360DigitalInfluence

Thanks very much to the nearly 300 people from across Asia who dialled into our webinar on “Social Media for B2B Companies”, hosted in partnership with the Wall Street Journal Asia and Citrix Online.

As promised we have uplosed the presentation deck to Slideshare and have updated to include links to a few great additional resources that you can use to help your business get started. These links include the following:

• Ogilvy On: Social Media for Crisis Management  
• Ogilvy On: Twitter for Business
• Ogilvy On: Facebook for Business
• Social Media in Asia Presentation
• APAC Statistics and Research (Asia Digital Map Blog)

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

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 Graham White, Managing Director of Howorth Communications in Sydney.

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

http://bit.ly/aWsvrI

Where do you go to escape negative social media attention? Well, you could try one place that Twitter and Facebook will struggle to find you: China.

Some might think that is exactly what NBA “problem child” Stephon Marbury did when he moved to China a couple of weeks ago to play for Shanxi Zhongyu.

Marbury seems to have completely moved his social media presence. He posted his last Twitter entry on January 26, having already made his first entry a day earlier on the equivalent Chinese site. Marbury, the biggest NBA star ever to have played professional basketball in China, already has 26,132 fans on the Chinese Twitter-like Sina Microblog.

Of course, Marbury hopes to do more than escape twitterers; he is partly here to promote his clothing and apparel brand, Starbury. His posts frequently link to his Taobao store, where a pair of low-cost Starbury basketball shoes retail for around RMB 150-200 (USD 20-30).

I think this could become one of the best marketing uses so far of a Chinese microblog site, perfectly combining personal branding and product promotion.

Marbury is already creating a genuine dialogue with his fans. Earlier this week, for example, he engaged in a mammoth microblog Q&A, directly answering huge amounts of questions from fans.

Of course, challenges remain. He is only able to speak to his online fans in English, and his off-court brand will largely depend on his on-court success. Last week, Shanxi Zhongyu lost their first game with their new star.

Korea’s second most popular search engine, Daum is preparing to launch its own Social Network Service called Yozm (http://yozm.daum.net).

Various modification of a Twitter-like services have developed in Korea to better serve Koreans’ socializing habit, needs and interest:
-me2day(www.me2day.net by NHN Naver), Twitter-like service instead offers 150 words
-sfoon(www.sfoon.com by Nurien), Connects your twitter, Me2day, Flickr, You Tube accounts in one viewing convenience
-itgling(www.itgling.co.kr by Mediare), socializing with people who share similar web surfing/using pattern rather than choosing to follow or request to be friends

So, how is Yozm different from the rest?

Well, first of all, Yozm, meaning “nowadays” in Korean, allows the user to select/type in
- What you like
- What you dislike
- What you are good at
- Where you go often to find friends.

Under each category, the user can enter up to three things, which can be changed at anytime.
This function, not offered in Twitter and Me2day allows the user to quickly socialize by allocating and becoming friends with people who share similar taste and lifestyle.

Like me2day offers 150 words to input a message but it also allows the users to upload image (not just a link) to the message box.

Yozm is being tested through active social media users now. It is expected to launch sometime in the first quarter of 2010.

Pic 2:   1) 150 word message   2) upload image, link, direct msg to a friend   3) view option (my msg, reply, favorite, private)

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

I had a wonderful conversation this afternoon with MIT Professor Jing Wang about her project “NGO 2.0 China.” We were first introduced to each other randomly through Scott Kronick, by my desk, where I kept a book Brand New China written by her. Scott asked me if I’d like to have the author’s signature – of course! During our random but pleasant encounter, Professor Jing Wang mentioned her current project -“NGO 2.0 China.” I was intrigued. Having done some research at home, I wrote to her and told her that I’d like to be a volunteer.

Professor Jing Wang launched the NGO 2.0 China project in spring 2009 in collaboration with Ogilvy & Mather in Beijing, the University of Science and Technology of China, and three other Chinese NGOs.

What exactly is NGO 2.0? Professor Jing Wang and her partners are building the first social networking platform for grassroots NGOs in

China. At the same time, they will be holding Web 2.0 training workshops for NGOs in Western and central provinces and co-developing training materials with Intel China. A ranking system will be integrated into the platform to promote the organizational transparency of NGOs.

The project was created to meet the dilemma faced by mid-sized grassroots NGOs in China: even as they each develop their own small websites, these NGOs remain as insulated from one another as before. What they actually need is a platform that allows them to share resources, build networks and recruit members at little cost. Web 2.0 would be a perfect solution to help them.

Professor Jing Wang’s design of the project, in its much simplified version, is to bridge Chinese grassroots NGOs with 1) IT infrastructure/service providers and 2) business entities like Ogilvy & Mather. The former can help build a necessary platform and participate in implementing creative ideas generated by vanguard grassroots NGOs; the latter can provide creative ideas for NGO 2.0 programs and help with content generation on the platform. In addition, (1) and (2) can both contribute to training programs for capacity-building.

The NGO 2.0 China project intrigued me because in a world where everyone is talking frantically about social media and Web 2.0, I feel this project is one of the few that has a clear purpose backed by thoughtful program design.

NGO 2.0 China is not the kind of ideal that can only end up being a good will in real life. This ideal is supported by pragmatic program design that aligns partners with different interests and drives things forward together. Imagine an IT company that has a strong interest in CSR projects. Imagine a company that is attempting to engage third-party endorsers.

Finally, NGO 2.0 China encourages me to think critically about the role that traditional and mainstream Chinese media plays in this field. Many times, published NGO stories are often dominated by sensational and distorted narrations. The effect of such reports, in addition to creating a large readership, is often the further marginalization of the victims.

If you are interested in learning more about this project, please visit the following websites: http://web.mit.edu/fll/www/people/JingWang.shtml (Professor Jing Wang’s personal webpage) and http://ngo20china.wikispaces.com/(NGO 2.0 wiki site).

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!)

Last week Google announced it’s real time search feature, which I believe is set to forever change the way we think about and use search.

If you haven’t seen it in action yet I recommend you go to the Google home page and search for something topical like climate change.

In the results some movement should catch your eye and there they’ll be - real time search results. Take a moment to just sit back, relax and let the strangely compelling waterfall of information wash over you.

Once you wake from the dull, Google-induced trance you’ll have hopefully experienced an epiphany similar to mine:

Right at this moment people all over the world are talking about you, your business, your brand, your event, whatever it may be, and now as soon as they say it - Google will display it.

So how are we going to influence the conversation and harness the power of real time in 2010?

Chinese microblog platforms have one major thing in common with Twitter, they limit updates to 140 characters. However, since a Chinese character generally conveys much more meaning than a single letter of the Roman alphabet, a Chinese microblog update can say a lot more than one in English.

As a very rough guide, four Chinese characters (新浪微博) are used to describe one of China’s leading microblog platforms, while fourteen characters are needed to write its English translation, Sina Microblog.

Similarly, 推特 - the Chinese for Twitter, does in two characters what English does in seven.

In addition, Chinese sentences do not need any spaces to make sense, even after punctuation marks.

Admittedly, posts on Chinese microblogs are often a mixture of English words and Chinese; and the online cultures of China and the English-language speaking world abbreviate in different ways.

However, despite these qualifying factors, by offering the same 140-character limit, microblogs are being much less stingy to Chinese writers than people updating in English.

So, a company or an individual can say a lot more. And quite often, they do just that. First, look at this fairly typical Twitter update from microblog aficionados, Dell (@DellOutlet):

Below is another update, also from Dell (@delldirect), on Chinese “twitter-like” site, Zuosa.com:

In just 114 characters, this Dell microblogger had managed to say the following:

Dell’s National Day Sale will run from Sept 11 to Oct 8. To celebrate the 60^th anniversary w. the motherland, Dell Home Computers is offering 6 cool gifts & deals on 10 computer models. These exciting offers will run non-stop for 4 weeks. Also, get a free upgrade to color casing & a 512MB independent graphics card, as well as other service upgrades. All offers are on a first-come-first-serve basis. What R U waiting 4? Act now!

It doesn’t look so “micro” now, does it? By using only part of their allowance, Dell managed to say the equivalent of 430 English-language characters.

When it comes to microblogs, I am less likely to read long updates; fat blocks of characters – English or Chinese – put me off.

Of course, not everyone is as lazy as me. However, companies should think about whether they should take advantage of these slightly less “micro” opportunities by writing longer updates. Personally, I think they shouldn’t. In this case, less is definitely more.