He said that a lot because I was terrible at math – still am. I was terrified out of my wits everytime he looked at me and he would say, “Remove that curtain of hair from your face, woman.” If only that hair alone was responsible for my failing math …

But no, it wasn’t Mr Ong in front of me but rather Ian McKee, who runs an agency called Vocanic in Singapore, which calls itself “Asia’s leading Social Media and Word of Mouth Marketing Agency”.

McKee was the keynote speaker at last week’s Asia Connect in Singapore, organized by HSMAI Asia Pacific. He came on right after my opening panel and I could tell he was itching to address a point we had raised about the need for hotels and venues to free Internet access “because the Internet is like the toilet”, as Brett Henry, Abacus International’s vice president of marketing, astutely said just a couple of days at the Asia Connect event in Bangkok.

Yes, it’s that old “free the Internet” revolutionary call and McKee started his address with, “Do you know the difference between bad profit and good profit?”

Bad profit is short-term – you make money, yes, but you lose customers’ goodwill. Good profit is making money while earning advocacy.

“You still want to charge for Internet access?” he challenged, after he had said things like “Bad profits make you fat and lazy as a brand”.

McKee is a speaker who likes to challenge. I like that, but I think there’s a difference between shocking your customers to think and frightening the wits out of them.

Showing data that showed a huge disparity between media consumption and how advertising budgets were being spent in Asia, he said, “Shame on you” and he told the audience they wouldn’t get jobs in Taiwan or Hong Kong because their skill sets were lagging behind their customers’ needs.

Mario Jobbe, who obviously was not raised in the Asian school system, challenged McKee, saying he was basing his remarks on 2006 data. “You better make sure your data is current and accurate before you start telling people they can’t get jobs. I know of marketers in the room (at Asia Connect) who are using the web effectively as a channel.”

McKee, saying he had tried to get more current data, added that in general, the same disparity would still be true – marketing spend, he said, was still lagging behind customer trends in the travel industry.

McKee’s message was that brands today had to earn customer advocacy. He said measuring customer satisfaction scores was old school, telling the audience to throw out those survey forms.

The key and only question that mattered in advocacy marketing was, would you recommend us to your friends and family?

He also said the most stupid question anyone can ask is “what’s the ROI on social media”?

I kind of felt so stupid after that remark because that’s a question I like to ask and so I voiced aloud the belief that “there’s no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid answers” or something stupid like that.

By which time too, as McKee got to the end of his presentation, I suspected the audience had either been so shamed or felt so stupid that there was just the kind of silence that I recall descended at the end of Mr Ong’s classes.

One thing I will say though is at least McKee has opinions and he dares to voice them – like Mario, he too wasn’t educated in the Asian school system (his bio says he studied in the University of Birmingham).

So my dear industry friends, all of us educated in the Asian school system and who had teachers like Mr Ong, I say to you, it’s okay to have opinions and voice them, never mind if people think you’re stupid or they say, “Shame on you”.

In today’s world of the social web, you need opinions to create unique, differentiated content to get your business to stand out. Otherwise, speakers such as McKee will keep trying to shock you into saying something and if you say nothing, well, “shame on you”.

Featured image credit (Hand holding an empty speech bubble): Ockra/iStock