Southern China Commentary

The 1st anniversary of Web Wednesday Guangzhou was held at The Paddy Field, Guangzhou on 24 June, with guest speaker David Ketchum, founder of Asia Digital Marketing Association.

Turnout was sizeable and punctual. Some of that motivation might have come from Web Wednesday Hong Kong founder - Napoleon Bigg’s sponsor of free beer for the first 50 thru the door.

Join our Web Wednesday Guangzhou Facebook Group!

David started by summarising the findings of the ADMA 2009 Yearbook (Available for download here), with an overview the Asia Pacific trends in online user behaviour, online advertising, mobile and e-commerce.

Some interesting data include:

• 32% of Asian users say the online advertising they saw “significantly increased” their interest in using the brand
• 82% of Asia’s online ad spending in 2008 was in China, Japan and South Korea.
• More than 450 million consumers across the region participate in social media websites
• More than half of Asia’s Internet users visit gaming sites and online gaming with sponsored content is expected to be worth US$6.9 million by 2013.

Lonnie Hodge, the main organiser and host of Web Wednesday Guangzhou, then hosted a Q&A session with David and our audience.

Some Q&A excerpts (paraphrased):

Question: The advent of the IT and Internet is supposed to automate things. We now hear of Dell’s campaign on Twitter, addressing user concerns and help requests at an individual level. We’ve come a long way from getting rid of such labour costs, and now social media seems to be take a step back from automation and back towards manual labour? Is this the way forward?

Answer: There has to be someone out there because dedicated customer service is not something that can be read and replied by a machine. It is interesting, to note how communities of customers take care of each other. On Ebay, you can see that replies in pink are submitted from ebay employees, while other replies from users are not in pink. The community gets together and solves problems. Sometimes when you post a question, say on some iPhone app installation malfunction, someone from the community who had encountered and resolved situation before, might be able to reply quicker. If the reply is stupid, another guy would step in and say that it is a stupid reply. So, there is some efficiency to harnessing the wisdom of crowds, thru interchanges, to provide answers.

 
Question:How can a brand effectively utilise Social Media channels?
Answer: The key idea is to offer something tangible, and to be visible. If a company has the whole checklist package of social media elements (Facebook page, MySpace, groups, microsites, Linkedin, Twitter etc), it still not quality as a digital strategy and presence. The Best Job in the World is a successful case study to look at - they offered users a dream job of a life time to live on a paradise island and get paid good money just to blog about it. And all users had to do was to send in video resumes, which were visible across multiple social media sites. This is contrasted against some ill-conceived campaigns from other companies where publicity efforts were undermined by internal firewalled sections of content, which were only available to paid subscribers.

Question: How are Social media platforms going to make money for themselves, with Google Adsense/Facebook ads, or is there a different way forward?

Answer: I feel strongly that it will be a different way forward. The young generation these days are exposed to hip and traditional forms of digital media marketing, and would mentally edit out any form od advertising element that pops up or is framed up in a part of their frequented social media sites. I believe that the way forward would be the sponsorship of public relations and written content - companies would pay for groups to be setup, grown and maintained by influential online people who can get conversations going.

If I were to look into my crystal ball, I would also think that many of the websites and applications that users are enjoying for free now, would probably go away in time. Most of those apps, which do not have a viable monetizing strategy, and are likely to be phased out.

Other Random snapshots

1. Lonnie Hodge remarked that he used a form of Internet/Twitter back in 1979. It was a worldwide think tank, that used terminals which brought out on thermal paper, real time conversations with 200 people elsewhere in the world. It cost $1,000 a month back then for such a connection. Back then, Lonnie did not send tweets like “I’m having a sandwich“.
2. Look who’s here. It’s WeirdChina and WeirdChina Junior.
   

   WeirdChina & son at Web Wednesday GZ

3. Some Twitter users present: @lonniehodge, @weirdchina, @mathiaslin, @junde, @adeh, @billyjr, @enedhilwen
4. Web Wednesday Guangzhou has run a 1 year course with Lonnie Hodge at the helm. He will be taking a smaller (nonetheless significant) role in upcoming sessions, and yours truly, a China Web Consultant would be stepping up.
5. Photo credits by our official Web Wednesday Guangzhou photographer Cecilia Li
   

   Snapshots by Cecilia Li

Aims of the ADMA
David also elaborated on the aims of ADMA as a non-profit organisation: ADMA brings together industry professionals, as well as enthusiasts, on to a same page for knowledge and experience sharing. The digital media strategists and providers, as a well-organised group, would interact the corporations who but are apprehensive about spending big dollars on relative unknown publicity zones. The synergy and interaction within the group also prepares them well to face the next big things in the industry.

The ending note
Near the end of the Q&A, David asked the audience if there was anything they had seen online that has really impressed and gotten their attention. This was Web Wednesday Guangzhou’s first year anniversary. David expressed hope that at our second anniversary next year, everyone would be able to instantly recall prominent examples of impressionable digitial media content they had come across in their daily lives. That would be affirmation for the aims of the non-profit ADMA organisation, that the industry and audience in Asia have moved forward with the times.

Join our Web Wednesday Guangzhou Facebook Group!

Previous Web Wednesday Guangzhou Report (May 09 Catalyst Night) here.

 

Tags: ADMA, Asia Digital Marketing Association, David Ketchum, Junde Yu, Lonnie Hodge, Web Wednesday, Web Wednesday Guangzhou

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 27th, 2009 at 11:25 am by Junde and is filed under Web Wednesday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.