Synovate Survey - My life is my phone

Latest report from Synovate on Asian Youth's fondness for the phones. See extract here.

Photos - Social Mixer V38.0

Thanks for all you 140 fearless members of the Web Wednesday community in Hong Kong who battled the elements (black rainstorm warning) to join us for our 38th social mixer and interview with Christian Cadeo from AdMob. As a reward, here are some great photos taken by PJ Hau (email: 300dpi.fotography@gmail.com or call +852 9779 7024).



If you have some photos that you'd like to add to the community, feel free to upload them either on Flickr (flickr.com/groups/webwednesday) or Facebook (facebook.webwednesday.hk)

Admob at Web Wednesday V38.0 on July 28th

Calling all Asian Digerati!

Due to the summer holidays - two weeks in sunny England - this month's social mixer will be on Wednesday 28th July at Volar.

Our guest speaker will be Christian Cadeo, Head of Brand Advertising for AdMob, which was purchased by Google last year for US$750 million.

We will be talking about the future of mobile advertising and how smart phones are changing the way we search for, find and consume multimedia content. Naturally, we'll cover how AdMob plans to counter Apple's iAds and if they are getting into bed with location-based advertising hotties, like FourSquare.

In June this year, Admob launched ad units for iPad apps. That look like this:

In November last year, they launched interactive video ads for the iPhone, which were used by Microsoft to launch Windows 7. Watch the video on an earlier posting.

The event will kick off at 6:30pm and wind up around 9:30pm, with the interview starting at 7:15pm at Volar Bar & Club, Basement, 38-44 D'Aguilar Street, Lan Kwai Fong, Central, Hong Kong.

Sign up for the event on Facebook or (if you're one of the few still resisting, on this blog).

As per usual, there's a HK$100 entrance fee, including one complimentary drink and the chance to win lucky draw prizes.

Our lovely assistant, Vivian, will issue receipts if you need one. (For students, you can get in for HK$50 without free booze). Thereafter, all standard drinks will be charged at special happy hour prices. 10% of entrance fees will be donated to Oxfam Hong Kong.

We have a lucky draw with great prizes generously donated by uBuyiBuy, Hong Kong's very own equivalent of GroupOn.

Looking forward to seeing old faces and meeting many more new ones!

Napoleon Biggs
Founder & Host - Web Wednesday Asia
Head of Digital Integration, Fleishman-Hillard Communications Asia

World Cup 2010 pushes Universal Search

Web Wednesday V37.0 on June 2nd

Calling all Asian Digerati!

Topic: "Goodbye, social media. Hello, social business!"

This month, we bring you Jeremiah Owyang, one of the world's leading web strategists (His blog: web-strategist.com) and a well-respected industry analyst (Forbes CMO Network, Bloomberg TV, SXSW) ...whom we successfully diverted from a trip to his ancestral home in Zhongshan!
We will be discussing the future of the social web and what actions organisations should take to benefit from the next evolution, otherwise known as "social CRM".

Web Wednesday - the premier networking event for Asia's Digerati - will kick off at 6:30pm and wind up around 9:30pm, with the interview starting at 7:15pm.

Venue: Volar Bar & Club, Basement, 38-44 D'Aguilar Street, Lan Kwai Fong, Central, Hong Kong.

If you're on Facebook, do sign up here so we know how many people are coming. If not, you can sign up on this blog.

As per usual, there's a HK$100 entrance fee, including one complimentary drink. Our lovely assistant, Vivian, will issue receipts if you need one. (For students, you can get in for HK$50 without free booze). Thereafter, all standard drinks will be charged at special happy hour prices.

Prizes: "Open Leadership: How social technology can transform the way you lead", by Charlene Li (Jeremiah's business partner). You can buy the book here.

We will donate 10% of entrance fees to Oxfam Hong Kong.

Looking forward to seeing old faces and meeting many more new ones!

Napoleon Biggs
Founder & Host - Web Wednesday (facebook.com/webwednesday)
Head of Digital Integration, Fleishman-Hillard Communications Asia

Web Wednesday V36.0 - May 5th

Calling all Asian Digerati!

For our third birthday, we have the pleasure of bringing you acclaimed filmaker Siok Siok Tan, who's latest creation is "Twittamentary", a crowd-sourced documentary about how the real-time web is changing social encounters around the world.

Siok (Twitter: @sioksiok) describes herself as "a filmmaker, entrepreneur and a honorary geek with a deep passion for great storytelling in the age of real time web". She is also an internet entrepreneur who has built Niurenku, an online video venture in China focused on sports, music and youth culture. Siok previously worked as an executive producer for Discovery Channel in Asia. The shows she produced have clinched more than a dozen awards and nominations at the Asian TV Awards and the Golden Bell Awards. Siok has also been a visiting lecturer at the Beijing Film Academy, where she directed a documentary about the Beijing Olympics (Boomtown Beijing) with the assistance of her students. Siok holds a Bachelor of Arts degree (Honors) in Comparative Literature from Brown University, USA.

We'll be having other birthday surprises so do come along on Wednesday 5th May at Volar Bar & Club, Basement, 38-44 D'Aguilar Street, Lan Kwai Fong, Central, Hong Kong.

The mixer will kick off at 6:30pm and wind up around 9:30pm, with the interview starting at 7:15pm. We'll be showing extracts of the documentary.

If you're on Facebook, do sign up here so we know how many people are coming. If not, you can sign up on this blog.

As per usual, there's a HK$100 entrance fee, including one complimentary drink. Our lovely assistant, Vivian, will issue receipts if you need one. (For students, you can get in for HK$50 without free booze). Thereafter, all standard drinks will be charged at special happy hour prices.

We will donate 10% of entrance fees to help fund the completion of Twittamentary.

Looking forward to seeing old faces and meeting many more new ones!

Napoleon Biggs
Founder & Host - Web Wednesday
Head of Digital Integration, Fleishman-Hillard Communications Asia

How to manage a social media overload

[This is an extract from a recent article published in Media on 26th March 2010. Read the full article here].

Social network overload? Napoleon Biggs, vice-president and head of digital integration for Asia-Pacific at Fleishman-Hillard, shares his secret on how to deal with more than one online presence at a time.

I'm suffering from social media overload! Maintaining my social media presence has become a burden. Being a person that thrives on social interaction, I never thought that I'd reach this stage in my life.

Let’s start with some history.

In the beginning, there was Facebook. The world of status updates was simple. Facebook even told us how to start the sentence: “Napoleon is …”

Then along came a punky upstart by the odd name of “Twitter”. Its open platform rapidly encouraged people to share links (with URL shorteners, like Bit.ly), upload and comment on photos (with Twitpic), retweet other people's thoughts and star your favourites. All this within the space of 140 characters.

The world of status updates changed overnight. Now everyone and his mother is offering status updates, be it Sina Weibo, Google Buzz, Plaxo Pulse (recently renamed "Stream") or Me2day memos.

Thanks to the creativity of the open source world(s) we currently inhabit, there are quite a few tools out there to manage all these conversations and they are all heading in the same direction.

Many started as tools for managing Twitter conversations, like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Seesmic but have now integrated Facebook as well. Ping.fm allows you to manage your status updates across multiple platforms at once. But, I’m going to run through a tool that I find works very well in an office environment, for managing your work and personal messaging platforms.

It’s called “Digsby”. No it’s not related to the large fluffy dog ‘Digby’, but is almost as faithful to its master’s demands. The software comes in Windows, Mac and Linux versions, and can be downloaded at www.digsby.com.

[Read more on Media.asia]