From the category archives:

Social Media

Levi’s; So you think you can “blog”?

10.28.2009 Insights
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It is of no surprise brands and companies are struggling to find alternative and cost-effective ways to sell, survive and possibly stand out in the over-crowded world wide web.
So, given this is the era for blogging – it’s no surprise many brands are fast jumping into this space. It just seems to be there [...]

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Live at the ‘Chivalry’.

10.26.2009 Case Studies
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You throw in a few ice cold celebrities, high-end whisky and a dash of ‘life’ and you end up with Chivas new-ish campaign reposition to ‘Live with Chivalry’. A small shift from the previous feature ‘This is Chivas Life’.
Fortunately for Chivas the budget was didn’t seem to be a problem, with a mix of [...]

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Ipart.cn; Undisturbed Digital Domestic Bliss.

09.24.2009 China SNS Snapshot
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Whilst it’s difficult to find a branded social community having little or no predators, ipart.com definitely leads the way. It could be one of the few communities that hosts a disturbance-free online atmosphere, and given the site basically operates a virtual ‘apartment’ where complete strangers (mostly boys and girls) live under the one roof [...]

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Intel; Multi-tiered Social Media Campaign.

09.21.2009 Intel
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We seldom see well integrated SNS campaigns in China; if you’ve been a regular reader of this blog, you’ll probably notice a distinct bias toward negative reviews.
Well sister, today you’re in for a treat, cause we’re going to show you Intel’s campaign and what they’ve done right. The short and skinny of it is Intel [...]

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Phillips SNS creates a thriving community, then moves shop!

09.19.2009 Phillips
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Lifestyle products. How many followers do you think a category such as this can reel in? Without giving all the products away of course. Because we have stumbled across one brand doing it ‘mostly’ well – they managed to get a great following and integrated some FIRST time applications that really impressed.
Introducing [...]

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New Balance creates a great community site, so why is it empty?

09.16.2009 New Balance
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I’ve seen brands launch campaigns on popular SNS, or create their own SNS then use other popular SNS to promote them, but I haven’t seen a brand build its own SNS site but chose not to promote it, and this brand is New Balance. To me, this is almost like buying an expensive beach house [...]

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McDonald’s; can you make more than a sundae?

09.13.2009 McDonalds
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McDonald’s know rewards. They understand rewards very well have been using them in campaigns since the birth of the ‘happy meal’. It’s the rewards that play the key factor in promoting participation. It’s really simple, make it fun, easy and then give them a reward.
McDonald’s not only attracts a broad group of [...]

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Metersbonwe meaningless ‘magic cube’ game.

09.08.2009 Metersbonwe
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The more I read about popular yet meaningless brand experiences created online I am beginning to feel it’s all just a strategy to seize young peoples down time or ‘time killing’ as we might call it. The majority of these campaigns actually miss the opportunity to create something relevant, engaging and potentially ever lasting [...]

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Pocari MSN campaign pulls in record number of individual votes!

09.08.2009 Case Studies
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From singing contests to essay contests – all the big brands are using a ‘voting’ system to build mass amounts of traffic to a community. It works so why wouldn’t you? It spreads viral and it spreads fast through dedicated pockets of existing (offline) social communities.
This particular campaign seemed pretty ‘normal’ in what [...]

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Social Media promotes generation ‘ME’

09.06.2009 China Consumer Profile
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This is an excerpt from an article on our sister site ZeroDegrees.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that the bulk of Social Media evangelists consider the space as a way to promote themselves.  Nothing wrong with promoting yourself – I mean we can’t all have a ‘Don King’ like character doing our talking for us.
A report [...]

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Social Media promotes generation ‘ME’

09.04.2009 Social Media

I wasn’t surprised to learn that the bulk of Social Media evangelists consider the space as a way to promote themselves. Nothing wrong with promoting yourself – I mean we can’t all have a ‘Don King’ like character doing our talking for us.
A report out of SDSU was released this week confirming that Generation [...]

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Cartier; Social Media Campaign sans “Social”

08.27.2009 Haibao.cn
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I’ll start by saying this: Cartier’s China social media campaign is pretty disappointing. I’ll get into some more detail soon, but in an effort to save you time what you’ll see in this post is what NOT to do when launching a social media campaign; and what not to do when launching a website in [...]

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P&G Xiaonei campaign, dressed as Social Media… smells like a big Ad

08.27.2009 P&G
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With opportunities to win cars, flights, holidays and even cash you have to wonder why anyone would go and support a bar of soap or shampoo product for simply a ‘chance’ to win a 200RMB value prize pack. But once again China’s booming Social Networking sites continue to generate interest for what would seem [...]

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Biotherm; Ubrupt Social Media Campaign.

08.19.2009 Biotherm
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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, [...]

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BMW’s flirt with the masses – Qzone ‘1′ series launch

08.17.2009 BMW
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When I first looked at reviewing this campaign I thought why would BMW be pushing their product through QQ? I mean sure, the numbers are just astronomical but how many QQ users can really afford to buy a BMW?
I’m certain they did their research and they were pushing the most affordable product across the [...]

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QQ: Master of the Micropayment.

08.13.2009 China SNS Snapshot
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This is an excerpt of an article posted on LRB’s sister site: ZeroDegrees
QQ is China’s largest instant messenger service; in 2008 it owned 86% of the market, with MSN owning 5%, and a bunch of others owning less. QQ dominates the market – but the money made seems not to be from its instant messenger; [...]

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Foundertech; Xiaonei Social Media Campaign.

07.21.2009 Dell
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Recently, on missniuniu’s Xiaonei homepage, 2 banner ads for 2 doodle contests caught my attention. Frankly, I am not a fan for doodling, but what got my interests is – both contests are held by computer brands, Foundertech and Dell. In this web2.0 plus social media marketing age, it seems that holding or sponsoring [...]

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Pepsi; So-So Social Media Campaign.

07.15.2009 Case Studies
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Pepsi recently launched a social media campaign targeted to the youth market; its a “battle of the bands” themed event; all elements are aggregated online on Pepsi’s main promotional site (pepsi.sina.com.cn), and a series of satellite SNS groups were created to drive traffic to the contest and stimulate buzz online.

However there seems to be a [...]

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Top political China SNS “inaccessible”, angers Chinese netizens.

07.13.2009 China Modern Culture
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Lately, more and more websites became “inaccessible” in mainland China, popular ones including Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Besides those foreign websites, there is one Chinese sns site Fanfou, which is one of China’s Top 4 Twitter Clones Rand introduced here previously, also became “inaccessible”. Regarding the reason, nobody has a confirmed answer, some says it [...]

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missniuniu case study; Building traffic through China’s social networks.

07.13.2009 Insights
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Say hello to our little friend.
Building traffic/leads to your business is tricky. Especially so in China where many of the medium are either too broadly targeted, too expensive, or simply faked numbers. So here’s the logic:
A quick rundown of your options looks something like this:
PRINT: Magazines will cost you about RMB 20k – 100k/page/month; while newspaper [...]

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Building a successful Chinese social media network from scratch.

06.18.2009 Case Studies

I mentioned BA’s “secret” in-house project a little while back (here); this project is an attempt to create a popular Chinese social media site from scratch, solely using China’s already established SNS.
Now the initial impression for something like this is “yeah right good luck buddy”, and to tell you the truth I also almost bought [...]

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Littleredbook.cn; At 6 months old, our digital baby has learned to walk.

05.28.2009 Interactive

Littleredbook is 6 months old, and I want to take a brief moment to pull the spotlight away from China’s social media landscape and briefly shine it on LRB. So what have we accomplished in 6 months?
My initial goal was to show up on the top of Google for the search term “China Advertising”; among [...]

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