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.

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.

For today’s SDMA report, we’re going to contrast two Southeast Asian neighbours: Thailand and Myanmar (formerly known as Burma):

Thailand

Myanmar

The populations of the two countries are still predominantly rural, but they’ve adopted the internet in very different ways.

Thailand’s youth in particular are seizing the opportunities that the internet brings them, and as with their other Southeast Asian neighbours, much of this activity flow through mobile devices. Research from Nielsen indicates that 36% of Thai internet users access the web via mobile devices, but this ratio is considerably higher amongst younger demographic groups.

This is perhaps unsurprising in light of mobile statistics; Thailand’s mobile penetration rate is in excess of 100%, but nearly three quarters of Thai mobile subscribers are under the age of 24.

Overall internet penetration sits at just 27% of the population, but data suggest that those who use the internet prefer it above all other media. For example, Thailand’s internet users spend more than 50% more time online than they do watching television.

Social networking is one of the most popular online activities, with 85% of all netizens visiting social media sites at least once per week. Watching video follows close behind, with 82% of net users streaming or downloading video content each month.

The Thais are also Southeast Asia’s biggest gamers, with 60% of internet users playing online games several times each week.

The picture in neighbouring Myanmar is remarkably different though.

The internet is highly regulated by the ruling junta, and access to many sites is either blocked or restricted.

Tellingly, Myanmar is one of only a handful of countries in the world that advertisers cannot target on Facebook. This list has become ever shorter in recent months, but Myanmar (along with North Korea) is still unavailable in the self-serve options, even though the Yemen has recently appeared as an option.

However, the internet situation inside the country isn’t quite as bleak as it might appear from the outside.

Local observers suggest that many of those who wish to access the internet often find ways to do so – mostly through the country’s large network of internet cafés.

Despite the fact that the majority of these access points are regulated by the government, many Burmese still manage to create and maintain a Facebook account, and anecdotal evidence suggests that around 80% of Myanmar’s internet users have an account on the world’s largest social network.

However, this is still only 80% of a very small base, and while accurate figures are hard to come by, even optimistic estimates suggest that penetration levels are stuck around the 1% mark.

This may be due in large part to the general lack of telecommunications infrastructure in the country, where, like mobile phones, fixed line penetration also struggles to achieve 1% penetration.

This looks set to change in 2012, however, as the country’s mobile phone infrastructure evolves.

Our opinion is that improved access to more advanced mobile devices will help accelerate internet adoption, although access will still be through basic feature phones.

Observers within the country predict similar trends, with Mizzima.com suggesting the number of internet users will triple over the next couple of years.

Whether this ‘digital revolution’ has broader implications remains to be seen, but the future certainly looks brighter for those with an appetite for the internet.

Easing you into Friday afternoon, here’s our weekly round-up of juicy social media-related trivia and statistics. Have a great weekend!

China surpasses U.S.
China has surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s largest smartphone market, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. Smartphone shipments in China reached 23.9 million units, an increase of 58% from Q2 2011, while the U.S. saw a 7% drop to 23.3 million units. Nokia leads with 28% of smartphone shipments in China last quarter, while Samsung was second with 18%.

China’s ‘Internet water army’
A research paper developed by Canada’s University of Victoria and China’s Beijing University provides insight into the behaviour of China’s ‘Internet water army’, a term for paid-to-post commenters who ‘flood’ the Internet with fake comments and reviews in China. It was discovered that paid users tend to post more new comments than reply other comments, and post more often with 50% of them posting every 2.5 minutes on average.

Social Gaming in India
MOL, Asia’s leading e-payment provider for games and social networks, claims that half of all Facebook users in India play social games, which amounts to roughly 10 million social gamers. This would indicate that India has 20 million Facebook users, although SocialBakers data shows that there are more than 38 million Facebook users in India currently. Despite the disparity in figures, this growth presents an opportunity for marketers to promote their brands through social games.

Friendster’s Revamp
Friendster, the pioneer social networking site, was re-launched as a social gaming platform back in June 2011, and has reportedly attracted more than 50,000 new users and included over 40 premium games within two months of its launch. More than 90% of new users are based in Asia, and Monthly Active Users and Daily Active Users have increased by 50%. Users can now login to Friendster using their Facebook accounts as well. Friendster has its focus set on Asia, and now operates mainly from the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore.

Thailand requests removal of ‘unlawful content’ on Facebook
The government of Thailand has requested Facebook to remove more than 10,000 Facebook pages that are deemed in breach of laws preventing the defamation of the Thai royal family. Facebook users in Thailand risk prosecution if they share, comment or even like messages that breach Thailand’s lese majeste laws.