360DigitalInfluence

Asia’s Internet speed is not surprising news, but the details of this recent report on the Internet by Akamai show how much Asia and South Korea dominate the world of high speed Internet. Korea is also increasing the average national Internet speed at the fastest pace of any country in the world.

Korea, Japan and Hong Kong have the world’s fastest connections

Although South Korea continued to hold the top spot  as the country with the highest average measured connection speed at 14.6 Mbps, its fastest city (Masan) was ranked fifth among Asian cities, at approximately 1.2x the country average. South Korea, unsurprisingly, has six of the top 10 fastest cities in Asia, all with average speeds above 15 Mbps.

 
South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong are in global top 5 for increasing average speed.

As compared to the second quarter of 2009, South Korea saw a shift in the distribution of connections to higher speed buckets, with the 5-10 Mbps bucket declining from 35% to 29%, while the higher speed buckets all saw increases, with more than 10% of connections once again being made to Akamai at speeds greater than 25 Mbps. 
The increased percentages of extremely high speed connections are in line with South Korea’s third quarter growth in both average measured connection speed and high broadband adoption rates.
While having a high broadband adoption rate that approaches just half of South Korea’s, Hong Kong has the second highest levels of extremely high speed connectivity among the top 10 countries, with more than 2.5% of connections to Akamai at speeds between 20-25 Mbps, and more than 5% at speeds in excess of 25 Mbps. The distribution of connection speeds above 5 Mbps remained fairly flat in the United States between the second and third quarters, and the United States remained #12 globally for this metric.

Compared with their peers globally, the Millenials in India obsess more about the technology of their employers than youth of any other nation surveyed in a recent poll, while Chinese use real-time chat and speak about themselves more in online fora.

These results come from a recent survey by Accenture on how the Millenial generation uses technology. The intention of the report was to look at Millenials from the perspective of how companies should manage technology, but the survey is also interesting for cross-cultural comparison of Internet usage.

Chinese Millennials spend an extraordinary amount of time in the virtual world for both business and personal use, especially engaged through real-time communication tools. Young Chinese in the workforce spend an average of almost 34 working hours a week on communication tools, versus almost 11 hours for the rest of the world. For leisure, the Chinese spend 14.8 hours a week playing video games (versus 3.4 hours for the rest of the world), 5.1 hours shopping on the Internet (versus 1 hour), and 5.3 hours in a virtual world such as Second Life (versus 0.4 hours).

China and India topped the charts in three respects:

1- Tech-Obsessed India
Indians are more obsessed about finding employers with great high-tech infrastructure than any nation surveyed.

2- Chinese Chatting
Chinese are more obsessed with real-time chatting at work than any nation surveyed.

3- Sharing with Friends
Chinese are more enthusiastic about posting personal information on blogs or social networks than any nation surveyed.

Survey details: Acccenture surveyed 5,595 employees and students, ages 14-27, in 13 countries: Brazil, Canada, and the United States in the Americas; Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom in Europe; Australia, China, India, and Japan in Asia-Pacific.

Details and charts:

1- Tech-Obsessed India

Millennials want to choose what technologies they use, especially in emerging markets. Globally, almost one in two mid-Millennials in school (ages 18-22) expect not only to use the computer of their choice once they are on the job, but also to access their preferred mobile and technology applications. By contrast, only one in four want the employer to choose these technologies, and one in four remain uncertain. This sentiment is even stronger in Brazil, India and China. Indeed, in India, only 6 percent of mid- Millennials expect to use only corporate applications at work.

2- Chinese Chatting

Asia-Pacific Millennials spend the most time, and the highest share of time, on real-time communications technologies like instant messaging. China and India lead the pack in emerging methods of employee communication: 27 percent of employers in China already use online chat and 20 percent use mobile texting to communicate with employees.

Millennials in China, India, and Brazil lead the world in use of emerging technologies for work purposes, while most European countries and Japan are lagging.

Young Chinese employees, in particular, are pushing the boundaries of multi-tasking. While the time spent on email is similar to their U.S. counterparts, the Chinese outpace the rest of the world in using real- time communication tools. Working respondents ages 18-27 in China tell us that, during an average week, they spend 9.2 hours on email, 9.2 hours on instant messaging, 6 hours texting, 3.3 hours in a blog or tweet, 3 hours in a virtual community, and 2.9 hours on a social network site – a total of 33.6 hours per week.

3- Sharing with Friends

Related to IT security, Millennials sometimes have a much looser notion of online privacy than do older workers. Some 30 percent of global working Millennials write openly about themselves and friends online. The most open, as shown above, are in China (51 percent), Germany (42 percent), Japan (37 percent) and Brazil (36 percent).
The most discreet, who say they never or rarely post information about themselves or friends online, are in India (50 percent), Canada (50 percent), and France (46 percent).
Social profiling is most common in China and India, where more than three in four Millennials use social networks more than half of the time when trying to learn more about peers or superiors. Similarly, Brazilians use social networks more extensively than their peers in other countries to investigate prospective employers, service providers, or clients.

You can see the full study here.

Across Asia, social media tools like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and blogs have redefined how businesses operate. While the focus is often on Social Media strategies for reaching consumers, companies operating in the B2B space – consultancies, wholesalers and manufacturers – can sometimes benefit even more than consumer-focused companies.

Shouldn’t you learn how to leverage social media?

Join the award-winning Social Media team from Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide for a free 30-minute online seminar powered by Citrix GoToWebinar and done in partnership with The Wall Street Journal Asia.

This webinar will provide concrete examples, action plans and case studies, including:

· 5 key steps for a business-to-business strategy;
· How to build and engage a community of potential and current customers;
· Real-life case studies from successful business-to-business strategies;
· The highly popular – and now extended – Question and Answer section;
· Much, much more…

The seminar will be led by Brian Giesen a senior regional strategist in Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team and moderated by Thomas Crampton, the team’s Asia-Pacific director.

Hurry! Space is limited for this 30-minute webinar* and registration is required.

Join us Wednesday, 3 March at 11:00am (Hong Kong time)

To register go to wsj-asia.com/webinar

Following a seminar Ogilvy organized with Business Next in Taipei, there were so many questions that I could not answer them all. Here’s a video attempt to quickly answer some of the ones that people still had afterwards:

• Our customers are all above their 40s. Besides waiting for the younger generation to grow up and become our new customers, what can we do on social media for those middle-aged?
• Could you advise what could you recommend to a Chain-store who want to engage social media? Should I focus on brand image, not sales in the near future?
• My company want me to do something on social media but our major customers are not using internet. What can I do?
• What’s the next driving power of social media?
• If the social media is fragmented, how to run the “diversified but targeted/fragmented” marketing campaign in SNS successfully?
• Do you have specific advices (do and don’t) to international enterprises who want to engage social media in many countries?
• How to leverage Facebook API to do marketing?

An annual survey of Chinese consumers by McKinsey took time to highlight the power of Social Media in China.

China really is a global-standard country in terms of involvement in Social Media by consumers. The landscape is, of course, radically different from other countries due to government censorship policies, but Chinese are incredibly involved in Social Media as a trusted source of information on many topics.

Samples vs Word of Mouth

The McKinsey study points to the influence of Social Media in terms beauty products in China, which is  we at Ogilvy have found to be totally true.

McKinsey found: 66 percent of Chinese consumers would be influence in the purchase of a moisturizer by recommendations of friends and family, while just 38 percent would be in the US and UK. By contrast 66 percent of UK and British consumers say that free samples could sway them, compared with 20 percent in China.

Excerpt from the McKinsey report:

The Internet is an increasingly important marketing tool. All the online media vehicles we tracked in our survey, including online advertisements, product articles, blogs, and forums, have significantly increased their impact (SEE CHART ONE). Consumers even rate the credibility of blogs and online forums higher than traditional TV ads.

This had an enormously positive impact for the company: word of mouth combined with 19,000 blogs encouraged drinkers to switch to Wang Laoji. One blogger developed the slogan: “If you’re going to donate, donate 100 million. If you’re going to drink, drink Wang Laoji.” This consumer-created ad was distributed widely online. The sales volume of Wang Laoji increased by 25 percent at one supermarket chain the month after the earthquake, and by 35 percent at one restaurant chain.

Amusing chronology of Social Media events in 2009, expressed in cartoons. By Rob Cuttingham.

Tiffany Wong recently published the first of a multi-part series in China Daily on Social Media, speaking with Jonathon Zhu, who runs the Hong Kong Internet Project and myself. Zhu has come out with some amazing studies of Hong Kong Internet habits.

The main issue that Tiffany and I discussed was how increased Internet penetration and speed tends to spread usage across all demographics.

In other words, the Internet starts out with geeks, freaks and adolescent boys, but ends up becoming a medium of generalized usage.

The photo of me was taken by Joi Ito, who unfortunately did not get a photo credit from China Daily. Sorry Joi!!

The below announcement is regarding a Social Media strategist position in our Shanghai office, but we are looking elsewhere in Asia as well, including Malaysia.

Are you the right person? Shoot me an email: thomas.crampton at ogilvy dot com

We need an ace Digital professional in Shanghai who knows the Internet and Social Media in China.

Your qualities? You have a passion for the changes in digital and communications. You get things done. You are supremely organized. You are always learning. You hate when things are not done as well as they could be. You are enthusiastic and love team work. You are curious about everything.

Some slides from a presentation I did recently on Social Media in Asia. I may pull them out one at a time to encourage people to give their take and input. (But feel free to comment below!)

Singapore’s Today newspaper quoted Ogilvy DI colleague Brian Giesen about Twitter and how businesses can best use it.