360DigitalInfluence

I caught up with Yiying Lu Lu an artist and designer probably best known for creating the iconic fail whale that greets Twitter users when the service is down. We talked about the history of the image (hint: it wasn’t originally a whale) and how the guys at Twitter came across the image.

Here’s a clip from our interview…

A recent report by Inside Facebook highlights the interesting development of Facebook in Southeast Asia. Despite being blocked in China, East Asia’s largest and fastest-growing market, Facebook has grown phenomenally in the rest of Southeast Asia during the last few quarters.

How has this happened?

• In Taiwan, Facebook has exploded from 400,000 to nearly 7 million users in only 12 months
• Significant growth in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia
• Indonesia is now the world’s #3 country in terms of total Facebook audience size (behind US and UK)
• Facebook has overtaken hi5 in Thailand and Friendster in the Philippines (formerly the top social networks)
• …But Facebook has seen little growth in Japan and S. Korea

Taiwan’s rapid adoption of Facebook is a particulary interesting example, as it is now one of the few non-English speaking countries with over 30% penetration, joining Hong Kong and Singapore as one of Facebook’s Asian sucess stories.

Why Taiwan?

• A key driver for this growth has been social gaming apps, like Happy Harvest, Pet Society and Restaurant City
• These apps pull users away from other social sites without games, like Taiwan’s other social network Wretch.cc
• More games are being developed in or translated into Traditional Chinese, such as Mahjong by Godgames

Though perhaps Taiwan doesn’t represent a gateway to the rest of Southeast Asia,  it does show that Facebook can be successful in the region. Perhaps social gaming will also open doors for Facebook in tougher markets like Japan and South Korea…

Why Tweetup?

Some of you might have seen tweets about the Ogilvy’s APAC Digital Influence Summit lately. Ogilvy’s DI Summit is an internal event held by the Asia Pacific Regional team where all the digital experts from around the region will be attending a 3-day event in Hong Kong to exchange digital knowledge, connect and bond with other team

Although the event is not open for public, we would like to offer you a chance to meet our team, head of the global digital influence team John Bell will also be flying all the way from Washington DC! It is a very rare opportunity for you to meet all of us at once, in the offline world!

When?

Tweetup will be held this Sunday, June 27th at 7pm. Not the perfect timing for tweetup but due to the World Cup schedule, this is the only time when venues are available.

Where?

Tweetup will be held in RED Soho as usual.

Address: 2/f, Kinwick Centre, 32 Hollywood Road, Soho Central. (Right next to the escalator above hollywood road)

How to sign up?

Here

See you there!

There are some companies that are still unable to understand the true value of social media for their business. Now there is a better way to convince them, in a language they understand: ROI.

A recent study (pdf), conducted and published by Syncapse, examines social media in terms of ROI.  It does this by quantifying and understanding the impact of social media marketing investment on the top 20 brands on Facebook. The findings were pretty interesting.

This is particularity important, because quantifying the ROI of Facebook marketing efforts might change how we present social media as a marketing strategy to our clients.

The study examined the five leading contributors to Facebook fan value.

(1) Product Spending (2) Brand Loyalty (3) Propensity to Recommend (4) Brand Affinity (5) Earned Media Value.

Significant Findings:

ROI:

· Fans spend an additional average of $71.84 on products for which they are fans compared to those who are not fans.

· The average value of a Facebook fan was $136.38. On a McDonald’s fan base of 2,232,328, the worth of annualized value would equate to $580,003,461.

· No two brand’s fan values are the same: Fan value of BlackBerry ($83.98) versus Nokia ($180.87).

Repurchase

· Fans are 28% more likely than non-fans to continue using the brand

· 42.5% of fans indicating a heightened likelihood of continued product usage

Loyalty

· 81% of fans said they feel connection/empathy with the brand, compared to 39% of non-fans

· 87% said they felt warmth, gratitude, happy or satisfied, compared to 49% of non-fans

Word of Mouth:

· Fans are 41% more likely than non-fans to recommend a fanned product to their friends

· 44% Likelihood to try a product if close family member or friend became a fan

· 68% of Facebook fans indicated that they are very likely to recommend a product (One of the highest was Victoria’s Secret with 79.4%)

Shaping Fan Value:

· Factors influencing and impacting fan value include: Product price, purchase lifecycle, sales penetration, brand health, product health, Facebook marketing success, loyalty, spending, fan acquisition cost, affinity and media value.

Key Takeaways for Digital Marketers and Their Clients:

· Frame It In $$: More and more, we should present social media marketing to clients in terms of ROI, ##’s and $$. This allows us to demonstrate the power of this marketing platform in a business language most can understand.  It also portrays social media in a context that makes good financial sense. “Social media can make you money”

· Digital Deep Dive: This study, along with specific case studies should act as a digital gateway, by helping us in convincing clients to dive deep into social media strategies and allocate a bigger budget for social marketing.

· Act Now, Look Later: Social media marketing is a long-term process which aims at building networks of loyal and brand hungry consumers.  It might be comprised of various short-term campaigns, but brands must have a long-term view of social ROI

· Online Efforts Boost Offline Sales: The 20 brands examined in this study rely on offline sales to succeed. They use social media to drive offline traffic into their stores.

· Social Actually Works: The more you reach, connect, and effectively engage audiences on social media, the more you increase:

1. Long-term ROI

2. Brand perception and awareness

3. Brand loyalty, connection & repeated purchases

4. Organic marketing (facilitated online word of mouth)

· Ask Why?:  Finally, we should be able to easily explain to clients that “There is a reason why these big brands are pouring millions in social media, and moving away from traditional media:”

1. Cheaper and more effective than most mass media marketing

2. More targeted and audience specific

3. Generates added brand empathy and connection with consumers

4. Provides consumers access to the brand, anytime, anywhere and at their fingertips

5. Allows consumers to market & recommend brand products themselves

6. Timely and compelling, moves consumers to take action

7. Allows consumers to engage with brands in a FUN WAY (and not interruptive)

Connect with Haysam on Twitter: @hisom

Wanchai Computer Centre is Hong Kong’s gadget heaven. Not only do you get a wide range of amazing gadgets, but they are cheap, due to Hong Kong’s tax-free status.

Similar in spirit to Tokyo’s Akihabara or Thailand’s Pantip Plaza, Wanchai computer center is one of those unique Asia tech bazaars. (Sadly Taipei recently moved their computer center from old bomb shelters to a new building)

This video was done by Tem Hansen and Andrea Fenn to welcome members of Ogilvy’s regional Digital Influence team to Hong Kong for our regional Social Media summit.

It is an internal only meeting, but we plan a Hong Kong Foursquare swarm. Let me know if you want to join!

I was lucky enough to have the chance to interview the CEO and founder of the SC Storage (時昌迷你倉), Kevin She. SC storage was founded in 2001, the first storage company in Hong Kong, it is also one of a few Hong Kong successful cases using social media.

Kevin is passionate about social media himself, he doesn’t use social media as a channel to generate sales, instead, he chose to engage with local people who are active on Social Media, using Twitter and Facebook Page as main channels to develop real friendship with them.

As I mentioned in my presentation Social Media Basics for Executives, companies should never buy coverage on social media (e.g. pay per post), they should actually engage with targets to build long-term relationships. No matter how much Kevin’s competitors invest in advertising, I would still go for SC storage when I need storage spaces because I’m connected with him personally through social media, and that’s the true power of social media for SMBs.

Link to the video we talked about during interview, the TV ad that went viral on Youtube:Cantonese Only

Most of the social media projects I deal with at Ogilvy are for global brands, it’s interesting to learn from local successful cases like this one. It’s a cafe in Mong Kok with a wide range of comic book collections called Ease House Cafe, where they target mainly to young comic lovers.
As a small cafe located on the 25th floor of a building, 21 year-old owner realized it would be hard to spread the message out if he used traditional marketing tactics, so he went digital.

They use Facebook as a channel to grow fan base and increase loyalty by keeping their fans updated on news and special deals, also partnered with a local cafe directory site up4cafe to offer readers coupons.
Recently, they are having this “Blog for free dinner” campaign, where they encourage bloggers to write about their Cafe, they will search on Google every month with keyword “Ease House Cafe” and pick a blog that’s index high enough on the search, sounds like a small scale blogger engagement, a very smart idea to get themselves quality organic search results, but personally I would also go for keywords like “comic books”, “hong kong” too. (in Eng & Chinese).

With limited resources, many local small & medium business owners in Hong Kong are afraid to invest time and money on this new media, but with all the recent success here in Hong Kong, I think business owners should really reconsider and make a move soon!

Thomas Crampton, Tim Ho and I just had a delightful meeting with Edith Bagda, Marketing Director of high-end jewelery brand John Hardy recently showed us an outstanding presentation on how luxury brands can leverage the power of social media. (Email thomas.crampton @ ogilvy .com if you would like a copy)

In a kind and amusing nod to our Social Media belts system, the John Hardy team made a slight adaptation to our system.

Here, we proudly present the first “orange” social media belt – the special edition designed by John Hardy that matches our original collection of white, red and black belts.

John Hardy’s “Social Media for Luxury Brands” presentation is a great example of knowledge sharing, idea remixing and – hopefully – the first steps of a concept going viral.

This week in Hong Kong we hosted a number of travel-related clients for a lunch and learn session on how to use social media and travel. Here’s the deck, enjoy!

An upcoming session we are doing in Hong Kong on Social Media and the Travel Sector. Please join!