Ian On The Red Dot

Daryl from Unique-Frequency asks why social media in Singapore is blooming slowly but not blossoming rapidly.

Is it really struggling?

Let’s stop and ask ourselves what is social media? That phrase has a definition that is nebulous at best and schizophrenic at worst. But lets try to use the great Google to help us. Using define:social media, we get this:

Web content such as blogs and wikis, created by individuals or a collaboration of individuals.

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.

Hmmm…so blogs are just one of the tools and bloggers just a subset of the individuals involved in creating social media.

It would seem to me that the problem is not that social media is struggling. It is there. It is happening. The problem I feel is that we (people who live/breathe the media2.0/web2.0 space) think it is all just happening on blogs (Daryl also touched on this point). It isn’t. Have companies made an effort to reach out to Singaporeans commenting on forums beyond just sticking ads on it? Are there companies creating tools to make it easier for forum owners to monetize their traffic? From the conversations with my colleagues, most of them participate more actively in forums then social networking sites and blogs.

The thing is, I suspect Techmeme, Techcrunch, Mashable and all the other similar sites we (the media2.0/web2.0 groupies) check out have done us great harm in skewing our perspectives of the online world in the context of Singapore. We see cool stuff happening there and think it SHOULD happen here.

The thing is, what’s happening in the US, UK or whatever other markets is interesting and we definitely can learn from them. But we got to be sensitive to what’s happening here. We can try to get everyone to come to our new club to party. Or we can see where the people are going to have fun and go there and be part of the fun if not make the fun there better.

Daryl asks if the problem is our small population. He also asked if the convenience of meeting people we know and the ubiquity and ease of other channels of communications like SMS hurts social media’s growth.

No. Well, maybe it hurts it in the form of blogs and reviews on a website or whatever Web2.0ish thing we can think up based on current tools. But it shouldn’t.

Why?

Because basically what the above happening shows is that people want to share. They share differently – not through blogs, not even online. So, how can we capture this sharing that is happening? In a way, it is social media, just in a different form or rather a form that hasn’t been able to be wrapped and place online and made more accessible. Take SMS – it is just SILOED in our individual phones. How can we make it easier for people who want to share this information offline. How do we track these conversations offline. How do we use what we have learned from Web2.0 and the current crop of online tools to make these offline communications better and pull it online and connect it with online conversations.

I don’t think there is a problem with the same bloggers going for events although I would be worried if the numbers don’t grow though. The thing above social media is that we got to recognize that the same people who create content online are also those who are more likely to share an opinion with a friend in the offline world. So, if the individual is interested, you would want him or her at the event even if they had been to a competitors. Sure, maybe since readership online overlaps, the company might want exclusive online coverage for a certain segment but while online readership might overlap, offline it probably might not.

I think what’s actually happening is companies are struggling to engage with these content creators and consumers (and it is actually a big ‘if’ that they even want to). More importantly, the problem is that Media2.0/Web2.0 evangelists who are trying to carve a niche for themselves to increase their own professional value, career prospects and industry reputation are finding hard to sell their wares here or get others to drink their Kool-Aid.

There is a difference between the above and social media struggling.