Benjamin Koe

Friendster still #1 in Singapore

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Jeff Roberto presenting some interesting stats at Naumi Hotel, Singapore
Had a lunch session with Jeff Roberto, Marketing/PR Director at Friendster today and contrary to the buzz about Facebook and MySpace, Friendter is apparenty doing pretty well in Asia and stands at #1 in Singapore "with over 1.6 million registered users and 974,000 million monthly unique visitors". Their claim is that over 60% of Singapore's internet population is on Friendster (or at least registered an account once upon a time).
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One of the more interesting insights Jeff gave about the company was that it had a huge mobile focus. The company has the m.friendster.com mobile site and also serves up APIs for developers to create their own apps. And because Friendster seems to be thriving in Asia, they've already created localised versions of the mobile portal in Indonesian, Malay, and Traditional Chinese. I wonder how many of the 1.2 billion mobile phone users in Asia will fancy social networking on the mobile? The other interesting thing about Friendster that I didn't know was that it apprarently has the top user engagement score. That means people are lingering around on each others profiles a whole lot longer on Friendster than they do on other social networks like Facebook and MySpace. I don't get this at all! When I asked Jeff, he said it was the photos, music, and content that people upload that keeps audiences there. But isn't that the same content found on any other social network? I wonder what people are looking at on Friendster. Although I got on Friendster way back in 2003, I find most of my friends are now on Facebook. Somehow the Facebook wave swept through the region and we're now in the swell. But if these positive numbers Jeff gave are anything to go by and Friendsters move in the direction of an open app platform, then there might be a good fighting chance for Friendster to break out of Asia for a global tug-of-war. After all, Jeff did say that there's very little overlap in social network users.

Are we seeing a netbook ecosystem?

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My Eee PC 901 with Ubuntu Eee 8.04.1
This happens a lot with technology. When something becomes common place, we begin to see an "ecosystem" form around the technology to support it and leverage the value that can be added to the technology. While the iPhone is with a good example with its apps, hacks, and websites, I believe the netbook is beginning down that path as well. After getting my Eee PC 901, I came to realise that a 8.9" screen with 12GB of disk space isn't the kind of machine you want running Windows XP and it may not be the best machine for running Microsoft Office as well. I'm starting to see a rise of alternative software specifically built for the netbook. These include Linux operating systems such as Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Mandriva Mini, and office suites like ThinkFree Netbook Edition. It appears that the main consideration for these alternate software is to cater to the small screen size and lack of processor power. I believe that this ecosystem will morph in different ways as the netbook hardware introduces different features. One upcoming paradigm shift is coming with Asus's Eee PC 901 that includes built in HSxPA. That means not just being connected at Starbucks WiFi, but while you're on the move making the netbook more like a 3G phone and less like a laptop. Also, most netbooks today get about 5 hours of continuous usage on 6 cell battery packs. If innovation would would take place and increase battery usage to about 10 hours, the netbook would match the usage of mobile phones, and that will be another game changer. I'm looking forward to seeing more people clutching their 1kg netbooks accessing applications and websites that fit nicely to a 1024x600 screen. The Ubuntu Eee website puts in quite nicely:
Your Eee PC is not your typical laptop, so why should you use a typical laptop interface?

Swapping Windows for Linux on Eee PC 901

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I got my Eee PC 901, the 12GB version that comes with Windows XP, yesterday. Today, it runs Ubuntu 8.04. No, I'm not a Linux fanboy. In fact, I wanted Windows installed to use this netbook as my mobile office especially when I do presentations. But within 24 hours I learned that Windows XP is not fit for the Eee PC and the best alternative is a Linux one. So what went wrong with Windows? Updates. Yes, the very code that suppose to keep you safe and running fine broke my netbook. Like any good Windows user, the first thing I did when I got my computer was to install an anti-virus (I used AVG Free). Then I connected to the Net to update the AV as well as Windows. Now, do note that this simple netbook only has a 4GB SSD for the OS. There's another 8GB SSD as a secondary disk, and the Windows installation is on the 4GB one. As I left the updates to download and install in the background, I decided to install Microsoft Office 2007 on the 8GB disk. That went well and I even ran Word, which wasn't as sluggish as I thought it would be. While there was smooth sailing on the 8GB disk, little did I know that a ship wreck was about to take place on the 4GB disk! All of a sudden, I received a prompt that said I was running very low on disk space. I checked and to my amazement I was down to 52MB! I panicked, stopped the updates and tried to move as many files as I could to the 8GB disk. I even re-mapped the Desktop, My Documents, and Program Files to the 8GB. But even that wasn't enough. Updates kept coming for Windows and Office and these were critical updates! Many hacks later, Windows started acting weird. The Programs menu started displaying odd things and other programs vanished. I didn't know how to fix these, and the updates kept bugging me for an install. It became apparent that a 4GB system disk wasn't enough to contain Windows XP. So I went to look for an alternative and found that there were many Ubuntu projects that focused specifically on the Eee PC. I came across eeebuntu and eeeXbuntu but decided to settle on Ubuntu Eee, which looked like the most popular. It appears that all these were designed specifically for the Eee PC and based off the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I absolutely love this OS. Not only does it install well, it is designed for netbooks. Windows XP isn't. Using Ubuntu Eee, you'll notice that the Windows sizes can't change, every window you open appears in full screen because netbooks already have small screens and it isn't wise to make multiple windows fit into the real estate. The only things that don't work upon install are the WiFi and the Webcam. The WiFi fix is easy actually because there's a native driver from Ralink, but there's a NDISWrapper method too if you want to use the Windows drivers. There's a great tutorial for that here. I'm yet to figure out the Webcam, but let's leave that for another 24 hours. Update: I re-installed Ubuntu Eee 8.04.1 and now everything just works. WiFi works perfect, it even has roaming (auto-detects networks). To get the webcam working was just turning it on in BIOS. Suspend manages to recover well now. The only bug I'm aware of is pressing Fn+F2 to turn off WiFi radio freezes the machine. Hope the next update fixes that. Looks like I've got a full fledged Eee PC without the stock OSs! =) Update 2: If you want to watch Kevin, Preetam and I discuss netbooks, click here.

How good are social media monitors?

Kelvin sent me this interesting blog post by Andrew Frank of Gartner. In it he decides to test social media monitoring companies to see if if they practice what they preach. In other words, do they listen in on their own brand to see who's talking about them. Andrew had listed all the social media monitoring brands at the end of his post.

Most of the brands came back to reply in the comments which is a good sign. But this simple exercise got me thinking not just if they do it, which is easy even with Google Alerts, but can they.

What if we repeated that exercise on a freshly created blog. No search engine has picked it up no one has linked to it. How long and what would it take for these services to find it? I think this would be a true test of these service's technical prowess.

Why do I have doubts? Because just before reading Gartner's blog post, Kelvin and I were mucking around with a new social media monitoring service. I shall not name names here, but one of the keywords we used was "poverty". What was amazing was that it had results that dated all the way back to 1964 (before the Internet was invented by the way) with a grand total of... wait for it... 466! Just for scale, Google returned 73,300,000.

But seriously, I don't expect these engines to re-create Google for the sake of selling a subscription service to marketing folks. I think a lot of them do their best based on search engine results which is a good measure. If it can't be found in a search engine, it might as well not exist. And if you didn't know, a search engine doesn't return results past 1,000 (10 results a page x 100 pages). Also, Steve Rubel believes that search engine page rank is the best measure of influence online.

Plurk isn't a game changer... yet

Today I went back to visit Plurk and updated it since I last left it in favour of Twitter back in June. While I was trying to re-familiarise myself with Plurk, I had a sneaking suspicion that there were many like me who tried it when it first came out but now exist with 0.0 karma and have not been back since. After a bit of poking around, I found that friends like Kevin and Adrianna were karma-less like me. I guess it was comforting to know that I wasn't the only one who can't manage two microblogging platforms. But then in an attempt to restore my Plurk reputation and give this platform another chance, I stumbled upon the very helpful "Find Your Twitter Friends" button. I clicked it, put in my username and got a bigger surprise! All the top social media and Web 2.0 experts I follow on Twitter including Steve Rubel, Jeremiah Owyang, Mitch Joel, and Nat Torkington have picked abandonment in favour of Twitter.
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I don't think Plurk is a bad service at all, but I think it'll take quite a bit of effort to do a Facebook on me (I've officially abondoned Friendster in favour of a Facebook which came much later). Maybe I'll visit Plurk again in another four months to see if it has evolved into a game changer. But for now, there's just too much going for me on Twitter's shores to migrate.

Social Media Marketing Examples in Singapore

I was inspired today to follow the lead of Peter Kim and publish a list of brands that have been using the social media for marketing. This is a great exercise that has given me a good picture of what's been happening. Unlike Peter's, my list isn't as long and it's focused on Singapore. What's interesting is that in Singapore, there's such a lot of blogger relations/events going on. Also, the oldest use of social media for marketing is NHB's Yesterday.sg back in 2005! Well done Walter! My list definitely isn't exhaustive, so if you've got other examples to share, do send them my way or add them to the comments. I also plan to incorporate this into Ming Yeow's Wiki soon. Hope you find it useful too. HBO Asia HP / Waggener Edstorm Intel / Ogilvy PR
  • Blogger Event: Intel Centrino 2 Launch (July 2008) Coverage: Claudia, DK,
Lenovo
  • Blogger Event: IdeaPad S10 Launch (September 2008) Coverage: DK, Claudia,
LG
  • Blogger Relations: LG Secret product review (July 2008) Coverage: IZ Reloaded,
  • Blogger Relations: LG Scarlet HDTV product review (May 2008) Coverage: IZ Reloaded,
  • Blogger Relations: LG KS20 product review (April 2008) Coverage: IZ Reloaded,
  • Blogger Relations: LG 42LB7RF HDTV product review (April 2008) Coverage: IZ Reloaded,
  • Blogger Relations: LG Viewty (March 2008) Coverage: Sparklette
  • Blogger Relations: LG Shine product review (May 2007) Coverage: IZ Reloaded, Sparklette,
LG / Fleishman-Hillard Media Development Authority Ministry of Community, Youth, and Sport / Ogilvy PR Microsoft Xbox Ministry of Health National Heritage Board National Heritage Board / Hill & Knowlton Nokia NParks NParks / Hill & Knowlton Panasonic
  • Blogger Relations: Panasonic Toughbook Product Review (February 2008) Coverage: mrbrown
Sony / Hill & Knowlton Samsung
  • Blogger Event: Innov8 Launch (October 2008) Coverage: Nicole,
  • Blogger Relations: Video Camera videos (February 2008) Coverage: Estee
Starhub Pfingo Yahoo! / Fleishman-Hillard

Remember to engage the fans

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This morning I was at Social Media Breakfast 4. It was my first time to SMB and I have to congratulate the organisers on getting a great crowd. I loved the fact that there were so many people from PR agencies and corporations there trying to pickup on new ideas and network with bloggers. Today's session focused heavily on blogger relations, for some strange reason because the topic was "Corporate Adoption of Social Media", and while listening to the discussions something was bugging me about what was being said. Everyone wanted to find out which were the best bloggers, what bloggers wanted, how to treat them, what to expect from them, and what they wanted to do at events/engagements. It them occurred to me that the reason all that sounded strange was because the fundamentals were missing. No one said: "I engaged a blogger because he/she bought my product, loved it, and blogged about it". This I found quite funny because anyone who's been doing social media marketing knows that to start you need to listen. And if you've listened right, you'd know who your fans are and who you need to impress a second round. I have also noticed that at most corporate blogger events in Singapore, it is almost always the same bunch of bloggers. It can't possibly be true that all these same folk bought and loved Samsung, Sony, Intel, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. To me the biggest mistake a corporation or PR agency can make is to aim for the highest profile bloggers and neglect those not-so-famous fans who have already blogged about them. Not that engaging the popular bloggers aren't a good idea, but seriously, we have to start where it matters and greater impact is felt when one of these fans tells his buddy: "Hey, after buying this product, they invited me to check out a sneak peak of the new model and it's damn hot!" Well, at least that's what I'd go after when trying out blogger relations.