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.

He also mentioned about his intention to purchase Friendster way back in 2007 but was not taken seriously by some of shareholders of the social network. When Richard Kimber became the CEO of Friendster, MOL started to establish commercial relationships with Friendster. “After a while, when we look into how we can have a deeper relationships, and that culminated into today’s MOL buying Friendster,” said CEO Bangah.

To remain competitive, Friendster already launched (or going to launch) these features on its social network:

• Microtransactions or sales of virtual goods, are particularly popular and widely adopted by the Korean (Cyworld) and Chinese (QQ.com) social networks. Friendster already launched its Wallet and Gift Shop. With microtransactions, is Friendster is merely trying to milk an aging cow?
• Social gaming: Facebook and MySpace are already the two popular social gaming platforms. Electronic Arts recent purchase of social gaming company, Playfish, in a deal worth US$400 million, underscored the upside of this segment. Friendster will soon join the party.
• Music: MySpace is still the king of the hill, when it comes to music. It is still THE preferred social network for music bands. Friendster too is eyeing to enter this space. (This is no surprise, considering Friendster’s Head of Asia, Ian Stewart is formerly from MTV).

Friendster (and other social networks) can no longer compete with Faceboook, on scale and scope. So, MySpace is carving its niche along area of interest, which is music; whereas Friendster along regional lines. The new Friendster’s goal is to be the favorite social network for youth in South East Asia through fun, simplicity and local knowledge.

Below is the full speech made by Group CEO Ganesh Kumar Bangah at a Friendster’s event last night.

To Revitalize Friendster, Just Blend Together Microtransactions, Social Games, Music and a Fair Dose of Luck originally appeared on GreyReview on December 11, 2009.

A Green Day-esque song played on Hitz.fm radio this morning, titled Through My Window (click to play), with artist name undisclosed but DJ @rudyculously mentioned a website address, EveryoneConnects.net. On the website, there’s not much information except the MP3 file of the song (available for free download), together with the song lyric. Its “What’s the Buzz?” box is displaying Twitter updates stream. Also, there are links to its Twitter, Facebook and Friendster profile pages. And this phrase is seen at the bottom of the page, “Everyone Connects is about getting people to communicate & collaborate because when everyone’s connected, anything is possible.”

Song as teaser, Twitter stream on website and profile pages on social networks – ingredients for brewing a groundswell? At the time of this posting, Twitter, Facebook and Friendster pages are still relatively empty. Search the Whois database and the record shows the domain ‘www.EveryoneConnects.net’ was created on September 29, 2009 and is registered to Monster Interactive Sdn Bhd (the interactive agency for this campaign?).

‘Through My Window’, part of Microsoft Windows 7 campaign? Or is it for a music-centric social networking site? Or is it by a communication/colloration software solution provider? Or is it… Anyway, let your imagination run amok and enter your wild guess in the 1Question Survey form below.

Through My Window, I Can See A Silhouette of A Social Media Campaign originally appeared on GreyReview on October 19, 2009.

Ian Stewart, Head of Asia, Friendster gave a keynote address at the recent Social Media World Forum Asia in Singapore. From his presentation, we can learn that Friendster is positioning themselves as the social network for youth. That’s why his presentation is packed with data from MTV survey on online activities of young people. Some of his predictions for social networks in 2010 are more focus on teens & tweens, virtual currencies, social shopping, more monetization models and cross platform aggregation (see below for complete list).

He also mentioned Twitter in 2006 is the “last time there has been a significant web application that comes along the social media space and captivated the whole world.” Interesting observation. Anyway, here are audio snippets from his keynote, accompanied by his slides.

Overview of Social Media landscape

What’s Hot, What’s Not

How many friends do you have?

Youth and Social Networks

Age Groups and Social Networks

Web Evolution

Maturing Social Networks

TechCrunch Quote

The Road Ahead for Social Networks

The Shifts

You can view Ian Stewart’s entire presentation slides here.

What’s Now, What’s Next for Social Networking: Ian Stewart, Friendster (with audio clips) originally appeared on GreyReview on September 25, 2009.

There are now more than 1 million users of Facebook in Malaysia. Friendster said there are 2.2 million active Malaysian users on its social network. Now, what about Twitter? In December 2008, TwitterFacts estimated a total of 3,429 Twitter users in Malaysia. I believe the number has increased since then.

Let’s look elsewhere for hints, clues and indications. WeFollow, a user-generated Twitter Directory by Kevin Rose, where users self-tagged to a set of 3 keywords to describe themselves. There are only 274 users who tagged themselves to ‘malaysia’ but I’m quite sure the figure doesn’t reflect the current total Malaysians on Twitter.

TwitterCounter and Twitter Grader directories also offer listing of Twitter users by country. Unfortunately, Grader only list Top 50 users whereas TwitterCounter limits its listing to 10,020 profiles, per location. TwitterCounter says it is tracking 3.9 million unique Twitter users and yes, a search of ‘malaysia’ returns 10,020 Twitter usernames.

There are two ‘live’ directories, which are indexing Twitter users – TwitDir and Twellow. At the time of this posting, TwitDir has a total of 4,013,391 accounts and 2,231 of them with ‘Malaysia’ within their location detail. Twellow called itself Twitter Yellow Pages and it categorizes Twitter users into various categories, based on bio details. Currently, there are a total of 6.6 million Twitter profiles in its database. At the time of this posting, a search of ‘malaysia’ yields a total of 7,766 accounts.

Take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes

Based on TwitDir directory, the percentage of Twitter users from Malaysia is 0.055589%. On Twellow, the percentage is roughly 0.117667%. The average of these two percentages is 0.086628%, which, for the sake of this attempt to estimate the number of Twitter users in Malaysia, constitutes the percentage of Malaysian users in Twitterville. For some unfathomable reason, that percentage of remains constant from now until 2013 (beyond that, it’s anyone’s bet).

For total Twitter users worldwide from 2009 to 2013, let’s use Twitter’s private-now-public estimates. Twitter defines a user as “unique individual having a conscious twitter experience in a given week.” The following table shows the estimated number of Malaysia Twitter users for the next four years, assuming the percentage of Malaysian within Twitterville remains constant at 0.086628%.

By end of this year, there are more than 20,000 Twitter users in Malaysia. By 2011, the number of users will swell to more than 300,000 and the half-a-million mark will be crossed in 2012. By end of 2013, there will be an estimated total of 866,280 Twitter users in Malaysia.

So, even when Twitter achieved its dream of becoming the first web service with a billion users in 2013, crystal ball says total Malaysia Twitter users will not cross the 1 million user mark (a feat Facebook already achieved in March 2009).

And there you have it. Prognostication or hallucination? Find me on Twitter @zhiQ and do let me know if I should ditch my crystal ball.

My Crystal Ball Says 866,280 Twitter Users in Malaysia by 2013 originally appeared on GreyReview on July 31, 2009.

Facebook with 250 million users and these users are sharing over 10 billion photos. YouTube is streaming 1.2 billion videos a day, worldwide. The number of worldwide unique visitors of Twitter catapulted from 19 million in March 2009 to 32 million in April 2009 and each day, Twitter users are generating roughly 18 million updates. And according to comScore, social networking penetration rate worldwide was 65% in the month of May 2009, or 734.2 million Internet users across the globe accessing at least one social networking website during the month.

Malaysians love Social Networking too

There are about 16 million Internet users in Malaysia and IDC Research projected Malaysian Internet users will reach 20.4 million by 2012. In March this year, the number of Facebook users in Malaysia surpassed the one million mark. Recently, a brief survey by YouthSays, Malaysia’s largest youth community website with over 160,000 members, showed 95% of a total of 900 respondents have Friendster’s account, 90% with Facebook and 38% with Twitter (This survey was presented at the recent Malaysian Media Congress 2009).

In Malaysia, the social networking penetration rate was 66.6% in December 2008 (see Table below), behind only to Singapore (74.3%) and South Korea (68%). See Table below.

In terms of Average Minutes Spent on Social Network(s) Per Visitor, Malaysia ranked second at 181.2 minutes after Korea (277.8 min) and ahead of Singapore (175.6 min), Hong Kong (127.7 min), India (110.4 min) and Japan (72.8 min).

Top Social Networks in Malaysia

Like elsewhere in the world, Facebook and Twitter are the superstars these days in Malaysia. Besides these two, what are the other popular social networks Malaysians spending their time these days? Alexa and Google Ad Planner can provide some answers. Alexa Traffic Rank measures website popularity and calculated using average daily visitors and pageviews over the past three months whereas Google Ad Planner is “based on an automated analysis of millions of search queries and site visits” and Unique Visitors refer to number of people visiting the site over a specific month.

Based on the Table below, Facebook is the top social network in Malaysia, followed by YouTube and Friendster. Twitter is the 8th most popular social network in Malaysia.

Top Malaysian Social Networks

Despite the phenomenal popularity of Facebook, etc., there are a handful of Malaysian social networks offering localized contents and services. Some of the notable local social networks are Ruumz, eKawan, GoEatOut, Circles99, FriendX, eMeiMei and Pacmee.

So, how popular are these social networks? For a starter, these social networks are nowhere near global social network brands like Facebook and Friendster, in terms of Malaysian users. Launched in February 2009, Ruumz is today’s most popular Malaysia social network, followed by eKawan (social network for Malay-speaking community) and GoEatOut (dining guide-cum-social network). See Table below.

Discussion

Facebook is replacing Friendster as Malaysian top social network; Facebook outranked Friendster in Alexa and also, Facebook with more unique visitors from Malaysia compared Friendster (Google Ad Planner). However, according to a Friendster Summary Fact Sheet posted on TechCrunch, the social network boasted a total of 2.1 million active users in Malaysia compared to 1.1 million Facebook users in Malaysia.

Malaysians are using global social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Friendster compared to local social networks. Only a few countries are dominated by homegrown social networks, namely Mixi in Japan, Cyworld in Korea, QiQi in China, Cloob in Iran, Maktoob in Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Dubai, Kuwait), StudiVZ in Germany, Hyves in The Netherlands, iWiW in Hungary, Nasza-Klasa in Poland, and Vkontakte.ru in Russia.

How do these local social networks compete? Sites like Pacmee, Friendx, eKawan and eMeiMei tied its social networks to mobile services and deliver value-added services e.g. posting photo via MM and receive status updates via SMS.

Ruumz offers different blend of value-added services on its social network. For example, online music subscription, photo printing and photobook services. With its unique brand positioning and services, Ruumz can differentiate itself in the local social networking scene.

But will it be able to dent Facebook’s armor? Quite unlikely in short-term. Rather than competing head-on with the social network giants, local social networks can thrive by offering different social networking experiences. Facebook and Friendster, for example, are typically broad-based type social network and offer culturally relevant experience is probably not their strong suit. Herein lies the opportunity for Malaysian social networks.

And maybe Malaysian social networks can learn something from the ascendancy of Old Town White Coffee, a Malaysian-based coffee chain. Amidst the crowded marketplace dominated by global brands like Starbucks and Coffee Beans, Old Town able to differentiate its offerings and capture marketshare in Malaysia (and elsewhere in Asia).

Conclusion

This article offers a snapshot of social networking activities and the popular social networks in Malaysia. The leading social networks are Facebook, YouTube and Friendster whereas top Malaysian social networks are Ruumz, eKawan and GoEatOut. Local social networks provide diversity in the social networking landscape and offer choices to Malaysians. Possibly, local players can eventually offer more culturally relevant social networking experiences with localized contents and services.

Snapshot of Social Networking in Malaysia originally appeared on GreyReview on July 28, 2009.

Social technologies enable the creation of conversational platform for businesses to engage in richer interactions with customers. Traditional mass media lacks interactivity and information flow is dominantly unidirectional, from brand owners to consumer.

However, the new social media enables consumers to connect with one another and brand owners to co-create brand experience. Global corporations like Procter & Gamble, Dell, Coca Cola and many others are already adopting social media as part of their brand building infrastructure.

What about Malaysia’s biggest brands? Are they using social technologies? How are they using the conversational media to listen and interact with their customers?

To answer the questions, I’ve investigated social media plays of companies listed in Malaysia’s Most Valuable Brands (MMVB) 2007, created by the Malaysian Association of Accredited Advertising Agents, in collaboration with Interbrand. This exercise involves searching for the brand names in social networks (Facebook, Friendster, MySpace), video-sharing site (YouTube), online photo-sharing site (Flickr) and microblogging (Twitter, FriendFeed). The results are presented in the “Social-ize the Brands” table below.

Notes to the table:

• “Rank” is the actual ranking in MMVB 2007.
• Giant and Dutch Lady, which appeared in MMVB 2007, were omitted as both are non-Malaysian brands.
• Only initiatives created by brand owners are considered to provide a better indication on the importance of social media marketing to the brand owners.
• For more on how MMVB’s Brand Value is calculated, read here.

Social-ize the Brands: How Malaysia’s Most Valuable Brands are Embracing Social Media

Some Observations

1. Big brands adopting social media marketing
   • About 60% of Malaysia’s most valuable brands are leveraging social utilities like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
2. Conversations with AirAsia
   • The budget airline has the most interesting and purposeful usage social media marketing tools and are ‘designed’ to engage with its target audience.
3. User-generated content
   • AirAsia is tapping into the power of bloggers with its blog, “Just Plane Thoughts.” Besides contents posted by 16 AirAsia bloggers, the site also encourages its readers to post their travel stories and comments. Although the blog is moderated, negative customer comments also get posted. Newspaper The Star also allows its readers to post up contents on its Citizen’s Blog site.
4. Conversational vs Informational
   • AirAsia’s blog is more conversational than its competitor Malaysia Airlines’ Living Malaysian Hospitality, which is geared towards providing corporate news.
5. Facebook rules
   • The fast-growing social network is by far the most used social utility among the biggest brands in Malaysia, followed by YouTube. Facebook ranked 8th in Malaysia’s Alexa Top 100 Sites; YouTube ranked 4th (as of Oct 19 2008).
6. Tweet with Astro
   • The use of Twitter is gaining popularity among enterprises. Astro, the subscription-based satellite TV provider, is the one and only Malaysia’s big brand on Twitter.
7. Bank with blog
   • Malaysia’s largest bank, Maybank, is the first Malaysian bank with a blog; uses its “AllYou” blog to complement its online banking site, Maybank2u.com.
8. Blogging CEO
   • Tony Fernandes of AirAsia is the only Most Valuable Brand’s CEO with a blog.
9. Not-so-social lifestyle
   • Consumer-oriented retail brand, Parkson and apparel brands – Bonia and Padini – are notably missing in the social media sphere.
10. Financial-ly not social-able
    • Financial institutions dominated the MMVB list, with 32% representation. However, out of the eleven big brands that are not using social media, six of them (or 54%) are from the financial industry.

Social Media Marketing and Malaysia’s Biggest Brands originally appeared on GreyReview on October 20, 2008.