What were we told when we were at school?

1. Vietnamese are smart, creative, and hard-working (thanks god they also told us this!)
2. Vietnam is rich. We have gold forests, silver seas, and all that wonderful stuff that we would never use up.

I think Japanese kids were told something like this:

1. Our natural resources are scarce, if any.
2. We need to work as hard as possible to enlarge our wealth.

There’s a lot in common between the above-mentioned study and how we’re doing as a country. When we have a lot, we waste. No hard-work. No sweats!

The recent National Assembly meeting has alarmed that we are wasting an awful lot of money with ICOR being > 8. That basically means if we invest 8 dollars, we get back 1 dollar of growth. This is a ridiculously high ICOR compared to many other countries’.

For years we’ve been known to be a fast-growing, but little is known that we’re burning up our resources for that 8.x% growth rate.

More sadly, most of this ’s been fueled by government spending. In other words, we’re buying growth at the expense of tax payers and natural resources, leaving nothing for our children in future.

It’s high time we should tell our children that we’re POOR and they need to work HARD to earn whatever they want. Would you tell them otherwise?

The contest will run for two weeks, the end-product of which will probably be the Logo for Barcamp Saigon for a few years to come, until future organizers decide they need a newer one. Friday November 13th is the last day to submit your logo!

This contest is open to everyone, not just Logo designers. Candidate logos will be displayed on our website so that others can vote for their favorite Logo.

If you wonder why you should enter into this contest, we have the answer for you: it’s the privilege to serve a vibrant community of IT enthusiasts, the opportunity to get your name widely recognized, and to see how “the other dudes” in the industry are doing.

We ask only one thing from you: give it your best shot!

Alright, below are the details (copied mostly from the Barcamp Hanoi guys ^ ^).

Submission Deadline

Friday, November 13th, 11:59 PM (GMT+7)

Design Guidelines

The logo should:

* Convey the concept of Barcamp. What is a Barcamp?

* Be distinct, unique and easily identifiable (It’s the logo of Barcamp Saigon, not a general Barcamp)

* Aesthetically fit in with a broad range of site/application designs

References:

* Starting files barcamp.org/SpreadBarCamp

* Sample logos barcamp.org/LogoGallery

* Barcamp Saigon 2008 Logo

* Barcamp Hanoi 2009 Logo

How it works

• First, create your Logo design. View the Design Guidelines for more details.
• Upload your design to the contest-specific Flickr group Barcamp Saigon 2009 Logo Design Contest for review.
• These designs will be posted online at the homepage of Barcamp Saigon for public voting. You determine the winner!
• The winning Logo will be used on blog, websites, banners, documents and T-shirt to help promote Barcamp Saigon 2009.
• If you have any additional questions, comment right below this post.

• You can submit more than one design.
• Submissions can be made via JPG/GIF/PNG however please be prepared to provide high resolution/vector graphic versions of your work.
• As part of the submission, participants must be willing to give up all their rights to the copyright and donate it to the community.
• Tag your photo with the phrase “barcampsaigon“. This will allow us to search for and pull your photo into a public image gallery.
• Make sure your Flickr account is linked to an active email address; this is the only means of contacting the winner!
• Don’t forget, the submission deadline is Friday, November 13th, 11:59 PM (GMT+7). Start right now!

Jiang Ziya

Stephen R. Covey, in his “The 7 habits of highly effective people”, talks about maps. No, life orientation. With the right map, even if you’re slower than others, or your techniques are not as good as them, you’ll “get there” one day. On the other hand, no matter how superb one person is, using the Hanoi map to find a club in Saigon takes him nowhere regardless of how skillful he is. Character vs Personality.

What the hell do fishing and maps have to do with social media anyway?

Well for one thing, social media is so different from traditional marketing in that it takes a lot of time, it’s incremental. It’s neither about blockbusters nor serial killing ads on da TV. It’s about building up the conversation and “keep posting”. Or fishing. With or without a hook. When you have an interesting story to tell, they will come to you. You probably won’t have to wait until you’re 80 like our man. But don’t expect success to come early.

It may never come, if you’re fishing in the wrong lake. What if the lake has no fish and you’re happily waiting? Bingo! We need a map! Why didn’t anyone say this early?

To make life easier for fishermen, Forrester Research has proposed a methodology called POST (People – Objective – Strategy – Technology), whose use is to help our men catch fish more easily. The People in this methodology means looking at the lakes we currently have and identifying ones that have the most fish. Simple as that.

POST Method by Forrester Research

So after two weeks of running the Social Technologies Survey, we’ve been able to release the initial maps to the highly-participated-by-the-fish lakes, which can be found here.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand Vietnamese, we’ll present it at Barcamp Saigon, in more details. But here are a couple of highlights:

• 26% are still blogging. This could be way higher if it were 2008. The closure of Y!360 has significantly increased the rate of unemployment in the blogosphere.
• Blog readers and commentators account for 80% (!) of Web participants.
• Forums are stil popular among Internet users in Vietnam, with only 10% “don’t give it a damn” about this platform.
• As expected, Social Networks rule the gang. 50% update their profiles/avatars at least once a month while 41% post on their buddies’ wall.
• RSS is surprisingly used by 21% of the participants.

Of course, our fisherman can always use guesswork, it might work, but he may waste time fishing at too many lakes at the same time. Do you love fishing?

Social Technographics Profiles

Our idea is simple: we want to gain a better understanding of how Vietnamese Internet Users are using Social Technologies (Blogs, SNS, Forums, etc.) everyday so we can target at them more effectively. Or to put it another way, we strive to build a big picture for the Social Computing scene in Vietnam.

On Tuesday October 13th we started the survey, which essentially asked people which technologies they are using. After receiving some very constructive feedbacks from @nhnguyen and @chipro, we decided to restart the survey, sacrificing the first 300 samples. However, since we mostly used social media to push the survey to people, it’s worth it, especially when the data were very skewed (asking Facebookers if they use Facebook, for example.)

It didn’t take long for us to achieve the same number on the next day, and with Raovat123’s support, our samples have grown substantially since then. What’s more, samples from this Classified ads site are very neutral to our survey and the random people who come from search engines through this site have been a great comfort to us. Thanks @ncchinh a bunch!

Raovat123's Frontpage with our Survey Banner

After talking to many people we understand that this is not a really perfect survey in terms of methodology and the questions that we asked. However, we’re pleased with the progress and pretty confident that this is a very good start in our venture into the real world of social media in Vietnam.

The survey will be closed by the end of Monday, whose initial data will be available to the public before long. A more detailed discussion will be presented at Barcamp Saigon. In the meantime, stay tuned by taking a look at our daily updates (in Vietnamese) here.

It wasn’t a very pleasant moment at first, and I was not alone. Let’s take a look at the new design when it’s still fresh:

• The highlight is gone. For the past month we’ve experimented with different kinds of media on the highlight as a marketing tool for our Fan page and all of a sudden it disappeared. Without this, advertisers’ve lost a valuable estate, but thanks god the suggestion box is still there. I will take another couple of weeks to see how this hurts our work ( or how other changes may compensate for it.)
• Live Feeds are back. Oh dear, I almost fell in love with these feeds a while ago when Facebook decided to pull the plug. Now it’s back! It’s not the same as before though. Things can go viral more easily but I’ve heard the neighbors saying it’s too noisy and irrelevant. “Why do I need to know someone becoming friends of all of these strangers?” or “why they don’t they group those tagged in the same post together?”. Hopefully it will be better with time.
• News Feeds are the new Friendfeed. I haven’t used Friendfeed a lot but I can tell that this new option looks a lot like FF. Basically content that gets the most reactions stay on top. It makes life a lot easier for those whose motto is “content is king” but this is probably not a good thing. It’s going against the long tail, and fat cats just get fatter. Now we can start seeing the fruit from Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed.
• Friend suggestions are confusing to me. Seeing “Reconnect with him/her” makes me wonder when I removed that person when in fact we’re still good friends.

The old design of Facebook has come back with more bells and whistles. But I’m trying to refrain myself from giving any opinion of these changes now but will come back in a few weeks when data are available for analysis. For the time being, I’ve switched to the Live feed option.

For those who like the new design, here’s your friend. How about you? Do you “like” or “dislike” the new design?

Please take part in our poll to vote for your preferred date HERE

• If I navigate to “Tin mới” [New News], and choose Technology, I get newly submitted Tech news.
• If I navigate to Technology, and choose “Tin mới”, I get general submitted links instead of Tech ones.

It’s weird. Can you guys fix it?

It has been a long while since we have heard something from the only Venture Capital firm in Vietnam, and it looks like some good news. Are our men back to business? (wink)

Looking back, I used to be one of the Twitter “evangelists” who would excitedlt pitch this shiny social technology to anyone in contact. But that’s changed now. Not that I don’t believe Twitter will be something in Vietnam in a foreseeable future, but it’s practically not practicable for brands to take advantage of this as a communication/ PR platform. If I were to advise a client on which social technologies to use for the next social media marketing campaign, Twitter would be at the end of the list. Sorry, my blue bird.

Haven’t we had enough local microblogging services? And what sort of difference does Mino bring if cheap SMS message is the only difference from the others? Maybe, just maybe, this can help them push more users to the platform, but it might take them at least two years to grow like Twitter used to. Because it looks exactly like Twitter on first look. How much percentage do 5mil users account for out of the total Internet population? And how much would that be for the Vietnamese market? Plus, what’s the point for the English interface anyway? Did someone just mention Facebook? Tee…hee…

I’m a little clueless.

It’s mostly related to the look and feel of the pages, not the work flow. Anyway here are a few screenshots:

Facebook Event Management

Facebook Event Guest Invite

I like*:

• The UI looks a lot sleeker than before
• Instead of just using texts as navigational cues, Facebook is now explicitly showing the 3 Steps in which to complete the event creation process, which is great!
• The page’s length has been shortened a lot to fit into one page, no need to scroll down like before, thanks to the use of select boxes and in-place editors.
• Event managers can invite people from past events. This is the most impressive improvement. As someone who’s creating periodical events, this change makes my life a lot easier. No need to pick up guests from a list of 1000 friends any more!

Thank you Facebook. Love it!

P/S: I’m looking forward to seeing you at our second Organizers’ Meeting.

But thanks to that, I learnt a couple of things. I believed @taitran wrote this blog post: “Social Media engagement on Facebook: Fan Page is the better channel” partly to remind me that creating a Facebook Profile for the movie was not the right way to do it. And he was right.

For the past months, I’ve seen local businesses going to Facebook to promote themselves, unfortunately most of them’ve created a Facebook Profile instead of a Fan Page. Certainly it wouldn’t hurt a lot in the beginning but the cons of doing it eclipse the pros.

Now, the question is: what are you gonna do about it? How do you convert your “company’s friends” to loyal fans? Yesterday a friend called me asking this very question and I wasn’t able to come up with an immediate answer. So here it is.

Suggest them to become fans of your business.

But suggesting fans needs some delicate handling. During my experiment with fan suggestion, I’ve found that suggesting a whopping 500 fans won’t work as expected. Facebook seems to have implemented some prevention measures that disallow mass fan suggestion.

Another weird “bug” I’ve found is some people who have become fans are still in the “not-fan” list, which causes a lot of confusion.The best tactic to fix it is send suggestions to 50 persons at a time. This works better than sending them messages because your limit is only 20 persons at any given time. And you can still attach a personal message alongside.

Key takeaways:

• Don’t create a Facebook Profile for your business. Go with the Fan Page.
• Fan suggestions should be exploited at a reasonable rate.
• Bonus: Facebook Ads can work to your advantage.

If you have been one of those who’re building fan pages for your/others’ business, please kindly share your experience here.