Postscript: Where Are Corporates In Taking The Lead?
Friday, October 10th, 2008First, I’d like to direct you to Dorothy’s excellent post questioning corporations engaged in social media on what they really want. While my previous post was a personal critique, hers includes research.
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.
Tags: dorothypoon, no corporate buy in, sleazy corporate agendas, social media breakfast singapore, verge
