Cool Video: Social Media in the Workplace

I’ve been looking for a primer for a long time to explain how social media fits into the modern corporation (or any organization for that matter). The concept of the “social corporation” has been slagged around the buzzword scene for so long, I just had to figure it out myself.

It’s a wild concept to wrap your head around, especially if you’ve been hobbled by conventional thinking for so long. But this 13-minute short film called Social Media @ Work I found on Vimeo from  UK-based communications consultants Red Sky Vision gets it, and does a fine job of explaining it so we can all finally grok this.

So here it is – It’s not about marketing or advertising, it’s not even just a communications strategy. It’s the whole conversation between the organization and third parties, and within the organization among employees. It’s not just emanating from a traditional corporate communications group, it’s everybody in the organization.

From the press release for the film:

Businesses that fail to adopt strategies for social media run the risk of
missing tangible economic benefits that such technologies can bring
through engaging with individuals both inside and outside the workplace. The finding
forms one of the key conclusions discussed in a new film, launched today, that lifts
the lid on the benefits of peer-to-peer business communication.

Despite the burgeoning consumer use of social networking technologies, many
businesses have been slow to pick up on the huge benefits that social networking can
bring and remain cautious over the adoption of peer-to-peer communication.

The film, entitled, Social Media @ Work and co-produced by content creators, Red
Sky Vision, and change consultancy, Able and How, highlights the impact that social
media is having in the workplace and proposes that those organisations who choose
to ignore it are failing to recognise the benefits it can bring and falling behind the
businesses where more innovative communication is embraced.

Pedring 2011: Rain, Flood, Power Failure, Mobile Network breakdown, and Social Media

On September 25, 2009, Typhoon Ondoy lashed Metro Manila and plagued it with wind, rain, floods and power failures. Mobile networks (mainly Globe) went down, causing communications breakdown. And social media took center stage as people plugged into the networks, reporting news, finding news, generating Tweets, Facebook updates, sharing media, and creating homespun disaster reporting networks.

On September 27, 2011, in an eerie coincidence almost two years to the date, practically all of the above repeated itself, only this time the typhoon was called Pedring.

Roxas Boulevard covered with water - Twitpic by @itsmechiniego

Once again, I got all of my news through digital social media, through SMS, on mobile internet, and on the social networks. Very early in the morning, the office sent an SMS broadcast to all employees – no need to go to work today, just stay home, and stay safe. What’s going on, I asked, how is everybody? Years ago, I would stay glued to AM radio and the TV news channels. Nowadays, I bring up the Twitter app on my phone and scan the feed. Why wait for commentators and news anchors? Social media is more immediate.

Twitter, Facebook, joined this year by Google+, all served as the primary source of information by the digital generation. Trees knocked down in the neighborhood? Rooftops whizzing by? No mobile phone service in your area? Power down? Is it flooded where you are? People took to reporting the news by themselves with a speed that professional news organizations struggled to match.

Certain incidents stood out as we monitored the people-powered newsfeeds. Roxas Boulevard is flooded! Check the Twitpics and the YouTube clips for confirmation.

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Billboards crushed cars on Buendia! There’s a YouTube clip for that.

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The Sofitel Hotel got flooded! The Sprial restaurant – site of many a memorable buffet dinner – was under water. Proof? There’s a Twitpic or Yfrog photo for that:

Here’s a photo of the flooded Sofitel (posted on Yfrog by Jerick Bautista, hotel employee):

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Here’s another photo by Jerick Bautista of the floodwaters swamping the back of the Sofitel Hotel.

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There was the inevitable meme. Floods everywhere, hey did anyone inform Christopher Lao? Was he informed? And just like that, Christopher Lao trended once again on Twitter for a brief spell.

Hey how could we help? Check out the Philippine Red Cross Twitter feed for details.

As in Ondoy, DIY crowdsourced disaster reporting mechanisms popped up, allowing people online to report critical areas needing help. The best one I saw was the Typhoon Pedring Crisis Map on Crowdmap.com. It even has a handy list of Emergency Hotlines .

And then there were the commentaries.Two years after Ondoy, did we learn anything new? Are we more prepared for disasters than before?

When the worse of the typhoon was over, I suddenly remembered I had a television set. I turned it on to ANC. The 24-hour news channel was rehashing all the info, reports and video clips I had already seen on social media sites.

The best Typhoon video coverage wasn’t captured by television news crews: it was uploaded on YouTube, shot by ordinary people on phones and small cameras.

At what point did the idea of a 24-Hour TV News Channel get so outdated?

Pedring: The Return of Christopher Lao on Twitter

For a brief moment at the height of Typhoon Pedring on September 27, mentions of Christopher Lao reappeared on Twitter , bringing the punsters – and the finger waggers – back out in the open. The term trended on Twitter for a brief moment, before receding and letting the more general #Pedring reign as a trending topic.

In the Global Map of Social Media Penetration, the Philippines & Indonesia are crushing it

It’s an accepted fact that as far as social media sites are concerned, Indonesia and the Philippines are usually at the top of the charts in almost any category in both the Southeast Asia surveys and the world rankings.

Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare – you name it. Though I’ve yet to see results for Google+, it is safe to speculate that these two countries are probably dominating this young social network as well.

Last June, the UK-based Internet consumer research company Trendstream, which operates the site GlobalWebIndex.net released a comprehensive infographic on Social Media usage called “The Global Map of Social Networking 2011” that has been cited in most of the usual suspects, such as Mashable. (click on the graphic for a magnified view)

Over the weekend, UK based Internet marketing agent Nuance & Fathom tweeted the following observation, which got me revisiting the infographic:

@nufamrketing Wow, Philippines & Indo social media penetration smashes UK, USA and Europe… take a look at this global #infographic http://ow.ly/6DNUN

Sure enough, the Philippines and Indonesia are leading the pack in the social media penetration chart. GlobalWebIndex lists the Philippines first, which translates to a slight edge over Indonesia.

The obvious follow-up question is, “Why is it always the Philippines & Indonesia?” – what is in the cultural makeup of these countries that makes them so accepting of social media technologies?  To the extent that even highly developed countries with mature Internet infrastructures are left eating our dust.

That’s an interesting conundrum, which I’d like to explore in subsequent blog posts. If you have any theories, I’d love to hear about them.

Reeling in the Years: Raiding the PhilMusic Archives

Our home baked music site PhilMusic.com has gone through several stages of evolution in its 15 or so years of existence.

It started as a mailing list (then referred to as a “listserv”) on the local ISP iPhil in 1996 before becoming a full-fledged web domain. It then went through another round of evolution as a website, from an online music magazine (actually more like a music blog in today’s sense, before the word “blog” was even invented) from 1996 to 2004 — to today’s musician-oriented community forum.

As a new media destination site for the band-dominated music scene of the the era, PhilMusic pioneered some things taken for granted today – the music artist chat event, an event calendar known as a “gig guide”, online concert photography galleries, the site podcast, and long articles and reviews that would probably have looked great in print but were dedicated to the online medium.

Since 2005, today’s PhilMusic.com Forum (talk.philmusic.com)  is more familiar to local musicians as the defacto place to find great deals in music gear. Looking to sell your guitar or want to swap stories about the best effects boxes with fellow guitarists? The PhilMusic Forum is the place.

This community identity may not be ideal for people who still miss the old music-journalism persona of the site, but in today’s net scene, every band already has their own site or social media account plugging their own gigs, and publishing their own content and photos. Having a third party join in would just add to the new media clutter. Besides, every local band out there already has its own Facebook page, and probably a Twitter account as well.

Speaking of Facebook, as of Feb 2011, you can now add another stage of evolution: PhilMusic the Facebook Page. Rather belatedly, The PhilMusic Facebook Page went up in Feb 2011 to serve as the official online presence of the site on Facebook. You can find the page through the URL http://facebook.com/philmusic.dotcom .

Facebook Pages  makes perfect sense for all sorts of corporations and media companies nowadays.The amount of people you can reach on it is staggering (22M Filipinos at last count), and the engagement is amazing.

Content posted on Facebook gets more hits than if they were just placed online on a stand alone website. Then there’s that whole social notion of “Liking” and sharing content, which drives eyeballs back to the original content sources better than the old darling of the blogging community – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) –  ever could. And since there’s no cost to hosting on Facebook – the combination is irresistible.

What to put in a Facebook edition of PhilMusic? After stumbling on a couple of old drives filled with old PhilMusic content – made up of photos, videos and features articles from the site’s “online magazine era”, some of which had been previously published online, some of which had never been seen by the public – I decided to sift through these old files and repost some of these on the Facebook page. People can then freely share these with their contacts.

So there’s the page’s reason for existence: A place to highlight material from PhilMusic’s archives.

A visit to the PhilMusic Facebook page today is a bit like a trip through a time machine. You’ll see images from a performance that took place in 2005, or read a review of a “new” artist that was originally published in 1999. But you’ll see this through the eyes of a modern Facebook user, using the online photo and video display and “like”, commenting, and sharing social functions of today.

So come join us and sift through bits and pieces of music history of the recent past. With 15 years of local music-oriented content to go through, you’re sure to bump into some gems.

The new-fangled social media touchpoints… “Like” or “Follow” PhilMusic on these links!

PhilMusic on Facebook: http://facebook.com/philmusic.dotcom

PhilMusic on Twitter: http://twitter.com/philmusic

The Philippines as a Facebook Nation: We passed 20 Million in 2010, We’re #5 in the World.

Determining the Philippine Internet population has traditionally been a tale of chasing the “guesstimates”. The closest we had to a scientific effort to nail the figure were the studies published by the market research company AGB Nielsen. In 2009, they announced a figure of 20 Million online Filipinos that year, with a projected run up to 30 Million by 2012.

How Nielsen arrives at those projection is always a bit of mystery to me (surveys? projections?), but given the state of the Net in the PH, that might be understandable. Internet access isn’t just measured in terms of Internet ISP accounts since home usage is low (the usual scapegoat – low PC ownership is the oft-cited culprit), but Filipinos access the Internet in alternative ways, through cybercafes, school labs, offices, and mobile phones. The recent phenomenon of the USB dongle – inexpensive 3G modems with prepaid accounts that you can purchase on your own – adds another dimension to the equation. The dongles gives people their own unique “Internet key”. Even if they don’t own a personal computer, they can walk over to their friend’s laptop and plug in, and voila – instant netizen.

But there could be more reliable stats, and that could be in the form of the Facebook numbers coming right out of Facebook’s own advertising API. Facebook calculates the number of unique users for a country based on a combination of IP addresses and registration profile info. The Ad API presents these figures to the user when you select the option to advertise on Facebook. One of the most convenient aspects of this self-service method is that it takes the guesswork out of targeting an ad buy  - you can select a very specific demographic (such as all single males in the Philippines 18-24 years old), or you can select “all” for everybody in the country. The “All” selection returns the number of all users in the country.

The independent Facebook tracking service SocialBakers (formerly known as Facebakers) plugs directly into the Facebook Ad API and uses it as the basis for its country statistics. As far as the Philippines is concerned, we are now clocking in at 21,759,280 users as of today, for a penetration of 21.78% of the total population.

This puts the Philippines among the Top 5 countries on Facebook. And with our high growth rate, (6.2 Million users were added in the last 6 months) we’re #5 on the charts with a bullet!

When you drill deep into the PH stats, Socialbakers turns up all sorts of interesting profile info, like the male/female ratio (48% male, 52% female) and age distribution (44% of users are 18-24 years old).

If we consider Facebook to have a significant market share among Filipino Internet users (It is #1 in the Alexa rankings, and for a lot of people, Facebook *is* the Internet), the Facebook demographics give us an insight into the composition of Filipino netizens as a whole. Socialbakers itself estimates that Facebook is used by 73% of the Philippine online population.

You can argue about the accuracy about the stats coming from the Facebook API, but it does inspire more confidence about accuracy compared to surveys and projections. We can continue to guess that that there are between 20-25 Million Filipinos on the Internet today. But thanks to the Facebook stats, we can say with certainty that there are at least 21,759,280 Philippine users.

Why 2010 is the Year of Mobile Social Media

Some months back, I gave this presentation (the deck is embedded here as a Slideshare link), which encapsulated some ideas I had been thinking of for sometime. It seems that as far as social media is concerned, several factors came into play in late 2009 that have conspired to create a “perfect storm” that have positioned mobile platforms as the main deal for social media starting this year, 2010.

I’d summarize these factors as the following:

1. The emergence of Facebook and Twitter as the most popular (or influential) vehicles for social media in the Philippines. Which means we can finally dispense with Friendster, Multiply, and all the others as irrelevant. The stats presented in this presentation are all out-of-date by now by the way.
2. The emergence of affordable all-you-can-eat mobile internet data plans from Philippine mobile operators. Starting late 2009, mobile internet rates evolved from pay-as-you go to daily, weekly, and monthly denominations.
3. The recognition of mobile as the main platform for growth by the web giants Facebook, Google, and even Microsoft at the Mobile World Congress in Feb 2010.
4. The emergence of the “geo-location” wars as gelocation apps moved to center stage at SXSW 2010.

Some of my stats (particularly that of Facebook) need to be updated, but I think the presentation remains relevant for the most part:

Friendster’s Twitter is Updated from Facebook

We’ve heard of social media mashups before, but this one strikes us as more than just a little odd.

Apparently Friendster maintains an official account on Twitter (which is confirmed through a post on the official Friendster blog). Since Friendster’s operations have been increasingly Philippine-centric, this Twitter account is run out of Manila. The Twitter feed is updated sporadically, as is the official blog.

What does seem strange however, is that three out of the most recent updates were updated from Facebook, as the screen grab above will attest to. It seems that the Friendster tweeter prefers not to open a new browser tab while moseying around the web, so he tweets right from where he is (which unfortunately for him, is an account on Facebook, not Friendster).

Clicking on the Facebook link on the tweets shows the originating application is the Facebook-Twitter connection found at facebook.com/twitter .

Our helpful suggestion: If the official Friendster Twitter-master can’t be bothered to post from the web or a third-party Twitter client, Friendster can at least try to connect to Twitter’s open API so that users can also tweet directly from their Friendster profiles.

That way, a Friendster tweet will be seen as coming from Friendster  -  and not from Facebook.