Social Philippines

Don’t be Myspaced like Friendster was

Posted by: drea on: October 17, 2008

I’m in the middle of Larry Weber’s Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business and so far it’s been full of excellent ideas and anecdotes, and a little bit more comprehensiveness compared to Gary Vaynerchuk’s energetic and brief idea-bites on social media. Definitely a book to pick up if you’re looking to learn more about where the tide’s going to be in the future. I picked up a lot of good stuff.

The title of this post is a line that caught my attention on the book. Basically, Larry Weber narrates how Friendster went from being the talk of the town to taking a backseat to newer and better social networks such as Myspace and Facebook. Jonathan Abrams, the founder of Friendster, attracted many investors with this social network he pioneered eventually had to bow to their commands of expanding without ensuring the site’s functionality. Eventually, users got tired of the slow site and moved on.

Of course you have to make sure that your site works. A lot of people had been fed up by Twitter’s excessive downtime as of late. But what keeps Friendster going now is the sheer number of Filipinos on board. I conjecture that the Filipino community is such that they may not all be late adopters, but if you get enough of the community on board a site, chances are, it’ll be hard for them to move on. Multiply now has many users because of its increased social functionality, but Friendster remains to be the top social networking site in the country. Public school students have Friendster.

In short: Filipinos stick to community more than quality. Not many Filipinos can be early adopters, which is why Friendster is still in business. This can give startups a longer shelf life than they deserve, but more than that, it should prompt said startups to engage in a dialogue with its users. Most of all, it’s a sign that the Philippines is ripe for a social media revolution, not only engaging the community at large but hopefully elevating the connected Filipino into a more discerning browser.

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It’s not in the blogs

Posted by: drea on: October 15, 2008

Today I scoped some of the more popular blogs in the Philippines and I realized that these blogs don’t exactly have an established niche. It seemed a little bit more traditional media in the sense that these blogs were not really collaborators but broadcasters, with a large audience (probably) and less dialogue. And when you take a look at Alexa’s top ranking sites in the Philippines, you’re going to find that the much more popular websites are YouTube, Friendster, and Multiply. The more popular blogs like Yugatech are hardly what’s gathering hits nowadays. The answer is very clearly found in social media, as even ABS-CBN found themselves negotiating an ad deal with Multiply. A lot of people scoffed at this before, but I think it was a smart move. ABS-CBN joined the audience where the rubber meets the road.
It’s fascinating how blogs gave us our very own opportunity for a soapbox yet the more popular ones remain channels of broadcasting and not collaboration in the Philippines. Top bloggers in the Philippines are more of a clique than a community. Social networks are where Filipinos are really at, whether it be Friendster, Multiply, or even Plurk. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it is the Philippines that helps keep Friendster and Multiply to thrive. And Filipinos have certainly been creative with Multiply even creating their own online stores and forming communities.
Consider them, if you will, the cottage industries that you find online. However, these young entrepreneurs are going to need more than just Multiply if they want to grow. They have no access to demographics and they will have to rely on traditional, imposing marketing to keep themselves relevant and find-able, as it were.
However, social media has a lot of potential. If Gary Vaynerchuk declares that America is currently in a social media gold rush, can we say the same of the Philippines? The market is undoubtedly there, but this potential remains to be harnessed into something profitable, and ultimately, something collaborative and community-building as social media was destined to be.

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An introduction

Posted by: drea on: October 13, 2008

Social media is so interesting, and I think the fact that we’re talking about it in the Philippine context spices it up.

Twitter especially. All I did was tweet into the void about how otherinbox, tumblr, and mindmeister didn’t work and the developers themselves would tweet back to help me out. That’s some transparency, and a lot of effort on their part to reply to people who don’t even follow them. It’s become a tool for businesses to reach out to their consumers and have a real dialogue where the rubber meets the road — and that’s real globalization right there, to have a CEO of a startup make a connection with someone all the way from the Philippines like me. None of that impersonal bureaucratic fluff. It shows me that these people sincerely want to improve their product the way Richard Branson installed leather seats on his planes.

Everyone else has moved on to Plurk but I think that speaks oodles about what kind of social media consumer Filipinos really are. Twitter is the first micro-blogging service out there but Plurk by far has the most bells and whistles that keep my roommates stuck to it for up to hours at a time (like people keep the television on in the background).

I’m also pretty sure of the fact that many of you have heard how Multiply had gone on server overload the day after Christmas because of the one or two million photographs uploaded by Filipinos. I think that’s the real people power now. That’s people power that can also generate a lot of money. (On a sidenote, I think Customs has a lot of nerve and a lot less brains to hold up imports that, you know — keep businesses running. Seriously the hoops that you have to jump through for them is so degrading and infuriating.)

One thing I’ve observed however is an utter lack of bloggers tackling social media in the Philippines. A lot of the old-timer probloggers are still stuck on technology-related posts that keep their blogs stuck in a niche. Pete Cashmore, the really handsome founder of Mashable.com owns the tenth highest-ranked blog in the world. And precisely, his blog is all about social media and related startups. I’m tempted to think that this is just because he’s really handsome, but not really.

So this is my attempt to start blogging about Philippine social media and social networking. I think social media is going to be big especially because it is a cultural characteristic for Filipinos to be social. There’s a lot of potential still left untapped.

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Hello world!

Posted by: drea on: October 13, 2008

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