:: as I think most of you know, I’m a strategist at Edelman Digital Asia Pacific. As such, I just wanted to share some news.

Together with our partner Brandtology, we launched the Asia-Pacific Digital Brand Index (DBI), a regional study of online conversations about big tech brands covering 10 markets (Japan, Korea, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, India, and Australia). The study captures and distills 800,000 mentions of 233 major technology and telco brands on over 4,000 sites.

For more details and market-by-market data / fact sheet downloads, link here. [Google was #1 and Dell was #10, link here to found out the rest of the top 10.]

The study’s analysis and insights are quite telling.

One of the key take-aways for me (something John Kerr, Edelman Digital Asia Pacific head discusses more here) is that while having a consistently aligned social media strategy across Asia markets on a macro objectives level is crucial, tactic execution needs to be locally contextualized to ensure success. The nuts and bolts of brand engagement simply won’t work uniformly across such diverse social media environments.

The study also puts forth an interesting series of indices that help local and regional marketers find measurement benchmarks around important areas like Internet word of mouth conversation volume, engagement (or mentions per unique voice), channel volume / breadth, etc. All very much worth checking out.

To learn more, feel free to get in touch: adam.schokora@edelman.com

Also, see below for a video of John Kerr giving a quick overview of the study. To better understand the study’s methodology, link here.  // AjS

[Full disclosure: Edelman and Edelman Digital represent technology brands around the world, many of which are included in the Edelman Digital Brand Index.]

:: I peeked this TED Talk today and was pretty impressed. Shirky does many things really well in this presentation, but most notably:

• he smartly and succinctly summarizes the entire “transforming media landscape” X “social / digital media is important and why” meme we have all come to know and love over the past 5 years.
• he clearly illustrates the best example of social media in a China to date – better than any of us so-called Chinese digital experts have done. [Hail the power of online video and good public speaking skills!]
• he says this, “on the Internet, every medium (i.e. TV, magazines, telephone, books, etc.) is right next door to every other medium, put another way, media is increasingly less just a source of information, and increasingly a site of coordination.”
• he also puts forth this brilliant nugget of wisdom, “the media landscape that we knew, as familiar as it was and as easy as it was conceptually to deal with the idea that professionals broadcast messages to amateurs is increasingly slipping away. In a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous, and cheap; in a world of media in which the former audience are increasingly full participants – in that world [i.e. today], media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals, it’s more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups [i.e. conversation and community-based interaction]. The choice anyone who has a message that they want to have heard anywhere in the world faces, isn’t whether that’s the media environment we’ve want to operate in, that’s the media environment we’ve got. The question now is, how to we make the best of that medium even though that means changing the way we have always done it.” [Halle-fucking-lujah! Shirky, you killed it with that closer – bravo!]

The last point is what I have spent a good chunk of my professional life trying to get others to understand (and pay for). It has vast implications for “media people,” (who is everyone now-a-days) as well as the communications, PR, marketing, advertising, etc. industries. The next time your client (or colleague, or your mom) just doesn’t get it, play them this video. If English is not their first language, get a professional to translate it into the appropriate language. It will save you a lot of time / effort / money in the long run.  // AjS

:: my weekly Friday 5 briefs on the Chinese Internet are (hopefully) a useful resource and (fingers crossed) an excellent way to keep up with online trends / culture, local web communities, and social media engagement on the Chinese Internet. However, you are still left six days out of the week in which you can’t expect a Friday 5. Fortunately, there are a wealth of other respectable online sources focused on social media, online marketing, and digital trends in China. The selection below represents English language content of such sources, ranging from websites put out by ad / marketing / communications agencies and consultancies, to personal blogs by individuals and groups captivated by China’s Internet culture.

personal ::
In2Marcom describes itself as “a weblog all about INnovative and INsightful marketing communication, around Digital and Social Media in China.” It’s run by Jason Zhan Jia (ZJ), who started it up just this past March after working in digital and social media for several years. One interesting recent post looked at the development of a “test paper” meme, in which netizens repost exam questions answered with sarcasm, dirty jokes, or non-sequiturs, and its use as a marketing tool by Peugeot, Cadillac, and finally BYD. Dutch entrepreneur and social media practitioner Marc van der Chijs is an online personality based in Shanghai. The co-founder of Tudou.com and CEO of The Netherlands Spil Games Asia (”the world’s ultimate online game destination”), he keeps an English-language blog with a pretty good following. He’s an enthusiastic Twitterer, and many of his posts are about Twitter, for example, when his “Tweet” appeared in a Dutch newspaper from June 2009, which was about a frustrated attempt to book a flight on KLM, the Royal Dutch Airlines. Another notable post was “Talking and Talking”, from July, in which he spoke about Spil Games in Holland and Internet entrepreneurship in China. Included at the end of the blog post is an embedded video interview with an online TV station.

group ::
88 Bar (八八吧) is maintained by Jason Li and Lyn Jeffery and is the successor to Virtual China, the blog they ran for the Institute for the Future. They launched 88 Bar when their focus on Virtual China expanded from purely virtual culture to include offline culture and interactions between the two. They still blog regularly about Chinese social media, trends, and viral memes, although more as pointers to in-depth treatments on other sites. Recent posts include a look at steampunk animations and coverage of the World of Warcraft protests at this year’s China Joy. Danwei, a group blog that covers Chinese media as a whole, also dips into social media from time to time. It recently interviewed Dan Brody of 360quan and covered the shakeup of China’s microblogging platforms in the wake of the Urumqi riots.

tech ::
TechBlog86 (the number refers to China’s IDD prefix) is kept by David Feng, whose gossipy, insiderish writing style assumes that readers are familiar with the larger context behind the latest developments in China’s digital sector. The blog, which relaunched in May following an unfortunate hiatus, covers a wide and (sometimes random) variety of topics, from the most interesting MSN signatures to conference writeups (CHINICT 2009) to speculation about impeding changes in the local Web 2.0 industry: will Xiaonei get shut down? No, it’s just changing its name to RenRen. MOBINODE (动点博客) is a group blog focused on the Asia tech industry, with an emphasis on China. It’s maintained by Gang Lu (see this interview on 56minus1). Recent notable posts include advice to Facebook to forget about its prospects in the China market, and a look at Tencent’s rebate program. MOBINODE is associated with Mobinode.tv (动点博视), a series of Chinese-language interviews with Asia tech professionals. It has plans to develop an English-language counterpart, but has only done one subtitled interview, with Yeeyan co-founder Jiamin zhao, so far.

agencies / consultancies / professional entities ::
CNReviews, which hosts active discussions on hot-button issues in Chinese politics and culture, also features content from Blogger Insight that looks at the Chinese SNS / social media scene. Recent highlights include a look at the four distinguishing characteristics of Chinese SNS websites and a hilarious examination of opaque 3G advertisements. One of the things that makes CNReviews such a fun read is that it stakes out a firm position on issues – no wishy-washiness here – which generates energetic comment threads. Little Red Book looks at advertising and marketing in China, with a particular focus on the Internet and social media. It’s run by BA360, a “boutique marketing firm” (from its about page), and the major contributors to the site are strategy director Rand Han and media director Sherry Xie. Posts introduce viral marketing campaigns, quirky print ads, and SNS strategy as well as general Chinese Internet and youth culture issues. Little Red Book also provides a forum for further discussion of ad and marketing issues that haven’t made it to the front page yet. Many of the social media marketing / SNS case studies excerpted on Little Red Book come from ZeroDegrees, a project launched by BA360 in association with postcard design firm Mailman. ZeroDegrees has a fairly active comments section, and it also features discussions of more abstract issues, such as this recent post on the actual significance of Shanghai’s Expo 2010. Recent highlights include a look at micropayments in QQ, an unimpressed examination of Pepsi’s SNS campaign, and a look at how L’oreal celebrated its centenary on Chinese SNS. Ogilvy Digital Watch, although gathering dust now, has an great archive of posts about social media in China and the local tech / web industry. It unfortunately has not been updated since December 2008, about the time the agency’s key digital ninja Kaiser Kuo departed. The China IWOM Blog at CIC Data should already be on your RSS reader. The blog covers IWOM trends / culture, social media marketing case studies, and strategies for monitoring / measuring online public opinion and Internet word of mouth conversation. Mostly teasers for the company’s full-length reports and white papers, but even the excerpts are fairly interesting, and the linked PDFs invite careful perusal. An archive of past CIC slideshow presentations is available even if the latest installments, such as “Social Media Getting Closer to Real Life”, are unavailable to the casual user. Similarly, for the non-subscriber, Ad Age China has promising headlines (”Watch Out Ebay! Here Comes Alibaba” and “Can Baidu Keep its Crown as King of China’s Search Market?”) that tantalize from behind a pay-wall.

updates ::
Two other notable sites that look regularly at Chinese SNS and local social media in general are China Web2.0 Review and China Youth Watch, which were covered in a previous Friday 5 brief on Chinese bridge bloggers. China Youth Watch recently featured an article titled SNS and the Changing Chinese Youth, as well as an interview with 360quan.com editor Hui Wang. 56minus1 interviewed CYW co-founder Zafka Zhang back in November of last year. China Web2.0 Review recently covered the Xiaonei / RenRen changeover. (Incidentally, if you’re a fan of cheesy soaps and boom-era product placement, check out the TV show Heart-Net (心网), the story of a group of friends who start an Internet cafe in Shanghai. The old RenRen.com, which was huge back in 2000, is all over the show). Also mentioned in the Friday 5 brief linked above were  ChinaSMACK and Youku Buzz, two blogs that regularly feature the latest hot memes and viral videos to hit the Chinese Internet.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: a great 2D animation short titled 胡同的梦 (Hutong Dream) by Li Chao (李超), an undergraduate student at China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Li made this video as part of a Digital Media Workshop. Through a series of interrupted dreams, the animation shows a lonely old man’s blurred perception of reality as his monotonous life hurdles toward its end – death. Bravo, well done.  // AjS