It’s just 28 more days to Youth Olympic Games (YOG) and Singapore, been the first country to host such a game is doing everything they can to promote this event. The two weeks event which starts from 14 Aug to 26 Aug, aims to inspire youth around the world to embrace, embody and express the Olympic values of Excellence, Friendship and Respect.

The committee also hope that this event will create a lasting sports, culture and education legacy for Singapore and youths from around the world, as well as enhance and elevate the sporting culture locally and regionally.

With social media been the forefront of it’s marketing efforts, YOG community recently launched their own social networking site WhyOhGee!. Base onwhat I understand, the networking site features multimedia content produced by young people for young people, and aim to connect youths globally through the digital media site.

Features of the site includes integration of your social media profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc, forums, groups, pictures uploaded by users and athletics profiles which users can send their encouraging and supportive messages.

Besides WhyOhGee!, Singapore also launch a series of other digital media sites:

• Singapore 2010 Odyssey: A 3D virtual world featuring the venues and sports of YOG.

• Million Deeds Challenge: Be part of the Olympic movement through sharing deeds of Excellence, Friendship and Respect, and join a virtual torch relay in the process.

• Facebook: Official fanpage of YOG.

• Twitter: YOG Twitter account.

• YouTube: Videos produced for the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games.

• Flickr: Photos for the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games.

Are they overdoing it?

Personally, I like their idea of having a community site (WhyOhGee!) where youths can get engaged and interact with each other before, during and after the games. I also understand their need of having Youtube, Facebook and Twitter as their satellite medium to reach out to youths. However, I do feel they are slightly overdoing it.

What I don’t understand is: Why do they need a Flickr account? What is the value of it? What is the purpose of having  a two additional digital platforms (Singapore 2010 Odyssey and Million Deeds Challenge) without the element of community building?

What do you think? Are they overdoing it?

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As we all know by now, animal-lovers all over Singapore are seeing red over the beating of a puppy by a woman. The case was exposed when the video maker, many believed to be the puppy’s owner uploaded a video on Youtube. As soon as it was uploaded, it found it’s way to Hardware Zone and the social media  mayhem begin.

Stomp, a Singapore user-generated content (UGC) site, notorious for exposing acts by ugly Singaporeans posted the video onto its site and immediately generated huge criticism from readers and animal-lovers alike. Many of the comments express their disgust with the woman beating the poor puppy and demanding that authorities step in and bring the woman to justice.

Similarly, Facebook users are also up in arms when the video began circulating on the popular social networking platform. SPCA Facebook Page was littered with comments demanding SPCA to do something about the case and eventually, SPCA announce that they will be working with AVA to track down the culprit and bring the dog  out of it’s suffering. In just one day, SPCA Facebook Page receive up to 500 comments regarding this case. Most of the comments from the users express their concern for the puppy and not only would they want justice to be done, they also want the mainstream media to be involve in this.

True enough, by the second day of the video being brought to light, AsiaOne Portal ran the story and subsequently, Channel 5, CNA broadcast the report and today Straits Times too ran an article about this case.

Some kind souls like myself (ahem) begin contributing our own effort to making sure we rally around Butters (the puppy’s name) by setting up a community page for him, while others decided to pull their resources together by raising funds for Butters’ future living expenses should he get a new home.

Social Media’s Role in This

I am convinced that social media have a profound impact on bringing this case to the general public. If you follow the sequence leading up to media reports, you will find that it was the voices of the audience that are instrumental in bringing the attention to mainstream media. Through this experience, I realize that most people (the video maker in particular) take social media platforms such as Youtube and Facebook for granted. I am sure he doesn’t realize the impact the video can have on his life and the lives of millions out there who love animals.

I will carry on updating the story at the community page as long as it goes and hopefully we have a happy ending. In the mean time, I have included the videos of the sinful acts in this post. Be warned, it’s not pretty.

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It is just a matter of time before every company realize the importance of having a presence on social media. Well, it took DBS a crisis to realize no matter how big you get, you can’t ignore the voices of thousands angry customers.

Problem started this morning (Monday, 5th June 2010) when all the 900 ATMs and 81 branches belonging to POSB bank decided to take a break (crash). It started at 6am in the morning and over the next 4 hours, customers from all over the island reportedly could not withdraw their cash, make payment or top up their cash cards for ERP.

With that, thousands of customers use Facebook and Twitter to vent their anger, demanding DBS to compensate them for the inconvenience they have caused.

DBS responded quickly by starting a Twitter page  and responding to customer’s frustration. It was a good move from DBS’s part because it shows that they are listening to what is being said in the social media space, which also means that they care about what their customers think.

Out of curiosity, I wrote a simple tweet praising DBS’s effort and less than an hour of that tweet, they replied with a ‘thank you’ note. Now that’s called effective listening.

What they could do better

One area which they could have done better is to have started the  Twitter page earlier. They should have followed Starhub’s footstep in having their social media presence both in Twitter and Facebook to acknowledge the fact that they are not just listening, but responding to customers’ queries.

While I am writing this post, I realized DBS Bank do have a Facebook Page. Similar to their Twitter page, they seem to have started the fan page due to this crisis. I am very sure things would have been different if they have planted their presence in these two platforms earlier and have built a strong bond with their customers. Nevertheless, since they already started using the platforms to better understand their customers, it shows that they care. I wish them good luck in being the first bank to use social media locally to connect to ordinary people like you and me.

Additional Resources

DBS Customers Vent

Glitch Cripples DBS Banking

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I have been doing some research over the last couple days and I am delighted that social media marketing is getting more and more attention from the mainstream media. Well, they should since most of the mainstream media themselves are using social media tools to distribute news. (Think @ChannelNewsAsia, Channel News Asia Fan Page).

However, this post is not about the mainstream media. It’s about the results I have found and the results come with good news for both trainers and agencies alike.

GetIT Survey

GetIT Comms, together with Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation had published a survey that shows that social media is increasingly been used by ICT marketers in Singapore. The key findings of the survey suggest that:

• More than three quarters of the respondents indicated that their marketing budgets had increased (44%) or stayed the same (32%) compared to the previous year. 45% of the respondents saying that their marketing budgets for social media, social networking and interactive digital media have increased.
• 90% of the respondent continue to use their web presence primarily as a means to inform and provide information about the company. 71% of the respondents are now using their web presence to generate sales leads.
• 94% of the respondents use social media marketing in order to generate exposure for their business, usually through brand and/or product awareness. 35% reported that they use social media to generate leads, establish a thought leadership position (29%) and engage customers (28%). When the respondents were asked how they would use social media within the next 6-12 months – generate leads (58%), engage customers (54%) and establish a thought leadership position (34%).
• Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging are the main social media platforms companies use to build their social media presence, with 43%, 35% and 35% of respondents respectively reporting that they are active on these platforms . However, 35% of respondents indicated that they are not in the social media space at all.
• 70% of respondents manage their social media activities in-house, either by their marketing team, IT support team or distributed within the company. Only 12% outsourced their social media marketing to an external agency, with the remaining 18% managing it on an ad hoc manner. This demonstrates that more companies prefer to have a personal and authentic tone of communication, direct from the people who run the business, rather than outsourcing it to a third party.
• More companies showed sustained commitment to maintaining their social presence, with 56% of the respondents spending 2 hours or more per week using social media, and 24% spending more than 5 hours per week.

My Thoughts

I believe more and more companies are getting interested in using social media to market and generate leads for their business. With this survey report, I have a better idea of how to create interesting, relevant information for both my readers here in my blog and the participants for my upcoming programs.

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Social media for business details are in plenty on the net. Businesses and companies utilize the media to reach potential customers and also develop and sustain their reputations. The tool has become very essential in internet promotion and sales. Individuals and organizations wishing to conduct online businesses ought to learn about the advantages of utilizing the instrument.

There are several advantages associated with social media for business. One is its influence on search engine optimization. The key goal of an effective SEO tactic is to assist you create links. The biggest advantage of social networking is the tendency of the communities to generate links to superior content.

It aids in the making of excellent web pages and site that are both persuading and engaging. Content is responsible for setting websites apart from each other. It is only original, creative and quality content that is able to engage readers. In addition, it aids websites not only enhance their search engine rankings but also generate traffic. On the contrary, poor quality content does nothing but drive visitors away.

It can help you improve the conversion rate of your website. A conversion rate is defined as the percentage of site users that are converted into leads. It also refers to the proportion of leads that are ultimately converted into customers. This is what is known as sales funnels. To be able to improve the results of your website, you must measure the conversion rate.

The biggest gain of the media is the ability to be measured. When doing business online, you ought to continuously gauge your success. This helps you find out what does not work and what does. You could utilize a site analytic program to compute the amount of links that propel traffic to your sites. The type of internet user to frequently visit your site and the information that are fascinated by are additional that can be provided by the program.

If you are a novice in online marketing, you ought to chat with specialists in the sector. They are the best to provide you with information on ways that the media may help your business. Then again, you may carry out online research. They are lots of sites with information on the benefits of social media.

Making use of the media may prove challenging initially. Nonetheless, with constant use and lots of fortitude you get used to it. You may employ professionals to assist you. Ensure that you chat with their customers and find out if they are trustworthy.

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Are you afraid of people talking about you negatively about your brand? Always protect your brand even if you don’t plan on leveraging social media in your marketing efforts for six months, now is the time to reserve your brand name on the major social networks. Take control of your brand name before someone else claims it.Do you have a Content Strategy? The fundamental key to a successful inbound marketing strategy is to produce compelling content on your own site first. Social media only works if you have something interesting to say. Become a thought leader in your industry, or teach your audience something new. This is the type of content that attracts visitors, builds inbound links and promotes the sharing of content online.

Interesting content is being shared every minute of the day, now is the time to join in. Your current audience members are your best advocates. Allow them to easily share your content with their personal networks on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Make sure your blog posts can be shared via Twitter & Facebook. A few simple links and your content will begin spreading faster than you could ever email it.

Never be afraid to test, track and learn from your early forays into blogging or social media. Make sure you have marketing analytics in place before you begin. This will make it easier to determine who is sharing your content online, and what the outcome of that social interaction is on your business. You should also track the specific sources of your traffic. Which social media site works best for your particular audience or vertical? This data allows you to make informed decisions at a later time. Inbound marketing is constantly evolving – without data to back up your decisions; you’re not giving yourself a fair chance to be successful.

In the past, online marketers simply had to execute a solid SEO strategy or hire an agency to do the work for them. Today, it’s not so simple. Social media has made it incredibly easy for users to share content such as video, links and photos with their friends and colleagues online. As a marketer, your business needs to have a presence in social media, no matter how niche your target audience may be.

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People are more likely to trust information coming from people they know. Therefore, the folks at Google have come up with a new type of search engine that includes your personal online social networks.

In the tutorial video below, Google show you how their new social search engine works by giving an example of “getting to know Zurich”. In the video, Google outline that in the past, one can search and find information on Zurich on the usual travel site. But with the new “social search”, your friends on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other networking sites will also pop up in the search should they mention the word “Zurich”.

The scope of information goes far beyond simply traveling to Zurich because the information is provided by the people you know and each of them have different level of relationships and different level of experience about Zurich. The information is as unique as the individuals itself. In fact, this type of information is the newest trend on social media as homogenized continues to fall out of fashion.

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Time really flies. It’s already the second month of the new year and many of you know that this year is going to be the year of social media marketing. From my previous post, we know that SMEs will devote more marketing budget to social media instead of traditional media. But where will the money go? Well, in this post, we will explore some of the avenue where social media budget will flow to this year.

Retail and Ecommerce

The chart below gives you an overview of a dramatic increase in social media budgets across all the industries and how each industry compare against each other. This chart also shows you that retail/ecommerce is stepping up to the plate this year with 79% of marketers in that category increasing social media marketing spend in 2009. For marketers who market in this industry must also realize that there could be more competition within the space and that would determine the social effort they wish to be involve in and how they can break through the noise.

Facebook Will Be The Main Avenue

This year, social media networks budget will begin to flow to the social network of choice, Facebook. The chart below give you an a reason why. In 2009, MySpace recieve $490 million in advertising. E-Marketer however, predict that it will decrease to 21% by this year. On the other hand,, Facebook will increase it’s advertising revenue by $39% in 2010. With this growth, Facebook will also be force to develop services for the brands to justify the advertising budget as well as new opportunities to engage their fans.

In House Budget Will Go Up

According to e-Marketer, about 60% of social media budget will go into staff salaries for blogging, content development and monitoring of social media channels. About two fifth will be spent on outside help such as agencies, consultancies and service providers. This being said, if you are allocating a budget for social media, don’t just allocate all  internally or all to a social media agency. Consider hiring at least 1 social media manager and then an agency to help spark some ideas and implement the concepts.

Expectations of Social Media Will Rise

Along with the rise of social media budgets, also come a rise in expectations. CMO’s concern this year will be the measureable ROI.  An article produce by MarketingProf’s called “CMO’s Want Measureable Results from Social Media” noted, “Nearly three out of four CMOs (72%) who did not attach revenue assumptions to social media in 2009 say they will in 2010, according to the survey; in addition, 64% of CMOs say they plan to invest more in social media in the next year.”

As these expectations rise, how marketers begin to associate revenue with social media marketing will be important.  In my opinion, before budgets are allocated toward social media, companies should conduct research around their sales funnel, and identify the key performance indicators associated with overall objectives.   This is especially important for marketers who don’t have e-commerce functionality, and therefore need this data to make the connection between online activities and offline purchases.

This research should help figure out important questions like:

• Does your product require education before purchase?
• Does the general public know that your product (or the category of your product) even exists?
• Do they use search engines to find answers? If so, how?
• How have your current consumers been persuaded to try your products?
• Does an increase in site traffic typically lead to an increase in sales?

This just barely scratches the surface of the very important question, “How will I know I’m successful?” We hope to explore more into this in the next few posts.

Do you have any predictions to add to this list?  If you are a marketer, how are you changing your social media budget allocations in 2010?

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While more and more companies are trying to break the ‘social media code’, many seem to understand that consumers no longer find it exciting to friend a brand with just a single click of the mouse on the brand’s Facebook page. If that is the case, why are there so many companies trying to increase spending on social media in 2010? Probably because it’s easier to follow the crowd than redefine marketing around consumer’s touchpoint.

Nathaniel Perez provided some guiding principles to help us get beyond the tactical earned social media generation and enable you to create a richer and more successful ‘social movement’ around your brand.

You can shape the outcome, but can’t prescribe it. Leave predictable outcomes behind. Successful social experiences all have one thing in common: They relinquish control. Bring your consumers closer to action and let them take over. When insights are scarce, leverage the good old reward method to get them to play, then watch them play. If your brand has risk and readiness constraints, consumer control is not a pipe dream. Make it a priority.

From Communication to Connectivity. Your brand should no longer think of itself as an authority (even if it is one), but rather a facilitator or enabler. Its role is no longer to broadcast, but to connect. Understanding brand connectivity requires more than just digital listening and influence identification. Moving beyond single degree measures is crucial. Examining passions and motives within dynamic behavioral contexts is essential. Digital discovery (or anthropology) can help uncover motive “in action”. Social media is an unbound source of insights, allowing limitless exploration of digital personas and their behavior. Your brand can engage and build connectivity through behavioral contexts it can associate with.

Create mediated experiences. Focus on understanding the potential impact of various media interactions against consumer motives and apply that understanding to your experience strategy. Leverage YouTube as more than an outlet for brand video and search traffic. Instead, study how video sharing can promote the quality of the engagement and motives you seek to trigger. As you plan your experience, don’t limit yourself… Define the media while giving it the opportunity to define you. Create experiences that are engaging but unconfined. Experiences that impose less constraint (or more connection) lead to a greater ability to mine insights from engagement. Branded widgets and social network applications can surely help amplify brand messaging but are really little more than evolved direct media. UGC campaigns with very prescriptive requests cannot allow you to measure much more than response rates.

Listen to your experiences. Leverage digital listening to clearly understand how the media has shaped you. Extend your discovery efforts against your conversation to understand patterns of behavior, motives of engagement, audiences and other measures of how your brand is or can be more connective. Measure impact beyond response and conversion by putting your data to work across all sources to truly understand consumer behavior against key business metrics, both offline and online.

Keep Shaping & Being Shaped. Whether looking to sustain successful initiatives or creating new ones, brands need to understand how to play in a fully dynamic context. Focus too much on the media itself and your efforts won’t scale. Instead, focus on measuring and extending your “connectivity” step by step, creating a well balanced insights & experience machine.

It is nicely put. I would also add that getting people to talk about your brand is NO LONGER enough. Ultimately, you have to convert prospects in to customers and show your management that your social media strategy works (ROI). With all these said, you will still need social media as an intelligence tool and to have a channel for customer feedback.

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It seems like conducting survey is a trend now. Everyone I know are coming up with surveys to understand their target market. Therefore, to follow the crowd, I too have a survey I need you to help me with. ‘Challenges Marketers Face With Social Media‘ is a survey to find out more about what challenges you are facing with when it comes to social media. It also allows me to understand how I can design my programs to help you meet those challenges. So, please help me help yourself by giving me the answers to these questions. Thanks!

Challenges Marketers Face With Social Media

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