Singaporean bloggers came together to celebrate the inaugural Singapore Social Media Day at *Scape.
Contributed By Dawn Seow
SGSMD 2011 Committee and ambassadors celebrate the end of a successful day. PHOTO: Ma Xianrong
On June 25, blogshop owners and Youtube performers went offline and turned up at *Scape on June 25 for Singapore’s first ever Social Media Day celebration, proving that there does not need to be a disconnect between the real world and the virtual.
Social Media Day, started by social and digital media news site Mashable, is celebrated internationally on June 30 in recognition of the media revolution that has taken place in recent years that allows users to get real-time information, connect with those located miles apart at almost zero cost and, most significantly, bring about social and political change such as that seen in Egypt at the beginning of this year.
The Singapore Social Media Day was organized by a group of 10 local bloggers and supported by bilingual news and entertainment web portal, omy.sg.
Mint Leong, 25, a coordinator from the SGSMD organizing committee said that the event was organized to bring awareness to the social media scene in Singapore on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs. She said, “Many of my friends don’t know about other bloggers beside Xiaxue; they are not aware that there are many different categories of bloggers who blog about different things. That is why we want to use this event as a platform for people to get to know us (bloggers) and other social media users.
“People have the misconception that when we are active on social media sites, we are detached from the ‘real world.’ Fact is, we only tweet and blog content of actual events happening in reality, and we use social media platforms to follow-up on new friends we meet at these events. There is so much more to the social media world—we do meet new friends and network at these events,” Leong explained.
The Fat Short Boys performing at SGSMD. PHOTO: Conan Seow
SGSMD also saw blogshop owners taking their sales offline, setting up stalls to offer various products during the event. Leong shared that for many of the blogshop owners, it was their first time experiencing offline sales and they were very enthusiastic about it. As it was a charity event, all profits made were donated to the Straits Times School Pocket Money Fund.
Besides shopping and performances, visitors also tested their social media prowess at four game stations nearby. Visitors to the Twitter booth were given content to be summarized into “Twitter-sized” blurbs no longer than 140 characters; the Youtube booth held a Q&A session while the Blog booth utilized photos and URLs of 14 bloggers as content for a memory game.
There was an eight-by-12 foot “Social Wall”; visitors were encouraged to write on the wall as a gesture of raising funds for the Straits Times School Pocket Money Fund.
The event also gave local Youtube performers including Ashmie and Afwan, Joshua Alexis and Jeremy Khoo, Shimona, Angie Wang and Echo Music a leg up in their profiles as they performed in front of a live audience.
The event also allowed participants to network with other netizens. At the end of the day, new friendships were formed and networks were built. In fact, Leong found that her Twitter account increased in followers from 280 to over 300. While there are no fixed details, she has shared that the committee is planning the next year’s Social Media Day event.
Celebrations of Social Media Day around the world saw Internet users tracking and tagging #smday to their comments on Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and YouTube. In fact, Mashable reported 1,419 meet-ups with more than 8,500 attendees on World Social Media Day in six continents. Nine cities and one state in the US have also declared the day official.
Find out more at SGSMD’s website at http://blog.omy.sg/sgsmd/.
