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.

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.