Mobile Talk

One of the most powerful tool in the world today is the power of the mass or ‘crowdsourcing‘! Even though using the mass to make an impact like through demonstrations and war have been going in since man existed, there is a more powerful and positive tool created by the mass today. The ongoing ability to do content creation in the forms of blogs, images and video uploading has created a phenomenon so huge it can be considered a Tipping Point. Websites nowadays are self-sustaining as long as it is open. Having numerous people inserting comments and uploading images and videos onto a website will create unprecedented ongoing traffic. In shorter words, this is also called social media where contents are contributed entirely by the public be it for a fee or for free. This is where Wikipedia, Blogspot, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn play a part and now the proliferation of many more social media sites.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg knows this. He’s young, sure, but he’s no rube. Zuckerberg knows exactly what’s at stake. “The full potential of the web is to make the world more open, so everyone has a voice and can share what is important to them,” he wrote in a recent blog post.

Zuckerberg wants his company to be the gateway to openness. So does Google. So does Microsoft. So does Yahoo! All of them know that the gateway is where the money is.

Closer to home, we have so many Web 2.0 sites now that are using the same crowdsourcing method through the use of not only videos but also uploading interesting MMS of daily occurences to the website. STOMP in Singapore does quite a good job in this and even creates their own videos like a reality series based on blind dates and all the series can only be watched online. Sad to say, I do enjoy the corny lines spoken by real-life people filmed for the series plus the shaky video filmed by the inexperienced videographers (or did they do it on purpose?) being uploaded onto the website. Driving traffic to the site was easy by assigning a few local pretty faces and bloggers to blog weekly on a given topic. Each of the bloggers have their own personalities and it was interesting reading about some of their adventurous. Some more bimbo comments than the others but those make for good reading right?

Now what about Malaysia. It is catching up with the launch of so many social media sites from The Star’s R.AGE (with a nice layout and readable contents, I must say), AllMalaysia.info (that allows people to blog about anything and everything Malaysian) and the recently launched YouthMalaysia.com. These social media has definitely tapped the right target market which is the youth market who are hungry for information. always looking for something new and enjoys getting recognition for their contributions. There is so much room for growth in this country as people are getting more outspoken and innovative and with the emergence of the latest technology, the youth are empowered to find their own outlet of expression. It is no more only about feature writers penning their daily thoughts but the public who captures interesting photos, blogs about the amazing events they participated in and uploads videos of extremely funny characters. This definitely creates a platform for charity especially when the work of voluneters and donors are highlighted by the people themselves and thus setting a role model for others.

A flash flood of ad dollars is waiting to flow to social media, but the models need to be proven. MySpace failed its proof-of-concept test with Google, and your less-than-$600 million valuation for Facebook suggests it will, too. Facebook has valued each user profile on their site as $4 a person which comes up to $600 million for the whole site due to its 150 million members and counting. Twitter meanwhile is a phenomenon no one can avoid and practically useful to everyone! Imagine updating your friends with just a few words and click! Your friends can catch up with what you are doing and you get the opportunity whenever someone finds you. Investors have valued Twitter at more than $1 billion in a public offering with 6 million users, which means each user is worth $167 or 42 times the approximate value of a Facebook profile.

It is with the rise of the importance of social media which brings me to an event in Singapore one would not want to miss to talk about where social media will go and where will it bring us. I have had talks on this with so many people and if not wrong, it would have to be a gateway that merges the needs of everyone from uploading videos to micro-blogging to posting your photos or songs which Facebook is doing very well now. But will we see more of a merging in the near future? I will not be suprised. Now, I am back to racking my brains about how I can utilise this power of the mass for more value and dollars.