Sangat Pedas

A Reckless Simplification And Uncool Provocation

September 18, 2011 by Remco | 0 comments

Sangat Pedas, a blog that loves the use of exaggeration and sarcasm. We love controversy, provocation, discussions, drama and an occasional confrontation.

Some of you might remember the post in with the snappy title “Social Media Marketing is a HOAX!” in which I personally argued, amongst others, that the value of Social Media is highly over-rated. Well, people got upset, big time!

When waking up with a hangover this morning quickly checking my Twitter there was an unusual amount of mentions. Lucky for me no “Red Square girls” and after quickly disregarding the mentions by the Tokobagus team members fishing for a salary raise (not even when I’m drunk guys) there were 28 MENTIONS left. All came from the same person whom I’ve never heard of before.

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Twitter Celebrity Stalker Alert Service

September 13, 2011 by Remco | 1 Comment

Having become a celebrity myself *kuch* I’m used to having many friends *kuch* and many media attention. But there’s a dark side to being a celebrity: the inevitable stalkers on Twitter. Of course you can easily block creepy followers but with 1,522,631 followers that can be a time consuming and inaccurate operation. After all you don’t want to block your nice fans that just hunger for some kind attention but obviously you want to get rid of the real, often silent and devious, Twitter stalkers.

There are people out there claiming they have created an app for that but unfortunately these are just plain criminals who are out to place a virus on your computer making you end up worse than before.

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Social Media Marketing is a Hoax!

September 11, 2011 by Remco | 5 Comments

Social media marketingMillions of companies world wide fall victim to Social Media Marketing companies every day #FACT! One of my tweets today that pretty much expresses my feeling about the Social Media Marketing Industry. I also said that the profession Social Media Marketeer is somewhat like a taxi driver, but for the last job you at least need a drivers license and a permit. Pretty bold statements and btw not meant bad towards all the nice taxi drivers.

I realize what I’m getting myself into here, it’s almost impossible to prove the absence of something because just one occurrence will prove me wrong. Obviously I’m talking about successful Social Media Marketing campaigns. And of course there have been successful Social Media campaigns but bear with me to make my point.

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Point proven, no more Twitter auto feeds

January 8, 2011 by Remco | 0 comments

Recently I wrote a post claiming that according to the statistics hyper activity on Twitter gets you much more followers and I announced a field experiment to put this claim to the test and so I did. I added some external feeds to Google feedburner and used the publicize feature to automatically tweet about posts from sites like Techcrunch, Engadget and some others.

I started this experiment on my own twitter account on December 17th when I had 210 followers and now it’s three weeks later and my follower base grew over 50% to a staggering 306 followers. Nice result but I annoyed the hell out of some of my more appreciated followers and a rough estimate says that more than half of my new followers are spammers or companies I’m really not interested in.

So my conclusion, auto feeds on Twitter definitely will improve the quantity of followers but has the opposite effect on the quality.

Bubble is coming, bubble 2.0 is coming!

January 3, 2011 by Remco | 0 comments

Got your slick powerpoint presentation ready? Did you give your business plan an extra boost? Already have a few visitors on your start-up in stealth mode? Got your blue shirt and kaki pants back from the laundry service? Memorized your elevator pitch? Made yourself familiar with Valley slang? Came up with a cool logo and an even more cool name for your company? (fruggle is already taken)

Our time has finally come, the moment every start-up entrepreneur has been waiting for, better than having Christmas and Thanksgiving in one day: Bubble 2.0 is coming! So exit stealth mode and make sure your on Techcrunch, e27 or Dailysocial, certified altars for any tech investor. VC’s armed with big fat check books are already fighting to get a piece of just about any pie, even when it’s plain old fashioned apple pie. Don’t worry if your business is still 1.0, just ad some Web 2.0 visual effects, connect with Facebook and Twitter, say it’s all in the cloud and you’re all set.

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Need traffic? Hoax a celebrity dead!

December 30, 2010 by Remco | 5 Comments

Everybody running websites is always chasing after more traffic because traffic equals money and thus the more traffic you get the more money you make (I’ll explain it later dad). So I’m writing my ass off in this blog to build a solid amount of visitors so that hopefully by the time I’m 70 years old I can retire in a tiny apartment on Bali.

Now I can understand that people are not happy with the prospect of having to wait that long or with the final reward and so they think of better and more efficient ways to gain traffic fast. Now shocking news about celebrities is always good for a lot of traffic and when it’s “user-generated” it’s even better.

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Twitterview: Shinta Dhanuwardoyo

December 27, 2010 by Remco | 10 Comments

Allow me to introduce a woman that hardly needs an introduction, Shinta Witoyo Dhanuwardoyo: digital power woman, techno entrepreneur, one of the first Internet pioneers in Indonesia and the hardest working women in the Indonesian Internet community. Shinta Dhanuwardoyo was born in Indonesia in 1970 and spend 7 years of her life studying Architecture and Interior, International Business and Corporate Leadership and Innovation in respectively Eugene, Portland (both in Oregon, USA) and in Adelaide Australia.

After her return to her homeland Indonesia Shinta became an extremely busy, passionate and successful entrepreneur. In 1996 Shinta founded Bubu.com which is now Indonesia’s leading Digital media Agency specializing in both online and mobile media. Shinta is also the instigator behind the Bubu awards, Indonesia’s most prestigious web award, as well as Pesta Blogger, Indonesia’s first and only national Blogger’s event. If that isn’t enough Shinta also founded and managed Mojopia/Plasa.com (now a Telkom Indonesia company) but recently resigned after more than two years.

Definitely time to find out more about this intriguing and strong woman with a deep love and passion for Batik. So we’ve decided to subject Shinta to a twitterview (question and answer max 140 characters) SangatPedas style, raw and uncut. Continue Reading →

Facebook now leads in 115 of 132 countries

December 22, 2010 by Remco | 0 comments

Probably not surprising but still impressive to see how Facebook slowly but surely beats any local competition in almost any country. Thanks to the diligence work of Italian Vincenzo Cosenza we can give a clear insight in the current social media market and the development over the last 18 months.

While in june 2009 there were still 16 social networks other than Facebook leading in their local market, 18 months later only 11 have withstand the Facebook power which makes Facebook market leader in 115 of 132 countries. Orkut is still market leader in Brasil, V-Kontakte still rules Russia and Zing is still Singapore’s favorite.

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Hyper activity on Twitter pays

December 17, 2010 by Remco | 1 Comment

Twitter clockSysomos recently published some nice research on Twitter statistics in 2010 compared to 2009. The highlights of this research shows:

Users with more than 100 friends have increased by three-fold to 21% since 2009.

•  22.5% of users accounted for about 90% of all tweets.
•  80% users have made fewer than 500 tweets.
•  Justin Bieber is one of top two-word phrases and top
name in user’s bios.
•  Significantly more users are disclosing their location, bio
and web information in Twitter profiles.

So it has been a good year for Twitter in which they probably doubled their number of members. What got my attention in the publication was this graph:

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