Shahul delivering his speech at the Summit
KUALA LUMPUR: The power of social media is in what it lets us do and connect with, said Malaysia Social Media Chambers founder and president Shahul Hameed Dawood.
"We've passed and long crossed the point where social media seems new or particularly novel.
"Even the term social media itself is beginning to feel outdated; the communications it refers to have become so ingrained into our everyday existences," he said in his keynote address at the launch of the fourth World Bloggers and Social Media Summit.
Shahul said that the power of social media is in having the ability to connect with more than a billion people.
"The story isn't the 70 hours of video uploaded every minute - the story is that anyone with a story to tell can broadcast it to the whole globe in just a click," he said.
Ezzad Emir, the vice-president and organising chairman of Malaysia Social Media Week 2015, said the social media landscape has changed over the years in Malaysia.
"Numbers have grown tremendously and that is not shocking as this is the future, the Internet has finally taken control of many people's lives," said Ezzad, attributing the cause to the increasing ease of Internet access in Malaysia.
The Summit is part of the programme for the Malaysia Social Media Week which will address pertinent and relevant issues, moving away from merely traditional social media.
Topics discussed during the event include crowdsourcing via social media, damage control on social media, and combining apps with social media campaigns.
The summit features a diverse roster of more than 30 international speakers and social media specialists from about 10 countries.
Key speakers include former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Deputy Education Minister P. Kamalanathan, Social@Ogilvy regional director Jonathan Nguyen, India's Bharatiya Janata Party national head of information technology Arvind Gupta, Lenovo social data consultant Anna Rokina, Times Group Digital chief editor Rajesh Kalra, personalities such as Christopher Tock, Joe Lee, and bloggers Grace Tan and Ng Sock Peng.
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