Big Day Out

Figuring out social media marketing in Malaysia was the topic up for discussion at yesterday’s Starcom MediaVest Group Digital Day Out.

No easy task – but Starcom managed to assemble DiGi marketer Lau Sulin, Starcom’s executive director Lee Yew Leong, Nuffnang’s Timothy Tiah, TV host Jojo Struys, and Scott Wenkart from Australian agency Spiral Digital+Media+Lab to represent a mixed bag of point of views for the discussion.

The usual what is social media question was followed by a series of others ranging from whether advertisers should care about social media to the all important question on effectiveness and ROI.

At one point, Nuffnang’s Tiah even shared how one campaign the company did for a debit card brand flopped big time.

The client wanted to get bloggers to write in about how they would spend X amount of money using the debit card and then reward them with a trip to the Gold Coast.

But, against Nuffnang pleas, insisted that bloggers would have to first apply for the card, get the card, use the card, and take a picture of the receipt and send it in with the write up.

“It was a total disaster,” Tiah said.

“A record breaking four entries to the competition but a lot of emails from bloggers complaining about the competition and that the card never showed up [after they applied for it],” he said.

I asked the panel for their thoughts on Malaysia’s social media marketing scene where we are seeing a lot of brands experimenting on the medium with some launching campaigns which are not really engaging at all. Does this turn consumer’s off from using something like a Facebook if they are being bombarded with unsocial like ads?

“The cream always rises to the top,” Spiral’s Wenkart said.

“People will only engage with something they like,” he said.

The rest – I guess – is just seen as noise and gets ignored.

You can watch some of Spiral’s work here and here.