So while i haven't been updating much these days, mainly because i don't see a need for this blog to be a diary of sorts anymore. i suppose my blogging habits have changed, as perhaps my lifestyle and thinking has shifted too.
i've been noticing a similar trend with my friends as well, and maybe with the entire ecosystem.
i think there will always be bloggers, but one thing i've notice is the rise of blogging networks that behave more like online publications (Mashable, Techcrunch, Readwriteweb), and really have achieved a sort of critical mass for influence and timely news.
i find personal blogging to be mainly more of a niche now, and yet they will maintain their audiences because of the opinions they have and share.
the entire ecosystem is so vibrant and fragmented at the same time, that i wonder if it's near humanly possible to ever join those dots.
maybe those dots will never all really be joined, as much as we as people will never all really meet every single person in the world.
yet we all add to this ecosystem we call The Net. we all leave our footprints in this virtual world, we breathe its same air of ones and zeros, and exist as people or ghosts. interacting or watching, this is a medium that increasingly doesn't act as any physical comprehension, but virtual opportunities abound.
the question is, if you die in The Net, do you die in the real world?
but Shelly does make a very important crtique about the state of the way social media is being engaged in Singapore.
if you're wondering what this means to the PR practitioner, new social marketer, the digital advertiser, blogger or all-in-one communications extraordinaire, have a read and we can always discuss -)
Singapore's social media landscape background: agencies and corporations in Singapore probably started experimenting with blogger engagement in early 2006. i remember Fleishman Hillard's LG Blogger seeding programme quite well. Seed bloggers with LG Shine phones, no strings attached and invite them to write an honest review.
2007, i joined Ogilvy Singapore's Digital Influence practice, and promptly got started connecting and engaging with some of Singapore's bloggers. Other agencies and marketing managers also started their own engagement programmes, and blogger events became the 'standard' way of engaging bloggers.
engagement is one thing. what about community building? what about building the relationship between brand and blogger?
i guess these are the signs of Singapore's blogosphere maturing. as communications practitioners, we should be ready to meet the present and future needs of communications.
what are such future needs?
1. community building / involvement - whether you like it or not, the net has brought us closer together. some bloggers have chosen to maintain their privacy, let's respect that. but there is also a growing community of well.. communities. Ping.SG, Singapore Plurkers, fans of local bands, political advocates, social media enthusiasts, photography groups, driving enthusiasts, food reviewers, travel writers, philanthropic bloggers, technopreneurs.. etc.
is your BRAND getting involved? and as a blogger, what is your PASSION?
2. the cutting edge of communications - i'm never satisfied with doing what everyone else is doing. call it divine discontent. if you look right, i look left. and because i've always been critical of the media, i decided to study about it in university, and found myself working a job in the media industry.
- the net has given everyone a voice, but some voices are louder than others. but the net has also connected people, and made it easier to communicate, spread information, organise events, and where i find a lot of value, bringing people together.
- this means, i meet like-minded people who talk about social media, who see it as more than just events, and coverage, but the walking together of owning your own community. not that you're the leader, but you're a part of. in church, we talk about taking ownership of one's ministry, or responsibility. it's the same thing, taking ownership of your community, is to work to build, improve, and make each community you're a part of, the best that it can be.
- having said that, we have to be on the cutting edge, laying a good foundation that "social media" has helped empower her users, and not merely be a house of cards or dot.com bubble 2.0
3. Your audience matures - there's only so much longer before people become more media literate. my parent's generation didn't necessarily grow up with a television
- i grew up with the television, and to a certain extent, the Internet.
- there's a whole generation that is now growing up with mobile broadband Internet. if i think i'm so great with my suite of web2.0 tools, i cannot begin to imagine what we'll see in the future.
- as hardware improves, so will software, so will communications, so will how we make use of technology
- growing up in a mediated environment might naturally make us more cynical and skeptical of what the mass mediums put out. today's underground is tomorrow's mainstream. people may find it harder and harder to believe something they've read, watched or heard. they need to make their own truths, and to believe in something, means they have to publish it themselves.
- i forsee an explosion of content producers in less than five years, as today's 14 year olds develop tomorrow's new web platform.
- as a communicator, will you mature along with your audience?
This post has been brewing inside my head for about one or two weeks, and i thought, i might as well whack the initial thoughts out while they're still fresh, so here goes:
Beyond blogs, there's more to it right? i mean, afterall, it's only been the last two to three years that communications and marketing people are starting to take blogging more seriously. Already in Singapore, we see more and more bloggers being invited for press events, blog advertising is becoming more sophisticated, going beyond banner ads into more community centric events, or at the very least advertorials.
but make no mistake, we have not arrived, all this is just birth pangs and teething problems. blogging will continue to evolve, or the blogger will. and along with it, communication, marketing and advertising practices.
yongfook talks about the evolution of blogs into lifestreams. We interact with the internet so much, that lifestreams will basically aggregate our online experiences, a somewhat centralised point where people can be kept up to date about our activity on the net. kinda like leaving virtual breadcrumbs. all picked up by RSS readers of course.
friendfeed and sweetcron are the possible first manifestations of this future. you can check my friendfeed on my sidebar. everything also gets aggregated to my tumblog
So what do i mean by "Beyond Blogs"? Well, as the communications industry and corporate entities start paying more attention to bloggers, recognising us as part of the communications ecosystem, inviting us in their conversations, activities, press conferences, product reviews.. etc. we're already seeing how blogs and bloggers are evolving.
this is where some of my fear and paranoia lie, especially as a communications practitioner. what sort of blogging culture are we breeding with our media activity? do we see the blog as a tool? or the blogger as the tool?
there's a stark difference in this. i value the blogger. i think the blogger and their ideas, conversations are what i'm interested in when we conduct media activity. the blog in that sense, should be the least of your concerns. there are so many ways BESIDES the blog to share information and have conversation, and yes.. these conversations are increasingly happening online.
and with communications practitioners constantly reaching out to bloggers, what culture are we perpetuating? i won't go into much specifics, but i hope it won't become a festering pool of product placement, fake shakey-cams passing off as "reality", or ungenuine reviews and reporting. what's the point in all that?
communication that matters, is when it's genuine, transparent and meaningful. but i think that's too much of an ideal, there will always be some corporate matters that stay corporate matters. Maybe if we all thought carefully of what our businesses are about, we would know how to communicate it to the media, to the people.
by starting on the this train of thought, the concept that goes "beyond blogs", is to perhaps envision a future where media and public life are asynchronus. where press events can become public events, afterall.. everyone has a media capture device these days. and we'll get our share of professional media, and personal media.
it's earstwhile to highlight this post by Chris Anderson, who champions the passionate amateur, as opposed to the bored journalist. LINK
he's a bit biased, but i agree with him. but i believe thie bored journalist happens when they've lost their lustre to write. we still have great journalism today, and some very memorable ones in the past. and good journalist deliver a value that sometimes even the most passionate amateur may not be able to deliver. perhaps a skill, a flair, a trained insight, the kind of thing that only professionalism can give you.
but i'm not discounting passionate amateurs, who go out of their way to find the information that makes the most sense to micro-audiences, and sometimes, very wide audiences... increasingly, this line is getting blurred.
different motivations for very different writers. in that sense, whether paying a blogger is something we want to discuss, i say that as more journalists find themselves blogging, and as more bloggers find themselves being credible, responsible and professional, there's a middleground where both meet to be writers/bloggers/content producers that get paid.
in the future, we HAVE to see more content producers, as audiences get increasingly fragmented, post modern, searching for different facets of the truth, that there will be a breed of digital natives that are credited, and regarded to present that truth, or at least a facet of it.
will it go beyond eyeballs and readership, subscription numbers? i don't know per se.. but i'm very interested in any conversation around that.
but the media network of the future will be far more interesting, more brazen, more truth seekers.. but it'll also be harder to tell the truth from lie, from signal vs. noise.. it could go either way. i don't know if i dare predict utopia.. i envision more happening, but whether or not it ends up as a good thing, depends on how we wield our tools now.
if traditional media enabled us to connect, by informing us about the world around us and gave us a common stage to have the same knowledge. then social media has enabled us to participate by allowing to publish anything, from text to multimedia.
participation requires connection, it is a step up from merely being in the same room, you need to say something in order to be heard.
that's the main difference i see between the media we used to have, and the media we currently have. and so, you need a new media strategy, not because you want to exist in the mindshare of the public, but because you want to participate with them in their conversations.
i first pushed "publish" more than five years ago. it was the thirty-first of january 2003 (i checked). i was still in the army then, and i had no idea that i'd see myself this far down the future.
call it a bit of a retrospect, but so much has changed since then (i was 21 when i started the blog) and i just turned 26 two days ago. add the time between finishing national service, 3.5 years studying in murdoch, perth and almost a year and a half in an agency, i'd say things have pretty much evolved from when i was just a wee lad in my early twenties.
for starters, coming full circle, i started this blog as an extension of myself, then i got embroiled in turning this into a professional mouthpiece, but now, i'm inclined to return to my roots. That this blog is me. it's gonna be a meepok blog as uniquefrequency describe diarist style blogs. why is this important to me? well.. i do my professional blogging elsewhere, namely the open room and i'd like to keep this space my little broadcast to the interwebs. a space where i can remember, and converse without corporate strings tugging.
i think this is essential to maintaining some sort of personality and identity to my craft as a blogger (if i can even call it that). futurebureau explained it nicely when he IMed me this morning, saying that'd he'd blog to benefit a user's online experience. for me, that's partly where i'd like to take my blog to, and also.. to help you see the world through my eyes. not that i have anything better to offer, but that's why i started reading blogs in the first place, to see things through your eyes.
i refer to this video from ghost in the shell: stand alone complex. tachikomas are wondering why we humans still use words to communicate with each other. why indeed? for starters, as sophisticated as language is, it really is rather primitive, only in terms of how it can be transferred. if what the tachikomas say is true, then if you and me formed a data link, you would instantly know how i was thinking, feeling, tasting, seeing.. my five senses would be uploaded to you straight away. but still, here we are on blogs, evolving as blogs are, larger data packets, more multimedia, audio, visuals.. but we're still limited by what we can do, or what our abilities are.
you can watch the video now:
but that's exactly what keeps us human perhaps. that even in a data link, i'm still me and you're still you. even if i experienced in all five senses what you experienced, i cannot put it into the context of you. in other words, i can't transfer my soul to you and vice versa. as human beings, dare we say we are more than experiences, cells and subatomic particles?
i know i majored in mass communications back in uni, but it's this other side of our non-professional selves that i'm interested in. what do we share with each other that makes us human? i do think that one of the reasons that we share, whether online or not, is to elicit a response for something or someone else. to validate our existence, that proves we are not just a figment of imagination, not just a passing of time in the vast cosmos.
and we do that by sharing things. social media has made it easier, it's been used effectively by entities and people to better understand where we're all coming from. i don't know if it's the fulfilment of the dialogue, but i believe we've only taken a step forward in terms of communicating, or finding new ways to communicate. we can now have threaded conversations and everyone can crowdsource and be part of a discussion. we are no longer bound by geography, language (language bots), audio visual aids and etc. the gift of the internet is unbridled communication tools. but the beauty and mystery of conversation and dialogue, still lies with the human. who moves like a reed in the wind, fluid, taking the story wherever he goes. to those who will listen.
An innocent tweet about the new socialite, an upcoming blog that seems to be covering the new media scene / blogosphere / twittersphere around singapore.
and they quoted me! linked my blog. AND! deemed my friend @ambarvalia crush worthy -)
oh, the wonders of having me as your friend will do wonders for your brand!
well, in my defence, i never "accused" anyone. for further evidence, please refer to above image and notice the tone of my "non-accusing" tweet. i mean, how harmless is that? -)
anyway, i don't think the new socialite means any harm, and i've already subscribed to its feed. if someone else has got the pulse on singapore, you've already got me hooked as a reader.
i've also yet to join the Facebook group that nadnut invited me to for sweets.sg. i saw the trailer, and looking forward to what these new players in the vodcasting scene are gonna show us!
my oh my. what a tragically long absence away from my blog. for a variety of reasons, i had avoided penning down my thoughts because as fatigue took over, i didn't want to post incoherently.
unfortunately, as the week progressed, more and more things amassed, and my lack of a draft system meant that i wasn't taking note of what i wanted to blog about.
there were a few highlights:
1. social media breakfast 2 i had fun as usual, and was always good to touch base with one of the more prominent blogging communities in Singapore.
3. byzantin3 posted some highlights from vinton cerf's keynote address. [vinton is part of the team that created TCP/IP protocols that are the architecture the Internet is built upon] here. her department, Ogilvy One also posted an interview they had done with him online. chekkit out, it's 5 morselly minutes of goodness:
4. there's a new commoncraft show: social media in plain english
5. but do checkout the hacked version by kommonkraft for the new media douchebag.
i wish i had more input to the things i've just shared, but i'm a bit swamped with the way life is catching up with me. countless rehearsals for church, gigs and weddings make for a busy month. but things should lighten up after this week. *hopes meekly*
in other news, the new Baybeats 2008 website has been launched. My band Leeson will be playing at "Asia's largest indie rock festival" so do pop by and check out the video teaser they've put up for our band and the other 10 as well -)
www.baybeats.com.sg my props go out to you and whose army? anna judge april. silhouette and cardinal avenue!
a rather interesting micro-phenomena has been going on in my life. twice in the past week, my good friend napture has been informing me of new media (NM) trends and stories as they were reported in traditional media (TM), or blogs that he had come across.
The first story was coming across uniquefrequency's blog post "Why Generation Y Doesn’t Read The Newspaper And Can They Do Anything?" Now, i posted this about three posts earlier, and actually was blogging live on the IDC conference when uniquefrequency first made his comment. so in some sense, this came as 'old' news even though he informed me one day later.
The second story was when Digital Life ran the story of how Twitter helped a UC Berkley undergrad escape incarceration in Egypt after being arrested. @Techcrunch first posted it on Twitter (of which i subscribe to) about the article that he blogged on Techcrunch. This news comes one week late to me.. and it's interesting because journalists are following the same bloggers / new media evangelists that i follow. which is somewhat natural.. wisdom rises to the top and becomes influence.
we really live in a world of decentralised information, where no breaking story is really breaking for a very long period of time. i'm also reminded that my perception of the world is shaped inherently by the media i choose to consume. which also lies my diellema of choice. there is no way we can read all the sources of information online, and thus doomed to only shape a fractal truth of something that really happened. it's the post-modern state where everything is nothing at the same time.
so how i live my life, is based on the choices i make everyday, what i read, consume and spit back out into this world. just one more blip in the pulse of the intertubes.
but anyway, i digress.. the point of simplicity that i'm a trying to make is that, i have simplified my life with the use of RSS feeds. at a glance i can see all the news and information that i choose to subscribe to. some are more useful than others, some are entirely useless, but at its heart, i chose to subscribe to them.
mass communication models are breaking down, they can no longer hold the control of one way information via broadcast, print, radio.. everything is splintering apart, everything is fragments. media people, corporations and the consumer have to recognise this. that the old way of doing things, the old theories do not hold true anymore in a connected world. new theories have to be thought of, something to explain the things we see.
the vague and loose point that i'm trying to make about simplicity is my own natural evolution in the way i aggregate information. i'm trying to apply John Maeda's laws of simplicity to my own aggregation of information, and the first law, reduction, are wise words to live by.
"The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction."
you can download laws of simplicity wallpapers here
so, do have a rethink of the way you consume information, what you can leave out, and what you can't do without. then think of the process in which you consume that information, and if you have a need to aggregate that information, find out what tools you'll need, if not.. don't bother -)
okay you lot. this sod promised Daryl that he would go down for the Social Media Breakfast @ Frujch last saturday, 29 March 2008. i'm glad i did, i met a bunch of great people, had really good conversations and best of all, i enjoyed myself.
it also got me thinking, as PR practitioners who are evolving, we always talk about "oh yeah, and we can leverage on social media to do x-x & x for your brand / organisation." but seriously, i think it's a whole balloon of hot air. why?
because we focus more on the "media" than the "social".
when we focus more on the media, public relations doesn't evolve, it stays the same and we basically riddle the intertubes with more bad PR, more reasons for bloggers not to want to meet us, more reasons for corporations saying that social media doesn't work, more reason for the public to see us as spin doctors. what we basically do, is spread more PR jargon and out-dated messaging methods on the myriad of "social" media tools at our disposal, be it blogs, forums, youtube, flickr, twitter, jaiku, myspace, friendster, facebook, pownce, plaxo, twhirl.. bla bla bla
you get the idea. that's what i loved about the Social Media Breakfast. i could have gone to NUS to attend Web 2.0 - Emerging Industry Series, and as much as i love Kevin and Vantan, they do such a great job explaining what they do on the blogs and vodcasts, that i needed to challenge myself with something really new, and that was to be more involved in the community that i reach out to when i represent clients, and for my own personal interest of better understanding this emerging media industry.
a simple breakfast gathering, no fancy powerpoint presentations, measurement or videos. this is where SOCIAL media gets very very very interesting. meeting like-minded people, and very different people, this is the stuff that people experience and can talk about.
i know for a fact that there was plenty of socialising at the other event, but i'd like to think the the SMB proves that social media is more about the people and community, than it is about cutting edge technology, new ways of communicating and all the other cool technical stuff. social media, in its essence, is about meeting people, sharing and publishing our thoughts to the intertubes.
so as a PR practitioner, don't be bowled over by the communication tools that are out there, they are important, yes.. they help bridge you and the community together, but what is even more important, is to meet your community, face to face, help your clients meet their fans, their advocates, share some of the insight and joy of working in your really cool organisation to the folks that are fans.
afterall, how difficult is it to say "hello"?
personal tagging i actually started del.icio.us-ing myself by pasting links over myself, and pasting links on people. something the toolkit didn't tell us we could do -) *smirk*
some bloggers who've covered or the Social Media Breakfast
1. miccheng - now with more video! 2. ridzuan CEO of widgeo.us, with whom he told me many great things and we had some great conversations about social media. 3. and daryl of course, who organised the breakfast.
and of course big shout outs to other bloggers i met that day 1. DK, yes your arm longer than mine -) 2. Rinaz, you asked me why things are becoming more complicated when it comes to blogging these days, i hope to answer your question soon, but even top bloggers in the US are not spared the fate. -))) 3. Nabilah, thanks for the food and hahaha, perhaps our next meeting will be when Jonpan arranges for one of his schemes again -) 4. Hisham, sorry we didn't get to talk, but there'll be more opportunities! 5. Jerrick, always a pleasure to see you -) 6. Jean, i do hope you get better soon -)
one of my main gripes is, people expecting a digital influence strategy to be the miracle pill to all your business woes.
the audience exists online right? so why not just reach out to them there? yeah, the proof is in the pudding, but i'm sure every marketer and advertiser has also seen the charts that indicate, the money simply isn't going into digital. markets in Singapore are still holding on very tightly into investing their marketing dollars into traditional media, a paradigm that is slowly losing its audience to a fragmented media landscape.(but constantly evolving, more on that next time)
so anyway, say you do intend to put your money where your mouth is, and invest into digital strategies. you've made the right first step, but digital isn't just a digital carbon copy of traditional strategies. if i may mention seth godin's analogy of the meatball sundae.
traditional marketing, advertising and PR is your meatball. it tastes great, it works well, it's been established that these are the best practices to approaching each discipline. However, using an un-thought digital strategy is like putting whipped cream, cherries, hot fudge and a waffle to your meatball. the toppings taste great, but they really don't make the product any more palatable.
what you want, is a digital strategy that works more like meatball sauce, or spagetti to go with your meatballs, or change your practices, products, organisational structures to become more like a vanilla ice-cream. that's when instead of just getting a single meatball or a single scoop of ice-cream, you get a much richer and fulfilling brand.
so that's all fine and dandy, yeah, great analogy Seth, but what next? (i havent read that far into his book yet, but i'm going to hazard my opinions and guess here.)
in my line of work, i can reach out to bloggers, i can talk on forums, i can get stuff onto facebook, i can do a lot of things that gets the word out to people who are influential and where certain niche audiences exist. but sometimes, we still have a certain old mass media mentality. we want EVERYTHING. and we end up cluttering the web, adding noise to signal, telling stories to people who don't want to hear it.
i suggest, targeting specifically the key influencers for any project, and be open and transparent with them. the advent of this digital age, is that we should no longer need to read between the lines of press releases, or the hidden agendas of media publications.
the blogger is unique, in the sense that, he/she is doing it for himself, whatever their motivations are. but its so deeply personal that hidden agendas can easily become the public scrutiny.
so hence this changes for PR, direct communication. listening to what people are actually saying after you tell them a problem. are we really listening to what people really want to say? i've always believed that by asking the right questions, you'll get the right answer. don't just ask generic things, ask what's really pressing in today's fragmented media. people are calling out for more transparency, more realism, more entertainment, more interactivity. and we've shortchanged them more than we have listened to them
in terms of advertising, was talking to a few creative people in my agency, we all know banner ads are dead. if your marketing dollars are simply going into banner ads, fire your media agency, they obviously are holding on to old-world vestiges.
we talked about interactive microsites, mini games, in-game advertising (think WOW, racing sims, sport sims, metauniverses) but above and beyond, Digital solutions don't always solve your traditional problems. the general evolution of advertising will somehow find its way to be more targeted, so that when you see an ad, it makes perfect sense to you, it doesn't piss you off. it's more like a personal assistant or friend that recommends you something you might have forgotten, or not known about. i guess it's sort of like having a girlfriend who buys you gifts, and if she understands you, she'll get stuff you like. (not she likes)
this evolution can come from the traditional sense, it doesn't always have to be digital. because the problem is not always about where the audience is, but how the audience is perceiving the media around them. HENCE, marketing, advertising and PR all have to meet this mindset change.
people are changing, mass media is probably going to give way to mass micro media. content providers have to deal with smaller audiences, but really serve their audiences, and prove that the audience they're reaching really pertains to what media buyers should be putting their money into. hence.. the conglomerate might be dying it, specialised units is the way of the future. it's easy really, as the market fragments, shouldnt our strategies as well?
maybe one of a man's most innate fear is that he is obsolete, redundant, and basically all the things he isn't that he thought he was.
does your spine not tingle when the cold, thin fingers of fear arch their way across your back as the impending doom of non-existence looms in the horizon?
that you are not needed
that you are no longer wanted
that everything you thought you knew was a lie
of your own self-confidence betraying you
and all you're left with is the empty shell of your own prerogative?
can self validate self? is our own reality our own illusion? when stacked against the mysteries of just this universe.. truly, the cosmos are vast are we are but a speck in its awesome wonder.
in case you were wondering, and as much as i evangelise about new media, nay to you marketers and people going places.. there is more to this than just social media and the wisdom of the crowds.
there is the voice and the wisdom of God, something we have exchanged for our new gods, ourselves.
it's probably not advisable to type an entry at 1:52 in the morning, but i can't help it. i logged on, after everything was over. and it's true, everything is over and this blog really feels like dead space.
to think it used to be a glorious space of ideas, thoughts and musings, and now it's the graveyard for days gone by.
i don't think it matters to the masses, i'm probably the oxymoron of digital influence, i believe in micro-casting more than i believe in the mass media, it's just that i think i'm part of the minority, and not the wisdom of the crowds. As such, the majority will always be correct, and the lesser voices will be the wrong who think that they're right.
so much for grandiose notions of having a voice that matters, the truth is that nobody cares, and we only hear what we want to hear.
i can't trust popular opinion, i don't see why anyone else should. what does your heart say? what do the voices in your head tell you? do you listen to your soul to tell you who you are? or what other people say you are.. we have exchanged the truth for the lies of the world today.
according to www.strumpette.com, Loren Feldman is their person of the year. I had to hear what he had to say about his predictions for 2008, and his predictions for all these new social media applications notwithstanding, it was his final sentence that made me realise just how important this man's voice is.
watch the video, and listen out for the clincher at the end:
"it will finally dawn on people that the most important voice on the web, is their own. not the dopes that they are following."
while it may seem ironic that i'm putting this much weight on the apparent 'dope that i'm following', it nevertheless is timely advice to us all who.. may take social media a little too seriously.
too many times, we tend to associate how popular a particular post, or how many comments its generated as the voice that matters, we try to measure an influence on what other people say.
but does one voice that disagrees against what ten thousand other voices are saying mean that it should be dis-credited? on the contrary, if that once voice were yours, as long as you believe it to be true, it matters to you. hold on to your integrity, be honest with yourself at the very least, and don't believe in a lie.
that's why i don't have advertisers on my blog, i'm not skewing my posts to attract readers, nor am i writing for more readers. at the end of the day, this is my voice and i'll be damned if someone else told me what to do with it.
i'm sure there are many many definitions about social media, so i shan't add to the already saturated or diluted (depends on how you look at it) pot of ideas, but if i may, i'd just like to propose in a nutshell as to what social media means to me:
when you and i produce content that is accessible to someone else, that content is social media
why is this important? it means we have the power to publish, and become something like citizen media, and hence 'social' media. available to your fellow man via the internet, wifi, wimax, mobile device.. etc only problem is, we tend to be rather unregulated, and the number of illegal porn sites should bear testament as to how deep the south is where we're standing.
i used to be a production student, and so i was trained to shoot video in the highest possible format, and also be technical in the way i approached my cinematography, production, what format to shoot on, what format to export to and all the things that go in between. i shan't say i'm very good, but i guess i wasn't too shabby either.
anyway, fast forward a year, i find myself in the PR industry as opposed to production, and i found myself still holding on to those processes. i'd want to edit with professional software like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premeire Pro, but getting my hand on the software and hardware was an issue altogether, i just wasn't earning enough to equip myself with a semi-professional studio.
enter: my epiphany that social media has flourished because processes were simpler.
my ethos now, to borrow Masamune Shirow's Appleseed quote: functional simplicity, structural complexity
i want technology that works. at the push of a button, processes are automated, a product of high quality through the automation process, and then perhaps an improvement of a process when customised by the human touch.
anyway, my point is this, after i decided on this, i ditched trying to get my HD camcorder to work with my offline editing programme, and got a video recording of my band's performance through my point-and-shoot digital camera, which records a compressed .avi file. after which, i edited in Windows Movie Maker, exporting to a .wmv format, and then using a video converter, i converted it into a .mp4 format. Which is now ready to be hosted on youtube.
Absolute Beginners
and the good that came out of this, is that my video converter is my new maxim in wonderful ones and zeros. it converts most formats (.flv .avi .mpg) into .mp4 which seems to be the language of ipods, mobile phones, mobile devices, portable media players and video hosting sites such as youtube.
the complexity of social media, powered by a single "convert now!" button on this beautiful piece of software. i now enjoy videos on the go through my ipod, from stuff i've downloaded off the net. next up, figuring out how video podcasting works in syncing with my ipod, and perhaps starting my own vodcast! we'll see..
no, it's not writers' block, it's just that i've been rather busy between the last sit-down post and this one.
i'm marred that the only real time i get to sit down and fill this blank white space, is when i have no activities and can actually sit in front of the computer and do stuff.
and i've done stuff, such as changing the look of this blog to colours which make me feel more comfortable, and perhaps reflect my state of mind. white goes rather well with black don't you think? colours as expression are usually overrated, i see this as a black and white canvas, especially when it comes to text.
text should be black on white, or vice versa.
so between our last conversation and this one, i've done a couple of things. firstly, i'm constantly updating my links. if there's one thing that i've loved about the internet, is that it allows me to share. now, i'm usually not bothered to update my blogroll or links list on the right, so if you want to know what's been appealing to me on the internet, check the del.icio.us cloud on the right and click on a tag that piques your curiosity. that usually gets updated regularly when i'm surfing the net at work, and if you want, add me to your network and share some links with me too. i really heart del.icio.us
i'm still trying to figure out what the problem is with my HV-20 and why adobe premiere does not recognise it as a camera device.
one thing that has been of interest and keeping me busy the past week has been the National Drug Abuse's latest anti-drug campaign, if you play, you pay it's nice summarised in this article here by the Straits Times Interactive. there's also a video at the bottom left of the page where i'm interviewed about the blogger involvement in this project.
the story has been picked up on tomorrow.sg and singapore daily, two singaporean aggregation sites worth your while if the net ever seems a bit too much to trawl. it was also one of the top posts on ping.sg, a singaporean version of digg. and from my end, i think that is pretty good coverage for something that hasn't particularly been plugged to death by mainstream media.
other things that have been hot, and i've been watching closely as well are repeal 377a vs. keep 377a. it's nicely tracked by singapore daily, so do stop over if you want to bring yourself up to speed about its developments. and in case you've been in the woods, the government has decided to keep the law in place, making it illegal for homosexual men to be caught having sex.
i'm still saving up for my black mac book, which i hope to purchase at the end of the year, and maybe a canon 400D kit after that.
daniel and i have also been busy getting our 2007 mix cd just right for our close friends, and it's also an annual project which we do to summarise the year in music, what got us excited, and basically a platform to share the joy.
okay, i really have to support one of the coolest people i know. virtually.
haha, i actually got to know of kevin lim's blog, theory is the reason by sheer luck while surfing ping.sg, but the quality of his content always kept bringing me back to his blog. i must admit, communications theory has always intrigued me, and maybe that's why i'm also currently doing what i'm doing, engaging people on the online space.
i was initially inspired to blog by two bloggers, yongfook and styra back in 2003, but lately it's been kevin that really inspires me to always think of the future of communications and what possibilities lie across the horizon.
so i must admit that i was stoked when i read this off his blog. a blogging scholarship! support kevin's work! vote now!
hey gang, for those of you who are rather astute, you'll noticed that i've finally added an RSS subscription button, and here to tell you all about it are the kind folk from the common craft.
and you'll also notice on the sidebar, my del.icio.us account. if you want to know why del.icio.us is one of my favourite web 2.0 applications, watch this video at your own peril!
i hope these videos helped you in your adoption of the more recent web 2.0 applications, and how you can use them to your benefit if you're running a more professional blog, or even a social one. it doesn't really matter, just think of the new ways you can connect to your readers!
and if you're an avid RSS user like myself, please subscribe to my feed! haha, because heaven knows i've probably already subscribed to yours!
Okay, forgive the really cheesy title, but i'll be going down to Popout tonight, thanks to the fabulous invite from estee! i'm really looking forward to this, especially the presentation by gen kanai of mozilla! if you happen to be there, do remember to say hi! i pretty much look the same as the profile picture on the right.
since there are only a couple of us here in singapore who are practicing public relations and are also active in new media or social media (links on the right under the header public relations), i see it as a sort of corporate responsibility to talk about the topic of where public relations fits in the grand scheme of all things new and social media.
as a public relations practitioner, we cannot blindly charge into this new space with six-shooters blazing without a plan. when you engage a blogger, or a participant in this new social space, you cannot just treat them as professional journalists, nor can we just infiltrate and saturate the space with crappy public relations practices that might also explain the current mindset people draw when the public thinks of public relations. if you're a public relations practitioner, or a blogger approached by a public relations representative, or a communications student, i hope this post is for you.
many times, society has been burned by the more 'shadowy' tactics of public relations. while i know must of us practice with a high level of professionalism, all it takes is a few bad eggs to make a lasting negative impression. so now that we are all trying ways and means to come up with best practices for this new media, can we avoid the mistakes others have done? i hope so. for starters, i won't claim to be an expert or have all the answers, but i hope that i can keep to my integrity both personally and professionally, and i hope the same goes for you too.
some of our counterparts have come up with the term pr 2.0. now we have to be clear that this does not just mean practicing public relations using new technology. what brian solis stresses is that because of the new publishing power bestowed onto everyone now, and not just people in the media and publishing industries, user-generated content is a force to be reckoned with. so remember, its not just about blogs, rss feeds, video and audio podcasts, it is ultimately about the people. that is pr 2.0, valuing the people, and the communities that people form, both virtually and in real life.
so if i could put down in point form, what i've learnt so far while working as part of ogilvy public relation's digital influence team, interacting with some bloggers and my own challenges when walking through a digital strategy with clients, it would be this:
1. engage and understand the space by reading blogs, forums, online magazines, watch youtube, chat on msn, use facebook
2. when you find that you have too much to read and consume, start looking to RSS and starting an online reader like google reader and start syncing feeds to your reader and watch how it magically updates so you don't have two millions tabs or windows open.
3. now, you've got tonnes of individuals updating you about what's going on in their lives, their areas of expertise and their industries, what you need to do now is identify the communities that are forming.
- for singaporeans, i recommend these wonderful aggregation sites that help sieve blogs for us, and actually some have formed their own little communities within them as well.
4. finally, if you're up to it, start engaging! by this i mean, start your own blog, lifestreams, social bookmarks, youtube accounts, podcasts, upload pictures, get your own facebook accounts.. and with RSS, you can sync everything to one another.
and just to show off a 'lil bit, you can find me on all of these, if you know what i'm talking about, add me to your community or network, and you can be sure you'll receive only the best of what my clients can give you. in the end, you have information and i have information, let's tell more people and have a ball. that's one way of looking at public relations -)
