In the material, was a simple idea about friendship.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now take a closer look.

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

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

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.

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:

Good morning everyone.

I’m excited the Malaysian Media Conference 2009 dedicated some time to focus on the youth market.

As you know, these pesky kids are causing marketers a lot of pain. How many social networking websites do they need? Why can’t they all just watch twelve hours of TV every day?

Well, I guess we’re trying to be nice to them today, considering they’re the future of our business. They’re the ones buying all our stuff, they’re setting trends, and calling the shots.

And there’s a lot of them.

Market size-wise:

• Southeast Asia. Ages between 15 to 34. We have 200 million of them.

• Add a dash of China and India. You add another 1.1 billion of them.

• If we zoom in on Malaysia. Next year, 65% of our population will be under 35.

Yes, A LOT of them.

And collectively, they’re deciding who to support. Or who to ignore.

Today’s presentation is about them.

The youth.

My name is Khailee Ng, from Youth Asia.

We will take a good look at what they’re telling us about MEDIA, INFLUENCE, and WINNING THEM OVER.

We’ll start with Media. And influence.

To paint a clearer picture, I’ll use history’s most effective (but sometimes controversial) method to paint the picture to you.

I’m going to use women. I’m going to use images of women to show you what I mean by youths, media and influence.

Ready?

Look at her. AMAH. Ho Bo.

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

She watches 12 hours of TV everyday. And she doesn’t change the channel during ads.

She doesn’t have 1,000 friends on Facebook. But her sphere of influence directly involves my dad, and my maid.

Next up, is my Mother.

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

She watches TV 4 hours a day.

She’s on the internet 2 hours a day.

She line dances rest of the time.

As for influence, she consumes news off the internet, finds information, and forwards me loads of emails. She uses email to forward stuff to her line dancing friends, too.

That’s my mom.

Now. I’d like to introduce you to some girl who works in a nearby office, Rina.

Rina’s in her 20’s.

Unlike grandma, Rina does NOT watch 12 hours watching TV. She only watches TV when she buys DVDs.

She’s spends 12 hours online at work and at home.

She uses all these websites, social networks, devices…

Facebook, twitter etc…

Those are all tools she uses to interact with all her different circle of friends….

Rina is different from my mom, and from my grandma.

Why?

The key difference is in the so called “media” she consumes via the internet created by her social circle. Not by advertisers, or big name producers.

She communicates via the same “media” to influence her friends. She spends time on the internet doing all this, because it’s socializing.

Most of you know this as Social Media.

She uses online tools to interact with her friends. Which are major influences in her life.

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.

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 are way at the bottom with SMS text ads.

But most of you already realize that friends influence them the most, and they influence their friends. Not banner ads.

And this affect youths like Rina? I’m talking about homegrown Malaysian youths in our backyard, not skateboarding teens in New York mind you.

Here’s how it relates to marketing to Malaysian youths:

According to the MCMC: Young Malaysians aged 15 – 34… about 87.7% of them have access to the internet!

So we ran a quick study yesterday with an open survey on YouthSays. We got 900 responses in 6 hours, telling us:

• 90% of youth have a Facebook account
  Average of 225 Facebook friends
• 95% of youth have a Friendster account but only 32% login frequently
  Average of 296 Friendster friends
• 73% of youth have a MSN IM account
  Average of 109 MSN IM friends
• 87% of youth have a Yahoo IM account
  Average of 117 Yahoo IM friends
• 38% of youth have a Twitter account
  Average of 30 Twitter followers
• Average of 278 phone numbers in their mobilephone
• Average of 262 email addresses in their email addressbook

Of course the sample is skewed to existing internet users, but remember, 87.7% of Malaysian youths between 15 to 34 use the internet… and we can conclude our Malaysian youths aren’t exactly living on trees.

Like Rina, they’re connected, and using social tools to communicate with friends.

…

Let’s review what we know about youths, media, and influence so far:

1. There’s a lot of them. 200 Million in Southeast Asia age between 15 to 34.
2. They spend most of their time online, connecting with friends.
3. They’re heavily influenced by friends, not by online banner ads.

HOW DO WE TRANSLATE IT TO MARKETING – ?????

This is encapsulated in the deep wisdom of the 90’s youth marketing gurus:

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.

And this, is why the dominant “Marketing TO Youths” model is broken.

Brands try to use tools to reach youths.

Some brands use the IM, the Twitter, the Facebook, to get their attention. Eyeblast them, stuff in text ads, interrupt them, locate where they are, target them…

Sorry, brand, but you’re not their friend.

Friends don’t do that kind of stuff. Stalkers do.

This is why ad banners are NOT VERY WELCOME in social media.

So this is why other marketers prefer to do it “the other way”. And what way is that?

A way which begins with respecting that youths are using their social tools to communicate with friends.

So you start with a substantial number of youths. You understand what they want – what motivates them. You develop your value proposition. Give it to them. Make it easy for them to use their tools to share with their friends.

This is also known as, “marketing with youths” – my own buzzword. Not too fancy, I know. Marketing With Youths. TM. Has a ring to it.

Give youths a compelling reason to use their tools to talk to their friends about you. Simple.

Realizing this, the team at Youth Asia has spent the past 4 years with these youths – understanding them, representing them, organizing them, connecting them to agencies, brands, and the government. Basically, Youth Asia cultivates friendships and builds trust with youths, then collaborate. We produced over 200 youth research projects. Nationwide campaigns, and the country’s largest youth festivals, like YOUTH’09 earlier in January.

All of this are based on direct relationships with youths, and a deep understanding of what motivates them.

How did this begin?

We cultivated this friendship via YouthSays.com

We built YouthSays.com with the understanding that youths are always voicing out, all over the web. And our value proposition to these youths instead of voicing out to no one. Now, their voices will be heard. Not only by like-minded fellow youths, but by brands, business leaders, and the government, too.

We started with 1,000 unheard voices.

In 18 months, That grew to 168,000 members across Malaysia who were reaching out to brands with opinions, ideas, and feedback.

YouthSays has grown to becoming an action network, where youths voice out for various reasons.

• 28,342 Question asked
• 269,727 Answers
• 18,931 statements, 19,738 agree/ disagree, 47,650 discussion comments
• 3 million survey questions answered!

And we continuously cultivate our friendship with them.

• We have had nationwide research projects which involved getting them to fill in diaries about who they were, and what their lifestyles were like.
• 
• We got their feedback on 1Malaysia, and presented it to the prime minister. The youths were ecstatic to know their voice was heard.
• We identified which movies they liked, and gave them pre-screenings to watch them before anyone else, then share reviews of the movies.
• We did nationwide surveys on brands they use across 13 different product categories.
• Our latest research was with Jobstreet who in turn send what young jobseekers are saying to employers across Malaysia.

To date we have conducted over 200 research projects for clients, some for ourselves – we needed to truly understand what motivates them, what makes them tick.

Truly understanding them was the best grounds to develop a real friendship for marketing with them.

For a simple example, Nike was having a warehouse sale in 2 days. They wanted a lot of people to come and buy stuff.

Instead of advertising and telling youths about it, they gave YouthSays members an hour headstart before anyone else – like how a friend would get you into a club for free. We got 1,400+ RSVPs within 2 days and over 600 of them were reported to go.

For a larger example, we’ll look at replicating “Marketing with Youths” on a mass-level.

We’ll look at what went down in history as the largest youth festival ever held in Malaysia.

YOUTH’09.

Working with our community of youths enabled YOUTH’09 to attract 20 brands, 36,720 youths over for 100 activities in one weekend, packing both halls of PWTC.

It all began by realizing that

• Young people wanted to be part of something big
• There were multiple niche youth communities already organizing their own events and trying to get noticed.

ORGANIZING

We identified each leader of a hot niche and gave them a platform, support, and promotion to host and organize their own mini-festival. Like how dance crews organized their own series of dance activities and competition throughout the 3 days.

We replicated this across 30 youth community interests.

PROMOTION

So what we did was to ask our friends at YouthSays.com what was most relevant to them, and recruited 3,500 evangelists.

These evangelists were then given tools to promote YouthSays through social media and on ground.

• They were given a unique link and “free pre-event passes” to give to their friends. For every friend who signed up, they earned RM0.40
• They could form their own groups of friends who were going. 250 groups were created through a social media widget badge
• Anyone who wanted to go could meet each other and discuss. A discussion of up to 10,000 comments were facilitated in YouthSays.com
• We asked them to create their own Facebook events  featuring Youth’09, instead of trying to own our own. 15,000 invites sent through Facebook with 2,068 confirmed guests attending
• 1,812 Friendster.com members became fan of the event
• For everyone who signed up online, we recruited volunteers for flyer distribution. 100,000 flyers distributed by evangelists and volunteers around KL, 3 days before the event.

This resulted in more than 15,000 pre-event signups on our site. And 200 volunteers involved with managing the event.

All of this was good news to the brands who believed in the power of youths.

RESULTS

• 36,720 youths participated in over 100 activities – half of them were sponsored activities aligned with brand associations.
• 1,000 new signups on Celcom’s latest prepaid plan
• 5X targeted revenue achieved at Petronas Mesra popup store
• 2000 youths signed up for the Ministry of Youth and Sports membership program
• G-Shock was reintroduced to the dance community
• Over RM100,000 worth of products sold by youth traders
• 92 bands competed in Battle of the Bands, sponsored by Celcom
• 350 participants attended HSBC and Dutch Lady sponsored National Youth Entrepreneur Convention

Post Event:

• •400 blog write ups
• •50 YouTube videos generated

Ladies and gentlemen,

And for the 166 thousand young Malaysians on YouthSays, this is only going to be the beginning of what they can achieve when they flex the influence they have over all their friends, and the rest of the country.

To wrap things up, I’ll briefly run through how this “marketing with youths” model worked for other marketers.

Obama being the main one.

He started with an awesome value proposition, based on what the citizens of USA needed most at the time.

Change.

They didn’t have mass media budgets to splurge though.

So his strategy focused on giving very specific segments of people specific tools to reach out to their sphere of influence.

And they did. The rest, you can say, is history.

As for our side of the world…

We have 200 million youths.

It’s only going to get harder to market to them with a broken model of “Marketing TO them”

The next 5 years will have more social tools, more fragmentation, and rapidly evolving media consumption trends. Finding new tools, new ways or new technology to market TO them will be complicated.

Times like these, it’s a good idea to tap into the power of solid marketing fundamentals.

Whether you’re research, advertising, communication, awareness, engagement, activation, events, etc.

GET CLOSER TO THE CONSUMER.

Do your marketing with them instead.

THANK YOU

Slides will be on youthasia

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.

Silently, I pull together strands of optimism from the strings of disappointing interviews I had today. Then, she walked in…

Maybe you’ve been here before. You visualize this top-notch candidate to groom and let bloom. But you’re tired, because you’ve been looking hard. Real hard. And you haven’t found ‘the one’.

Or maybe you’re here with me now. In a time where (I hear) people get retrenched and companies freeze hiring. A time where we would assume there are plenty of young Malaysian talents wading in the talent pool, right?

YOU GOT A BRIGHT FUTURE, KIDDO.

Right. There are plenty of people looking for jobs. But 99.9% of them are missing the vital ingredient. Most of them lack the ONE THING needed for them to evolve and outperform – especially in the ever-changing face of youth marketing.

The girl who is about to be interviewed – does she have it?

Don’t get me wrong. You can get good people. The smarts? They have it. The experience? They can get it. The skills. They can learn it. They got plenty going on for them – IF – and only if they have this ONE THING – the ONE THING which makes the world go around.

And that, my friends, is care.

Care – Do these kids care? What do they care about? Do they care about what they are doing in their job, and how it contributes to the world? Do they care if the campaign gets carried out proper?

Care – It’s another kinky little four letter word, like, um, ‘Love’. But it is potent. The rest of this article will clarify how CARE affects everything we know about marketing, especially how we get ‘jaded’ youth audience to care about your product…

Do we care enough to know?

I’M DOING IT FOR YOU, HONEY, HONEST!

It starts with one person.

If the one person on the team doesn’t care about much, it will bleed into the workflow, the client communications, the campaign, the delivery of the product, all the way into the hands of the potential customers. I mean, if you don’t care, who will?

As shortlisted candidate #57 closes the door behind her, I wonder if she is generally a caring person. This girl needs to care, if she hopes to work here. Caring has to start inside the individual, the people who do ‘the work’. Here’s why:

• People who care about themselves will challenge themselves to grow. The care about advancing in their careers.
• People who care about their work, will make sure its done well. They’ll pay attention to the details which matter.
• People who care about other people’s situations, will respect deadlines, revert fast, and go the extra mile to deliver.
• People who care make excellent team players, because they are more likely to help, and less likely to offend.

People underestimate this, but caring is infectious. All of a sudden, a project is fun, because the team cares about the journey and the outcome.

Sure, it’s easy to see how hiring someone who cares is a good idea for client service, meticulous coordination, and dependable execution. But get this: People who care about the right things, make excellent marketers, too.

WHEN MARKETERS BEGIN TO CARE

Beware! Where marketers place their care may just give you crazy results… or crappy results.

A marketer who cares for the ‘truth’, will dig for the ‘truth’.

They want to know why. The ‘why’ makes them tick. They won’t let an idea fly without genuine insight, belief, or evidence. Do they care for the gratification of their ideas or awards? Maybe they care more about ‘the truth’ of what works.

On the other hand. Some marketers who care just enough to get the job done. They’ll propose what ‘seems’ to be working for other people. They might care more for avoiding work and avoiding blame than anything else.

However, both marketers will be equally dangerous, if they don’t care about the consumer.

Caring for the consumer on the big-idea level can mean Hyundai America allowing con­sumers to return any new Hyundai leased or financed in 2009 if the owner unexpectedly loses his/her income within the first year. But no, that’s not the full picture.

Marketers stuck on the big-idea level forget about the little things which matter most to the consumer. For example:

Remy the Marketer pays an agency to pay an interactive agency who pays an IT grad to ‘make a website’ to end up with a 20MB Flash game which requires the consumer to have alien broadband and a degree in aeronautics to meander. “WHOA USER ENGAGEMENT HOLLA!” Remy the marketer might holler. Do the users of the website holla back? No. They’re likely to close the site, and go to more ‘usable’ sites which get to the point.

And the big idea never got through.

This is just one example of how caring affects the last mile of a customer experience, especially when all your customers are online. It’s a ‘little detail’, true, but these are the things the customers you serve care about.

And this is a goldmine. When you care to understand, or research your customer, to get into their psyche, and let that translate to the actual person at the receiving end of the ‘communication plan’, good chance many of them may care enough to listen…

Speaking from experience, it’s the difference between a seeing a youth event with 300 youths versus attracting 30,000 youths to care enough to make it great.

AFTERTHOUGHT: THE AGE OF MEANING

Have you ever wondered why we leap out of a comfortable bed every morning? Why do we care so much about the jobs we’ve chosen? I’ve always believed that work gives people meaning, or, people can find meaning in the work they do. Or at least, happy people.

I wondered if the girl I’m about to grill feels this way about her previous job. Or maybe she didn’t, which is why she applied to Youth Asia. Maybe she can see a career opportunity with us as a doorway to her calling.

I sure hope so, because along the way, I’ve been blessed with working with passionate people who care. In and outside work, they care about their families, their hobbies, their curiosities, their causes. And it’s no surprise, the game changes when you work with people who care.

//

So after this episode, what do I think about the new generation of marketers? Do many of them care about their work?

Firstly, considering we’re always on a lookout for talent, this episode will probably be on repeat. Secondly, yes, some people do care. We’ve hired 2 people in the past week, and have multiple openings ranging from market research, client service, to programming and web design to be filled.

And the girl, did I hire her? Turns out the girl who walked in was not a shortlisted interview candidate, but Joanne, my colleague, who cared enough to tell me that I would not be having anymore interviews for the day, and should go home to get more rest! :P

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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