Singapore Social Media: Romancing Singapore

While I was in Singapore last week, we talked about interesting campaigns, this was one of my favourites: the Singapore Government saw the need to increase the population of Singapore so they started a Romancing Singapore campaign.

1. Romancing Singapore campaign

This is my all time favorite.
40 Years ago, when Singapore was an under developed little country, the government decided that campaigns would be needed to stop the population of growing, not to burst the obviously (Singapore is an island) existing borders of how many people Singapore could hold.
This was executed through well done AIDS preventive, birth control etc. campaigns, with a huge success. Mission completed.

Almost. Years later the government realized that their campaigns was such a success that soon the little country would face the problem of getting extinguished soon. No one was getting babies any more, and the only real value of an island without any natural reserves is… their people.
(The 5 Best Places In Singapore To Have Sex In Your Car)

So Singapore decided to start the “Romancing Singapore Campaign”, which aim simply was to get couples back in their bedroom and starting to “make more babies again”. Newspaper printed guides on best ways of how and where to have Sex in the car while the Playboys magazine web page still was locked on the islands Internet.(3 Reasons Why Singapore Is The Most Unromantic City Ever)
In the end the campaign was a much lesser success then expected and Singapore faces serious problems of lagging man/brain power these days. (From Angry Ang Mo)

It actually went much further than newspaper printed guide as it’s a whole year of marketing messages to change the behaviour of a nation.

Movies anyone? The Mocktail implies no alcohol… we want people to marry and have babies, not get drunk, have sex and then regret… that’s the Australian way. heh. The government running it’s own dating social network is not without it’s challenges:

All logins of profiles will not be disabled on 1 Oct. No further contact with other members will be possible without reactivation by the administrator once you have registered and attend at least one event.
You will still be able to access the site’s information and register for events by emailing directly to the respective organisers.
We need to stop spammers, scammers and serial online online daters from abusing the system.

Well, lemme tell you: I’ve history with serial daters and playboys and can only applaud the Government’s effort to stop the lyin’ cheatin’ pond suckin’ scum…. oops.

Anyway, the government has funded a number of Stranger networks – coming together for the purpose of meeting unknowns as opposed to friend networks like Facebook.  The forum on RomancingSingapore seemed quite active but very different from normal dating sites  – less Hot Or Not and more about Short Film Festivals.I think that overall there is less fear from Singapore Government about making an error, though there are also less traditional media to put a spin on cases like this:

LADIES BEWARE OF SCAMMERS IN THIS WEBSITE

To all ladies out there, juz beware of these scam stuff. I meet this guy from this website. He said he will send a parcel to me. To cut the story short, i nearly paid RM 3960 = S$1700/- for the release of the parcel. I went to the net and check, there are alot of simlar scam now. After u made a first payment to

them, they will ask for a second etc payment from u.

Something like this would shut down an Australian government run dating site.

I’m interested to know how they block non-Singaporeans and allow purple haired pink grumpy pixies from joining.

I guess they don’t. That’s SilkCharm’s Member’s Corner (admin panel) for the dating online community.

What do you think? The Facebook group only got 300 members in 3 months. In comparison I did it in 48 hours – not sure how social media courses rates against Singaporeans dating though: I think they have the harder task. I noticed that the Facebook group is now at just over 1000 members. Remember this is a year to change the way Singaporeans approach dating and mating.

Hmmm? Is this something our Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should invest time in? Heh. Actually I think it’s a far more creative response to a country’s crisis than anything we would get out of our government. What do you think? You can read the wrap up report on ScienceDirect.com.

*note: the information that it was the Government funding the dating community came from a South African blog and other third party sources. But I also want to say that “it’s common knowledge”… for whatever that is worth in community parlance.