It is no secret that the Internet in China has been an agent for reform, and it is serving as a valuable tool for people to explore a world often beyond their reach. The Internet is not only serving China’s growing set of Netizens though. It is quickly replacing traditional media as brands and companies seek to connect with their consumers in new and different ways. With the exception of Google, international platforms that offer a cut and paste version of their American or European sites simply fail and often get banned. Popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter have fallen victim to the Great Firewall of China. While young innovative Chinese Netizens can find a way to get to these sites, why would they want to? Chinese social media is simply way cooler.

The Internet in China is dominated by long-running, multi-service portals like Sina, QQ and Sohu that have been offering social networking, discussion forums, blogs, instant messaging and other “socialised media” long before Twitter and Facebook. As the nationally preferred form of social media, bulletin board systems (BBS) are available in every imaginable topic, and in these forums, Netizens can be extremely vocal, resourceful, risk-takers, subversive and sometimes a little worrisome.

However, for the most part Netizens are simply seeking entertainment and escape. The bulk of internet users in China, young white collar urban Chinese, are informed, intelligent and generally optimistic about the future. This state of mind is exemplified by one of the hottest games at Kaixin called Parking Wars. Players earn virtual mullah for parking in their friends’ spaces and issuing parking infringements if they catch their friends parking on their home turf, with more money earning you shinier wheels. It is simply addictive and unrivalled by anything on Facebook.

Netizens love the collective and escapist nature of the Internet where avatars have become a nationwide obsession and are carefully designed as a form of self expression and extension of personality.  QQ offers avatar clothing and hairstyles for 1-5 RMB apiece. Many friends are made only in avatar form online, with Netizens never actually meeting face to face.

With no hesitation about inundating friends with requests to play this game, read that blog, join in this conversation or watch that video, the Internet and social media are no less than a national addiction. This addiction, and fast growing channel, has become the opportunity and challenge for companies and brands. The question everyone is asking is how to get started?

The first movers among companies and brands in leveraging the Internet to reach their customers know that a true digital brand experience requires creativity, authenticity and originality.

Chile

The government of Chile in promoting Chilean wine in China understood this. With limited funding and an ambitious agenda, ProChile, the Chilean government body responsible for the promotion of Chile and Chilean Wine, found gold with their online campaign.

China’s rapidly growing wine industry is full of both opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity rests among China’s rapidly growing wine connoisseurs, who seek new and different types of wine. The challenge was that Chinese consumers often default to French wine and high prices, focusing on the status achieved by the association of consuming French wine.

What Chinese consumers didn’t know was that Chile has affordable and high quality wines. The Chilean government wanted to reach out to Chinese wine consumers and help them understand that there was more to choosing wine than just comparing price tags.

The primary objective of the campaign was to increase Chilean wine sales in China. Beyond that, ProChile wanted to promote Chile to create a stronger brand presence for Chilean wine. The result, after only three months conducting a multi-phased digital campaign, was that Chilean wine moved up in the rankings of wine exporters into China.

Background

Wine is one of the fastest growing alcoholic drinks in China among a defined target audience of young (25-35 years old) urban professionals. However, after conducting research, young urban professions were often embarrassed to order or purchase wine because of a lack of understanding about the product. At the same time this group of people fell in the demographic of heavy Internet users. They were the foundation of China’s flourishing social media scene. These consumers were found to often look to bloggers for advice and viewed the internet as an instrument for self study and a place to share knowledge and recommendations.

Hence, it was obvious that online education and social media engagement should serve as the cornerstone of a campaign to build awareness, trial and preference for Chilean wine.

Strategy

Seeking to empower consumers with knowledge and confidence, the campaigned focused on arming netizens with the tools to buy or order wine. To create a bigger brand presence, images were used and information disseminated about Chile as a constant backdrop to everything undertaken.

A three-phase campaign roll-out was launched:

Phase 1: “I love wine.” During this phase every Netizen was invited to learn about wine appreciation, appealing to all current and would be wine drinkers.

Phase 2: “I love Chilean wine.” Focusing on the specific advantages of wine from Chile, the second-phase of the campaign encouraged people to convert to Chilean wine. Here, the campaign highlighted the affordability, taste quality and sustainability practices that set Chilean wine apart from the wines of other countries. In the process, we introduced netizens to the different regions of Chile, furthering education.

Phase 3: “I love Chile.” With a solid understanding of Chile, through Chilean wine, the door was open to introduce Chinese consumers to other products produced by Chile – fruit, salmon, urban transportation and tourism.

The main channel to begin discussion of Chilean wine was to leverage the blogosphere and make this viral. To begin with, the campaign involved collaboration with four influential bloggers asking them to stage a competition. Each week over four weeks the bloggers were sent a bottle of Chilean wine, together with information and facts about Chile.

The thrust of the blogger involvement centered on getting them interested in writing about the wine in their blogs in their own personal style. The blogger’s posts were aggregated at a site developed for the campaign, zhiliwine.com. This allowed us to create a lasting and permanent record of the event. Throughout the campaign over 70,000 netizens voted for their favorite articles, with many bottles of Chilean wine offered as give-aways for the competition. Blog posts were featured on the front pages of some of the biggest portals.

A broad social media footprint is important for every brand, and marketers need to take their message to the places where netizens are already investing their time and trust online. To extend the campaign message, popular social media was leveraged with content continually added to encourage debate and to help establish a community where netizens were able to discuss wine. Specifically:

• Kaixin – Chinese social network site where wine fans could come together and share wine drinking tips.
• Youku – Chinese video sharing site (like Youtube) where content was produced specifically about Chilean wine and this was uploaded for all to view.
• Flickr – Furnished numerous photos of Chilean wine, landscapes and other activities by ProChile in China.
• BBS forums – Seeded information in more than 50 relevant BBS forums to encourage interest.

The campaign empowered Chinese consumers to drink wine with ease, and impress their friends and business associates with “Webisodes” (short videos), created specifically for online video sharing networks as a tool for self-study. Through the webisodes the campaign delivered simple tips such as how to open a wine bottle, how to taste wine with confidence, and how to pair wine with Chinese food.

In addition to the online outreach, a comprehensive Interactive e-book in cooperation with Chilean wine companies in China was created, and the Chilean wine companies provided content and incorporated the e-book into their own marketing strategies.

Beyond social media, the campaign involved working with editors and producers of major portals to promote the campaign vehicles: the e-book, the videos and the blogger competition. It was important to reach out to editors of the more traditional online media so that the campaign reached people who do not use social media heavily, but who regularly read major Chinese websites such as Sina and Sohu.

After only three months, the greatest achievement was seeing Chilean wine climb from the fifth to the fourth largest exporter of wine to China, according to the Commissioner General of ProChile in China.

Like the country itself, social media in China is fast paced, constantly changing and growing faster than anywhere else in the world. For brands looking to get on China’s digital highway, seatbelts, a GPS and a little sense of adventure are a necessity. There is no more rewarding or amazing place to do social media.

Michael Darragh is Digital Strategic Planner at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide / Shanghai and producer of World Expo Blog.

The Web 2.0 lifestyle has allowed this generation to enjoy the pragmatic processes of interaction and communication. Where once the lengthy struggle of finding what to say and how to say it involved the risk of humiliation has now evolved to a single click on a status update, a simple comment on a photo album , or perhaps a re-tweet of an interesting link.

The whole culture of social networking has begotten a totally different set of social cues, social etiquette and media. The very “wall” which it has employed others to use as a barrier for true personal identity is the very same wall the art of social networking breaks when people submit themselves to the interplay of voyeurism and exhibitionism.

And such has become a necessity, especially because we live in a globalized world where each country’s competitive advantage rests also on tangible exchanges that uncover emergent and informal communication between the parties at play.

The vital question that arises therefore is whether we are losing patriotism, local tradition and values, and in turn being Filipino by becoming social.
Philippine modern society is highly liquid, modern culture is highly individualised, and globalization produces local effects – the landscape of society, culture, and technology is constantly transforming and in response to our own interactions.

How this affects a traditionally orally based Filipino culture is seen by the statistics as the nation is now a major user of SMS (with use at 10 times the global average), with a 50% take-up rate for mobile telephony and 25% Internet penetration. Founded by a society that has a very strong private and a weak public culture, its public sphere is an unclaimed territory open to predatory acquisition (mainly by adept politicians, but also by everyday citizens). The social structure is characterised by the gift economy, and based on consociation; trust is severely limited and includes only close friends and kin, and so Filipinos try to personalise their contacts either through intermediaries or the establishment of an elaborate system of personal relationships.

Which is why much of the exchanges through such networks still only involve close friends and relations, and remain relatively banal; the main use of such messages is to maintain the relationships themselves. However, there are also text-only relationships which are not translated into the offline environment, as is the same with social network contacts. Such uses imbue the mobile and new media with a significant personal value, the phone becomes an extension of the person, and its loss is acutely felt.

The new media is therefore a technology of transformation, and banality has a significant role to play in this context; it provides a reassurance in the context of an increasingly complex and incomprehensible world. It also provides a new space for cultural participation and interaction, and the development and exploration of different personas. This significantly changes social relationships, and allows new spheres for sociality to emerge. However, most changes are also increasingly being able to be absorbed into the continuously changing systems themselves – posing the same challenge we face as new technologies arise – Do we come off better or do we actually lose more than the original problem the technology supposedly addressed?