Conversation with Brandon Cheung of wwwins Consulting
To contrast my conversation with Jay Oatway, I sent similar questions to Brandon Cheung of wwwins Consulting. Brandon is the Strategic Planning Director in the wwwins Hong Kong office. wwwins Consulting is “one of Asia’s leading full-service digital marketing agencies”. Brandon will provide a perspective of added value for his clients compared to Jay Oatway who is a heavy participant.
1. What were the primary elements that first drove you to become interested in social media?
At first, social media just hit me over the head as a better utility to keep in touch with a growing network of friends. As my real network of friends got larger, and as I moved to a different locations, social media helped me keep in touch with good friends, acquaintances, and eventually professional contacts. I wish it was this mature while I was still in college so I could have kept better contact with the people I knew then. Friendster just wasn’t cutting it back then. Fast forward to today, social media is my life. It’s at the core of digital communications and every marketer in the world wants to know how to harness its power.
2. Which parts of social software do you see providing the greatest benefit and added value? Who benefits the greatest from this added value? Users? Marketers?
Social software definitely benefits the users the most right now. We’ve seen some decent innovation in terms of aggregation tools and analytics tools, mostly being offered for free. Marketers trying to “get in the game” can use a combination of these tools to get started, but sooner or later a pricing model will have to come into play. The lack of paid services is limiting tools development from taking the next step as a more serious utility for marketers. The money will eventually come from marketers when the right set of tools can make their SM efforts accountable. In the meantime, you’ll see the tools space remain a mile wide and an inch deep.
3. As an advertiser utilizing social media and social software, how has his benefited you personally? Has it enhanced your reputation? What are drawbacks?
Social media has definitely helped me in the advertising world. I personally don’t try to acquire a mass following. I focus more on using social media as a learning space from others, as well as a connection point for other people that I find to be influential. There are superstars out there focused on making a name for themselves and their mass followings will prove to be beneficial to them one day. Advertisers will want them to push their products like PR people want journalists to push their stories.
4. Twitter isn’t popular in HK compared to the US and other regions. How have you used services like Twitter/Fanfou to your benefit? Does this provide you with a larger global audience?
Twitter is the biggest and best for now. I’m not saying it will stay like this forever, but the reason they remain ahead is their API. They’re allowing a lot of outside developers to take the essence of micro-blogging and mash it up with other great services (e.g. customer service, buzz monitoring, social network enhancement, CRM programs). Yes, it enables connectivity to a global audience but at the moment the country lines are all a bit grey. I personally can’t wait for the location-based-services to kick into play.
5. What are some of the trends you see in the near future for social network sites and social media?
I see 3 big trends that will drive the social media space forward:
Open APIs are at the heart of being social. They enable mash-ups of the best tools. You’ll see more leading companies open up their code to the world to reap the benefits. Zuckerberg and Stone know what they’re doing.
Increased social connectivity enables the power of crowd-sourcing. We talk about the power of cloud computing, but we rarely give credit to the power of cloud-thinking. We consume information so much faster than we used to and we solve problems more collectively than we used to. Look at companies like Threadless and how they’ve empowered a design community to create new business models around social media. That’s just the beginning. Don’t be surprised to see cloud-thinking used on a larger stage to solve bigger problems.
Real-time search. Twitter started it. Google will probably finish it. Once the world has access to search through real-time information you’ll see services online act like they’re on steroids. The moment a comment of relevance is made to a person/brand/service, the opportunity to reach or respond will be instantaneous. The efficiency is going to be fascinating.