Archive for August, 2008

The evening of August 14 was a sold out “full house” with over 200 of South Florida’s leading business representing various industries as well as marketing and advertising professionals. The evening kicked off with presentations from the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association members that helped sponsor the dinner banquet.

The main event of the night was an hour presentation from keynote speaker and Emarketer CEO Jeff Ramsey, CEO of Emarketer.com. Armed with numerous statistics and studies of web trends, his presentation was informative, humorous, and extremely enlightening. Being that we are on the forefront of a changing industry, WEB 2.0, this new frontier has many challenges for business to overcome as they decide how to invest the resources in the new paradigm of social media online communities.

Jeff presented numerous statistics which point in multiple simultaneous directions as to the success of these communities to promote brand identity, trust and loyalty. Overall it is very subjective as numerous research firms try to make sense of the direction of the online world given sketchy measurability; but one thing is certain. Online communities are consumer driven and are striving to maintain a level of transparency between members and that is future of the web. In our next post, we will examine some of the terminology and criteria mentioned here to help you understand and digest these emerging communities.

Facebook has failed miserably in Japan, but succeeded tremendously in Chile and Colombia.

Japan

Facebook has been unable to gain any significant traction in Japan because they have fallen into the trap of thinking that what works in the U.S. can also work in Japan. Mixi, the locally grown social network ranks at #6 in traffic while Facebook does not make it to the Top 100. Serkan Toto, a contributor for Techcrunch, notes that the reason why facebook has not fared too well include:

• Failure to adopt to cultural differences: Different from American social media consumers, japanese culture places more emphasis on community than on individual self-promotion. And that what Zuckerberg heralded as a value proposition of showing real names and pictures, is actually something that Japanese users try to avoid.
• Lost in translation (Without Mobile, You’re Dead): Facebook is not optimized to work with Japan’s handsets, a big flaw, considering that people use the handsets to access the internet more than they do a PC.

Eventhough myspace and facebook are failing in Japan, they are doing great in Latin America, and we will take Chile and Colombia as examples.

Colombia:

• 2,691,760 Users on Facebook
• Number 1 in number of facebook users in Latin America
• 5th in number of facebook users globally (excluding the U.S.)
• Approximately 25% of all Colombian internet users are in Facebook

Why such vast and exponential growth? My theory is that its growth can be attributed to the Colombian expatriates in the U.S.

Between 1998 and 2000 it is estimated that more than 1 million people left Colombia and moved to the U.S. for economic and political reasons, many of those people had children that would eventually enter college around the time that facebook was getting it start and opening up to all colleges and high schools.  Thus, by the time facebook opened up to anybody with an e-mail address in 2006, there was already a large population of Colombians living in the U.S. that were members of Facebook, and they invited their friends and family in Colombia to join facebook.

Another significant event that helped the growth of facebook was the utilization of facebook as a tool for organizing a social movement. A group was created in facebook called 1 Million Voices against FARC (FARC is a marxist-guerrilla movement considered to be a terrorist group, one of the factors that forced so many people to Colombia in 1998-2000) and it grew very fast gathering coverage from the national press, media and radio, it eventually culminated in a protest February 4th 2008 in which 4.8 million people showed up to the streets in Colombia and 10 million people worldwide.

Chile

• Between February and August grew in Chile from 106,960 to 2,456,480 a staggering growth of 2,197%
• Approximately 33% of internet users in Chile have facebook

One of the reasons why facebook was able to grow so fast was because they made a spanish version in February, which coincides with the start Chile’s growth in facebook.

Although Facebook has had more success in Latin America than In Japan, it is by no means a declared victory because local rival sonico.com is gaining ground in places like Argentina and Brazil.

In future posts we will explore what local competition means for American social media sites and how social networks like Friendster have a new hope in emerging markets rather than in the U.S.

Links:

• Chile es el pais de mayor crecimiento en Facebook a nivel mundial (FayerWayer)
• Taking social networks abroad (Techcrunch)
• Tracking Facebook’s 2008 international growth by country (InsideFacebook)
• Rise of the 5th power Facebook and the Colombian Social Movement (Pulsepolitics)

A significant factor in social networking is giving consideration to how people naturally communicate and build communities. In this way, looking at off-line community trends can shed some light on how online communities will perform and interact. 

China Off-Line

In China off-line communities form and behave in very different ways to those in the USA or other western countries.

First and foremost is the sense of family. Due to the One Child Policy, most young people, born after 1979, have no siblings by birth. Instead, groups of children who were close friends from a young age and have lived near one-another for many years form relationships which they referrer to as familial. That is to say, much later in life, someone may refer to another person as their brother or sister in passing conversation although they are not related by birth

Similarly social relationships are often built out of immediate necessity and thereby used to maintain some sort of serviceable relationship. In China social circles aim to include people with a convenient set of influences but are often built purely by exposure to or participation within a community, as opposed to active networking in the way it is found in the USA. In this respect the network structure can be stagnant for a large portion of the population, though people tend to have very reliable networks and are very willing to participate and contribute to the community.

An interesting phenomenon in China are the ad-hoc summer evening social activity involving large groups of people congregating around parks and paved areas where they can simply sit and chat, or do exercise or allow their children to meet others. The dynamics in a situation like this are very different from those found in similar social scenes in the USA. People in this context are also quite willing to cross communicate and interact on an informal level. It is a highly connected network with little functional significance associated with the strength of a specific, human to human connection.

 China Online

Online community trends in China are similar to the day to day habits there.  For instance most people are interested in expanding their networks when they get the opportunity, even in situations when in the United States people might shy away for various social construction related reasons. People seem really happy to connect when they can. However, most services online are not designed around creating new connections with people whom one does not know, or at least, people with whom one does not have an inroad to know. It is almost as though, if you meet someone without the appropriate context it is not a significant meeting. 

One potential area of growth for Chinese web communities is a platform which allows its users to easily build casual relationships with other users, within the framework of their social building methodology, without the restrictions of a overwhelmingly structured user identity, or the confusion of too many options and immediate networking opportunities. Interestingly, further growth, after gaining a proportionally small threshold group of users, is relatively easy as the Chinese market is very thick with real life social networks and existing communities. The high population density and a culture of social activity lead this to be the case. 

Consuming Together

An important aspect of this situation that should not be forgotten is the expectation of high accessibility to media and media related interactions such as sharing. The Chinese web experience includes a lot of media consumption and on some occasions this is a group experience. An example of this is a common situation in internet cafes in which users will watch online movies, often at HD resolution, and simultaneously engage in two person video chats with many friends scattered around the region, presumably doing the same sort of thing. The market for tools that help people consume what is free or easily available is already quite crowded. Media as an inroad to community building, however, is a market that is largely untapped.

Miami is one of the cities that is creating awareness about social media and the way this is playing an important role through the internet for many communities, organizations, and most importantly people. Last weekend, Miami hosted SocialMediaCamp, an event that “brings together the brightest minds in Social Media with people interested in learning more about the power of Community Based Marketing”. One of the characteristics of this social media camp was the constant interaction among the audience members who shared their knowledge to inform others. Some of the presentations were very productive and the attendee always had the choice to leave the room if the topic was not of his or her interest.

During the event, Erica O’Grady mentioned that social media is based on relationships and dialog. However, This creation of new relationships are based on trust and an embedded culture where social capital is the key point to maintain it. She used a quote by Mahatma Gandhi, ” You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Social Media is a powerful tool that is being used and can be used to create change because there is a new influence where people exchange ideas, engage in dialogue, and change their minds.

Matthew from Clearcast Digital Media shared how social media is changing the old way of thinking. One of his examples was the impact of social media in engaging voters for local elections. The turn out was the increase of the number of voters from a ten percent to a twenty one percent thanks to the use of social media. He added that internet users and bloggers have an online community that consumes positive content that has useful information.

Overall, Social Media Camp was successful because it generated a social platform to establish real relationships. It generated dialog and it served as a vehicle to exchange information. People paid attention to what they thought it was new and important. Some people in the audience were twittering about some interesting points made in some of the speeches. Everybody had the chance to present a product, a service, or an idea that maybe was useful for someone in the audience.This was an opportunity to interact and build relationships that in the long run will help to consolidate the social media movement and learning community in South Florida.

According to Mashable - And This is Why China is Every Internet Company’s Wet Dream China now has 253 Million internet users, assuming China has 1 Billion people this corresponds to 23% penetration. In the USA there are currently about 223.1 Million internet users which means about 74% penetration.

Just an interesting factoid; when we say China has 1 Billion people, the rounding error is more than the population of the United States.

The growing internet markets in China and many other parts of the non-western world are

1. Forgotten by US web companies
2. Very interested in developing localised web tools and services of their own.

Mimicry of the west is not a new thing for many of these places, so copies of western websites are quite common now. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Paypal, Ebay and many others already have near identical twins some even with substantial traffic.

The interesting thing here is that there are differences, subtle differences, between the western market and the Chinese market. For example, when many web companies try to create services for a wider audience they fail to localise effectively. Simply making a Chinese translation of a web experience is not enough as there are noticeable cultural barriers. Similarly, when western groups try to create new experiences for the Chinese market they often fail due to a complete lack of knowledge about what Chinese users are actually like.

Internet trends in China

In China many internet users do not own computers and just use internet cafes on a regular basis, also many heavy web users often do not have email addresses and instead interact with other tools like a large messaging network called QQ. In some respects this market and even the elderly internet users in China are a lot more similar to Tween users than the young people leading web tech development in the US today. However another cause of difference is that web based services in China are often geared towards business or leisure but rarely in between so users tend to perceive the internet as a different kind of platform.

Opportunity and Risk

For any company creating web experiences, China could provide a huge user base, however, it could also act as a competitor of drastic proportions or even a business threatening lawsuit. Western companies interested in a global market should get in early and get informed about how their product can be applied and relevant to the Chinese market place. The web may make the world more flat in some ways but cultural nuances are now more important than ever because of the diverse cross-section of potential end users. Users that are considered incorrectly or not at all will not be users for long.