Here are all of the posts tagged ‘e-commerce’.

We Are Social Asia Tuesday TuneUp #25

by Cai Yu Lam in News on 24 April 2012 at 13:52

Chinese marketers to increase digital spend, but request accountability
A joint study by R3 and independent ad tracking company Admaster reveal that Chinese marketers intend to increase their digital spend in 2012 by 26.9%, compared to 18% in 2011. 25% of those surveyed have budgets between RMB 5 to 10 million or S$990,150 to S$1.98 million, while 6% have budgets above RMB 50 million or S$9.9 million  The focus will be on online video with a share of digital spend of more than 23%, followed by microblogs with 20% and social networks with 16%. Only 16% of the 150 companies surveyed believe that they are actually getting competitive digital media buying rates, with fewer than 40% satisfied with the reliability and quality of measurement of their campaigns. This certainly bodes well for digital agencies.

Sina Weibo launches Weibo Places
Sina Weibo has launched a new location service that will collect and arrange posts that a user has made on Sina Weibo that contains a geo-tag into a timeline that includes maps of each location. It also allows users to check-in at specific locations, or search for new places to visit which they can then mark as ‘want to visit’. The latter functionality sounds similar to what Chinese location-based app Jiepang already offers, even though Weibo Places appears to be more an aggregator tracking the history of a user’s location-based posts. In addition to the web application, Sina Weibo has also partnered with several third-party mobile applications such as photo-sharing app Tuding001.

China’s e-commerce site Tmall launches an iPhone app
China’s leading e-commerce website Tmall has launched an iPhone app, which allows users to browse and purchase items from all of its B2C brand partners and independent stores, with the addition of social functionalities such as ‘likes’ and comments. The mobile app also supports full order management, such that purchases can be tracked whilst they’re on the road. This signals the growing trend of m-commerce whereby consumers are making purchases from their phones while on-the-go, and Tmall seems to be capitalising on this with their dedicated mobile app. It’s interesting also that Tmall has decided to launch an iPhone app first while the iPad and Android versions are currently in the works, which signals the increasing popularity of the iPhone in China.

Boris Johnson joins Sina Weibo
Boris Johnson’s campaign for re-election as Mayor of London has even seen him join Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo in a bid to win over London’s Chinese community. However, Mayor Johnson certainly hasn’t quite gotten the hang of it yet.

Mobile an increasingly important media channel in Thailand
Statistics from mobile ad network InMobi reveal that mobile is an increasingly important media channel in Thailand, with 44% of mobile web users claiming that their preferred method of going online is through a mobile device. Most importantly, 75% of mobile web users are as comfortable with mobile advertising as they are with TV or online advertising. Mobile is fast becoming an important driver of consumer purchasing decisions with 38% of Thai respondents saying they have been introduced to something new via mobile advertising, while 13% have reconsidered a product because of mobile advertising. M-commerce will also be a driver of this mobile movement, with 68% of mobile web users planning to purchase a product through their mobile device over the next 12 months. Marketers clearly have an area of opportunity to better target Thai consumers through mobile advertising given their receptiveness to it.

Trust in social grows
According to Nielsen’s latest Global Trust in Advertising report, social networks and consumer-generated media continue to have a significant impact on advertising as consumers’ reliance on word-of-mouth in the decision-making process has increased significantly. The report showed that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends above all other forms of advertising – up 18% since 2007, with trust in consumer opinions posted online up to 70%, a 15% increase in four years.

Sponsored ads on social networks, a new format included in the 2011 Nielsen survey, were found to be trusted by just 36% of consumers, underlining that a paid strategy for social networks alone is not enough.

Consumers respond to social media symbols on TV
A new survey has reinforced the idea that social media and television are a perfect match. The survey, carried out by Accenture, found that one-third of US television viewers interacted with a social network ‘after seeing a social media symbol on the TV screen’, with the Facebook ‘Like’ being the most recognised symbol. Interestingly, US television viewers are more likely to recognise QR codes than Twitter hashtags.

Facebook tests and launches a range of new features
It’s not exactly news that Facebook is focusing on mobile – witness the purchase of Instagram – but it is interesting that they’re focusing on all mobile users. Recently, they’ve launched a new ‘Facebook for every phone’ app which creates a much better mobile experience for non-smartphone users, and in good news for brands, includes the ability to vist Facebook Pages within the app. It’s a move which shows Facebook is keen on mobile domination across the market.

Facebook has implemented a ‘listen’ button on artists’ fan Pages that lets users instantly stream songs from an artist’s catalogue. The feature could help make Facebook a go-to option for people looking for new music, similar to the Myspace in its glory days, but more likely will just integrate music more strongly into the existing Facebook product.

Facebook is also testing a new “trending articles” feature to highlight social reader articles within users’ News Feeds in an attempt to drive more users to Open Graph news apps. Particularly for smaller news sites, this could have a big impact on the number of people reading their site.

In addition, Facebook has delivered “real-time” analytics to Page admins for the first time. This overdue improvement provides new abilities to help marketers measure how well a post is performing on their Pages now, rather than 48 hours later, and modify their content (and advertising spend) accordingly.

It’s an interesting move now, as over the next few weeks, Facebook will introduce more granular metrics, measuring actions other than ‘Likes’, within its ads management platform. Facebook’s product manager for Pages Insights David Baser said the measurable actions “could be anything [such as] commenting or sharing a page post, claiming an offer, or, instead of just installing an app, actually using an app or doing things within an app.” The new feature titled “Action Measurement” will appear as a column and pie chart in Facebook’s Ads Manager and will help marketers tailor ads for relevant consumers.

It seems clear that Facebook are trying as hard as they can to get existing advertisers to spend more money with them – both through letting marketers optimise the performance of their posts, and by making advertising more measurable.

Google products get the social treatment
YouTube aims to become more social and increase revenue by possibly introducing Google+ comments to the site. It could be a mutually beneficial move for Google – encouraging better quality comments on YouTube and also increased use of Google+.

In a smaller piece of news, Gmail users can expect to see recent photo and video thumbnails from Google+ when they hover over the “people” widget within their inbox.

Foursquare announces advertising platform launch
Plans for a mid-June launch for a paid-media platform have surfaced which will give Foursquare merchants the ability to promote a deal to check-in at a given place. According to the reports, Foursquare is pitching brands to become launch partners, and it’s a move which we can definitely see being of particular interest to restaurant chains.

Tumblr to overtake blogs, will introduce advertising
Tumblr looks set to overtake ‘blog’ by the end of the year in Google searches. Between the two terms, ‘blog’ is currently ahead but XKCD blogger Randall Munroe believes that ‘Tumblr’ will see more Google searches by October 12 this year.

Pinterest losing its interest
After its explosive growth in recent months, it seems Pinterest’s bubble may have burst and might now actually be losing users. Monthly active users of their Facebook app are down from 11.3 million on March 1 to just 8.3 million currently. It’s likely that the hype around the photo-sharing and curating site motivated many people to join, but have now decided that Pinterest is not their thing.

Quora and Path both raise funds and plan expansion
According to TechCrunch, Quora is set to raise between $30 – $50 million in its Series B fundraising, giving it a $400 million valuation. Co-founder Adam D’Angelo will also be investing up to $20 million of his own money along with other investors according to one source.

Location-based app Path closed its Series B funding of ”more than $30 million” with investors including Sir Richard Branson, which values it at $250 million. In his email statement, Path CEO Dave Mortin noted the investors’ commitment to building Path “for the long term” with the funding being used for “international growth and expansion as well as user adoption”. It’s unclear whether he meant they would be spending money on advertising, or just on improving the product to boost user adoption.

Klout launches Brand Pages – ‘a new twist on influence’
Klout, the influence measurement company, is now topping 12 billion API calls a month– and has launched Brand Pages to try and work more with brands. According to Klout, the newly launched Brand Pages give ‘influencers a place to be recognised and have a direct impact on the brands they care about most’.

Red Bull have teamed up with Klout for the Beta launch and are offering their top advocates the chance to win a trip to the X Games or, more likely, some merchandise. It’s good to see Klout trying something new, but what they really need to work on is their influence measurement which could do with some work.

Brands tweeting and the Olympics
If you’re working for a brand which isn’t an official Olympic sponsor, even mentioning the Olympics on social media channels could get you in hot water. While Rax Lakhani makes a fair point that it will be impossible for the IOC to keep an eye on every tweet and the rules are clearly overbearing, it’s still an unnecessary risk to break them.

It was notable in the pre-Christmas period how little variety there was on brand social media accounts, with everyone talking about Christmas and little else, so it will be interesting to see how skilled community managers perform in posting content which deflects attention away from their competitors’ Olympic sponsorship, without breaking the rules.

In other Olympic news, the IOC has launched the nicely designed ‘Athlete’s Hub’ which will bring together social media updates from different athletes. While you could just follow them all on Twitter, this is an easier way to follow the Olympic stars, with less effort for the ordinary fan. Nice.

Honda ask people to give up Pinterest – sort of
The new Honda campaign for the CR-V strikes of one where somebody has come up with a decent pun – Pintermission – and built a campaign around it. The campaign revolves around offering active pinners $500 to give up Pinterest for a day, and instead go outside and do the things they’ve been pinning about. It even features personalised invitations and persuaded a few super-users to give Pinterest up for a day.

But as Adweek neatly put it:

The campaign is nicely designed and executed, but somewhat frustrating. If the only way your brand can relate to Pinterest is by dissing it, isn’t it disingenuous to build a whole campaign around it?

Quite.

Dr Pepper’s new Facebook Connect campaign
Dr Pepper have launched a new campaign called ‘The Best Day Of High School’ which creates a bespoke video for each user by connecting it up with their Facebook profile. Considering how long Facebook Connect has been around, it’s a little underwhelming.

Air New Zealand give consumers cashback for recommendations
UK-based Air New Zealand customers can earn £50 for every Twitter, Facebook, email or blog recommendation that turns into a premium economy booking. Consumers that register for the trial can earn cashback on bookings for the premium economy seats. Although the campaign will probably show impressive numbers, it will be hard to prove it has convinced people to book who wouldn’t have otherwise.

Fulham FC attempt Foursquare Super Swarm
Before their home game against Wigan on Saturday, Fulham attempted to unlock the Super Swarm badge for all those checking-in on Foursquare. While this isn’t particularly innovative or interesting on its own when you consider there was a crowd of 20,000+ at the Cottage, Fulham also plan to introduce special offers on tickets and retail items throughout the season that you can only redeem with Foursquare.

Italian ‘blog killer’ law returns
In a quite incredible story, the Italian government is trying to pass a law so brilliantly ridiculous one could be mistaken for thinking Silvio Berlusconi was still Prime Minister.

The proposed law – which is designed to protect those libelled online – works like this:

In order to protect people from online defamation, this law states that each webmaster of whatever website must rectify within 48 hours (even if you’re a private blogger who just left for the weekend!) any page on the website itself, if somebody just tells him or her (how?) that they consider themselves wronged by that page. No discussion or reply allowed, no judge needed, and the fine for not “rectifying” within 2 days is 12,000 Euros [about S$19,693].

Nuts. In other words, if one writes a fact and anyone disputes it, the person will have to change what they’ve written. Looks like the trolls have finally won.

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We Are Social Asia Tuesday TuneUp #17

by Cai Yu Lam in News on 28 February 2012 at 16:41

How Sina Weibo is faring against Twitter worldwide
There’s no doubt that Sina Weibo is big in China – it receives 1 in every 100 Internet visits in China. How then does it fare against Twitter, which is used internationally? Resonance China charted the percentage of visits both microblogging services received in the respective countries they’re used in for December 2011, and Sina Weibo sees a higher penetration in China than Twitter in the many countries it is available in, such as US, UK, India and Brazil. Interestingly enough, Twitter sees a higher percentage of visits in Singapore, where it is receiving 0.85% of Internet visits, compared to US, which sees only 0.23%, and UK, which accounts for 0.44%. This could be due to users accessing Twitter via third-party applications such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, or perhaps through Twitter’s mobile apps.



Sina Weibo promotes social good through its charity platform
Sina Weibo has included a charity platform ‘Gong Yi‘ to its microblogging site that will allow users to ‘follow’ and donate to good causes on the site itself. The concept seems slightly similar to Facebook Causes, a social fundraising tool available to non-profits that wish to integrate donation capabilities with their online efforts. The Gong Yi homepage categorises charities into education, child assistance, medical care, animal protection, and environmental protection, and on each charity’s page is displayed a progress meter that shows how far along it is to hitting its target amount of donations, as well as a donation button. Once Gong Yi is out of its beta phase, it’ll be interesting to see whether non-profits utilise the platform given the 250 million users on Sina Weibo.

Navigating the weibo waters in China
There are plenty of figures on the number of users Sina Weibo has, but the great takeaway from this infographic by Digital Jungle is the demographic data of Sina Weibo users. Apparently, females dominate Sina Weibo – 70.2% of Sina Weibo users are female, and the other 29.8% male. The majority of users, 68% of users to be precise, are aged 18 to 25, while 32% of users spend more than 3 hours on Sina Weibo per day.

 

‘Occupy Obama’
For months, Google+ had been banned in China. When the firewall was mysteriously removed last week, thousands of Chinese web users flocked to President Obama’s Google+ Page, in a move dubbed Occupy Obama. Yes they can.

LiveJournal Singapore launches LJ checkouts
LiveJournal Singapore will be launching e-commerce features through its brand new LJ Checkout platform, catering specifically to the unique local ecosystem of ‘blogshops’, which are online shopping websites hosted on the LiveJournal platform itself. The suite of new features include product catalogue creation, a shopping cart system, and an online payment gateway which will see it partnering with MOLPay. Given that the 50,000 or so blogshops in Singapore generated US$72 million or S$90.25 million  in 2011, it’s no wonder LiveJournal Singapore is responding to this particular niche.

What happens on social media in 60 seconds
If you’ve ever thought that you can’t accomplish much in a single minute, think again. This infographic by Social Jumpstart shows you what happens on social media in a mere 60 seconds, and some of the figures are breathtaking indeed. 2 million videos are viewed on YouTube, 700,000 messages sent on Facebook, 25,000 stumbles on StumbleUpon (updated figures provided by a StumbleUpon representative), 7,610 searches on LinkedIn – all in the space of a minute.

Facebook announces partnership with mobile carriers to offer carrier billing
Today at Mobile World Congress, Facebook announced what could be a potentially game-changing move: it’s created an ecosystem where people can pay for things on their mobile phone bill directly through Facebook, in just three steps.

Facebook set to launch new premium ads and speed up Insights
According to a document leaked to Gigaom, Facebook plans to update its premium ads product by requiring their premium homepage ads to be in page post format.

According to Facebook, page posts significantly outperform other types of ads with 80% more chance of being remembered, a 40% increase in engagement, and a 16% increase in fan rate. These changes are expected to go into effect on Wednesday.

Facebook is also giving Insights, its analytics tool, a revamp. It is expected that they will soon show Page performance data in real-time or near real-time rather than on a 48 hour delay. This is an opportunity to give businesses the understanding necessary to drive higher ROI, which will in turn attract more brands and advertisers to the platform. According to Chad Wittman, EdgeRank Checker’s founder, making real-time Insights data available through the API “will give Page owners an opportunity to see how their Page actually lives and breathes”.

Twitter’s global takeover


Twitter now has over 500 million users just ahead of its sixth birthday. This phenomenal global growth appears to have no plans to cease, with Twopcharts predicting it will hit 600 millions users in around 108 days. On top of this, Twitter has taken yet another step in its international growth by announcing that Google’s Russian rival, Yandex, is their new real-time search partner. Yandex says it has licensed the “full feed of all public tweets” covering all languages. This is an extremely clever move for Twitter in both extending its coverage and utility beyond its home market and English.

LinkedIn launch ‘Follow Company’ button
As of today, LinkedIn have launched an embeddable ‘Follow Company’ button, which companies can add to their sites, to allow anyone to follow their company on LinkedIn. Big news for those who like to stay connected.

Google+ integrates with Google Voice, adds ‘More By’ to search results
Google have announced that Google+ will now be linked to Google Voice by bringing information from your Google+ circles into your Google Voice phone account to make it even easier for you to organise your contacts. This means it will be easier than ever to manage your callers – i.e. ‘Creepers’ go straight to voicemail. It’s another step towards Google bringing Google+ to every Google web app, indicating that Google+ is now the “new mode of usage of Google” that its leaders envisioned – at least from Google’s perspective.

Google have also recently added a new ‘More By’ link to the authorship tag in search results which when clicked, brings up a personalised search results page containing all content by the author. At the top this features information about the author from Google+ and then below lists all the blog content. This is expected to soon be populated by more social content.

Pinterest hype not backed up by the numbers
Looking at the latest research from comScore, Pinterest actually lost users in the UK in January, despite only having 300,000 users to start off with. This might burst some people’s bubbles, but Pinterest is the ultimate embodiment of the Emperor’s New Clothes – just look at the graph! As for the rest of Europe, it’s barely even registering.

PeerIndex launch reward scheme
PeerIndex – a competitor to Klout – has launched a reward scheme, called PeerPerks, which offers free products and discounts, to those they consider influential. Visitors to PeerPerks.com can choose the offer they’re interested in and then find out if they have the Klout clout to be eligible for it.

NBA All-Star game adds social media offering
Yesterday’s NBA All-Star game saw two separate social activations. First, the annual Slam Dunk contest was opened up to Twitter, with users able to vote for their favourite player – by using their surname and the hashtag #SpriteSlam.

Second, and perhaps more interestingly, they teamed up with Shaker, a virtual nightclub which lives within Facebook. This allowed them to create a site which gave fans a chance to interact, chat, watch exclusive interviews and highlights, and test each other’s NBA knowledge. The by-product of all this is that is has been dubbed the most social NBA All-Star game, ever.

Could ‘Fringe’ be saved by a hashtag?
US TV-show Fringe was threatened with cancelation – because its audience was too, um, fringe. But a clever social media campaign has reached a lot of people, suggesting that it might be saved. It’s worth reading the full story to learn about the viewers’ strategy to save the programe, and how they’ve managed to reach such a huge online audience with their campaign.

Ford crowd-source ideas for mobile innovation
Around this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Ford are looking to crowd-source answers to this question: What will communications technology in vehicles help us do in the future? The most interesting responses will be collated into a “customer vision” for mobile-vehicle interactions, and published via social media storytelling tool Storify. Users will need to focus in order to give Ford the fiesta of ideas they’re looking for.

Eurostar launch new social platform, Eurostar Live
Last week saw Eurostar launch their new social platform, Eurostar Live, with a little help from the We Are Social team in London. It brings social media commentary by the general public about Eurostar’s destinations to 363 public display screens across London and the South East.

Kellogg’s develop Totes Amazeballs cereal after Twitter suggestion
Kellogg’s developed a cereal for The Charlatans front man Tim Burgess after he announced his interest in developing a cereal to his followers on Twitter. They created Totes Amazeballs, after Burgess tweeted that he wanted to create a new super cereal which would be Rocky Road flavoured, using the hashtag #totesamazeballs.

Having seen the tweets, Kellogg’s decided to commission the idea in the singer’s honour, with the cereal ultimately containing Kellogg’s Coco Pops Rocks, marshmallows, shortbread pieces and raisins. It remains to be seen whether this was a one-off, or whether Kellogg’s will make this a serial feat.

Absolut London Instagram competition
As part of the launch of their newly-designed bottles, Absolut London are running an Instagram competition to win one of the limited edition bottles.

People like big chocolate bars
Last week Mars announced it was cutting back the size of a whole range of its products, in order to ensure none were more than 250 calories. Judging by the comments on the Snickers Facebook Page, people like big chocolate bars. Picnic.

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Social Commerce

by Simon Kemp in News on 27 February 2012 at 09:32

A number of high-profile brands have shuttered their Facebook Commerce Tabs in recent weeks, but we recently learned that nearly 30% of Burberry’s online sales are driven by traffic that originates in social media.

So who’s indulging in social shopping, and what’s holding non-users back? This great infographic from Digitas investigates:

Thanks to Allfacebook for the tip.

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Five Friday Facts #12

by Cai Yu Lam in News on 27 January 2012 at 15:29

How Chinese luxury online shoppers share information
Data from iResearch shows that 97.1% of Chinese luxury online shoppers are willing to share product information and the website from which they purchased luxury goods. Amongst these online shoppers, 21.9% share information via Weibo, which has yet to surpass the 22.9% of shoppers who share while chatting with friends. iResearch’s data also demonstrates that recommendations by friends triumph online advertising in referring new users to luxury shopping websites, in which 44.7% were referred by friends’ recommendations whereas 42.9% reacted to online advertisements.

Online shopping behaviour of women in the US
Ekaterina Walter of The Next Web pulled together certain statistics of women that marketers need to know to better engage, or advertise, to them. 78% of women in the US use the Internet to seek product information before making a purchase, 33% research products and services on-line before buying offline, and 92% pass along information about deals or finds to others. These statistics illustrate the need for brands to capitalise on consumers’ willingness to share information through social media by improving social sharing functionalities of their branded online platforms.

Importance of online advertising in Asia
Online advertising is very relevant in Southeast Asia, where over 70% of its Internet users actually claim to be very influenced by website advertisements on social media. 7 out of 10 Southeast Asian consumers have “liked” or followed a brand on a social media platform, which is markedly more than the global average of 52%.

YouTube numbers
Online video consumption just keeps on growing. YouTube now serves more than 4 billion daily video impressions, with almost 60 hours of fresh content uploaded every single minute, which is a 25% increase from the 48 hours of new content users were uploading onto the site back in May 2011. More juicy numbers at its onehourpersecond website.



World map of social networks
With more than 800 million users, out of which 202 million are from Asia alone, Facebook is slowly but surely taking over the position of top social network in various countries from many local social networks. In a list compiled by Italian digital strategist Vincenzo Cosenza, Facebook has secured the number 1 spot in a total of 127 countries out of 136 countries listed. However, there are still several dominant local social networks in Asia, namely China, where Facebook is banned, South Korea, and Vietnam. The map excludes Japanese social network Mixi, which was still more popular than Facebook in June 2011. According to our SDMA Japan report published last December, Mixi triumphs over Facebook in terms of number of registered users, with 24.7 million compared to Facebook’s 5.2 million, although the number of active users is uncertain.

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We Are Social Asia Tuesday TuneUp #9

by Cai Yu Lam in News on 3 January 2012 at 09:30

Happy 2012 everyone! After the merry feasting over Christmas and smashing (in more ways than one) New Year’s Eve countdown, it’s back to work in making this new year even bigger and better than before. 2011 has been quite the whirlwind year in social, digital and mobile, so let’s take a look at the big stories that concluded the year with a bang, and those that are paving the way ahead.

All restaurants in Malaysia’s capital to provide free Wi-Fi, by law
Come April 2012, all restaurants in Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur will be required to provide free Wi-Fi. This new law will also apply to cafes, pubs, bars and club lounges, as long as they occupy 120 square metres or more. Even though patrons of these establishments will likely welcome the free Wi-Fi, it seems slightly extreme for this provision to be made mandatory by the law.

Free public Wi-Fi introduced in Bangkok
In another part of South East Asia, free public Wi-Fi will be made available to users in Thailand’s capital city Bangkok. 40,000 hotspots will be installed by the end of 2012, with estimated web access speeds of 2Mbps. Besides these wireless networks, the government aims to boost high-speed broadband access across Thailand such that 80% of the country will be able to connect to a faster web.

This is a great initiative to improve Thailand’s Internet penetration, which currently stands at 27%, but locals seem to remain sceptical of this free service given Thailand’s slow adoption of 3G mobile technology, and slow Internet speeds of current hotspots in Bangkok. Given that mobile penetration exceeds 100%, the majority of users accessing the free public Wi-Fi through their mobile devices will still benefit greatly, regardless of fast or slow web access speeds.

Find out what’s trending on Sina Weibo, even if you can’t read Mandarin
In order to provide a glimpse of the hot topics on popular Chinese microblog Sina Weibo to those unversed in Mandarin, University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC) created WeiboScope, a website that allows users to perform a visual search for trending issues on Sina Weibo. Users can either search through a gallery of ‘retweets’ that contain images within the last 24 hours, or perform a direct keyword search through Google Translate. After all, photos transcend words, and can be universally interpreted.

What happens every 60 seconds on the Internet
These are just some of the incredible things that occur every single minute on the web. In 60 seconds, there are more than 20,000 new posts on Tumblr, about 13,000 iPhone applications downloaded, 600 odd new videos uploaded on YouTube, 6,600 new pictures uploaded on Flickr, 98,000 tweets or so, 695,000 Facebook status updates and 510,040 comments, and even more mind-blowing events. We sure are living our lives in the fast lane, online.

What happens every 60 seconds on the Chinese Internet
Similarly, the Internet activities occurring in China every minute are astounding as well. In 60 seconds, 227,000 ‘tweets’ are posted on Sina Weibo, 30,000 virtual ‘Q coins’ are spent on Tencent social games, Taobao achieves 3 million RMB in sales volume, and 5.55 million online ads are viewed.

Online shopping in China in 2011
2011 was a big year for China in terms of online shopping and e-commerce. 200 million Chinese were expected to have shopped online, spurring an estimated 7 trillion RMB in online shopping transactions. Taobao Mall was the market leader in B2C e-commerce with 51% market share, followed by 360Buy with 19%.

2011 Mobile Year in Review
2011 was the year of mobile, and this phenomenon will well continue into 2012. In all, 8 trillion text messages were sent, Facebook saw 350 million mobile users, 103 million wireless tweets were sent per day, 1 billion check-ins on Foursquare, and 1 billion mobile apps downloaded worldwide each month. All in a year’s work.



Top tech trends of 2011
This infographic by G+ sums up the top tech trends of 2011. In particular, we see group-buying take-off in the form of Groupon, which expanded its international reach even as its Chinese site Gaopeng suffered. Geolocation apps also increased in popularity, with Foursquare claiming 15 million users while Gowalla was acquired by Facebook. Crowdsourcing through the likes of Quora and crowdfunding initiatives such as Kickstarter also took root.

 

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Five Friday Facts #8

by Cai Yu Lam in News on 23 December 2011 at 15:25

It’s just two days more before Christmas, and we are wrapping up (pun intended) with our last 5 Friday Facts post of 2011. Enjoy the long Christmas and Boxing Day weekend everyone!

Massive growth of e-commerce on Livejournal Singapore
In Singapore, Livejournal is not used just for blogging, but as a platform for online retailers as well. In particular, e-commerce in Singapore is booming on Livejournal, with 1.2 million Singaporean users and over 50,000 ‘blogshops’ that generated more than US$72 million worth of transactions in Singapore in 2011 alone. Altogether, Livejournal blogshop transactions represented around 6% of Singapore’s forecasted e-commerce volume of US$1.2 billion in 2011.

Online shopping increases by 18% in India
Almost 60% of Indians with Internet access from home or work visited an online store last month, an increase of 18% in unique visitors from the previous year. Deals and coupon sites have contributed to this increase in online shopping, with 16% having visited a coupon site. Traffic on coupon sites increased by a massive 629% from the previous year. comScore estimates suggests that all of India’s coupon sites attracted 7.6 million visitors in total in the month of November.

Increased use of smartphones for capturing images
Photo-sharing mobile applications such as Instagram, which saw its user base increase from 1 million to over 15 million users in 2011 alone, have gained immense popularity and contributed to the shift from traditional cameras to smartphones in capturing images. A study by NPD Group found that smartphones took 27% of photos in 2011, an increase of 10% from the previous year. Conversely, traditional cameras took 44%, down from 52%.

Myspace will exit Japan
Myspace plans to exit from Japan from February 1 next year, although its service will continue to be available for those that use it there. It recorded just 1.09 million users as of August 2011, compared to Facebook’s 6 million odd Japanese users, or Mixi’s 25 million registered users.

Increased use of social media by B2B marketers
B2B companies are increasingly using social media as part of their marketing mix. According to web survey company iTracks, 89% of US B2B companies were using social media marketing as of May 2011. Sagefrog Marketing Group reports that LinkedIn is the top social media platform of choice, with 58% of US B2B marketers who used social media utilising LinkedIn, compared to 50% for Facebook and 43% for Twitter.

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Five Friday Facts #7

by Cai Yu Lam in News on 16 December 2011 at 15:30

Here are Five Friday Facts to round-off this week in social media news in Asia and across the world. Have a merry weekend everyone, it’s the last weekend to shop for Christmas gifts!

Record for most tweets per second broken
The TV screening of highly popular Japanese anime Castle in the Sky set a new record for most tweets per second with 25,088 tweets per second earlier this month. It surpassed the previous record of nearly 9,000 tweets per second following the announcement of Beyonce’s pregnancy. This is testament to Twitter’s popularity in Japan, which has an estimated 10,000 million Japanese users.

Fashion-focused social network
Singapore-based Clozette, a fashion-focused social network, is partnering with Glam Media Japan to launch a Japanese version of its site. Clozette is now seeing around 85,000 monthly unique visitors and 750,000 page views, up from 80,000 monthly unique visitors and 500,000 page views back in September. It’s great to see a niche social network from Singapore grow and expand into the region.

How new ‘e-tailers’ are discovered in China
How does social come into play with e-commerce? 42.71% of Chinese consumers discover new online retailers, or ‘e-tailers’, via Taobao, 27.51% through online advertising and 18.22% through friends. Apparently, search and word-of-mouth (not necessarily online) are still important factors. Surprisingly, 11.18% of Chinese consumers discover new e-tailers through Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) as compared to only 3.14% via social networking. Perhaps we will see a change in these figures as social commerce takes off.

Consumers not turning to social media for local business information
In America, the Internet is the number one source people turn to for information on local restaurants and businesses, followed by newspapers and word-of-mouth. 51% of American adults use the Internet to look for news and information about local restaurants, bars and clubs. Surprisingly, only 3% turn to social networking sites, as compared to the 38% who perform search engine queries.

Marketers stumped by measurement challenges
A survey conducted by voice-based marketing automation platform Ifbyphone found that 82% of marketing executives surveyed expect every campaign to be measured. Yet, only 26% think they can effectively measure Return on Investment (ROI) for social media marketing. Of the various tools used to measure marketing campaigns, only 30% of respondents used social media monitoring tools. These challenges with data analytics and tools similarly resound in our post on how marketers are still struggling with social.

 

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