Tag: social media strategies

Skittles & Social Media – Success or Scuttle?

August 21, 2009 • Social Influence • 2 comments


There are almost 20,000 photos tagged with “Skittles” on Flickr (courtesy of PaPeR.cLiP)

First made in 1974 as a hard shelled candy, Skittles is part of the MARS stable and is easily recognisable for their multi-coloured sugar shells with the letter “S”. The candy brand shocked and awed the world back in March this year when they transformed their corporate website into a real-time social media portal. The new website also incorporates a floating widget pulling in content and inputs from Youtube, Flickr, Wikipedia and Facebook. To get onto their home page, all content producers – photos, videos, tweets – need to do is type the word “skittles” or tag them and Voila!

Skittles was able to initially generate a huge amounts of traffic (more than 1332% in a day) by people who were simply curious to see their own “skittles”. It also generated a tremendous amount of publicity and buzz online.

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Addressing the Absence of Attention

August 19, 2009 • Blog • 1 comment


I love this pie chart! (Courtesy of Creating Passionate Users)

One of the most prominent phenomena in this present age is its move towards slicing and dicing everything down to its simplest and most fundamental parts. This relish for reductionism has resulted in an ever increasing number of people who acquires information in a vast number of areas without ever dipping below the surface.

The latest I read was that mini-MBAs are now growing in popularity. Who has time to spend 1 or 2 years of their lives pursuing a fast ubiquitous qualification these days – other than the few oddballs like me?

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Clay Shirky on The Future of Organisations

August 17, 2009 • • 1 comment

Broad and sweeping, yet detailed and penetrating, Clay Shirky’s volume “Here Come’s Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” is a tour de force of how technology influences group activity and organisation. Shirky skillfully blended social sciences like psychology, sociology and anthropology with elements of the social web – mailing lists, forums, blogs, Youtube, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter.

Weaving his words into an easily digestible narrative, Shirky isn’t afraid to borrow theories and concepts to back up his claims. A notable example is the Coasean Theory, which states that high transaction costs make hierarchical organisations more efficient than individuals striking agreements with each other. Shirky’s argument is that the lowering of coordination costs to practically zero through social tools like forums, emails, and blogs make it possible for new loosely structured groups to form outside traditional organisations. Hence the Coasean Floor of transactional costs are lowered, making it efficient and cost effective for such groups to form.

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How To Generate a Good Following

August 7, 2009 • Blog • 3 comments


Having great photographs always help (courtesy of the highly talented Nay aka tranquil niche – a friend from Graduate House)

Why do we return time after time to a favourite blog, Youtube channel, web forum, or Flickr group? What makes it seemingly easy for an individual to attract hordes of Twitter followers while you have problems breaking past the 500 barrier?

The answer lies in what I call the degree of interestingness of these user generated content creators. In other words, the quality of their writing, photography, videography, music making capabilities and how these can help to sustain an audience.

Of course, being able to build relationships are also important, but you can’t just befriend your way to blog superstardom if your blog posts, facebook updates and tweet feeds are complete bores.

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Of Tribes, Leaders and Heretics

July 12, 2009 • Social Influence • 1 comment

I just completed marketing maven Seth Godin’s book on leadership titled “Tribes – We Need You to Lead Us”.

As a long-time fan of “Sethology”, I have always marvelled at his cutting edge ideas and thought provoking approaches to marketing, lapping up past works like “Purple Cow”, “The Big Moo”, “The Dip” and “Meatball Sundae”. I am also an avid reader of his wonderfully written blog, which is a must-visit site on my list of must-visit sites.

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Social Media in the World of Museums

April 25, 2009 • Blog • 5 comments


Clay Shirky speaks at the Smithsonian (courtesy of taoboy)

After several weeks of doing some online research/surfing/bumming around and asking friends (like the ultra intelligent Kevin Lim), I managed to get a handle (well partially) on what’s happening for social media in the museum world. Here’s what I found after some digging around:

First is the discovery of a blog aggregator for museums around the world called (surprise surprise) Museum Blogs! Believe it or not, there are now some 331 museums blogs (at least those which are captured here) around the world. I am glad to see that our dearly beloved Yesterday.sg is there too! Yay.

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