In an increasingly global world, it’s not unreasonable to believe that some tactics used in developed markets will be successful in China. But it’s also important to recognize that new trends or even new uses of familiar tactics make every market different, a fact I was reminded of after moving to China three months ago.

For example, advanced analytics tools for monitoring the social media space will dramatically change the approach to social media and the value placed on it by marketers—once they arrive in emerging markets–just at they did recently in developed markets. The expansion of market leaders like CIC, a digital media research and consulting firm in Shanghai, will help drive this change.

China’s digital marketers can skip some of the mistakes made in other more established markets as they go through a huge digital growth spurt and probably develop new tools (and associated mistakes) on their own. I expect the same thing to happen with some tactics.

As a westerner living in Shanghai, I’ve certainly had to re-evaluate what I understood about China, including the way to approach digital marketing when taking on the world’s largest internet market. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far:

1. There is plenty of life beyond Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
And that’s a good thing, since these banned sites are non-players in the Chinese market. Although the social media space is fragmented, there are major players with hundreds of millions of users that rival even the biggest players.

Although a myriad of players exist in this complex social media space, start by learning about platforms like Kaixin (social network), Sina Weibo (micro-blogging), Youku (video sharing), and QQ (instant messenger). Re-learning the platforms can be challenging, but is possible for non-Chinese speakers by accessing them through Google Chrome with its automatic language translation function. The brand communications principals behind authenticity, transparency, and value in social media still apply, though.  Read More »

Check out the official teaser video for Facebook places. What I really love about it is that it maps exactly to SapientNitro’s PoV on the space-time continuum for experience mapping; in layman terms what we believe is that every moment should cross space and time. A moment crosses spacewhen multiple people in different locations can live the same moment .. for example,  you share a live video feed, lifecast, share status updates, photos, and your friends all over the world can interact with this content in real time. A moment crosses time when you can geo-tag content and you can interact with the same content any time in the future when you’re in the same location … or if your friends visit the same location, can could see your previous experiences in that place.

Everything we do, we do with a mindset of digital amplification through space and time … and Facebook places is just, exactly, that. This can really be huge.

Why to Check In? by Facebook.

Twitter just launched their official Tweet this button — about time … it comes in three versions (110×20, 55×20, 55×63) with five different settings for customization. You can set the URL obviously, the Tweet text default, via @SapientNitro or some user, related, and count box position.

You can embed with an iframe or embed with a JavaScript hosted at Twitter that will style a pre-determined class in a link. Pretty straight forward of course; how much can there really be for a simple Tweet this button.

You can see it server directly from Twitter here.

Step-by-step instructions by Mashable:

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• Old Spice accounted for 75 percent of conversations in the category in the first three months of 2010.

• Half the conversations came from women.

• The YouTube/Twitter social media response campaign was “the fastest-growing and most popular interactive campaign in history.”

• More people watched its videos in 24 hours than those who watched Obama’s presidential victory speech. (Which most of us can agree is kinda sad.)

• Total video views reached 40 million in a week.

• Campaign impressions: 1.4 billion.

• Since the campaign launched, Old Spice Bodywash sales are up 27 percent; in the last three months up. 55 percent; and in the last month up 107 percent.

NOTE: These stats are for the entire campaign, mostly TV and traditional. The sales numbers were taken from June, before the social media component even launched. Impressive nonetheless. For unofficial social media specific stats please refer to my previous post.

I am so glad I [accidentally] decided to write about the Old Spice videos last Friday, prior to the social media campaign launch. The Old Spice simple and clever social media campaign has been running for the past 48 hours, allowing fans, influencers, and random people get their own personalized Old Spice video response by Tweeting, through Facebook, or Youtube commects … amazing! Full review by Mashable is pretty good.

Inevitably and as expected, the videos got views, but following rapidly increased across all channels.

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