Panelists:
Sam Fleming @samflemming
Benjamin Joffe @benjaminjoffe
Jacqui Zhou @jacquizhou
Description:
Most Westerners learn about China’s social media through traditional media whose coverage tends to focus on conflicts and politics. But that’s not the whole story. We will explore the motivation behind massive adoption of social media, reasons behind local brands’ domination of the market and social media’s impact on business and…
Discussion:
The landscape is very complicated.
Flemming: Everything that’s happening in the West is happening in China.
Different platforms have different services. The Bulletin Board Sservice (BBS) is the heart of social media in China. They are very popular, they’re anonymous and people talk about just about everything here. There are 117 million BBS users in China. Blogs are used for personal purposes, the “About Me” narrative. Social Networking Services (SNS) are also quite widely used.
As a brand, it’s essential to measure and track how people are talking about your brand.
What are they doing online? Online video and instant messaging (IM) is huge, eCommerce is taking off, online gaming and music is big.
China social media dominates the US: Chinese netizens are more engaged in creating/sharing content. 40% of users in China are creators, compared to 21% of Americans.
Netnovels are popular, published online, people will read it, and the ones that get the most attention are actually published.
Joffe: People not only use social networks, but they use several of them at a time, depending on who they’re talking to, what they’re trying to do, etc.
People have multiple identities, and often multiple identities on a single platform.
China isn’t learning just from the US, they’re learning from several places, such as Korea (for online video mostly). The local market hasn’t developed very strongly for online advertising, so most of those services don’t rely on advertising.
China’s virtual goods market was about $5B in 2009!
Tencent is one of the most important network in China, it’s the third largest internet company in the world, 90% of the revenue is from digital goods (35% of which is from games) and 10% is from ads. They’re net margin is 40%!
5Cs of Chinese Innoviation: Copy, Combination (put two or more existing products/services together into something more), Competition (fostering innovation), Constraints (another source of innovation, they had to find new concepts), China.
