The Nectec Academy and Kapook.com are hosting a two-day conference on the social media, with the aim of raising awareness of the hugely popular online phenomenon.
The event, called Social Media Conference 2010, began today and will end tomorrow.
The academy's director, Adshariya Agsornintara, said the academy wanted to pave the way for Thai society to make practical use of ICT knowledge, and the social media were currently in the public spotlight and were being used for many purposes, including business and politics.
She said the social media were quite new for Thai society and only some groups of people were so far taking advantage of them. This was leading to a gap between people in society who knew about the powerful social media and those who did not.
"We want to bridge this gap and create equal awareness of the social media," Adshariya said.
She said that in this conference, Nectec Academy was cooperating with a private sector organisation -Kapook.com - to reach a wider audience of non-IT people. Normally, the academy's professional training courses focus on IT people. But it has two conferences for non-IT people every year.
Poramate Minsiri, the managing director of Bundit Centre, the operator of Kapook.com, said the social media were new to Thai people and many were unaware of their power. The conference will aim to update participants, acquainting them with the social media and user trends.
"We have a lot of well-known speakers who are experts in different areas, such as regulators, business people and the media, who will share their vision and experiences on adoption of the social media.
"We also have many social-media case studies from around the world, as Thailand is only in the early stages of their use," he said.
