For some reason today it hit me how many tweets I read from the local Singaporean bloggers have become increasingly brand-focused over the last few months. And in many instances not because they are genuinely fans of the brand, but because they’re part of this programme or that outreach or whatever it is.

If Twitter (and social media) is a channel, then these brand-pushed tweets are no different from the ad in the middle of my magazine, billboard when I drive on the road or 30 second ad in the middle of my tv show. They’re disruptive and we’re back where the whole problem with traditional media began.

The problem here is twofold:

1) Agencies are lazy
I think it’s time to go beyond blogger outreach. This is a whole blog post on its own so I won’t get into it here. The other problem is

2) Bloggers allow it
I don’t even know if this is a conscious or subconscious decision, but how many bloggers are blogging about what got them started in the first place? I look at a couple of blogs who I used to follow and now the word “advertorial” is in every other post. I think we (bloggers) need to remember what got us those readers to subscribe to our blogs in the first place. What got the first 10, 50, 100, 200, 500 people to follow us on Twitter in the first place. I’m pretty sure 9/10 times the reason is not “so they could get messages from brands” and to be free walking breathing tweeting advertisements for them. As Jo from Flowing Motion put it to me today while discussing the topic: “what about your reputation?”

The whole promise about social media was that it would be a conversation. People would feel passionately (or not) about products and services and by communicating with each other, hopefully community is built and advocacy is developed. And yes, I recognise that it won’t always be organic and that sometimes a brand will reach out and we bloggers will respond, but really, let’s try to maintain some decorum of self-dignity and refuse to be the new marketing vehicles of companies because we have worked hard to build up our credibility and to be relevant to our audiences and have their trust.

Is that really worth that extra blog post just so you’ll get invited to that next event that has barely anything to do with your blog content?

You decide.

Pat has a great post with the same title: how to be a social media junkie and keep your job over on Blankanvas and it inspired me to make a post of my own, though I certainly don’t mean to compare my fresh 3-month agency life with her career!

It took me awhile to figure out that I although my work and personal life crisscross in that the subject matter happens to be the same, there would be no way to manage this on a long term basis unless I turned it into a well-oiled machine, and I finally feel like I have that routine nailed down enough to get close to full productivity at the office.

First, a little bit of what I do. I work in a 100% digital ad agency so thankfully all my client work is online. While I have my fair share as billable hours, as the resident “social media guy”  (not guru) in the team, I maintain all of BLUE’s social media presence from the BLUE blog to our twitter account to delicious, stumble upon, Facebook and the like. As with anything, maintaining these accounts and doing my billable work takes time, so this is how my typical day goes:

0745: get up, check my own Gmail for important mails I need to take note of, have a once-over my RSS feed and check in on Facebook.

0900 (ish): reach the office, clear my work email and work Gmail. This includes looking for comments on the BLUE blog, seeing who’s followed us on Twitter, approving friend requests on Facebook and anything else that might have come through those channels.

0945: check in on BLUE’s Twitter account to look for anything interesting, mentions, DMs or tweets worth re-tweeting. I make it a point to try to follow 3-5 new people daily just to expand our horizons. We deal in everything digital so everyone from design to mobile people to SEO/SEM to social media to even mainstream marketing people are all “fair game”.

1010: next I peer into my rss feed on Outlook (which is separate from my personal Google Reader feed) to look for stuff that’s relevant to the team and stuff that will help with thought leadership, case studies and the like. Where applicable I forward them to the team or bookmark them on delicious, stumble upon etc. I also make a quick scan of oursignal.com just to see what else people find interesting.

By the time all this is done it’s anywhere between 1030 to 11am and I move on to whatever tasks I have for the day. This is where it enters “anything goes” territory and things are a little flexible, but I always feel like I cleared an important part of my routine by now. And in fact given the line of work I’m in, that’s about all the routine I can expect. There was one week where I had more work than normal to do and I completely didn’t engage in this routine for a good four days. It took me a long while to dig myself out of that black hole.

As much as starting the day off is important, I like to end it with some structure too. There’s a great post on Webworker Daily called firewall your time and I try to dedicate half an hour starting at around 545 to do certain tasks:

• Achieve inbox zero (both work and Gmail) (I sometimes fail this step)
• Check ‘later’ email folder for actionable items
• Save sent emails worth saving
• Check outlook calendar and Google Calendar for appointments/events tomorrow that I might have to prepare for
• Write todo list for next day
• Review any stuff I wrote down on paper today
• Check check my tickler notes for today and tomorrow to see if there’s anything outstanding for today I need to do, or take note of for tomorrow
• Clear physical inbox (things that I have to process once goes in here: paper to recycle, trash to throw, stuff to bring home. So I don’t shuttle back and forth)
• Fill up my timesheet (daily is a must)
• Decide what to do when home, enter that into my tickler file
• Clear what I can from my Outlook RSS feeds
• Clear my desktop – limited to what I’m working on tomorrow and archiving the rest. (I usually fail this step)

After work, I clear stuff I’ve written down on my tickler file and generally do my own thing (game, catch a movie, have dinner etc) but more often than not stuff I read online is work related, so I email that to myself and make a note of what action I should take the next day.

So that’s what I do to keep myself same, get my social media ‘fix’ and keep my job (so far) all at the same time. How about you?

ps: Interestingly enough, almost exactly a year ago Pat and I did a similar ‘day in the life’ post talking about the brands we would come into contact with and use throughout the day. Read about her brand timeline and mine if you’re so inclined. (Caveat: I was in Canada at the time of that post, so Canadian brands will probably be overly represented)

Is the company that is clueless about social media, which is equally harmful for the fresh grads looking for jobs thinking they actually found one that’s social media-related.

I’ve had enough of this social media “guru” bashing (for the record, I don’t consider myself one of them). I’ll take the opposite point of view, a view i was particularly familiar with until about three months ago:

How about all these companies who think they want to be involved and throw around catchphrases like join the conversation but have no clue whatsoever what they should be doing? Yeah you know the kind I’m talking about. Those who want to know how many Facebook friends you have so that they can use you to invite some of them to their “influencer events” or readily dump you the awesome job of “setting up a Facebook group” (while Facebook is blocked by their firewall).

Those are both true stories by the way.

The fact here is there’s a gap. A gap which both sides are readily willing to exploit. I’m not agreeing with either but let’s face it, companies who hire the social media “gurus” aren’t really victims here. They get them because they’re equally eager and greedy at the chance to jump into this and will hire anyone, qualified or not, and don’t bother to do their research.

Think about it. The social media “gurus” lure companies in with the false promises of solving their social media problems and take their money, the companies lure job applicants with real talent with the false promises of a chance to work in real social media and take a piece of their soul. Either way someone is getting conned.

It’s a match made in heaven.

As I type this, there’s a live concert going on on YouTube (yes, YouTube) by U2.

I’m by no means a fan of U2 (don’t kill me) but there are a few interesting things about how this is done.

Click to view large

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1. While I wouldn’t call U2 an “old” band, one would argue their fan demographics skew slightly older. Getting a concert on a social channel could help spread the world to younger (< 18) fans in this day and age.
2. U2 is a smart band. If you look at the stream (screen shot above) there are calls to action everywhere. Whether it’s monetary (buy album now), opting in for future news/transactions (joining newsletter) or spreading word of mouth (sharing on Facebook, Twitter) anything someone clicks on adds value to the broadcast and U2 in some way.
3. This could really be the future of broadcasting where everyone globally interacts at the same time. We already see it during soccer matches if you follow them on Twitter. But what if it were aggregated to one channel (ie YouTube) for everyone in the world? It really changes your perception of television, media and broadcasting.
4. Less of an observation but just a thought: how much bandwidth do they have?!?!?!

What did you think of the live concert? Just another live stream or revolutionary? Glimpse of the future or gimmick? Comment below!

[this post originally appeared as part of a group blog on Digiramblings]

If you don’t already follow me on Twitter, you might not know that myself along with Dorothy, Mark and Amelia have started a group blog on Posterous called Digiramblings.

It’s a group blog for us to talk about all sorts of social media, digital marketing and public relations stuff from the point of view of four Gen Y bloggers in our first job doing digital in one agency or another.

Think of it as four blogs in one! Do check us out and give us feedback!

Gen Y is motivated to make a difference in the world… Each person has unique talents that are waiting to be maximised.

Scott Asai, Brazen Careerist

As I connect with friends who are new entrants to the workforce, I find that an increasing number of them come back feeling work should be “more than this” and feeling anywhere between annoyed to outright fed up with processes that should have been extinct right around the time of the dinosaurs.

I look at these friends and see people who were student leaders in school, excellent team mates who I’ve worked well with at one point or another and real go-getters, so why the seeming disconnect?

Perhaps we’ve been trained to think, to learn how to be decision makers and knowledge workers. But when we question processes/actions that could be done in cheaper, faster or smarter ways, they’re thrown under the “we’ve always done it this way” bus.

We seem used to solving problems within days when we could make the decisions, but now problems could take months to solve, new initiatives months to be approved, depending on how many hoops your corporation makes you jump through.

In a world where you can reach anyone via LinkedIn and we’re taught to connect to CEOs and build those relationships, these hoops seem counter-intuitive.

It seems Generation Y feels like they graduate from school and get hired by employers who do not know what to do with us and instead slap on “tried and tested” methods of management and work processes that bury Gen Y with what they perceive (rightly or wrongly) to be meaningless work, instead of harnessing the crazy amount of energy they possess and unleash it on conquering the world (or some similar corporate goal). Are the unique talents really being maximised? Or are they being utilised the way they always have been utilised before?

It seems they graduate and look at people in the company who have worked for a few years and are settling into “just get by” mode, and can see themselves transforming into those drones in a few years.

Can we change a world that is resistant to change?

Is this the “sense of entitlement” that people claim Generation Y have? Or is it a sign that the workforce is fundamentally broken and needs to be fixed?

You tell me.

I wanted to build a little on my earlier post, 5 things conference speakers can do to make their sessions better, and talk about vendors who have little exhibition stalls at the conferences in hopes of generating leads, awareness or whatever the business goal is.

1) Have a demo
I meet vendors who’re able to explain to me what they do in abstract terms, but I really want to have a feel of doing it myself without the pitching and fluff. Provide it.

2) Provide case studies
It’s nice to hear “25,000 companies are using our platform”, but when I ask “like who?” and you can’t name a brand? It sounds a little suspicious. Showcase some successes or experiments and give me a feel of how it works.

3) Give me something to take away
Sometimes it isn’t a tangible product, sometimes it’s a service. Lewis PR had this tongue-in-cheek collateral on how to comment on a blog and it was just something fun to take away.

4) Give me a trial
Knowing about your product/service in theory doesn’t do much. We all know how the marketing funnel works, get me down to the trial stage and maybe it’ll help push me towards a purchase decision if the product speaks for itself.

5) Be genuine
Too often I get vendors who squint at my nametag and try to determine if it’s worth their time to talk to me or not. I’ve mentioned this before in going for the sale vs going for the customer. Be genuine and the rest works itself out.

Those are my thoughts, what would you suggest vendors do to make their exhibitions more accessible?

Disclaimer: Any brands and products mentioned are my own personal interactions with them and do not represent endorsements by either myself or my employer, I’m simply using them for illustrative purposes.

At best, you’ll be as good as them.

Today the BLUE blog is finally going live after about two months of planning and preparation. It was literally handed to me on my first day of work and I was told to make it a reality. I gotta say, it has got to be the hardest blog I’ve ever set up, compared to signing up with Wordpress with a click.

But one thing I really enjoyed about working on the blog was that I was never told to look at company X or firm Y. It was really built on the belief that we’d get it started and it’ll evolve organically as time goes by. And when you aren’t thinking within the “box” that competitors or other firms have set, then you have much more room to grow.

Maybe you notice one competitor is on Facebook and another is on Twitter so you decide to go on both just to “keep up”, when that money could have been spent on paid search or SEO and doubled your conversion rate, but you didn’t because your “competitor wasn’t doing it”.

Where would the iPhone be if Apple looked at the existing competitors in the market at the time? How about the Wii if all Nintendo did was look at what was in existence in the form of the Playstation and the Xbox? How much money would then-presidential candidate Obama have raised if he chose to do it the same, “tried and tested” way every presidential candidate had before him, through fund raising parties intead of going straight to the voters via new media? Where will your company end up if all you’re doing is looking over your shoulder?

I’m not saying scoping out the competition is a waste of time, definitely not. But you’ll have strengths that they won’t have and they’ll have weaknesses that you don’t. So whatever they’re doing may not work for you and vice versa.

Take my limited real world “experience” with a bucket of salt, but give me the choice and I’d choose to cut my own blazing path than be a follower. Innovation is key.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for the longest time but I think recording it on video would get be something different, hope you enjoy it:

Here’s a link to the article by Tania that I mentioned, worth taking a look at.

Thanks to recent “inspirations” like the badly executed Singapore Writers Festival and numerous bad PR pitches that really drive the point home. – you really need to be careful who you put behind social media initiatives or they the risk of it blowing up in your face increases exponentially.

Agree? Disagree? Would you prefer to hire someone with the “technical” skills and re-purpose them for the web, or hire someone familiar with the web and polish their craft?

The Singapore Writers Festival is back and the big news was that they were bringing in Neil Gaiman. After continually hearing about it and repeatedly checking their website, there was no mention of Neil until one day it was all over the social media channels that tickets had run out and were only announced on Twitter (to an audience of 170+) as opposed to their Facebook group (700+) or even their mailing list.

Understandably, this led to confusion, disappointment and outrage all over the Facebook group, Facebook event page and Twitter:

I believe the organisers made one of the biggest mistakes there is to be made in social media: focusing on the tools, platforms and technology. They probably were aware that “Facebook” and “Twitter” were the latest buzzwords in town and decided to use them exclusively instead of their website or even email communications.

And even then, I’d be hard pressed to say they used them well. There’s little to no response to the upset people above on the channels and to put it plainly, it seems like the organisers intend to ignore them.

At the end of the day, we have to realise social channels is to be used in conjunction with existing channels, not instead of. If and when they are brought into the marketing or communications plan, there should be a solid strategy or goal behind it, not just using the tools for the sake of it.

Perhaps the Singapore Writers Festival organisers  should have taken a page out of the British Council’s book since they organised it brilliantly when Neil was last down a few years ago.

For a completely different case study, check out Jonathan Wong’s post on Anime Festival Asia