Archive for the 'Communications' Category

For all of you digital natives and visitors, one and all - Happy Holiday Season!

Thanks to Roger at Groucho on the Rye for first sharing this vid with me.

I’ll be taking a break away from the computer now to enjoy the winter festivities. See you in 2011!

~~~

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Over on Sharon Bakar’s blog recently, she bemoaned the fact that Malaysians still did not seem to be reading. This has been a long-time issue for Malaysians as far back as I can remember. Many of us are good at business, finance, engineering, IT etc but not so many of us are world-class writers. The local publishing industry is small and focuses mainly on business and self-improvement books rather than fiction or literature. The market just isn’t there.

There appeared to be a glimmer of hope in the last few years with the rise of litbloggers in Malaysia - people who love books and reading and who blog about their passion. Many are also published as well as aspiring writers. They gather regularly in Kuala Lumpur (KL) at book events and also in writing groups, some hosted by book-lover extraordinaire herself, Sharon Bakar. But for all their literary and intellectual abilities, this seems to be a small group who, while well-respected, are not generally treated to events of pomp and circumstance with corporate sponsorship and the recognition of celebrity status - eg. in the same way that in the UK, there’s the Booker Prize dinner which is covered in the press as well as on TV.

In contrast, I’ve noticed in the last year or so that bloggers have been getting the star treatment in Malaysia in a way that seems to overshadow the book writers. Last year saw the launch of the regional Nuffnang Blog Awards to honour the best bloggers in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Australia . It was a glitzy, black tie affair held at a fancy hotel, apparently modelling itself on the Oscars and was even covered by the Malaysian terrestial TV channel NTV7.

Kenny Sia, who won Best Entertainment Blog, leads the Blog-Rat Pack, with his personal blog rated as the no. 1 blog in Malaysia by the global blog ranking service Technorati. He has become a celebrity through his blog which then launched him into other high-profile roles eg he was invited to be a panellist on the Malaysian X Factor like web TV show, Malaysian Dream Girls, alongside other A list celebrities. He has been named as one of the “Top 20 under 40” influential people in Malaysia by print magazine KLUE.

Nuffnang continues to play the role of star maker with its Project Alpha web TV series, which is “the first Online TV Show unveiling the real faces behind Malaysia’s Top Bloggers”. According to the blurb, “The show will take audience into various sneak peeks of bloggers’ lives, who they are, how they live, what makes them tick and where they derive their inspiration to capture the attention and interests of millions of online readers on a daily basis. The show will also try to uncover their darkest secrets which they keep hidden from their readers.” Kenny was one of the stars in Season One and the measure of the show’s success is that Season Two is now underway.

So Malaysians may not be reading books but they certainly seem to be reading blogs. My take on the rise of celebrity bloggers there is that bloggers connect with Malaysians as Malaysians. There’s no attempt to polish their English or to write in a literary way - they just write in their own voices, as Malaysians, and that is what gives them a strong connection with their readers. Their fans identify with the bloggers - their sense of humour which is typically Malaysian, their interests, their daily lives. In contrast, novels as we know them today are really a Western art form, dominated by native English speakers from the UK and US, with prizes created in the West catering to a Western taste. The West defines what literature should be. So for Malaysian writers trying to break in to that field, it is bound to be much more challenging than for writers who are comfortable working within those defined parameters. Similarly, for Malaysian readers, it can be challenging to sit down for hours on end reading about stories and people that do not speak to you or even have you in mind as an audience written by people who don’t have any real connection or feel for what your experiences might be. In my view, it’s not surprising then that bloggers have taken hold of the Malaysian imagination in such a big way.

The other thing is that there is Nuffnang taking a very active role in making the blogging stars. They are an ad/ PR agency matching blue chip global brands such as Sony, Adidas and the like with bloggers as a way of marketing those brands. There’s money in them thar blogs, so to speak. I’m not aware of any similar sort of business taking an interest in writers and in fact, the general refrain I hear (and not just from Malaysian publishers and writers but globally) is, there’s no money in books.

Here is a trailer for Project Alpha Season One:

So, is blogging becoming the new art form for Malaysians? Are the bloggerati the new literati? Should the rest of the world take the cue from Malaysian bloggers and start recognising and celebrating bloggers as the new influencers and new creatives for today’s generation?

What do you think? Have I missed something in my outline of Malaysian writers as the poor relations of Malaysian bloggers? Please let me know, especially if you have personal experience of the writing and/ or blogging scene in Malaysia.

Photos: Sharon Bakar, from her online page
Kenny Sia, thanks to KLUE

As some of you may know, I’ve been involved in a community blog, in my local area, Dulwich OnView, which is the blog of the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery. We were invited to give a presentation on our strategy and volunteer strategy at a conference for the museums and heritage sector last week. This is my report from that event (which is also appearing on Dulwich OnView):

You may have caught The Virtual Revolution on BBC last Saturday night, which gave on overview of the way that social media has been changing our society and culture. According to the programme, 18 million people in the UK read blogs - that is about a third of the UK’s general population of 61 million. Blogs, social networks, Twitter and the like are now pretty much mainstream and and it’s not just businesses who need to adapt to these new ways of communicating. Museums, galleries, libraries and the heritage sector are more keen than ever to find out how to use these tools to engage with their visitors and users.

Which is where the Social Web Conference, organised by the UKOLN comes in. They are part of the University of Bath and are “A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities” and last Friday, they held a conference about Web 2.0 and social media for the heritage sector at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Marieke Guy, UKOLN’s research officer and organiser of this cutting edge conference invited our editorial team to give a presentation to the delegates about Dulwich OnView. It was a further opportunity to showcase our “online magazine” to the heritage sector as an example of how blogging is being used to raise the profile of the Gallery and build an online community around the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery, the charitable group that raises money and supports the work of the Gallery.

I was first up and outlined the strategy and context behind Dulwich OnView. One of the aims of the Friends is to invite more people to join as members and to encourage a diverse range of people to come along to Gallery and Friends events. The Friends put on a lot of events - films, talks, concerts and more - and the Gallery of course arranges many exhibitions with with associated art classes.

But Dulwich OnView, the Friends’ blog covers more than just these events and includes articles, videos and photo-stories about loads of arts, culture and music in Dulwich and South East London. Why? Well, we reckon that if you’re interested in all those things, you’re going to be the kind of person who’s going to enjoy Dulwich Picture Gallery - but you may not have initially thought of yourself as a “Gallery type” because, maybe, you’d never heard of the Gallery or it seems a bit too posh or stuffy and serious and is not for you. On Dulwich OnView, we hope that our readers can see that people involved in the Gallery and the Friends are just like anyone else who enjoys arts and culture in the local area and that you’ll be tempted to check out Gallery exhibitions and Friends’ events as a result.

We’ve been really lucky in attracting writers, photographers and filmmakers as well as wine experts, historians and just ordinary folk who love arts or the local area to contribute articles to the blog and to become part of the regular Dulwich OnView team - all on a voluntary basis. What this shows is that the Friends and Gallery are becoming more and more part of the local community through this blog as much as the local community becoming more aware of what the Gallery and Friends have to offer!

So how do we do it? How do we manage a team of volunteers on no budget at all and with no central office space? Next up was Angie Macdonald, web designer and Dulwich OnView trainer and editorial co-ordinator. She explained how we devised and set up a virtual system, working entirely online, to allow our bloggers and editorial team to be self-managed. There’s no “boss” although there are a handful of us who help co-ordinate the team. We all contribute a range of multimedia items about whatever we feel like (in keeping with the mission of the blog: “celebrating people and culture in the Dulwich area”). To avoid duplication of content and chaos, we note down what we’re going to post on the blog on an online editorial schedule hosted on Google Docs which our regular team can all have access to from any computer. There is a library of “how-to” online manuals which explain how to upload posts to the blog, how to add photos to our Flickr site and also sets out procedures and policies for our rota of editors. One of our team is in fact now in Belgium for her day job but can continue her role as one of our editors due to this virtual system we’ve set up! But we’re more than an online team - those of us who are around in South London meet up once every 4-6 weeks in the local pub for a drink and a catch up as well as to discuss future article ideas and plans for Dulwich OnView.

Freelance writer and museums consultant Steve Slack picked up on this theme and told the conference how his involvement in Dulwich OnView has led to some good friendships with people on the team, as well as offering opportunities to meet loads more locally through covering local events and interviewing people in the area for the blog. Articles on Dulwich OnView range from art to fitness, dancing to allotments, tattoos to wheelie bins - as well as events put on by the Friends and the Gallery. But being a blog, our posts publicising Gallery events don’t offer the usual PR blurb but we give them a quirky twist - for example, an opera themed event inspired a blog post with a special opera themed recipe for our readers.

Ingrid Beazley, former Chair of the Friends and e-learning project developer at Dulwich Picture Gallery, acts as our liaison with the Gallery and Friends. She rounded off our session with some stats that show how Dulwich OnView is having an impact on drawing more people online to the Gallery. Most of the organisations we have written about link to us from their websites. 53% of our incoming traffic comes from these local supporters. Although 98% of people visiting DOV are not searching for Dulwich Picture Gallery, 33% of onward clicks go to the DPG website, mainly to exhibitions and events pages. The Gallery links to DOV in places and 14% of our incoming traffic comes from mainly their events pages as people click through to find out more from the enhancing articles written by locals. DOV is the 9th largest driver of web traffic to the DPG website.

As to how much of that translates measurably to new Friends memberships or extra tickets bought for events and exhibitions is difficult to say at this stage as there is no system in place as yet that specifically tots that up. However, we reckon that increased web traffic to the Gallery’s main website via Dulwich OnView can only mean increased awareness of the Gallery within the local community and that can only be a good thing.

One last thing I should stress. Blogging and social media may be making headlines right now but they in no way supercede traditional marketing, which continues to play a key role for heritage organisations. Kate Knowles and her marketing team at the Gallery reach a very wide range of people through traditional media such as the BBC, broadsheets and other national and international outlets. Dulwich OnView complements their activities by making connections with a different community, especially those people who might not initially think of themselves as Gallery going types.

We are all thrilled that this blog that began as an idea over drinks among local neighbours has managed to have this small but significant impact for the Gallery and the Friends - and continues to impress the heritage sector: Dulwich OnView has been showcased at conferences in Iceland, Montreal and London and will also be featured later this year at the Museums and the Web 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado.

If you’d like to find out more or to join our team of regular contributors and editors, or if you just have the occasional article or multimedia story you’d like to submit, please email our Acting Editor via dulwichonview[at]googlemail.com (substituting @ for [at]). We’d love you to become part of our community!

Further articles about DOV:

Dulwich OnView in Iceland

Dulwich OnView in Montreal

A Museum Blog By The Community For The Community

The British Malaysian Society put on a great event the other evening at Jom Makan, just off Trafalgar Square, for the talk that I gave with my co-author Silvia Cambie on using social media for business. There was a good crowd there - a mix of Malaysians and British folk ranging from representatives from the Malaysian High Commission, Malaysian students and British and Malaysian business owners and solo professionals. Silvia spoke about the use of social media by global business, giving examples from multinational companies and also international associations. Changing gear, I focused on small business and solo professionals who use blogging and social networks, throwing in a mix of Malaysian and British case studies.

Here are some pics from the evening:

There were some interesting questions and also a good discussion after our formal presentation. To give you a flavour of the issues of interest, here are my notes on two of the questions that people wanted to discuss further:

How useful is Twitter for business use?

In Silvia’s response to this question, she gave some examples of how Twitter can be used to encourage delegates at a conference to participate in the discussions through Twitter - she is implementing this strategy for one of her clients, the European Commission, at an event coming up soon. The Twitter comments and conversations can be collected through tactical use of hashtags (a way of attributing a common keyword to a Twitter conversation eg including “#leweb” in your “tweet” to reference the Le Web conference will enable it to be collated via a search of that hashtag) after the event and analysed/ reviewed by European Commission ministers.

For small businesses or individuals, I suggested that Twitter is also a good way in every day usage to make an initial contact with people who may be tweeting on topics you are interested in and this contact can then be followed up by email, for example. It’s a good way as well to ask questions and invite opinions, especially if you are researching an issue eg for an article or a book. You can also raise your profile and expertise if you tweet about your speaking engagements and projects you may be working on as well as engaging in discussions on topics of relevance for your industry.

Can you make money using social media?

Silvia highlighted that sales of virtual items on the Chinese social network QQ brought in revenue for the owners of that network. There are ways to monetize social media through such innovations but it is a matter of identifying the right market and products that can be sold in this way.

I offered the counter view that the value of social media is not necessarily in direct sales but rather in creating networking opportunities. It falls in the ball park of sending out mail shots and newsletter or taking clients out to lunch or coming along to networking events such as that night’s events where you might learn something useful for your business and also meet some interesting contacts. There may not be direct monetary value but the value comes through making contacts and building relationships with them.

Thanks …..

And as a last word, Silvia and I would like to thank Haliza, Louise and Zehan as well as the other committee members of the BMS for inviting us and for organising such a pleasant evening!

Youtube can help you hit the big time. It’s official.

I blogged awhile back about Malaysian singer songwriter Zee Avi, who was discovered by an L.A. music agent, after she uploaded a video of herself performing a song in her bedroom and now has a record deal and is touring music festivals around the world.

Now, a commercial director from Uruguay Fede Alvarez has been offered a US$30million deal from Hollywood after uploading a short sci-fi video “Ataque de Panico!” (Panic Attack!) onto Youtube:

And the short apparently only cost him around US$300…

Too good to be true?

Well, apparently, global blockbuster District 9 director Neill Blomkamp (also a commercial director) got his big break after his viral short Alive in Joburg got him the chance to work with Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings). That partnership eventually led to Blomkamp’s chance to make the feature length version of Alive in Joburg, which became District 9.

You can watch the short below:

The magic seems to work for videos that have a scifi theme or lots of special effects/ explosions. However, I wonder if any budding Woody Allen’s have had their Youtube flicks picked up by the big studios….?

The other evening, my co-author Silvia Cambie and I, along with corporate communicator Marc Wright, gave a talk at the Asia Pacific Technology Network (APTN) on Asia and the Interactive Web, at the invitation of Louis Turner, APTN’s chief executive. (Thanks, Louis, for inviting us!) APTN is a group for people interested in Asian technology and the evening’s guest included technology and patent lawyers, telecommunications entreprenuers and Asian affairs specialists.

Silvia spoke on the shift of economic power from the West to Asia and presented some case studies on use of social media in China by companies such as Toyota. I discussed the use of social media by the Asian diaspora and how the internet is helping an emerging class of affluent, influential and articulate Asians network around the globe. In counterpoint to the two of us, Marc gave the view from the West, highlighting that businesses no longer controlled their messages and the importance of engaging in social media with an authentic voice.

One of the things I enjoy about blogging and social media is how it has enabled me to connect with a range of talented and creative people whom I would never have met otherwise. As I went through my slides, I was struck that two of the three case studies I presented were due to Malaysians I had met via blogging:

• Photographer Steven Lee first approached me via my blog to ask if he could photograph me for his book on prominent Malaysians (as it turned out, I couldn’t participate in the end because, technically, I’m now British, but we’ve remained friends and hook on on Facebook, via our blogs and also in the real world). He was my first case study that evening - an example of how an Asian living in London networks globally through social media to raise the profile of his photography business.

• I learnt about Rantauan.com, the Malay social network, through journalist Zaharah Othman, aka blogger Kak Teh. I left a comment on her blog once and she then came along to read my blog. We corresponded via our respective comments pages and then by email and then finally met up in London for coffee. I’ve since interviewed her about political blogging in Malaysia for my book and she’s written a number of articles about my books for papers in Malaysia.

To top it all, I was really pleased to finally meet in person Chinese-English translator Nicky Harman who has written for this blog. She contacted me a few years ago out of the blue asking if I knew how she might find a publisher for her translation of Striking Root. Directly as a result of her blog post about the translation, a publisher got in touch and was interested to publish the book. As it turned out, Nicky went with another publisher in the end but there’s the power of blogging for you. Anyway, unknown to me, Nicky is a member of APTN and so the other evening, we were able to meet for the first time in real life!

Here are some pics of the evening, including one of me with Nicky:

These are the slides for my talk at London Metropolitan University, Business School on Thursday evening 15 October:

… together with the full length email interview I conducted with Martin Smit, host of The NBT Podcast:

If you’re doing something remarkable to become a “Social Media Idol”, I’d love to hear about it - I am researching a book by that same title and I’m looking for great case studies. Leave me a comment or email me via the Contact page.

I’d like to thank Milan Todorovic, Senior Lecturer/Course Leader for Music and Media Management at LMU for inviting my co-author Silvia Cambie and me to speak at the University. You can follow us on Twitter.com - Milan = @LondonMetUni), Silvia = @xculture and I am @fusionview .

Whenever I talk to businesses about blogging, this issue invariably comes up: “We don’t want a blog because, well, what about negative comments?”

The thing is, people are talking and commenting about your business online - as well as off-line, I might add - whether you like it or not and whether you have a blog or not. It’s difficult to track what people are saying offline because speech leaves no vapour trail. But chatter online does. The very least any business needs to do these days is to accept that blogging and social media are here to stay, whether they like the idea of these things or not - and to monitor what people are saying about their business or brand online. They may not be saying it on your business’s blog because you don’t have one - but they may be talking about you on their own blogs, in forums, on Twitter, on Facebook etc.

And now there is a new player in town that could transform the whole web into a social network of chatter and comment - Google’s Sidewiki, launched within the last few weeks. The unnerving thing about it is that it enables people with the Sidewiki app installed in their browser to comment on your website or blog or webpage right there next to it - the comments can be seen by others who also have Sidewiki installed BUT you won’t know about it unless you also have Sidewiki. As the webpage owner, you cannot control those comments in any way - not delete, not hold for moderation, nothing. You could add your own comment within Sidewiki if you install it on your own browser and as the site owner, you have the right to insert a sticky comment that always stays at the top of the comments once you’ve verified with Google that you are the site owner - but that’s about it.

So the old strategies of making your visitors register in order to leave comments or holding comments for moderation are all out the window. Anyone with Sidewiki installed in their Internet Explorer or Firefox browser can comment on your webpage anytime anywhere and those comments will be viewable by anyone else who has Sidewiki.

Here are a couple of comments I found on the Sidewiki alongside The Times Online front page:

• Anthony Anders - 28 Sep 2009
  We can now comment without limitation - Not one comment I have ever entered on any of your articles has been approved by your team of censors. Now, thanks to SideWiki, we can comment on your articles freely. As you gradually see the comments on your website move to Sidewiki rather than appear on the site directly, perhaps you will engage in some deep and thoughtful reflection about why this is happening. Perhaps you will even begin to recognise your own failings.

  Richard Hamerton-Stove - 1 Oct 2009
  Digital Healthcare, PH7
  Indeed - I’ve only been using the sidewiki for a few days and already I find that its pervasive nature suits my browsing habits much more than the somewhat awkward and clunky comment features. The moderation issue is one that we’ll have to watch closely.

Andrew Keen in The Telegraph and Charles Arthur in The Guardian take an “anti” stance and worry about Google dominating the web and collecting the data from Sidewiki to monetize users comments in some way. They predict that take-up will be slow or minimal and that Sidewiki will die its own death.

The level of entry is relatively easy for most people - click to add Sidewiki to your browser, sign up for a free Google account and away you go. So take-up could be huge. But I think that the problem will be spammers, flamers and trolls - if they take over and cannot be controlled in any way, then regular people will desert Sidewiki or not find it worth signing up. Personally, I’m finding the app interesting to play with at the moment - it’s fun checking out the “hidden” comments that only us Sidewikians can see (a little icon of a comment bubble appears on the left side of the screen to indicate that someone has left a comment on the page you’re looking at) and I’m having a go leaving my own side comments. There is integration with Twitter and Facebook, and you can also share your comment by email. My comments are all aggregated on my Google profile.

Web strategist Jeremiah Olwang has a much more interesting anaylsis of Sidewiki and its implications for businesses than the knee-jerk “hate it, hope it goes down in flames” angle of the two broadsheets I mentioned. My own view is that whether Sidewiki in its current form stays or goes, the trend is towards an open-source approach to commenting and discussions and we will be seeing more public, free-for-all (in all sense of that phrase) spaces for everyone and anyone to throw in their tuppence worth.

So, for any business reading this, whether you hope Sidewiki will live or die, you need to add it to your tracking tools for now…

Illustration: screenshot of sidewiki column alongside Guardian page

My good pal Susan Macaulay posted this video on Facebook, asking if it was real or fake.

Wouldn’t it be cool if it were real?

I’m afraid it’s not. It’s a clever viral add in the German market for Microsoft Office Project 2007 - see the Mach es Machbar (Make it Possible) site. The Google transalation of the German text is below:

Bruno Kammerl `s point landing:

Make it possible - with Microsoft Office Project 2007
The man without fear of big ideas - is it really?
Bruno Kammerl Even if an invention is. The time is ripe for new heroes.

Product Shoot Microsoft Office Project 2007 Make it as Bruno - realize your plans:
With Microsoft Office Project 2007.

Twitter is THE big thing these days on social media. Barack Obama and other presidential candidates made it hip for politics in the last couple of years. Celebs like Stephen Fry and Oprah have also helped with bringing Twitter to the masses. Royalty have got in on the act - check out Queen Rania of Jordan (thumbs up for a smart and appealing use of the app) and also the British Monarchy (thumbs down for press releases galore).

Now, it’s the turn of the RAF in the UK and NASA in the US to use Twitter to bring what they do to a wider, global audience. The RAF hopes to use Twitter and also Flickr to help with recruitment, according to New Media Age (NMA). Six RAF personnel have been given multimedia phones to upload pictures and commentary on what they are doing. One paragraph at the end of the NMA article made me smile: “The RAF’s latest recruitment project comes as the Central Office of Information revealed its annual report earlier this week. It spent £40m on digital marketing in the 12 months to March 2009, an increase of 84% year on year” - I hope that they didn’t spend £40m just to come up with this Twitter / Flickr campaign!

Over in the USA, space agency NASA has its own Twitter feed as do a number of astronauts such as Mike Massimo and Mark Polansky. There is also a general NASA Astronauts feed. I’m following the two astronauts mentioned and it’s wonderful and surreal to read their updates from space - all about space walks and orbitting earth - while I’m here at my desk going about my daily business. We’ve come a long way from the Apollo missions and the moon landing back in the ’60s when we all crowded round the TV or radio to hear the latest bulletins - now we can get real time updates straight to our PCs or mobile phones directly from space!

Photo: thanks to ImpactLab.com