FreshNetworks Blog

New Chinese social media sites have long been inspired by popular sites and trends from the West, such as Facebook’s distant cousin Renren and Twitter’s brother Sina Weibo.  It is no surprise then that they have embraced Pinterest with both arms.

Rather than just creating direct clones of the site, they have been inspired by the image-heavy, ‘waterfall-like’ layout (the Chinese describe the dynamic grid as ‘Pubuliu’, meaning ‘waterfall stream’), creating new sites that use this layout but add different features or use it in different ways to Pinterest. We’ve found over 30 Chinese Pinterest variants (and we reckon the number is growing); here are a selection of the most interesting ones.

General interest sites

Huaban (meaning ‘Petal’) and Pinfun (no translation needed; even the logo looks familiar)

These sites closely emulate Pinterest , with users collecting, pinning and sharing images, video clips (Huaban) and gif files (Pinfun) of interest.  However, the content is mainly related to Chinese culture, such as upcoming Chinese festivity, popular Chinese stars, food and scenery in China.  Pinfun also has a link called ‘Pandora’, linking merchandise images to the online shopping website Taobao.

Food-specific sites

Meishixing (meaning ‘Gourmet Journey’) and LSKong (‘Lingshi’ means ‘Snacks’; ‘Kong’ means ‘Control’)

Meishixing allows users to share pictures of restaurant dishes they’ve eaten and liked, and ones that make them drool.  Click on the images and the restaurant name and its Google Map location are displayed.  Foodies can browse images according to cities in China; so far there are 38, and likely to increase.  LSKong focuses on snacks, finger food, tea, wine and Chinese medicinal drinks.  What makes LSKong different is its focus on each user’s profile page.  Like Facebook’s profile timeline feature, user’s ID page displays pictures and comments on their snacks; this invites other nibblers to comment on your discoveries too.

Fashion-based sites

Faxian

Early in March 2012 Alibaba Group launched their social shopping website Faxian (meaning ‘Discovery’) beta version.  Specifically targeted at female users, the site allows fashionistas to share and comment on items on virtual pin boards.  By clicking on images it also allows users to purchase items on Taobao.

Mogujie (meaning ‘Mushroom Street’)

Finally, we should look at the growing success of Mogujie (meaning ‘Mushroom Street’), launched in 2010.  The founder Chen Qi developed the concept of combining online shopping and web forums in 2008 by first experimenting with a cosmetics community website his wife was using.  He discovered that users are often unsure of what to buy and which products are stylish, or suitable to them.   Mogujie was already popular amongst females aged 18 to 25 (hence the site’s cutesy mushroom mascot), but when the site incorporated Pinterest’s visually attractive, image-heavy ‘waterfall’ layout, its number of daily visitors soared.  Since last December there were 400,000 registered fashionistas, and 120,000 daily visitors.

Mogujie has a rigorous user registration process; not only do you have to register your name and date of birth, you can add details of your height, weight, skin condition, shoe size and vital statistics. Like LSKong’s focus on profile pages, popular users become models showing everyone what and how they dress (like the UK site What I Wore Today), and provide fashion guidance to her followers.  There are pages dedicated to fashion brands, such as Topshop, Zara and H&M, and the items all link to the relevant pages on Taobao.

Mogujie is also not only about materialism.  During the Chinese Valentine’s Day (the 7th day in July according to the lunar calendar), the site set up a forum for single ladies spilling out their singleton woes, which became hugely popular and only adds to the site’s financial success.

Chen Qi is quick to point out that apart from the ‘waterfall’ layout, Mogujie is different from Pinterest in content and community management style. It is still early stages to decide which of the few Chinese Pinterest variants are here to stay, but we know that to copy like for like will not be sustainable.

Like by matt_london

Facebook has reportedly acquired Instagram for $1 billion in a mix of cash and shares. The photo-sharing service was launched in October 2010 and recently launched its Android app having been exclusively on iPhone before that. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook will be “keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything”, but it is certain that we will now see a new level of integration between these two services.

That Facebook has made this acquisition will not come as too much of a surprise to many. Indeed their had been rumours that they would announce a tool similar to Instagram alongside the changes to Timeline and apps at the F8 conference late in 2011. Also there should be no surprise that it would be interested in a service with more than 30 million users sharing over a billion photos (and all this when it was restricted to just iPhones).

But perhaps more notably, the rise of Instagram, and its acquisition by Facebook, reflects the growing importance of images in the social media mix.

There is, of course, nothing new about us sharing messages through images. We know that we’ve been doing it for over 32,000 years. That’s a lot longer than we’ve been sharing things with the written word. But until relatively recently sharing images online was not as easy. It has been facilitated by the rise of mobile devices with cameras (to take the images) and mobile and wireless data connections (to allow us to share them online). Services like Instagram then help us to make these photos look beautiful.

With this increasing ability to take and share photos online we are seeing a shift from the written word being the main means of communication in social media. Facebook has slowly integrated photos into all actions (from events to status updates); with its most recent implementation of Timeline we have seen photos take primacy in the way that the “Matt is…” status updates used to. Twitter has also made it easier to share and view photos, buying photo-sharing services and then changing their web and other services so you can see images inline with written updates. Finally, we only have to look at the role of Pinterest and Tumblr to see how images can lead in social media.

For brands this requires a real shift in the way that many have been using social media. Many have focused on engaging people through words – status updates, questions, discussions, Q&A. For others social media has been closely aligned to their SEO strategies – creating written content in blogs and forums, and sharing links back to their site. The job of a search engine is to find good written content, and social media has provided brands with a way of creating such content. Win-win. Of course, with images search is less of a benefit, and less useful (as anybody trying to search for a particular image they have in their mind will know.

But the rise of images in social media should help brands to focus on using social media as a tool for truly engaging with your audience. The success of Instagram shows that people like creating and sharing images, they engage round images from friends but also round images in topics of interest. They are easy to reshare and provoke just as many discussions as the written word.

Brands that are truly engaging their audiences in social media will find that the rise of images supports and promotest their tactics. It will give them another way to engage their audiences in terms that they understand and care about. Those brands who are just promoting their content or using social media as just another channel for the same messages will find this changing landscape more challenging.

There is a concept in macroeconomics called ‘perfect information‘. In brief (and apologies for missing many details of the theory and debate for a non-specialist audience), this would say that if all consumers know all things, about all products, at all times, then they will choose the best one for them. Taken to its conclusion, this theory would say that the best products would get the highest sales; and conversely the worst products would get no sales. The best products would survive, because they are the best.

Traditionally, in any purchase, the consumer does not have perfect information at all. Buying a TV, for example, there was no way that they can know all things about all products. Their selection was immediately reduced to the ones a particular store had chosen to stock (so they were not even exposed to all products), they got most of their information from either what the manufacturer or the salesperson chooses to highlight (and so they were in control of the information that is known) and, critically, they did not know about future products that might be just about to come out. The power in this sales relationship lies with the manufacturer and the salesperson, and not the consumer.

Of course, there have been many ways that this ‘information asymmetry‘ can be rebalanced. Organisations such as Which? in the UK have long published detailed reviews and analyses of products. As competition in the market grows, consumers have access to more stores in their towns and online that stock more products for them to compare against. But they are still limited by the products they are able to find (and then buy) and in most cases by the information the manufacturers and salespeople choose to release about their product.

Social media has changed this, or at least many would say has the potential to change this. Reviews, the ability to find other people with a product, and the ability to share images, videos and discussions have flooded the market with information from consumers and for consumers. The manufacturers and salespeople have lost some of their advantage and the information asymmetry is yet again rebalanced a little.

But, will all this extra information flooding the market lead to consumers knowing about all products that exist, knowing all information about these, and having this information to hand when they want it? Will social media lead to perfect information in the consumer market?

It is tempting to claim that it will do. Tempting to claim that social media is bringing a revolution in consumer information that will put consumers on an equal footing with manufacturers, salespeople (and marketers). Tempting to claim that social media will lead to only the best products surviving in the market. But this is unlikely to be the case.

What is happening is actually confusing the picture even more than it was before. In the traditional example above, it was clear that the manufacturer and salesperson had more information than the consumer, and everybody knew that. Social media has not led to perfect information, but rather has made things less clear.

Now the consumer does have more information, that is clear and is evidenced in their changing purchasing behaviour. It is marked in some markets (notably hotels with the likes of Tripadvisor) than others, but this extra information is coming and is changing markets. However, this information is not perfect – the consumer still does not know everything about every product – social media is creating two bigger issues with this information:

1. Access to information. The real challenge with all this extra information in the market is the ability for consumers to search for, sort through and find the information they want. As more and more information is out there, tools and organisations that facilitate this will become more important and more valuable.
2. Information accuracy. The problem with many reviews and other information in social media is that there is no way that we can 100% assure its accuracy. Often this doesn’t matter – we use it to help inform a decision and use our best judgement to decide on the accuracy. But perfect information relies on the information we have about a product being accurate. As has been seen (again with many Tripadvisor reviews), this cannot be relied upon.

So social media is certainly flooding the market with information. It is definitely rebalancing the information asymmetry between the manufactures / salespeople and the consumer. And it is evidently changing consumer behaviour and making brands change and behave differently too.

But is social media leading to perfect information? No. It is muddying the waters. Perhaps the biggest danger (or advantage – depending on the point of view you are looking at this from) is that social media is leading consumers to think they have all the information and are making the best choices of the best products because of this. When in reality they may be getting closer to this state, but they are not there yet and will probably never get there.

From SXSW to new apps on the scene, this month has seen another big month for social media. Let’s take a look at our what’s hot in social media round-up for March 2012…

Charity and social media

The beginning of March saw a host of charities using International Women’s Day on 8^th as an opportunity to do something interesting in social. One of the most striking examples was Bollock’s to Poverty’s Facebook app which turns your timeline into that of an oppressed 1950’s housewife to highlight gender inequality issues.

Another charitable issue which came to light in March was the hotly debated Kony 2012 video from Invisible Children. If you’re one of the last people on earth not to watch it (over 86 million people have watched it on Youtube) the video is about raising public awareness of Joseph Kony, who is head of guerrilla group, the LRA in Uganda. Despite being a complex issue, this campaign has simply mushroomed in a way which other marketers could only dream of for their brands.

Social entertainment

On a lighter note, March saw the explosion of ‘Draw Something’, the app ‘du jour’. With a staggering 35 million downloads and a billion drawings a week, this Pictionary-style app has been making hundreds of thousands of pounds from in-app adverts per day. No surprise then, that social gaming powerhouse Zynga has just bought OMGPOP, the creators behind ‘Draw Something’ for a cool £113 million.

Meanwhile, social TV has been gaining traction in the UK with Social TV app Zeebox seeing a strong increase in user numbers following a TV advertising campaign, supported by BSkyB’s recent investment in the company.

Pinterest

This month the buzz around Pinterest has continued. British airline BMI has launched what could be Pinterest’s first lottery by encouraging fans to re-pin images from popular holiday destinations for the chance to win free flights. Pinterest itself has been suffering the common annoyances that come with popularity – clones and spammers. Take a look at this site for example – look familiar at all?

Finally, this month sees the launch of Facebook’s full screen photo viewer and the changeover for brands from pages to timeline is anticipated tomorrow. Are you ready?

The Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK has warned employers not to ask for the Facebook username and log-in details of their staff or of people who apply for jobs. That this even has to be ruled on will come as a surprise to many – I wouldn’t expect to give my employers access to my house, or to my diary or to my holiday photos. But apparently some employers in the UK (but more in the US) have been asking for this data so that they can get an understanding of a candidate before they hire them, or of an employee they have working for them.

That this is being done, or even being talked about, reinforces the negative attitude there can be to social media in many organisations and in many recruitment processes. At its worst, it is a way to spy on people and something that should be banned from all workplaces and all workplace activities. This is clearly wrong.

Rather than banning social media or turning into a tool that is used to spy on employees, organisations should be encouraging and educating them to use social media to support their work and to support the brand they work for. A more restrictive attitude to social media is most likely to lead to a lack of respect of the medium and, potentially, of the brand you work for in that medium.

For many leaders and managers, social media can feel scary and like the unknown – there are new channels and networks and tools all the time, and the chances are others in your organisation will be more knowledgeable about them. The openness and sharing that social media enables is new to us all and is very different to the way that most businesses and managers have been used to. And for many there is a real concern that social media is about chat with friends and so it is wasting time in the workplace. None of these areas should lead to restrictive policies on social media, rather they should lead to training, sharing and education so that businesses can use social media in the most effective way.

The most successful businesses, and those that are set to make the greatest advantage from social media are those with a clear programme of training and educating staff about how the brand, and how they as individuals, can use social media. Both for personal reasons and for the brand. The line between the two is drawn, employees understand how and where social media can help them at work and so understand what kind of usage is acceptable.

For example, you might not want one of your sales team to be spending an hour chatting to a friend on Facebook. You might, however, love them to spend this time building initial relationships and credibility with contacts across a target segment or sector. You equally wouldn’t want one of your concierge or front of house teams in a hotel looking at YouTube videos for an hour, you probably would like to spend downtime searching for new places and tips in their city through YouTube or Foursquare so that they can better advise your clients.

Social media can help people to do their jobs more effectively and more easily – helping you to find people, find information, find solutions and learn things. At a conference in Cambridge last week, this was summed up most effectively for me by Charles Elvin, the CEO of the Institute of Leadership & Management in the UK:

Employees need to be constantly learning to help them and to help their employer; and social media is the best way of them doing this

To make the most of this, employers need to take responsibility for training their staff. The true social business has a process of training and educating all staff about social media, how they can use it, how they should use it for work and what they should not do. They may go on to train employees about how the brand uses social media and how they can contribute.

Social media offers many great opportunities for brands and for their employees to be more efficient and do things in new ways. Most people need support and training to make the most of this and it is this that should be put in place, not restrictive policies behaviours.