John Solomon’s Live Blog From Mobile Youth Malaysia

Enovate director John Solomon is in Kuala Lumpur for Mobile Youth’s Unconference Malaysia. He’ll be alongside Graham Brown (UK), Ian Stewart (Singapore), Muhhamad Faisal (Indonesia), Samyak Chakrabarty (Mumbai), Bernard Hor (Malaysia), and Niki Cheong (Malaysia) discussing all things Asian Youth.

Be sure to keep up with John as he blogs live from the conference right here.

*Check out Mobile Youth’s website for more on this international collaboration.

March 11 — 11:30am

Thanks to Nick for setting this up. We are now heading out to the conference site and will be starting the conference at about 1pm. It has already been a thrilling time learning about different youth insights from some of the major markets around the world. More to come…

March 11 — 1:15pm

Good group rolling in now. about to get started. The first keynote will be Graham Brown, from mobileYouth. Just met one of the keynote speakers, Ian Stewart, who was recently with MTV and Friendster.

March 11 — 1:30pm

The ministers have arrived and we are set to go!

March 11 — 1:35pm

Delegates are representing 45% of the world’s population at this conference, a lot of youth voices and opinions here. Malaysia, although a relatively small country in the Asian region, is doing a lot to help young entrepreneurs incubate their business and entrepreneurial ventures…very impressive. We are in the Technology Park Malaysia which is a newly developed facility to help encourage this growth.

March 11 — 2:00pm

Graham’s keynote is now starting. Sharing examples and findings from 250 client and 60 clients.

- You don’t want to go for the customers that “like” you but “LOVE” you. The “fan factor.” You need to find and support them.

- Stop asking “how do I get on Facebook” and stop talking about your brand. Need to focus on helping youth to tell their story.

- Graham brings youth, Alvin, on stage to talk about brands in his life. He has had a Nokia phone since he was 7 years old and is a stronger supporter of Nike through soccer. Showing the power of word of mouth and passionate users and brand advocates. Youth driven by wanting to be involved and heard, give them that platform.

- Graham shows the awareness test (insert youtube clip), great way to show that 95% of what is going on (advertising!) is being filtered out.

- Focusing on the flip camera case study. flip gained 18% market share without doing any focus groups or advertising. Instead, focused on a grassroots approach. Went out and gave youth the camera to use for a week. The key insight they found–youth do not carry around the correct cables and that was the main impediment to using the device. Therefore, they developed the built-in USB connector and this solidified the future of this product. This could not have been developed from sitting in a focus group and asking questions. Instead, you need to get out into the field and immerse. Only then, will you truely understand user needs and requirements. Note, flip recently sold their company to Cisco for $600 million!

March 11 — 3:00pm

Ian starting his keynote. Previously worked at Coca Cola, MTV, Ogilvy, and Friendster. He also previously created a youth agency, Filter, that was sold to Aegis.

- Opportunity in Asia is huge but starting to fragment as social networking is maturing.

- lots of great information on www.slideshare.net/ianstewartmtv

- 40% of all interent users are in Asia. 76% of asia net users were on social networking sites BUT only 16.5% of Asia is currently online! 25,000 users per hour coming online in Asia!

- More Asians have a mobile phone than an internet connection

- Facebook is the 4th largest “country” in the world

- Youth multi-task and actually have a 36 hour day and 5 minutes of attention span

- People are media. each of us have social currency and have friends that we can get a message out to instantly

- most of Facebook’s growth is over 30 year olds

- myparentsjoinedfacebook.com ha ha!

Predictions for 2010:

- Teens and Tweens don’t have their own site right now.

- Everything heading into mobile

- Everyone wants immediacy

- Virtual currencies a boom

- Gifting and gaming will continue to expand

- Social shopping, ebay model doesn’t work if you have never sold anything before

- Monetization Models

- Cross Platform Aggregation

- Better privacy tools

- Brands Work It Out… 2008 was the year when brands asked about social media. 2009 gave it a try. Nokia has 1 mil fans on their Facebook page but they have no idea who owns it or how it started or WHAT TO DO WITH IT!

March 12 — 3:36pm

Coffee break!

March 12 — 5:50pm

We just finished our break out sessions. Really interesting to hear how similar youth in Malaysia are to Chinese youth BUT it is all about Facebook and Twitter here. Same themes: engage, allow for feedback loops, and add value. That is it for today!

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