SalingSilang Converts Social Conversations to Useful Data in Indonesia

Indonesia is a huge social media nation and has been called “The Next Big Thing in Digital Media“.

If you haven’t already known, in terms of number of users, Indonesia is the second largest Facebook nation and the fourth largest Twitter nation in the world. With so many status updates and tweets in the country, there’s clearly a massive amount of social data that could be analyzed and turned into meaningful actions. But how can we do that?

Saling Silang is the answer, at least in Enda Nasution‘s vision and opinion. Read on as Enda answers a few of our questions:

1. What is SalingSilang.com?

SalingSilang.com aims to provide all information and analysis on Indonesians’ digital voice through human editor and also our  SalingSilang Engine which tracks conversations in Twitter, blogs, Facebook and eventually mailing lists and forums.

We’ll be providing the enterprise version of SalingSilang.com called “SalingSilang.com Index” to businesses as well as digital agencies for them to have a framework when evaluating and planning their digital initiatives.

2. Who founded PT Saling Silang?

PT Saling Silang was founded by several people, a combination of seasoned Indonesian digital players like Didi Nugrahadi who is one of the founders of Detik.com in 1998, the first and largest Indonesian News Online. Other founders have backgrounds in mainstream media and digital marketing, but are also rooted in the online community. I myself involved a lot in the Indonesian blogging community, as I started blogging as early as 2001. I was the chairman of the first Indonesian blogging conference in 2007 and continue to help steer the committee till today.

3. When was it founded?

PT Saling Silang was formally launched in Feb 2011 but before that we have been experimenting with different sites, first as blogging provider, dagdigdug.com in 2008, followed by Politikana.com in 2009. Subsequently there were other UGC sites like Ngerumpi.com, BicaraFilm.com, CuriPandang.com, B2W-Indonesia.or.id and 12 others. We planned to grow this community of websites to 50 site this year.

4. Did you guys receive any funding?

We have been bootstrapping since 2007 and received funding from a European VC based in Singapore at the end of Jan 2010.

5. I have read and heard that SalingSilang is the head of an entire company.  You guys own Politikana, Ngerumpi, Tentukan, and even a Twitter app, TuiTwit. What is the objective here?

There are few layers of SalingSilang.com. First of course the flagship site is SalingSilang.com. We believe that social media in Indonesia will eventually have a positive impact upon its people. The audience is growing fast and the digital scene will take on a more siginificant role in all aspects of life, society, business, politics, education, and more.