It’s happening right now - 5.00pm MYT. A flash mob — Tali Tenang – that garnered interest and attendance via Facebook group United Colours of Malaysia and promoted via Twitter (@RandomAlphabets), to advocate peace amongst Malaysians in light of the our recent religious unrest.

While many of us can’t be there in person, we can get live updates from @RandomAlphabets and #talitenang. Let’s wait and see if #talitenang will become another trending topic.

Bad news sell… or a laughing matter does.

On Tuesday, Malaysia’s Information, Communication and Culture Minister gained celebrity status on Twitter, and here’s why.

While the world is focused on the misfortune and issues in Haiti, Malaysia had its own share of the limelight at the start of 2010. We made news with our recent torching and vandalising of churches following a court ruling that allowed Catholic publication, The Herald, to use the word “Allah” to refer to the Christian God.

In the spate of events, a student was charged for posting a church attack hoax on Facebook — he was charged with threatening public safety in relation to a comment he posted about the recent attacks on churches.

Amidst all this clamour, Malaysia’s Information, Communication and Culture Minister, Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim, had stepped forward to advise Malaysians, especially Muslims, against being totally immersed in the Internet culture, especially Facebook and Twitter.

In recent news reports, he said that facilities such as the Internet could not be accepted wholly because it was a form of business introduced by the West and “Malaysians were just users”. Datuk Seri Dr Rais was quoted as saying that when using such facilities, the people must upkeep the values taught by Islam, Buddhism or Christianity to maintain our culture.

Following this. the local blogosphere and twittersphere were astir with comments about what he said. Twitter-ers have started making jokes about him being too old and regressive-minded, and have made #yorais a trending topic on Tuesday (moving up from no.8 to no.4 within the hour I was writing this). Thanks to the hashtag creator, too.

I was trying hard not to ROTF in stitches reading tweets about “Rais Yatim is so ancient, he…”

Now, I wonder how he (and the government) is going to influence the people to resist (being totally immersed) the powerful allure of Facebook and Twitter (and ultimately the Internet). This is especially when Pikom — the National Information and Communications Technology Association of Malaysia, expects the Internet penetration in Malaysia to grow between 10% and 20% this year, and broadband penetration to reach 50% from the current 32%.

Most of the social media projects I deal with at Ogilvy are for global brands, it’s interesting to learn from local successful cases like this one. It’s a cafe in Mong Kok with a wide range of comic book collections called Ease House Cafe, where they target mainly to young comic lovers.
As a small cafe located on the 25th floor of a building, 21 year-old owner realized it would be hard to spread the message out if he used traditional marketing tactics, so he went digital.

They use Facebook as a channel to grow fan base and increase loyalty by keeping their fans updated on news and special deals, also partnered with a local cafe directory site up4cafe to offer readers coupons.
Recently, they are having this “Blog for free dinner” campaign, where they encourage bloggers to write about their Cafe, they will search on Google every month with keyword “Ease House Cafe” and pick a blog that’s index high enough on the search, sounds like a small scale blogger engagement, a very smart idea to get themselves quality organic search results, but personally I would also go for keywords like “comic books”, “hong kong” too. (in Eng & Chinese).

With limited resources, many local small & medium business owners in Hong Kong are afraid to invest time and money on this new media, but with all the recent success here in Hong Kong, I think business owners should really reconsider and make a move soon!

The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced it’s 2009 Word of the Year:

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Who would have thought that with all the talk of short form communication eroding the English language, social media would make such a significant contribution? LOL.

I am attending the Digital Marketing and Media Summit in Melbourne today and just attended a great session from Mark Higginson, Director of Analytics at Nielsen Online.

Mark shared some interesting new research from Nielsen Online today about Facebook and social media usage here in Australia:

• 8 hours/month:  Australians spend on average 8 hours/month on Facebook
• Australia Leads: Australians spend more time on average per month using social media (any social media site, not just Facebook) than any other country (7:12 hours/month per Australian on average)
• 8 million Aussies: the current number of facebook.com users is 8 million Australians/month
• 13.7 million overall: there are 13.7 million active monthly Internet users in Australia

I think these statistics are remarkable because they show that Australians are doing more than checking out sites like Facebook and Twitter, setting up an account, and then abandoning the sites after a short amount of time. That’s a common refrain of non-believers out there. We Australians are, as Mark correctly observed, addicted.

Here are some resources for anyone interested in learning more about the landscape of Facebook + social media here in Australia:

• Facebook for Business:  presentation created by myself and Thomas Crampton on business strategies for Facebook. This was tailored to Asia Pacific and delivered as part of our partnership with the Wall Street Journal Asia.
• Australian Social Networking Jumps:  link to a Digital Media news story about how Australian social networking jumped by 29% - from Comscore, Ausgust 2009.
• History of the Australian Social Web: much-Dugg interactive timeline of the Australian social media and digital evolution
• DMMS09 Twitter Stream: feed of Tweets from the 2009 Digital Media & Marketing Summit
• Asia Digital Map Australia + Social Media Posts: all of the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence posts on Australia

Malaysia records 3.4 million Facebook users, one of the 10 fastest growing countries over the past week. www.checkfacebook.com

We at Ogilvy believe they should, as long as they have a strategy and/or  objective behind it. We have blogged about them here and here.  Always there must be a strategy, and not to do it for the sake of doing it.

Here’s an interesting blog discussing whether your B2B organisation is even ready to engage social media in the first place - a checklist of points.  How many of those points apply to your company?  How often has someone said to you, “Our competitor has a Facebook page, we must have it too.”?

Common sense, most of those points and I think they also apply to all businesses, and not just B2B.

Point #10 raises the most pertinent question for me. How many marketers and PR folks today are ready to listen, talk with their customers, rather than the old-school marketing world of “talking to”, or “telling” their customers?  How prepared are we?

We have all read about how, Facebook is growing in India. But it seems that now following Obama, even the Indian government is trying to make its presence felt in the social media. The most recent addition to the list of Indian political leaders trying to connect with the one billion populace of India, of whom only 5 per-cent can  be on internet, has been our Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh. After reading a Reuters article on how our PM has been spotted on Facebook, I could hardly contain my curiosity and ended up finding Dr Singhs’ profile on Facebook. What I found looked authentic enough, though I have a few questions.

Since  Government officials are barred from the use of social networks, how did Dr Singh actually get around to doing this? Also somehow the picture of our Prime Minister, updating his status on Facebook, while at work, just doesn’t quite ring the right bell in my mind. It would be interesting however, if he does come up with a “How well do you know Manmohan Singh quiz”

Also why isn’t the national portal being used for this? According to me, the Indian government could have taken inspiration from the White House and established a Government page on Facebook. Sooner or later this needs to happen as a lot of business decision makers and practically the entire urban youth is on these sites and this segment is quite important for the government to connect with.

A social media element which can be mashed up with the national portal to enable the citizens to make maximum use of the services can also play a very important role in promoting democracy in its true sense, in the world’s largest democracy.

However, to summarize, whether it is the Government’s PR machinery which has made this page or Dr Singh himself, what is heartening is that a change is happening and sooner or later, the day won’t be far when the government utlises social media more actively to communicate with the people.

As for now what next Dr Singh? A twitter account? Infact Shashi Tharoor recently tweeted that the PM had enquired about what was twitter. Which shows his interest in twitter as well.

In traditional Facebook style” I Like This”.

Join me, Josh Mehlman (Editor, NETT Magazine) and Suzi Dafnis (Community Director, Australian Businesswomen’s Network) and find out!

Next week Wednesday, we’ll be running a 1-hour session on Facebook for Business.  Here are the details:

Lunch+Learn Webinar
Title:    Using Facebook to Build Your Brand
Date:    Wednesday, 14 Oct 2009
Time:    12 noon Australian EDST

REGISTER HERE!

During the session, we’ll be giving practical tips and covering:

• 5 ways to a rapid-start strategy in Facebook
• How to engage your Facebook community
• Real-life examples of how businesses of all sizes use Facebook to build their brands
• And more…

Here are the slides from our highly successful partnership with The Wall Street Journal and GoToWebinar for the training on The Executives Guide to Facebook for Business.

We also have a full video version posted here and below.

Please enjoy and share!

Oct 7th Facebook for Business from 360 Digital Influence on Vimeo.

First in a series of free online Webinars on Social Media presented in partnership by The Wall Street Journal Asia, GoToWebinar and Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. Join our next event! Next session announced on our blog: www.asiadigitalmap.com or email thomas.crampton@ogilvy.com