Singapore? Most importantly, do you see it changing? In how many years? Or will this being small turn on its head and be a strength? I want to hear from you.
