I've been thinking about the way PR folks measure their success. In Singapore and most markets I've worked with, the standard KPI is clippings. But I have a problem with that. Yes it is easy to count, but as a boss or client, what is my influence? You see, the mass media is dead. By dead I don't mean out of business, but dead in terms of influence. Before the age of the Internet and cable TV, it was easy to communicate your agenda and news to the masses. Just get into the newspaper (most cities/towns in the world have only one) and get on TV or Radio. But today, with hundreds of cable/satellite/IP TV channels, approximately 200 million blogs, millions of online news sources, and not to mention endless hours of uploaded video, there is no media that reaches the masses. All that's left is niche media and highly distributed media. This shift affects the PR industry the greatest and it really calls for a different game plan. I feel that most PR agencies, at least in Singapore and Asia, still live in denial and continue to sell the "we have great friends in the media" pitch to prospective clients. In our social media age where a single obscure blog post can turn into a whirlwind of influence (remember the HD DVD key issue?), calling the editor-in-chief of the newspaper your best buddy isn't exactly a trump card anymore. The advantage of a good PR agency is its ability to produce stories that spreads. It doesn't matter if that story goes out to a journalist or a blogger, as long as it's online because good story spreads no matter what. So until we can do wireless keyword search on everyone's brain, I think that the true tangible effect of influence from a PR perspective is how well it spreads. It's not impossible to accomplish as proved by the launch of Cuil. All it took was one good press release to get this snow ball rolling.

Last Friday I spoke at an workshop hosted by the certain government organisation. My portion of the workshop was about using the social media as a marketing and communication platform. I approached the topic in an allegorical fashion by looking at the impact of the social media as the ripples in a pond produced by dropping a stone in. Here are some the points I made regarding approaching the social media. 1. Bloggers aren't always the best way to go Most people look at the social media like a shopping spree. They run right into the mass of bloggers and grab randomly a couple of popular ones who they think will blog about their product or service and wine and dine them in hope of a blog post. While this approach can be useful for certain popular consumer products which do end up spreading like wildfire, what impact does this approach really have among the approximately 200 million other blogs worldwide? 2. Start by leveraging your existing stone Most corporations forget they already have an existing ripple generating platform (read stones). It could be a website, a product, or even what the public are searching for. By grabbing the random bloggers to pitch to is like creating multiple tiny ripples with limited influence. No one knows where the impact came from, and the influence can be easily forgotten. With a little bit of research using Google Insights, for example, you can easily find out what people in any market are searching for when it comes to your product or brand. Leverage their habits you can communicate with them on what they're already fascinated by. Here's a simple example: Searches for BMW spiked around interest in F1 in Singapore. Did BMW take advantage of that to reach out to people searching for it online? 3. Create a resource Resources as opposed to corporate brochure sites are a great way to utilise the social media. Not only do people share them with others they know need them, but they often get bookmarked and referenced when needed. A resource could be anything from a niche search engine like ExpatFinder or a simple blog post like this one which was bookmarked on delicious by over 700 people. 4. Be your own media Traditional PR tells us to communicate to the mass media and make use of their platform to influence the public. In the social media we get the chance to be our own media. One of the best examples in Singapore is Yesterday.sg. This is a blog run by the National Heritage Board and it is not only a marketing tool for the organisation, but also a really useful media resource for anyone interested in heritage and history in Singapore. 5. Create content that spreads Everyone loves viral videos. But what's better than one viral video is a viral series. A lot of marketers try for that one big viral campaign. But why stop there when you can make a whole show? The prime example is definitely Gary Vaynerchuk's Wine Library TV. All he does is sits behind a desk, talks about wine and goes crazy over the New York Jets. This simple production has become a real hit online. What's interesting here is that while he could have sold the show to TV networks or cable channels, he continues to provide it free online. Why? Because when things are online with a permanent link, they spread! People share these in email, on their blogs, in social bookmarks. Try that with TV shows. 6. Build community The final point I made was the importance of building a community. Not just getting eyeballs on your fancy campaign, but get them to come back again and again. Get them to contribute content, make them talk to each other, make it worth their while in participating on your platform. Every organisation I believe can build community from their base of fans to the smallest of niche user groups. Communities make people realise that they're not the only ones using your product and can easily get support and feedback from the community. Marketters should also think about growing these communities empowering existing members to help new members. Software companies such as Six Apart are especially good at this.

I thought I'd write about my bus trip from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur and back over the weekend since there was actually interest expressed on Twitter. What's most fascinating for the technorati is that this is a high-end luxury coach that provides power sockets for laptops and free WiFi as well as a personal movie/games-on-demand on a swivel 11-inch LCD screen. For readers who are not from Singapore or Malaysia, travelling from Singapore to KL and vise versa is a common occurrence in these parts with the road trip lasting between 4 to 6 hours depending on the traffic and how many speeding laws you break. This was my first time on an Odyssey coach. It cost S$110 a person (return). This could possibly be the most expensive bus service for this route and competes very closely with Areoline. I have to admit, the money spent on it was worth it because it was definitely my most comfortable trip to KL. I actually prefer this to flying. OK, no point me rambling on here, let me show you some pictures and explain along the way. This is what the bus looks like from the outside. I actually like the professional look and colour scheme and really stands out as premium compared to other buses that use loud colours and tacky phrases. This is what the bus looks like on the inside. Above is from the front, and below is from my seat looking out. Now for the exciting part. That's me using the WiFi to check mail. If you're ever within 10 metres of these buses in Malaysia and want to borrow a little bandwidth, you can whip out your WiFi-enabled device and try to connect to "odyssey[bus number]" SSID. Mine was odyssey1603. The fidelity of the connection isn't perfect. I felt it was close to 70% up time. While in the bus, there's no issue getting the WiFi signal, always full bars. The only problem is the backhaul. My guess is that the router is connected to a 3G data modem which gets a connection where the network is strong. At times along the highway download speeds were slow or even absent, but near KL and JB it was pretty good. Every seat on the bus feels like a quality airline flight with its own entertainment system. But unlike the one you get on Singapore Airlines, this one looks like a home-grown system. It has both a English and Chinese lables on its controls and the movies have A and B sides--you know what that means--VCDs! All of the content was digitised and very well delivered through the client box and Ethernet cables under every seat. Lastly, here's the view of the "cockpit". It is actually quite amusing to listen to the cabin crew welcoming you onboard and introducing the Captain. Short of the phrase, "...we hope you enjoy your flight..." you would have thought it was a Boeing you just hopped on. That's it from me. Maybe you can try it out yourself and let me know what you thought. Would like to see other coach services step up to meet the needs of the technorati. It was a rather productive 5 hours for me.

This is a note to bloggers and also a followup/response to Vanessa's and Claudia's honest and very helpful blog posts to PR folk. Being a PR guy before, I'd like to propose that the reversed approach could work for bloggers too and possibly reduce the amount of miscommunication and frustration felt on both sides. If you've never received an invite from a PR agency or corporation like Vanessa and Claudia and you want to get in some of the journalistic action, here are a few tips on how you can go about making yourselves known to PR agencies in a productive way.

1. If you're seriously into something you know corporates use PR agencies for, write to them! For example, if you love your Nokia mobile phone, why not write in to ask to be invited to the product launch of the next product? I would suggest that you could even propose fun things to do such as borrow the product for a review, tell them you want to do a video review and upload it to YouTube, etc. A good starting point for bloggers in the region is the Asia Pacific PR Directory.
2. PR agencies need to justify to their clients why they're spending time and money on you. So when you write to them, tell them not just your interests, but also alert them to your Technorati ranking, and reveal a bit about your visitor statistics to prove you're worth their while.
3. PR guys need to be smart about who they target and brief their client on who's coming. So make it easy for them by always having an about/profile page and readily available contact details such as an email address and mobile number. Photos of yourself would be useful too if they've never met you before.
4. If you have a bunch of friends who happen to care about something niche, like a bunch of technology geeks who want to check out Microsoft's PhotoSynth, why not write in as a group and propose to the agency to persuade their client to get a really good engineer down to demo it for you while you livecast it.

If this reversed approach makes you shy, let me tell you that many professional journalists do the same when they want to write a stroy on a specific topic/technology. PR agencies are gateways to top corporations and have ready spokespeople to speak to you on the topic that inerests you most. All they ask for in exchange is influence through an honest medium. So if you're already going to write about something you love so much, you can make use of the agencies to get so much more. On the flip side, if you hate a product you got, you can feedback to the PR but customer support will most likely be your best bet in solving your crisis.

Last week I had the chance to play with three of Sony's latest Cyber-shots: the T77, T500, and T700 at their media/blogger event. For a guy who's last digital camera was a Canon PowerShot A70 from 2001 (it was revolutionary at that time mind you), these new point-and-clicks were gifts from the future. My favourite was the T700 (pictured above) mainly because it came with 4GB built-in memory. That makes absolute sense. No need to carry many storage cards and swap them around, just turn on and shoot. The other thing that fascinated me was the button-less back panel. Nothing there but a huge touchscreen. No it isn't like the the iPhone's pinch-to-zoom one, but Sony did a decent job is making full use of the real estate. Talking about touch screen, the T700 and T500 had good solid touch screens, but the T77 used a soft material, like the one on your laptop's LCD so that when you touch it, it produces those scary LCD ripples. Felt like I was going to damage the screen... and yes you were suppose to touch the screen. The last thing that thrilled me was the smile shutter. I know, tacky right? But it's amazingly fun! What it does is automatically snaps a photo of you when you smile. No pressing of the shutter release, just snaps on its own. There are just so many applications for it: wedding reception tables, candid shots at parties, etc. Oh and just one final point to gloat: I ended up winning a Sony DPF-D70 digital photo frame! So did DK, Esther, and Nadia! w00t!

Since my exit from PR, I've been getting a couple of invites to blogger/media events organised by PR agencies for their clients. Being on the "other side" has made me think about the effectiveness of reaching out to bloggers. I'm beginning to realise, at least in Singapore's technology industry, that it's always the same few bloggers who get invited to the events. It's definitely fun in the beginning, but unlike media, bloggers do not have the obligation or need to "fill a page" or "file a story" like journalists. Because of this, the fun wears off when a blogger realises that he/she didn't really fancy the product that was launched and the outreach is wasted. My advice is that PR agencies need to move one step up and not just invite bloggers for the sake of getting an online clip, but invite those who are truly interested. For example, I posted a simple post on the Ruckus Wireless’ MetroFlex DZ way back and within a month, I was contacted by the local distributor here to ask if I wanted to try it out for myself. I said yes. And ended up making a video of it with Kevin. The key here is having a conversation with an interested party instead of inviting the random blogger to every new product launch. It would definitely be more worthwhile if it was more targeted. If a blogger uses an iPhone, Apple should talk to him/her. If they use Sony Cyber-shot cameras, Sony should invite them to the events, give them media discounts, etc. This way brands can build ambassadors while achieving PR goals. That approach is obviously more time consuming, but it is definitely more rewarding. My guess is that it isn't being done well in Singapore. A good example on my blog is despite my two most popular posts of all time being about my Samsung i780, Samsung's PR agency has not even tried to make contact. In this world of search and links, it really isn't about the overall rank of the blog that matters, but what visitors are going there for. I dare say that the thousands of visitors to my Samsung i780 posts easily beats and definitely influences stronger than other blogs with better overall readership.