We’ve seen all kinds of social fashion startups crop up in Asia in the past couple of years. One of the newest is Zoolook, created by a team of six people that’s split evenly between Tokyo and Hong Kong. This particular app focuses on the social and photography side of clothing, and is made up of a social network were people can share and tag their favorite looks (pictured below).

One big draw in the app, explains Zoolook founder Benoit Lavaud, is the presence of top fashion labels who have virtual “showrooms”, not dissimilar from Facebook brand pages, within the social network. This feature is being used by over 60 regional but prominent fashion companies, such as Kenzo, and… er… lots of others that I won’t pretend I know. But I’ve heard of Kenzo. For more clued-up fashionistas, the app is a way to keep up with trends, share their looks, and get inspiration from the numerous Asian fashion bloggers who also make use of the startup’s service.

Benoit explains this strategy to us:

Brands are quite lost in terms of promotion now that digital has entered their landscape. They lack resources to manage at same time in-store promotion and digital promotion. We have entered this category where they feel we do the job of connecting bloggers and influencers for both real and digital.

Zoolook is also working the floor at offline events in this sector, and was recently selected as the official app of the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tokyo. Readers in Hong Kong might want to check out Zoolook’s ‘live fashion snap’ event on Thursday (16th) evening at 6pm at Apple’s Causeway Bay store. Benoit explains what’s going to be happening that night:

We have invited over 20 top bloggers and Hong Kong Fashion icons to come and be snapped by Stephenie Kay, a Chinese fashion photographer. We setup a photo booth and a stage in the store and gather fashionistas to watch how Stephenie master photography snapping these influencers using an iPhone and our app. Very unique to be able to organize such a gathering in an Apple Store.

The Zoolook iPhone app is here, while the Android version is still in the works.

Let’s take a look at the highlights from the infographic (the full thing is embedded at bottom) and the newest statistics for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare, and Line.

Facebook in Thailand

Zoning in on Facebook, the ZocialInc crew finds that the peak time for posting is 11pm. These are the demographics within Thailand:

Twittery Thais

There are now two million Thais on Twitter, who on average tweet 5.5 times each day. Like with Facebook, the country’s Twitterers are night owls, tending to post more between 10pm and midnight. 66.7 percent of Twitter posts in Thailand are made on mobiles.

YouTube boom

YouTube is still seeing great growth in Thailand, and is now up to 630,000 channels within the nation, adding up to 5.3 million videos uploaded by Thai users. The top video cateogry for these guys and girls is music.

Snapping up Instagram

With the most stellar growth in Thailand in the past year, Instagram is now up to 600,000 users in the country, up from 150,000 this time last year. In the first four months of 2013, they collectively posted 21.38 million photos. One of the most liked users is @aum_patchrapa, the beauty queen turned actress Pachrapa ‘Aum’ Chaichua.

Checking out of Foursquare?

Foursquare, the location-based service, saw a nine percent drop in check-ins in the past year in Thailand, but the number of venues grew. The best growth figure for Foursquare was that 55 percent more people checked in via Instagram.

Line up

There are no Thailand-specific numbers from WeChat for Thailand, so let’s focus on rival app Line, which has a pretty spectacular 15 million Thai users. It’s also an important new platform for social marketing and brands outreach, with the top Thai brand on Line having 4.6 million followers already.

Here’s the full slideshow presentation:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

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The report notes that the best newcomer, in the eyes of Chinese netizens, is Tottenham Hotspurs’ Gareth Bale. Interestingly, Spain’s La Liga players are a lot more popular than those in the English Premier League (BPL). La Liga’s top six most popular players on Weibo have eight times – yes, x8 – the number of followers compared to BPL’s top eight players.

One interesting thing to note is that Japan’s Hidetoshi Nakata – who retired a few years back – is the fourth most popular European player on China’s leading social networks. Although he’s Japanese, he’s played in a few European clubs like AS Roma and Parma in the past.

The last time the Mailman Group, which helps celebrities do social marketing in China, assessed football mania on Weibo, it noted that European football clubs have 15.6 million supporters online in China.

Here’s the infographic for you football fans:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Japanese companies seem to be doing well in terms of social marketing, with drink-maker Ichitan coming out on top in Thailand, and bike-maker Yamaha revs up the most social media fans in Indonesia. But in Malaysia and the Philippines, two homegrown brands (Air Asia and Smart, respectively) are at the top of this ranking.

This combined count can be a bit unfair in some ways, as it punishes brands who opt to, say, avoid Instagram but have good numbers on other networks. An example is BlackBerry Indonesia, which is not in the ranking despite being one of the nation’s top Facebook brand pages with 26.7 million followers.

With all that in mind, here’s the full infographic, which also has some fun snippets about user behavior on brand pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

A Mumbai-based startup is taking on the world’s top project management web apps – things like Basecamp and Trello – with its minimalist and good-looking BrightPod. Made by the team at Synage Software, BrightPod is now close to the end of its months-long private beta and will launch to the public on April 16th. (UPDATE from the startup team: TechinAsia readers can sign up for Brightpod with the code “founders” (without the quotes)).

Up against a hundred or more task management app rivals, BrightPod aims to be the best collaborative working platform for marketing teams – and that of course includes social marketing. So the idea is that the web app is the best place for marketers to run campaigns, check off tasks and milestones, and keep track of organizational messages without resorting to a mess of email threads.

Among lots of useful BrightPod features are workflows that can be cloned and automated across different projects or campaigns, a daily digest email of the previous day’s work, an intuitive card-based layout, and an area for things that need particular attention from a team member. It looks like the kind of thing that this blog could use as well, rather than our lumpen Google Docs-based editorial spreadsheet.

Keeping track of the project team in BrightPod.

Yamini, the startup’s marketing manager, tells us that Brightpod now has over 150 companies using the app with a total of 272 users making use of it prior to the public launch. The seven-man Brightpod team previously started up DeskAway, a more general project collaboration service that’s in use at some major corporations. Because DeskAway already got funding and is now profitable, that helped the Mumbai entrepreneurs to get BrightPod rolling. Yamini adds: “However, in the next few months we may look at raising money as we expand the [Brightpod] team and broaden our reach globally.”

As for the focus on marketing teams, Yamini explains:

Over the years, we were seeing DeskAway being used as a general purpose project management tool by companies across a lot of verticals. However, we also witnessed a surge in signups from marketing teams with feature requests aimed at marketing/campaign related projects – stuff that they require. They felt it was chaotic to plan and track progress of various marketing projects/campaigns (SEO, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) when working with multiple people and clients.

We know the collaboration space pretty well and hence decided to create a new product that would serve this niche market with features specifically for marketing teams.

New features will be added to the web app soon, including an editorial calendar and marketing analytics. Also, it will better integrate with social networks, which is something obviously critical to those doing social marketing.

Quite a few startups are trying – or have tried and failed – to crack the first-world problem of how to share and transfer images between a group of friends. You could email stuff back and forth, upload to Facebook and download some of your friends’ best snaps of you, set up a Dropbox folder, or use a wifi transfer thingy like Bump. Or a dozen other ways. Now PixBento wants to be the answer. One of our Startup Arena pitchers this afternoon, PixBento is launching into beta at this event. Users can pool and share photo albums with specific buddies across an iPhone app and a web app (pictured).

Right now, PixBento founder Kelvin Koh is pitching to our judges and explaining how it works. Before the Startup Arena pitching kicked into action, Kelvin told to me that Facebook privacy concerns – and over-complex settings – put a lot of people off sharing photos on Facebook. Plus, photos of a particular event/trip/holiday/party end up scattered and largely forgotten across the albums of numerous participants. That’s where PixBento comes in, ensuring privacy among a certain group with easy sharing and simple downloading of photos that are true keepers.

The PixBento web app – click to enlarge

As for previous failures in this genre – like the colossal cock-up of the over-funded and underwhelming Color app – Kelvin is confident of not falling into the same trap, telling me:

Well for one, apps like Color or even Albumatic – which tried to do something in similar fashion – put their money on real-time events and real-time contributions. One problem which they faced are complaints by users about strangers in the same vicinity joining their groups (due to geo-locational discovery). Apparently that is one key reason (amongst many others) that led to the downfall of Color.

One advantage we have, in relation to real-time usage, lies primarily on our web-based image collage, which we believe set our product apart from them. With a screen projection of the collage, we can see PixBento being used in public events, such as roadshows, weddings, parties, discos, etc. There are immediate engagements and gratifications from the users’ point of view.

It can also be used at any time after any event as well, whenever people get round to sharing images.

Picturing monetization

In addition to its usefulness, Kelvin explains to the judges (pictured above) that he has in mind a revenue model for both regular folks and business whereby the startup will be a platform for photo-oriented social marketing. Citing the example of how Facebook marginalizes the attempts of fans to give content to brands, he suggests PixBento as a better way for businesses and customers to push images to each other. A more positive example of social marketing is automaker Audi cleverly using fans’ photos on its Instagram feed; the idea is that this startup would make it easier for this kind of photo sharing to take place. As for monetization, brands could purchase tiered packages to allow fans to submit more photos to them.

A similar freemium model could apply to regular users, with free accounts capped at 200 uploaded photos. The startup reckons that, so long as one percent of 157 users sign up as a paying customer, it’s a model that can work – and a photo-sharing problem solved.

Once fully launched, this Singapore app is going global. Look out for the PixBento iPhone app once it launches officially. Until then, check out the brief demo video:

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

(Pre-photoshopped image: Jacky Naegelen/Reuters)

China’s online sales of clothing were worth $50 billion in 2012, but only 41 percent of luxury fashion brands have any e-commerce offerings of their own. Furthermore, there’s an overall lack of commitment and direct involvement with a mere seven global couture brands selling directly to Chinese consumers from their own sites. That’s the stark summary presented in the new L2 Digital IQ Index: Fashion Supplement.

Digging deeper into the report, it shows some interesting e-commerce trends in China, as well as other ways in which luxury fashion brands are failing to reach out to Chinese e-shoppers.

The most interesting trend is a shift away from consumer-to-consumer shopping when it comes to clothing. In 2011, 80 percent of China’s fashion sales came from amateur shopkeepers on Taobao, China’s biggest C2C site. But, in 2012, there’s a clear leap towards more official sources, such as brands’ virtual storefronts on sites like Tmall, or from flash sales sites like VIPshop or GlamourSales:

Setting up e-shop

When it comes to setting up shop for Chinese netizens, a standalone e-commerce site undoubtedly allows more brand control, which is especially important for luxury brands who want to charge insane prices for their fashionable baubles. As mentioned above, only seven top luxury brands have done so, with Burberry, Coach, and, as we saw recently, Hugo Boss being among these. 11 percent of the brands use the Yoox platform to more easily create a Chinese e-store, while many others opt to ship from overseas from their global websites – that’s despite the complications in adding sales tax and unreliable shipping times:

Social marketing mavens

So which fashion brands do the best social marketing in China? It’s an immensely important aspect of doing business in China – especially when your target customers are wealthy, middle-class urbanites who get much of their information from social media. The L2 report reckons that only four brands are doing an “exceptional” job with their digital presences in China – Burberry, Louis, Vuitton, Chanel, and Coach. That leaves, after a few other companies doing a mediocre social marketing job, a huge 67 percent of fashion brands with a “feeble” online persona. The weak ones include the likes of Calvin Klein, Hermes, Ralph Lauren, and the homegrown Shanghai Tang brand. Here’s why the top brands shine:

Sina Weibo is the most important social platform in China, and 85 percent of couture fashion houses have official brand pages on Weibo. An official video channel on Youku is the next most prevalent. It’s interesting to note that China’s other Twitter-like service, Tencent Weibo, is home to none of these luxury luminaries – most likely because its social user-base is made up mostly of folks in poorer cities and rural areas (click to enlarge):

Click to enlarge the graph.

To see the full Digital IQ rankings and more of the report, you can find it here on the L2 homepage.

Brand24.co.id, an Indonesian company that specializes in monitoring online social marketing – and the company which brought us Jakarta’s social infographic – has opened its doors last week. Brand24 is actually an Indonesian branch of its Poland headquarters, and most of the expertise comes from that end.

Brand24 analyzes conversations from Indonesia’s social media, identifies people’s sentiment, and points out the current trends. The service can also help make reports and infographics for you. I gave the service a try using the keyword “Tech in Asia,” and it was quite effective in doing all the stuff mentioned. There are still a few Polish words lying around the generated report and the Brand24 admin panel, but it does not disturb the whole experience that much.

One thing I realized is that the service can’t help you analyze past social media trends. And that the service monitors data from Indonesian social media only. A Brand24 representative explains that these Indonesia-based monitoring results are the best thing about the company’s system.

There are a few sites offering similar services like, NoLimit and Katapedia. Brand24 believes that what sets it apart from the rest is its high frequency updates which happen in minutes, and its more intuitive design experience.

Brand24’s key differentiator, I think, is its impressive global clientele which includes Intel, Panasonic, and AirFrance.

Indonesia’s digital and social marketing is now shifting towards social media sites. Besides the growing services offered by companies like Brand24, there will also be a company called IdBuzzNetwork that aims to use social media influencers to help promote companies’ brands and products in the near future. With companies paying attention to these social sites even more closely, being logged into social networking sites has become as important for brands as it is for you and me.

The social media posting platform HootSuite ventured into China last October with support for Sina Weibo, which is a crucial avenue for social marketing to Chinese consumers. Today Canada-based HootSuite has added a bunch of new features for Weibo, the biggest of which is advanced scheduling for posts (pictured above).

In addition to scheduling, HootSuite’s Sina Weibo support now allows you – and its enterprise customers – to add multiple accounts and save searches to monitor keywords. That last one will be useful for brands wanting to track what netizens are saying about your company or products, making it easier to respond positively.

HootSuite added China’s Facebook-esque Renren back in November, and that social site gets some loving today as well. The Renren plug-in within HootSuite also adds scheduled posts and multiple accounts, along with new streams for tracking your photos and shares.

HootSuite’s community VP, Dave Olson, explained to us a few months back that much of what HootSuite is doing in China is in reaction to feedback it’s getting from local users. A possible next step for the Vancouver startup is integrating some Tencent-run social networks.

As we saw in a recent report about luxury brands engaged in social marketing to China, Sina Weibo is the go-to platform. Indeed, 88 percent of surveyed high-end overseas brands have an official Sina Weibo page.

While that’s all very nice for Tencent Weibo, it still doesn’t change the fact that it’s not as cool as Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) offering. And, more importantly, Sina Weibo has more active users:

Thanks to We Are Social for the graphics. Yes, at 2012 Q3, Tencent Weibo had 10 million fewer active users a few months back. Xing Hongyu also revealed yesterday that Tencent Weibo has 100 million daily active users.

But the main reason for all the buzz going to Sina Weibo is the nature of its user-base. That’s because Sina’s users are mostly living in China’s wealthiest cities (tier one and two areas, from Beijing to Wuhan, Shanghai to Hangzhou), while Tencent Weibo’s users are in poorer cities or rural areas, and are not worth as much for social media marketing and are not the kind of folks who can set the national agenda when discussing issues online. Here’s the comparison:

Of course, Tencent Weibo does do some cool things; its coordinated approach to the London Olympics coverage was fun and popular, and you can even buy cars directly within the social service. But its Sina rival remains the “Weibo” that people are actually talking about.

The Chinese social media scene has, of course, seen huge growth alongside growing web penetration. 50.9 million new netizens were added in the country in 2012. There are now 597.6 million people (out of 1.34 billion in population) active on the nation’s top social network, QZone, which is made by local web giant Tencent). With 41 percent of the populace being under the age of 40, that’s good news for social networks – and social marketing – in China.

Before looking at the full report (embedded below), you might to see some of the standout slides. This is what they like to get up to online:

Focusing on social media in China, you’ll see that the Twitter-style Sina Weibo might be the most talked about, but it’s not the market leader as such:

As the full infographic report points out, Tencent’s QQ instant messenger app (which is linked to QZone) has the most number of active accounts, with a staggering 784 million active users per month. But then QQ numbers (aka: accounts) are about as ubiquitous here as phone numbers.

In terms of social marketing, it’s worth looking at the following few slides (starting at page 60 in the embed) to see the huge scope for engagement for brands in China, especially by having a presence on Sina Weibo:

You might also like to check out a different report about which overseas brands are doing the best social media marketing in China – and how they’re doing it.

Here’s the full presentation from We Are Social, which also ventures into mobile and e-commerce, in all its 200+ pages glory:

(Source: WeAreSocial SG)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Line app experienced crazy growth last year, and looks set to surpass 100 million global users sometime this month. To hit that milestone, and to get onto the smartphones of more kids in North America, NHN Japan has persuaded the rapper Snoop Dogg to give the app plenty of shout-outs. Not only that, Line app now has a range of Snoop Dogg virtual stickers that are available for download (pictured above).

Snoop Dogg has been promoting – or pimping – Line via Twitter to his 10.4 million followers, shrewdly using a couple of corporate-approved hashtags:

make sure to download tha new free snoop sticker set on tha #LINEapp 2day!!!! uhearme!!!! #expressmore

— Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) January 15, 2013

If you follow Snoop within Line, you’ll notice him making the same pitch there.

When Line app reached 70 million users back in October, NHN Japan revealed that just over half of them (about 37.4 million) were overseas. Anecdotally, it would seem that most of those are scattered across Southeast Asia, particularly in places like Thailand and Taiwan (and thanks to Taipei-based @Tortue for the screenshot).

So Line app clearly needs a bit of help in western markets, and the Snoop buddy-up should help quite a bit in the long-term battle against Whatsapp and Kik. Line also has plenty of strong competition from this region in the form of KakaoTalk and WeChat, the latter of which just hit 300 million registered users.

Line app recently enlisted some other all-singing, all-dancing marketing help in the form of Korean pop star Psy, of invisible horse-riding fame.

All the ladies who make up Sina Weibo’s 400 million registered users take note: Brad Pitt has just joined Weibo. The movie star’s verified account (here) saw its first post at noon today:

It is the truth. Yup, I’m coming…

In the space of just two hours since that post, Pitt’s first missive has had 8,000 comments and 20,000 reposts on Weibo. The front half of Brangelina has a whopping 73,000 fans already.

Although lots of celebrities from around the globe have joined Sina Weibo – mostly for social marketing purposes, Brad Pitt is perhaps the most controversial of all these. No, not because of his very awkward and stagey new ad for Chanel, but due to the fact that Brad Pitt is supposedly banned from ever entering China after his starring role in the 1997 movie Seven Years in Tibet, which was deemed by authorities in Beijing to have been too sympathetic to the exiled Dalai Lama.

It’s not clear why Pitt has joined Weibo at this specific time. It’s most likely driven by marketing concerns, either for an upcoming movie (IMDB indicates that Pitt has four movies in post-production at this time), or for a brand that he represents. Perhaps Chanel.

In the past we’ve seen Tom Cruise join Sina Weibo, followed a while later by the Harry Potter actress Emma Watson.

(Hat-tip to @MissXQ on Twitter for spotting this)

Remember that interesting little social commerce experiment earlier this week in which Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi sold phones via Sina Weibo? Well, that two-day promotion has now ended, and Xiaomi has revealed that it generated about 1.3 million reservations on its way to selling the allotted 50,000 Xiaomi Mi2 phones in just five minutes and 14 seconds.

Not bad considering the Mi2 was being sold at full price (1,999 RMB, which is US$318). As for the social side of all this, Xiaomi’s original post about the promo on Weibo ended up getting 810,000 comments and 2.33 million retweets/reshares.

With the whole experiment being way over-subscribed, a lottery will decide who are the 50,000 people that can go through with the transaction. They have just 24 hours to sort it out, so their credit cards better not be maxed out already.

This all looks to have been an e-commerce test for the Twitter-esque Sina Weibo, which has been piling on new features in the past couple of years as quickly as its accruing new users. It surpassed 400 million registered Weibo-ers last month, and assuming that it has not reached a plateau it could well hit half a billion users before next summer. But it’s still not milking monetizing all those folks very well.

As for Xiaomi, we noticed last night that the Beijing-based phone-maker was teasing the prospect of its expansion into Hong Kong. So far it has focused solely on selling online within mainland China.

[Source: The Next Web; Xiaomi]

If you’re not willing to face the Mayan’s mooted apocalypse on the 21st while clutching your lousy old phone, then Xiaomi has some good news for you. The young Chinese phone-maker is doing some clever social commerce today, selling two of its new Xiaomi Mi2 devices every hour via Sina Weibo, China’s hottest Twitter-y service.

The Xiaomi Mi2 on sale on Sina Weibo. Click to enlarge.

Sales of the Android-based Xiaomi Mi2 run through to the 21st – but note that only 50,000 units of the popular phone are available in this promo. The most unique part of the whole exercise is that, as a Xiaomi representative tells us, “Ordering and payments are all done within Sina Weibo,” so you don’t even need to leave the social site so as to snag your new smartphone. Ordering can be accessed via a special events page on Weibo, here (pictured right).

To make it truly viral and social, all orders also get posted as Weibo ‘tweets’. The hashtag attached to this event is seeing lots of action, and the original Xiaomi post about the sale (here) has so far racked up nearly 617,000 retweets and over 281,000 comments.

This promo is also very likely to be a test-bed for Sina Weibo shifting more fully into e-commerce, so we can expect more like this on Weibo in the future.

Xiaomi has always taken social media – especially Weibo – very seriously as a key way of building up its small brand as it takes on giants such as Samsung and Huawei in the country. The newest Mi2 model went on sale in October.

Last year this Digital IQ report ranked three global companies as having “genius”-level marketing chops: Audi, Burberry, and BMW. This time around, four luxury brands get this accolade, led by cosmetics firm Estée Lauder (see the top ten table below).

So how is this calculated? To make the grade, brands need to do a lot of optimization, social outreach, and clever online marketing. For this report, the grading structure is 30 percent each for doing social media and localizing your site, and 20 percent each for digital marketing and mobile compatibility:

With all that factored in, here’s the top ten. Note that Audi once again appears as a “genius” brand when it comes to its online work in China:

As for the winner, the L2 Think Tank team notes that Estée Lauder has a web “presence on six social platforms [which] yields a social universe of more than 1.6 million fans.” Not the biggest number among these global companies, but the report states that its strategy is very social and well integrated.

Being social in China

Aside from things like search engine optimization for Baidu, luxury brands in China need to get themselves on the right social platforms. The report finds that social media adoption is up on every site, with Twitter-esque Sina Weibo still number one. A big winner this year is the video site Youku (NYSE:YOKU) where 60 percent of the analyzed brands in this report now have a social media presence:

That sure has been a long time building up, as we reported on brands like Cartier and Burberry opening brand video channels on Youku way back in the summer of 2011. Once again we see luxury automakers doing especially well, this time exploding their number of channel video views on Youku in 2012:

Of course, there are new platforms emerging, and brands need to be aware of reaching out via the messaging app WeChat (as we’ve seen Starbucks do so well this year), or on the Pinterest-like Meilishuo. Plus, the Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) owned video site iQiyi is aiming to challenge Youku for classy brand video channels, so that outlet needs to be considered as well.

Keeping the conversation flowing on Sina Weibo

Car makers again make a strong showing on China’s most important social service – Sina Weibo. Cadillac is top in terms of fans/followers on Weibo in this luxury segment, and fashion labels Dior and Coach are playing catch-up this year:

For more information about these brands and their strategies, catch the full report here. Plus, L2 has made a nice video overview that runs to three minutes:

(Mobile readers: Digital IQ Index®: China 2012 from L2 Think Tank, on Vimeo).

Coffee chain Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) is keeping its relationship with Jiepang, China’s top Foursquare-esque check-in service, brewing for yet another year. This year’s Starbucks-Jiepang social marketing campaign for the holiday season is now in full flow, offering four virtual Christmas badges for coffee drinkers who also make social check-ins within Jiepang’s cross-platform mobile apps. There are also Christmas-themed e-cards and some unlockable buy-one-get-one free drinks rewards.

Once again, the coffee chain’s tie-up with Jiepang is geographically limited to eastern China – namely Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang provinces – but that’s still enough to cover over 300 Starbucks stores.

To ensure all this is even more social – and to give it viral potential – the e-cards are designed to be gifted to your buddies on Sina Weibo, China’s biggest Twitter-like service, from right within the Jiepang app. Here’s the check-in and the e-card before you send it out:

As for Jiepang itself, the social startup says it now has four million users, mainly in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, which is pretty good growth from three million this spring. But check-in apps are not exactly mainstream stuff, so the company is always aiming to connect more and more with its demographic of smartphone-toting young urbanites with a huge desire to go out and try fancy new places. In terms of brand partners engaging in this kind of social marketing, Jiepang tells us it has buddied up with “over 300 local and international brands, including Starbucks, Starwood, Louis Vuitton, [and] H&M.” This is the third Christmas tie-up with the coffee chain.

Last year the duo focused more on NFC check-ins to get social promotions. I’m not sure how that went down, but there are likely not enough people with NFC-equipped phones to make that work again.

Jiepang currently has 100 employees scattered across its Beijing HQ and offices in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Taipei, and Hong Kong.

Today Mumbai-based digital advertising platform Komli Media has announced that the company has signed an exclusive partnership with Twitter. Komli will now take charge of Twitter’s advertising products sales in five Southeast Asian countries – Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

In this partnership, Komli will be looking to engage advertising agencies across the five aforementioned countries through a series of education and training programs about what Twitter ads have to offer. These Twitter ad products – which include promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends – were previously only available to brands in the US, UK, Japan, and Latin America, and are now available through the Komli Engage sales team in the Southeast Asia region.

Akshay Garg, the managing director for Komli Media Southeast Asia, commented on this partnership:

We are really excited to partner with Twitter. Together, we will offer marketers new and relevant opportunities to engage audiences in SEA and drive brand value. Social media growth in this region is among the highest in the world, and Twitter is one of the most recognized and utilized platforms in our region

The Komli team says that Asia is home to 50 percent of the world’s social network users, with 54 percent of Singaporeans and 44 million Indonesians being regular social network users. The team then said that the majority of these growing social network users consult various social media before making purchases. This partnership with Twitter can help advertisers to engage more effectively with these users.

Akshay then explained about Komli’s future plans:

Komli Media will continue to focus on becoming a top three digital advertising business across APAC. On the back of our success with online video and social media we will be adding more ad solutions including mobile. In the coming year, we will be introducing more data and technology platforms to support our ad solutions and help deliver more value for our clients.

This latest partnership with Twitter is great news for the Komli team, particularly for the group of investors that ploughed its money into Komli Media in June. Southeast Asia users can expect to see more localized promoted tweets, accounts, and trends on their Twitter streams with this latest partnership.

If you are building a consumer internet business, you have probably spent 90 percent of your time on product development, building a team, chasing funding, and defending your decision not to get a “real job” to your mother. If you are lucky, then you spent the other 10 percent getting some sleep. The one area of execution that I typically see Asian startups least equipped to tackle is advertising.

Probably best to ignore Bad Advice Kitty.

As I have written before, there is a dangerous and false notion that products sell themselves. They don’t. Your product will not go viral and anyone that bets the success of their startup on tweets is a fool (and will eventually have to admit to their mother that she was correct). Advertising is to be taken seriously and you need to provision for both investment and time to learn how to acquire and retain customers online. There is no question that startups in Asia have an engineering bias – and that’s a good thing. But we are far behind our counterparts in Berlin, London, New York, and Silicon Valley when it comes to the quality of our UX (user experience) and marketing execution. Today I will focus on paid banner advertising, which is also known as display advertising. (I will cover search engine marketing, retargeting, email marketing, mobile advertising, social, public relations and UX in future posts on TechInAsia).

Online eyeballs

I spent over a decade spending an average of US$20 million a year in advertising for my previous employer (now current competitor). That marketing investment was almost entirely online and distributed into 15 different geographies across Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Having benefited from that responsibility at a young age I learned a thing or two about online consumer behavior, building a brand online, and of course the ins and outs of digital advertising on a global scale. I also learned that fucking up once in a while was normal, and success in achieving marketing ROI (return on investment) is done through the systematic process of spend, track, learn, adjust, and then scaling the investment when you see returns. Even today, I accept that 70 percent of my teams individual advertising campaigns will either fail or break-even, but it is our job to ensure that the 30 percent that work get the majority of the investment and can scale up fast. It’s not dissimilar to the portfolio theory of a venture capitalist. They know most of their investments will fail but their ability to rapidly identify and ramp up investment in the winners is the name of the game. Treat your marketing tactics and campaigns the same way. Without some level of risk there will be no reward.

When I launched my startup into the very traditional bricks and mortar consumer financial services industry in Hong Kong, I had a theory that it could be built and operate entirely online. I had faith that consumers had evolved faster than the businesses serving them. I saw a disconnect between consumers demands and the stale business models that faced them. This was simply the opportunity. 8 Securities is new company going head to head with huge competitors such as HSBC and Bank of China. If we want to win in the long-term, we have to acquire new customers at scale, add value to their lives and strive every day to make them happy. In 2012 we will have spent approximately US$500,000 in advertising and 100 percent of that is online. Here are some lessons learned and recommendations that that I hope are useful for you.

Tip #1: It all starts with your value proposition

As a consumer internet startup, your paramount objective is to solve a problem for your customers. In doing so, you need to crystallize what differentiates you and precisely how that benefits your customer. Only once you have done this can you begin to think about your message to the market.

Defining your value proposition is no easy task. After nine months in the market we are still refining ours as we are constantly learning from our customers and striving to meet their needs. What we thought might be a benefit often has no resonance with customers, and only by listening do you really understand their pain point and the solution. Your value proposition and your brand have a symbiotic relationship in that one can not live without the other. Your brand is your promise to the customer. Your brand equity is what is left after you subtract your brand’s value proposition with that of your competitors. Marketing can not be effective until you are very clear on how you will position your value proposition in the market and and ultimately in the mind of your customers.

Many of the “marketing professionals” across Asia maintain a false belief that brands can not be built exclusively online. Furthermore, many media planners are still very traditional in their thinking and will advise you that “offline” marketing is a necessity to build brand strength and trust (they also earn more from traditional media). Leave the “offline” advertising to your competitors that are dinosaurs and focus your marketing efforts online where your customers eat, sleep, and breath. With the exception of any public relations you are able to generate in the press or TV, I would ignore the offline channel all together. Marketing in print advertising, outdoor, and on TV is a luxury and certainly not a necessity for a company born on the internet.

Tip #2: Banner advertising and the economics of lead acquisition

The first online banner in history belonged to US telecoms company AT&T. It was hosted on a website called Hotwired and got an astounding 78 percent click-thru rate. The average click-thru rate today is 0.07 percent – and falling fast. Online banner advertising is tough but if you crack the code it will give you a tremendous competitive advantage and a much lower acquisition cost per account than more traditional competitors.

The main advantage of banner advertising is that you can scale it at a rate not always available through paid search. There are three main variables you must optimize when running online banner advertising. First, you need to negotiate a viable CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) if you are not running a pay per click campaign. Theoretically, an “impression” is defined as each page load where your ad is displayed in front of a real set of human eyeballs. That said, a vast majority of your purchased impressions will not be seen as we have trained ourselves to ignore advertising as we browse content. This is among one of the biggest factors why we have seen click-thru rates plummet.

Many online properties where you will want to advertise still operate on a CPM basis and that includes Yahoo. For the sake of this example, let’s assume you negotiate a CPM of $5 on a site that generates quality traffic that you would like to target. If you invest $5,000 then you are purchasing one million impressions for your ad.

Second, the quality of your advertisement is critical. The most common mistakes are banners that try to convey too much information, don’t have a clear call to action, or don’t visually stand out from the background. We usually find that we have to change our messages and creative two or three times before we get it right. In terms of media, your creative can span simple flash all the way to expandable video ads. We have run a number of video based campaigns on Yahoo and LinkedIn (one of the first in Asia to do so) and saw a CTR (click-thru rate) of over one percent. Most of the videos we ran would drive interaction from over 50,000 unique visitors, but that of course is all a function of our investment level.

The benefit with video is that it’s a more effective medium to grab attention, to tell a story, and build your brand identity, but it comes at a greater cost both in terms of production and the media buy. For the purpose of this example, lets assume we run a standard three rotation flash banner. Let’s assume we beat the average and can achieve a CTR of 0.10 percent. If you invest $5,000, you have purchased one million impressions. If 0.10 percent click on your ad then you will have generated 1,000 unique visitors to your landing page (also known as the campaign page).

Finally, you need a great landing page on which your sole goal is to convert the visitor who clicks on your advertisement into a qualified lead or user. Don’t make the mistake of sending your leads to your home page as you need to isolate their experience to the objective at hand. The conversion rate of visitor to qualified lead really depends on your specific business and the information you are capturing. That said, you should aim for a minimum of 15 percent of your visitors to convert.

The fundamental elements of a great landing page are:

1. Your call to action and design elements must be consistent between the landing page and the ad that was clicked. If the experience is not seamless and logical then your visitor is lost.

2. Have a very clear headline and body copy. You must tell your visitor what it is and what you want them to do. If you are not promising to solve a problem for them then they have no reason to stay and will bounce off.

3. Don’t over-engineer your online form to capture lead information. Make it as simple and clear as possible. If you don’t need their mobile phone and home address then don’t ask for it. Keep it to a minimum and ideally just just ask for name and email, or use social log ins. Don’t forget to clearly highlight your privacy policy if you expect their trust. A simple “We promise we won’t share your email” will often suffice.

Plus, here are ‘101 Landing Page Optimisation Tips’ from one of the brightest minds in the business – so there are already no excuses for getting it wrong.

In summary, we have invested $5,000 in our example to generate 1,000 visitors to our landing page with a minimum goal of converting 15 percent, or 150, of those visitors into qualified leads or users. This results in a cost per user of $33. Do you expect the lifetime value of your users to be greater than $33? If so, the investment makes sense. Know your ROI and constantly optimize your lead funnel as there is always room for improvement.

Tip #3: Tracking and optimizing your advertising investment

Anyone that knows me would be right to say I am crazy about analytics and data. I have invested a great deal of time testing hundreds of tools to measure the entire life cycle of our customers from the point of advertisement to engaged customer. We currently track the specific advertising source that a customer clicked on and bind it to the customer’s activity so we can assess in real-time the revenues ultimately generated by the specific ad, the channel, and the campaign.

There are no endorsements here, but I wanted to lift the hood for startups so you can see what marketing systems we run. We use MediaMind for our ad serving platform. From this platform we host and deploy our banner ads across different websites and geographies. On a daily basis we track CTR, conversion, and revenue metrics on the specific ads and campaigns we are running. We are constantly optimizing our media mix based on this data.

To track interaction on our landing page and website we use Google Analytics. This provides invaluable insight in terms of how visitors are engaging and navigating our store front. Tools such as CrazyEgg provide a deeper real-time heat map so you can optimize the layout of your page.

The most important tool I use when it comes to lead acquisition and conversion tracking is MixPanel. MixPanel provides event driven funnels based on your defined flow. In our case, we measure leads from the point they arrive on the landing page through each of the six steps of our online application. I can see specifically where customers may drop out of our online application and work to make the process simpler. Once we generate potential customers online, we use Salesforce to auto route the prospect to the appropriate sales person based on language, geography, and product experience. This of course increases the sales conversion rate as you are matching customer needs with the person best equipped to help them.

We use Salesforce as our end-to-end CRM system. As a transaction-driven business we measure our revenue and core business metrics in an OLAP (online analytical processing) tool called MicroStrategy. For pre-revenue startups you can very likely tackle this manually until you reach a point of scale where it makes sense to invest in automation. Rather than waste time logging into all of these systems I publish them to the entire office in real-time through a dashboard called Geckoboard. As they say, you manage what you measure.

Focus on these three core areas and you will be running very effective and performance-driven online banner campaigns in no time. Remember, be prepared to take risks and accept that failing fast and pivoting is a normal part of the marketing process.

Yesterday, it was announced that Singapore startup NoiseStreet and SPH MediaBoxOffice have partnered to launch a smartphone-based solution that aims to bring a new level of engagement, interactivity, and immediacy to what’s called out-of-home advertising (OOH) – ads in stores and on the street.

The smartphone-based solution, also known as Noise Street, is part of the drive to make screens a two-way medium, instead of a one-way platform. Noise Street claims to be a one-of-its-kind in Asia, allowing consumers to be engaged with advertisements, and enabling them to play games on their smartphones in order to receive rewards and benefits on-the-spot.

Edward Tang, SPH MediaBoxOffice’s general manager, explains:

We’re committed to bringing leading-edge innovation to our advertisers. This partnership with NoiseStreet allows retail advertisers to increase footfall and sales, and brand owners to create a unique engagement with consumers.

Using Noise Street’s custom analytics, retailers are able to tailor future marketing promotions to suit their customers’ preferences, such as tracking redemption rates, promotion-linked in-store sales, and the level of user engagement during the promotion period. They are also able to select from a ready-made set of available games developed by Noise Street or design a customized one.

In a recently concluded pilot promotion with bubble tea brand GongCha, it is said to have attracted new customers with good redemption results. Customers at the participating branch played a ‘Guess the Drawing and Win!’ game, which could be played by scanning a QR code in the mall’s foyer. With the correct answer, consumers could proceed directly to the mall’s GongCha outlet to redeem their rewards.

Anyone can take advantage of such promotions, provided they have an internet-enabled smartphone. No apps are required.

NoiseStreet : Engage your audience .. from NoiseStreet on Vimeo.

Travel website Wego Indonesia won an award for best social marketing strategy at the social media-oriented Eye For Travel Awards Asia in Hong Kong on Tuesday. Shashank Nigam, the CEO of Singapore-based aviation marketing strategy company SimpliFlying, who is a member of the judging panel for the awards, commented on the choice:

Wego Indonesia tackled a very basic challenge in the Indonesian travellers’ mindset – that there are more destinations than just Bali and Lombok.

We talked with Graham Hills, the managing director of Wego Indonesia, about how the team’s social media strategy won them this award. He said that Wego’s localization effort in the country was an essential part of it. The company hired two community managers who are very well connected in social media, and also an editorial team comprised of four writers for the website’s travel blog called Travel Editor’s Desk.

He explained three particular social media campaigns that the team implemented.

1. Travel Photo Contest – Ini Indonesia!

Meaning “This is Indonesia!”, for this Wego Indonesia campaign, the startup asked fans to upload their best photos of Indonesia that they personally took. Over 6,500 photos were submitted and a gallery was created and integrated into Wego’s social media channels for future use, to further promote destinations within Indonesia. Five winners accompanied by Wego Indonesia’s community manager experienced a five-day trip to Wakatobi on a photo assignment.

2. Vaastu Video

Together with Hifatlobrain Travel Institute in Jakarta, Wego Indonesia created a travel video called Vaastu to inspire exploration and travel within the country. Vaastu is Sanskrit for ‘direction,’ and the video was promoted on social media channels and on the team’s travel group pages on Vimeo and YouTube. The video notched up thousands of views and got good feedback from Wego’s fans.

3. Facebook Milestone Campaign

To celebrate Wego Indonesia’s achieving 250,000 fans on its Facebook page, the team held a campaign to ask fans to share their most unusual experiences on an aircraft. The prize was a fully paid trip to Bali. Those entries can further be used for PR purposes and Travel Editor’s Desk stories.

Currently, Wego Indonesia’s Facebook page has around 280,000 fans. The company’s Twitter page has 10,000 followers.

You might want to check out Wego Indonesia’s video, made a few months ago, which explains about the team’s social media strategies. It was made for the WITovation Awards’ ‘uber social’ category. The team was a finalist at that event.

Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has just released an interesting report filled with facts and stats about users of its Sina Weibo service, which passed 400 million registered users earlier today. Combing through the report, we see it has lots of Weibo user demographic facts that would be super useful for brands and marketers, so we’ve picked eight of the best for this list.

1. Gender and Age

Weibo users are split evenly along gender lines, with 180 million each. That doesn’t add up to Sina’s newest 400 million figure, so it seems the data was compiled a few months ago. Anyway, users are mostly people born after 1980, making it a very young user-base. The biggest group is those born between 1980 and 1989 – who are China’s first boomers and netizens. Those born in 1990 or thereafter are the ones to watch, and the group that might require a change of marketing strategy:

2. Education Levels

As well as being quite young, Weibo users are also skewed towards those we are well-educated, with the majority having a university degree or higher. Indeed, 30 percent of current Weibo users are current university students, making them the biggest single professional user-group. The next largest subset is white-collar workers, representing 19.6 percent:

3. Monthly Income and Spending Levels

The chart on the left relates to monthly disposable income among Weibo users, while the blue chart relates to income. Clearly, the bulk of users say that they spend 1,000 RMB to 2,999 RMB ($159 to $478) per month. Tallied with the afore-mentioned preponderance of white-collar and mid-level office workers (in #2) on the social site, there’s a fairly sizable chunk of income set aside for spending each month:

4. Spending Power

All of Sina Weibo’s users have an annual theoretical spending power of RMB 16 trillion ($2.55 trillion), which equates to the GDP of Italy. OK, so Chinese tend to be conservative with spending – prefering to save for college funds and to counterbalance a lack of a social safety net – so this one is not so meaningful for brands. Instead it’d be better to look at education and income levels (see #2 and #3) and carefully cross-reference that with regional distribution (see #5). Nonetheless, this is a fun factoid:

5. Where are Weibo Users?

Weibo users are – as the above stats give a clue – scattered across China’s richer coastal areas and hi-tech manufacturing hubs. On the heat map, Guangdong stands out in red, with the most Weibo users of all, then Jiangsu province and Beijing municipality. All three provinces have a similar weight of middle-class and wealthy inhabitants, and its interesting that they share a strong Weibo user-base as well:

6. PCs, TVs, Mobile

Basically, this is what media Weibo users are interested in, compared with folks on Facebook or Twitter. Note the greater love for mobile usage in China:

7. Weibo Usage on PCs, Mobile

For now, Weibo users spend more time accessing the service on their PCs – an average of 5.8 hours per day for a user. On a mobile, that’s down to 3.9 hours. Both stats, Sina claims, are higher than for either Facebook or Twitter:

8. Ad Blockers?

Lastly, how receptive are Weibo users to adverts? Sina claims that the majority find ads “quite useful” – a greater number than those who dislike ads:

Check the the full report for further details (and to see specifics of its methodology), though note that it’s all in Chinese. Get it from Sina Weibo’s official reports page (login required), or we’ve put it up here for your convenience.

Mig33, Indonesia’s largest mobile social network on feature phones, together with Universal Musik Indonesia, launched a competition today called “Mig33 Fanatik.” The competition will send a minimum of five winners to go to Miami and watch Justin Bieber and Carly Rae Japsen in concert on January 27th, 2013.

To enter the competition, you will need to upload a 30- to 90-second video that shows how fanatical you are about either Justin Bieber or Carly Rae Japsen. Five people with the highest number of likes will receive the tickets, while a few additional winners will be decided by the judges from media partners and sponsors.

Those extra winners will be decided by Indonesian telco Indosat and radio channel Prambors.
Other ways to win this competition is by activating the Mig33 data package during the competition period with an IM3 Indosat number. The package will be launched tomorrow. While Prambors will hold a surprise ‘Mendadak Hits’ quiz which will send away one more winner to Miami.

Click to enlarge. No, Justin’s not in the photo, so you probably won’t bother.

The competition starts for one month from November 15th to December 14th. The winners will be announced the next day, which is December 15th. To enter this competition, you have to be aged between 14 to 25 years old, an Indonesian citizen, own a Mig33 account, and you must have purchased a genuine CD album of Bieber or Japsen between the period of November 1st to December 14th.

Kiki Rizki, the country manager of Mig33 Indonesia, said that the Mig33 Fanatik competition was built based on their understanding of Indonesian teens’ aspirations. This competition isn’t only a program to meet their idols, insists the gaming company, but also a way to get young adults to be directly inspired by their idols.

The competition will attract a lot of female music fans in the country, just like with Lazada’s One Direction contest held last month. This is made even more obvious by the poster, which seems to be focusing on Bieber rather than Carly. I wonder if this sort of online competition is going to become a trend in the coming months among Indonesian web companies. For more information about the Mig33 Fanatik competition, you can check it out here.

[UPDATED two hours after publishing: Corrected the author attribution; UPDATE 2: Removed a line written by the editor with an erroneous detail].

Indonesian soccer fans who are still talking about Torres’ dismissal in last weekend’s Barclays Premier League (BPL) football match might find this news interesting: several BPL clubs are looking to strengthen their brands in Indonesia this year. The Shanghai-based online media company Mailman Group, which is spearheading this project, has made its first move by opening a representative office in Indonesia yesterday.

Giulia La Paglia, a representative of Mailman Group, told me that they are planning to hold a major marketing campaign for its sports clients starting in December this year. It is understood that Mailman will represent several Premiership clubs for its Indonesia campaign, but the clubs’ identities still remain a mystery.

Mailman Group has previously worked with Manchester United FC and Liverpool FC for its social media projects in China – which might be a clue as to its Indonesia social marketing clients. The company has made its mark particularly for the latter project. Mailman has amassed more than 300,000 fans on Liverpool’s official Sina Weibo page in over a year, making it the number one English football club page on the social networking site.

Giulia hinted to me that they are tying up deals with two other BPL teams besides the (speculative) aforementioned duo. But she could not specify if Man United and Liverpool will be part of the Indonesia campaign. She simply said, “Think big out of all the BPL clubs that might have an interest in Asia.”

So which BPL clubs have showed great interest in Asia? Perhaps Liverpool FC, one of whose sponsors is Garuda Indonesia? Manchester United FC, which has its own exclusive bar and cafe in Jakarta? Chelsea FC, whose prominent sponsor on its shirts is Korea’s Samsung? Or Everton FC, which is sponsored by Thailand’s Chang Beer?

Which BPL teams do you think will make their way to Indonesia this December? I do hope Manchester City FC will be one of them.

[Image source: duniasoccer.com]

Austrian startup RealLifeConnect is adding support for China’s Sina Weibo to its social media check-in stations. To back that up, RealLifeConnect is launching in China, pushing its RFID/NFC-equipped hardware to allow people to shout out to Weibo from these terminals, either from events, exhibitions, or stores.

The idea behind RealLifeConnect is that it links real-world spaces with digital networks, forming what CEO Michael Ionita-Ganea calls “offline social media.” The two other founders are Christoph Wagner (CFO), and Juergen Hoebarth (CVO). Juergen tells us that its Asia operations are run out of Hong Kong, and that the company is now working with partners in China to develop “solutions for certain consumer brands” – to be revealed at a later date. With Sina Weibo now added to the line-up, the startup can tout access to the Twitter-like Chinese site and its 300+ million registered users.

RealLifeConnect doesn’t rely on people using their own phones, since NFC uptake in smartphones has been lackluster. Instead, says Juergen, “We are doing it with RFID/NFC cards or tokens – they have an RFID/NFC chip inside which is linked up with your Weibo profile during the registration process” (pictured below). The chips inside these things are cheap, so they’ll be given to folks for free by brands or event organizers. And then, if you opt to interact with one of the stations, you’ll be able to quickly and seamlessly do things like check-in to an event or store on Weibo, or post about your experience there. In theory, this is a way for brands to get more people posting about them on Weibo, bolstering their social media marketing efforts.

As for the idea’s genesis, Juergen explains:

The RealLifeConnect cards and token, equipped with NFC and RFID tags. Click to enlarge.

The initial seed to linking up the physical world with the digital one and RealLifeConnect was born back in summer 2010 during a roadtrip to a conference between me and Michael Ionita. This was just a few days after Facebook released Facebook places which allows users to check-in at venues. We were brainstorming ideas and came to the conclusion sooner or later we will check in to all things around us not only places and visioned about what would be possible with this.

Michael was at this time already involved and made a major contribution with his knowledge around Facebook’s API and its possibilities. Both me and Michael presented the concept to people around us which are working in the advertising and social media space, and we recognised a demand for a easy to use one shop stop solution for a service like this which resulted into incorporating RealLifeConnect finally in May 2011 where we already started to do the first smaller projects as test pilots before going fully operation with our platform in autumn 2011 supporting social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Linkedin.

Variations of its social media check-in stations can do other things like transferring files or contact details via NFC or RFID. The hardware can be rented or bought, depending on how long the store or event wants to have the installation.

RealLifeConnect says it has seen 50 successful cases of its kit in action across five continents in just the past 10 months. Right now it’s hiring and scaling globally, and attracted some useful seed funding of $120,000 at the end of 2011.

Here’s a three-minute demo video mixed in with scenes from RealLifeConnect’s recent China launch:

HootSuite and its owl have flown into China, adding support for the country’s hottest Twitter-like service, Sina Weibo, in its social media dashboard. This could be of great use to many brands who need to use Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) wildly popular Weibo for doing social marketing to Chinese consumers, as Sina Weibo still only has Chinese-language support on its site.

Along with the Sina Weibo rollout, HootSuite now also has support for traditional Chinese, as used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and among many overseas Chinese. Hootsuite has been blocked in China for some time (it was a useful workaround for using Twitter, which got blocked way earlier, until Net Nanny slapped it down), but it doesn’t really matter as local Weibo users and Chinese companies are not the target of this. The Weibo support is instead aimed at HootSuite’s paying customers, especially for its enterprise packages, which include major brands like Seagate and Pepsi.

HootSuite announced this on its blog yesterday, as spotted by TheNextWeb, and describe it as a mere “first step” into the Chinese market – next up is a simplified Chinese localization of the site (which is currently being crowdsourced). There’s now also a HootSuite Chinese presence on both Twitter and Weibo (see here and here) so that clients and users can better interact with the HootSuite team.

The Weibo integration extends to all the usual HootSuite features, such as posting text and images, Weibo searches, and analytics so that brands can better monitor how their posts are going down with Chinese consumers. We’ve seen something similar come already from an Australian startup with its Hubblr site, which additionally supports China’s facebook-esque Renren site.

Canada-based HootSuite has been busy in the region recently, adding a version for Indonesian a couple of months ago.

[Source: HootSuite blog (in Chinese); via TNW]

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Shanghai's Pudong biz district skyline turns green. Photo courtesy of Rovio Mobile.

Rovio Mobile will launch its much-anticipated Angry Birds spin-off game, called Bad Piggies, later today, and the company has taken to the roads of China to promote it. Last night, in a neat publicity stunt, the Shanghai Pudong skyline was turned green (pictured above) by a light-projection of the Bad Piggies, those dastardly nemeses of the understandably frustrated birdies.

But that’s not all. As spotted by lots of Sina Weibo users, there are two elaborately painted vans going round Shanghai (pictured below). The red van represents the Angry Birds, and the green one for the piggies. We’ve confirmed with the Rovio office in Beijing Shanghai that the vans are “official and a part of our Bad Piggies launch” – but it’s not clear what time exactly the new game will roll-out in China, and the game developer is keeping it under wraps for now. All we know is that it should hit iOS, Android, and Mac pretty much simultaneously sometime today.

[Update: Bad Piggies is available here]

Both photos via Weibo user @万里行房车 taken today in Shanghai.

Bad Piggies will be the the second different title (following the puzzler Amazing Alex) after the huge global success of the four Angry Birds series games. China was a huge part of that success, as seen with the local Rovio office and versions of the original game that used familiar cultural themes, such as Angry Birds Seasons for Chinese New Year, and even one for the autumnal Moon Festival. If Bad Piggies prove as popular, then we’ll likely see similar adaptations – and lots more cutesy piggy merchandise too.

Canon has started an online video contest for the Southeast Asia region to celebrate the launch of the Legria HD camcorder. The Legria competition is being held in five Asian countries: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Amateur film-maker entrants will have a chance to win $30,000 total prizes. In addition to all that cash, this competition will open the door to professional filmmaking industry. The winners will get exclusive mentorship by famous film directors and videographers in their country.

The theme of the contest is Love drama? Create your own. Entrants can actually use any device for the filming – even your smartphone. All you have to do is upload the raw materials from your recording to the Canon Asia site and then produce your two-minute film. You can directly edit the video by using its web app called the Cinema Style simulator. In this way, Canon is introducing the same features that you can find in the Legria HF M52/56 and HF R36/8 series. It’s kind of fun to edit online – not everyone has cool desktop apps like iMovie – and you can see what your video would look like if it were inside the LCD of a camcorder. Though that’s just a marketing gimmick. The video submission deadline is September 30, 2012.

The Canon division director of PT. Datascrip, Merry Harun, said the winners from each country will receive $2,000 and a Canon Legria camcorder. Canon will also pick two winners from the top five most popular videos who will get $5,000 and exclusive mentorship from a film director.

They will get an opportunity of a lifetime to remake their own film with a film director by using the Canon Legria camcorder.

If you don’t have an idea yet about what kind of drama that you’d like to create, perhaps find some inspiration from the Canon Asia Legria microsite. The camera-maker already uploaded a bunch of short films by professional videographers from Southeast Asia who took part in Canon’s challenges before – namely Ifa Isfansyah (Indonesia), Efozy (Malaysia), Mei Wong (Singapore), Panu Aree (Thailand), and Tran Dung Thanh Huy (Vietnam).

With this competition, Canon perhaps expect to reach amateur indie film maker as a target market for getting a Legria. This competition is open only to non-professionals. It also hopes to go viral via YouTube as a sort of Asian version of YouTube’s Your Film Festival.

Agnes Monica (courtesy of Agnes-monica.com)

Agnes’ engagement on Twitter has landed her more than 5 million followers. Thanks to that, the #dancelikeagnes hashtag reached the number one spot among Indonesia’s Twitter trending topics shortly after the campaign began.

The winner of Dance Like Agnes will become a guest dancer at Agnes’s 20th year anniversary concert to mark her two decades as an artist. There will be 20 winners who each receive a cash prize of IDR 10 million (over $1,000), a Samsung Galaxy SIII, T-Cash balance (e-wallet) of IDR 5 million (over $500), SimPATI top-up credit worth IDR 5 million (over $500), and a 1GB per month SimPATI data package for one year. Total prizes worth IDR 1 billion (over $100,000) will be dished out to lots of winners.

To register, you will have to visit DanceLikeAgnes.com and upload a dance video featuring yourself, up to 60 seconds long. The video submission period is from today, September 5, up until October 31, 2012. Agnes and her dance team will pick 200 contestants. At the end, there will be 20 winners chosen by public voting.

With this competition, SimPATI launched a specially priced IDR 60.000 (over $6) for 2GB internet package with the speed of 7.2 Mbps. This promotion will last for 45 days.

Telkomsel is targeting 66 million mobile data users by the end of this year. This company already leads the Indonesian cellular market with 110 million users. With this campaign, they will push the use of data packages by asking people to upload their video. But actually uploading the video might be an annoying problem here, due to the poor capacity of internet connections here nowadays. Perhaps this is why they have a limit of 60 seconds.

Made by the folks at Thailand-based social analytics firm ZocialInc, it’s concocted using data from its ZocialRank system. The infographic shows that Thailand has the greatest number of high-ranking brands on social media (86 brands), and that the most liked/followed brand in the region is the Bali-based clothing retailer Surfer Girl, which is apparently living up to its claim of being a fun brand. It’s also got some killer social skills. Global brands in the top 10 include motorbike-maker Yamaha, AirAsia, BlackBerry, Nescafé, and Starbucks.

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

[Source: ZocialInc blog]

After acquiring millions of users, perhaps it’s time for some monetization. That’s the case with the team behind TuDing, one of China’s biggest Instagram-like photo-sharing apps, which has recently started to play host to brands as part of their social media marketing campaigns. The three biggest to have partnered with TuDing so far are Starbucks, Nike, and North Face.

The two sportswear makers have a pretty unique thing to show for their marketing – a custom photo-filter within the app. It seems to be paying off for North Face, climbing beyond 100,000 followers in the photo-sharing service, which has a total of more than five million users. That’s growing well from the four million we reported last December. Starbucks, meanwhile, has just signed up as a regular user, and doesn’t have so many followers to show for it.

It marks TuDing’s growth to the level at which it can be a destination for brands. Aside from the hundreds of millions of people on Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, and Renren (NYSE:RENN), Tuding is more like the check-in social network Jiepang in being a niche app where certain leisure brands can connect with a well-heeled, smartphone-owning, and receptive audience. That’s why Jiepang has partnered with Starbucks for two years already, and has run some interesting campaigns with the likes of Louis Vuitton.

An infographic in Chinese (see it here) made earlier this year suggests that 58 percent of TuDing’s users are women, so some female-oriented brands are perhaps missing out there. Of that five million user-ship, 33 percent are using the iPhone app, and 26 percent are on Android. As a whole, 48 percent of its users are synced up to Sina Weibo, firing off their photos to the nation via the country’s biggest Twitter-esque site.

Snag the Tuding app for Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, or Symbian S60 from its homepage.

"Oh, you silly cat. That's not how you spell 'cheeseburger'!"

Asia now has more than one billion internet users – or 1.016 billion, to be precise – who amount to 46 percent of the world’s total number of web users. More than half of those are in China. In addition, 623 million access the web via mobile phones. That’s the overview of the Asia-Pacific web scene depicted in a new report by the Asia Digital Marketing Association (ADMA), a non-profit organisation backed by corporate donors such as Google, Microsoft, and CNN.

For that fast-growing regional audience, ADMA cautions brands to think carefully before engaging in social marketing – “Although 60 percent of social networkers say that social networks are a good place to learn about brands, 50 percent also say they don’t want to be bothered by brands” – and to take care to note the “fragmentation of online activities” between different nations. Here are five eye-watering biz and marketing stats from ADMA’s David Ketchum:

• Online advertising spend in Asia-Pacific reached US$24.8 billion in 2011, making the region second only to the US, with $34.5 billion.
• Every marketing dollar spent online returns $1.78, exceeding the returns of all other marketing media including TV, print, out of home and trade (according to Nielsen).
• By 2015, Asia Pacific is expected to account for a third of all global mobile ad spend, reaching $6.92 billion.
• India, China, Australia and Japan are expected to generate $258 billion in commerce sales in 2012 between them, and mobile commerce is on the rise with 34 percent of mobile internet users in China and Korea transacting via handheld devices.
• Mobile app downloads reached five billion in 2011, generating $871 million.

Here are some of the key demographic tables from desktop internet users in Asia as a whole. It focuses on who’s online, Asia’s most trafficked sites (note Chinese web giants Tencent and Baidu), and where folks go for social media, online gaming, and e-commerce:

And here are three of the demographical highlights of mobile web users in Asia in the ADMA report. It’s interesting to note just how much more likely Asian mobile users are to do serious, practical stuff on their smartphones or feature-phones:

If you’re more into the consumer attitudes and marketing aspect of this and want to see ADMA’s report in full, grab it at the source link below.

[Source: ADMA’s Digital Marketing Yearbook report for 2012 (requires sign-in)]

Bentley's EXPLab app on Sina Weibo today.

Whether legendary British automaker Bentley decides to make its first ever SUV could rest in the hands – or mouse-clicks – of Chinese social media users. That’s because Bentley is seeking input from users of Sina Weibo, China’s hottest Twitter-like site, about the design of its EXP 9 F concept for a luxury SUV. To do so, the manufacturer has created an app within the Sina Weibo site called EXPLab – check it out here if you’re logged-in to Weibo – that canvases opinion on many key elements of the model.

The experiment is being backed up by Bentley’s own official Weibo page which launched back in March. Spotted by the luxury-oriented website Jing Daily, it points out that Bentley did the same thing on Facebook a while back after a luke-warm public response to the hefty SUV concept.

Firstly, the new Bentley Weibo app asks for your impression of the SUV as a whole, how its interior strikes you, whether it should have a V8 or W12 engine, how you like its interior, and, ultimately, if you think it’s a good idea for Bentley to launch the thing. Then the survey goes off into other aspects of driving and vehicle preferences in general. At the end, you’re rewarded with some wallpaper for your computer and mobile devices. Not exactly a detailed focus group in terms of feedback, and it’s debatable if the responses on Weibo – or Facebook – will have any impact on the Volkswagen-owned marque and its SUV plans.

Hot or not? A promo shot of the SUV concept from Bentley. Click to enlarge.

After testing out that app, I see that only 73 other Weibo users have done likewise. But, as with Bentley’s cars, it’s about the quality – and perhaps the free publicity too – and not anything so crass as numbers.

The EXP 9 F is Bentley’s response to the huge success of the Porsche Panamera – especially in China, where I see they outnumber bicycles in some richer suburbs of major cities – which in turn adapted the idea of the Range Rover as a high-end SUV/four-wheel drive car that has all the luxuries of an executive-class sedan. It was debuted at the Geneva Motor Show back in March and Bentley later conceded that its design might need some work before it almost certainly heads into production. It would also be up against the upcoming Lamborghini Urus SUV, which many would say looks more awesome and less ungainly or blocky than Bentley’s contender.

[Hat-tip to the Jing Daily for spotting this]

Bonus: Here’s the Bentley EXP 9 F promo video that the company has put up on Youku, China’s biggest video-streaming site:

(Direct video link for mobile readers).

Surely the key element of social media marketing is to keep it relevant. And so London Mayor, Boris Johnson, seems to be failing at reaching out to Chinese folks on his new Sina Weibo account (see it here), as it consists almost entirely of inscrutable nonsense that has been copied-and-pasted from his official Twitter page.

Last night, Mr Johnson’s Weibo – now at 80,000 followers and rising rapidly – tweeted out this irrelevant message:

isabellagornall you can find them at http://t.cn/zOOzf18 for just £1.50!

The first name is a reference to a Twitter user that doesn’t even exist on Weibo. Most of his Weibo missives – presumably done by a staffer, not Boris himself – are similar mis-fires straight from his @backboris2012 Twitter profile. Also, Weibo uses a double hash for its hashtags, so all the Twitter-oriented ones – such as #backboris for his mayoral campaign – don’t work on the popular Sina social network. The vote for London mayor takes place on May 3rd, and it will therefore decide which man – Mr. Johnson, former mayor Ken Livingstone, or challenger Brian Paddick – represents the city during the Olympics.

Inevitably, as spotted by The Daily Dot, some Chinese netizens are having a giggle at the Mayor’s expense, joking that he’s inexplicably campaigning to Chinese voters. One other commenter said:

Hey old man, can you speak a little Chinese? We’re Chinese people, on Chinese soil.

While another politely requested:

Since you’re using Weibo, please write Chinese, mister Mayor.

But most of his followers on Weibo are just happy to see the Mayor on the service, where he seems to be reaching out to the previous hosts of the Olympics in the year that London prepares to host it in just 99 days time.

And, credit where it’s due, Mr Johnson has actually posted two Chinese messages (out of 170 posts so far). The most recent was early this morning, in which Boris wrote (or, rather, a more Weibo-savvy staffer) a note about his public transport plans (pictured above), along with a photo of him stepping off a London “tube” train. In translation, it reads:

Transport investment is the most important part of the nine-point plan I’ve developed for the Greater London region. By 2015 I will have reduced tube delays by 30 percent, and the suburbs and subway system will be connected by the new Central London Railway that’s under construction around the City of London area; plus the bike rental program will be expanded.

Thus far it has just over 120 retweets and nearly 100 comments. I get the feeling, however, that his followers would much prefer some insights into preparations for the Games across the city (and, indeed, across the UK), rather than bland policy and politicking.

Boris Johnson created a very bad impression among Chinese media and bloggers when he was involved in the handover at the end of the Beijing 2008 Olympics. At the time, the somewhat eccentric Mayor was slammed as being “rude, arrogant and disrespectful” due to his floppy hair, unbuttoned jacket, hand-in-pocket, and generally relaxed demeanor at the event.

[Source: DailyDot; via BeijingCream]

The Chinese travel e-commerce site Ctrip (NASDAQ:CTRP) has a new team member – a microblogging ‘robot’ that can reply to users of Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging service, and recommend them hotels or flights.

It’s a smart bit of social marketing, allowing Weibo users to get travel suggestions right from their Weibo app of choice, with no need to even search for info. The Ctrip robot – this is its page – will reply to queries with an answer in a flash, in the form of a Weibo message containing one or two links (pictured above) that should contain the relevant information. In theory, it should save users a few clicks, especially when on their smartphones, and brings the possibility of free publicity as microbloggers might retweet their answers and discuss their trips with friends on the social network.

Asking the Ctrip robot to recommend hotels in Shanghai.

To ask the automated Ctrip account a question, you could say, for example: “Shanghai hotel @携程” (pictured right) and it would link you straight to that search page on its site. For flight tickets, you could query something like: “Shanghai Tokyo February 28 ticket @携程” and then the robot will figure out what you’re looking for. Sadly, the robot account doesn’t have the sass of Apple’s Siri, or the audacious awesomeness of the Futurama character Bender.

The feature does raise privacy issues. But then if you’re dumb enough to make a public query about hotels on your Weibo account when you’re setting up a dirty weekend with your mistress, then you deserve to get caught.

For the time being, this Ctrip robot is only on Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo, not on Tencent’s (HKG:0700) or any of the other Twitter-like services.

Sina Weibo has 250 million registered users, giving Ctrip access to a lot of its upscale users. Ctrip needs all the outreach and marketing it can get as it battles eLong (NASDAQ:LONG), the Baidu-invested Qunar, as well as general e-commerce sites in China that are beginning to move into the travel sector.

[Hat-tip to the People’s Daily for spotting this]

This post is a part of our coverage of Startups in Asia (Singapore), Penn Olson’s first tech conference. Our full coverage of the event can be found here, or for our RSS feed, click here.

Marketing promos, especially social ones, are practically de rigeur for clued-in businesses these days, but they can be tough to implement. With this is mind, the Singaporean startup Gspot wants to give brands an easy way to do this. From its simple dashboard for companies, they can run social promos that give users discounts, keep them engaged, and hopefully also turn the consumers into promoters.

Gspot aims to do it by actually being useful and easy for consumers. Just by sharing a promo from within the app with friends on Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare, someone gets an immediate discount. Once shared, other friends can pick up on it and get the discount themselves. CEO kent Hole says that the social marketing campaign could then “go viral immediately,” spreading across social networks.

The dashboard provides the stats for brands, such as tracking how a promo is reaching consumers. It’ll allow businesses also to limit how often a deal can actually be used by consumers, such as by limiting it to just twice per person.

Delivering the pitch here at the Startups in Asia event, co-founder Kent Hoie says that Gspot can earn from 10 to 50 US cents per share, giving it a clear revenue model for campaigns both big and small.

Here’s a demo video of how it works at the consumer’s end, getting themselves a deal by, so to speak, finding and hitting the Gspot:

Smartphone-toting singletons in China will get some help in finding a potential date for Valentine’s Day with a new social marketing campaign from Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) and the local social network Jiepang. Using both the Jiepang app and some in-store postcards – a good combo of hi- and low-tech – single folks in China could make a new connection as well as perhaps win some prizes.

Jiepang is a social check-in service that has previously teamed-up with the likes of Starbucks and also Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) on fun campaigns, and both those companies are in evidence for this new Valentine’s Day promo.

What’s on offer? All check-ins within Jiepang in some parts of China will earn a blue or pink Valentine’s badge (pictured above), which, when followed up by purchasing a Starbuck’s reward card, will earn anyone two free cups of coffee. For some luckier users of the service, a grand total of 520 Nokia N9 phones could be won; or, for those who fill out the match-making in-store postcards, you might win a special Starbucks mug – and perhaps even a date.

If you’re looking for alternative distractions on the big day, February 14th, people in Japan could buy a ‘chocolate’ phone, and the people of the world can finally play Angry Birds on Facebook.

As befits a social marketing campaign, there’s a specially-made video promo, this one showing Jiepang helping a guy and a gal to connect in the real world:

Singaporean startup Media Pop has launched a new service that makes it easier for brands, either big or small, to set up a social media campaign on Facebook. Its social marketing dashboard is, the startup says, a useful way for a company to engage users more effectively, with custom apps for offering giveaways and other enticements.

The Media Pop service has four main apps that it then injects into the ‘Facebook Page’ of a brand: giveaways, vouchers, and photo and video competitions. And then all of this is managed mostly from within the campaign dashboard.

Clinique of Singapore is one of the high-profile brands using this in its own Facebook social marketing strategy; but a better example of custom apps can be seen on the page of the Filmgarde Cineplex – see it here.

Two of the steps involved in setting up a social marketing campaign with Media Pop.

The startup’s dashboard has free and paid packages for campaigns on Facebook, and so it says the service is accessible even to individuals or family-run businesses who could run one page with a limit of up to 1,000 fans entirely for free. It’s open to users worldwide.

Media Pop was doing social marketing prior to the launch of this new platform, and last spring we saw it running a cute campaign for Singapore Zoo to name a baby orangutan.

Give Media Pop a try, starting on its homepage.

A Chinese startup named Guohe is getting netizens to engage in online social marketing ostensibly for no money – and giving them “free” McDonald’s food instead. It’s all handled via a brand new app for Android phones called Free McDonald’s wherein assigned promotion-related tasks are rewarded via a virtual currency system called ‘fruit coins.’ That’s somewhat ironic, as users will presumably be getting diabetes-causing junk food delicious burgers rather than fruit.

And so there’s a task-for-reward system that has been set-up by Guohe whereby a certain activity will earn users a pre-defined amount of ‘fruit coins.’ For example, 700 such virtual coins can be redeemed for one McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) ice cream, or 800 for some spicy chicken wings. Tasks are set by Guohe, and stem from whichever company is paying for online exposure – be it tweeting out adverts on Weibo, installing certain apps, or roping-in friends to sign up for a service (as pictured below):

Perform a task online (shown on the left) and earn virtual coins to get McDonald's 'food' in return.

The app itself also has a social element, with the ability to friend fellow users, and a leader-board so that you can see how much virtual currency some people have made.

In Chinese, the whole practice is very euphemistically referred to as a “slave trade,” and is not too dissimilar from the notorious practice of ‘gold mining’ virtual items in multiplayer online games. Presumably, users of Guohe’s app are being paid far less that their online promotions are actually worth in terms of clicks or acquired users.

It’s not clear if – but unlikely that – this is associated with McDonald’s, so Guohe might well be on very shaky legal ground using the golden arches and clown mascot on its website.

Download the Guohe app for Android from the startup’s site, or the Baidu app store.

[Source: Toumingti - article in Chinese]

A new annual report from the L2ThinkTank has been released today, giving insights into which big-name luxury brands are best engaging with Chinese consumers in 2011. The researchers dub it a “China IQ” – a measure of a company’s effectiveness on the web and social media among China’s growing middle-classes.

The report’s authors stress that “success in the world’s fastest-growing prestige market is inextricably linked to digital competence.” They’ve identified a list of top 100 companies in this regard, but we’ll boil it down to 20 top web and social media engagers.

Before we identify those brands, how big is the luxury market in China?

Looking at the above graph, we see a realistic, “addressable” market amongst the world’s populace who have an income of over US$30,000. China, pictured in red, is the only region that’ll experience exponential forecasted growth from now to 2025. Europe still has potential, as eastern European areas develop and its own middle classes emerge. The US, however, looks stagnant. These figures point to how crucial it is for a brand – especially in the luxury sector – to follow the new money to China and other parts of Asia.

Top 20 “China IQ” List For 2011

And the winner is… Audi. The German carmaker has already been a hit in terms of sales in China, and now they’re getting better at digital engagement as well. The report praises the way that Audi “maintains presence on six different social media sites in addition to its own OurAudi.com.” The lead image shows Audi’s official Sina Weibo page. Now if only Audi drivers can raise their own IQ and stop driving like asses…

Second is Burberry, the British fashion label that we’ve seen working with check-in service Jiepang, and launching a new brand channel on Youku.

BMW is in third place, and rounds out the three companies that are labelled as “genius”-level in terms of digital engagement in China.

The Swedish – oh, wait, I mean Chinese – automaker Volvo had a good social media year with a Sina Weibo-based campaign in which Weibo users could design the plot of its next TV ad.

Going Up, Going Down…

Some brands had a good year, upgrading their status from “feeble” – such as the cosmetics company Benefit which made better use of Youku, Weibo, and Kaixin to promote its products. Likewise, Dolce and Gabbana raised their game this year, with a wider social media presence and even a new app for Nokia phones available in the Ovi app store.

A lot of brands seemingly forgot to update their social sites in China this year, such as Scoth whisky maker Chivas Regal. The report’s authors lament that its Douban page has barely been touched since 2010.

Getting Your Brand on Baidu, Not Google

A lot of brands seem to be having issues optimizing their online presence for Baidu, which is China’s dominant search engine, with about three-quarters of the market share. So, it’s not much use being well indexed on Google if you’ve not made your brand-name highly visible on Baidu.

On the plus side, luxury companies are doing a better job of using Baidu’s paid search services, such as “brand zone.” This year, paid searches account for 31 percent of all online ad spending in China.

Shopping Overseas

Astonishingly, “fifty-six percent of Chinese luxury purchases are made abroad.” That’s because China’s middle-classes travel a lot these days, and they know that China’s excessive import taxes make things a lot cheaper overseas. Hong Kong, with its zero VAT, is especially popular. For fashion items, many like to go to the source, in France or Italy, where a strong RMB makes the price tags even more desirable.

Despite all this, not many brands are clued up. 42 percent of companies lack an overseas store locator function on their Chinese sites, and a huge 68 percent don’t provide website settings for prices to be viewable in RMB.

Genius Ideas

Lastly, the report has a “flashes of genius” section to highlight how some brands have found some brilliant ways to engage and promote in China. One of which is Lamborghini’s official TMall store, which we reported on back in May of this year.

Another is the Chinese rice wine brand Wuliangye, which set up a good-looking site (pictured above) to help combat counterfeiting of its spirits. It comes replete with an authentication section to check that your bottle is genuine baijiu, and not paraffin or something (though I don’t think I could tell the difference, even by taste).

Readers can follow two of the report’s authors on Twitter: @sagebrennan, and @maureen_mullen.

[Report: L2 Think Tank (see/download the full report), in conjunction with the George Washington University School of Business]

Cartier’s branded channel – go take a look, if you fancy it – is a bit sparse thus far, with just four videos that have been watched only a few hundred times; but it’s still in its infancy. Cartier will surely be hoping that their channel proves as popular as Louis Vuitton’s: the LV one, which started in February 2011 when Youku first launched its luxury brand channels program, has well over 100,000 views on some of their videos.

A number of posh retailers have advertised on Youku in the past in more conventional in-video ads – so these channels clearly represent more of a commitment to telling their brand’s ‘story’ in China, and engaging with consumers here.

For your amusement, here’s LV’s most popular video on the site, which gives a sneak peek into their special exhibition currently open at the National Museum in Beijing:

QR Codes are not a new phenomenon.

QR codes are those square matrix bar codes that appear to be a bunch of random squares which, when scanned by a mobile device, allow users to download content, read messages or visit mobile sites. Try scanning this one on the right.