Survey Results for SMB4 Thanks everyone for helping out with the survey we drew up for Social Media Brunch 4. As it was our first “structured” session, your feedback and suggestions are very important for us. About 70 people were at SMB4, and we’ve received total of 20 responses for the survey. Let’s take a look at what we’ve got from the survey… Of the 20 who responded, 75% of them have attended SMB before. And everyone likes the new format for SMB4, with 55% loving it! (Thank you!) Let’s take a look at the responses for the rest of the survey… So generally, most of you like the panel discussion but would like to have time for networking too. We will make sure that time will be better managed in future sessions so that everyone will have time to interact too. As for the Q&A part, we’ll try to make use of our forum or Twitter during the session to get a secondary discussion going on too. This will be exciting! Feedback and suggestions for future panel/sharing sessions… (listing down everyone’s comment) Try to ensure that all parties in a topic are represented in the panel. Consult people you consider experts on who to put in the panel if you have to. Need to moderate the discussion. It seemed like Facebook and social media is a must for all companies and agencies, which is clearly not the case. Audience feedback would be nice. It’s the 1st time (?) with so many corporate representatives. Some of the audience might be intimidated to share thoughts. not too corporate please! Too many people on the panel and too many from similar backgrounds. Social media is so much more than blogger relations but because most of the panelists were from PR background, there was too much focus on blogger relations. May have to play by ear. While there should be time for networking, if the panel/presentation etc is really great, then networking can be secondary. Could have a debate as well.. Have bloggers who are not affiliated to PR, advertising or the likes on the panel Have a fixed agenda and try to follow to the time. The panel discussion should have rounded up before the break. The 2nd half of the 2nd half of discussion was alright. Moderation of the panel could have been better. Suggestion would be to allow people to submit the questions before the panel/sharing sessions, or passing paper around for people to fill in as the session proceeds. Not too much self promotion please. don’t look at seperating them into two distinct things you need to do. networking vs. panel. there’s value in both. if anything, facilitate more conversations with the audience and the panel. stress that no one is an expert, and encourage people to speak up and ask questions More diverse panel to represent all aspects, from corporate to agencies to consumers. More interactive - perhaps breakout sessions may help as 70-strong group is too large for real interaction. There was insufficient discussion about social media apart from blogging and social media for FMCG corporates. As an example, what about social media as a tool for B2B companies? How about the relevance of a social network implementation for maintaining a community of customers? I’d like to see more blogger interaction - I want to get to know you and understand the online persona may not match the offline one. sigh. We’re glad so many of you are supportive of the idea for donation. Few of you even are willing to pay to attend! Thanks so much! We were still worried that it will push participants off if we start collecting money at the door. Thanks to everyone’s help, we managed to collect total of $360 from SMB4. All money received from donation will be used in the planning and running of SMB sessions. You can also take a look at where your donations (or sponsorship) are used here. As you can see, our cash flow is still in the red. If you would like to help support us, please do get in touch with us. To find out more about sponsorship for SMB|SG, please refer to this page. We will also fine-tune on the registration process and work harder to make the overall organisation and flow of event smoother. More suggestions/ feedback/ comments/ complains for SMB | SG team Keep it up guys. I took so much away from this round. Looking forward for more! Give perspectives from public sector and to balance out the private sector? You might want to get experts from outside of Singapore. There are many pro-bloggers in Malaysia who would make great speakers. 1. The moderator should be more knowledgeable. He didn’t know the diff between “blog” and “blog posts”, and didn’t know that most pple referred to rss feeds when mentioning “feeds”, and not facebook feeds. 2. Moderator talked too much, esp about his company. 3. “Complains” should be “complaints” 4. Do publish the survey results (comments should be anonymous of course) Like the format of SMB4. Looking forward to more sharing and discussions like SMB4 happening in future sessions! Keep up the great work! Thanks for the effort! You guys are awesome! but i’m biased cuz i know you -) but yeah, keep it up! Know the team had wanted to avoid corporate sponsorship, however donations are not sustainable and corporate involvement will certainly help defer costs and take care of essentials like venue and F&B. This doesn’t mean SMB needs to endorse the sponsoring company - it could be as simple as having a door gift, or a quick 3-min spiel on the company during a break, or some branding in the room. That said, there is value to SMB and people are beginning to recognise that. Attendance fees for future SMBs can certainly be considered. Generally, would have like more networking time at SMB4. Lots of familiar faces to catch up with, but this also meant less or no time to meet with first-time attendees. Perhaps an ice breaker session or coloured tags to identify first-timers to facilitate meeting new people? 1. Consider using Qik.com or UStream.com to do live blogging of the event. Not sure how many people will come on to watch but certainly those who woke up late would have an option of taking part in the action. 2. Consider using live wiki/blog to have participants start discussing about the topic while the panel is on-going. Overall, EXCELLENT job in getting the whole thing up and running!! Kudos to the entire team and keep up the good work!! I love the tagging idea! Bring it back =) WOW! That’s a lot to digest right? There are many constructive feedback received and they are all very useful and encouraging too. If there’s any more feedback to share, please do leave a comment here. Thanks everyone again for your support and we hope you will continue to support us. SMB|SG Book of Transactions As mentioned, we will be keeping an open ledger to record the financial transactions for SMBs. We have published a spreadsheet to record the transactions of Social Media Breakfast. It will reflect the money spent for SMB sessions and the amount received from sponsorship and donations. This book of transaction will be maintained by the team. We want to remain 100% transparent with the funds we received, money spent and the current financial status for SMB|SG. All money received goes into the running of SMB sessions only. You can view the ledger here. If you want to support the team and SMB sessions, do take a look at our sponsorship opportunity details. If you have any feedback or questions, do drop us a note here. Thanks everyone for the support for the team so far and we look forward to more great sessions to come! SMB4 - Our 1st and it was great! Just when we thought SMB3 broke new grounds, now SMB4 brought us to a whole new level! Social Media Brunch 4 was very much our first… first SMB with a structured-informal sharing session with a group of friends first SMB with the biggest crowd thus far with close to 70 people first SMB where the ratio of friends from the industry side has grown more than friends from the blogging side first SMB with Live Blogging first SMB where we collected donations at the door first SMB where we had live photography and photos for all to bring home And we look forward to many more first for SMB! The earliest group - Derrick, Kimberly, Willy, Dorothy, Claudia and Shermeen There were so much actions, discussions and things happening during the short 3 hours, I don’t know how to summarize the event! To be honest, while typing this entry, I was listening to the discussion session from the almost 7GB worth of video recording, trying to catch up on the many blog posts that were already up talking about SMB4 and following any discussions happening on plurk, twitter and facebook! Wow!! Talk about Social Media!! So instead of repeating what many would already have read, seen or heard about SMB4, what I’m going to do is to consolidate all the posts and discussions here for your reference and discussions. Don’t be overwhelmed by the number of links and things that’s to follow. Links and posts will be constantly updated as more are up. Firstly, if you’re there at SMB4, can you please help do a survey for us? You can remain anonymous if you want. The survey is available >>> here. Thank you very much! And here’s the slides from the panel discussion… You may also carry on with the discussion on Corporate Adoption of Social Media over at our forum here. Videos of the session will be uploaded soon. You can listen to the discussion recording here by the tech65 crew. Thanks heaps guys! Sharing in progress Thanks to our friends for agreeing to be on the panel for SMB4! Thanks Willy, Benjamin, Daniel, Supriya, Pat and Derrick! And here are the links to all the posts/blogs that were mentioned during the discussion… Vanessa Tan - Feedback to PR teams, from a blogger’s perspective Pat Law - 11 things you need to know when pitching to bloggers Benjamin Koe - Example of why corporations should engage their customers too: Ben’s post on Samsung i780 Thoughts and discussions happening in other blogs and places… Dorothy - her thoughts and photos on SMB4 Daryl Tay - his thoughts from Canada Renhao - on Social Media Brunch 4 Benjamin - Remember to engage the fans Yuhui - a brief run-down of the discussion at SMB4 Cullen - Quality Vs Fame - Dilemma of Social Media Brain - Social Media Breakfast 4 Breadcrumbs #1: Metrics Vs. Relevance Victor - His thoughts on SMB4 Claudia - SMB4 - I’m glad it happened Nicole - Nicole’s thought on SMB4 Pat - on making the next SMB more delicious Daniel - SMB4 - A New Hope for New Media In Singapore Kris - SMB4 - Bloggers Credibility vs Popularity Leonard - on Social Media Brunch 4 On Plurk… ssumin - The blogger voice was missing from SMB4… ssumin - Did size of group affect interactivity though? The 60% remaining at the end of SMB4 Thanks everyone again for making SMB4 possible! And thank you all for your generous donation! We’ll be starting a spreadsheet soon here to record all financial transactions. We know transparency is important especially in Social Media. Also would like to thank our friends from NHB for hooking us up with URA for the venue! Thanks URA Center for allowing us to use their place for SMB4. This post will be constantly updated with more links to posts that will be coming up over the next couple of weeks on SMB4. So do check back here often. And don’t forget to help us complete this short survey. Thanks lots!! Updated: Survey results collected will be published for reference. Of course we’ll keep to the privacy concern. Names will not be used during the compilation of the survey results. Live Blogging: Social Media Brunch 4! Hello everyone! 10:30 am: Dorothy here and we’re currently at the Theatrette of the URA building setting up for SMB 4 and it’s going to be an exciting time because this is the first time we’re having an official sharing and panel discussion and of course live blogging! Lineups and all the awesome people involved below. 11.20am:Sharing by Willy Foo - “Corporate Adoption of Social Media” - Do’s, Don’ts & Pitfalls of Web 2.0 12.00pm: Panel Discussion - “Corporate Adoption of Social Media”. Moderated by Willy Foo. Panelists: Pat Law, Derrick Koh, Supriya, Daniel Goh and Benjamin Koe. Claudia’s been getting everything organized, Willy and Live Studios team are going to do live photography for the event, Shermeen is making sure brunch will be all ready for us, so we hope to see you around soon! 11:06am: People are beginning to stream in and mingle, so conversations are happening all around. Also, when we say live photography, we really mean live photography because what I have in my hands right now are instant name-card sized printouts of photos we’ve just taken of the team. Sweet! More social media junkies arrive! 11.26: SMB 4 starts with a round of introductions from the panelists! 11:30: Willy starts off the panel sharing by throwing the age old question that most corporations have - What is the ROI of incorporating social media into your work? ” It’s about listening, participating and creating conversations. “ - Derrick Derrick also advocates the 4 Ps of marketing in the social media space, namely people, privacy, passion, and of course, perpetual beta. The beauty of the social media landscape is that it is alive and constantly evolving with the times, learning and applying. For the corporations, one of the things that social media can do for your brand/product/service, is allowing you to engage your customers, addressing their dissatisfaction, concerns, and being able to take the conversations offline into real life. So, the issue is how can we move away from a single minded focus on ROI into the realm of conversations? Daniel is touching on how 90% of customers complaints are online right now. How do you measure the ROI of addressing this 90% of customers? Supriya is sharing a less publicized point - that monetary investment is very low for Web2.0, which is true. Many of the tools such as Facebook or Twitter are free for users. “Measurement metrics should be dealt in a different way.” - Derrick. Ladies and gentlemen, we interupt our regular programming for this announcement: For all of you who can’t be here physically, slides of the discussion going on will be available after the event, so stay tuned for them. Take a peek at what’s going on right now: Pat is now sharing her post on pitching to bloggers, which you should read because it summarizes some of the more salient issues raised when maneuvering around the relationship between bloggers and communication. Is paid blogging ethical? There are varying views on this matter. For one, bloggers can’t be directly compared to professional journalists because most of them do lack that training. Yet, with the disintermediation of media today, we cannot deny that the tools of production and the power that comes with it has been taken away from merely those who own the printing press, and given to the masses. On the other hand, from the blogger’s perspective, blogging sometimes pays off..in many alternative ways. Have you seen the videos on Where the hell is Matt?. (The 2008 video mentions Singapore. Link as shared by Daryl, who isn’t physically in SG right now, but definitely still contributing to SMB, thanks to Web2.0!) What started as a prank to annoy his friends with a quirky dance sequence turned out into a much larger movement- and most importantly, Matt getting offers from Stride Gum to take a trip on them (just because they liked his “work”), and make more videos. Anyone can be a social media rock star these days. 12:22 pm: We’re getting some good turnout for SMB 4. Standing room only! On bloggers and company sponsored events (or just events in general): Web 2.0: “There isn’t a single formula that fits everyone.” All bloggers are different. Each blogger has their own needs and desires. Each country has their own cultural norms regarding bloggers. This is why companies that are moving away from the likes of mass media to a more personalized, sincere approach are going to see the fruits of their strategy. 12:38pm: BREAK TIME! We’ll resume updates in a bit! 1:30pm: Willy continues to share about the role of Web2.0 on his company’s site. He is postulating that successful products are going to platforms, rather than positioning themselves as standalones. A prime example of a good platform is Facebook. And because there is almost always two sides to any story, Daniel is now sharing how Facebook may not be the most appropriate area for larger corporations to try and engage their audience. For one, conversations on Facebook tend to be more personalized, and corporate-speak will not go down too well in this case. The Future of SMB: Your Thoughts? Some interesting thoughts which surfaced during break. They were basically on where SMB will go from here. It’s great to have many new faces at this event, and every demographic has been slightly different at each of the past SMBs. SMB3 was blogger centric, SMB4 seems to be a gathering of many people from the communications industry, and the best thing about it is that nothing fundamental about what this event stands for has changed. Web2.0 and its possibilities just encapsulates so many different groups of people, there is always something for everyone. My question is - What do you want out of SMB? This event is very much about YOU as well, so do drop us a comment and share your feedback. This quote surfaced during the panel discussion a while ago, that “Feedback is a gift“, and indeed it is. 1:59pm: Corporations and the Learning One of the issues to do with social media, is having to come to grips with corporations feeling that they are “losing control of the message”, whilst their PR arm tries to manage the communication. The thing is, are you after a transactional relationship, or a long term relationship? Pat Law is describing social media as being in its “honeymoon stage” as a tool. At this point, it is time to step in. Active social media citizens are mostly a younger demographic, whilst the older ones are on the internet reading, but perhaps not participating as much. The thing is, can you, as a company, afford not to tune into this new channel? The audience is trying to define what social media is. Social media - people as media. Social media - a tool. Social media - Marketing. Perhaps it is not so important to clearly define what social media is, but just to recognize the mere fact that it affects everyone, and to varying degrees. What social media is will probably change over time, what social media is to you will probably change over time. Are you coming along for the journey? If you’re getting psyched about social media in Singapore, we’d love for you to connect with us! Leave a comment, join our Facebook group or start some conversations at the SMB Singapore Forum. We’ve come to the end of SMB4, and the room is abuzz with conversations again. It’s been a series of firsts this SMB4 and we hope to see you at the next! Watch this space! __________________________________________________________________________________ Link love: Read more about thoughts on SMB 4 here. Social Media Brunch 4 on Oct 4 SMB4 is coming!! This time round, we’re finally adding some form to our Social Media Breakfast session! And the good news is, we’re doing lunch! We know how hard it is to wake up early on a Saturday morning, so we’re going to start slightly later this time. Here are the details for Social Media Brunch 4: Date: Oct 4 2008, Saturday Venue: Singapore City Gallery, at the Theatrette on 3rd storey of The URA Centre, 45 Maxwell Road (next to the famous Maxwell Food Centre) Time: 11am to 2pm Fee: *Any amount you think its worth The Day’s Event Line-up 11am: Registration (Please try to come on time. Programme will start on time as planned. :)) 11.15am: Welcome by SMB team 11.20am: Sharing by Willy Foo - “Corporate Adoption of Social Media” - Do’s, Don’ts & Pitfalls of Web 2.0 12.00pm: Panel Discussion - “Corporate Adoption of Social Media”. Moderated by Willy Foo. Panelist: Pat Law, Derrick Koh, Supriya, Daniel Goh and Benjamin Koe. 12.20pm: Networking and Makan 1.00pm: You might want to catch the Light and sound show on “Discovering the Central Area” at Singapore City Gallery (7 min show) 2.00pm: Guided tour around Singapore City Gallery by the friendly people from Singapore City Gallery (Optional) Exciting line-up isn’t it? We hope you will come join us on Oct 4! If you’re new to SMB|SG and is scratching your head wondering if you should join us, don’t have to scratch anymore! Just come! Everyone is very friendly and most of us are crazy people too! We talked about almost everything and anything under the sun! Yes! Not just on Social Media, New Media or any other media. And please don’t expect an invitation from us k! Cause there’s none! Just come! EVERYONE is welcome! *We’ll be starting to collect a nominal fee at registration from SMB4 onwards. You are free to drop in any amount of money you think its worth giving for a SMB session. Suggesting about $2/pax. We will be keeping an open ledger on this site to show where these money are used and all money collected goes to the organising of SMB sessions. Such as catering of food, buying of stationery, rental for venue, covering the cost of any necessary materials needed for SMB sessions. We hope you will give generously but within your means of course. See you on Oct 4! If you’re keen to help out at SMB4, we need volunteers! If you’re on facebook, do join us in the SMB|SG group, and you can also join the event here. SMB Forum After having the discussion during the meeting, we’ve decided to launch a forum. You can check out the forum here. We’ve started a couple of threads, and we really hope you guys can join in and participate. The forum will be a place for you to establish relationships and connect with people before/after meeting them at the breakfasts. You can also throw out any questions you may have about social media, or any suggestions about the breakfasts themselves. Basically, it’s going to be an extension of the breakfasts, for us to interact with each other. Or at least we hope that’s what it will be. How well it works out depends on whether you guys join and participate. So yeah, we really hope to see you around on the forums. The SMB team has a meeting The SMB Singapore team has been working really hard to bring you the very happy and fruitful breakfasts you’ve come to love. Here’s the proof! We have to do a lot of research to find out what’s good for breakfast. Eating and taking notes constitutes part of our work. Quite hard work, too, I must say. And I’m very proud to announce that yesterday, for the first time since SMB1, we broke the record for the number of peeps turning up for an SMB meeting. The previous record held was TWO. (But that was when we only had three members.) Yesterday, the record jumped an impressive 100%, clocking an amazing count of FOUR (out of five members). Here are the other two hardworking members of the SMB team, diligently looking at the two o’clock direction (for what I’m not entirely sure, but just assume that it was for something useful). We called for a meeting because we realised that SMB was growing and we needed a clearer direction as to how it should evolve. We discussed, among other things: Our mission statement. The structure of future SMBs. How we can finance future SMBs without resorting to corporate sponsorship. Whether we need a forum on this website for public discussion. How we can more effectively engage public discussion because, ultimately, SMB was started for the community and the community should have a voice in its future. How many chicks Daryl will manage to pick up when he’s in the USA. We’ve come up with some ideas, but we want your input, too. Over the next few days (or weeks, I dunno), we will be posting up points for discussion to gather feedback before we commit to a final charter. Please contribute your thoughts freely, especially since Daryl will have to take time off chick hunting to post on this blog once in a while. We look forward to hosting better breakfasts for you. Social Media Breakfast Singapore is brought to you by Derrick, Daryl, Sheylara, Claudia, Shermeen and the letters A and Z. Social Media Breakfast Video Recapped: This was how it started… Sheylara and Daryl preparing for SMB1 Social Media Breakfast | Singapore Website Launches! Hello from the Social Media Breakfast | Singapore team! It’s taken us awhile, but we’ve finally decided to get a little more functional and organised and set up a central homepage/blog to hold our discussions, serve as a medium to keep everyone updated on the latest happenings, and to encourage feedback from you. We started SMB back in March 2008 and have since had two more successful breakfasts in May 2008 and August 2008. Our breakfasts have gathered a diverse mix of bloggers, PR folks, advertising folks, podcasters, videocasters, tech folks, entrepreneurs, investors, and many, many more, all coming together to discuss and learn more about the exciting new world of social media. The team too has grown to five with Sheylara, Claudia, Derrick, Shermeen and myself and we’re continually re-evaluating each event to make the subsequent one even better. But we can’t do it without you! So feel free to join us in our discussions and/or leave comments on the blog. Thank you to everyone for being supportive of our breakfasts. We’re still very much in the infancy stage, but we could never even have reached here without you. We’re looking forward to bringing you better breakfasts in the near future. In the meantime, subscribe to us to keep yourself updated with all the latest happenings! SMB3 - Feedback and Suggestions If you’ve attended Social Media Breakfast 3 at the Asian Civilisations Museum on 16 August, we hope to get your feedback and suggestions. This post is for your discussions and postings. So post away! Hello world! Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!