The Chinese social media UNIVERSE (2^nd Edition)

Mathew McDougall

Copyright Mathew McDougall © 2011

Published at Smashwords

DEDICATION

To my mother, 3 great kids and beautiful wife, Catherine

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“New marketing is about the relationships, not the medium.”
-Ben Grossman

For me, this quote by Ben Grossman sums up some of the misconceptions running around about Chinese social media and was in part, the motivation behind wanting to share my views and ideas in this book.

So a big thank you to all the people that provided their encouragement and assistance on this project. However, special mention for the interns who helped in the research; Lisha Li, Conny Wiryawan and Peilin Fu.

As always, a big thanks to my family for indulging my passion (and arguable addiction) for exploring and writing about social media.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgement……………………………………… i

Preface…………………………………………………….. iv

Introduction to social media………………………….. 1

Understanding the Chinese web …………………….. 17

Chinese social media landscape…………………… 36

Considerations for marketing via Chinese social media………..…………………………………………….. 66 Practical examples and tips for Chinese social media marketing………………………………………. 98

What to measure in social media marketing 127

Final thoughts…………………………………………… 142

Preface

Social media is dramatically and rapidly changing; not just in terms of the number of platforms but also how users (like you and me) interact and engage online. Largely, this is due to the expanding variety of platforms, interconnectivity of functions and automated connection points between the systems/users. 

When Mark Zuckerberg recently said that Facebook would reach one billion users, there were few who were doubtful. After all, we all watched as Facebook reportedly passed 500 million users and then quickly met the 600 million mark (and now beyond). Given this dramatic rise in popularity of social networking it is not surprising that this medium has become a mainstay of many people’s web experience and is second only to Google in its importance to online users (and therefore digital marketers). 

Google is known in the West as a ‘quantity’ search platform (meaning it crawls the majority of websites online and creates an index of this digital content) and for marketers, has become a mature advertising and marketing platform. In contrast, Facebook collects content based around a personal profile and appears to be still evolving their advertising model.

At the F8 Facebook developer conference in 2011, the company announced significant innovations on several fronts. New potential opportunities were being added and the complexity to a marketers’ task of developing effective strategies for Facebook was increased. These new features tended to focus more on traditional media inventory although in the past few months, industry rumors about the advent of Facebook Search are increasing. Facebook Search, if realized, is an exciting new way to index search results based on social information and will clearly be a marketer's dream if one is able to target advertising against this rich user data.

However, it is not my intention to write another book outlining the growth and usage of Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter et al.  There is already a litany of great books out there that do this subject justice.

Instead, I want to inspire you to explore a new universe; or one that some might call a parallel universe. Where familiar names are replaced by foreign sounding ones and where marketing practices sometimes make little sense.

You probably recognize that your marketing world is changing as we face a profession entertaining new technologies and approaches but it’s far more than this. The world is entering a new economic dawn fueled by a rapidly growing Chinese middle class that wants to experience and enjoy Western products and brands.

This new China, is ripe for our Western luxury goods, cars, electronic goods and numerous other products. So, we marketers are being called on in greater numbers to help develop our brands and grow sales in this region.

“Target the middle class in the tier 1 cities with some banner ads” was the default strategy employed by the large multinational companies. However, as competition becomes more fierce and audience segmentation increases, the marketing ideas of the old are replaced. Now like the West, we are seeing a move towards social media marketing to engage the Chinese consumers and interrupt their purchase decisions.

Even if you may not be directly involved in campaign planning or the execution of social media strategies in China, you must be able to speak with your Chinese Agency or in-house Chinese marketing team about their online social media marketing activities.

However, once you start this discussion with your Chinese counterparts I expect you will find missing from this dialog words like “Facebook, Twitter, YouTube” and instead hear new words like “Pengyou.com, Renren, Weibo, Youku”. Therefore, in this book I will introduce you to an area of social media that for many remains a mystery. That is, the world of Chinese social media and the practices of Chinese social media marketing.

1. INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL MEDIA

So, what is all the fuss about social media?

I guess the sign that something has gone mainstream is when you go do a dinner party and most people around the table have some first hand examples, anecdotes and personal experience of the topic. It was in this kind of event when I was hit with an epiphany; a realization that social media has gone mainstream and was no longer the realm of geeks or technology pioneers.

Here was a group in their 30s from a wide range of professions sitting around a table enjoying a casual dinner when the topic of Facebook came up. At the beginning of the talk, we heard of the controversial relating to privacy but this topic quickly branched off into a more general chat about social media in general and the direct impact it was having in each of their lives. I was privy to hearing how social media was responsible for the breakup of one relationship “lost to the Facebook mistress”. This was quickly counted by the admission that another couple at the dinner met via social media. Wow, such a versatile media! A number of other anecdotes where shared but in all it was clear from this sample group that social media was ‘mainstream, alive and impacting the everyday lives of everyday people”.

So when reflecting on this dinner party and thinking about the implications for marketing professionals I am also struck by the lack of solid frameworks and models we can use to support our marketing endeavors. Sure, many ‘social media experts’ are putting their views forward and I am seeing some great and interesting ideas surrounding Facebook, YouTube and Twitter campaigns. However, they do not help me in China (where these platform are inaccessible) and for my thinking still seems to be a simple, narrow view of the marketing potential in this social media environment.

Also the term “social media” is being talked about a lot these days, but I am not sure if its definition is shared by everyone. Do we consider it social networking? Is it social bookmarking? Is it wiki? Is social media different in various parts of the world? Does the definition of social media in the West differ from that in China? How do I get started with a social media activity in China?

These are just some of the questions that this book will set out to answer.

Is Chinese and Western social media the same?

Wikipedia, defines ‘social media’ as:

Social media is media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques. Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue.

In China, Sohu Baike defines ‘social media’ as:

Social media is a new form of online media that gives users increased freedom in interacting and responding.