Category Youth Marketing

09 Apr

“Confirm Friend?”: A layman look at Youth, Media, & Influence

Last year, I presented the original “YOUTH: Media, Influence, and Winning Them Over” (Full transcript) at the Malaysian Media Conference.

In the material, was a simple idea about friendship.

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http://www.adoimagazine.com/mmc2009

Then months passed. And many things changed. What started as a simple idea changed into something much, much more.

But to share this with you, I have to start with what has not changed (and probably will not).

Media & Influence Explained by Grandma

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Meet Ah Mah.

She’s my grandmother. She is 97 years old.

MEDIA: She watches 12 hours of TV everyday. And she doesn’t change the channel during ads. Heck she doesn’t even move much.

INFLUENCE: She doesn’t hang out much with friends, or have them on Facebook. At her age, many of her friends hang out in a better place. Since she’s here, she is mostly influenced by my dad and my maid.

Now meet my mom.

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Here she is holding a melon. Or cucumber. Or something.

MEDIA: She watches about 4 hours of TV a day. She’s on the internet 2 hours a day. She reads the papers.

INFLUENCE: She’s influenced by what she read on the papers, sees on TV, some crazy emails forwarded by her friends, and very occasionally, my dad. She recently began to invade Facebook too, bringing along with her, a circle of line-dancing aunties.

That’s my mom.

Now. I’d like to introduce you a young girl, Rina, from a nearby office. She’s 23 this year.

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MEDIA: Unlike grandma, Rina does NOT watch 12 hours watching TV. Papers? Never liked it. Instead, she spends a lot of time online, chatting, sharing and connecting with 1,000s of ‘friends’. She consumes media created by her social circle. Perhaps that’s why it’s called social media?

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In fact, she’s using different ways to connect with different circles of friends.

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INFLUENCE: Not surprisingly, she’s pretty influenced by her friends, as well as what she consumes online.

Not surprisingly (again), this is true across most people connected to the internet as well.

Measuring the Influence of Friends

A study by Forrester Research and Intelliseek in 2006 revealed that recommendations from consumers leads to consumer trust.

Online banner ads are right at the bottom with text ads on mobile phones.

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A similar research done by the Nielsen Company reinforces this. “Recommendations from people known” and “Consumer Opinions posted online” top the charts in consumer trust. Online video and banner ads were once again way at the bottom with SMS text ads.

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But most of you already know this. Research is just proof that you’re right.

Now we know Rina is influenced by her friends. Big cheese.

Does this apply to local youth in Malaysia?

Let’s see.

  1. In 2008, according to the MCMC: Young Malaysians aged 15 – 34… about 87.7% of them have access to the internet.
  2. The Nielsen study was repeated in Malaysia with identical results.
  3. And day before yesterday… Comscore reports that in Malaysia, social networking penetrates 84.7 % of Malaysians, with social networking visitors visiting a social networking site 22 times a month (almost every day), in the same way my Grandma watches TV every day.

Want to influence a Malaysian youth? Start by being their friend.

o&m

The “Friend Test”: Can a brand be a friend?

I have once proposed an easy 3 question test. This was featured in Marketing Magazine in late 2009, and then on 89.9 Business FM in January. 3 questions which can tell you if a brand is a friend. And it starts in the schoolyard, where you learn what being a friend really means.

Friends understand you

Friends never let you down

Friends contribute to your identity

Think of your really good friends. Is the answer yes to the above? I hope so.

Now think of a really good brand. Is the answer yes to the above?

Ask an Apple fan, or a kid who loves his Nike’s. You’ll hear it for yourself.These brands tend to pass the friend test.

But how about other brands? Are they friends? How can they be a friend?

True friendship: Actions speak louder than words.

Here’s another friend test. You see how they ACT.

Here’s my Facebook profile.

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Now take a closer look.

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On Facebook, you can clearly see the FRIEND’S ZONE. This is where friends hang out. I hear from my friends inside here. Sometimes we talk about brands. Sometimes we rave about them, too. And we do it in the friends zone.

Then beside us, trying to be near us, trying to look like us, be like us, and get our acceptance are the brands who lurk in the STRANGER DANGER ZONE. We turn a blind eye to the stranger danger zone (except when we are seduced by money or sex?).

Brands pay a lot of money to be in the STRANGER DANGER ZONE. Some even go so far as POP UP at you. EYEBLAST you. And DISTRACT you when you’re online. Not cool. That’s not how real friends act.

Real friends (or brands who are real friends) don’t have to. They find themselves in the FRIEND’S ZONE. And in thousands of Facebook profiles. Twitter conversations. IM chats. Email correspondences. They find their way into our minds and hearts.

I discovered this for myself, almost accidentally.

The Unintentional Discovery of Social Advertising

In 2008, a group of young people organized YOUTH’08, a weekend-long youth festival. They had a key presenter and an advertising & promotion budget, and got 21,000 visitors to what became Malaysia’s Largest Youth Festival.

In 2009, I joined this group to organize the festival again. With only a few weeks left, the key presenter couldn’t get involved in time. Without a promotional budget. All we had was the mother of all invention – necessity.

Desperate. Slightly scared. We did what was natural.

We told the youths in our online community YouthSays.com that we needed their help. We’re going to give them what’s left of our budget if they could help us tell their friends. Each young person was given their own unique link they could use across their Facebook, Twitter, IM, Email etc social conversations. We offered only what we could, which was RM0.20 for every friend they invited to register for a pre-event pass.

10,000+ Youths registered before the event. The weekend received 36,720 visitors. And the YOUTH’09 Festival was saved.

A few months later, we had a big challenge, to present a “What change do youths want to see” to a group of leaders at the Youth Engagement Summit 2009. And we needed to collect voiced from across ASEAN. Fast.

Once again, we called upon youths to use their unique link across their Facebook, Twitter, IM, Email etc social conversations, and in return, we would fly some of them down to Kuala Lumpur for the Summit.

The result? 105,205 responses in 6 weeks.

Eventually many brands, agencies, and even non profits asked us to lend them this power. We spent months developing a robust platform, and tested it on 30 social campaigns in 4 countries.

In March 2010, we rolled out 4 commercial campaigns for clients like Jobstreet.com, TM, Nestle, and DiGi.

You can check out the live campaigns in Malaysia here:

http://malaysia.youthsays.com/campaigns

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As of 07-04-2010, we mobilized a total of 13,661 youths to send 201,331 of their friends to these campaigns. And now our aim is to mobilize 1 million youths to send millions more to your campaigns.

After all, if brands are already spending money on the STRANGER DANGER ZONE, getting into the FRIEND’S ZONE shouldn’t be a bad idea.

Because in the end, if we understand media and influence amongst youths, their friends is always a good place to start.

If you want my future forget my past,
If you wanna get with me better make it fast,
Now don’t go wasting my precious time,
Get your act together we could be just fine.

If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends. Make it last forever friendship never ends.

What do you think about that now you know how I feel, Say you can handle my love are you for real,
I won’t be hasty, I’ll give you a try
If you really bug me then I’ll say goodbye.

~ Spice Girls

About the Author

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Khailee Ng is the Executive Director and Cofounder of Youth Asia, where he organizes over 250,000 youths in Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam to collaborate with leading businesses on research, social media marketing, and activation.

He has been organizing youth communities since his student days. His community organizing efforts in social issues and underground music has won him local and international media recognition. He completed his degree in business at the top 2% of his class a Valedictorian having studied in Sydney, San Francisco State and UC Berkeley. He also won the Asian HSBC Young Entrepreneur Award in 2006, the first (and only) time the award was given to Malaysians.

He then spent the early years of his career with Mindvalley, where he worked with entrepreneurs and technologists from 16 countries to mobilize online communities in the US and UK.

With Youth Asia, he continues to integrate the understanding of young people with modern technology to truly unleash the power of organized communities with shared goals.

Khailee writes and speaks regularly about mobilizing youths:

  • Since 2008: Regular columnist on Marketing about the youth segment
  • December to January 2010: “Marketing With Youths with Khailee Ng” An 8 episode special on Business FM 89.9
  • 22 July 2009: “Youth: Media and Influence” @ Malaysian Media Conference 2009
  • 10 January 2009: 2nd National Youth Entrepreneur Convention 2009
  • 17 November 2008: MSC Innotech
  • 19 January 2008: 1st National Youth Entrepreneur Convention 2008
  • 18 March 2007: Asia Business Forum (ABF), Kuala Lumpur

You should follow him on Twitter http://twitter.com/khailee

Read about Youth Asia cofounder Joel Neoh.

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23 Feb

YOUTH: Media, Influence, and Winning Them Over (Full script + slides of MMC2009 presentation)

DSC_0258To the organizers and guests of the Malaysian Media Conference 2009, you rock.

We live in exciting times and I’m honored to have been given the chance share some insights about the youth market. I hope this transcript of the presentation is useful to you in sharing your ideas as well.

To those who didn’t attend the presentation, the 6th Malaysian Media Conference (MMC) is an annual alumni of about 250 media pundits, industry specialists and key media decision-makers in the fields of media, marketing, branding and advertising across Malaysia. Amongst the speakers featured are thought leaders in their space from Malaysia, Singapore, India, Australia and Japan. http://www.adoimagazine.com/mmc2009/

I was very humbled by the opportunity to speak there about the one thing I am most passionate about.

Here are the transcript and slides:

Read More »

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06 Sep

Vital videos to watch if you want to reconnect with your consumer!

Many of you already seen this, but for those who haven’t, now you are saved.

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31 Aug

What the new generation of young Malaysian marketers really need

I have an issue with young Malaysians. Considering I contribute monthly articles to Marketing magazine about Malaysian youth marketing, I probably have many ‘issues’ with young Malaysians.

But this is a different sort of issue. The kind of issue you would care about if your business relies on marketing to young Malaysians each and every day. Recently, we’ve expanded our operations in a big way, hiring people in the process. The thought arises: How do I hire and train young Malaysians to be top performers at work? How do I turn youths into youth marketing experts?

We’re looking at the next-generation of marketers here. Is it just me, or is there something they need now more than ever?

THE SEARCH FOR TOP MARKETING TALENT

It’s 7pm, and I am in the ‘boom-room’ sofa with my eyes closed, soaking in the sounds of the rain I love so much. I am waiting for shortlisted candidate number 57 to come in. All this is happening after 2 weeks of interviewing and countless CVs.

I hear a knock on the door.

Read More »

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15 Aug

Paul Corrigan, CEO of Group M talks about the tricky bits with the youth segment

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02 Aug

Comedian goes mental about youth marketing

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22 Jul

Best Damn Youth Marketing Advice Stolen From the 90’s

If you want my future forget my past,
If you wanna get with me better make it fast,
Now don’t go wasting my precious time,
Get your act together we could be just fine

I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want,
So tell me what you want, what you really really want,
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really
really really wanna zigazig ha.

If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends,
Make it last forever friendship never ends,
If you wanna be my lover, you have got to give,
Taking is too easy, but that’s the way it is.

What do you think about that now you know how I feel,
Say you can handle my love are you for real,
I won’t be hasty, I’ll give you a try
If you really bug me then I’ll say goodbye.

Yo I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want,
So tell me what you want, what you really really want,
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really
really really wanna zigazig ha.

So here’s a story from A to Z, you wanna get with me
you gotta listen carefully,
We got Em in the place who likes it in your face,
we got G like MC who likes it on an
Easy V doesn’t come for free, she’s a real lady,
and as for me..ah you’ll see,
Slam your body down and wind it all around
Slam your body down and wind it all around.

If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends,
Make it last forever friendship never ends,
If you wanna be my lover, you have got to give,
Taking is too easy, but that’s the way it is.

If you wanna be my lover, you gotta, you gotta, you
gotta,
you gotta, you gotta, slam, slam, slam, slam
Slam your body down and wind it all around.
Slam your body down and wind it all around.
Slam your body down and wind it all around.
Slam your body down zigazig ah
If you wanna be my lover.

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20 Jul

The 6 dimensions of a ‘community’

I personally evaluate a community by 6 dimensions. This is useful to evaluate if you should collaborate with a community or not:

1. Interests: What is the common interest between all its members?

Most of the time, it’s based on a hobby or an activity, or around a personality. At other times it may even be a product, belief system, mission, or identity.

2. Function: What do its members collectively do?

For example, an online fashion community may submit photos and write fashion reviews on a website. While a hiphop dance community may have monthly clubbing outings, and organize a dance show once a year.

3.    Focal points: Where do they pay attention to and communicate on the most?

It may be their online forum, a daily email newsletter, a blog, or a weekly meetup.

4.    Size: How many members do they have?

Very popular online youth communities can have up to thousands of loyal, supportive members.

5.    Depth: How deep is the relationship and involvement of each member with the rest of the community?

An online community may have a large ‘database’, but its members may not care much for the community. However a smaller community of ‘deep’ members can be very influential.

6.    Demographics: Who exactly are its members?

Armed with these 6 broad indicators, a marketer can assess if a given community presents an avenue for a brand can connect to its target audience.

When you’re looking at a community in these 6 dimensions, you can more easily identify a match between your message, their members, and a potentially awesome collaboration opportunity!

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20 Jul

How the Rise of Malaysian Youth Communities & Why You Should Care

As Published in Marketing Magazine

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Standing in a smoke filled nightclub in KL, I was peering into the crowd.

I remember feeling absolutely frustrated.

During my student days in Sydney and San Francisco, the local music scene had a thriving community of followers. I was there, both as a fan, and well as a marketing student, observing how communities of fans self-organized and grew.

However, my return home greeted me with a local gig going community which had just enough people to fit into a Perodua Kancil.

The fans of local music were somewhere out there. I knew it. Disconnected, waiting to meet each other and rock out. It was only a matter of time, and perhaps some effort to bring the pieces together.

Being impulsive, ambitious, and excited, I gave it a shot.

By then, I had already built my first active community with a group of young Malaysian journalism students. Fueled by passion for sociopolitical issues in Malaysia, we used online tools to rope in over a thousand young Malaysians to our online community theCICAK.com on a daily basis, to write and discuss issues they cared about, and promote good writing via nationwide writing competitions.

It is this same rush of being around like-minds, engaging in our interests, which motivated me to build the same kind of active community around the local music scene. Soon, a series of meet-ups around the city to catch local independent bands was unleashed, under the codename of Project Bazooka.

All this happened in late 2005.

And that was just me, as one example.

Since then, countless other young Malaysians, armed with new weapons of technology, built their very own passion driven communities both online and offline. They were grouping friends and strangers together for different reasons, creating movements of varying magnitudes across the country, one community at a time.

Today, the Malaysian youth scene and its communities have really come alive.

And I am excited, because this silent revolution is only the beginning.

Of course, savvy marketers are taking notice, as behind each youth community is a hidden opportunity deep relationship building between a brand and its audience.

However, these opportunities are not fully utilized, nor has there been very predictable, effective ways for brands and communities to cooperate.

Not yet, at least. Till now.

In this article, I hope to explore how youth marketers can seize this opportunity.

To do that, we must first take a closer look at “Youth Communities”, and how the adoption of specific technologies in Malaysia makes them what they are.

Youth communities explained

Who are these ‘youths’?

The typical marketing definition of ‘youths’ include tweens (Age 8-12), teens (Age 13-19), college kids (Age 18-21), and young adults (Age 22 and above). However, for this article we will focus on youths aged 15 to 30. These youths are also referred to in a Malaysian context, to focus the article on marketing to youth communities locally.

So, how does the adoption of technology affect a community?

You may have heard of Web 2.0, Marketing 2.0, social networking and other neat buzzwords. You may have even attended 3 day conferences on them.

To be honest, I heard about these buzzwords plenty, and nodded plenty, too, but never knew what they meant. Not till I spent 2 years building online communities using some of the most cutting edge web2.0 technologies.

However, young Malaysians didn’t need to know what Web2.0 referred to. They didn’t need to know about how new online technology worked. The just pick it up and used it!

They started blogging a lot. They put up profiles of themselves on social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and communicated through them, meeting new people and building relationships people faster than ever before. Very quickly, they were able to find one another, and group together.

I remember growing my communities without ever meeting 90% of my committee members. Yet we self-organized through email, instant messaging, blogs, and got things done!

Technology was a tool.

After all, humans have always come together for a shared interest or passion. It’s just that today’s technology makes us more connected than ever. And in this hyper connected world, coming together, and doing things together is only going to happen a whole lot faster.

As more young people get online and get connected, youth communities will multiply and grow at an even faster rate.

Which begs us to ask… is this limited to the ‘online world’?

Do ‘online communities’ have anything to show for in the ‘real world’?

How do brands connect with these communities?

I admit, at first, there weren’t too many face to face gatherings or events amongst the youth communities. Nor were there many brands present in the communities. At least, I didn’t feel it happen at the time.

But one event changed it all.

Connecting brands with youth communities

It was early January 2008, and I was trying to fit into an old jacket.

I was 20 minutes late to speak at the National Youth Entrepreneur Convention (NYEC) alongside a few other young entrepreneurs. This event was part of a larger 3 day youth lifestyle festival at PWTC, called YOUTH’08.

In my haste to arrive fashionably late, I ran into the wrong hall.

I ran into thousands of different young Malaysians across hundreds of booths. There were celebrities on stage, an Indie-clothes label bazaar, battle of the bands, and I almost knocked some breakdancers down.

youth-dancing

I haven’t seen so many youths of different races in the same hall since a secondary school fire drill. Even that had far less students. And they weren’t dressed funky, doing cartwheels in the air.

How do you pull so many young people together on-ground? It’s not like it’s a Mawi or Justin Timberlake concert. And it certainly wasn’t the Olympics.

This was an eye opener for me (especially after too many years of online-only activity). These youths actually came out of their houses, off their computers for once, and mixed around with each other across 100 activities and 3 days.

I was curious, and I wanted answers.

A week later, I was having dinner with the person responsible for the event, Joel Neoh.

I was already familiar with his previous work with Youth Malaysia. His on-ground projects reached over 500,000 youths in colleges and universities nationwide. He was 25 years old, only a year older than I was. And without fully leveraging online technology, he was really bringing youth communities to life, in a very ‘real’ way.

We shared stories and exchanged lessons. This led to many more discussions on effective marketing to youths via youth communities, but it always led to the same question.

As more Malaysian youths come together to do what they love and speak out, is there an effective way for brands to join the conversation, and become part of the community?

Surely there is more than just slapping a logo up in the background.

Continuing success in community marketing strategies has been found in engaging and cultivating the natural communities that form around a product/service.

~ “Community Marketing”, Wikipedia

We’ve found that brands will become part of the community when they can enhance the community, and ignite the right conversations and associations. But how? Each community is different, and has to be easier, more effective ways to get specific communities to embrace relevant brands.

Once again, it was only a matter of time, and perhaps some effort to bring the pieces together.

Being impulsive, ambitious, and excited, Joel and I gave it a shot.

The future of youth community marketing

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

~ Alan Kay, American computer scientist

In the months that followed, Joel and I connected almost 40 of Malaysia’s most vibrant youth community websites under our network, built up YouthMalaysia’s community to 50,000 members, and grown a dedicated survey and feedback community called YouthSays.com of 15,000 deeply profiled members.

And we got these youths to open up, and talk to the brands.

Via our tools, brands who target young Malaysians can now get instant feedback from their target market, on anything. In fact, some of the biggest ad agencies and brands have used our tools to do pre-campaign, post-campaign, advertisement split testing, and market feasibility testing.

While this is one clear way for brands engage more deeply with these communities, we will be opening up more.

In October, we’re launching dedicated communities for brands, and opening up targeted youth advertising inventory.

All these youth communities we’re growing will lead up to the largest youth lifestyle festival in Malaysia, YOUTH’09.

YOUTH’09 will build on the success of YOUTH’08. It will be held at PWTC again, with a much larger hall, with a targeted crowd of 50,000 young Malaysians. We’re currently working with brands towards relevant tie-ups with the youth communities present in YOUTH’09.

I’m very excited.

I’ve always been passionate about growing youth communities, and brands can make it go a long way. As we watch the rise of Malaysian youth communities, we can now seize the opportunities for effective marketing that come with it, and both communities and brands will win.

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05 Jan

(Campus Sponsorship) Students, let us help you get sponsors for your events!

3 Simple Steps

  1. 1. Submit Your Event to the Youth Asia Campus Calendar by filling in this form.
  2. 2. We will contact you to further verify the details and propose the event to our clients.
  3. 3. If our clients agree to the sponsorship – we will contact you immediately.

Get started now by filling in this form

To view FAQs, click here.

If you have further queries, feel free to contact Carolynn at 03- 7805 3731.

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