SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Should corporations think of reaching out via Social Media channels in Singapore ? Your customers may be having buy discussions online, blog about a certain experience with your store manager, or live twittering during a product event. And that’s reality if you pay attention to new online behaviour that is evolving as new tools gain mass traction.

I am reading the Singapore social media landscape albeit loosely while working out just how indulged are Singaporeans in social media. Stefan has some interesting figures for Social Media overall in Asia. For my own study I referenced Alexa’s traffic rankings in Singapore, while digging deeper for closer look at the stats. From Alexa the top 10 listing includes

• Blogger
• YouTube
• Friendster
• Facebook is ranked 9th when I checked
• Wikipedia

Other social networks Singaporeans visit are Multiply (at 23) and Orkut (at 60). Stomp a popular news sharing site is at 67. Out of interest, it’s worth mentioning that making the list at 75 is Golden Village, no surprises there.

Brief On Analytics

Blogger has daily reach of 8% of overall internet users, and for the past 3 months from April 08 to June 08. Singapore users contributed 1.2% of the 8% which roughly works out to 1.3M users basing on 1.4 Bil Internet users - I am no mathematician, correct me if Im wrong. It is a fairly significant figure against Singapore’s population of closing 5 mil. This number refers to both blog authors and site visitors, and does not include other self hosted blog like mine.

According to the social networking report released in Feb 2008 by Hitwise, Friendster has maintained a stronger following over Facebook. Just randomly browsing profiles, I find I stumble on more

With Facebook there are about 500 over groups that bore the search term “Singapore” and ranges a couple dozens members to 5,259 members for the group “Support Singapore Youth Olympics Games 2010 bid”.

A quick check, Facebook showed close to 400,000 users in the Singapore network, and that’s discounting Singapore users who did not join “Singapore network”. As early as Janurary 08 it was hovering 300,000 users, by my calculations an estimated 30-odd% jump in 5 months. A quick browse into the discussion board showed over 1500 topics, and the latest as recent as 4 days ago. This is merely an indication, I know this does not say much about actual site engagement or the fact regarding dead accounts. However basing on Australian users in 3 top leading social network, Hitwise reports that the average sessions times has doubled from January 2008 in February 2008. This high engagement is perceived as a trend across the region.

YouTube ranks third (3rd) on traffic rankings for Singapore. No wonder. MDA had several months ago put up online a video that earned it more than 100,000 views, more than 400 comments AND comments are still filling screen space since it was uploaded end 2007. Most comments are just bad press if you ask me. The video spurn a viral across Singapore known blogosphere, just google “singapore MDA YouTube” you’ll see. When a friend in MDA first showed me before it went online, I was totally lost for words, know what I mean? [He was beaming with pride, I secretly went OMG]. MDA wins this round hands down, other than the viral it spun, MDA learnt true public sentiments that hopefully leads it towards building brand relevance. MDA has an opportunity to join the conversation in appropriate measure if it wishes.

If you have more to contribute, please drop a note in the comments area and I will add to this list.

The good people from OgilvyOne Singapore organized an interview with Mr Internet himself, Vinton G. Cerf Google’s VP & Chief Internet Evangelist. Doesnt he reminds you of the “Source”, almighty fella in Matrix Revolutions.

I am fan of  Common Craft. It is an art to explain complex ideas, and clear the flog in less than 5 minutes. These guys are really great at it. You almost always go … Ahhhhhh I see

I suggested in my post on Singapore Prestige Brand Award that the web, particularly social sites are the best places to monitor your brand. In the post I made mention of MyStarBucksIdea.com which fell under the radar eyes of Matthew Guiste, program manager for MyStarbucksIdea.com on the same day the post was published. That is one company actively monitoring, and it is good to know they are participating. BTW Matthew, I love the “MA&MT” comment.

The point is, conversations are being said online about products, what they like about a particular service offered by so and so and what not about the experience.? These same voices occupy screen estate on forums, one comment followed by another, flooding product review discussions, and features on social networks help to amplify digital signals carrying each of their own impressions about their lastest purchase to other netizens - literally the good bad and the ugly. In actuality you cannot escape that influence on your brand.

I recently picked up a Webinar link through a Facebook post, focusing on China internet community. Unfortunately I misplaced the link ( I’ll try to recover it and post it here) . It was a presentation on Chinese Internet population and provides an insight to their online behaviour. Amazingly Chinese internet community in 2007 exceeds 200 million users, who spent their time online in social sites like YouKu.com (ranked 8 in Alexa), Yo2.cn and BBS sites. And It is also known that chinese surfer spends time online reading peers review before running off to the stores. The Web 2.0 era is changing marketing strategies quite literally. Such work is done by Sam Flemming whose blog China IWOM I am starting to enjoy these days.

Monitoring Tools ( and free )

Thank God some for the new innovative tools are freely available to us. Below is a list of tools I use to follow some of those conversations. Here, I have loosely coined the term “Sentiment Keywords” to describe people’s feelings towards an object; be it feelings towards a brand or a product or even an experience at the store. The tools below allows you to match and search sentiment keyword phrases that appear on blogs, forums, twitter. And when constructed with a brand name, for example… “GKG sucks” or “MyStarbuckIdea cool”, the results will likely interest people in the roles as brand managers, product managers and marketers.

Technorati + Google Reader

Using the example of mystarbucksidea, I create a feed on Technorati that picks up conversations with mentions of “mystarbucksidea” http://feeds.technorati.com/search/mystarbucksidea. Combine it with sentiment keywords, we can also create a feed to find all blog mentions containing the terms “mystarbucksidea rocks”. I actually did that and I found 2 posts for the latter. You can then add these feeds to your Google Reader account (reader.google.com) and monitor future related entries.

This a free service that searches twitter conversations - real people telling everyone what they are doing, thinking, feeling which reminds me of days in IRC channels. Except in Twitter, the messages stick a very long time. I created a feed with Summize that listens for the terms “Singapore Homestay” on twitter and then add it to my feeds list on Google Reader. To make it even more interesting, you can come up with more related terms combination, phrase matching, exact terms matching. The term “MystarbucksIdeas” twits generates a long list here.

Google Alerts is a love and hate thing for me, it all depends on the frequency. It gets to me sometimes, because I cannot keep up with it always. The nice thing about Google Alerts, you can configure the system to inform you “as it happens”, “once a day” or “once a week”. When a blog, regular website, contains words that match what you are searching for, Google compiles the list and emails it to you.

I was on IM the other day with Connie Bensen, my favourite Community Strategist star and she mentioned about brand monitoring. I am no brand expert, and I did not realize what I was doing with Google Alerts was part of brand monitoring. That sets me thinking about how companies have the opportunities to shape their branding with people who are actually their customers, and ones to-be.

Association of Small & Medium Enterprises (ASME) organizes the Singapore Brand Awards annually to choose winners in several categories who “have managed their effectively through various brand-related initiatives“. I am wondering how many of these companies have turned to conversations in social networks, forums, social enabled sites in helping manage branding activities.

Im a Starbucks Fan and I thought it is kinda nice they are putting up a web site to gather inputs from their customers. That has to do something to your brand, and keep it current with what customers values most during purchases. MyStarbucksIdea is the same as Dell Ideastorm. Ideastorm was deemed the point of return for a company that once entered a brand crisis. You have to be serious enough to bring upon changes with sites like this. Notice that they have “Ideas In Actions” tab, it is not your typical NATO ( No Action Talk Only) fashion. I think this certainly keeps the values of a brand in check.

The Open Room from the people in Ogilvy Singapore, is a blog for brands and bloggers. They started a conversation on the topic Can Brands Have a Social Life. Interesting comments, from that post.

Related Links

10 Top Reasons For Monitoring Brands In Social Media

We are relaunching this blog. The unfortunate happened with our hosting server, disrupted our postings, in fact lost posts. Well what can I say ? It is said good service goes a long way, the reverse is just as true. Moving along, I like to start this first post on the subject that has been keeping me busy lately, and thats marketing on Facebook.

For the marketer, Facebook presents a powerful platform with tools that when leveraged correctly send your brand within the spheres of influence of your target audience, mostly through viral channels. The key to successful Facebook campaign is in getting the strategy right. The steps in an overview - (1) Assess your business objectives, (2) Assess your audience, (3) Design the Strategy & Tactic, (5) Test - Measure, Test - Measure. Let me touch briefly on these.

ASSESSMENT OF BUSINESS GOALS

Agencies sometimes make the mistake of creating expensive ad online/offline, microsite and even Facebook apps without in depth consideration of alignment to overall organization objectives. Define those goals, whether it is to increase site traffic or simply exist to build brand awareness. With objectives clearly written out, you can then work on appropriate benchmarks. Understanding these goals will do you well in putting in place the right strategy.

AUDIENCE ASSESSMENT

Here we start the process with assessing your target audience. Often the questions are “Are they already on Facebook ?”, “How can they participate in your corporate brand ? And why would they care?”, “What are the motivations and value ?” - Get a discount code maybe. The list of questions builds up to help you understand the nature of this group of people, their motivations, so as to lead us further along this process on pinpointing the “what” strategy, the tactics to engage them, and to what end - your business goals.

DEVELOPMENT OF FACEBOOK STARTEGY & TACTICS

With inputs coming from the after assessment stage with audience and business objectives, you are ready to design the strategy and corresponding tactics.

With each tactic, you want to look at a suitable measurement metric. Here we drill down to each tactic and its corresponding measure. E.g. the growth of the community within facebook, carry on actions in corporate owned website. Some of these measurements can be derived using analytics software (e.g. Google Analytics), and within Facebook platform there are analytics for Facebook Page and Social Ads although limiting.