This Monday, Melvin Yuan's article, 'What businesses need to do in the changed environment', was published in the Business Times. Hurrah!
He notes that a few companies here are now engaging bloggers to publicise their products, while others watch cautiously from the sidelines. As citizen journalism becomes more popular, corporations must change their mindset and embrace change. Customers can be your best advocates, and they should be engaged in blogs or forums. Before this happens, though, those within the company must understand the nature of the social web. Honesty, integrity and trust are very important here, because a wrong move can subject the company to intense scrutiny.
Mr Brown was featured. Also mentioned were a few groups I'm currently involved in - the Gahmenbloggers, which I co-founded with Ivan, the Second Life Singapore Community (group leader Alvin). At the rate things are going, I might turn out to be a Digital Movement groupie as well, considering my attendance rate at their recent events, like Nexus and BlogOut.
Knowing the people behind Ping, Singapore Angle and Singapore Entrepreneurs also makes things feel like one big family. So far, everyone I've met is brilliant, humble and willing to share ideas - very important qualities for developing our own Web 2.0 community.
Somehow, I feel this can make more headway than lots of stuffy board meetings and proprietary IT jargon. We're building our own Silicon Valley culture here, where ideas flow freely. Now, that's progress.
2 Comments
It is exciting to see all these 'Silicon Valley culture' happening right here in Singapore now. Lets hope someone make something big out of these events.
As someone who is in private equity/vc, it is nice to see that the culture is slowly developing here in singapore but I remember talking to Kevin Lim recently when I met him for drinks, that I think something is really missing.