This morning, Twitter Local Trends is activated on my Twitter profile. Twitter officially roll-out the feature to limited users on January 22 2010. By now, the feature is already available to most users. Users can choose to set Trending, by Country or City. Unfortunately, none from Asia. For now, only 6 countries are available for selection – US, UK, Mexico, Brazil, Ireland, Canada. There’s a total of 15 cities, all US cities except two (Sao Paulo and London).

Local Trends is a natural evolution for the Twitter’s Geotagging, which “attach a longitude and latitude to all of your tweets” and was released in August 2009. Prior to Twitter’s geotag APIs, there’s already an application (one of a handful) called TwitterLocal that filter tweets by location, by “caching all tweets with valid location.” Now, Twitter goes meta with Trending topics for each location.

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According to Sycomos latest report on Twitter, Asian countries constitutes about 7.74% of the Twitter unique users worldwide. Indonesia topped with 2.34% of unique users, followed by Japan (1.47) and India (0.97). On a global perspective, more than half of Twitter unique users (56.59%) are located in the US and followed by UK (8.09), Brazil (6.73), Canada (4.36) and Australia (2.63). This is based on analysis of active 13 million unique users, between Oct 16 2009 and Dec 16 2009.

comScore reported the total global unique users of Twitter.com has reached 60 million. However, Fred Wilson argued that “Twitter ecosystem is about 3x Twitter.com.” Twitter ecosystem refers to all interactions with Twitter APIs, via the plethora of third-party Twitter apps i.e. Tweetdeck, bit.ly, Facebook, iPhone apps, etc.

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Maxis, leading cellular provider and exclusive iPhone distributor in Malaysia, just launched its mobile applications marketplace, 1Store Developer Sentral. The 1Store (the name most likely aspired by 1Malaysia) will feature Java/Symbian-based mobile applications. Developers (individuals and companies) can now register at here. And the applications are available to over 11.4 million Maxis and Hotlink subscribers. Maxis is using its existing billing infrastructure to charge subscribers for downloading applications from 1Store. It is opening up its billing APIs to both purchases and in-app micropayments. Developers will then get paid via funds transfer (for local developers) and TT (for foreign developers).

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According to the latest Digital Brand Index (DBI) by Edelman and Brandtology, Twitter overtook Low Yat Forum as the Malaysia’s buzziest channel (in terms of brand mentions). In the Top 10 list of Buzziest Channel in Malaysia, Malaysia’s leading social network, Facebook, is no where in sight. On methodology, the survey states it “monitors key brands.. across a list of popular online channels.” With 350 million population worldwide, Facebook is undeniably one of today’s most “popular online channels.” The absence of Facebook in the Top 10 – it’s either not covered in the DBI survey or it implies Facebook users in Malaysia converse less about brands compared to Twitter’s users. If it’s the latter, is Facebook a viable media for brands in Malaysia?

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According to the latest Opera Mobile Report, Southeast Asia experienced the highest annual growth for mobile web usage. Opera is tracking users of Opera Mini, its browser for mobile. The latest November 2009 report shows Southeast Asia led in every category of growth, in terms of page view (575%), unique users (362%) and data transfer (580%). Worldwide, Opera Mini users jumped to 41.7 million in November 2009, from 16.4 million last November.

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On the morning of December 9 2009, AirAsia became the first airline in the world with 100,000 fans on Facebook. This makes the award-winning airline the most popular Malaysian brand on Facebook; also, one of the top Asian brands, in terms of Facebook fans. The airline with less than 50,000 fans in August this year. In 4 months or so, the airline organically grew its fan base and surpassed the 100,000 mark. However, within a day, the 100,000 mark is surpassed by US-based Southwest Airlines.

Fans Growth of AirAsia Facebook Fan

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Friendster started looking for buyers in July 2009. On 10 December 2009, the once leading social network is acquired by Malaysia’s MOL Group. No financial details were announced. However, in July this year, TechCrunch estimated Friendster to worth around US$137 million. (UPDATE: TechCrunch reported Friendster valued at $26.4 Million in sales)

Why buy Friendster? According to the new MOL/Friendster Group CEO Ganesh Kumar Bangah, it’s because of its “strong South East Asia base… very focus, has a very strong following in Malaysia.” He believed “right localization,” in terms of features, contents and applications, is Friendster’s competitive strategy. Ultimately, he envisioned Friendster as South East Asia-centric community, a platform for Asian-ized contents and applications.

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Here’s some of observations about the use of social media (and as shortcut, social media is myopically defined as Twitter and Facebook):

• Twitter, a water cooler chat. Facebook Page, a community canvass. On Twitter, people want to interact with you e.g. complaints and ideas for product improvements. Unless you are a news organization like CNN and The Economist or a celebrity like @Alyssa_Milano, @The_Real_Shaq and @BritneySpears, it’s hard to get away with just tweet-casting without being called inept user of social media. On Facebook, your community want to interact with you AND among themselves. So, it’s relatively easier to get away by not interacting with your fans. Facebook Page can be used by fans as a community wall, for public display of affection towards a brand. In essence, it provides user-created online context for fans to connect with one another, share thoughts and propagating the allure of the brand.
• Social media is interactive. So, be inventive. Toys r’ Us uses its Facebook Page to “to distribute coupons, announce unadvertised deals and solicit feedback.” Others used social media to announce arrival of new products e.g. fresh bakes from oven @AlbionsOven. Some use it effectively as a broadcast tool e.g. @cnnbrk. Depends on needs and context, social media can be used to support your brand building infrastructure or obtain customer feedback or source for talents or ..
• Easier to grow community on Facebook than Twitter? It depends. Coca-cola has the most popular Page on Facebook, with over 4 million fans; on Twitter, Coca-Cola is followed by only over 12,000. It’s the reverse for JetBlue Airways.

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Vocanic Pte Ltd., Singapore-based company, is behind Project 500. Vocanic is a company specializes in word-of-mouth marketing, which “harness and amplify the conversations that consumers have about your brand, and use them to create highly effective marketing campaigns” (Source: Vocanic’s website). It started as a website, requesting social mediaphiles to sign-up for a secret project. A briefing was held to reveal the ‘product’ and it’s a social media streams aggregator. Think Ping.fm and Orsiso. Is this the aggregator referred to as “the next big thing to explode in the social media scene”? I’m doubtful.

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Today is the finale event of the Everyone Connects campaign by Telekom Malaysia (TM). The campaign revolved around a song titled Through My Window, performed by a local indie band, Bunkface. The song was released on October 19 2009 as a mystery song over the airwaves. During the past 1 month, it generated thousands of mentions on the social media space and also generated over 6000 user-generated versions of the song (audio and video). This campaign is both ambitious in scale and expansive in scope, designed to deliver a fresh narration to the TM brand. When it started, I predicted Everyone Connects as a social media campaign but it also involved the use of traditional media like TV, radio and newspapers. It delicately weave the online and offline activities to create a seamless brand experience. It involves several notable ‘firsts,’ in terms of tools and methods used. Anyway, here are the key moments of the Everyone Connects campaign:

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