A Blog Post to Datuk Seri Najib on Social Media Marketing

This guest story is by Kent, who has been an online marketing consultant at Human Website Malaysia for the past seven years. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

I wrote this blog post because I care about the future of Malaysia.

I would like to share some ideas on how to use social media more effectively to communicate and engage your people (Malaysians) and why there are problems in spending $1.8 million to build Tourism Malaysia’s Facebook pages.

Prime Minister, Your Facebook Page Doesn’t Cut It

I hope that you, Datuk, can understand the basics of social media marketing. It is all about communicating and engaging. Let us take a look at your Facebook page below.

I followed your Facebook page, Mr. Prime Minister. But it seems that you never reply to any comments on your Facebook page. We’re now in the conversational era, not the broadcasting era. What you are doing now is broadcasting, not communicating and engaging. Clearly, you have ignored your people on your Facebook page. There is no engagement at all between you and the people.

U.S President Barack Obama uses social media marketing pretty successful and should be used as an inspiration for most government officials. Not only for his Presidential Election 2008 but even until today. Obama has his own President Obama Weekly Address on Youtube. It helps him build relationship between his people and him. He and the White House have their own blogs to communicate and engage with his people. Perhaps you – as the Prime Minister of Malaysia – can also do the same.

Problems in this campaign

In this video, Anthony Loke (DAP-Rasah) slammed the decision to spend $1.8 million when Facebook can actually be used for free. The video is in Malay but you can get the same interpretation and meanings here and here.

Here are the two problems I observed:

1. Impact Creations – Are they proven?

Tourism Malaysia assigned Impact Creations Sdn Bhd to run the entire Facebook marketing campaign for $1.8 million from 2011 – 2013. Well, I tried to search for Impact Creations Sdn Bhd on Google. To my astonishment, Impact Creations doesn’t even has a website. It isn’t visible on search engines. Until today, Impact Creations’ website is still under construction. Plus, Impact Creations doesn’t seem to have an credible portfolio but yet is still able to receive a 1.8 million project. It sounds really fishy to me.