Social Media Spotlight: Abang Edwin, Community Manager at Yahoo! Indonesia

Abang Edwin (@bangwinissimo) is considered a pioneer in community management in Indonesia. He began his journey in 1998 and successfully launched several interest-based communities for Music enthusiasts, Volkswagen lovers using mailing-list as a platform. His passion for human behavior on social media lead him to become Community & Social Media Manager at Yahoo! Southeast Asia starting 2007 and Yahoo! Indonesia starting 2010. Abang is sharing with us some tips about community management and some thoughts on Indonesia's social media landscape. The country was reported as "the world’s second-largest market for Facebook and the third-largest for Twitter" by The Economist.

• Can you briefly tell us about your role at Yahoo! as a CM? Are you involved in the Koprol activation?

My role as a senior community manager with Yahoo! is to build and maintain communities around Yahoo! products and act as a brand advocate online. A big part of my job is also to educate users especially on newly launched products and help them become loyal users and evangelists. Koprol is a very unique location-based social network (acquired by Yahoo! in May 2010) that needs specific support in a lot of different ways but my team is facilitating its expansion.

• What KPIs is your manager typically looking at when evaluating your work?

That's a very good question. At Yahoo!, we are always exploring the best ways to measure performance internally. We are focusing on engagement value based on number of conversations, number of clicks and number of page views.

• Based on your experience, what are the key success factors to grow a community?

There are 3 main areas to cover in my opinion:

1. Find good platforms: Don't stick to a unique platform but be flexible to find the best fit for your community 
2. Incentivize members to join and participate: This will allow your community to grow and your member will stay engaged
3. And of course provide good community management. The "playground" needs to be properly animated by the CM

• Can you explain us why social media is so popular in Indonesia?
  

I think that most Indonesians love interaction. They love to chat with friends and they are not afraid to adopt new platforms. This is the reason why social networks have always been popular in my country, starting with IRC, mailing-list, chat messenger, Friendster and now Facebook. Some experts were skeptical when Twitter was launched but it's now one of the top destination for Indonesians to interact with friends.

• What's your take on Klout and the notion of influence?

Klout is an interesting tools to analyze the level of influence of a particular person on social media and I think that it will soon become a standard in the industry.

• Would you recommend 4-5 people to follow on Twitter?

@chrisbrogan, @pennolson, @rww, @socialmedia2day, @mitchjoel

Have a specific question about the Indonesian market for Abang? Ask him in the comment section and connect with Abang on Influenceon, Google+ or Twitter @bangwinissimo.