Last night, thanks to Sony Pictures Singapore and Qais Consulting, I was privileged to be one of the first seventy (or less) members of the public in Singapore to attend an exclusive preview where we were treated to a screening of the highly anticipated fall movie “The Social Network“ (also commonly referred to as “that Facebook movie”), which is loosely based on a novel “The Accidental Billionaires“, featuring young billionaires.

Except I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg’s success was accidental. The man is brilliant, and you have to give him credit for building a website platform like Facebook. Read the many articles online about Facebook and Zucks, and you will see that the development of Facebook was in no way an un-calculated move, nor an accident.

The movie, directed by David Fincher, was simply brilliant. It offered an insight (albeit some dramatized), to who Mark Zuckerberg was, and is. Zucks has told the media that he has no plans to watch the movie (in fact, he did not turn up for the screening of the movie that was organized for all staff members of Facebook Inc.) earlier this month.

He may not like that he was portrayed as a “backstabbing, conniving, and insensitive” (The New Yorker: 2010) or an egotistical and greedy (Mashable: 2010) individual, in the movie. But beyond that, I believe it does correctly portray Zucks as a socially awkward geek, a brilliant individual, who is complex and closed to outsiders (i.e. anyone but himself). I don’t believe there are many people in this world who may understand Zucks himself, nor predict his next move. And that, in itself, is brilliance.

The character study of Mark Zuckerberg (played by the aptly casted Jesse Eisenberg) is only one part of the movie. The rest of it tells of how Facebook came about (some of it may have been exaggerated), the development of the social networking site, the people involved, and the lawsuits that arose. I also must say that Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker (founder of Napster) was a surprisingly good choice, and the part about the Winklevoss brothers (or the Winklevi, hehe) really made Zucks look like the prototypical millenial rockstar and badass geek. I loved it!

I loved the flashback scenes between the two legal discussion meetings and the scenes back in Harvard (which weren’t shot in Harvard, by the way) (Wikipedia), the geek scenes with all the hacking and coding (*hyperventilates*), the snarky/cocky answers (what an awesome script, kudos to Aaron Sorkin!), and yes, most definitely the intense opening scene where Zucks and his girlfriend Erica have a heated argument that ends with her breaking up with good ol’ Zucks and telling him,

“Listen. You’re going to be successful and rich. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a tech geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”

EPIC! (Intense scene portrayed below)

The reality, though, is that Erica Albright might just be a fictional character (nobody really knows for sure, as far as I can tell from a Google search, although some sites say that her real identity is NYU alumni member Erica Bern-Cohen), and dear socially awkward Zucks in real life, is in a very stable relationship with American-born Chinese Priscilla Chan, whom he has been dating since 2003, even before Facebook was born.

In the face of the release of this movie, Zucks has been followed around by paparazzi, and an article which contained pictures of Zucks and Pris was widely circulated on the internet (and a lot on Facebook itself).

Now Zucks is a billionaire (the youngest in the world, in fact) and he can have any girl he wants. He may not be extremely dashing, but his geek and his brain turn many women on, I’m sure. Priscilla is no head-turner, and in fact, the pictures in the article showed her to be a frumpy, pudgy, plain-faced girl with little sense of fashion. I must admit that my initial thought upon seeing the photos were “this must be true love”. And yes it was mean, but hey, like I said, Zucks is a billionaire with girls falling all over him, I’ll  bet.

But moving on, after reading The New Yorker’s article “The Face of Facebook” (which is an awesome supplement to the movie, by the way), you find that Zucks and Priscilla have a pretty stable relationship that’s lasted longer than any of mine so far, to be sure. And she’s probably stuck by him through thick and thin (well, from rags to riches) from pre-Facebook till now. And just last month, Zucks updated on his Facebook that “Priscilla Chan is moving in this weekend.” Must be pretty serious! It’s kind of heartening to know that relationships can and do last even if you suddenly find yourself the CEO of a company valued at US$25 billion. I also like how in the movie, Zucks still dressed in his usual slacker hoodie even after Facebook achieved milestone successes. So typically geeky!

About Facebook privacy:

In the last 1-2 years since Facebook literally became a global phenomenon, the company has been under a lot of fire for simply being in line with Zucks’ vision of Facebook and the internet: open. But I see where Zucks is heading (an article I wrote back in May 2010 which sparked a bit of a discussion in the comments section). I have heard and read arguments against my own, saying that Facebook needs to respect people’s privacy beyond just what their friends can see but what Facebook and its partners can access from their profiles through apps and default settings, but I still believe that the internet should be open.

On the issue of Facebook privacy issues, Mark Zuckerberg says:

“We realize that people will probably criticize us for this for a long time, but we just believe that this is the right thing to do.”

And I feel that it is the people (the users), who need to be in control of themselves, their own sharing, their actions that may cause backlash on the internet, etc.

Anyway, it’s an argument that will go on and on and on, even though Zucks and Facebook have undertaken to deal with the privacy issue in coming months. But as the movie’s tagline says:

“You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.”

This hasn’t turned out to be much of a review, has it, with my rambling about Zucks, his life, his character, bits and bobs about the movie, about Facebook and its direction, etc.? But here’s the final conclusion:

You should watch “The Social Network”:

• If you’re a Facebook user
• If you’re a Social Media geek
• If you’re a geek
• If you’re an entrepreneur
• If you’re a movie buff

Actually, I think everyone should just watch it.

In the boyfriend‘s words: “It’s a major geek bitchfest.” If nothing else, the scandal is worth the watch. And hey, everybody loves a scandal!

I’ll probably be re-watching it when the movie is released in cinemas all across Singapore come 28 October 201o, with friends who are just as huge fans as I am of Facebook, and we’ll have another round of discussions then!

Other interesting articles:

• [Mashable] “The Social Network”: Mashable’s Complete Movie Review
• [Mashable] How Has “The Social Network” Changed Facebook’s Brand Perception?
• [ReadWriteWeb] Did You Love or Hate “The Social Network”? Don’t Worry – It’s Generational

[All images in this post have been provided by Sony Pictures]

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All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go. I’m standing here outside your door, I hate to remind you but you need to prepare!

SMWF Asia is happening in 12 hours – have you prepared yourselves?

Attending a conference is a big deal to me. I like to get the most out of my time spent at a conference, and the amount of money spent for the conference fees, if any. So here’s how you can prepare the way I do:

1. Look at the conference agenda and workshop agenda and decide which ones you want to attend
2. Check out post-conference networking events, such as the Facebook-sponsored Helipad Party, and this community-organized TweetUp
3. Set up hashtag monitoring columns on your Twitter client (I use Tweetdeck) – The 2 hashtags for SMWF Asia are: #SMWF and #SMWFQ
4. Prepare namecards for networking and introductions to conference attendees – you may also consider bringing Pokens or digital namecards if possible
5. Add yourself to lists of attendees that you can network with via Twitter such as this one. Check out the list of attendees and link up with them on Twitter before the conference.
6. Check out this [Google Spreadsheet] list of conference and workshop speakers’ Twitter handles or follow the Twitter List I’ve created
7. Connect with conference participants, speakers, and exhibitors via Twitter and other social networks, if you are interested

Here’s how you can connect with me:

Other must-bring items:

1. Laptop + Charger
2. Namecards and Poken
3. Mobile phone
4. Conference pass confirmation email
5. Jacket (conference venues can be freezing, at times!)

BTW. If you have an iPhone, there’s an SMWF iPhone app!

Happy conferencing! See you at SMWF Asia 2010!

[Image source: TheSituationist]

According to Facebook,

… managing multiple accounts is a serious violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If we determine that an individual has more than one account, we reserve the right to terminate all of their accounts.
(source)

On the topic of business profiles on Facebook, they also say,

Maintaining multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If you already have a personal account, then we cannot allow you to create business accounts for any reason. You can manage all the Pages and Socials Ads that you create on your personal account.
(source)

Which means users are supposed to create all Facebook pages, administer them, and manage them from a single user’s individual account.

However, if I use my personal Facebook account to administrate multiple business Facebook pages, which includes:

• Sending messages to individual members Facebook pages, to obtain feedback, answer their questions, or conduct audits for contests
• Sharing links and media content on various public pages, including my own Facebook profile, and through Facebook message (to direct Facebook page users to a source to obtain information)

Social Media World Forum Asia 2010
22-23 September 2010
Suntec City Convention Centre, Singapore

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

I first heard about Social Media WorldForum Asia from Dorothy Poon, who attended SMWF last year and who has been, for 2 years running, one of the official media partners for this event.

I think this in itself is something exciting for me, because Dorothy is a friend and someone I continually engage with, online and offline. Earlier this year, I also attended the Mobile Marketing Association Forum Asia with Dorothy, and to say the very least, Dorothy is a very attentive conference attendee who injects very insightful updates into every conference’s social stream. Definitely looking forward to following her live updates on Twitter come 22-23 September 2010.

SMWF Asia, in its second year now, is fast gaining traction amongst social media practitioners and enthusiasts in the region, and worldwide. It should come as no surprise that social behaviour online in Asia is very much different from that in other parts of the world, so those who are looking to understand the digital space in Asia should definitely attend this event.

There’ll be several segments to the event, namely the:

• Conference
• Social TV session
• Exhibition
• Workshops
• Networking events

I’m personally looking forward to a few specific items on the agenda during the event:

• “The State Of Social Media in Asia Today – A Year On” – Keynote by Thomas Crampton, Asia-Pacific Director, 360 Digital Influence,Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Hong Kong
• “Case- Study -Social Media Marketing @ Toys R Us” – Presentation by Argha Sen, Head of Marketing & CRM, Toys R Us
• “Increasing customer intimacy and empowerment through Social CRM” – An Interactive Panel session with Damien Cummings of Dell and Nik Ong of MRM Singapore
• “Integrating Social Media into traditional marketing strategy“ - An Interactive Panel session with Singapore marketers (Derek Yeo of Tiger Airways, Jeremy Khoo of NTUC Fairprice, Francis Wang of Singapore Turf Club, and Pooja Arora of P&G)
• “Monetizing Social Media & Social Networks” – Keynote by Laurel Papworth, Social Network Strategist
• Meeting Brian Solis
• Meeting Shalabh Pandey
• Party at Helipad!

25% discount off conference ticket price: Find out how

Social Media WorldForum Event Brochure

Twitter handle: @SocialMediaWF
Twitter hashtag: #SMWF

Disclosure: SCB is a client of my company, XPR Pte Ltd, and this social media outreach was organized by my team at XPR.

The event was held at British gourmet bar and restaurant, “The Queen and Mangosteen“, at VivoCity.

Entrance to The Queen and Mangosteen, Vivocity, Singapore

Breeze is not your regular iPhone mobile banking application that is simply a revamp of what one typically sees on an internet banking site. It actually gives you a whole new rich banking experience, with features that are unique only to Standard Chartered, like:

Breeze e-Cheque: No more paper and pen! Just add me as a payee (using my name and address), and write as many cheques as you want to me! You know you want to!

Breeze's Calendar View : Just click on any day to view the day's transactions!

Breeze's location-aware ATM and branch locator, which actually gives you useful information like address, opening hours

View Standard Chartered promotions from a range of merchants, be it dining, R&R, health, fitness, beauty, education, shopping, or even sports! Pretty nifty for those of us who love getting good deals.

There are also some fun ‘hacks’ on the app, which are basically just fun things that show the fun side of the app developers:

• Shake your iPhone to ‘move’ your money
• Personalization of your Breeze account using different colours, avatars, etc.
• Dynamic backgrounds that change according to Day or Night

Breeze seems like a really fun way to manage your money. In addition, the Standard Chartered executives have also shared with us that in the upcoming version of the app, SCB customers can look forward to:

• adding payees from within the application itself
• more location-based features
• foreign remittance
• add bill payments from within the application itself
• getting apps on other platforms as well, like Android!

Now I really want to get my own Standard Chartered Bank account, and of course, my very own soon-to-be-launched iPhone 4! Here are some pictures from the event:

Jason and Nizam with SCB staff Selina, who showed them some unique features of the Breeze app

Aman Narain, Standard Chartered's Global Head for Remote Banking

Yummy Food! (which I unfortunately did not eat much of, cos I was having too much fun chatting with friends and playing with the Breeze app)

Shin Wee, Product Marketing Manager, (seated at the head of the table), interacting with the bloggers

One lucky blogger walked away with an iPad courtesy of Standard Chartered!

The lucky blogger, Justin Ng, of http://justinng.sg (He's also one of the members at our favourite local technology podcast, Tech65)!

I really had fun organizing the event, and I hope that all those who had attended did have fun too! Looking forward to reading more blogposts and hearing your thoughts about the app and the event.

Funny how people don’t realize that privacy has long been dead.

I, for one, will not leave Facebook, come 31st May, when 3377 (at press time) Facebook users severe ties with Facebook, one of the most visited websites on the internet (at present, the most visited website in the United States, and the world’s top social networking site and most visited mobile social network).

I am not leaving, because despite having 3377 people pledging to quit Facebook, there are still over 400 million people on Facebook I can interact with, and Facebook still remains a very effective way to reach the masses in Asia Pacific. (Well, social media is my job.)

But I digress. The truth is this: Facebook, now branded as the evil privacy thief (and Mark Zuckerberg the king of the thieves), is no different from a blog. Except now you have fixed pages for you to post stories on, fixed albums for you to organize your photos in, a proper ‘biodata’ page to plonk in all the information you might ever want people to know about you, and a section to list all your likes and dislikes. Plus, you get to play games, shop online, get news, get updated with your friends’ lives, conduct business, make announcements, and a whole lot more you never thought it would be possible to do on a single site.

Facebook is a blog. A structured blog. Within a big big community.

So what makes it so “private”? Because in the first place, they give you the option of restricting access of content to people you want to give access to. And suddenly, you discover maybe things are not so private anymore because now you realize that Facebook mines data from your profiles, and your contacts’ profiles, if you don’t fix your privacy settings. [cue slight uproar]

Then came Open Graph, a whole new way of looking at ‘social sharing’. [cue major uproar] And this just tipped the bucket, I suppose. Websites like Gizmodo started making Top Ten lists of reasons of why people should quit Facebook. Two really passionate (and I always say this, passionate people are biased – I know I am) Canadian men started a website to get people to pledge to quit Facebook come 31 May.

Okay, so the reasons and arguments presented on websites like Gizmodo sound logical and are compelling. But that’s just good writing. The way Steve Jobs (or his PR people) wrote the article that convinced many that the iPhone really doesn’t need Flash. And as the old adage goes: the pen is mightier than the sword. If you write well (if you have a way with words), you will win the battle.

And as another old saying goes: There are two sides to every coin.

So don’t be caught up by the arguments presented in the lists you see on the internet that are written by brilliant writers who make a living of writing articles to convince people to buy products and services. Have you heard Facebook’s side of the story?

But again, I digress. My point is this:

If each Facebook user had the gumption to put on Facebook only what they are comfortable in revealing on the internet, we wouldn’t have this problem and this whole unnecessary uproar over a privacy issue that never existed (because privacy simply doesn’t exist in this information age). What makes the content you publish on Facebook so differentiated (in terms of privacy) from the content you would put on your blog?

Do you publish notes, random thoughts, photos, email addresses, names of friends on your blog? Chances are, you do.

So why this uproar over Facebook using these data to make your user experience better? Why the uproar over how they use this data to customize what kind of advertisements appear on your Facebook sidebar? Why the uproar over how Facebook makes everything super social, when you accept, from the start, the fact that Facebook is a social networking tool?

In my opinion, there really is no case at all.

If anything, Facebook users need to learn how to: exercise gumption and exercise discretion. And if you don’t know how to do that, perhaps the rest of us on Facebook won’t miss you being on it anyway.

And for the record: Privacy? That’s long gone. If you can’t live with it, you might want to completely stop using the internet completely (and that includes your email).

How many times have you meant exactly what you’d written?

How many times have you really rolled on the floor while laughing when you said ‘ROFL’? Did you really laugh out loud when the word ‘LOL’ slipped out on your keyboard?

Probably ZERO to all the above questions.

This is the face of the serial internet surfer or the Social Media Addict.

And these are the faces corresponding to the various expressions we use frequently on the internet:

What’s yours like?

(via @iammyy)

Stop Writing on My Wall. Brilliant ad campaign by Sony Vaio. If it didn’t get your attention, you’re probably not sufficiently addicted to Social Media.

So, are you a Social Media addict? I know I am! But as they say, the first step to recovery is to admit it!

Some background info: Tweet.sg, run by 33 year old software security engineer and entrepreneur Jym Cheong, and powered by Ennovative Pte Ltd, is a free service that allows Singapore Tweeters to update their Twitter page by sending an SMS to a local Singapore number. Prior to this, we could only update by sending an SMS to a UK number, or update via Twitter’s mobile web page.

Tonight, after seeing a re-Tweet by shenheng, I got curious:

So I headed over to TweetSG’s Twitter profile page to check out what in the world was going on.

Before I begin, let me say that I have used Tweet.sg before. In fact, when they first launched, I tried the service. However, I soon left Twitter for Plurk, and never continued using the service. When I got back to Twitter last month, I was pleasantly surprised to see that a lot of people were using Tweet.sg – “another startup that succeeded,” I thought.

So tonight, I was really a little surprised, hearing the announcement via shenheng that they’re halting / slowing down. From what I know, not many companies go down this path – it is, afterall, a step backwards.

I arrived at TweetSG’s Twitter profile page fully intending to find out what had caused them to disable new signups. Never did I expect that I’d see a whole flurry of angry Tweets from the founder and creator (who also Tweets as jymster). I scrolled through a couple of pages of the Twitter history for the user profile of TweetSG, and found out that the founder’s anger was due to the fact that users had been questioning the reason for a lag between time that SMS-Twitter update had been sent, and the time Tweet.sg actually posts the update to Twitter.com.

Much to my shock and horror, TweetSG (aka jymster) had begun lashing out at people, asking them to unfollow him and discontinue using the service that he has been providing, free of charge. Worse, he threatened to remove users who complained, from the Tweet.sg database, thereby disallowing them to continue using the service.

Wow. Epic social media fail.

Immediately, a flurry of angry Tweets from TweetSG followed, some directed at me, asking me to just shut up about my “social media shit talk”, and reminding me that Twitter is a free space where he can type anything he wants. He also mentioned that it would do me good to remember that Tweet.sg “is not an entitlement”!

Ah. Right. Of course it’s none of my business how he runs his company / service. However, as a Netizen, I have every right to Tweet about it, or blog about it! Well, to quote the man, “Twitter is a space that I type what i please.” [sic]

And interestingly, he states that he’s the same person, online and offline, and that if he doesn’t like a person, he will “just whack” [local lingo for "just attack"]. While being the same person online and offline is a good thing, I’m not sure how many people would openly admit to being a mad / unprofessional person online AND offline.

So here’s what I have to say about this whole issue (and social media in the corporate world) (and my own personal experiences prior):

1. It takes a long time to build a good reputation, but only a minute to ruin it.
2. Do not undermine the importance of social media in building a business or reputation that exists in the digital space.
3. Businesses should always remember that the Twitter / Facebook account that is used to communicate with users is an official representation of the organization.
4. You may not care about what people think about you right now, but in time, the bad bits of your reputation will surface and will precede you.
5. As an entrepreneur, this speaks volume about how you handle a business, and you might want to start worrying about how this will affect future partnerships.
6. In a world where everything is Google-able (and cached), you can never really fully delete yourself. As the Chinese saying goes, Paper can never keep fire under wraps.

So I guess what once promised to be a good product is now tainted by this founder-and-users dispute, and I see many people already calling for fellow Tweeters to move to another similar service called sgBEAT.com, which Claudia claims (backed by many re-Tweets by fellow users) is a “101% friendlier and nicer” service compared to “the other one“.

BTW, at the recommendation of my frend, victan, I’ve tried instead, yet another similar service called SMSyo.com.

With it’s clean and intuitive interface, quick updating service, and SMS numbers for Singapore and Malaysia Tweeters, I can see SMSyo.com rising quickly in the ranks of SMS-Twitter services available in Singapore. Do give it a shot and tell me if you like it! I do hope they have Plurk integration soon!

In the mean time, let’s all steer clear of Tweet.sg – who knows when the founder might just delete our accounts and send our Tweets into a Twitter blackhole?

(Was hesitating to write, until Uniquefrequency’s post on this issue was published, making me want to air my views too!)

I wrote them, asking if they would be allowing users to add in their own social services, like Plurk, in the signatures. At that point in time, they’d pretty much covered everything, in addition to MSN, Google Talk and Skype. But since Plurk is part of my social media portfolio, I really wanted to be able to add that in as well!

After I wrote them, I received an email response within 6 hours, thanking me for the suggestion, and affirming, “Yes! We’ll be including Plurk!”

Wow, I thought. So it was as simple as “Ask, and you shall receive”? I was pretty impressed, but soon forgot all about it, figuring that Firefox would remind me when there’s a new update to an Add-on that I was using.

Fast forward to May 13, I received a surprising email from WiseStamp again:

At this point, the only thought I had was, Wow! I’m not just impressed, but completely blown away! This is a great example (of not just saying, but of doing) of how companies can stay close to their customers, users, and fans.

1. Reply to all comments, emails, etc.
2. Listen to suggestions and feedback
3. Act upon suggestions and feedback
4. Inform users that you have acted upon it
5. Ask for a plug! Ask, and you shall receive!

For more information about the new features of WiseStamp 1.2, please check out their blog!