Showing posts with label digital marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital marketing. Show all posts

Saturday 3 August 2013

The History of SEO




I'm spending a lot more time on SEO these days. This new presentation is a good history of the topic and even though it's a hundred slides it can be read in ten minutes. Maybe twenty if you're not a fast reader.


Thursday 24 September 2009

Adidas/Y-3



The Y-3 collaboration between adidas and Yohji Yamamoto is one of my favourites. I thought their store refit in the IFC building of Hong Kong was a one off, but it appears they are well coordinated with a coherent campaign using Google Earth as a store locater visual. Pretty hip move. Well mapped out. More please.

Monday 30 March 2009

Planning Wank



One of the notable disappointments of the plannersphere is the inability to engage with the larger subjects of the day. A herd like mentality (high five Mr Earls) seems to invariably ensue until a breakaway opinion is shared.

I mean really, was it only me who noticed that this economic turmoil would be the single most influential dynamic in our business before I blogged it?

Of course not, it's just that nobody wanted to point out the elephant in the room and this post is all about the elephant in the room.

Thanks btw to Neil who respects his own opinion as much as he welcomes others or I think we'd still be keeping quiet.
So, some months ago I came across a post on the use of a hotmail address which I found to be symptomatic of any London based planner who has yet to sharpen their skills abroad which is an assumption that what seems right in the UK is obviously a more progressive and thus substantial opinion than abroad - wrong. It's all over in London and this post one year down the line is my call on where the action is.

The writer (a friend of friends and thus a friend I might add) asserts that the use of a Hotmail address is either uncool or indicative of age. I'll let you read it but I'd like to state here that a hotmail address in China (the Leviathan of internet populations) is considered more prestigious than a QQ address which most are unaware of and the reason why I'm blogging about this topic.

Why put one's foot in the mouth without qualifying that one is just a local planner and the views expressed commensurate with that? The internet is after all a global media despite our cousins in America failing to understand that we don't all live in a U.S "state" when signing up to try stuff out. One of the perks of planning I might add.

The point is that clearly a snobbery of some kind (at the worst possible time) is intoxicating a large segment of the plannersphere, because while I use all my email address so that I can see who is doing what I use my hotmail address as the oldest and most well known leaving say my Gmail for business or Yahoo for the password options or whatever it is I used Yahoo for while trying to figure out what Yahoo 360 meant to social media some years ago. (Unilever Asia are you listening yet?)

No that isn't the point. The point is that when it comes to Microsoft the plannersphere is tainted. Seemingly jerking off to the latest Skittles work which admittedly punches above its weight and is thus to be welcomed.

When it comes to any discussion of Microsoft, the debate is already in the realms of "I use Apple and they haven't spoiled the world" so let's all break out into Kumbaya, in unison ; after we watch this Coca-cola hill top ad (which hasn't aged as well as we would hope).


Well the thing is Apple wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Microsoft (nor would Google) and as I've shared previously it's time to stop kicking the Grandaddy of Software for just existing (and who would pull it out of existence if their paycheck was not on time as most are?)

Microsoft is way off from perfect, and this post is being written on an Apple MacBook Air which frankly has weathered the single toughest beating I've dished out to a notebook and survived but that doesn't mean we shouldn't aquaint ourselves with some facts:

Microsoft is the de facto operating system of the world. It is as it is and we cannot unwind the clock. We probably need it, more than it needs us (Think about that).

Bitching about Microsoft is like bitching about an incontinent relative who was mopping our own urinary leaks long before reasonably sentient thoughts arrived.

Go to China and, Microsoft or Bill Gates is the ONLY thing that is openly admired about the U.S.
The responsibility of ensuring that the system doesn't freeze up after more than 30 years of solid performance is in itself considerable and while it's easy to see that less is more when considering operating systems, I don't know a single person who hasn't succumbed to feature creep when buying a technology for the first time. Why wouldn't the inventors have succumbed to that line of thinking too?

So people like Tom Rafferty who make a living through liberal pinko commie bashing Microsoft are just that. Blow hards who have never done anything as fundamentally important or profoundly life changing as Bill Gates and Microsoft. Who could deny that here is a man who didn't change the world?

So while it's fashionable to take the piss out of easy targets such as Hotmail ,like this joker over here I'd like to remind people that getting my first mail address outside of University which provided one that was all numbers and letters and @solent.ac.uk was when Hotmail first allowed me to talk to anyone else with an email address back in '95 through the revolutionary interface of what is now called The Cloud. It was brilliant back then and is still a brilliant idea right now.

I've been watching something. I seen how social media and the ability to share common interests or even share uncommon ones thus providing a learning platform is the single biggest revolution on the planet since Microsoft increased the market for computers from about five as IBM predicted (and is in the seven worst tech predictions of all time) to just about the entire planet.

Big organisational goal I might add.

I've watched as one memorable evening the Microsoft Live (call it 'we're not buying Facebook' statement if you will) has rolled out and quite hard work for me as one one who has thousands of emails scattered all over the show, took about an hour to consolidate what up till then was in my opinion a reasonably slow and poor blogging/messaging platform by Microsoft.


It isn't now, it's one of the best and most seamless integrated roll outs I've witnessed and here is a question to my peers in digital agencies, planners all over and anyone interested in what can only be classified as a revolution in communication. Why haven't any of you deemed it important to record that the largest adoption of or invitation to social media is occurring as we speak and is based on a platform that has been around for years?

Maybe it's the Asian numbers that are missing so here's some quick cut and paste to help me get to the final sentence before I pass out with faux rage and delicious tropical heat.

Windows Live reaches 142 million users a month in Asia Pacific and that number is about to get bigger. Microsoft and Windows is a large, healthy, growing, prestigious brand in Asia from a population that appreciates the sheer ability to connect through web cams to messengers but don't take my word for it here's a presentation from Geert who I met in LA last year and is responsible for that fab brand consumer ad we all loved so much.



There's more facts to appreciate what is going on with the QUIET launch of Windows Live.



If the Windows Live user community were its own country it would be the third largest in the world. 8.2 billion messages are sent via Messenger daily - that's 14 times the amount of snail mail sent via the US Postal Service on a daily basis and 17 times the number of comments posted daily on MySpace. Look even in the UK Microsoft Live fares unexpectedly well on the visitor stats as you can see over here.

So really my irritation is that because something is fashionable we, the planning community, seem to invest it with magical powers of efficacy that simply aren't there. Because we the planning community are by and large appreciators of Apple products we've lost the respect and the impartiality to judge what is unquestionably the de facto operating system of the world that churns out our payslips and which we are asymmetrically unprepared to talk about in the same way we are so keen to give Microsoft a good kicking at the first opportunity like their recent Global Advertising (On a local budget if you think about it) for pointing out what heaven forbid in this world of truth rejection is easily the hardest factoid in the universe.

MS is a cheaper operating system to run. Christ I'd like to have that in a brief. I'd send the creatives down to Four Bucks and get them to pay the agencies Macchiato coffees while explaining that this is what the cost of living means to most people in the real world.

So there you have it. Microsoft is huge, they're in business, they just rolled out some pretty awesome integrated social media shit and we the planning wank community pretty much ignored it preferring to waffle on like "let's not talk business or profit or communications efficacy" and continued with our specialist subject of "let's talk about what's hip" what's yoof or anything that has diminished our client's ability to believe in us. Because frankly they don't really and who could blame them, given the silence on something so large that just rolled out. Most planners probably don't even know because they're too sniffy to have a Hotmail address. Go figure that one out in ethnographic field studies.


My only real gripe with Microsoft is that somewhere back in the day, they changed the world and I believe they could do it again if they really really thought about it. Now that is awesomeness. My latest fave word.


I'll try to clean up this post later when I've cooled down from the rant. Formatting is all over the shop in Draft blogger but little I can do till they fix things.

Wednesday 18 June 2008

Fink about the money!


I was over at Zeus Jones blog a few days ago, and Adrian’s post on monetization of social media got me thinking about digital again, and whereas I usually fire off a long comment when that happens, I reckon it’s time to write some thoughts down over here.

Firstly I can’t bear that word monetization. It’s the English part of me I guess, but it just feels crass that everything has to be monetized. I’m reminded of this each time I watch Fox News, because all the bullying of any (pinko Commie bastard) liberal guests they bring on to bait is won by their vulgar but implicit idea that if profit is not made then its not of worth. This is the point where I think the United States has gone slowly wrong in the last 50 years because the values it was built on are not about profit to the detriment of all else. OK I got that off my chest. Back to making money! We’ve also all got bills to pay. The environment of course being the biggest!

Yes of course there should be some sort of transactional value exchange model between social media platform providers and the people who frequent them. It does however feel like the old media model of huge profits and mass market broadcasting persuasive powers has disintegrated.

Micro-transactions work very well here in China for the most popular platform QQ using a virtual currency that is paid for in hard cash. (Kind of like a Second Life model) but this is where I like to think social media should embrace a number of revenue streams and think about revenue diversity because it’s obvious (to me) that good old fashioned bread and butter banner advertising works very effectively in Facebook. I generally love the ad to the left of their pages because they are eerily effective and are mainly China location based services making them highly relevant. In short they work. I like them even.

So we’ve got micro-transactions, and then traditional banner advertising. I like to call this distractive (contextual) advertising because if it’s good enough, then it distracts much like print advertising does today, interruptive advertising which is generally disliked but is based on the commercial break and includes pre-roll advertising as well as the hated pop up and even ideas such as “get this digital mobile phone for free as long as we can give you x number of ads a month”

I also think there are more innovative ideas that could be considered such as tiered or rewarded internet activity. Adrian has done a fine post about social media but as he correctly points out most people are hanging out on the net to get away from dull content and patronizing marketing communications. However the tiered subscription or rewarded activity is based on a model that really needs to embrace some ideas that Adam Crowe was, I think, the first to bring my attention to. The notion of data portability. The information accumulated by internet usage should belong to the customer not us.

If we (or Google or the ISPs) do the unthinkable and give our potential customers their own internet usage data to trade with us we then are truly opening up ideas loosely called the free market economy. It’s probably more American/United States than apple pie and fanny packs put together now that I think of it. This then opens up our potential customers to benefit from their data portability in the best way possible. The provider they choose to allow receipt of marketing communications from. It’s a bit like a bazaar. If you don’t like the voice of the trader or the goods they are selling, you can stay clear of them. Imagine a world where in return for premium content we permitted ourselves to exposure of specific marketing models. If the advertising sucks we make a decision about whether we can get by with lower value advertising-free content or not at all.

Either way I think we are moving into a new era of marketing communications because as an advocate of 'the medium is the message' it's clear to me that I never got ‘spammed’ while watching a commercial in a movie theatre, direct mail is lower down the food chain because its so much more cheaper to indiscriminately ‘target’ (using the language of old) with geography or basic demographics acting effectively to the point where a 3% response rate still makes it worthwhile.

But here’s the context. The internet is both a place where I can watch a Cannes winning Youtube clip and also open up my mail to be offered a larger penis or a fake Rolex watch. That never happens on TV or even direct mail and so the value of the internet is diminished by this activity. There are innovative ways around this if advertisers want to raise the perceived value for a short while. Like for example if I was P&G I would buy all the available online advertising space within a specific digital media aperture. Maybe the whole of the NYT or The Guardian for a few days. Just wipe out every ad in the online editions and put one sponsor message on there, advertising some spot removing clean or dandruff clearing shampoo. Something relevant seems appropriate!

There are ways to be creative on the internet, although finding the clients bold enough to do stuff like this is tough. Anyway in principle the point I want to end on is that it's not us who should be targeting the customers, it’s the customers who should be targeting us.

This is after all the 21st century and not the 20th. We had two world wars in that one.

Update: Adam links to this which is just the sort of example I'm talking about with P&G. i.e. buying space that would normally be filled with ads.

Sunday 15 June 2008

Is Google Stupid?

Baidu is the search engine of choice in China. Google has 27% market share here and it is growing, but Baidu has double at 55%. There are plenty of reasons, that extend from cultural inclination, history and product offering, but the one area that Google consistently fails to embrace is the notion that people can be driven to internet services from what I like to call hard media. Time and again I've seen very simple and effective advertising for Baidu. On Friday while taking a subway trip I saw yet more examples of invitations to use Baidu and took a quick picture.



That's a search box in Chinese underneath the English name with the search button on top to the right of it. It's quick, simple and effective. One of the dimensions of media that is talked about very little outside of the creative execution is the notion of trust and credibility. Just buying that media space says a whole lot to prospective Chinese internet search engine customers (think 'we're Baidu and we can afford this space), and I've been irritated for longer than I've been in China that Google has failed to grasp a window of opportunity by using simple and traditional media. I've noticed that the paper tray mats in KFC were also being used by Baidu for a co-promotion recently and the reason why I think Google has slipped up is that I really wanted their Google Talk feature to become more popular. It could have done that and created momentum for user growth in more of their products too, quite easily.

If the internet is today more understood to be about the power of community, then it smacks a little of brand arrogance not to approach people and potential communities in the media that they may have exposure to more easily, or even prefer! Its us that are the digital evangelists. Most people have lives to get on with.

I absolutely love Google and their products (Google RSS Reader kicks ass). There's no doubt that they have been one of the most exciting and innovative companies on the planet. They are also phenomenally successful, a veritable black swan, but I think they have missed an opportunity to make friends, by not talking to people outside of what we are increasingly glued to. Our computer screens.

It would be nice to hear their brand voice elsewhere. The medium is after all the message and the internet isn't the only one that matters. Or even should.

One last point as there is more depth to this issue than I want to get stuck into here, is that Baidu is better at finding free mp3 files which is a contentious point, but in terms of efficacy I understand that Google is better, and for sure in English Baidu's best search result on me is by a long chalk unrepresentative. Yet still my Chinese colleagues prefer Baidu in some contexts.

You know Google; if you're listening, sometimes people like to find what they believe. Not believe what they find. Baidu is better at that function in China and that is the marketing challenge for Google here.

Sunday 8 June 2008

Chunking Express



This is a long and sweeping post covering Asia and Creativity and Survival. There's no way I am even close to being completely right and there will be gaps, mistakes and contradictions and could easily go on for much longer, but I think I've connected enough of the dots to write this down rather than endlessly repeat what I've been asked about through umpteen Skype/Coffee Shop/Phone conversations around the world even though it was a pleasure to do it one more time for my good man Mark in the early hours of Saturday morning (It was closer to 3 AM Mark, I lost track of time!)

I'm a committed environmentalist, green marketeer, sustainable energy man and yesterday, as promised, offered free B2B marketing consultancy to a Chairwoman I met on Friday night at a swanky hotel bar, who is trying to raise funds on AIM for biomass fuel resource development in China. So cut me some slack on buying this unecessary phone because it is now the stimulus for a long overdue post that I started with Quantity not Quality back here.


OK, so the phone is pictured above. I first saw one owned by the manager of a stall in a Xidan shopping mall that does those funky T Shirts with twisted slogans I love so much. She was kind enough to answer my questions about where to get one, although they were no longer available, and finally Gustavo emailed to let me know he'd spotted them at Silk Street Market.

I have no real desperate need for a secondary phone except as a backup, but here's the skinny. Its shaped in the style of those first 1985 models called the Motorola DynaTAC, only a lot smaller and it is in my opinion, the definitive ironic style accessory. But lets talk facts. It comes with some more stuff than the original despite being a fraction of the original size:

Extra Memory Card
Stylus operated PDA
Bluetooth
FM Radio
Two Batteries
Media Player
Camera
Sound Recorder
Video

and....... most importantly; a SOLAR PANEL on the rear for charging the battery, meaning I leave it in the sunshine and she's good to go. Oh yeah, and it carries two SIM cards so I can have a double life which is perfect because even though I turned down those alarmingly low paid but discrete approaches by people who insisted on being implicit and not explicit about what branch of government they worked for all those years ago, this phone has a telescopic detachable zoom lens so I can observe Al Qaida operatives long before they spot me, and way after they were called the Mujahedeen and funded by "The American Dream" to win the cold war that was also won by outspending the Soviets on Nukes instead of funding guerrilla fighters who wanted to protect their religion and culture. I digress but check the telescopic lens out.


Freaking neat huh?... Back to the point. Asia, and China specifically is staggeringly good at duplication, imitation, reproduction, cloning and replication. I don't mean that pejoratively at all, except that in general it appears very few give a fuck about the environment, but it's not like any fool can do it either. For a start, it takes an entrepreneurial mindset, lots of financial resource, the expertise to duplicate the latest technology, reorganise an existing manufacturing process, disrupt the in-process inventory model (which is a LOT of work), reconfigure supply side distribution management and believe it or not, try and do some marketing.

So even though Asia is brimming with the sort of creative output that humans all round the world are good at when given the right environment, the reality of the region and China specifically is that it does the industrially unprecedented, through scale and volumetrics, plus a monoculture that pretty much insists on a uniformity of mindset and collective action rather than the pluralism and creative tension of the Western model kicked off by ideas from Empedocles and Democritus. China is still closer to the pre-Socratic Eleatics in thinking and while I generally embrace all cultural idiosyncrasies I believe China should think very very seriously about how to embrace pluralism and how to work it together with collective endeavour outside of the neoliberal capitalist model for reasons I'll round up on once I've dusted off creativity.

Now there plenty of exceptions outside of China, of brilliant creative marketing executions. There are however insufficient Pan-Asian successful branding case studies to conclude that out of a few billion people in the Far East, only a handful have figured out how to build on their strengths rather than embrace the reality of not being innovation leaders. Lets list them. Singapore Airlines (had it, lost it), Sony (erratic), Honda (W+K London) erm Samsung/Epson/Panasonic/Asus et al (yawn) and shall we say that'll be the Daewoo? Because when I worked in London at HHCL, no creative could ever deliver a pun as an idea. Oh and by the way Hello Kitty is Asia's third strongest brand.

So back to the product because that is where Asia knows how to rock-it from a manufacturing, pricing and distribution angle. The phone above is a 3rd millenium mashup and I love its solar panel credentials (it's no toy feature) but there is nothing in it that was invented outside of an occidental environment. Hat tip to Charlie Gower for his post that highlighted it was the Japanese at Sharp in 2001 who put a camera into the first popular cellphone. Digital photography though is rooted outside of the country that implemented it first successfully.

Charlie Gower is also one of the most creative idea driven people I know and memorably suggested at The Endurance in Soho, that mobile phones cameras need a small detachable light connected by wire, for taking decent night time shots. He's right too. Lighting is in the top three things for a good picture with composition and subject matter. A serious Asian brand will never do it first because it hasn't been done elsewhere. Sony. You make the best camera phones. What are you waiting for?

And there my friends is part of the challenge.

Whether its manufacturing or marketing by the time it comes to that old chestnut called creativity the absolutely last thing on a serious Asian brand's mind is taking a risk. Monoculture is all about being risk averse.

The marketing psychology over here is all too often 'If everyone is doing the same shit, then its more than likely to be working'. If I go out on a limb I'm risking the whole shebang for some marketing glory. Why on earth would I want to do that? The agencies are quite happy to go along with the illusion of creativity because the remuneration for getting a regular kicking from their clients is worth it. Senior management just shuffle the spreadsheet finance numbers and it's those lower down the food chain that are bullied the most anyway.

Now I could go into the reality that there isn't much need to stuff Asian ads with the usual superlatives of shiny white teeth and happy sterile family stereotypes. In real GDP growth economies here in Asia of say 7% and above all we have to do is bash people over the head with a monologue and make money. Repetition, increased sound volume, general aspirational lifestyle imagery and a million wasted hours talking bullshit about brand values, propositions, transactional analysis (just kidding), rational versus emotional, link testing, likability versus memorability and the rest of that old marketing bullshit that invariably settles on the word passion because of course the client and agency believe the brand is ALL about PASSION. Of course they do! It pays their fucking mortgages for Christ's sake.

How do we move on? If Asia and China specifically wants to move on to having the glorious aroma of a brand that performs above and beyond product specifications, there is plenty of fertile territory that deeper analysis of the DNA and marketing context offers. So often the really sticky stuff that is insanely interesting about Asian brands are the humble roots of the people who started them, the scalability, the risk taking, the commitment and the reasons they put on their spreadsheet marketeer heads on each morning. For their families and for their dreams. The power of dreams as we all know is quite something which is probably where I should begin to wrap up because the reality is that while I know great brands can be built here in Asia that can go global and attract a lot of customer love we are all facing a much larger problem than flogging the latest tech gadget. The economic model we are using is broken. It operates by extracting resources from the ground, converting it into products and then disposing of them at an exponentially faster rate because that is why technology controls us and not the other way round.

The imperative marketing challenge for Asia and China particular if you are listening because it all rests with you until the Indian demographics kick in is to charge more for less.

More ideas less stuff.

More cost less consumption

How do you do that?

You build proper brands that stand for something your families would be proud of and that means embracing the word creativity and innovation with a view to doing nothing less than rewiring our economies and the corporations so that we have something to pass on to the next generations.

Its really rather simple, and very very complex at the same time.

There's also a lot of thinking some of us are doing about why digital is more sensible for explosive growth populations and why analogue is probably a more intelligent use of resource for the rich folk.

Monday 5 May 2008

Prove It

The best marketing clients in the world are those who are prepared to be brave. They balance their experience of what works historically against their judgment or instinct for what might work. In my experience they are highly demanding but are also the most rewarding to have.

I think we're living in quite profound times and not only for marketing communications, if anybody corners me privately on the implications and similarities of ubiquitous connections and say telepathy/extra sensory perception.

I don't believe the revolution will be twittered. I think it is being twittered and it's still early days yet. That doesn't mean the current slew of marketing automatons should rush to be prematurely involved and start interrupting peoples fun - That's not fast strategy that's dumb strategy, and a waste of carbon footprint between servers. It's a good idea to hang out with folk before you try and make money from them.

Why not try thinking of it differently? As Rob Alexander (I think) of JWT in London says 'We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in, and start being interesting'.

It's worth considering as Clay Shirky puts it: "Here comes everybody"

Then Charlie Leadbeater says: "In the past you were what you owned, Now you are what you share"

Let me paraphrase that "We are what we share"

I'm no longer surprised how excruciatingly dull marketing people can be. They used to hire their agencies to be interesting for them, but since they squeezed that equation to the lowest common denominator, it is now difficult to distinguish between the marketing department and their agencies. They're now frequently both dull and in all too many circumstances regrettably loathe each other. It's rare, particularly in Asia to hear 'I've got a brilliant client' from senior ad folk. Tell me if you believe I'm exaggerating or plain wrong, that's what the comments are for. If not, doesn't this suggest that it's time to change?

Interrupting content is the 20th century model for marketing communications and it still works to the extent that many people put their cognitive surplus into 'vegging-out' in front of the telly - Maybe they are the ones who work so hard executing, that they then have too little time exploring the internet to grasp what's going on. If I'm being charitable some of the most time pressured clients are too busy dealing with today to think about a very different tomorrow.

Do remember though that Hip Hop didn't start with the Record Labels. It started in the projects of New York and was home made. Its now the dominant music form globally. Because that number, who are chilling (or slumped) in front of the telly (and constantly ask me incredulously 'where do you get the time to blog?') are diminishing noticeably as the internet becomes more interesting. It's the clients who are smart and courageous enough to take a bet on the quantitatively unprovable yet instinctively worthwhile that are likely to be the new stars of tomorrow.

Here's 30 seconds of interesting content. I filmed it, edited it, added music and uploaded it all from my Nokia N95, as I was exploring my phone features. All the marketing folk have got to think about is how to facilitate that process or be part of the digital-content-topography for enjoying it without interrupting it, delaying it or annoying the much more demanding 21st century participant.

Disclaimer: I didn't take the dancers back to drink Cristal and dance around chrome poles like the air hostesses in Iron Man's corporate jet after.

I'm quite interesting enough thank you.


Untitled from Charles Frith on Vimeo.

And here's some proper content from TED if you're still paying attention.


Wednesday 23 April 2008

China 2.0


Here's what I would do if I was serious about marketing in China. China has the largest internet population in the world, and it's still growing. The shift from television screens to internet screens on computers or mobile phones is the largest media exodus ever. More people will engage with the internet on a mobile phone in China first than in any other country. The numbers go on for ever really. China is all about the numbers.

However Chinese internet isn't really Web 2.0 yet. The Western model of identity and profile through Facebook and Myspace et al simple doesn't work here, but use of BBS is unbelievably masssive. I wrote about it over on Kaiser Kuo's excellent digital China blog some weeks ago here. The most dangerous focus group topic I ever raised was identity versus anonymity here in Beijing with quite progressive University students. Even mentioning that 99.9% of China's internet voice is completely anonymous on Bulletin Boards (BBS) against the thought of 'appearing' on the net as themselves was enough to silence a room full of respondents with fear, as if I were interviewing them for Komitet Gosudarstvenoi Bezopasnosti in Soviet Russia. I'm not exaggerating.

Whether its the State, or the group or the family there's something about being identified or attaching a face to content that terrifies Chinese folk. Face is a big deal in Asia. However the internet is a very valuable and highly appreciated part of middle class Chinese ability to express themselves and articulate their thoughts. Sure a lot of it is flame wars but I think we all know that flaming is part of growing up on the net. Its not hard to wind people up via the interweb is it? Once that realization is discovered, we tend to move on. Possibly to identity/reputation management which is definitely the new game in town now that Google is in charge.

So here's the thing. 70% of Chinese BBS is built on a platform called Discuz which is owned by Comsenz. They just had another million bucks thrown at them by those guys at Google. Now the killer thing about Discuz is that it is partially open source. Open source is almost an heretical idea in Asia. The notion of 'sharing' is antithetical to the Asian mindset. Secrets and information are valued beyond anything else to the point that sometimes it would appear that some would prefer suffocation than sharing their oxygen supply with other parties. I really mean that, it also explains a lot of the copy mentality that exists in this part of the world. That's the irony to the insane fixation on secrets and not sharing stuff; nobody does anything really new and so everyone is watching everyone else to see if an incremental change or new direction is taken. It also explains why only one or two Asian brands, including Japan have brands that stand out.

But with Discuz there is an opportunity to create a mini platform between profile driven social networks and BBS topic driven net activity. I would suggest writing some code for some widgets to sit on top of Discuz driven BBS and then we have a half way house to facilitate cross networking of BBS and profile/identity management that exist with traditonal social networking sites. I'd even go so far as to encourage all the flamers to pick up a new moniker and treat it like they're in front of their family at all times. Like it's their new 'face'. ....Start afresh like!

So the trick now is to figure out where brands should hang out on the net with their customers and their respective communities. Nobody actually has a full breakdown of this information although Sam from See I See/China Internet Word of Mouth knows more than most.

A proposal I made was to do a standard quantitative research project of the top 500 BBS communities on the Chinese net. If that seems like a lot then hold steady because China is massive and there's more. I think the top 500 BBS communites across the metrics of 'most affluent', 'most populous' and 'most influential' would make sense. Then I would segment all those groups across the usual community interests that advertisers are most interested in, moms and families, car lovers, tech lovers, political, travel and all the usual useful-in-a-rough and-ready-way segmentation seen on those standard tick boxes we are asked to fill in when we subscribe to internet services.

Once this 'new digital media planning data' is available I'd then put forward a China 2.0 media plan. Using the fundamentals of Transmedia Planning and some viral work that embraced volume seeding, Lo-Fidelity video and the upside of risk, as talked about back here in the post Black Swan (and here too) I'd think about developing a plan for engaging with existing customers and potential customers on the basis of being interesting or useful to them. That plan should be strategically built on a broadcast to narrowcast basis or vice versa depending on the rationale for engaging/reenforcing something at an internet dialogue level first or television's monologue model. Its quite exciting when I start to think about creative briefs written with the net first or telly first as a rolling narrative direction. Lots of opportunities there.

The only part I'm still trying to figure out is how to 'represent' in those tens or hundreds of 'communities' on the net where it's important to be useful or interesting for specific clients and their needs. I've given it some thought and my instinct is to identify the people who are most active in and respected in the community. The trick is NOT to buy them, because they then lose their authority and respect (Shills they scream!), but to build up their reputation by giving them the ability to 'share' through either reputation enhancements of information sharing or favour dispensation such as Skype credits or Taboa (China's Ebay) coupons as an idea. It's crucial that all actions are transparent, open, honest and authentic otherwise it all falls apart. Brands aren't very good at that short list of Web 2.0 guidelines and it explains why most marketing 1.0 peeps and planners 1.0 types don't get it.

Ideas like the one above are unlikely to be implented here though any day soon. One of the most frustrating aspects of working in developing economies is just how many bad habits are picked up from the West and then applied cookie cutter style over here. The advertising format is pretty much the same for lazy/untalented marketers and agencies (insert pretty model with product implying that you too can be cool/beautiful/powerful). And then the methodologies for assessing the effectiveness of those campaigns are just lifted from the West without much thought to the notion that Asians have a different perception of the truth or how to articulate it. Even the focus group dynamic is completely stuffed given that cultural differences like Guanxi in China or Grenjai in Thailand exist. This is where even the sharing of inconsequential information is considered reckless and stupid. I did write back here how I would approach Asian research with a fresh mindset because the same old companies come back with the same old rubbish and its not hard to figure out better ways.

I've pointed out that a lot of the advertising people in China have sat on top of 15% GDP growth for 10-15 years and are at best unremarkable and at worst believe their own P.R. but I'm guessing that one or two might read the above and see the seeds of China 2.0 in there. It's all very exciting when I think about it - The End.

Update: I see that some of these ideas have started to materialize over on CWR blog.

Wednesday 20 June 2007

Uniqlock

I love this. Good solid digital marketing from Uniqlo. Click the "off" word on the bottom right hand to hear the music with it.