When I first created this wiki with Akanksha Goel in summer of 2007, here is how I described our wiki project.

Rapidly evolving. New challenges. Learning opportunity. These terms certainly could describe almost any company's first experience with social media. These words also describe our course experience (COMM 215 at Singapore Management University). There were no social media textbooks. Harvard style case studies designed to evoke conversation, debate, and analysis were rare, and most had to be written by our students. There was very little in the way of precedent to build this course on....and that is what makes this class so exciting.

I had little idea where this class or experience was going. If the truth be told, I was operating on a belief--developed by listening to Inside PR, FIR, Six Pixels, and reading blogs--that social media was changing the communication professions. Little evidence was immediately available in Asia, but still this opportunity seemed to require action. So a new course at SMU, Social Media and PR across Asia, was born. There were no social media textbooks, so we adopted Naked Conversations since it had a bit of a business emphasis. Only a couple Harvard-style cases studies were appropriate for this type of course, and everything else we have had to discover or create on our own (including original case studies about Edelman-WalMart, Agency.com, and Starbucks in The Forbidden City). Six Pixels of Separation became required listening which eventually led to Mitch Joel joining us for Podcamp Singapore 2007. People such as Jon Hoel with PR Junction proved reliable friends as students experimented with user generated content.

Perhaps most difficult of all has been a course title which includes "in Asia" when nearly all materials in existence have a strong western bias and do not discuss what is unique about social media in Asia.

The literature's ethnocentric bias (print or otherwise) is most unfortunate. Over the past year one point has become abundantly clear: social media develops differently in each nation and culture. Asia, with the current exception of Japan, does not have massive advertising markets like the United States. Thus, business models must reflect this fact and companies such as (which has QQ in China) and Cyworld have been world leaders with micro-transactions of digital goods. Measurement will be different as well, since we are much less concerned in Asia about making money through on-line ads. The preferred media properties vary as well, with BBS sites in China proving dominant. Mobile in Japan or Hong Kong, and in Jakarta, are additional examples of different technology preferences. Finally, culture impacts the ethos of a blogosphere in many ways. Not only do we have unique linguistic communities around languages such as Korean, Thai, or Tamil, but the blogosphere within national boundaries reveals unique tastes as well. In Singapore for example, blog about food, electronic gadgets, shopping, or star personalities and you are sure to get many hits. Professional or business blogs, however, mostly get ignored.

Thus, Akansha's article (found in the menu at your upper left) discussing culture and social media is particularly important. While I have my reservations about quickly and generally attributing (blaming?) everything on culture, the topic does raise complex questions and we hope that this wiki represents a first attempt at some answers.

I am proud of the students' hard work--which they continue to put in through the summer of 2008-- and I have learned much from our conversations. I am also very pleased to report that people like Sam Flemming in China, Debbie Weil from the USA, and John Kerr from the Edelman-Singapore office are supporting the class and this wiki by volunteering important information. Kind guests such as Mitch Joel and Jon Hoel have taken things a step further by sharing their experiences via podcasts. And this, my friends, is what the spirit of education and social media is all about. Today, my students follow people like Kaiser Kuo and Ben Joffe in China, as well as our homegrown talent like Daryl Tay. In 2008 the folks at Ogilvy--including John Bell, Tania Chew, Brian Koh, and Andrew Thomas--have been amazingly supportive and help lead the way forward with The Open Room. We are all better off as a result of building this community and sharing.

If you would like to track all of my feeds that I have come to love over the past year, you can find them here on Google Reader or, perhaps easiest now, is here on Friendfeed.

So what does the future hold for this wiki? Next we will look at Vietnam while also updating the year-old information for Singapore and Hong Kong. We need to add a few more Middle Eastern countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Israel to name a few. I also see us branching out to the BRIC economies and including Brazil and Russia. Thus, Argentina and Chile also seem inevitable. I suspect my personal legacy on this project will be my love of emerging economies. I would also like to see more projects that work across countries. We need to complete the research on mobile markets in Asia, ad spend (MSM and online), and also government Internet policy and investment. Finally, I would like to see our students, under my guidance, engage in original research about word-of-mouth, credibility, and on-line behaviors through Asia. Perhaps we will even see teams of students engage in content production through regional podcasts and video streams.

Plenty of work remains, and Asia continues to capture my imagination as a place to live, work, and research. The students and external clients make the experience extremely rewarding, and also ease the pain on days when we must suffer the mind-numbing meritocracy and bureaucracy. But yes, we must take the good with the bad, and it is the sum of my experiences that makes Asia so amazing.

And this experience will continue to intersect with the West. Free trade, the war for talent, instantaneous global communication, on-line communities, and the basic human desire to explore and communicate will ensure that we all have the opportunity to experience these changes together.

I am honored to share this wiki with you. Enjoy...and please, join the conversation!

- Singapore, 3 June 2008