Figuring out starting up

To be more specific, this post will explore 4 things your social media voice can learn from good raps. That means raps that only talks about fame, money and specific female body parts will not be considered. Seeing that good raps usually are not mainstream music, I’ll load up this post with many Youtube clips on raps so you’ll understand what I’m blabbing about. Due to the length of my entire blabbing, I’m cutting this into two parts, with 2 learning points per post.

Come on and join me as I bring you through this musical journey! *tap dances around the room* lol

Authenticity

In this song, Yoon Mi Rae sings about the discrimination and insecurities she faced in her life prior to becoming a famous singer due of her father’s race (her mum’s Korean while her dad’s black). The song also brings out encouragements to listeners to ‘hold on and love yourself’. Btw, Mi Rae is one of the best in her field in Korean hip hop, highly respected by mainstream Korean music as well.

Similarly, ‘Believe’ by Epik High is a song that talks about the struggles Epik High faced with censorship and other hardships before they got recognised in a relatively conserved Korea when they debuted. This song, although in Korean and I’m unable to find subtitles for it, mainly has the gist of spreading the message, “if I can do it, so can you”.

Both songs talk about their journeys of entering the industry and add in some form of encouragements to their listeners, but they presented their songs with such authenticity that it feels weird for anyone else to sing their songs. I mean, I can pick any song off the pop songs chart and sing it like I wrote it, but the same cannot be done for these two songs.

Food for Thought
Can someone else use your social media voice as though as they owned it? If they can, you’re not bringing enough of yourself onto the table. Think Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Both of them are university drop-outs and started the company from home, but these two names invoke different imagery in your mind. I believe that everyone and every successful company is unique (if your company is not unique, you’ll probably be replaced pretty soon), so bring out your personality to your social media platforms!

Style of delivery
You have your unique story to tell, how should you tell it?

Both Kero One’s ‘Missing you’ and Eminem’s ‘You’re never over’ talk, or rather sing, about their loss of a loved one. But as you can hear, their delivery is complete opposite of each other. Eminem’s style is rougher, vulgar while Kero One’s style is more classy and mild. This doesn’t mean that one style can deliver better than the other or that one style is more supreme than the other. (Although if you were to count views, Eminem beats Kero One hands down, but hey, Kero One is not signed. )

Food for Thought
What is your brand personality? Corporate speak does not apply to all kinds of businesses, so figure out if you’re going to be a pirate, girl-next-door, nerd or that cool kid and talk like that personality of your choice. Make sure you appear at the correct social media platforms too. If you’re going with the cool kid personality, I don’t think you’ll fit in well with LinkedIn. You see, social media tools are like different social settings.

For example, LinkedIn is a professional site while Facebook is a casual informal site. So for each tool, a company needs to be able to present itself appropriately while maintaining consistency in its corporate image.

Part 2 will be up in a couple of days! Let me know what you think about this post in the comments below!

As part of my excitement of getting into Top 23 of Standard Chartered’s search for the World’s Coolest Intern, I’m going to explain how you (small business owners, student leaders) can create your own World’s Coolest Intern using the same metrics that Standard Chartered is using without you having to spend a single cent!

(Of course the trade-off is that you don’t get an uber comprehensive analysis and you gotta do some manual work yourself. But it’ll still be easy, I promise!)

Let’s hope the guys at Jamiq (the people evaluating all participants for this competition) don’t hate me for potential loss of clients. :D Anyway, speaking of Jamiq, it’s really interesting how I come to know a few people working there. I went to an event at Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commence last year and met Employee No. 4 (that’s really his position on his namecard). Then I signed up for Rotary Youth Social Entrepreneurship Challenge which happened to be organized by another Jamiq’s employee, and I ‘met’ Jamiq’s founder on Twitter before the competition. These people are really everywhere. lol.

Let’s take a look at the evaluative metrics adopted for this competition.

Note that you must always go for track-able metrics.

Measuring Blog Rank

This can be done by using Google Pagerank, which is a set of algorithms that determines the prominence and relative importance of a website as compared to others. It uses links as a basis on analysis and gives a score between 0 to 10 to each website. The higher the score is, the better the website’s rank is.

To calculate a website’s pagerank, you can either download Google Toolbar or use some websites that can calculate the score. I recommend you not to download the toolbar as it lags my browser, but to head over to PRchecker.info. This is the only site that I’ve found whose scores match that produced from Google Toolbar, so I guess this site is the most accurate portrayal of pagerank without lags.

Measuring Twitter Influence
Twitter influence can be measured by the number of RTs, number of lists the user is in, number of followers, tweets linking back to a post or by using Klout score.

RTs is harder to track without hashtags. You can do a search on an username on Twitter to see that username’s mentions (when you RT somebody, their username will automatically appear in your tweet, hence it will show up when a search in done on the username) but it will be mixed with all other tweets that is not related to your competition. So if you want to use this metric, make sure you create a hashtag and make all contestants use it. Then you manually track how many RTs each contestant gets. For easy reference, simply search the hashtag once and click ‘Save this search’ and you can access this search from your home page without having to key in and search again.

You can read off your contestants’ profile page to get the number of lists the user is in and the number of followers.

If you want to measure the number of tweets linking back to a post, try backtweets. This tool allows tracking of an exact page (see picture) and bring results including RTs and shortened links. The only problem with this is that it only has 2 weeks worth of data so it your campaign will run longer, you have to constantly count and update every 2 weeks.

Comparing backtweets and the RTs/hashtags method, I’ll say that either one is fine. The RTs/hashtags method shows a consolidated list of all the RTs but it’ll not be sorted out neatly into contestants’ names. Backtweets shows all the tweets related to a contestant, but you gotta search for all links individually.

Lastly, simply use Klout score to determine the influence of each participant. Do read through their methodology to understand what is included in their calculations. If you want to use this metric, do get your participants to sign up an account with Klout to get their score calculated. Note of caution if you want to use Klout score: Klout score can be calculated from information collected Twitter alone, but information from Facebook can be added in as well. So this will skew the participants’ score in a way and you will not be able to tell if information from Facebook is added into the calculation.

Measuring Facebook Network
This is easy. You simply have to tell your participants to set their privacy settings to allow everyone to view the number of their friends. Or you can have them create a Facebook Page for their participation. In this way, you don’t have to get your contestants to sacrifice their privacy and you can still measure the network.

Measuring Buzz

Measure me?

This is the fluffiest item of them all. The meaning of buzz is really the activity regarding an issue. This refers to blogs, reblog, tweets, RTs, sharing, bookmarking etc. Since I’ve covered most of the activities that can take place, the tool you may want to use for listening to blogs/reblogs will be Google Alerts. This tool sends you an email when Google Search crawls the terms that you want to find. For example, I have Google to send me an alert as and when they crawl the term ‘Elisha Tan’. The alerts I get are usually my blog posts, some of my tweets and blog posts that mentioned ‘Elisha Tan’ but they’re not referring to me.

Putting It Together
It is easy to measure each metric individually, but the hard part is to put them together and rate contestants on a multi-dimensional scale. One suggestion I’ll give is to create your own scale for each of the dimensions and to assign points to each contestants from it. For example, a scale for Twitter influence can created whereby less than 5 RTs award contestants with 1 point, 6 – 10 RTs award 2 points etc. If your competition is on a really small scale, you can simply award 1 point per RT.

Do this for FB, blogs etc and sum the points awarded to each contestants. The contestant with the most points is your World’s Coolest Intern!

So tada! Now you know how you can find your World’s Coolest Intern without having to spend a cent! Please feel free to comment below if you know of any other tools that are useful for this purpose! And if you’ve find this post useful, please tweet this to improve my chances of making it into Top 10 of Standard Chartered World’s Coolest Intern!