The Singapore social media dichotomy

The Singapore social media dichotomy

When buzz and reality do not meet.

Marketers are increasingly getting excited about including social media in their marketing mix but who's actually putting their dough on the line? Additionally, most articles referencing online social networks cover the well-documented and highly patronised properties which I don't need to list again, but how many of those are built in Singapore? Debbie Cai jumps into the conversation.

These days, people can be separated into two distinct groups: those that are and those that aren't... on Facebook that is. And the over 332,000 Singaporean Facebook users today are the best promotional vessels for the site, encouraging the numbers to increase dramatically each day.

If you haven't already familiarised yourself with how Facebook works and how it can, overnight, transform the way you interact with your friends and business associates, it may be a good idea to get online right away to try it because it only takes about a week of down-time twiddling to master. Compare this to the many months (and many dollars) marketers are now investing in learning how to engage communities online and you'll find a massive disparate.

So when writing an article on social networking, I figured the best way to stay true to the topic was to actually put my money where my mouth was. So I found (through Facebook, of course) a few local young entrepreneurs who are leaders in the social media conversation here and asked them to name an up-and-coming, homegrown, social networking tool that has the potential to "rock the world". Afterall, the internet has made the world so small and there is no reason why the next Mark Zuckerberg cannot hail from Singapore.

These leaders included Justin Lee and Bjorn Lee, co-founders of Entrepreneur27 (E27), a company that helps technology entrepreneurs start up; Melvin Yuan, director for digital strategies group, Asia at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide (WE), who blogs at ThePR2.0Universe.com, Ng Ming Yeow, founder of The Digital Movement, a group which aims to foster young leaders in web 2.0 and social media; Cheo Ming Shen, co-founder of Nuffnang, an Asian blog advertising community; and Bernard Leong, co-founder of SGEntrepreneurs.com, a public and moderated blog for people who are involved in entrepreneurship and enterprise.

Not surprisingly, all agreed that there has not been any noteworthy start-up effort in the online social networking space that is worth a cover story. In fact, they also agreed corporations are beginning to discover the benefits of reaching consumers through their online networks but there just are not enough examples of those who have tried, failed, then succeeded in marketing their brands through such new channels.

"From a very personal standpoint, the good news is I believe this is an industry wide problem, and that could actually be a good story. The buzz is as heavy as anything, but there seems to be few concrete examples that are proving successful," The Digital Movement's (TDM) Ng says.

Possibly the main reason why there hasn't been more reports of success in this area is down to today's competitive business landscape which leaves scarcely any room for failure, although not being prepared to fail is its own Pandora's box.

"You've got to be willing to experiment and learn. You're never going to absolutely get it right but you've got to keep experimenting, you've got to expect that your experiment will fail," Rupal Shah, marketing director, Asia Pacific, Intel Technology Asia, said.

The entrepreneurial success stories

These words probably ring most true for Lai Kok Fung, whose company BuzzCity today is a mobile service provider delivering content to consumers in over fifty countries and serving over five billion advertising page views per year. Its flagship myGamma product is an online social networking tool for internet-enabled mobile phones and is likely to be the only such Singapore-built product which has successfully penetrated both developing countries (India and South Africa) as well developed nations (the US and UK).

It wasn't always so rosy for Lai, who writes in his blog, GammaLife, about leaving a secure job as a researcher at Kent Ridge Digital Labs in 1999 to form a start-up with four others. BuzzCity went through a total of three incarnations from dealing with allowing internet users to track updates to their favourite websites; to enhancing the technology to work on mobile phones and creating fee-based content; to ditching its Chinese partners and going it alone in China; and they picked up invaluable experience in the process.

"As we went back to the drawing board, we realised that we had matured. We had gained expertise in areas that would provide the basis for BuzzCity's current success," he wrote. "Specifically, we learned how to run a fee-based mobile content service, manage large user communities, market and distribute mobile content direct to consumers, and implement revenue settlement with a vast network of partners."

Today, according to Lai, no single country accounts for more than 20% of the company's revenues and its ad inventory is consistently sold out.

Most of us in Singapore have not heard of BuzzCity before and the reason for that is the audience here is "not big enough", says Lai, in addition to the fact that there is also not enough inventory or options for advertisers to place their ads on.

The size of our market has always been a point of contention but the advent of the internet has made it possible for businesses anywhere to reach any nook in the world that has been infiltrated by the humble telephone cable.

Which was one of the motivations iHipo (International High Potential Network), an online community for young professionals and international employees to network, capitalised on to fulfill its vision of matchmaking foreign professionals with international firms.

"The social networking and jobs combination is a natural winner, especially for international assignments," Patrick Linden, co-founder of iHipo, says, referring to how professionals who are about to take on expatriate assignments may get help from other expats already in the country or employers may contact a candidate through the site to fill in certain gaps in the candidate's resume.

The six-month old iHipo has received financial support from Thymos Capital and the Media Development Authority of Singapore, its user base will cross 10,000 by the end of January 2008, it will have over 1.2 million page impressions in the same month, and it has also attracted top-tier recruitment advertisers such as UBS, Roland Berger and Cisco.

While homegrown niche sites such as iHipo and Tagxe (an online forum connecting people going to the same location and who want to share a taxi) are increasingly sprouting up in cyberspace, these are not the only ways Singapore entrepreneurs are making themselves heard in the social media playing field.

A small but growing number of technology enthusiasts (or ‘geeky types') have put their creativity and tech know-how to test by building what is commonly known as "apps' - which is short for applications and which are typically used in online social networking sites.

Justin Lee and Bjorn Lee's E27 organised a Facebook Developer Garage in October last year, after convincing Facebook to allow it to stage the event in Asia for the first time, and attracted 150 participants who shared ideas with other local apps developers and sought partners for projects.

It was at the Garage where "the most successful app in Singapore", Justin Lee says, was unveiled. TYLER Projects, a Singapore and New York-based provider of multiplayer gaming applications for social networks and the rest of the web, developed what was claimed to be Singapore's first Facebook multiplayer online game, Battle Stations.

The latest figures show the four month old game with interactive spaces and rich content is the most played multiplayer gaming application on Facebook, achieving 118 million monthly page impressions and capturing visitors' attentions for an average of 19 minutes and 12 seconds per visit.

The game's media kit reads that Battle Stations produces up to 125 times more page views per user than other Facebook applications and maintained its high daily active user percentage (20-25%) even when other applications were experiencing massive drops in active users during the holiday season.

TYLER has also partnered with Sanrio Digital to produce all Hello Kitty Facebook applications, and expects to sell its advertising inventory to media buyers such as AOL Time Warner, Starcom Mediavest and Coca-Cola in 2008.

What links such start-ups, besides their common passion for venturing into the unknown depths of social media, is their age and amount of experience. Many of the names mentioned so far in this article are of entrepreneurs below 28 years, and their success has come barely 12 months into formalising their business plans - which is fascinating because the power of the media which traditionally belonged to a few large corporations, is being decentralised and literally put in the hands of tomorrow's leaders.

In Singapore, corporations are undoubtedly waking up to the idea that reaching their consumers in places they gather online is a very viable strategy but what's holding them back from exploring more social media options?

WE's Yuan says it is the fear of change and the thinking that ‘new media' is as it is... just new media, when in fact "everything has changed - there's a new way of thinking and new relationship dynamics between companies and their stakeholders.

"Companies also don't and dare not venture into areas they don't understand and cannot measure. And that's what digital PR strategists have to do - help clients understand what's being said about them online, and map out those narratives so that the resulting insights form the foundation of an effective digital PR strategy. Not just launch a blog, produce a viral video or start a group on Facebook."

Yuan also brought up the issue of how online communities today form and dissolve so quickly and marketers are grappling with finding the right time to "go in" and present themselves correctly, and then get out.

He added, "to participate in communities and conversations where business and consumer decisions are made, you have to have a strategy - an approach that serves as your guiding light. Only then can you be agile enough to do so. Many companies are unable to respond effectively to online relationship-building opportunities because they are not prepared. It's like arriving late at the party because you've forgotten to get the suit, put gas in the car, and buy the gift."

Global happenings

Google itself is all over the news with the November 2007 launch of OpenSocial, which gives developers of social apps a single set of APIs (Application Programming Interface) to learn for their apps to run on any OpenSocial-enabled website. This allows developers to build far-reaching applications that users can enjoy regardless of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use.

"The web is fundamentally better when it's social, and we're only just starting to see what's possible when you bring social information into different contexts on the web," Jeff Huber, senior vice president of engineering, Google, said in a statement. "There's a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in more places. With the input and iteration of the community, we hope OpenSocial will become a standard set of technologies for making the web social."

The sites that have already committed to supporting OpenSocial include Bebo, Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com and more -representing an audience of about 200 million users globally.

Friendster, for one, which was launched in 2003 as a social experiment, is the top social networking site in Singapore and the second most visited web property here - the first is Yahoo. Friendster claims 60% of the total internet population in Singapore are its members.

As a response to that, the site has launched a Friendster Developer Programme which allows apps developers to monetise their offerings freely.

"In return for creating compelling, innovative features for our users to discover, use and share with their friends, developers should be given every opportunity to monetise their efforts and build sustainable operations and businesses around these applications," Jeff Roberto, PR/marketing director, Friendster, said.

With the programme, and with supporting OpenSocial, Friendster has taken a major step in supporting data portability, which is currently a movement that will aid marketers in reaching more consumers better and faster.

VP of marketing for Friendster David Jones says Friendster has also launched a new key offering, Fan Profiles, that enables musicians, artists, models, non-profits, athletes, web sites, venues and many more to build a fan base within the Friendster global community of over 58 million members.

He says Fan Profiles turn the power of the Friendster social network over to entities and gives them an enhanced set of promotional features such as advanced e-mail capabilities, contact list management and unlimited fan base aggregation - all free - a dream come true for many corporations.

Corporations and social media campaigns

While everyone agrees there's a lack of daring companies investing their marketing dollars in new media, Marketing did manage to find a couple that have figuratively been baptised in the online social networking fire by going where no man has gone before - and emerged victorious.

M1 recently embarked on a multi-phase, multi-media campaign - Bye Bye Ring Ring - to get customers to subscribe to a connecting tone service, which is a special recording, normally music, that you hear instead of the usual ‘ring' sound, when calling someone who has subscribed to the service.

Led by TBWA, the campaign was aimed at helping M1 generate a consistant revenue stream as customers pay a monthly subscription fee for the service.

Supported by the core idea of making ‘ring ring' outdated, the agency formed a cheesy 80's band called Connexion, and made up a story about how the duo had a hit song in the 80's in Belgium titled ‘Ring Ring'.

"We created both the band, and their single. The band and their track embodied everything we wanted people to feel about their tired old Ring Ring connection tone: outdated and thoroughly old-fashioned," Graham Kelly, creative integrator, TBWA, says.

The first phase of the campaign saw most of the efforts aimed online. A music video, an 80's ad for ‘Cougar Sweatbands' featuring the duo, a cheesy interview of the brand on a Belgian TV talkshow, a tacky website, a wikipedia entry, and MySpace and Facebook profiles were all created to make the story as authentic as possible. And to further spread the word, three of Singapore's most popular bloggers were roped in to increase the hype.

The campaign then progressed to phase two where media from POS leaflets to bus shelter posters were used to communicate that the band was outdated and so was the ‘ring ring' connecting tone.

To date, on YouTube, M1 has garnered 4,465 views for the Connexion talkshow, 19,359 views for the ‘Ring Ring' music video, and 19,145 views for the ‘Cougar Sweatbands' commercial. It has also received 173,994 website hits so far.

TBWA also rolled out another project for M1 called the MeTV Campaign which was aimed at getting subscribers with video-enabled phones to send more clips via MMS and thus increase the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), the key metric that the telecommunication providers use to measure customer value.

With the barrier that users are wary of sending videos by MMS as it's perceived as costly, the agency created the mobile equivalent of YouTube but upped the ante by incentivising each clip submission.

A website was created to communicate the cash for clips proposition and mobile ads were sent via MMS to customers who had opted in to receive advertising. The campaign saw a adoption and usage rise to 12%, a sixfold increase from the expected 2%, and subscribers sent everything from straight-forward video clips to animated ones created with applications such as Face Store.

The cherry on the cake was, however, that the popularity of the campaign piqued the interest of rival StarHub which has moved to license MeTV from M1.

"Be careful when you're trying to engineer a social-type phenomenon because you can't. For any community to thrive you have to give people the means to communicate socially but that's it. You have to make it simple," Kelly says.

"The users are more savvy than the people who're trying to create the networks. They know what's crap, what's lame, and things change very fast. People move on, so be ready to change be ready to reinvent because social networks become so old so fast," he says. "It shouldn't be a question of should I or shouldn't I be there, it's how can I be a part of it in a way which really recognises you're not making an ad."

Kelly also feels agencies which who know the principles of one-to-one marketing have an advantage, because social media involves a dialogue.

Intel's Shah agrees, saying that corporations involved in the dialogue have elevated the role of the consumer to the person who complements its marketing and allows it to augment its traditional marketing mix in a way that's much more interactive and dynamic.

Although giving up control in this manner definitely scares big organisations, Shah says it can be scary but there has to be a balance.

"On one hand it can be a tremendous opportunity because to think that everyone inside the four walls of Intel has all the answers when it comes to communicating to the consumer is a bit naïve these days," she says. "Do I believe that companies such as mine should be shifting their marketing completely to user generated content or advocating control of marketing messages - surely I don't. But I think it's a balance."

Over two months at the end of 2007, Intel in Singapore cooked up the SG Action Film Fest 2007, a campaign to promote the Intel Quad Core PC. Using WOW TV, blogs, and YouTube, the initiative reached the target on a personal level and allowed for direct product experience.

"It was a programme that brought, first and foremost, strong business results. Secondly, it gave us an avenue to target around a key technology that we're providing which is our Quad processor and its video editing capabilities. We partnered with Jack Neo, targeted young filmmakers and asked them to make a video focused on tourism in Singapore," Shah says.

"None of us are doing the internet just because we're volunteers for the internet guys but because it's going to help us grow our business and it integrates well with the rest of what we do. For the film fest we had people post updates online and everything was user-generated. That was the perfect example of marrying the traditional marketing mix with your online marketing. It showcases your technology, drove business results and brought some benefit and variety into the market."

Another ongoing campaign involving consumer generated content is an Interactive Hub-initiated regional online talent competition, iTalentstar, which involves over 80 contestants showcasing their talents through video-clips, photographs and blogs. The champions stand to win US$5,000 (S$7,210), a Nokia N95 (8GB) and become the first-ever Friendster Asia Ambassador.

The crux of the matter is both entrepreneurs and marketers need to recognise that there is a demand, both from consumers and from corporations, for innovative social media options that either simplify, enrich or enhance our lives.

There is no doubt that we will continue to see a massive slew of interactive campaigns involving user generated content this year because it is all about the consumer. It should have always been this way and will always be this way. Even if we eventually get jaded with mass social networking sites and retreat to our niche networking platforms in the future, marketers will still not be able to shrink from our responsibilities of reaching the target audience.

Social media, despite the rate at which it is changing and the risk that whatever site you are investing in today may not be around tomorrow, has changed the way we conduct our marketing whether we like it or not. I'd rather be bucking the trend than picking the crumbs from the table, wouldn't you?

 

[Box out 1]

Web 2.0 can improve my business, corporations say

Almost 50% of companies view second-generation internet applications as a significant business opportunity and almost 8% view these applications as a threat, according to the first of a series of monthly surveys that market intelligence firm IDC will conduct in 2008.

The regional survey aims to examine the impact of web 2.0 on Asian enterprises and consumers

When asked why only 47% and not more viewed web 2.0 as an opportunity, Claus Mortensen, principal, for IDC Asia/Pacific Emerging Technologies Research said what the figures did not mention was the group in between that saw it as both a threat and an opportunity that made up 34% of the responses.

"The total number of respondents that see at least some opportunity in web 2.0 is thus 81%. In that context, having 47% saying that they see web 2.0 as what we could call a 'pure opportunity' is actually quite high," he said.

Mortensen also explained about the 8% that viewed web 2.0 as a threat saying the main reason was companies see web 2.0 as a security risk (34%) and 23% were concerned it would be major waste of their employee's time.

"Another interesting factor was 16% were concerned that their company could ‘lose control of information', which would include both security concerns but also corporate image issues," he said.

Other results showed that on average, 30% of companies said they needed ‘fair' or ‘significant' improvement in areas such as internal workflow and communications, networking with customers and sales and marketing - with a similar number of companies viewing web 2.0 as a ‘fairly or ‘extremely helpful' tool for improving in these areas.

"Singapore actually seems to come out below average with regards to seeing web 2.0 as an opportunity with less than 40% saying so - although we also see the highest percentage of ‘undecided' here. Given the sample rate, we can't really say these rates are certain - but they do indicate a trend," Mortensen said.

IDC began conducting the survey among medium and large enterprises in December 2007 and among consumers in January 2008. The enterprise component included 80 phone-based questions with 220 companies across Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Australia, India and Korea and. The consumer component included over 100 web-based questions, with 783 respondents across the same six markets but also included a seventh market - Taiwan.

- By Marcus Chhan

 

[Box out 2]

Top social networking sites and forums in Singapore
Rank	Domain	Market Share
1	www.youtube.com	16.06%
2	www.friendster.com	13.31%
3	www.facebook.com	9.37%
4	forums.hardwarezone.com.sg	2.01%
5	www.multiply.com	1.84%
6	www.imeem.com	1.73%
7	www.livejournal.com	1.64%
8	spaces.live.com	1.48%
9	www.tudou.com	1.40%
10	www.neopets.com	1.36%
Weekly rankings for the week ending 19/01/2008, ranked by 'Visits'. Source: Hitwise Singapore - sg.hitwise.com