the(new)mediaslut

Ping.sg has banned another member from its aggregation site for making seditious remarks that could split the community into two.

Wrote Uzyn for Ping.sg,

I love Ping.sg and I will not hesitate to take any actions to stop any unappreciative users from trying to break the site and the community.

The member who Ping.sg has banned isn’t just an ordinary member, but somebody who have worked within the community from day 1, maybe later.

Wrote DK of blog.dk.sg,

Missed the good old days when everything is still peaceful in the community. When the community is run by the community itself and not some community manager. When there is no elitism even in the regulars. When every single member are equal.

Still remember the first gathering at Pitstop Cafe.
The exposure during the Nexus event.
The meetup at Essential Brew.
The great gathering at Geek Terminal.
The fun we had at Far East Shopping Centre booth.
The ping.sg presence during blogout.
The geek terminal launch party and the mini birthday celebration after that.
The first anniversary party.
The funny advertisement we made for ping.sg.
The huge gathering at Ms Clarity Cafe.
The recording of blogbuzz.tv.
The wonderful Christmas gathering.

For that, DK99 was banned from Ping.sg

DK was referring to a blog post made by Daphne who is the part-time marketing person cum community manager for the Ping.sg  community.

Daphne did a great job of responding to DK’s post.

Wrote Daphne,

When I wrote the term, the “in group”, it was really quite clear to me that it was not an exclusive list of bloggers, and neither was it limited only to those bloggers who attended. If you look at my pictures from that damning post, you will see the faces of some of the most prominent bloggers on Ping.sg.

It had all the elements of a perfect PR crisis communication plan. Firstly, Daphne apologised for her post if it caused any unhappiness among readers who misunderstood her words.

She explained what her post really meant and finally ended it explaining how Ping.sg is for everybody.

Unfortunately, the instigator got banned and the issue is now a blogging point for the weekend.

While Nocturne provided a psychological explanation to the actions of Ping.sg and DK, this blogger doesn’t really think DK is all out for the glory.

DK’s post highlights a classical dilemma that all marketing teams have: How do you balance your marketing activities to keep existing clients happy and at the same time  get new clients in? In this case here, replace clients with members.

DK was probably concerned that new members are alienated from the usual group. This meant that all Ping.sg activities would be by the same members every year and this members could feel burnt out by it.

This probably explained why a couple of Ping.sg community members who helped out in last year’s Awards are taking a back seat.

As the community grows, you want new members and existing members to work together.

This blogger doubts the founder of Ping.sg plays World of Warcraft as you constantly have new members joining guilds which have level 70s soloing those level 20 instances or even up to level 60 ones nowadays. How do existing guild members help the newbies get to that level?

If the founder of Ping.sg is complaining about being in the red, it isn’t really a surprise.

Vendors want more than just banner ads these days and if they part money with Ping.sg, they want extra value adds from Ping.sg.  Maybe something like putting their content in a edm which can be send to members.

The irony of it is that Ping.sg has banned commercial blogs that depend on Ping.sg to get the hits and awareness so they can pay Ping.sg the money to advertise on Ping.sg.

So banning advertisers like Andrew Peters and Chain of Beads for having commercial blogs is like biting the hand that feeds you.

Furthermore, the only advantage that Ping.sg has is a technological one where members need only put in their RSS feed once and the site automatically updates it when a new post is entered.

From a marketing standpoint, more and more competitors are entering the other fields that Ping.sg stand a higher chance of making money, like the blog awards.

Omy.sg has entered this space. Not only do they have sponsors, they have rewards for the voters to vote for the blog awards.

The Ping.sg Awards is in less than two weeks time and no sponsor has been announced.

Inside marketing sources have also highlighted that working with Ping.sg Awards have not gone really smoothly too.

Does this mean  the found of Ping.sg have to fork out his own money to host the event?

Andrew would have tried his best to convince two of his clients, Recuit.net, or even Twinity, to part some marketing dollars to sponsor the awards, but this blogger can safely assumed that opportunity has been slammed long time ago.

This leads to the possibility that DK might one day become a marketing manager with a huge marketing budget to do online marketing. With the bridge burnt, this blogger doubts DK would want to bring Ping.sg from red to black.