Social Media Worldforum was organized in Singapore in this week. Traditional media companies (Sony Pictures, ESPN, MTV) had strong presence there, also some telco operators came to learn more. But it was very clear that social media is still driven by smaller and startup companies. They develop, for example, new platforms, apps on existing social media platforms, tools to help users, measurement and monitoring tools, and offer also consulting services to larger companies to survive in social media.
e27 is an interesting community of Singaporean web and mobile companies. This kind of communities are important, because many companies develop very specific applications and business, but they also need some other components to work with. We are still in the early phase to build social media ecosystem. Twitter has one billion valuation, but only 60 employees and no revenue. This business is not ready yet. And that’s one reason it opens many opportunities for startups.
I heard several interesting comments in the conference, for example: “this is not a time to expect significant revenue from social media, but this is the time to enter that business if you want to be there in the future”, “there is a shift from content to experience that means content, context and conversations”, and “the time of traditional PR is over, the future is a combination of PR, marketing, and social media activities”.
Social media helps startups to make its own marketing in a cost effective way, when startups are normally more creative in social media than corporations’ marketing and PR departments. You must get the first beta up and running by spending less than half million dollar in social media. If you need more for the first step, it is time to think your go-to-market plan. As a guy from Google said “you cannot just plan with white board, now you must do it, launch it and improve it”.
