by Khailee Ng
STANDING in a smoke filled nightclub in KL, I was peering into the crowd. I remember feeling absolutely frustrated. During my student days in Sydney and San Francisco, the local music scene had a thriving community of followers. I was there, both as a fan, and well as a marketing student, observing how communities of fans self-organized and grew. However, my return home greeted me with a local gig going community that had just enough people to fit into a Perodua Kancil.
The fans of local music were somewhere out there. I knew it. Disconnected, waiting to meet each other and rock out. It was only a matter of time, and perhaps some effort to bring the pieces together. Being impulsive, ambitious, and excited, I gave it a shot.
By then, I had already built my first active community with a group of young Malaysian journalism students. Fuelled by passion for socio-political issues in Malaysia, we used online tools to rope in over a thousand young Malaysians to our online community theCICAK.com on a daily basis, to write and discuss issues they cared about, and promote good writing via nationwide writing competitions.
It is this same rush of being around like-minds, engaging in our interests, which motivated me to build the same kind of active community around the local music scene. Soon, a series of meet-ups around the city to catch local independent bands was unleashed, under the codename of Project Bazooka.
All this happened in late 2005. And that was just me, as one example.
Since then, countless other young Malaysians, armed with new weapons of technology, built their very own passion driven communities both online and offline. They were grouping friends and strangers together for different reasons, creating movements of varying magnitudes across the country, one community at a time.
Today, the Malaysian youth scene and its communities have really come alive. And I am excited, because this silent revolution is only the beginning. Of course, savvy marketers are taking notice, as behind each youth community is a hidden opportunity for deep relationship building between a brand and its audience.
However, these opportunities are not fully utilized, nor has there been very predictable, effective ways for brands and communities to cooperate. Not yet, at least. Till now. In this article, I hope to explore how youth marketers can seize this opportunity.
To do that, we must first take a closer look at “Youth Communities”, and how the adoption of specific technologies in Malaysia makes them what they are.
Youth communities explained
Who are these ‘youths’? The typical marketing definition of ‘youths’ includes tweens (8-12 years old), teens (13-19 year old), college kids (18-21 year old), and young adults (22 years old and above). However, for this article we will focus on youths aged 15 to 30. These youths are also referred to in a Malaysian context, to focus the article on marketing to youth communities locally.
So, how does the adoption of technology affect a community? You may have heard of Web 2.0, Marketing 2.0, social networking and other neat buzzwords. You may have even attended three-day conferences on them.
To be honest, I heard about these buzzwords plenty, and nodded plenty, too, but never knew what they meant. Not till I spent two years building online communities using some of the most cutting edge Web 2.0 technologies.
However, young Malaysians didn’t need to know what Web 2.0 referred to. They didn’t need to know how new online technology worked. The just pick it up and used it! They started blogging, a lot. They put up profiles of themselves on social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and communicated through them, meeting new people and building relationships people faster than ever before. Very quickly, they were able to find one another, and group together.
I remember growing my communities without ever meeting 90 percent of my committee members. Yet we self-organised through email, instant messaging, blogs, and got things done!
Technology was a tool.
After all, humans have always come together for a shared interest or passion. It’s just that today’s technology makes us more connected than ever. And in this hyper-connected world, coming together, and doing things together is only going to happen a whole lot faster. As more young people get online and get connected, youth communities will multiply and grow at an even faster rate. Which begs us to ask… is this limited to the ‘online world’? Do ‘online communities’ have anything to show for in the ‘real world’? How do brands connect with these communities?
I admit, at first, there weren’t too many face-to-face gatherings or events amongst the youth communities. Nor were there many brands present in the communities. At least, I didn’t feel it happen at the time.
But one event changed it all.
Connecting brands with youth communities
It was early January 2008, and I was 20 minutes late to speak at the National Youth Entrepreneur Convention alongside a few other young entrepreneurs. This was part of a larger three-day youth lifestyle festival at PWTC, called YOUTH’08.
In my haste to arrive fashionably late, I ran into the wrong hall. I ran into thousands of different young Malaysians across hundreds of booths. There were celebrities on stage, an Indie-clothing bazaar, battle of the bands, and I almost knocked some break-dancers down.
I haven’t seen so many youths of different races in the same hall since a secondary school fire drill. Even that had far less students. And they weren’t dressed funky, doing cartwheels in
the air.
How do you pull so many young people together on-ground? It’s not like it’s a Mawi or Justin Timberlake concert. And it certainly wasn’t the Olympics.
This was an eye opener for me (especially after too many years of online-only activity). These youths actually switched off their computers for once, came out of their houses, and mingled with each other across 100 activities and three days.I was curious, and I wanted answers. A week later, I was having dinner with the person responsible for the event, Joel Neoh.
I was already familiar with his previous work with Youth Malaysia. His on-ground projects reached over 500,000 youths in colleges and universities nationwide. He was 25 years old, only a year older than I was. And without fully leveraging online technology, he was really bringing youth communities to life, in a very ‘real’ way. We shared stories and exchanged lessons. This led to many more discussions on effective marketing to youths via youth communities, but it always led to the same question.
As more Malaysian youths come together to do what they love and speak out, is there an effective way for brands to join the conversation, and become part of the community?
Surely there is more that can be done than just slapping a logo up in the background.
Continuing success in community marketing strategies has been found in engaging and cultivating the natural communities that form around a product/service. — “Community Marketing”, Wikipedia
We’ve found that brands will become part of the community when they can enhance the community, and ignite the right conversations and associations. But how? Each community is different, and there has to be easier, more effective ways to get specific communities to embrace relevant brands. Once again, it was only a matter of time, and perhaps some effort to bring the pieces together. Being impulsive, ambitious, and excited, Joel and I gave it a shot.
What is the future of youth community marketing, you ask?
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. — Alan Kay, American computer scientist
In the months that followed, Joel and I connected almost 40 of Malaysia’s most vibrant youth community websites under our network, built up YouthMalaysia’s community to 50,000 members, and grew a dedicated survey and feedback community called YouthSays.com of 15,000 deeply profiled members.
And we got these youths to open up, and talk to the brands. Via our tools, brands that target young Malaysians can now get instant feedback from their target market, on anything. In fact, some of the biggest ad agencies and brands have used our tools to do pre-campaign, post-campaign, advertisement split testing, and market feasibility testing.
While this is one clear way for brands to engage more deeply with these communities, we will be opening up more. In October, we’re launching dedicated communities for brands, and opening up a targeted youth advertising inventory.
All these youth communities will lead up to the largest youth lifestyle festival in Malaysia, YOUTH’09, which will build on the success of YOUTH’08. It will be held at PWTC again, with a much larger hall and a targeted crowd of 50,000 young Malaysians. We’re currently working with brands towards relevant tie-ups with the youth communities present in YOUTH’09.
I’m very excited. I’ve always been passionate about growing youth communities, and brands can make things go a long way. As we watch the rise of Malaysian youth communities, we can now seize the opportunities for effective marketing that come with it, and both communities and brands will win.