Singaporeans are not the only kiasu people around. While we can boast of the Bubble Tea phenomena, the Hello Kitty queues and the Donut craze (among others), the herd mentality as a result of “kiasuism” seems to also be present across the world.
Within the last few years, the Facebook explosion and $1.65b buyout of YouTube have gotten everyone crazy about social media. This is no different in Singapore, with the greater use by and coverage of social media news through media companies giving it exposure to the average citizen. Organizations too, have began jumping on board, evident through the increase demand for Social Media consultancy, and the many organizations that pitched with a Facebook Application idea in an attempt to get developers to work on them.
Big Problem though: Social Media is NOT for everyone!
As such, I took some time to compile 7 of the most important things an organization should know before wanting to get onto Social Media (or get a Facebook App for that matter).
1. Focus on Channels with your Audience
Social media is just a MEDIA. Similar to traditional campaigns, pick and choose the media where the target audience can be found and USE THAT MEDIA. There is no point being on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube & Flickr at the same time – there is no such thing as diversification of “risks” by being on all these media.
2. Tribes vs. Eyeballs
There is a need to choose if a campaign is to get as many eyeballs within a short period of time or to build a community around products and services. Having a cool application or social network or YouTube video is nice, but what is the business objective? To have a tribe of fans around products (e.g. Macrumors.com)? Or perhaps just to create buzz around that product?
3. It’s not about what you want
Social Media is not about pounding advertisements down people’s throats, and there is no way to “force” a community to develop. In order to meet the desired social media objective, value must be provided to the community that the organization intends to reach out to.
4. Social Media might not be Cheaper Whopper Sacrifice might have been cheaper to do than a whole page advertisement on Wall Street Journal, but how many failed Internet campaigns have you seen? In addition, once a community is built around a product, how much future money is to be spent maintaining the community?
5. Get an Expert & Leave it to them
Similar to how campaigns are left to PR and Marketing Consultancies (unless you have the expertise), it may make more sense to leave social media work to the experts. These are the people with the latest Social media news, religiously check Twitter, and love contributing to online communities. Spend time doing what you’re world’s best in, give a direct on where you want to go with social media, and let these people work their magic.
If one has all these thought out properly and still want to pitch about a Social Media idea, then I have great news for you. Through the experience thus far from the CS3216 module, all you need is a Good Developer with Passion for the idea, and the idea can be done on ANY platform. Be it on Facebook, OpenSocial or any other platform, magic can be done within 3 short weeks!!
Adapted & Edited from Sports Medicine journal:
“The activity patterns of exciting projects are intermittent in nature, consisting of repeated bouts of brief maximal/near-maximal work interspersed with relatively short moderate/low-intensity recovery periods. This is generalized description currently provides the best means of directly assessing the physiological response to this type of activity. During a single short sprint, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is resynthesised predominantly from having a vision of future achievements, with a small contribution from possible financial gains. During recovery, new ideas sharing remains at a high level to restore motivation via processes such as networking sessions, attending inspiring talks, and seeing others on the same path as you.”
Researching into the successes of the Apples, IDEOs and Toyotas of the world, a common theme of start-ups is often the seeming lack of fear – the singular focus on the goal at hand, ignoring all odds and giving it all you can.
Quoting from Seth Godin’s post yesterday, “The best way to overcome your fear… might be to sprint… all the internal dialogue falls away and we just go as fast as we possibly can… you don’t feel that sore knee and you don’t worry that the ground isn’t perfectly level. You just run… You can’t sprint forever… the brevity of the event is a key part of why it works.”
“The project deadline is tomorrow.”, “You have 24 hours to plan and execute the entire roadshow”, “(from Prof Ben) Learn an entire new programming language and API, and deliver an application within 3 weeks”. All of us, in a point or another, have achieved something extraordinary by sprinting, often egged on by external motivation factors, so we know that it is possible. Sometimes, we might even only realize the enormity of the project on hand after we had completed it.
How often do you sprint? Only when people ask you to? Why not decide to sprint regularly and build up your stamina to take on larger projects? Build the next Google? Be the first non-astronaut on the moon?
One thing from the journal to note for the chronic optimist (like myself) though, “if duration of the recovery periods is insufficient to restore the metabolic environment to resting conditions, performance during successive work bouts may be compromised”.. Pick your battles and sprint through to the finish line!
Stories of how companies are born are without fail, one of the genres of stories that I find most exciting and most appealing to the entrepreneur in me. That’s a major reason why I attended the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Series when I was in SV, still listen to its podcast regularly, and am involved in In3, where we try to bring such entrepreneurial leaders to share their stories at NUS to all Singaporeans. I was therefore, very happy when greeted this morning with a tweet from @dom about How Twitter was born.
Let’s do lessons learnt before we go on:
1. When you have an excellent team, try and try until you succeed - Odeo didn’t, but Twitter sure did
2. For the people – People didn’t understand the value of Twitter till much later, given its lack of a special feature. However, what they missed is the only important feature – People.
3. Keep a record of thoughts – Tweet #38 said “Oh this is going to be addictive” and sure it was. These records make for excellent stories, both in success and in failure.
4. Go for glory – Being B2C, without the huge events that Twitter supported, it couldn’t have gotten the network effect that it currently has
More straight-to-the-point than the article itself, though, is the comments that one of the co-founders, TonyStubblebine wrote:
“… Odeo was made up of a lot of past and mostly present company founders… I think we needed that many rockstars to turn the middling opportunity we had in podcasting into the major opportunity that Twitter has”
Throughout all these start-up stories, it is clear that persistence is one of the few persistent topics. By persistently pursuing dreams and aspirations, one naturally will attract people who are as passionate as they are. While along the way, each one of us may fail in our own projects, but when we keep at it, and find others on the same path to band together, great things are bound to happen.
Never give up pursuing entrepreneurial aspirations – it is going to be addictive!
On Wednesday, after helping NOC do a pitch to a lecture with many Sophomores, Juliana (NOC staff) asked me for my opinion on the following topic: “What makes Stanford special?” In summary, my response was that while in the graduate and post-graduate levels, there seem to be more opportunities for cutting edge research, in the undergraduate level, things are not all that different from other (good) universities. However, its alumni base, locality and special programs (such as STVP) provides a slight advantage that compounds over time to make it special.
A day ago, this was highlighted in a huge way on Techcrunch.
Before I go on, for those who don’t already know, let me explain what Techcrunch is. TechCrunch is a blog (mostly) about Web2.0 products & companies, started by Michael Arrington, who is one of Time’s Top 100 World’s Most Influential people in 2008. With over 1,808,000 web feed subscribers, mostly in the Web2.0 industry, the companies featured in Techcrunch often get a million users overnight just by being mentioned.
So yesterday, I saw a post titled “Stanford Students Release A Cool Batch Of iPhone Apps”, which was also had links to a prior post that I have seen before about the Facebook Apps released by Stanford students. Granted that the course is a year adrift from the posting about the Facebook Apps post, but seriously, the portfolio of the previous CS3216 course seems way way cooler, I mean, just look at it! There’s a collection of applications that might actually help you do something, instead of the super-poke-type applications.
However, here’s my point. The Stanford courses are featured on Techcrunch, which in turn is a guarantee for a instant jump in number of users. Talk about solving Cold Start strategies. (By the way I’ve heard Web2.0 entrepreneurs pitching to VCs with the marketing plan being “Get featured on Techcrunch”.) While head-starts do not necessarily make you more successful, but this, and other introductions and recommendations in the Valley, are the unfair advantages available exclusively to Stanford students. Leveraging on this to achieve greater successes, makes Stanford special.
Now that things are demystified, we can make NUS equally if not more special. Can’t we?
In 2008, Google was once again selected as the 100 Best Companies to Work For, which reflects results from a 57 question survey of employees in companies in US. So it was absolutely interesting to see this post on Techcrunch. In short, the general complains of the ex-Googlers as shown in the post were relatively lower pay, fringe benefits disappearing, and usual stuff like “too much bureaucracy, poor management, poor mentoring, and a hiring process that took months”.
While I think that these are the minority in Google, this brings up a conversation that I had with Ed a year back about Web2.0 companies. What is the optimal level of benefits that a company should give out to its employees and how much marketing (for the lack of a better word) should be done using these benefits to attract and retain talents?
The premise for the discussion: During the Dot com days, the remuneration packages and more observably, fringe benefits such as free food, free drinks, gaming rooms all around the office. Ignoring the “Home-run” companies for the reason that they are the outliers and not the norm, when the dot com bust happened, the companies that didn’t have the fringe benefits seemed to be more capable of retaining its employees while the “cool” companies that had to cut the fringe benefits due to cost cutting, had employees fleeting once they sensed that the company is not doing well.
From the emails and the various complaints that the ex-Googlers listed, it seems as though a similar thing is happening. People come in looking forward to being part of the “cool culture” in Google that is so well documented and advertised, but when it doesn’t happen as promised, employees start leaving and bitch about it.
Expectations Setting
This is nothing new, and I guess it boils down to the age old lesson of setting of expectations on a couple of fronts:
1. Manage Expectations of Employees: Instead of over-peppering potential employees and attract them with fringe benefits (which they assimilate to be necessities and forgetting that they’re just benefits), let them know about the reality from other employees.
1a. Set High Expectations, then Exceed Them: As an auxiliary to the previous point, it would yield you instant evangelists out of employees immediately when you exceed their expectations. So do this.
2. Manage Your Own Expectation: It is hard to do this, but seriously, when we choose a wrong company to work for, it is our own fault isn’t it? So instead of going in with too high an expectation and coming out complaining, won’t it be wiser to go in hoping to contribute (instead of them benefitting you), and let them sweep you off your feet with great HR plans?
As I close, I just realized that I unknowingly had a major headfake doing this post: Either be a HR expert, or hire one if you want to run a company. While there will be people that come out unhappy about the company, only then would a successful balancing act help you attract and retain your best talents. Like Google.
An excellent brand is more than just a good logo. Use the following terms and definitions when evaluating the brands you find tonight.
Delivery on Promise
A good brand has a well-defined (either implicit or explicit) promise to its customers, and consistently delivers on that promise. For each brand you visit tonight, try and define what their promise is, and how they deliver.
Memorability/Ownability
The brand uses color, typography, logo and other design elements such as layout and dress of retail locations in a consistent manner. Creating distinctive elements and using them consistently not only makes a brand memorable, but keeps other companies from using the same elements.
Superior Offering or Service
The brand’s product or service works more consistently, tastes better, or provides a more satisfying experience than the competition.
Fulfills a Need/Innovates
The brand takes an existing product or service and elevates it to a new level by re-imaging, redesigning, or combining it with a new approach.
“Company Culture” Definition: Company Culture is the term given to the shared values and practices of the employees. Note that the actual culture may not match the published culture. Examples: Many start up companies have a company culture that promotes working very long hours and then crashing under your desk.
Well at where I work at, I’ve kinda created a new company culture by the simple introduction of a new item that we got for a cheap price when a company that a classmate works at closed down. This item, though simple, and not all that interesting, has began to create a culture where the employees (though not many) at my company can come together after lunch, during breaks, etc. to have a platform to discuss issues or simply just talk while engaging in cohesion activities.
This miraculous item is none other than….. *drum roll*…..
Yes, the Foosballl table. It is amazing how something as simple as a Foosball table put right at the centre of the office has started to have the company talking more to each other and having a place to relax….
*entry uncompleted… gonna finish this after a mentorship session*
“Company Culture” Definition: Company Culture is the term given to the shared values and practices of the employees. Note that the actual culture may not match the published culture. Examples: Many start up companies have a company culture that promotes working very long hours and then crashing under your desk.
Well at where I work at, I’ve kinda created a new company culture by the simple introduction of a new item that we got for a cheap price when a company that a classmate works at closed down. This item, though simple, and not all that interesting, has began to create a culture where the employees (though not many) at my company can come together after lunch, during breaks, etc. to have a platform to discuss issues or simply just talk while engaging in cohesion activities.
This miraculous item is none other than….. *drum roll*…..
Yes, the Foosballl table. It is amazing how something as simple as a Foosball table put right at the centre of the office has started to have the company talking more to each other and having a place to relax….
*entry uncompleted… gonna finish this after a mentorship session*
Singaporeans are not the only kiasu people around. While we can boast of the Bubble Tea phenomena, the Hello Kitty queues and the Donut craze (among others), the herd mentality as a result of “kiasuism” seems to also be present across the world.
Adapted & Edited from Sports Medicine journal:
Stories of how companies are born are without fail, one of the genres of stories that I find most exciting and most appealing to the entrepreneur in me. That’s a major reason why I attended the 
