FreshNetworks Blog

China has the biggest market for social networks in the world. Restrictions by the Chinese government has caused several western social networks (e.g. Facebook) difficulty from entering the market, while naitve platforms have thrived. One of these is Sina Weibo, a microblogging service or, as many call it, ‘China’s Twitter’.

Why register an account on Sina Weibo?

Businesses who have brands operating in China, or who are planning to enter the Chinese market(s), should capitalise on the opportunity to protect their brand by ensuring they are properly registered before someone snaps up their name. Sina Weibo is growing quickly and the microblogging platform has recently surpassed 200 million users.

How to secure your brand name

Sadly, Sina Weibo can be a little impenetrable for western eyes. The language barrier has rendered the sign-up process less than UK user-friendly. We thought it would be helpful to take you through the registration process, step-by-step so you can make sure your brand is protected, even if you have no plans to invest in the market quite yet.

Image courtesy of wangruwei

Social media competition in China is beginning to heat up. Facebook and Groupon are looking at engaging the Chinese market as soon as possible and it looks like 2011 will be the pivotal year for Chinese social media.

As Chinese networks emerge and develop, it’s crucial to protect your brand and develop your presence among Chinese ‘netizens’*:

1. Develop your brand strategy

Think about how you want your brand to be perceived online in China. It’s possible that when you take your brand to China, or develop an extant brand image in that market space, you’ll want to be perceived somewhat differently than in European or American markets.

Capitalise on your similarities, differences and novelties. Look at what other brands have been doing and are currently doing and see what lessons can be learned from successes and mistakes.

2. Start monitoring Chinese Internet trends

• Baidu, which holds about 76% of the Chinese search market, looks set to aggressively expand its social services profile  (and has made a start with its Baidu Beat English service).
• ChinaSmack is  great for monitoring Chinese Internet vocabulary, Internet memes and viral videos – one recent meme involves punning on the word ‘GeiLi’ (‘Gives power’). Something that is ‘Geilivable’ is cool or great.

3. Protect your brand’s trademarks

If somebody is posting as your brand on social networking sites, you want it to be you. Protect your trademarks by registering now on the most popular networks:

• Tencent WeiBo – China’s leading microblogging service with over 100 million registered members.
• Sina WeiBo – China’s second microblogging service with an official reach of over  50 million members.
• Ren Ren – Positioning itself as China’s answer to Facebook with over 22 million active users.
• TuDou – China’s leading video service ranked 11^th in China’s traffic rankings according to Alexa.

4. Create a brand persona to engage on Chinese forums and blogs

Like online communities in Europe and the US, Chinese ‘netizens’ love to engage. Find ways to make your brand fun and interesting. Create interesting pictures, videos and interactive content and present it to Chinese communities.

5. Assess the content you use to engage

Don’t be afraid to engage. At the same time, be wary of the risks of some forms of content. Avoid politics, overt sexuality and extreme violence. These are themes that can put you on a wrong footing with the Chinese authorities and Chinese ‘netizens’. Instead, look for ways to associate your brand with fun, happiness, good-living and either China or the West depending on the brand image you’re aiming for.

6. Use the offline world to help engage online

Thousands of Internet-savvy Chinese students flock to the UK, the rest of Europe and the US each year. Find ways to engage with them offline and you’ll reap the benefits online as they engage with online Chinese communities.

*A ‘netizen’ is a commonly used translation of ‘网民’ (lit. ‘Net People’)

The latest edition of the McKinsey Quarterly includes the results from their global survey of Web 2.0 in firms. The survey documents the developments that we see at FreshNetworks – more firms are using more Web 2.0 tools for more complex business purposes. McKinsey go even further, noting that a significant finding from this year’s survey is that:

Companies that are deriving business value from these tools are now shifting from using them experimentally to adopting them as part of a broader business practice.

Web 2.0 tools are starting to enter the mainstream in business, those who trial them find them beneficial and want to look at ways they can use these tools across their business, helping them meet multiple aims.

If you’re interested in some of the detail of the McKinsey study, I’d suggest you go to the article on their site here (you will need to sign-up, although it is free). However, for me the most interesting findings are:

• More community-based tools are growing in their use. In 2008, 34% of businesses studies used blogs (compared with 21% in 2007); 32% used wikis (compared with 24% in 2007)
• Web 2.0 tools are popular both for internal purposes (94% of firms studied) and for interfacing with customers (87% of firms studied). When they are being used for the latter purpose, this is primarily to improve service to existing customers and then as an acquisition tool
• Blogs were more popular in Asia-Pacific and India; social networking particularly popular in North America and China; and, mash-ups and rating more popular in Europe
• The biggest barriers to using Web 2.0 tools are a lack of understanding of the financial benefits (28% of respondents), internal cultural barriers (22%) and lack of skills (17%)

This last point, the barriers to adoption, show the areas where we as an industry need to focus our efforts to help clients. We have written before on this blog about measurement and ROI in online communities and in social media (see posts here, here and here) and it seems that this is the biggest barrier that firms need support with. Perhaps as these firms move from trialling the use of new tools, to using them for specific business purposes, the measurement of how they contribute to these will be easier.

Some more reading

• Are Social Media Jobs Here to Stay?
• Web 2.0 Design and Internet Marketing
• Analysis: McKinsey’s enterprise web 2.0 survey
• Gartner throws weight behind enterprise Web 2.0

I saw a really useful set of research findings today from Universal McCann, the third wave of their research into the impact of social media. The research comes from a couple of months ago but is a fantastic digest based on a large respondent base.

The slide deck is below and is very detailed and worth going through, but I thought I’d pull out three highlights that resonate with our own experiences at FreshNetworks.

• The research highlights the power and continuing rise of the Asian social media market. China has more bloggers than the US and Western Europe combined and across the region social media growth is huge. I’ve seen this for a number of years, often investigating the Asian market (especially South Korea, China and Japan) for clients wanting to know what the next thing to hit the Western Europe might be.
• Video is the fastest growing reported area with significant growth in penetration across all regions. We see this every day – a growth in the use of video on sites and of making video portable and shareable. I know that the BBC in the UK has seen a significant rise in the viewing of video in its news site since it started embedding video rather than linking to it.
• There is a measurable impact of social media on brand reputation. The research shows that 34% of people post opinions (positive or negative) about brands and that 36% feel more positive about brands that have a blog. This is an interesting finding, our recent post on brand blogging talked about how brands might get this right, this research underlines the importance of getting it right.

The slide deck below covers the full detail of the research findings and I really think it is worth your while reading it. It’s particularly useful for looking at how different regions and countries are developing in different ways.

Some more reading

• Report: Like it or not, number of bloggers growing rapidly
• UK Social Network User, Ad Spend Numbers Keep Growing
• Firms ‘miss’ social site success
• YouTube most popular network site
• Summer Social-Network Traffic Still Sizzling, but Down from ’07

It started with a flurry of short messages. “I felt an earthquake” came one message from peanutbrittle25. “EARTH QUAKE in Beijing?? Yup” came a reply from dtan.

Short messages like these spread across the world and for the rest of today people were glued to their screens to watch what was happening. With updates direct from the scene. But these weren’t traditional news outlets. The messages spread through Twitter.

Social networking works because I connect with my friends and then they connect with their friends. This pattern continues and means that messages can travel very quickly between people – one person tells everybody they know; all of these people then tell everybody they know. And so on.

This is what happened today with twitter and the earthquake in China. It became a “crowd-sourced” reporting tool with people on the ground being able to report what’s happening, what it’s really like, where they were when it happened, what happened next. All the questions people want to know when events are unfolding, and the kind of details that traditional journalists would hunt out to report the next day. With twitter we can, and could, get this information in real-time and well-connected people could act as nodes, receiving and transmitting the updates.

Innovation in news has often been about reducing the time between an eye-witness reporting on an event and it getting to the reader. The Crimean War was a big step forward as the extension of railways and telegraph networks across Europe let reports come back in just a few days – ‘real-time’ reporting as it felt in the 19th Century. Today we can reduce this time to practically nothing. Somebody can witness an event, text twitter and the network effect on the web spreads the message around the world. Now that’s a rather exciting development!

Of course, this doesn’t mean the end of professional journalism; peanutbrittle25 works for the BBC in Beijing, as a journalist!