SalingSilang and the Effort to Support Social Media Development in Indonesia

Budi Putra via his blog wrote about the number of sites that will be developed by the existing network in SalingSilang.com into 50 sites. This article certainly caught my attention. It is a considerable amount of growth, since the SalingSilang 'family' members currently only reach 16, they would surely continue to develop new services.

Some of the services incorporated in SalingSilang network have already been discussed in DailySocial, one of it is Tentukan.com. One of the Indonesian Twitter applications, TuiTwit has now also become a network of SalingSilang.

I knew Langsat network (SalingSilang network) through the DagDigDug service or Inmark Digital. I tried to ask a few questions related to SalingSilang via email to Enda Nasution as the Managing Director of SalingSilang. He explained that, "Inmark Digital become a part and a subsidiary of SalingSilang that helps the brands and advertising agencies to communicate in social media." However, "The world of social media is not fixated on the interests of the brand, products, and services alone but on many other things, and that is what we try to do and support with SalingSilang.com."

It is also described that the latest developments of SalingSilang today is not too significant. SalingSilang released their version 2 since February 22, 2011 and aimed to be a website that provides various information about everything happens in the world of social media in Indonesia. SalingSilang also rested their various sites on the model developed with user generated content, such as Politikana.com. They are also now beginning to make reports related to social media in Indonesia and build a bond between the worlds of online and offline with Obrolan Langsat (Obsat) or Langsat Chat in English.

SalingSilang.com believes and concerned that our daily lives and the places where we live is so much richer and will have better quality with the presence of Social Media. Therefore we intend to support and maintain the life of Social Media in Indonesia.

Nasution also explained in the next year SalingSilang will help the community or organization and any initiatives to live in their own website and provided without any cost of development or maintenance. SalingSilang also regularly released reports relating to social media in Indonesia. The latest report can be viewed at this link, and for February will be released soon (this week).

As explained previously, one of the latest SalingSilang service is Kufoto.com, which is newly launched publicly a few weeks ago. Kufoto is a photo sharing site that provides services to those users who want to upload photos and networked. If you see the description on their site, Kufoto is targeting all camera users, but emphasizing on mobile phone and pocket camera users.

Nasution explained that Kufoto will also be supported by mobile natives for each platform. While there are several features in their services, beside uploading photos there is a calendar, facilities to chat and to make a Group. For photos you can choose the categories and photo themes.

Kufoto become one of the interesting SalingSilang 'family' members for me, because it is quite different from the other SalingSilang 'family', and photo is a big interest of Indonesian users. The growth of mobile phone and camera users can also be a large market share, although of course the competition in similar service is pretty hard. Aside from outside services, some local services have also been having a pretty strong user base. Approach to the facility to upload pictures from camera phones and pocket cameras is a niche market that seems to be the main target of Kufoto service.

For myself, the development of SalingSilang now answered my question about their strategy as a main 'funnel' from Langsat networks. They also see the opportunities for the development of social media in Indonesia, the idea is to collect various data that is popular in Indonesia related to social media, process, assemble as reports and manage the community with various activities. This community also must be able to give input data on SalingSilang.

For monetization, Nasution explained that monetization strategies still has not been touched yet, SalingSilang is still focusing on 'tidy up' included office moving (still close to the old office) and focusing on the service development. SalingSilang also has reviewed several opportunities to get revenue from services they provide, but it has not yet become the main focus at this time.

For myself, some of SalingSilang services are very helpful in daily work, such as Tentukan.com and SalingSilang itself. It certainly become interesting to see what other services will be developed by SalingSilang, because managing community on a user generated content based site certainly has its own challenges.

Translated by Nita Sellya.