Technology As Innovator

Assignment 1: promotion and expectation management using social media

Requirements

Chan Than San is a Vietnamese model working in East & South East Asia region. He has a Xanga site, a Yahoo! 360 site, a MySpace account and at least 2 Facebook accounts which he maintains manually himself. In 2010, his modeling career is rocketing it consumes most of his time and his manager wants him to fully focus on his main task as a model.

Suppose you are hired to be the Social Media Manager for Chan Than San.

1. How will you get to know him both professionally and personally? Detail all assumptions made.
2. How do you plan for the transition from he to you on the current accounts? Also clarify the legal and ethics issues relating to account management.
3. How do you manage expectation in communities in which the language used is not comprehensible to you? For example, you speak English and Vietnamese and want to see what Indonesian fans say about him - of course they use Indonesian.
4. Which media will you use to promote him? Why?
5. How do you manage the community? Detail all assumptions made.
6. How do you deal with criticism, negative responses, flaming, spamming, trolling from the communities both within and out of your management? Detail all assumptions made.
7. How do you collaborate with his manager, stylists, event manager, photographers and fan club coordinator?
8. How will you do SEO on his fansite (if any)?
9. Who do you expect to report to? Detail all assumptions made.
10. Think of a case when conflict of interest arise. Detail that case. Propose solutions you want to take in order to tackle the conflict.
11. Where do you see yourself in the next 3 years in your career?

What the…?

What is this joke about?

No this is not a joke. I’m serious.

This is a piece of career orientation I’m giving for the enthusiasts in the social media industry - if you care enough.

Social Media gives a platform on which new business opportunities are built. What businesses? Every single kind of business you can name.

In social media, there are not only the product implementers (creators), the advertisers (trader), the analysts (observers), the investors (angels), the users (clients). There is also the role of the consultant.

Consultants are ones who utilize knowledge and reputation influence to assist the business growth. Financially, this role helps generate revenues, and adds another link in the cashflow of this industry. These are also people who spread the words, standardize the concepts, educate users and businesses.

Where are these people in Vietnam? I can see Nguyen Viet Hai from i360 and Do Quang Tu. I know some others who are doing jobs very close to this role.

Are you interested? Think about it. And I hope you have been inspired.

Trivia

Do you wonder why I chose this particular person to write about, not another more well-known Vietnamese celeb? The reason is that he is not known only within Vietnam, but in other adjacent countries as well. The regional opportunities and challenges if working with this person are interesting to raise. The second thing is that he is using some social media properties including Xanga & Slides, apart from the default-in-Vietnamese Yahoo! 360 + Flickr, which should intrigue/interest the social media experts. This is similar to the buzz in the social media world about Britney Spears on Twitter.

I’ve heard about a fansite for Hoang Thuy Linh being developed by several young social media initiators. This could be a great opportunity for experiment with new media interactions. It will be interesting to see how a fansite built by the 2.0 people will differentiate itself from other sites.

What do you think?

The argument which was left unclosed…

On the fly with the news, I hastily posted an entry on the status of Facebook’s translation to Vietnamese project. That entry was left unfinished with a big gap between my premise and my conclusion.

So here I am to fill the that gap with more complete points

…urged me to review basic principles of the market…

The search for the answer reminds me of two articles that should be read going further into Facebook’s strategy

“Facebook is a relationship-centric SNS”

TanNg, Vài gợi ý cho người dùng mạng xã hôi ở Việt nam

***

“As with the overseas Vietnamese students, we tackle them by word of mouths. So far, we have identified a number of key Vietnamese student networks in the US and the UK. But again, it depends largely on “viral effect” – one person sign up, love it and spread it to others. We have great faith in our product and are working hard to constantly improve the system. So yes, we plan to use a combination of word-of-mouth and traditional outreach strategies.”

Khoa Pham & Thanh Le, Interview with faceViet’s CEO

Leave these points here, we’ll come back to them later.

…to get the foundation questions answered

1. How does Facebook acquire users?

Facebook started off in Ivy League’s colleges. Then these students introduced the website to their connections. More and more joined and used the service because it was a useful product.

That’s why we say Facebook is a relationship-centric SNS. The motivation for users to use Facebook is mainly their connections. Facebook’s user acquisition is organic and natural as long as it remains useful a product to the users.

How about Vietnamese users? A picture is worth a thousand words

2. What builds reception readiness?

In the illustration, I put my hypothesis on reception readiness of Facebook particularly and the social network concept as a whole.

So what found this readiness in users?

1. The use of interactive IT systems in their work/study

Emails, KPI management systems, deal tracking systems (yes, CRM or issue-tracker if you’re more familiar with either of them), e-learning systems, version control systems, discussions boards, digital submission systems, scheduling (or timetabling) systems, accounting systems, payroll systems…

The more proficient people with (some of) these systems, the more ready they are to use interactive SNS.

How familiar are the majority of Vietnamese students with these systems?

2. Media coverage & user educating

Or how well the media educate potentials users of the values SNS bring them.

User educating is not PR; it’s about values. It should not involve throwing the product on users; it’s about attracting them. It’s not about exposing your greed selling to users first; it’s about solving their problems first.

3. Water the root

Correctly if I’m wrong, but I believe that spending more efforts on power users would reinforce the organic introduction loop.

Where is the root of Vietnamese SNS users? Mr. Thanh Le from faceViet mentioned his point above and I agree with him.

3. Why will Facebook dominate the Vietnam market when they launch?

1. Because Facebook has the root of the roots.

2. Because Facebook is mature in all product, brand recognition and business model, if compared to other competitors from local market.

3. Because Facebook will stand longer. This crucial point is usually, and possibly intentionally, ignored in many discussions on SNS in Vietnam. All Yahoo! 360 users have gone through the fear of losing their contents and social graphs. They will make judgment in choosing the next destination! I think they are smart enough to know how big (which in turn means stable) the world’s biggest SNS is and how long it is going to last store their contents and social graphs as compared to competing services.

But Facebook doesn’t satisfy the needs of many Vietnamese users…

What do the majority of Vietnamese users need now?

• A blogging platform? Well, Facebook is relationship-centric, not content-centric. Nevertheless, it has a powerful Notes application.
• Media sharing? Well, Facebook is relationship-centric, not content-centric. Nevertheless, it is launching a music site.
• Customization? Well, Facebook is relationship-centric, not ego-centric. Nevertheless, certain application allows users to customize their page.
• Facebook is overwhelming with feature. Well, writing on walls, sending messages and uploading photos are way too hard it took me forever to learn. Fortunately, Yahoo! 360 and Flickr did are doing very well to educate users (including me) on these three extremely difficult tasks. Other features? If you don’t like them just leave them be, they won’t bite.

OK, leave the details there and take one step back to look that the big picture.

Vietnamese users, in their first experience with Web 2.0, were given a blogging platform (Yahoo! 360) and very basic social networking features. They want a place to communicate, express and share. The options for them were way so limited while local services are still not mature, or in other words, many Vietnamese users have not used a full relationship-centric SNS yet. We don’t know how Facebook will change their preferences until it does. This we don’t know, doesn’t make an argument whether Facebook satisfies their current needs or not. Reality will answer.

Conclusion

This entry fills the gap I left from my previous argument: Facebook will dominate.

How do you disagree with me? Or which service do you think will challenge Facebook?

Acknowledgment

With special appreciation to these people for helping me with this post:

Duy Doan, VCCorp

Thu H. Nguyen, Australian Consulate General

Twitter’s success has boiled to the point the even some Twitterers start to wonder how would the service monetize.

Here is the short list of a few ways I can think of for Twitter’s evolution:

1. Same as that of Facebook: display ads in left & right white spaces
2. Same as that of Google Adword: you tweet “I love cold drink”, an ad for Coca-cola is displayed
3. Same as that of faceViet: display ad between tweets
4. Same as that of vietnamworks: service providers pay Twitter to create a Twitter account specifically for brand-engagement / market research / recruitment / sales. This is politically difficult as the line between a service provider and a non-provider is vague
5. Same as that of many popular blogs providing premium subscription: celebrity Twitterer charge followers for valuable tweets, part of the charge goes to Twitter
6. Same as that of a social-C2C-commerce: Twitters become actual seller & procurers

What are your ideas?