Goodies for you guys!

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thedigitalmovement/sets/72157610646953472/

Video/audio links to the event:
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/kevinwalsh1.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/kevinwalsh2.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_1.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_2.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_3.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_4.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_5.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_6.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_7.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_8.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_9.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_10.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_11.wmv
* http://media.itr8.com/iterateod/tdm/gew/session_12.wmv

Chat Rooms:
* Main Discussion Room: http://www.chatzy.com/855575542660
* Room 1 (opens after keynote 1): http://www.chatzy.com/943003929798
* Room 2 (opens after keynote 1): http://www.chatzy.com/502132181517
* Room 3 (opens after keynote 1): http://www.chatzy.com/943297183044
* Room 4 (opens after keynote 2): http://www.chatzy.com/369936322338
* Room 5 (opens after keynote 2): http://www.chatzy.com/665407637852
* Room 6 (opens after keynote 2): http://www.chatzy.com/754735026892

Seesmic video conversations: http://seesmic.com/video/k0m7BmeUoW

Presentation Slides:
* http://www.slideshare.net/plus8star/stories-of-entrepreneurship-from-asia-presentation/
* http://www.thedigitalmovement.org/gew/docs/GEW_Slides.zip

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Dear Friends,

TDM invites all to an exciting speednetworking event where we in Singapore connect with like-minded entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and Stockholm.

Speednetwork the Globe is the first of the two global signature activities for the Week. It helps turn enterprising ideas into reality by building worthwhile connections between people all over the world. Rather than your typical speednetworking session, this event will be conducted online via chats and video conferencing to connect people in various parts of the world. The excitement will accumulate to the climax on 22nd Nov with keynote discussions covering from Singapore to Silicon Valley to Stockholm and others. Topics discussed are close at heart to entrepreneurs allowing them to exchange views, ideas and information. Supporting the online connections will also include some of the notable technologies from start-ups.

Date: 22 November 2008
Venue: Republic Polytechnic (Block W1, Level 4) | How to get there…
Time: 0900 till 1800 (GMT+8)

Sign up today to confirm your seat.

We have also set up a Seesmic channel where you can start the conversation right away! So if you have any questions or ideas to share, start replying to the video below…

Bring your laptop with you to the event for maximum satisfaction. *Public WIFI available

Sign up today to confirm your seat.
For more information, please visit: http://www.thedigitalmovement.org/gew/

Besides interesting talks happening here, an announcement was made here, this morning by Michael Yap, Executive Director of the IDM Research and Development Programme Office (IDMPO).

The Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF) is partnering the IDM Research and Development Programme Office (IDMPO) on a mentorship programme to cultivate and develop Interactive Digital Media (IDM) ideas and projects towards commercialisation.

Here’s the press release for it:

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Singapore, 31 October 2008 – Singapore’s Interactive Digital Media (IDM) industry receives a boost with the Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF) – and its vast network of industry members - partnering the multi-agency1 IDM Research and Development Programme Office (IDMPO) hosted by the Media Development Authority on a mentorship programme to cultivate and develop IDM ideas and projects towards commercialisation.

Targeted at individuals and young start-ups, the mentorship programme takes a two-phase approach. Firstly, SiTF members will shortlist and select innovative IDM projects for grants of S$50,000 from IDMPO’s Microfunding scheme. With the grant, individuals and young start-ups will be able to advance their ideas to the ‘proof of concept’ stage, with a clear focus on technical or business merit and feasibility. At the same time, SiTF members will offer mentoring in the form of technological and business expertise.

In the second phase, SiTF will cultivate these ideas further into the project stage with the ultimate goal for commercialisation by establishing funding mechanisms through close collaboration with government bodies and the industry. The selected projects will also have the opportunity to be matched with SiTF’s vast network of members for further investment. Lead SiTF members like MediaCorp Pte Ltd, Microsoft, SingTel and ST Electronics (Training & Simulation Systems) have already expressed their interest in project domains such as interactive media, mobile digital media, broadcast, IPTV and open source development etc. SiTF will continue to market this program to gain greater interest from more corporations who see opportunity to partner with start ups. Through support from the industry, the mentorship programme hopes to make available up to $10m worth of project funding and support over a period of five years.

On the partnership with SiTF, Mr Michael Yap, Executive Director of IDMPO said: “We welcome the joining of SiTF in our effort to fuel innovation in the IDM space. We believe SiTF’s wide network of industry members would add to the vibrancy of our IDM ecosystem.  We are exploring with companies such as MediaCorp Pte Ltd and ST Electronics to conduct joint calls for proposals.”

With SiTF, the IDMPO now has a network of 10 incubators to create support structures for the start-ups, including the platforms for regular pitching sessions and finding industry partners. Collectively, the incubators will nurture some 450 start-ups over the next few years. The existing incubators have facilitated the funding of some 90 projects to date, out of which 15 were completed. Thirty per cent of the completed projects have successfully received private investment.

“These are exciting times for players in the interactive digital media industry. Through the joint mentorship programme, SiTF aims to catalyse growth in the industry by enabling ideas to gain access to the right connections, guidance from industry experts and veterans, and obtain the necessary funding in order to ultimately develop into innovative products and services and bring them to market,” said Mr Ng Chong Khim, Chairman of SiTF’s Digitial Media Chapter.

To find out more about the joint Mentorship Programme, please contact Jacquie Khoo at Jacquie.khoo@sitf.org.sg.

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Times are in PST.

One-on-One Session with a Social Media Leader

0913 - Reshma is opening the second day by giving a brief outlook of what’s happening today.

0916 - Starting off in the morning, we have Paula Dum, VP Marketing, Digital Tax Solutions, H&R Block and Francois Gossieaux, Partner at Beeline Labs on the One-On-One Session with a Social Media Leader.

0922 - Paula: We launched a broad social media campaign by reaching out to users through a number of social networking sites, and by leveraging on the specific personality of each site and each community on these sites, we tweak our strategies to match the profiles of users on each of these sites. By using this campaign, we’re able to scale and in the process, we find the need to manage each community. Some widgets that we built didn’t relate well with some of the users on some sites (which we thought it would), so we have to move fast and respond to feedback. We are building on top of what we’ve learnt and applying it in future projects.

0929 - Paula: eHarmony - Measurements that we use - using brand tracking studies to study awareness, but social media alone did not drive that. It’s a combination of different strategies, but to actually measure engagement from the social media sites. We’re definitely driving more traffic, conversion rate and retention rate.

0931 - Professional content vs general content - Paula: Showing that we provide tax expertise in terms of tax professionals and advice increases credibility. So we started the conversation and for the users to continue those. After that we end of by fitting the professionals into the conversations again.

0937 - Have you run into scalability issues? - Paula: Twitter is a bit difficult because the questions that are coming in are very diverse, and we need different expertise to answer those questions, so that to me is a question of scale to address when we have more than we can handle. We try to engage external parties to help us to handle these extra issues which we can’t handle and for them to advise us on other relevant tools which we can use to manage.

0943 - How do you manage legal on twitter? Paula: Information on our site has already gone through the legal process. We’re not as legally concerning as we’re filtering it back to our legal team.

0953 - How is the balance between social media and traditional media in such an economic downturn? Paula: Social media is part of human capital. People are communicating more because they’re scared or frustrated. Now the companies are cutting media budget, not staff, so now is the time to focus on the social aspect, the human capital side. Creating a blog or responding to a comment doesn’t really cost a lot of money. The more people you can retain, the more money you save on retraining the staff and readjusting to the social media strategy.

0958 - Paula: It’s been a two year journey in the social media practices. Get it going, start small with some success stories, we started with Youtube user-generated content and SecondLife. Then we went ahead with MySpace, Facebook, eHarmony and creating other community sites. Get some learning, if you want to do something successful, you have to be an active participant.

1002 - Networking Break

Creating Your Social Media

1020 - We’re back from our break right into the session on Creating Your Social Media with Colin Brown, DIrector of Business Development at Mzinga.

1025 - Colin: Dimensions of Online Strategy is all about conversations, content and the influencers. And these dimensions help to solidify the goals. Content strategies - Editorial calendar for the next quarter, half year, one year etc, SEO, Newletter integration, rich media experience, “Live”events and blogs. Make sure newsletter contents are different to that from what users can get from blogs so that they can reinforce each other, rather than create duplicate spam. “Live” event, if done properly, there’s a huge PR aftershock to drive users back to the site, given that both the traditional press and bloggers get to know about it. Any marketer should be looking at the wealth of information that any social media is receiving. It’s the people, not the companies that blog. and focus is on having a true voice.

1035 - Conversation strategies - Get support and develop a moderation policy. We would love to have a “Live” response/update going out, so companies really need to revise their policies in getting the word out quick. Different audiences interact differently to different conversations, so companies will have to align the approach with the audience and the different goals that your company has. Start small with things such as responding to comments and then slowly grow big.

1040 - Influencer strategies - Working on engagement policies and plans on how to engage (listen first, Promotions vs Relevant Contributions), who to engage (Find the influencers in your industry) and where to engage (commenting on external blogs).

1050 - Colin is going to split us into 4 groups - B2B, B2C, Non-profit and Internal and for the next 20 minutes, we’ll be working on the 3 different strategies.

1120 - Groups are still engaged in pretty interesting discussions. Just returned from the group that was discussing internal strategies and they were talking about the challenges of balancing internal and external social media platforms. One huge challenge is getting people to adopt social media on a large scale in MNCs. The common consensus was that ti achieve a high rate of adoption, companies have to create dependencies on social media tools. For example, one organisation started a “no-attachments on email” rule to drive people to wikis in order to get the information and files that they need. This creates a habit that will allow social media tools to be self-sustaining.

1130 - Overheard from B2C conversation: Go to interest groups that are already existing. No point building something from scratch if there are tools available out there. For example, Facebook fan pages are a good place to start to get interested customers who know about your product. Blogs are also a good resource to get customer feedback. Search for yourself to see what people are saying and keep on top of the data that you pull up. It is also a good source to check out the competition. Using personas can be effective, but you will have to know how to manage them well.

1134 - Colin is asking the presenters to report back and regroup. We will be sharing the key learning points of the discussion in a little while.

1138 - Connie is presenting on B2C: How do we create a strategy to encourage user generated content? Put some parameters in company’s product forum. Necessary to have human interaction and engagement. Listening in the product forums and internet to understand customers better. The company needs to be open to the feedback. Incentivise customer participation - feature “experts” on certain subject matters. It’s easier for customer relations too as there is less of a company interest. On negative UGC: realize that negative comments are more managable when they are in your backyard and you can respond to them quickly and effectively. Long term commitment is necessary to sustain continued interaction.

1145 - JJ on Non-Profits: Action plan that non-profits can take. Goals include engagement and fund raising. Start with what you know about your organisation and your community. Learn about their online social behaviour with Forrester. Build a moderating tool to aggregate content and understand where participation lies. Content strategy include starting a blog (which also provides SEO value) where you craft compelling stories, publicize your cause and rallying people around them. For fund raising, ideas include banners, widgets and display ads. Read up on Beth Cantor, domain expert on Non-profits in the online space.

1148 - Internal: How do we connect people within the organization? Challenges include aligning nonmenclature that will aid search of profiles in the database. Tagging as a possible solution. At first, people use tags that are different, so to eliminate confusion, create tag groups. Community buzz on LinkedIn, using groups. Create value for using social media by addressing people’s business interest with it. Appeal to personal interest first before company interest - get people excited to get on the platforms first before asking them to think about how they can benefit the company from it. Content: start off with weekly features (YouTube, Podcast, presentation) to get traffic to the site

1152 - Ryan on B2B: Goals: 1) Inject yourself in conversations outside the site? Realise that the community on your site is your “love group”, those outside are the neutral “swing group”. 2) Measure ROI and maintaining exec support? Key sales metrics need to be identified and continuously improved. Set up your rules on how to measure something and stick to it. 3) How to involve the community in company discussions? Eg Threadless allows consumers to choose which ones they want to order. How do you adopt that model to the commercial area? Need to tell the customer what you want to know instead of opening it up wide and boundless, as they will be confused.

1156 - Connie Bensen and using Twitter for Business. Check out www.conniebensen.com for her blog posts and notes.

1213 - We’re going for our lunch break now, but before that, let me put up some links that was mentioned during the session.

Slides from the session will be up at www.constructingsocial.com.
Alternative to Tweet Scan - Tweetbeep
Business Case on Twitter at Connie Bensen’s blog
Twitter Search - Do a search on #SMS08 will bring up all the tweets on the event

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Strategy

1313 - We’re back with Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Strategy, the Tribulations Business Study with Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs, replacing Edward Moran from Deloitte Services who could not make it today because of some emergency.

1315 - Francois: Factors making communities work - people do want to talk to people, not to companies and people want to help other people, which is unbelievably powerful. Last thing that we found was that the commnunities that work the best, were communities that companies could tap into their social framework, rather than their market framework. Social framework is about the feeling when you help someone, market framework is more about relationship on business dealings. An evaluation was done on social framework by varying incentives that were given for help. People don’t understand the forces that are creating positive return on communities.

1322 - Francois: What a lot of companies is focusing on is the tools which is not the point. If your community cannot exist in a yahoo or google group, it’s not gonna exist anywhere. The fundamentals have to be something else other than the technology. In most companies, marketing are the starting point or core of the organization. Page views and time spent on the site are not a good way of measuring community involvement, example is that groups exists on yahoo or google groups who have never been to the group page to have good communication and conversations going on with the community. We’re not measuring metrics for advertising! Main things that company are concerned with qualititative data are measuring Sentiments, Activity Levels, Growth and Impact on sales.

1337 - Francois: 3 takeaways,

1. communities can increase revenue of up to 50% than a company which doesn’t leverage on communities. Communities can increase product success ratio because of the feedback loop that they can make use and improve on.
2. The rise of the CMO 2.0. What happens here is that, leveraging communities enables the CMO to regain the strategic seat at the executive table, representing the customers at the table.
3. To be successful, companies have to think different. There’s a mismatch of goals and actionable plan, mismatch between measuring metrics and goals of the company. Communities will transfer most business processes.
3.5 To build them, they will only come once. 99.9% of people in a community will never go back if you just build it without talking to customers. It’s all about content, moderation and ambassadors. Usually pilot projects are different from the actual situations that the company is trying to address. Communities of different size and goals require very different ways to building them.

1355 - Francois: Thinking out of the box. TiVo engaged users that weren’t in their primary community to provide them with insights on innovation

1402 - Measuring impact where there’re a lot of mentions going on, not just the community. How do you isolate from the noise? Companies that were measuring the impact exactly the way you would want to measure the customer support. Those companies who were successful those who with departments reporting back to their group using their own metrics, and also asking for funding from each department.

How to Implement Social Media Strategies for Big Businesses

1407 - Next up we have the panel talking about How to Implement Social Media Strategies for Big Businesses. We have the moderator Matt Warburton, Director of community Management at Yahoo, and the panelists, LaSandra Brill, Manager of Web & Social Media Marketing Team, Cisco, Michael Brito, Social Media Strategist, Intel and Connie Bensen, Community Manager, Network Solutions.

1410 - How do you define social media? Connie: It’s simply a set of tools that require human interaction, definitely a person needs to interact with the people. LaSandra: Agree on Human Interaction, 2-way communication and also different tools that can become conversation starters and facilitate conversations. Michael: Social media is about relationships across different channel, and there’re a lot of tools to foster relationships. Relationships and conversations.

1414 - LaSandra: There’re lots of red tape in big companies. There’re lots of risks and one of them is about the unknowns, which scares a lot of people. You should maybe do it before asking anyone about it - most effective :P. Mark: Getting stuff done with 3rd party vendors difficult. Michael: Just finding an ROI for social engagement is still blurry for Intel. Challenge is to convincing the traditional marketeers.

1439 - Do you write blogs for your companies? Connie: I’m writing. LaSandra: No. Michael: We want to make the blog less corporate. We want to make it conversational, so when we write, we would encourage people to respond.

1449 - LaSandra: I think the phase we’re at is being able to tie things together, tying the communities together. We want to really take that to the next level, really bringing the communities together, because there’re really some crossovers in these communities. Michael: Aggregate everything externally into one place, so that you don’t have to go everywhere to grab. Connie: We really need to listen and knowing about the customers. (Talks about some websites which are good tools.) Focus of connecting tools to others, something like subcontracting.

1455 - LaSandra: Using blog for getting community feedback. We’re driving topic conversations and listening. The challenge is not getting the feedback, but what to do with it and what processes are in place to manage the feedback. Michael: Not touching on consumer feedback yet. But on Intel Software Network, the businesses are giving the feedback in that thriving community.

1457 - Last comments. Connie: People and human interaction, it takes a number of people to be interacting. LaSandra: Go out there start small, and experiment and then add on to it. Don’t try to tackle everything. Michael: Forrester!

1500 - Networking Break

Overcoming Objections to Social Media

1522 - Overcoming Objections to Social Media with Gary Stein, Director of Strategy at Ammo Marketing and Peter Guagenti, VP Client Partner of Razorfish and Chris Carfi , co-Founder of Cerado, is the moderator for this event.

1525 - Peter: The number 1 objection, what do we need to do and what does that do to our bottom line. I don’t want anything negative to appear about my company.

1540 - Gary: There will be a few 5 star relationships, a few 1 star relationships and a lot of 3 star relationships. You don’t want to spend too much time on the 1 star relationships.

1546 - Gary: Biggest objection I’ve ever received comes from the legal department. Peter: You want whatever you want correct to be in place. The key is measurement and improve the value of it. Optimisation is always a spiral. Social media is the new thinking, you don’t have a little bit of room to experiment.

1554 - Gary: Social media is the tool to build relationships. It’s is best suited to do it rather than other forms of advertising such as doing it at SuperBowl.

1618 - Anything that is done has the opportunity to show up on YouTube

The Future of Social Media and Business

1620 - Closing Discussion: The Future of Social Media and Business. Panel members are Mike Walsh, CEO, Leverage Software and Shel Holtz, President of Holtz Communication. Darius Miranda, Customer Content & B2B Social Media Manager at Wells Fargo moderates

1624 - What will Web3.0 look like? Mike: From the perspective of communities, there are two stakeholders, the end user and the brand. End user - what you want, when you want it, how you want it. Host - evaluate and analyse information. This will come in the form of improved dashboards and analytics. Web 3.0 will see a maturing of technologies.

1626 - Shel: PR is about building relationships, not dumping press releases.

1631 - Shel: High level execs need to learn about Social Media and understand that it is not just what their kids are using and as a medium to spread bad news. Education is needed to change these wrong perspectives. Mike: VPs of Marketing and CMOs greatest concerns are on security and privacy. There is a need to balance the use of social media on internal platforms

1635 - Tip for success: try not to build your strategy in a bubble

1637 - Mike: Biggest mistake is not understanding how to get technology to advance in tandem with marketing programs. Shel: Biggest challenge: legal issues. CEOs need to balance legal risks with all other risks. Another big challenges include the team, budget and communication. Learnings: Engagement and social media happen on two levels - organic (both inside and out of the organisation) and campaign. Campaigns are a short term strategy and most companies focus on campaign. They need to invest time into both levels in order to fully leverage social media.

1641 - Mike: In the future, the different platforms will be more integrated so management of communities will be more convenient. Shel: Integration will happen on a variety of levels. Engaging people in conversation on your homepage will be a feature of the future. When you are passionate about something, you want to have a dedicated place to talk about your interests. For example, groups on Ning, Facebook and MySpace should be aggregated to create a larger and richer community.

1645 - Shel: Mobile strategy for employee communication is not really in place yet. Mike: It’s industry specific. Realtors and sales people will probably have a higher rate of using mobile devices. Also, it is more prominent in Asia Pacific. America lacks the infrastructure for the growth that mobile has experienced in Asia Pac. Culture shift to use of mobile is also holding the US back.

1653 - How far out should you plan your strategy for? Shel: One of the risks of planning far out is that you lock yourself into tactics within a changing environment. Tools, supply and demand can change. You have to be aware of the situation, and keep the conversation going. Mike: Planning ahead to about a year is the furthest you should go because of constantly changing situations.

1656 - Social media for recruitment? Concerns with legal issues: how do you use the information that is available positively? It is a double edged sword for applicants, so how should employers deal with social media on potential employees? Mike: Take a look at the info that applicants send you. Facebook is the tool for communication in Gen Y coming out of universities. Shel: Limits are set by the industry. The same level of trust should be placed on online conversations. Behave ethically and legally, and you’ll be ok

1702 - Closing statement by Reshma. It has been a great 2 days and thanks for reading!

Keynote

0910 - Introduction by Daya from WebGuild. Francois is up talking about why he’s here and he’s introducing the keynote, David Carter, Founder & CTO of Awareness.

0918 - David is introducing what Awareness is doing.

0922 - How is the economic situation affecting the social media industry. It’s not as bad as during the dot com bubble burst where money is being thrown blindly into the industry.

0930 - Is Social Media a fad? David says it has really evolved. It’s all about information and relationships management on the net now. It’s a tool that has evolved to solve a certain problem. People want more depth on the internet, and they expect to find it, such as searching for a product info on a site. Enterprises social communities using social media. People will actuallly be vocal about something they really care about, and they want to know about the companies they’re engaging with. Given Forrester’s research, marketing budget spent

Is Social Media a commodity? NO! That would mean we have all the tools we need and innovation can stop. There’re still a lot of improvements that we can make about the social media environment, so we are not able to get the same common experience across different social sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Profile portabiliy, contact list management etc. needs to be improved.

0943 - With the economic situation, there’re more eyes on where the money goes. Therefore social media strategies have to be spot on the first time. So how can we execute better? Identify and leverage on points on enthusiasm (press releases, conference events etc.) and make them part of your community. Identify watering holes for customers and pick the project that has the most obvious ROI. It doesn’t have to be about money, it can be about trust scores, community stocks, and in this case to gather the required information needed to measure and analyse this event.

Social Media in the Economic Downturn

0947 - Shel Israel, Social Media Strategist of Global Neighbourhoods and Mark Yolton, SVP Community Network of SAP are up on stage now talking about Social Media in the Economic Downturn. Shel: “This may be our time!! What can we scale back and cut back on in the downturn. We really need to talk to our customers.” Traditional advertising and PR has remained expensive in the last decade or so. Social Media is an answer to the problem of lean marketing and addressing the problem of how to stay close to the customers.

0952 - Mark on stage. Introduction to social media in SAP. Social media being used in SAP for about 5 years now. It’s core to what SAP does today. Given today’s economy, need to focus on cost efficiency.

0956 - David still on stage talking about his 8 best practices in social media.

0957 - Shel opening it up to the floor, but no one has any questions. So he continues, how do you measure effectiveness and efficiencies of social media practices. Mark: Basic stuff is definitely measured, from traffic, engagement and stickiness metrics. About cost, whether the questions from supporter organisations channel into the user community without the need for SAP to do it. SAP still provides customer support, but they have crowdsourced support from the community that comes in and defers cost. How many sales leads are being driven for the specific subscriptions is being measured. Community ecosystem serves to facilitate customer engagement for other departments within SAP. It actually functions differently about the other areas of SAP.

1007 - Mark: If you drive from one part/organization, be it engineering, marketing etc., it’s gonna be hard to bring change. So the philosphy at SAP now, by creating a separate cross group organization to facilitate all the organizations to make contributions. SAP is really close to its customers, by knowing who the bloggers in each country are, engaging in conversations with them, reaching out to a mailing list quickly, getting out to blog readers who are accessing the SAP blog. Reducing cost, agility and reaching out to customers are the focus points of community network at SAP.

1015 - David: What do you have to cut that you now can’t live without? Mark: As budgets get cut, be it training budget, marketing budget, traveling budget etc., social media is the thing to turn to. The same how PR is being done by providing daily news summaries which includes blogger comments. Serious discussions going on blogs and inviting bloggers to product launches, company events etc. Giving them the privilege because they’re the one who are asking the best questions.

1021 - Shel: Blogging gives someone a lot of power (based on experience). What’s your vision of the role that social media plays going into good times. Mark: Focused on engaging customers in other ways than sending someone out to fix something. Getting constant feedback from the consumers, getting product documentation from users, crowdsourcing data for the company. David: An entire circle of development in the company rather fixed product launches in the company.

1025 - Networking Break

Leveraging Social Media for Business

1040 - Up next is the panel on Leveraging Social Media for Business. We have Liz Miller, VP Programs & Operations, CMO Council, Lauren Coberly, Director Worldwide Marketing, Kodak Direct, Kim Johnson, VP of Sales and Marketing at Symantec and Naomi Cooper, VP Marketing, 1-800-DENTIST.

1042 - Liz: 3% of America use some form of social media at least twice a week and 25% of Americans are engaging with companies at least once a week. Introduction about what CMO Council is all about and what the marketing agenda for Marketing leads are and what the new challenges are now. Why does experience matter: A single bad experience will prevent the users from going back to the companies. Social media is a channel for customers to voice out as and when they have bad experience, and marketers are now listening more attentively to these channels. More numbers and stats.

1049 - Lauren: We now have 3 company blogs and chief blogger in Kodak. 1000 Words, PluggedIn and Grow Your Biz are the 3 blogs. Explaining how Kodak is engaging social media, Facebook Fanpage, Flickr integration tools, twitter, podcasts, Kodak Gallery featuring Slide.com integration etc. Traditional marketing complements social media marketing in an integrated marketing plan. Social media industry changing very quickly, that’s no way to create a 10 year goal plan for social media marketing as tools and trends are rapidly evolving.

1059 - Naomi: B2C and B2B in 1-800-DENTIST. Focus a lot on industry partner relations. Strategy that the company is embarking on - how to position themselves as a neutral third party expert, battling huge stigma for mass marketing in the dentistry industry by creating a video site with webinars and forum about how to do marketing for dentists, and also for people in the industry to use this site for lead generation and by giving dentists awareness of the need for marketing and to help them by giving them the information and advice, and even outsourcing opportunities to do marketing for their businesses. This is a positioned neutral site, appears to be sponsored by 1-800-DENTIST as opposed to being run by the company.

1115 - Kim: Uncomfortable for company working on security to create a blog initially, but now it has been experimented and tried to be quite a good way to reach out to consumers and businesses. Social media in the company on the consumer side - web game show at CES, RSS feeds etc. Moving forward, having experimental organization that doesn’t have any stigma, trying out new things. Ability to tie new technologies and new ways of catching customers to the ways of getting revenue.

1125 - Liz: Remember the Symantec campaign with Da Vinci theme? (The Da Vinci Code Anagram Game)

1128 - Lauren: How do we measure and determine whether its successful? Reaching out to other mediums that engages more consumers and through measuring RSS feeds, advertising numbers, Flickr numbers. Moving focus into search to make sure that the presence and visibility isn’t lost. That’s how we’re looking into determining success. We’re rather you be out there to talk about Kodak, saying something bad is preferred to saying nothing at all.

1133 - Naomi: Different from Kodak. People don’t like going to dentist, so people saying something bad is a lot worse than saying nothing :). Social economic bias of going to a dentist, eg pain, negativity, as comments can go really bad. Interesting challenge for conversations with consumers in dentist industry. Moving ahead with neutrality to evangelize about oral health. Just appointed a new chief blogger, usage of tools such as Tweet Scan. We don’t have PR or Social Media department, so you can actually do this yourself, and there’re a lot of great tools out there for you to make use on.

1141 - Kim: Using external agencies to do social media, PR if don’t have time internally to do it. Daily updates on social media ongoings about the company.

1150 - What tools do you use to check business intelligence on social media? (Do give comments! :D) Liz: Marketing now is a core data point for information coming into the company. From there, information is being permeated through to other departments via a collective CMS environment where a single question or problem can be accessed and retrieved by all the departments in a company.

1154 - % of marketing dollars spent on SEO and % of time spent on organic space? Anyone used interactive news release? Liz: CMO Council is partnering a company to do it, creating a compelling a news story. Bloggers are now utilising these news releases more and it’s actually achieving more from a PR perspective, creating an increase in awareness throughout the blogosphere. Lauren: Time and focus spent a lot on organic space. Naomi: We run every news release by SEO person, best way to help results. A lot of organic and paid search.

1159 - Lunch Break in Forneau’s Oven!!

Tapping into the Power of Employees Through Social Media

1310 - Now we’re back from a sumptuous lunch, straight into the first track after lunch, which is Tapping into the Power of Employees Through Social Media. We have Dr. Jim McGee, Director of New Shoreham Consulting.

1313 - Jim: Stories on Xerox, Accenture - knowledge management station, talking about social media usage in accenture. Jim is getting some feedback and input from the audience in talking about what social media tools and practices that are being used in the company. These are examples of inexpensive ways to get starting in solving problems, not economic for big consulting firms to use it. The idea is also to find the difference in working with knowledge workers as opposed to the engineers and features makers. It’s now we, as knowledge workers, have the discretion to use tools, and from there influence the rest of the companies to use it. You cannot force the management people to actually use these tools. By starting to use the tool in your company, it could potentially be a good gauge for how consumers will pick up this tool and give feedback on your company.

1343 - Jim: “Community trumps content”. Knowledge management systems are build by people who are more technically savvy who doesn’t really know about the expertise and environment they’re building for. Should we build social media tools that should be fun so that the pick up rate is fast and creates a perceived low barrier entry? Debate going on about this. It just needs to be relevant to the work. Don’t use “fun” to sell to senior management :P. Perceived fun is making some people think that productivity is being sacrificed because they’re having “fun”.

1352 - Jim: There’re 3 ways where employees in an organization to relate to each other.  Will try to get the model up later. AI - wonderful debate in the early days between needs and scruffies, kind of like the knowledge management and social media.

The Importance of Content in Social Media

1357 - Next up is the session on The Importance of Content in Social Media with Robin Carey, CEO of Social Media Today, Scott Wilder, GM of Online Communities Division at Inuit and Sylvia Marino, Executive Director of Community Operations at Edmunds.com Inc.

1405 - Is content an important issue in social media? Sylvia: Content is extremely important. Different communities all have a lot in common - a lot of people have questions, some others have answers, and many people have opinions. Content is important because it is relevant to consumers and consumers really need it. Scott: At the end of the day, it’s all about the conversations that’s going on. It’s not about the numbers, it’s all about the verbatim and what people are saying, the sentiment that is being conveyed that’s teaching companies a lot. Content is to be developed by our users. Is plumbing a good analogy to refer to a tool facilitating 2-way communication? (Would you want your plumbing to flow back?)

1410 - What kind of content are important? Sylvia: Content MUST be AUTHENTIC!! Readers and minders can smell it a mile away. Dialog has to be not me but you. Making the commitment in learning about consumers through 2-way engagement with them and listening to them. Scott: Community is not the place to market, but it’s the place to build a relationship. Authenticity and transparency is important.

1417 - Good quality content vs High SEO (Quantity)? Scott: Am I doing this to make me feel good (more traffic), or am I really solving for making it easy for user to contribute? Think about the technology that we use these days, there are a lot of people who are lagging behind and it’s harder for them to pick it up. So it’s all about who are you solving for and about making User Experience good and easy to pick up. Sylvia: It’s all about solving problems and needs, instead of blindly going out for the sake of creating something social. And it’s all about the correct and most relevant tools to use for the job to meet customers needs.

1425 - Systematic way of determining ROI - Omniture, Google analytics, look at consumer response, did they have a positive experience with the brands?

1458 - Afternoon Networking Break

Thinking Vertically Across Social Media

1525 - We’re back from the Break with the panel on Thinking Vertically Across Social Media with Rajiv Parikh, CEO of Position2, Chris Carfi, Co-Founder of Cerado and Darius Miranda, Customer Content & B2B Social Media Manager at Wells Fargo.

1535 - Darius: Ghost-writing?? Never!! The need for bloggers to have certain expert knowledge. For banks, how relaxed can they be? It’s all about people to people and how to be sticky. Chris: A lot of old media push tactics are not working effectively any more as users move online. Darius: We’re going to run a pilot to measure sentiment online. Because of our expertise, we should be able to influence our customers, and with our customers’ influence, they are able to influence other people.

1548 - Chris: Whoever fills that gap that questions that customers have and information that they need will actually come up high in Google organic search because it’s what they’re looking for. It can vary from the main website of the company or product to 3rd party sites that are able to provide the most relevant and most sought after information. Darius: Example is Oracle Openworld where there’s a monthly meeting all the way up to the event and during the event, people will look for each other. Dialogue will also carry on after that. Chris: Having a balance with offline and online flow is really great. Communication spikes usually happen before and after a physical offline event.

1604 - Darius: On blog, it’s real time, as compared to a few weeks to get some words on to your website in a major company. All blogs on Wells Fargo are legally compliant. We won’t change anything on a post or comments, unless it has some security and privacy issues, because all blog posts adhere to blog policies. Chris: As long as the blog posts are within legal means, get all the information and transparency out there, because it really helps the trust and authenticity.

1610 - Darius: If someone requests something about a product that requires an answer that is off topic, we tell them that we are working on it at the moment, but not actually revealing what’s in the works. Bringing the relevant person to give a reply usually works, and always end the answer or response with a question. Talk to them like he’s your best friend. Talk to people from other departments and find out what actually works, and if there’s a need to, split the cost. That will help large companies.

1612 - Question from audience: any crisis issues and how did you manage it? Chris: If the organization is okay with bringing internal discussions out in the open, the organization can already tackle these crisis by allowing the customers to know what goes on internally and to let them know that the organization admits or agrees that it is an issue that they have to solve. Being honest and humble helps. Rajiv: By engaging the community, we can really avert the crisis. Darius: For B2B, practise social media strategies inside out, so that the pick up rate for external customers will be smoother.

The Best and Worst Social Media Marketing

1620 - And here we have the last session of the day: The Best and Worst of Social Media Marketing with Sean O`Driscoll, Ex GM MVP Program, Microsoft, David Needle, West Coast Bureau Chief, Internetnews.com and Francois Gossieaux, Partner at Beeline Labs.

1625 - Sean: The day I left Microsoft, I got a question asking me whether Microsoft now won’t get social media.

1628 - Francois: We’re in the first stage of making social media work for enterprises, although we’re in the stage of transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. If you’re thinking about social media as part of your business, it’s not about using social media for your business, it’s all about putting social into your business. They need to develop initiatives that are social media based, such as social communities.

1630 - Sean: People always want to go for the shine and dime of tech. I learnt quickly as a consultant, it’s not my core competencies to be at the fore-front about knowing what’s the latest technologies and tools, it’s about finding out which tools are more relevant to the companies. The most important issue is how to measure the effectiveness of these tools, instead just about using them.

1636 - Francois: You can’t shut down a social community, otherwise there will be a revolt by the people who will still strive to carry on, which might turn its back against the company. Sean: The community brought back the MVP program when users sent thousands of mail to Steve Ballmer when they decided to close it down. Robert Scoble really became a big part of the MVP face, engaging the community for Microsoft. Top-down didn’t really drive things, so people will just go off and do stuff, eg the launch of Channel 9 - people at the top didn’t even know what was going on!

1642 - Sean: Expectations of companies - ROI is my favourite red herring. On one side, you need to have a business case to articulate that it benefits the company. Community meetings are useless as the people you are talking to are not as passionate about technology and social media as you are. But you’re working on the product quality line, so communities are not exactly inline with the business process goals. The dark side of ROI is realising that there are people who keeps bringing up ROI, because they don’t buy it. They are looking for a level of granularity in ROI that doesn’t really apply in a lot of the ROI analysis.

1645 - Sean: Engagement model: communities are not channels, not partner organizations - they do what they do not to help the company, but to help other users. Transparency is not a value proposition, but a tactic. Joining conversation is an importance piece of advice, but for a big company, there’re probably tonnes of conversations out there. So take 6 months off to listen to those conversations.

1649 - Francois: Build it and they will come concept is a sure-fire failure model. First mover advantage is only true if you can engage the 4 pillars of social media such as content and more importantly, transactions as part of the community.

1651 - Sean: Community is still all about content especially in B2B. Effort put into seeding content is especially valuable, possibly inducing a hockey stick growth.

1653 - David: any tip on social media? Sean: The magic of idea storm is not the site, but is the business process behind the scene to close the loop on the feedback. What can we learn from Microsoft? Red ring of death for Xbox is a significant PR disaster 2 years ago. Xbox froze up on Christmas Day, after lots of parents bought it as christmas presents for their kids. There was a lack of acknowledgement about the problem. A year later, Microsoft gave a radical 3 year warranty for the Xbox to correct the problem. It could have been done earlier to save a lot of money.

1659 - Francois: TiVo. What they did that they realise that their users were hanging out some where that they didn’t know. Hanging out on a 3rd party site that TiVo users created. So you don’t need everyone to come up to your site to engage the community.

1700 - End of day and Cocktail Reception!!!

Seoul, October 14th - GoingEast.Asia, the first survey on the expansion of Western Web 2.0, online gaming, mobile and e-commerce companies to East Asia, was released today. It was announced on the occasion of the biggest pan-Asian Internet conference, the Open Web Asia ‘08, in Seoul/Korea.
The unique online survey will reveal the most up-to-date information regarding the expansion status quo and the expansion plans of Western enterprises to East Asia in the interactive media field. The survey aims to examine the opportunities and challenges start-ups and established companies face and anticipate when “going Asia”. The first key results will be presented on November 14th, during the China 2.0 Blogger Tour in Shanghai. The tour is sponsored by Edelman Digital and features Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Sam Lawrence and other renown bloggers.
Participating in the survey allows companies to reflect upon their experiences and expectations on this topic. It also provides them with valuable insight into the expansion situation of Western interactive media enterprises. The survey results will be freely available to all participants.
Partaking companies are eligible for practical rewards related to business in East Asia that include free hosting packages, .Asia domains, market research reports, local search engine optimisation or PR packages. The survey is supported by the sponsors Web2Asia, Jimdo and SensorPro and will be accessible until October 28th, 2008.

For further information:
Participation: www.goingeast.asia
China 2.0 Blogger Tour: www.china20.asia

I am having a great time here in Open Web Asia 08′, Seoul. The crowd wowed us, we were expecting a normal turnout but surprise! We have a packed room this morning. Looking forward meeting as many people as I can.

I am sure many of you are probably not aware that I am one of the co-organizers for this conference. So, if you need help in anything (e.g get connected to the speakers, organizers)…drop me an email. I will see what I can do. Anyway, I am in the midst of gathering all of the presentation slides. Once done, I will have them here for download.

You can also follow our tweets at http://twitter.com/openwebasia

In the meantime, here are some random photos I have taken:

Here’s Loic (Seesmic) and Jason Calacanis (Mahalo) having dinner during the organizers, speakers gathering the day before.

On Wednesday, Mike and myself had the honour of attending the Google Chrome press conference at their Singapore office where we were given a live demo of Chrome followed by a Q&A session. We took this opportunity to query Andrew McClinchey, Product Manager of Google Southeast Asia and Dickson Seow, Head of Communications & Public Affairs, Google Southeast Asia with pressing questions most of you might have relating to the rational behind the development of Chrome.

Among some of the questions asked (by both press and TDM’ers):
 

Why did Google develop a web browser?

Google felt that there wasn’t enough competition in this field and current web browsers were limiting developers on how far and advanced they could take their web apps. They wanted to make a great new innovation that will make everyone else pick up their game. Their long-term vision is to improve the internet and make it easier for people to write better and more powerful web apps.
 

How are current web browsers limiting web developers?

This was tied down to  a demo of Google’s brand new V8 Javascript engine which showed the speed of a rotating 3D space shuttle in Javascript. When compared with Firefox, the rotation of the space shuttle is much faster in Chrome. This is an example of the possibilities opened up by the emergence of Chrome for web app developers where processing speed of the browser is no longer a limiting factor.

If you would like to do the comparison on your own, the Javascript shuttle can be found here.
 

Google and Mozilla have been working together for the past few years. Why didn’t Google improve Firefox instead of developing a whole new browser?

As Firefox has been around for a while and is quite developed, it would be easier to develop a browser from scratch to make it more lightweight and put in all the new features like the new v8 engine and memory management system. Google is not competing with Firefox but instead am hoping that with the release of Chrome, Mozilla will strive to improve Firefox further. Everything in Google Chrome including the V8 engine is open source so everyone is free to collaborate and share the technology.

Side note: The open-source platform which Chrome uses is called Chromium.
 

Chrome looks like it has many little features that improves usability quite a bit but these might not be obvious to most users especially those who are just trying it out for a short while. How do you see people getting to know about these features?

We are hoping that the early adopters who try the product out discover that the speed and usability that comes with all these features improve their web-surfing experience and hence tell their friends about it. Firefox used to have a market share of only 5% when it was first launched and now it is close to 20%. We’re hoping that Chrome will grow its market share as well as more users finds the benefits that come with it.
 

What do Mike and I think of Chrome so far?

We are definitely enjoying the clean, responsive interface and the higher performance of the browser despite a couple of bugs relating to Javascript happening here and there. Chrome is after all still in beta. One of the features we really enjoy is the memory management system where every tab is a process on its own. This means that if you opened 5 tabs and one of the sites causes your browser to crash, you can just end that process and the other 4 tabs would still work. And oh yes! Before I end off, no more irritating and obstructive pop-up windows appearing when downloading files. :D

Mr Tan Chade Meng, the jolly good fellow of Google and Singapore’s first googler, shared his personal philosophy, experiences as well as anecdotes on working with the multi-billion dollar company. He began with Google’s history, culture and mission - to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful; before sharing with us what life is like at Google. From food and trips, the 100 feet rule, 70-20-10 rule, 20% time rule to fun stuff, Chade Meng did not fail to inspire and draw laughter from the crowd.

There is certainly much for us to learn from Chade Meng and his aspirations, especially with regards to his positive belief in every individual. One of the key take away messages from the 107th employee of Google for Singaporeans was that anyone can change the world. There are many ways to realise our full potential and it’s important to strive to serve the greater good. In addition, to him, failure is not an end in itself but the key to innovation.

In retrospect, the event was a success with about 200 attendees who turned up at DXO that night,
and were treated to food and free flow of non-alcoholic drinks at the bar. We now look forward to
the next Infocomm Live! Series!

—————————-

Live blog:-

Good evening! Thank you for dropping by as we are preparing to meet the jolly good fellow of Google - Chade-Meng, who is also the first Singapore to be employed by Google. This evening’s event is organised by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and The Digital Movement (TDM). Meng will be sharing his personal philosophy, experiences as well as anecdotes on working with multi-billion dollar company Google.

If you are somewhere in town and you happen to stumble upon this, do join us at DXO, Colours by the Bay, 8 Raffles Avenue, #01-13, Esplanade Mall. I’m sure we would be able to make some space for you.=)

If you are already at DXO, you would be pleased to know that non-alcoholic drinks are on the house today, kindly sponsored by IDA. Nice little glow sticks are also available at the registration counter if you have not gotten yours.

The preparation started really early, and I was welcomed by lots of “mic tests” which thankfully stopped before the first guests came in. You can tell that this is not a particularly “techie” event by looking at the crowd - which comprises of the young, old, serious-looking and those seemingly waiting for the party to start. Yes, a helluva time is what you are going to get today as Meng shares with us his experience at Google; and if you don’t know by now, his official post in Google… is “Jolly Good Fellow”. Cool company, isn’t it?

6:57pm: I managed to find a hidden corner to do this live blogging. It’s probably the only corner where there is a power point for me to plug my laptop in. Well, we certainly don’t want the live blogging to suddenly go… er… dead, do we? =) Today, it’s our honour to have Rear-Admiral (NS) Ronnie Tay, CEO  of IDA to grace the event. This is the first of many Infocomm LIVE! Speaker Series to come and we will have Meng share with us on living and innovating at Google. This event is brought to you by IDA in partnership with The Digital Movement (TDM).

7:05pm: While we are waiting for the event to start, let’s have some small talk on getting into Google. Now, I am definitely no jolly good fellow, but I am lucky enough to know, personally, someone who went through the entire interview and is now a fellow jolly good fellow at Google. He apparently applied for a job and was shortlisted. After some short telephone interview (I can’t remember about this bit), he was flown down to Google HQ where he was almost served like the prince. The food, I heard, is wonderful and tastes authentic. In fact, it was something he really seemed to enjoy. To cut a long story short, he was finally employed by Google and have to move to California (speaking of which, my friend does seem to resemble Meng a little). Apparently, the lifestyle in there is so great, that they can just take time off to get their own stuffs done or to just take the dog out for a walk.

For such flexibility given by Google, it’s little wonder that the employees - or jolly good fellows, would work equally hard for the company. Now, let us all try to think of some companies in Singapore that adopts the same culture… =)

7:35pm: The event has started. The emcee of the evening is Estee Teo who started the event off with cheers from the crowd. Reiterating her, food is served at the back and non-alcoholic drinks are free-flow for the night. Today, we are also going to welcome 2 guests today - Rear Admiral (NS) Ronnie Tay - CEO of IDA, and Mr Chade-Meng, who is the first Singaporean employed by Google.

The crowd is just beginning to warm up as we welcome on stage, Rear Admiral (NS) Ronnie Tay.

7:38pm: RA (NS) Ronnie takes the mic and thinks that he is a little out of place with most of the crowd coming in casual shirts and jeans. Come on, we all know that it’s not true. Unknown to me, there is apparently only enough space for 200 guests to register for this event and according to RA (NS) Ronnie Tay, invitations for this event is sent out in the most usual way - not just via email, but through online portals.

Today, we have Chade-Meng to join us on the 1st of the LIVE! Speaker Series by IDA. He’s the 107th employee, to be exact, of Google. At this moment, he is working on a lecture series - Seach inside yourself, which is just a little of what he is doing. He is here today with his wife and child and it’s definitely our pleasure to have him with us. Agreeing with RA (NS) Ronnie, it’s going to be an interesting night with Chade-Meng as he hands the mic over to him.

7:45pm: Seated on the cushion, Meng introduces himself. He is an early Google employee and is the first Singapore Googler. He is hired as an engineer and now working with Google University. He worked on Mobile search, search quality, chinese search and all. HE developed emotional intelligence training program in Google. He is also the ambassador for Google.org - which is the official philantrophic part of Google. He graduated from NTU and worked in NUS. He considers himself bi-partisan. He also wants to save the world when he grows up. Go ahead - ask him about that and he will give you the entire flow.

He has a photo of Lao Zi on the screen and he thinks Lao Zi is a very rich fellow because people keep saying “Lao Zi You Qian” (^_^)”‘

Meng has a wall of pictures whom he boasts of - that, yes, he builds great walls. He has met many famous people - Colin Powell, Robin Williams, Condoleezza Rice - just to name a few. He’s also met President Nathan, President Mikhail and President Bill Clinton - yes - they decorate his wall!

Meng’s New Job is in Google University’s School of Personal Growth - to bring ou the best in Google and Googlers, which he will talk about later.

Today’s agenda started with Google History and Culture - which is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This is the mission statement since Day 1 - and it does not mention anything about creating a search engine - which is really huge. However, this is not just a mission statement, but rather, the way they run the business. Google is started by Sergey Brin and Larry Page and the CEO is Eric Schmidt. Google is started in Stanford University in 1995 and started off as a project for backlane analysis. If you look at any web page, it’s easy to tell which pages a page links to but it’s not easy to know which pages link to it. This gave rise to the crawling idea. Like all great companies in the Valley, Google was started from a garage - Google - World Headquarters.

Meng now gives a story of the company. Google is worth 150 billion dollars today while it could be bought for 1 million dollars. The first cheque was actually addressed to Google Inc. - but there was not Google Inc. then, and hence, the company was formed. The front page of Google is the same as when it started, except that the “!” is now missing from the word. Subsequently, they had Google Doodles - where they broke the golden rule of not touching the company logo. Subsequently, they start having April Fool’s joke, where the first joke was on PigeonRank (do a google on this).

So, how is life in Google? Life is fun! They play frosball, hockey, food (see! I told you!) and massage. In Google, meals are served 3 times a day and all are organic. Their beef and tuna are good stuff and the least meal of the day is sushi. (!!!!). There is a 100 feet rule in Google where nobody in Google should be more than 100 feet away from good. However, they didn’t tell you which direction the 100 feet is towards. =P

Dogs are allowed in the office but cats are not (ohhh……) and once a year, the entire company goes for a ski trip, except for 2008 when they went to Disney Land because the number of employees “out numbers” the mountain.

So, how do you create a 150 million dollar company? The first is to know about the 20% time rule - where Google allows Googlers to spent up to 20% of their time to do anything they want. From here, some good products came out of it - one of which is Google News. The others were Google Scholar, orkut and basically much of Google labs. Gmail was also created out of this - product of Paul. The other rule is the 70-20-10 rule, where 70% of the money/time goes to things that are core of Google, 20% goes to anything related, e.g. Blogger, and the 10% goes to anything in the world.

The structure in Google is extremely flat - where it only takes… er… 2 promotions to be the founder. =)

8:16pm: Meng has a burning question - can someone turn up the aircon? Anyway, what is “promoting innovation”? It is pretty much like growing flowers - and while we can’t force flowers to grow, we can create the conditions for the flower to grow. Of course, the next question is on how we actually create the condition? Well, we can create the climate - and Google does that by working on small projects and hire people that are really, really smart. Everyone at Google are able to access information such as the amount Google earns, amongst others, and every Googler believes that they can change the world. They also let engineers find their passion by working on things they want.

In Google, failure is the key to innovation. Soichiro Honda “Success is 99% failure”, and Thomas Watson are just amongst the few who tasted failure. The other key, is to feel stupid. Apparently, you have to be confused, upset and think you are stupid.

8:23pm: Fun stuffs - of course there are fun stuffs. Firstly, Google has one of the best translator and they get to see many funny translations from other online translators. If they analyse search data, they can see interesting patterns - “full moon”, “earthquakes” and they also found out that there are 800 ways to spell “Britney Spears”. Heh. Apparently, there’s also a book flipper machine when they embarked on a project to make every book searchable! Incredible!

Lastly, there’s a quote from Larry Page “The ultimate search engine would… ” (oops! I didn’t catch that). Oh well…

If there is one thing that Meng wants us to bring back today - it’s that anyone can change the world.  There are many ways to realise our full potential and it’s important to strive to serve the greater good. With this, Meng (Chade-Meng Tan, meng@google.com) ends the session and starts the Q&A session.

8:30pm: Q&A session starts. Ground rules for the night is to identify yourself and to stick to learning questions. First question by Ishel, he applied to Google, went through 4 rounds and got rejected… Anyway, he is asking about some power-app that is started by ex-Googlers. To this, Meng thinks that Google concentrates more on the users rather than competitors because this naturally brings in the moola.

The next question comes on the issue of retention - to this, Meng, thinks that the easiest way is actually to make things fun for the employees. Next, Andy from the floor asks about the flat organization and how it is managed. The answer is that Google is “on the brink of chaos” and the people there are very motivated - so things get done anyway even though they are not “managed”.

Next, the moderator asked on how it is decided that a product from the “20%” becomes a product. Ideas become products when it gets the thumbs up from the management and get killed based on statistics on usage. Next up, we have Bernie who asked how culture was built when it was started up. Meng’s observation is that a start-up is built on the vision of the founders; and to nurture by example. So even when an idea may be revenue generating, but if it does not benefit anyone, the product will not get the go-ahead.

Following up, someone asked Meng how he made the switch - to this, Meng said that he wanted to widen his horizon. When he reached the west, he felt that it was “Ru Yu De Shui” - like fish in water, and that he felt that when he was in the West, he thought that he founded a place to grow. Next question from Jeff, he wanted to know what stops Google from turning evil. To this, it started from a list of things that HR noted down which could simply be summed up as “Not be evil” by a fellow Googler. Next, Jeff also wanted to know if we should all be afraid of Google; to this, the answer was an obvious no. Simply because Google will work for the betterment of man else it will be dumped like dirt (of course, that’s in my own words).

So, what are some of the things that someone should do if he or she wants to change the world. To this, Meng thinks that the person should talk a lot about it - preferably to people who will believe in it - and to get the idea to grow with people and to get it to serve the greater good.

Someone next asked what the biggest problem for Google is. The answer? Scale. Google apparently has some problems with scale as they grow and even though they give people the 20% time, it is not known if this works until few years later. John from the audience next asked about the principle of censorship and what Google is doing about China’s policies on censorship. To this, Google will notify the user that some results are being censored while complying with China’s laws.

8:55pm: The next question from the audience is essentially on how they keep their engineers passionate - and the simple answer is to get them to believe that what they do can really change the world. Following up, someone asked about how a flat organization is being managed and not punishing failure. To this, objectives should be set up around methods as opposed to results - so when something is done, that the objective is met.

Next, someone asked how decisions are being made if there are conflicts - to which Meng answers that it’s through consensus.

Following, a lady asked what’s the most significant thing that happened in Google that changed Meng’s perspective. To this, Meng has a story to tell - the story of “Amid”. He decided one day that he wanted the CEO’s office and Eric had a tiny office. To this, Eric offered his office space to Amid as he was being nice. Amid was told to ask Wayne - the VP, to whom Wayne had no issues with it. Of course, Eric was being nice but well, his niceness backfired. Essentially, Eric went out of his office everytime there’s an important phone call. This tells a lot on Google’s culture… and insubordination. Heh.

9:05pm: Marcus from the floor asked about Meng’s vision to change the world. To this, Meng feels that he wants to make mental/emotional training (meditation) a field of science - to make it useful. If this is successful, this essentially brings about World Peace! This is because mental and emotional development brings about happiness, inner peace and compassion. A critical mass of happy, peaceful and compassionate people creates condition for world peace. This is a new approach to world peace - cultivating world peace from inside out, rather than imposing peace from outside in.

Someone then asked how does what Meng does make World Peace. Moment-to-moment, no-judging awareness is the answer, which is about bringing on self-awareness. Basically on emotional intelligence, which is… beyond what this poor live blogger can understand (oops!). However, what’s heart warming is that Meng remains passionate on bringing about World Peace.

9:10pm: Now, we would like to invite RA (NS) Ronnie to present Meng a token of appreciation, as well as Howie from TDM to present him… Ah Meng, as a token of appreciation from TDM. The event is now closed, but do feel free to mingle around. Have a good evening!

After some silence, we’ve finally got our mission, vision and objective realigned for the coming year. We’re terming it the “TDM Renaissance” to mark the rebirth of TDM and its key role in the region’s technology space. Hence, please bear with us while we revamp our website and do look out for some exciting news coming from us soon! :D

Cheers,

TDM Team

Our friends at Microsoft has joined forces with SiTF to offer you a fresh look at interoperability in a world of open source solutions. Speakers from Novell Singapore, Zend Technologies and the SOA Chapter of SiTF will enlighten you on the collaborative technologies between Microsoft and their respective companies.

Join them for a half-day seminar on Interoperability in the industry to see real world examples by real world practitioners.

More info on the seminar here…