In a market where even the undisputed heavyweight champion of SNS, Facebook, has struggled to gain traction, a little bird named Twitter now rules the roost in Japan.

According to ratings agency Nielsen Online, 16.3% of Japanese Internet users tweet, or “mumble” as it is translated in Japanese. This is compared to less than 10% of Americans. Perhaps the most stunning aspect of this story is the blazing speed which this little bird has added to its flock. Twitter Japan launched a Japanese language service in 2008, but it wasn’t until a mobile version was introduced in October 2009 that things really took off.

Having left Facebook and MySpace in the dust long ago in the Japan market, Twitter users finally surpassed the long-time king of Japanese SNS, Mixi. Following the example of Masayoshi Son, a Twitter evangelist who also happens to be CEO of Japanese mobile phone and data provider Softbank, Japanese businesses are waking up to the necessity of having an effective social media and more often than not, it is Twitter they are most interested in.

Opportunity no longer knocks in Japan. These days, it tweets.

Fast facts:

• 16.3 – Percentage of Japanese on Twitter
• 9.8 – Percentage of Americans on Twitter
• 3 – Percentage of Japanese on Facebook
• 8,000,000 – Number of tweets per day from Japanese users
• 12 – Percentage of global tweets that come from Japan
• Japan recently set the world record for tweets per second following a recent world cup game

Note: This blog entry was based on an Associated Press article by Yuri Kageyama.

This article is republished with express permission of Media Asia, which originally published it on April 1, 2010.

Debby Cheung, group managing director of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide/China, shares her insight on the highly anticipated, six month extravaganza known as World Expo 2010 Shanghai, and gives advice on how marketers can make the most of this monumental opportunity.

1. Bring your A game.

192 countries and 50 organisations will take part in the Shanghai Expo – not to mention the brands that will jockey for position with guerilla marketing. Competition for media and consumer attention will be fierce, and the battle will play out both on the ground and online. All involved in the Expo will be scrambling to reach out to consumers to reinforce the faces and personalities of their brands. To be heard, brands will need to pull out all the stops and create bold, determined, decisive and cross-discipline strategies. There will be no room for the faint or half-hearted.

2. Prolong the hype.

The Olympics comprise of 16 days of intense and enthusiastic campaigns that are more easily sustained due to the short duration of the event; but Expo is a whole different animal. This event spans six months, making sustained hype key to the success of campaigns. Without recurring, innovative and ever-changing infusions of activities, campaigns will get lost in the crowd.

3. Non-sponsors get on the bus by thinking green.

The theme, ‘Better City, Better Life’ means that anything sustainable and environmentally friendly is your ticket to an association with the Expo. Sponsors are not the only ones who can leverage this event – all brands should be thinking green to piggyback on the Expo theme. Moreover, the Shanghai government, Expo and organisations will continually look for new partnership opportunities so non-sponsors will have plenty of chances to take part. With 20,000 events in Shanghai, both on and off the Expo site, opportunities to contribute to the green theme are endless.

4. Think beyond Shanghai.

This Expo is expected to generate the largest number of visitors in the history of the event, and only 5 per cent of them will be from outside China. Domestic visitors are estimated at 70 million, with 75 per cent of them coming from second and third tier cities. As Shanghai is simply not equipped to accommodate so many visitors, the government has already secured the support of surrounding cities to help accommodate the overflow. As a result, effective marketing campaign strategies need to think beyond the borders of the already overcrowded and extraordinarily competitive Shanghai market.

5. Expo goes mobile.

3G and the connectivity of Blackberry phones and mobile devices mean visitors will be constantly on the lookout for the best and most interesting places to go and both positive and negative reports will travel at the speed of light. When mapping out Expo strategies, marketers need to capitalise on these channels and not shy away from them. The sheer size of the Expo will make targeting the right audience with traditional marketing a challenge, but mobile and online strategies will level the playing field.

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.

I tried to get around with tools like Ping.fm which could simultaneously update my Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Delicious in one go but bugger it is banned now too.

Of course, none of this matters to China’s 360 million Netizens who think foreign social media is inferior anyway (and in many cases they are right). However there is one benefit to living on this side of the Great Firewall of China that you folks will never know; not even my friends in Hong Kong. For while I can use a VPN server to access YouTube when I really need need it, Google’s Music channel in China is something you will only experience on the mainland.

Each morning when I log on I point my browser to http://www.google.cn/music, search for music and decide whether to add to my evolving playlist (and sing along to the scrolling lyrics) or download and send to friend or iPod.

There are prompts to purchase the music although I don’t really know why anyone would, nor for that matter what Google’s business model is, other than a sink or swim retaliation to Baidu’s equally impressive music search, listen and download system.

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?

Hence, when I had the privilege of listening to Pete Teo, Malaysia’s very own multi-award winning singer/songwriter/film producer, at the Social Media Club (Malaysia chapter) inaugural event last week, I really wished I could put him in front of many people and hear it from him straight!

Teo, famous for his anti-racism music video Malaysian Artistes For Unity that became a popular national culture phenomenon last year, recently produced the 15Malaysia project, which also instantly became a hit. The 15Malaysia website, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were primary channels for publicity, in addition to print media.

15Malaysia is a short film project consisting of 15 short films made by 15 Malaysian filmmakers. These films deal with socio-political issues in Malaysia and feature some of actors, musicians and top political leaders.

When the project was launched on Facebook on 17 August 2009, it reached 10,000 fans within an hour. Today, it has 86,852 fans on Facebook, 1,488 followers on Twitter, and 366,363 video files downloaded from the 15Malaysia website … and still counting. (The tremendous amount of traffic has busted four servers and Teo has also received a lot of help from the public through his SOS tweets.)

While he has successfully made use of social media to promote the 15Malaysia project (which has just received an invitation to screen all 15 films at the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taipei this November), Teo said that it’s not about the tools. Social media is only a tool and is as good as it gets if you do not engage people in an emotional way. He aptly stated that, “You cannot ‘formulate’ your way into this (social media success).”

Think before you jump. The important questions: What are you trying to sell? What is your message? How does your project engage the public and what value are you offering to the community?

In the midst of the hurley burley of crisis mode, a news story caught my eye­. Killer George Sodini went berserk in a Pennsylvania gym and killed three, wounding nine before turning the gun on himself. The thing about it is, he blogged about doing it. That’s when the idea sparked.

So I did some digging

It’s not the first time, that social media was used by a killer or a suicide victim to declare their intentions. With a quick search, I found Paul Zolezzi, a model who declared he was going to kill himself on Facebook and did. More interestingly though, I found Hsu Yu-sheng.

Hsu Yu-sheng

Hsu is a gay and lesbian rights activist in Taiwan, who on August 6 wrote a farewell note on his blog in English. After seeing the note, readers of his blog, launched a full scale effort to save him. Friends and strangers alike, thousands of people banded together, to try to track him down and others posted kind comments to his blog.

Police arrived at Hsu’s place just in time and saved his life.

The idea

We use social media monitoring tools such as Radian6 to listen to conversations on the blogosphere and elsewhere to protect brands. It’s not a stretch to deploy these tools to protect people.

How it would work

1. Radian6 set up to listen for a list of keywords
2. Suspect posts are parsed through to a heuristic analysis engine to further determine the sentiment of the post. Radian6 is has a automatic Sentiment engine built in, but we need one that would be tuned to suicidal/homicidal sentiments
3. Results that come up positive there are alerted to the on duty psychiatrist for an assessment and to alert the relevant authorities

There would be many issues that would have to be dealt with to make the system viable, feasible and workable and even then it would never be a certainty. What it would be is another tool in kitbag to tackle an extremely complex and difficult problem.

Why is this so clever? Mumbai is known for its monsoon season this time of year. Would it be likely that a scenario like this pop up where a boat was needed to get people to safety? Well, yes.

Not only was this an innovative way to promote Aircel as well as a media-stealing publicity stunt to generate word of mouth for the brand in a high traffic area, but it also received widespread media attention as an actual emergency arose which lead to someone needing to cut the rope and make use out of the vessel.

Springwise reports that on July 15, monsoon floods made the Milan Subway virtually impassable. “The rope was cut on Aircel’s billboard, the boat was released, and stranded pedestrians were ferried to safety.”

What a clever outdoor campaign. It’s just a shame that this wasn’t executed by the local Government of the day!