360DigitalInfluence

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!

Hong Kong this week is preparing to celebrate the mid-Autumn festival, an event that gathers families to hang red lanterns, light candles and eat Mooncakes.

Mooncakes are an extremely sweet pastry-covered delicacy containing egg yolk and lotus seed paste. (The egg yolk represents the full moon) They are best consumed as a desert with dark Chinese tea.

In what may be a first for this bastion of ancient Chinese culture, Mooncakes now have a social media strategy.

WHERE: Hong Kong

WHO: Maxim, one of Hong Kong’s largest fast-food retailers

WHAT: A Social Media campaign to promote their Snowy moon cake line. (Unless anyone else can name it, we will go out on a limb and say this is - drum roll, please - the world’s first Mooncake social media campaign.)

HOW:
Developed by local PR Agency “Igoo Communications”, Maxim’s launched a microsite to engage both young and old Hong Kong residents. The campaign builds on the recent YouTube-frenzy/viral video craze among the youth culture by encouraging people to upload a 15-second videos that shows the “coolest” way of enjoying Maxim’s Snowy mooncakes. Unlike traditional mooncakes, the Snowy mooncakes are partly made of ice cream.

THE PRIZE?

The winning video stands a chance of winning a grand cash prize of HK$100,000. Other prizes include restaurant coupons and iPhones.

THOUGHTS:

It is interesting to note that Maxims sells both traditional bread-crusted and ice cream crusted snowy moon-cakes – but the two products are sold very differently.

The traditional bread-crusted mooncakes target the middle-aged and old using standard advertisements and traditional PR. The traditional campaign aims to take people down memory lane and remind the non-stop workaholics of Hong Kong that they still have a family to think about and a culture to be proud about.

The youth-focused “Snowy Mooncakes”, on the other hand, are branded and sold as something quite literally “cool”.

How did they do it? Maxims gave the not-so-cool mooncake a “physical” and “thoughtful” makeover by following our constant advice to clients: “Listen to your consumers!”

Maxims did, and here’s what they found: Hong Kong kids told Maxim’s they prefer a Haagen-Dazs ice-cream cake over a normal cake from the local bakery. Maxims did well by first scanning the likes and dislikes among youth before targeting a product that would definitely hit them. That’s not enough however. Maxim’s Snowy Mooncake has outdone other competitors by sending out their message using the right channel. You don’t have to be a social media expert to know that kids are about the Internet.

Some companies are hesitant to launch a social media campaign for fear the effectiveness cannot be measured in a concrete way – “social media doesn’t necessarily drive sales”, “you can’t control how many people visit the site”, “At least an ad’s out there, with social media its uncertain”, and what I hear most often “Too Risky: it’s either a success or failure”.

Those naysayers are missing the point: Kids know it, love it and appreciate it when brands listen and converse with them in a meaningful way. Maxim’s for example wanted to make “Snowy” a fun and casual brand. Their campaign asks kids to show the coolest way to enjoy “Snowy”.

Truth is, the only way to eat a moon-cake (or anything!) is by stuffing it in your mouth. Maxims probably didn’t intend for people to come out with videos called “Maxims Pain-killer Moon-Cakes” (5287 votes by the way!) but that’s the beauty of social media - spontaneity and surprises.

Competing videos ranges from hipster rapping and remixes to young parents showcasing their dancing and laughing babies. So no doubt, innovation and an exciting atmosphere is what is rocking this campaign!

A recent survey conducted by the Hong Kong Association of Interactive Marketing found that Social Media has an extremely high level of trust among people working in businesses.

The full presentation is available on Slideshare, but the below two charts struck me as most relevant.

The first shows that Social Media is shown as trustworthy and influential a media channel as television. What is interesting about this is the relative cost of using television vs social media. A Social Media campaign will generally cost a small fraction the amount of a television advertisement.

The second chart shows how businesses recognize the power Social Media provides in creating connections with customers. This is a unique aspect of Social Media and one that more and more companies are coming to recognize. The Nirvana of connection is, of course, a company joining in co-creation with its own customers.

The Queensland Australia tourism bureau recently ran their “The Best Job in the World” competition to generate travel interest to the islands in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The job:

1. 6 months salary of US$110,000
2. Beach house on a gorgeous island
3. Keep a weekly blog

Sigh! Sure beats working for a living. Not surprisingly, there were 34,000 applicants.

The winner

The winner, Ben Southall, now blogs each day about his life as “The Island Caretaker” .

The real winners

No doubt Ben had hit the jackpot, but so has the digital strategy team behind this whole campaign - the “Best Job in the World” contest has generated massive media attention and won numerous marketing awards! But not everyone is a winner.

But was it actually successful?

Ironically, despite the huge publicity about the campaign, initial forecasts show that tourism to Queensland will likely drop this year. The number of “visitor nights” spent in Queensland is predicted to fall to 42.2 million this year, compared with 42.5 in 2008, according to  the Tourism Forecasting Committee.

So did the award-winning “Best Job in the World” campaign work after all? Yes, in terms of publicity, but we will need to wait until the end of the year to determine tourism’s impact.

Thailand follows suit

Thailand is now following Australia with their “Ultimate Thailand Explorer Contest” offering free trips to five couples who blog and tweet about their experiences, vying for a chance to win a grand prize of $10,000 USD, a Blackberry and a camcorder.

They’re looking for Internet savvy people with a good grasp of social media and various websites (YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc). Thailand’s tourism industry has suffered a bit of a drop from political upheaval and the current recession, which is why they’ve decided to run this contest. Lots of videos have already been submitted to their contest website which runs until September 15th.

Publicity on cheap

Both of these marketing campaigns use the Internet and social media to increase tourism for a relatively small amount of money. The Queensland Australia campaign cost about $1.2 million, but it’s attracted about $100 million of media coverage and brought nearly 7 million visitors and 48 million page views to the site.

The amount of attention and buzz attracted by the campaign will likely lead to an increase in tourism to the area, which should easily pay for the marketing costs and contest fees. Likewise, the Thailand contest is probably being run for less than a million dollars and will generate tons of coverage about the contest and from the contest winners as they blog and share their experience.

More to come!

The Thailand Chapter and Tourism Technology Association will also be hosting a ‘Social Media for Travel Marketing Seminar’ on November 11^th and has invited a list of so-called “social media experts” to lecture Thai travel marketers on how to build their winning online campaign (and for those interested, the event will be held at The Westin Grand Sukhumvit, Bangkok).

Thailand’s take on the social media is clear, and it is impressive to see how keen the nation is to move forward digitally by leveraging the power of user-generated content and social networks. Having quickly learned from Australia Tourism’s success and launched a similar promotion themselves in such a short time, Thailand is no longer the turtle in the race – and the country’s rapidly changing social media landscape is worth keeping an on.

This is the power of social media and user-generated-content. Often people just want to hear about an ordinary person’s experience, not some celebrity who can afford private jets and five star hotels and villas. It is interesting to read what real people have to say about a destination, a hotel, a restaurant, on their first visit, on the other hand, airline and tourism companies benefits from these affordable social media campaigns by getting free publicity – often times on a global scale!

Travel contests of this kind willing become a key trend in the years to come, which I think is great! It gives Internet savvy people like myself a chance at travelling to places and having an experience we might not be able to afford, and it opens up the tourism to a relatively untapped market. These campaigns make traveling seem more accessible than ever before, and with the increasing adoption of social media, it spreads the messaging to far reaching audiences through more and more channels.

I’d totally be up for traveling on a tourism board’s money in exchange for generating some online buzz, as I’m sure tons of other people would be too. Who wouldn’t want to blog, tweet, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook their travel experience if it means a free trip to Japan or Malaysia or any other country you never visited? Think about it!

During my recent trip to Singapore, I had the opportunity to grab coffee and have a chat with Ben Koe, Employee #3 of JamiQ, a new social media monitoring service which is currently in beta.

I’ve asked Ben a few quick questions about the state of social media across Asia Pacific, what companies should do first before jumping in, and how JamiQ will be different from the array of social media monitoring services currently on the market:

Q. How would you characterise the digital landscape here in Asia Pacific?
Asia Pacific contains some of the most densely connected communities in the world which makes it one of the largest opportunities for digital marketing. However, marketers are still undecided about the effectiveness of engaging online. But this is understandable, while we are certain about the large population that connect online, there is no one best way to reach them.

In order to engage successfully online, marketers need to flip their logic around. Instead of the traditional method of identifying the best media to communicate through, brands can now be their own media. Corporate blogs, community forums, YouTube channels, etc. are all affordable means for companies to establish their presence online and build communities around them. 

Q:  Across APAC, we are seeing an increased interest in social media. Before jumping in, what should organisations do in order to generate real results from their efforts?
Organisations need to take a step back from the hype and observe their brand online. Listening to what’s being said by their customers in the region is the most critical exercise one can perform. The ability to listen gives you the intelligence required to craft an effective communication strategy. Just like how you wouldn’t bother selling in-car stereos to people who take the bus, you need to know what your customers want; and most of the time your customers will not tell you directly, they’ll be telling their friends online.

Too often, marketers are communicating what’s on their agenda completely overlooking the “truth” being talked about on forums or being ranted on blogs. Once you know what your customers or the industry is talking about, you then can make better judgment and strategy for engaging them for your brand before consumer-driven perception takes over.

Q:  How will JamiQ be different from some other social media listening services?
JamiQ’s chief advantage is its reach. This is the foundation of social media monitoring. Just like a search engine, the more web pages the engine can cover the better a service it is. If you read the fine print on some social media monitoring services you’ll find that some claim to have indexed 12 million blogs, another 20 million, and others 100 million. So who’s giving you the full picture?

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Graham White from our Australian office picked up this piece coming from the UK.  The Archbishop of Westminster believes that social networks “..led young people to form “transient relationships”, which put them at risk of suicide when the relationships collapsed.“

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/facebook-myspace-put-teens-at-risk-of-suicide-church-20090803-e6hh.html

This piece follows an earlier discussion in Indonesia earlier in the year among the Muslim ulamaks, saying social networks promote promiscuity between the sexes, and there were calls for Facebook to be made “haram” (forbidden under Islamic practices).  Facebook, mind you, is the top-ranked site in Indonesia, with more than 800,000 users.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/indonesia-gives-facebook-the-nod-but-no-flirting-please-20090522-bi9v.html

Compare the thoughts of the Archbishop and the Indonesian ulamaks (whom I assume are not digital natives), with those of these commentators, (whom I assume are digital natives). 

http://www.alarabiya.net/views/2009/08/01/80498.html

http://www.bt.com.bn/en/analysis/2009/07/07/facebook_is_it_halal_or_haram

The reflection here is that social media and networks are not just secular or technology or mass media or marketing phenomena, it’s impacting religious practices, so much so that religious leaders have started commenting on them. 

What’s clear is that social media/networks are truly affecting and changing society (well, at least in the developed nations with Internet access). 

With social media becoming such an impact into our lives, shouldn’t we embrace it more, and look at the positive aspects of it?

On a separate point, here’s some stats from Nielsen on the growth of Twitter, and the split in the age group.

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/teens-dont-tweet-twitters-growth-not-fueled-by-youth/