Biotherm; Ubrupt Social Media Campaign.

China social media campaigns come in two flavors; the rare flavor of a sustainable campaign that pulls rewards over the course of years; and the more common flavor of one-off promotions.

Obviously the sustainable version is better; one off promotions, in addition to failing to leverage short run large initial costs for long run low maintenance, high value rewards they also tend feature a distinct lack of understanding of China’s SNS.

So which category does Biotherm’s campaign fall under? You can probably guess by glancing at the title of this post.

Biotherm’s campaign, begun on May 6th, 2009, starts well; it pushes customers to engage with the Brand. The promotion is simple enough – add one of Biotherm’s 5 avatars as friends on Kaixin001; and send them a Biotherm product every day for a chance to win a RMB 430 value product.

This is a great idea, as the RMB430 value product is enticing, and it pushes people to engage everyday with Biotherm. Sending products to beautiful avatars will eventually have customers subconsciously associate Biotherm products as the cause of the avatar’s beauty.

The content of this group centers around the promotional campaign; it includes general info, experience sharing, before/after pictures, etc.

Strangely, activity in this group completely stopped some time in June. There has been no follow up info during these past months. This is funny as Biotherm maxed out it’s group on Kaixin001, within a months time, and then suddenly abandoned it all? The theory here is that the “50 gifts” promotion had ended without an official announcement… but still – quite abrupt, no?

Also, Biotherm’s Kaixin001 discussion group has a disappointing 194 topics, all of which seem to dead end. The main admin, one of the promotions avatars, has 1027 friends, and the group features several complaints about Kaixin001′s tech problems when trying to add more.

The total friends for all avatars numbered around 2230; when adding this to the 3000+ group members, this campaign seems to have reached a minimum of 5000+ people on Kaixin001. Compared to other campaigns reviewed, this one seems less impressive.

The campaign also was seeded in pretty much every major China SNS site:

• http://www.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/no11/1/727861.shtml
• http://www.xptone.cn/html/mianfeihuazhuangpin/200905/09-1877.html
• http://bbs.sogou.com/127969/z2kga-HByDYIBAAAA.html
• http://www.7free8.cn/mfzq/051210593200910593.html
• http://club.she.tom.com/item_99_221992_0_8.html
• http://www.hd00.com/act_4096.html
• http://www.dianping.com/group/qiang/topic/817544
• http://www.freedhc.com/dhc/344.html

Thoughts:

This is a pretty common SNS campaign; create a quick promotion, drop it in Kaixin, pull in a few participants, seed the info on a few sites all over China, rinse, repeat. What we see here is the traditional promotion strategy + some engagement from customers on Kaixin001.

So was the campaign good? Choosing Kaixin001 as the platform was a great idea, as the target market for Biotherm’s products tend to cluster there.

Where the campaign goes wrong is in it’s abrupt ending. It’s a shame to spend whatever they spent to build up the promotion, the mini site, create the profiles, get the conversation going, and then suddenly abandon it after one months time.

An alternative approach that we suggest to clients is to create campaigns that are sustainable over long periods of time and that can support conversations; in addition to creating a community away from China SNS to funnel interested targets so as to give the overall campaign more longevity, and to bypass the limiting rules that seem to randomly appear in China’s SNS; in this case the “group” members cap, and the “add a friend” bugs.

The trick to this process though, is always content, and to a lesser known extent, management – as communities need babysitters early in their development; and editors to insure that these babies grow up right.

Concept here is essentially simple, but not necessarily easy to execute – to make these campaigns, with their sunk costs, longer to leverage said costs and gain more benefit from initial efforts; but in the end, it requires a new way of thinking about advertising in general; and the follow up know-how to make the idea really stick.

For Biotherm? It seems like a good test campaign; but on closer inspection, it seems like it could have been a lot more.

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Tagged as: Advertising, Advertising campaign, Asia, Biotherm, Chat, China, china soc, Kaixin001, social media, Social network service, Target market