Last Thursday, Asia Media Monitors organized their 3rd seminar “Media

Strategies in Changing Times - Expert Panel Discussion” @ Pacific

Regency Hotel Suites, KL. The event kicked off great with a fully
packed gathering of PR and Communication professionals. Leon
Hudson (Director of Sales and Client Services - South East Asia, Asia
Media Monitors) who was also the Moderator of the session,
commenced with the welcome address and a brief introduction of the
distinguished speakers. Just a quick note on behalf of Asia Media
Monitors to thank everyone who came and to the expert panelists:
• Cameron Buckley (General Manager – South East Asia, Asia
Media Monitors)
• Ku Kok Peng (Senior Vice-President, Partner and General
Manager, Fleishman-Hillard Communications Sdn Bhd)
• Suzanie (Suzie) Adina Mat Saat (Head of Corporate
Communications, Ministry of Information, Communications, Arts
and Culture)
• Shameem Abdul Jalil (Director, Corporate Communications &
Business Liaison of Public Investment Bank, Public Bank Group)

Leon also highlighted the session’s agenda and topics which were as
below:
• Trends within the media industry
• Social media
• The new audience
• Cross cultural communication
• Media intermediation
• Paid versus free content
• Citizen journalism.
Shameem was the first panelist invited to shed light on the topic. She
shared her vast experience in Public Relations and talked about her
book “Growing in Public Relations - Lessons from the Past” in which
she has encapsulated her knowledge for young PR practitioners and all
communication students. She repeatedly raised the point that
nowadays PR pros are not following the correct processes and
sometimes even getting their CEO’s picture on the front page is
considered enough. She spoke about how social media has
revolutionized the PR industry and how pros should integrate
traditional media, social media and academic theories like Laswell’s
paradigm, Two step flow, Spiral of silence, Grunig’s Agenda Setting
theory to succeed. Later in the discussion she shared an insightful
survey done by PRSA and is also on Public Relations Journal Vol 3, No
3, Summer 2009, “How PR Practitioners actually are using Social Media
-
Donald Wright and Michelle Hinson”. Click on the link to read in detail
-http://bit.ly/7SyrgA. The survey was on the PR Social Media Dilemma –
Big Gap between what they say is happening and what they say
should be happening in terms of social media use in PR. The top
three categories that should be important in overall communications
and PR efforts:
1. Search Engine marketing
2. Blogs
3. RSS

Three most important categories in overall communications PR for

their organization/ clients :-
1. Search engine marketing
2. Blogs
3. RSS, Social Networks, Video sharing
Frequent usage as information sources by PR Practitioners in this order
:-
1. Newspapers
2. Magazines
3. TV News
4. Radio News
5. Blogs
6. Social Network

In spite of huge growth, social media do not compare favorably to the

traditional media when it comes to :-
> Accuracy
> Credibility
> Trust

Ku was the next panelist to provide his insights. During his

presentation he touched on a number of points as below:
• How he gets the 1st bite of the news now via Twitter, SMS alerts
from Star and by reading emails on his Blackberry. Media is
evolving.
• Traditional media is no more source of goto information.
• Traditional media will either live or die.
• Traditional media will be ‘complimentary media’ with social
media.
• Everything has changed and yet nothing is changed.
• Credibility cannot be achieved if organizations are not going to
let go of control on social media. Credibility and Control are
inversely proportional.
• Web 1.0 has transformed to Web 2.0 in the shape of User
Generated Content (UGC), YouTube, Editing Wiki, Flickr, etc.
 • Circle of influence exists when referring to the Hierarchy in Social
media.
• Every organization should have a “Chief Communication Officer”
position and to be on the executive board, as Communication is
an integral part for any organization.
• There are no more media categories anymore, lines are very
blurred (referred to only ‘media’ now).
• Advertising Value Equivalents (AVE) is rubbish, it is actually an
advertising industry standard and a ‘cover your ass’ measure by
PR practitioners.
• Even GOD does not know PR value and Multipliers. Who are we
to determine PR values without actually qualitatively analyzing
our, messages and linking it directly to sales, business
objectives, etc.
• Forums are a place where people come for trouble shooting,
answers, sharing experiences and in worse cases grievances.
• If clients are looking to engage their customers on Forums then
they are to keep the below four points in mind:
1. Objectives to be clear.
2. More negative coverage is expected
3. Negative is not wrong.
4. Forum communicators should be industry experts as
mostly Forum contributors have niche industry knowledge.

Next was Suzie to provide her views on the topic. In her energetic and
engaging presentation she shared the Social Media Sphere (Carta
hubung kait media social di alam maya). She also highlighted the
below points:
• Traditional media will still work.
• Blogs still need traditional media to create awareness about their
existence.
 • She spoke about her 8 year daughter’s blog which has attracted
numerous visitors, high volume of hits and followers in just 5
days.
• ‘Hari Malaysia’ campaign success story due to media coverage.
• 27% of Malaysia’s population has internet connection.
• 6:1 is the ration for Urban: Rural for internet penetration.
• 101% of population has cell phones as one person can
sometimes own two cell phones.

Last but not the least, was Cameron. With his vast industry experience
of working in Europe, Australia and Asia, he shed light on many
interesting facts and statistics:
• Its about time organizations should try paid tools against free
tools.
• Positive / Neutral / Negative comments for coverage are non
descriptive (this does not show performance trends).
• Blogs / Online content analysis should be much more than
Positive / Neutral / Negative, more accurate methodology is the
CARMA Favorability ratings (0-100) where number of key factors
such as positioning, tonality, etc are used to score each article.
• Seat on the top table of executives by a Communication / PR
representative will only be possible when they are independent.
• Compared Social Media Evangelist (advocates) vs. Traditionalists
(cynical):

Social Media Evangelists Traditionalists

19.4% of Asia is online Globally newspaper went up by
1% (source: latest PANPA report)
1000% growth for Twitter growth Productivity in down-whirl spiral
globally. due to social media usage during
working hours.
Facebook has 300 million users But Facebook is still in deficit, yet
worldwide sharing over 10 billion to make a profit.
photos. 1.4 million Malaysians on
Facebook and some 100,000
Malaysians are joining Facebook
every month

• Discussed great firewall of China, Google vs. Murdoch story (Paid

model will not restrict all pages on a website, it will be selected.
Pointed out examples of such models like Bernama Online)
• 60% web traffic is Peer to Peer.

After the panelist’s discussion, was the Q&A session. There were some
really interesting, fiery and passionate questions and I think the guest
panelists did a good job to meet everyone’s expectation. The audience
engagement tool “Twitterfall” was used to track #AMM (event’s
hashtag), which had numerous interesting live comments on the event.
Many thanks to @scorpiojerm, @nicklwc, @kimberlycun, @minishorts,
@paprikaglobal, @nikicheong, @kukokpeng for contributing and sharing your
ideas, thoughts and feedback. Light refreshments were served after
the session and I thoroughly enjoyed mingling around with clients,
friends, twitterers and new people.

If you have any feedback, future event topic recommendations or

anything you would like to share please feel free to comment on our
Linkedin Group (www.bit.ly/3XuVsM) or use #AMM on Twitter. A special
thanks and congrats to AMM for organizing a successful event.
For more information on Asia Media Monitors, please click on
www.asiamediamonitors.com. If you have taken pictures, please share
with us by either posting a link to your album here or post it to our
Facebook fan page at http://www.companies.to/asiamediamonitors/

Cheers!!