I was talking to one of my mentors at the first company I joined after leaving school.  He coached me and advised me in this early period of my working life and we kept in touch long after I had left the company and he had retired.  When I talked about the frustrations I had with this latest generation, he just laughed.  He asked me if he had ever told me what his first impression of me was.  Puzzled, I said he had not.  He went on to say that being from the baby boomer generation, Gen X workers were as alien to him then as Gen Y were to us now.  In my first interview, I had worn a shirt and tie, but in his day, nothing less than a suit was acceptable.  Also, our impatience puzzled him.  It had taken him fifteen years to become a manager, whereas we were expecting to be promoted within five years and were leaving the company if we did not get what we wanted (mea culpa).  Our ability and desire to change jobs were confusing to someone who had worked for the same company for thirty years.

I recall saying that it wasn’t a fair comparison as companies had little loyalty to staff now and should expect the same sentiment from their employees.  Fair comment, he replied.  The world then was different from the world in his day.  Similarly, the world of today is different from the world I grew up in.  As such, with changing values, changing ways of interaction, a company just has to adapt.  His baby boomer generation learnt to accept the world had changed and developed retention and incentive schemes tailored to the needs of the new workers.  Basically he was telling me to stop whining and get on with it (never bad advice).

Reflecting on it a day after, its not hard to come to the realization that he has a point.  Whatever we say and do will not change how things are.  Can we guarantee lifetime employment?  Can we guarantee the company will always be around and not merged or taken over or worse, shut down?  The carrots and sticks that worked with Gen X no longer work with Gen Y who have different priorities.  There will always be those willing to sacrifice everything for money, just like there will be those who are too lazy to do anything, but in general, the mindset of a company willing to get the best out of these Gen Y workers will need to change.  What this change needs to be, I confess to not knowing yet.  Once the basic hygiene factors of pay and environment have been achieved, the intangibles need to provide sufficient motivation.

There is talk that this generation will bring disaster on mankind with their self centered and irreverant attitudes.  I found these 2 quotes:

"What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, 
they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the 
streets inflamed with wild notions.Their morals are decaying. What is
to become of them?"
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on 
frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond
words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful 
of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful]
 and impatient of restraint"

If you had thought these quotes came from the baby boomer generation or even the early 1900, you would be wrong.  The first is attributed to Socrates in 400 BC.  The second to Hesiod in 8 BC.  And yet here we are today…a civilization still going strong.

For a nation that prides itself on efficiency, this is a big slap in the face.  How does an organization (YOG Secretariat) that is derived from the civil service, adopts most if not all of the same checks and balances, make such a juvenile error?  It is likely that each document, poster, etc….needs a large number of signatures before being finally allowed out.  From the junior level staff who creates the document all the way to the Director, everyone puts his/her signature to “confirm” that it has been checked and verified.

In spite of all these checks, this mistake was able to pass all the way to the printers who executed the job.  How, one asks oneself, can everyone checking the document miss this important and glaring error.  Therein lies the crux of the problem.  Because of the large number of people verifying and signing, it is sometimes human nature to believe the folks signing before have checked….and for you to rubberstamp the document before passing it up the chain.

If this is the thought process of everyone approving the document after the originator, then we have to examine the mindset of the person who created the document.  We have to bear in mind that following the Games, the entire YOG Secretariat was dissolved and each executive staff who are all on contract, would have to look for new jobs.  So the element of motivation to do a good job is already compromise.  Adding to the fact that he/she knows that there are people approving (and hence assumed to be checking) above, it is almost a certainty that mistakes will be made.

So here we have the paradox of accountability.  The larger the number of people who need to approve a piece of work….the higher the chances of errors.  Couple that with the lack of punishments for mistakes and we have a situation where the whole checking and accountability mechanism is rendered ineffective….and has just cost a few thousand dollars for an easily avoidable mistake.

Today we are all more connected than ever before, but has this come at the expense of our ability to socialize on a face-to-face basis?  Through a myriad of enablers such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc….we are hooked up to the global community and the physical barrier of distance is being slowly overcome.  However, the question really is…has all this online socializing helped us to become better social animals?  My sense is that the jury is very much out on that.

The ability to build a strong relationship online does not necessarily translate into being able to build strong and lasting relationships offline.  I have met some so called online “Community Leaders” who have been socially dysfunctional, not being able to hold a conversation or familiar with the basic social niceties (yes, people still do shake hands when they meet for the first time).  There have been times when I appear to be having a conversation with a Twitter account…short simple sentences of not more than 140 characters.

I heard from a sociologist that socializing is a learned behaviour.  Therefore our ability to socialize is a function of how much interaction we have.  If this is predominantly through the internet then the tradeoff is our ability to socialize offline.  There is a fear that the next generation will consist of a lot of “shy” adults who lack the skills to build rapport or even build long term relationships (get married for instance).

The flip side of this argument is that there may no longer be the need to develop these skills as most of our interactions may be even more tightly integrated online and therefore we are only holding back the inevitable by continuing in our current mode of operation such as having people come together in one location for work.

Whatever the truth, I am truly going to be interested to see how the next decade shapes society as we know it today.

So-called Social Media consultants who advise you to measure your ROI based on number of members, amount of feedback, etc… are either misguided or do not have your best interests at heart.  A business is seldom run based on how much feedback they get.  Its a useful thing to have, but its not likely to be a business driver.  Furthermore, the ease at which unique personas can be created online, leads one to believe that with sufficient time and inclination, these numbers can be artificially manipulated.

Feedback is helpful in identifying operational shortfalls, but to use this as a measure of social media’s effectiveness is not what I would call a useful way to spend your company’s money.  And more often than not, the public’s vision of how your product should evolve is highly unlikely to be as innovative or ground-breaking as we would hope.  As Henry Ford, said “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”  That said, this kind of feedback is usually acceptable if its to tweak certain specs.

At the end of the day, if your company’s engagement within the social media space doesn’t lead to new business, repeat business or product development initiatives, then its maybe not the best place for you to be in.  I usually measure its effectiveness by launching promotions or products before the media blitz and see how much upside I get.  Thats quantifiable and easily measurable.  It also helps me to determine which channels or platforms work best.

Sometimes, we also get feedback that allows us to streamline our processes better, but these are rare.  More often than not, customers view the opening of another channel of communication as being just another (possibly more convenient) way to air their grievances.

For this reason, we don’t spend too much money on social media engagement to the chagrin of the many experts who believe that all big companies should pay them thousands of dollars to spout the rubbish they claim is their intellectual approach to social media.  I do believe social media is a ground breaking channel of communication, but till I see a greater degree of real business derived from it, I am unlikely to pour more resources into it.

As a customer said to me recently “It ain’t the way you say, its what you have to say….you could drop an email to my janitor offering to sell your product at 50% discount and believe me, we would find out and  react to it immediately…..or you could blast me from all angles with a great new product that don’t do nuthin for us, and we still couldn’t care less”……

Since then, he has been derided by the online community, including the founders of Twitter and LinkedIn, for what they perceive to be his short sighted approach to the “open” internet community.  I’m not so sure his approach is so wrong for the following reasons:

1)  Those making the most noise are those that stand to lose the most from the removal of credible news sources.  The majority of tweets are news headlines, endlessly retweeted, and not generating a dime of income for the source.

2)  Similarly, News Corp doesn’t stand to lose any money in the near term.  Their subscribers still have access to their content and I doubt that their income from online advertising is high enough to be of significance.

3)  Those online news parasites have little loyalty and will switch from News Corp to Fox to whoever gives them free info.  If all news channels start to charge, then this will get harder and harder, effectively marginalizing sites like Twitter, Youtube, etc…that are almost dependent on them to keep their followers.

4)  This brings us to a key point.  If other media organizations follow suite and bar their content from Google searches, and open their sites only to subscribers, then we might really see a fundamental change in the nature of the industry.  I’m not saying these media giants will ultimately win the day, but at the very least, innovative models to deliver credible news content might start to spring up.

I’m neither for nor against this move as I get my news in various ways (usually paid).  However, those that draw similarities between the music industry and the news industry are sadly misinformed.  The music industry was riding upon a high margin business and what iTunes did was merely to make it more accessible to the layman.  The sheer volume of incremental sales justified the move towards a low price, high volume model.

News on the other hand, is an inherently low margin business.  How much do you pay for that daily?  $0.75?  How much lower do you think this can go?  Some newspapers are already free, relying on advertising to fund their operations.  Maybe this is the model of the future.  The weakness of these papers is usually in their commentary and analysis…but nowadays, everyone wants to be a critic or commentator so the days of commentators like William Safire are probably over.

Actually, I think that the future lies not in News Corp sized conglomerates but in large numbers of specialist newspapers/sites, most of whom may consist of a single person acting as reporter, copywriter and editor.  Aggregators can then subscribe to them to form the columns in a more traditional newspaper or e-zine.  Its happening already….don’t we have popular blogs that we subscribe to??

Electronic Arts has been the dominant electronic gaming company in the world for several years, churning out blockbusters like Spore, The SIMs, and their sports franchised games like FIFA World Cup, NBA, etc….  Their strength has traditionally been in the packaged electronic games domain where their primary method of distribution has been to sell through retailers, packaged games for the PC, Mac, XBox, Playstation, etc…  Recently they have ventured into downloadable games which has reduced their distribution costs significantly.  In spite of their dominance in the industry, they announced substantial losses in 2009 which some analysts attributed to their absence in the traditional massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMPORG) and the growing social media gaming space.

The announcement of their purchase of Playfish, together with an announcement to cut close to 1,400 jobs, mainly in the R&D area, makes a bold statement of their intent.  The message is that their executives see the future of social media gaming….and that their current focus, which has served them well for almost a decade, is stale.

Playfish on the other hand, is at the forefront of gaming.  Titles such as Pet Society and Restaurant City which are primarily played on Facebook have millions of players who spend ten to twenty minutes a day with their online pet or restaurant.  Unlike the Tamagotchis, these pets need daily engagement to collect coins, visit friends and buy new things to decorate their houses.  The weekly addition of new items keep players engaged regularly.  What makes this such an easy game to play is that its essentially free.

But for those who think Playfish are as financially unviable as Twitter, think again.  When I met with their founders last year during a round of funding, they had already started to collect money from small purchases gamers made with real money to shorten the time it would take to establish their pet.  This amount could range in real cash, from $9.99 to $39.99 but allows you to use the virtual coins across all Playfish gaming platforms.  Such has been the success of this model that it is understood that Playfish did not touch the $20 million raised in their previous round of funding, achieving profitability within the 2 years since its founding.

Is this then the future of gaming (and by future, we can only talk about the next five years)?  Playfish is not the only fish in this pond.  Popular Facebook games such as Mafia Wars, Texas Hold’em Poker, Farmville and Yoville from Zynga, make them another attractive takeover target.  It took Farmville two months to get 11 million users.  Compare this to the 11.5 million users of the most popular MMPORG game, World of Warcraft from Blizzard.

So what are the advantages of running games on a social media platform?

1)  Huge base of members to reach out to.  Bear in mind that these members log in regularly to use platforms such as Facebook and MySpace for other things, so are more likely to log into a game to check or update their character’s status.

2)  The platform itself can channel reminders to members through their interface.  Members need not log into the game daily as any updates or notifications are listed on the main page of the platform itself.  The need to log into a game daily can quickly grow stale, but the reminders ensure members stay engaged with the game.

3)  Social media gamers tend to like a mix of games.  Games to distract the mind such as Bejeweled are popular, but do not pull gamers to play frequently through regular changes in their concept.  Playfish’s Word Challenge, Geo Challenge and Who Has the Biggest Brain, fall into this category.  The real winners are those that embed some aspect of MMPORG concepts.  Games such as Pet Society, Mafia Wars, Restaurant City, etc….all encourage interaction with other members, collection of credits, and the redemption of credits to acquire new items and go up levels.

4)  I blogged a few months back about Facebook potentially becoming one of the biggest payment platforms in the world.  Gaming is one of the areas which Facebook could facilitate the conversion of real cash into the online credits.  Few social media gamers (SMGs) are willing to fork out big sums of money to play these games, but are more willing to pay small sums of money to acquire special items or to shortcut the path to the next level.  At this time, Playfish and Zynga need to work out their own payment methodologies with third parties, but if Facebook as an example, can facilitate this for all the applications embedded within their platform, it would make it easier for members to pay.  As it is, these “small” sums have made Playfish profitable.  The idea of making a small amount from many is somewhat akin to Walmart’s concept, and we all know how successful that has been.  $1 from 10 million players is going to make you more than $100 from 1,000 players.

There are however, many challenges before SMG can be considered the future of gaming.  For one, fequent tweaking and upgrading of the concept means daily challenges to come up with new ideas to expand the virtual world created.  There is also the challenge of technological constraints as the number of players increase, most of whom will never generate a dime of income for you.

The one income stream that I haven’t really seen exploited sufficiently in SMGs is the idea of brand placement.  Its done frequently in movies now (Starbucks being the most blatant).  But, I have yet to see a Starbucks Cafe in Pet Society or a McDonalds in Mafia Wars.  These brands could not only sponsor a virtual outlet in some social media game, but also hold competitions, etc…which would effectively reach out to a massive online population at a very low cost per impression.  Whatever it may be, I think SMG is not just the future of gaming, but also the future of advertising.

Tong Hsien-Hui

Many blogs, articles, commentary and opinion pieces have been written on this topic.  Since most of these pieces have been written by people with an interest (either financial or otherwise) in social media, the inevitable conclusion is that these big time CEOs are doing their companies a dis-favour by not engaging their “customers” and stakeholders through the various social media streams.  I beg to differ for the following reasons:

-  The average CEO of a Fortune 100 company has thousands upon thousands of stakeholders…its impossible to engage with everyone at a personal level without passing on the communication to a team.  This is what the current “Community Managers” are already doing for the company so why create another channel which everyone will take to imply gets them more attention.  It dilutes attention from the corporate social media engagement without really affording the close personal touch needed.

-  The rules of Corporate Governance apply to all CEOs, so anyone expecting the inside scoop on Twitter or Facebook is going to be disappointed.

-  Since its unlikely a CEO would put down his/her personal opinion of various staff, customers, etc…what does that leave you in terms of content?

-  What would be the benefits to a “plugged in” CEO?  A closer relationship with the customer?  Building more PR sympathy?  Actually, as any social media specialist worth their salt will tell you, no one will universally like you online, and the opinion trends can swing in seconds from positive to negative.

So given that the actual benefits are almost impossible to define, the potential pitfalls are many, the effort is huge, the status quo is comfortable, why on earth would any CEO of a Fortune 100 company even consider building their social media presence online (to say nothing of the fact that these CEOs change more frequently now too!)?

Sad to say, the presentations by these so-called media giants was neither well prepared nor well structured.  They wandered off on irrelevant tangents and seemed more interested in whining about their jobs.  Their insights were neither insightful nor useful.  They spent a good portion of their time complaining about being “scooped” by one of their “competitors” at the table.  They rounded it off by talking about how they were undecided on using Social Media as a channel to their readers.

To make sure it wasn’t a total waste of my time and money, I got to thinking about how Social Media can be used to complement Traditional Media.  I know this topic has been argued to death in many other countries, but Singapore is quite different.  At the end of the day, the three “competitors” at the lunch ultimately report in to an organization controlled by the Government of Singapore.  That in itself defines the limitations on news coverage and commentary, but also ensures a sustainable income and subsidy, something which is critical for survival in today’s media environment.  Without this support, the main newspapers and news channels in Singapore would be treating Social Media with a lot more fear than they currently are.

In their defence, it has to be said that even with the high internet penetration rate in Singapore, most news readers still prefer to get their news in a format that they can touch, feel, turn pages and roll under their arm to bring to the toilet.  So print news is not going away anytime soon.  However, this issue of who “scooped” who is pretty much a non-issue.  The main english paper, the Straits Times, is printed and distributed at a fixed time every day.  Even if the US were to sink under the waves in an Atlantean catastrophe, readers of the Straits Times would only find out in the next day’s paper.  ChannelNewsAsia is slightly better.  They can put a headline above their news ticker similar to what CNN has.  However, unless you are a couch potato or carry around a portable TV, it is unlikely you will get this news till you are home.

Thats where Social Media can be useful.  Most people now access the web using their mobile devices.  Some companies, including the Straits Times and ChannelNewsAsia, even have mobile apps that embed their news bulletins on iPhones and Blackberries.  In the worst case, you can go onto their corporate website using your mobile devices.  It might seem a logical way to keep your readers in the know, but it doesn’t take into account how humans form habits.

I have the apps for the Straits Times on my iPhone.  Its free, but I very seldom access it.  A few reasons.  First, its slow and takes a long time to load, even using 3G.  There seemed to be a need to incorporate pictures and details into the articles.  Secondly, I haven’t formed a habit to click it to find the latest news.  Thirdly, the habit I have already formed is to use  Twitter for my short communications.  One of the organizations I follow on Twitter is Fox News.  Anytime there is breaking news, I get a short 140 character update from FOXNEWS.  I use this update to verify news that I would usually have obtained on Twitter earlier.  If I’m interested, I would click a link to read the details.

The beauty of Twitter is that you don’t need to craft an elaborate copy to hook the reader.  All you need to do is to shoot off a headline (once the news has been verified of course).  Its somewhat akin to the newsboys standing at street corners in the early part of the last century, shouting out the news headlines to passerbys in the hope that they would buy a paper from him.  And there is no dispute about who scooped who since all Tweets have time/date stamps.

I don’t expect these media giants in Singapore to change their philosophies anytime soon.  They lack the hunger and urgency brought about by a highly competitive environment, and to a certain extent, the luddites in senior management probably wouldn’t be comfortable in such a fast paced media environment.  So, till something happens to make them change, I expect things to remain status quo for at least another couple of years….while the rest of the industry worldwide moves on to the next big thing.

Tong Hsien-Hui

Well anyway, following this kid’s comments about how other kids don’t use Twitter much (see my blog post on “Why are we so quick to run down a teen’s opinion about social media?”), Mashable, a pretty decent aggregator and publisher of social media news, conducted or gathered research information pertaining to useage of Twitter.  The findings were interesting:

-  5% of Twitter accounts generate 75% of Tweets.  I speculate that 100% of this 75% is useless spam.

-  24% of Tweets are generated by bots (or small programs that automate some action…in this case retweeting stuff on DIGG, etc…).  Spamming used to be frowned upon.  In Twitter it seems to be encouraged!

-  60.6% of the most active (the top 5%) Tweeters live in the US.  The next is the UK at 6.9%.  I suppose everyone else has a life.

-  54% of the most active are male.  I suppose when they aren’t on WOW or some other inane MMPORG, they have to do something.  That or its actually only 1 guy who generated thousands of Twitter accounts using a blog and created his own virtual Twitter farm.

-  48% of the most active accounts have more than 100 followers.  If I were a follower…I wouldn’t be for long…imagine 150+ updates daily from a single account.  Mostly crap I assume.

-  Ok, so FoxNews is one of those most active Twit(s).  Maybe its not all crap.

So how to separate the wheat from the chaff?  You can’t really.  Its not possible to turn someone’s updates off unless you “unfollow” them.  I live in Singapore, a country with a reputation for high rate of internet penetration among the population.  A significant percentage are ostensibly registered on popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and the local press has been playing up Twitter recently (no surprise there….see FoxNews…..).  That said, I only know of a small handful of people who Tweet regularly.

My company has a Twitter account to keep our members posted on the latest events.  We will shortly be promoting certain programs and activities solely on Twitter and Facebook.  But this isn’t really creating a conversation.  Its just another channel of communication (like ads, flyers, etc..).  We do get feedback and criticism occasionally, but we need to actively search for it using Twitter’s search function.  In each instance, we engage using Twitter and close it online.  This usually doesn’t take more than 2 rounds of engagement which hardly constitutes a conversation.

For those keen advocates of Twitter out there…I am open to any suggestions you may have on how to make better use of Twitter given that few of our target market is on Twitter and even fewer are regular users!

Tong Hsien-Hui

What do I mean by that?  Well lets say you only tweet things that happen to you.  I have people I follower (usually not for long) who tweet about everything they do…no humour, no insight, just banal day to day activities.  To these people, and the losers/voyeurs/fans who follow them, this is a personal news feed.

If you promote your product or service or retweet a product of service, then you are using Twitter as an ad board.  If you use it primarily to tweet with your friends to arrange meetings or bitch about something, then you are using Twitter like an email or group sms system, albeit a really really unreliable one (I know the Fail Whale logo better than the Proctor and Gambol one…).  If you tweet personal insights or on specific topics or even if all you do is aggregate all related information on a specific topic and retweet them….then you are using it as an online forum.

Followers fall into three main categories.  Those that follow you because you follow back…and you don’t know them from Adam.  Those that follow you because they are your friends or acquaintances in the real world.  Finally those that follow you because they actually think you have something interesting to say (fans!).  So it should now be obvious what Twitter means to both parties.  In the first instance, because there is no social tie between members other than the tenuous link based upon mutual following, Twitter is a spam board.  In the second instance, because your Twitter universe comprises only friends, then Twitter is primarily a glorified sms system (a heck of a lot cheaper than using the group sms function which props up the business of most telcos).  In the final instance, Twitter is a powerful tool in brand building and communication.  Unfortunately, while many companies and individuals aspire to this, few if any actual attain this e-marcom nirvana.

The truth is, most of us have a combination of the kind of tweets we tweet, and the kind of followers we have.  I would find it hard to believe that all those following Ashton Kutcher are his fans…most I would suppose follow him because of the hype.  Following CNN on the other hand is a totally different proposition.  There is some real value in the tweets a major news agency sends out.  Unfortunately, given the speed of the internet, I usually only check CNN tweets to confirm information that had already been tweeted elsewhere….and I mean hours ago (MJ’s death was a classic example.  It was tweeted close to 5 hours before the first major news agency confirmed it).

So in a way, the power resides with you to determine what Twitter is or can be.  The beauty of these simple platforms is that you are only confined by your imagination as to how it can be used for your personal benefit….and if you run out of ideas…..tweet me at #hhtong……

Hsien-Hui Tong