It’s our last Tuesday TuneUp for the year, and we hope that everyone will have a marvellous Christmas, even amidst faulty public transportation and dreary weather. 

Heineken launch social Christmas tree, a Christmas memory game – and hire We Are Social
Heineken have launched a Facebook campaign where fans can send a Merry Christmas message to 16 friends in a sendable graphic. These messages will then come alive on a real tree in Singapore.

In China, Heineken is challenging beer lovers with a Christmas memory game based off their global TV spot ‘The Entrance’. ‘Discover the Entrance’ is an interactive campaign on China’s second-biggest video website Tudou, where participants will be challenged to remember the characters from the TV commercial, and stand to win a one-night stay in a five-star hotel.

In even more exciting news, Heineken have hired We Are Social to work on Bulmers and Jacques, two of their cider brands.

Most engaging brands on social media in China
According to R3’s on-going En-spire study, Taobao is the most engaging digital brand in China, with more than 70% of respondents voting it as their favourite shopping portal. For other brands, sports giant Nike leads in terms of engagement at 13.2%, followed by Lenovo with 10.8% and Coca-Cola at 8.7%. The En-spire study noted that Lenovo in particular has been enhancing its Weibo presence and impact. It currently has 179,904 followers on its Sina Weibo account.

In terms of recall of advertising messages online, Coca-Cola has greatest advertising recall.

Malaysian Government uses Internet TV to communicate with public
The Malaysian government has introduced a new Internet video service which will help it to communicate information, news and other updates to Malaysians, both within the country and abroad. The government sees the importance of an avenue where they can provide reliable and up-to-date information, given the socialisation of news in which breaking updates are disseminated through social media and other Internet channels. This IPTV Internet channel 1MalaysiaIPTV can be viewed online from a mobile device, or through dedicated applications for BlackBerry, Android and Apple devices. Content will be purely in Bahasa Malaysian.

Chinese microbloggers must now verify their identity
It will soon be mandatory for Chinese microbloggers to adhere to the real-name policy, one of 16 new regulations for microblogs set by the Beijing municipal government. Users are now required to register their microblog accounts under their real name by providing their official state ID number. The severe implication for users will be the accountability they now hold towards anything they ‘tweet’ on Weibo, as opposed to using nicknames previously through which their real identity could not be traced.

Most overused buzzwords on LinkedIn profiles
LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals, has identified the most overused buzzwords on the profiles of its 135 million users worldwide. Singaporeans like the term ‘track record’, Indians are ‘effective’, Australians think themselves ‘creative’, French are apparently ‘dynamic’, and Brazilians are ‘multinational’. It’s time to update your LinkedIn profiles.

Social networks used by over three quarters of consumers
A new study from Ofcom produced some interesting findings about the state of social:

Social networking is a global phenomenon, with over three quarters of consumers in the markets we surveyed saying that they have visited a social networking site, with the majority saying they visit them on a daily basis. This is much higher among 18-24 year olds, with eight in ten (83 per cent) visiting on a daily basis.

Social networking sites are most popular in Italy, with 91 per cent ever having visited and a quarter visiting over five times a day (24 per cent), while in the UK eight out of ten (79 per cent) have ever visited with one in five visiting over five times a day.

UK consumers are more likely to access social networking sites on a mobile phone than other countries, with 43 per cent of those with social networking site profiles saying they do so compared to just 30 per cent in the US.

More widely, the UK is Europe’s most digitally aware nation (second only to America) and this is underlined by Britons spending more time online, owning more smartphones and even watching more TV online.

Nonetheless, perhaps the most interesting graph in the whole report is how different age groups use social media to share news. The graph underscores how young people are ‘always active’:

Companies look to expand social media spend in 2012
An interesting bit of research from Grant Thornton highlights how although just 43% of companies worldwide currently use social media, 61% plan to increase their usage, with it breaking down by country as follows:

Notably, 75% of companies from ASEAN and 56% from APAC are planning to increase use of social media. The quicker growth amongst BRIC countries is also backed up by the latest research from KPMG, which suggests that brands are keen to use social media in those markets as a cheap and effective way to boost brand awareness.

Judging by another survey, it seems the increased spend will go – unsurprisingly – mainly to Facebook and Twitter campaigns:

Facebook profits hit 1 billion – and flotation nears
According to Gawker, Facebook will make one billion Dollars in profit in the calendar year 2011 – double its profits from the previous year. More to the point, its limited outgoings means Facebook is swimming in cash.

These extraordinary profit figures mean that if and when a Facebook flotation does occur, the social network will be valued at at least 100 billion dollars. And that’s a lot of money.

Facebook Timeline now available worldwide and on mobile…
A long time after it was announced, Facebook Timeline is finally available worldwide. Once users activate Timeline, they get a seven-day review period to check what goes on the Timeline before it goes public. Timeline is also now available on iPhone, Android and Mobile Web.

Brands try to make the most of Timeline
Although Brand Pages don’t yet have Timelines, a couple of brands are already getting involved: both Mountain Dew and Volkswagen have added a tab to their Pages where users can download images and use them as cover images for their Timeline. Nifty.

Facebook considering new ad formats
AdAge reports that at the end of March, Facebook is planning its first push into mobile advertising – by putting Sponsored Stories into the mobile News Feed. It’s an interesting development as Facebook believes its user base will be growing on mobile, meaning that this is almost certainly the first of several steps.

Judging by a post on Inside Facebook, the social network has also launched a new premium ad unit, allowing brands to post Coupons on their Pages and then push these through traditional Facebook social ads. This could be great for establishments like restaurants and bars.

Buy concert tickets without leaving Facebook
With Ticketfly, the entire ticket-buying experience now takes place right on a Facebook Page. Ticketfly was one of the Open Graph launch partners announced at Facebook’s f8 conference, and music venues in Oakland, San Francisco, and New York have been beta testing the service and seen advanced sales on tickets increase by almost 25% for various artists. Buying concert tickets has never been easier.

LinkedIn launches Polls in Groups
LinkedIn last week launched Polls within their private Groups – a development they dub as ‘the easiest way to join the professional conversation’. They’ve clearly never spoken to anyone in real life.

New Google+ updates and changes to Hangouts
With the end of the year just a few days away, Google have decided to launch some new updates to Google+. First up, they’ve added the option to ‘change the volume’ of Circles, so that the overall stream can be better weighted to your interests:

They’ve also updated Brand Pages in a really positive way: they can now have multiple admins with a notification flow to enhance Page management, and they also have launched an aggregated count of all users who have engaged with a Page:

Besides that, they’ve launched a whole range of updates for Hangouts including video Hangouts on mobile which are designed to make them more accessible.

But how effective this all is, is rather questionable: for all Britney Spears now has a million followers, it’s hard to escape the truth: nobody cares. After Google Wave and Google Buzz, it’s like oops I did it again.

Miso launches a superb update
Social TV startup Miso has launched a nice update called Sideshows:

Basically, it’s a slideshow of additional content that can be synchronized to run alongside a TV show. In one example, Smillie showed a fan-created, fashion-focused SideShow for Gossip Girl. When a notable outfit appeared on screen, the SideShow would bring up a card with more information about the clothes, as well as an image and an online shopping link. Another example was a demo that SideShow created for MTV’s high school comedy Awkward. As a song played during the show, Miso brought up a card with the title, artist, and a link to the song on Spotify.

In some ways, this may seem like an update to the on-screen captions and annotations that TV shows and DVDs have experimented with in the past. But the SideShows are more interactive, since they’re connected to the Web. And because they’re on your phone (it’s only available on the iPhone initially), they don’t interfere with the TV image itself.

It’s a tremendous update because it means that brands can socialise product placement in TV programmes, and really link their marketing strategy together.

Banks begin to use social data to decide credit ratings
An interesting – if somewhat scary – report from Betabeat show how banks might try to tap into customers’ social data in the future. Privacy is important to most social media users, and these development are somewhat worrying – essentially, your credit rating could depend as much on your friends as what you yourself do.

KLM to introduce in-flight matchmaker zone
KLM’s latest social campaign is one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve heard all year: customers will be allowed to see fellow passengers’ social media profiles, and based on their interests can choose to sit together.

This could go well, or really, really badly. And that’s what makes it so brilliant.

BrandAlley predicts 5% of sales in 2012 will come through F-Commerce
The success of sales directly through their Facebook Pages has led BrandAlley to predict that 5% of revenue next year will come directly from F-Commerce. Impressive.

Capital One offer bonus rewards based on Klout score
Capital One have launched a Christmas promotion with Klout to reward cardholders, offering bonus rewards based on individual Klout scores. This means that everyone who participates – with a Klout score of 10 to a Klout score of 100 – gets some form of bonus rewards based on their influence.

Sherlock Holmes film utilises Stephen Fry’s Twitter following
It’s not original using celebrities for endorsements, even in social, but this one caught our eye for its inventiveness: Stephen Fry has been posting Holmes-esque cryptic clues on his Twitter channel to promote the new Sherlock Holmes film, and the first person to crack them each day wins a prize. A good campaign, well executed, without any elementary mistakes.

All Saints reaches out to fashion bloggers
All Saints is to expand the number of UK bloggers it works with in a bid to drive greater advocacy. They will focus on nurturing partnerships with fashion fanatics.

Dunkin’ Donuts new Foursquare campaign
Dunkin’ Donuts are offering quite a cool Foursquare sweepstake in the New York area. If users connect their Foursquare account on the DD Facebook Page, they become eligible to win a whole host of prizes in-store. Nice.

Sweden lets citizens take over its Twitter account
In a bold move, Sweden is letting ordinary citizens take over its Twitter account and curate it for a week at a time. While this will obviously drive PR value, it could also go disastrously wrong. That’s the beauty of it.

Republicans compete to spend more on Twitter
Republican Presidential rivals Rick Perry and Mitt Romney seem to be competing as to who can spend more on Promoted Tweets. The real-time opportunities of Promoted Tweets is what seems to appeal to the different candidates.

The We Are Social team in London shared a fantastic update yesterday on the redesign of Twitter and its new functionality.

Following a closer look, though, and fuelled by this great post on Penn Olson, we came to the conclusion that many of Twitter’s ‘new’ features look quite familiar.

However, as Steven says in his Penn Olson report, we’re not trying to “call copycat” here; rather, we believe that exploring these similarities helps to illustrate how global social networking is fuelling some great innovations in the way we share things, and may point to other, future developments we might expect over the coming months.

Homepage
In Twitter’s new re-design,

“Tweets can now expand to show more information such as replies, retweets and embedded photos and videos.”

These various capabilities are also present in Sina Weibo, but the major difference lies in visibility. The number of ‘retweets’ and comments are shown on every weibo on the user’s homepage, whereas Twitter users will have to click on specific tweets to see this information. As for photos, instead of having to click on ‘view photo’ before the embedded photo is revealed within a tweet, a thumbnail photo that can be expanded is embedded within a weibo itself.

Connect
You can now ‘see who follows you, retweets or favorites one of your Tweets, or adds you to a list’ in a single stream. More comprehensively, Sina Weibo features a comments thread that allows users to view all comments and ‘retweets’ of an original ‘tweet’, with the added functionality of either replying everyone on the thread, or replying comments individually.

What this allows is a conversation between seemingly un-connected individuals, and resembles a comments thread similar to Facebook, which does not seem to be present on Twitter even in its re-design. So instead of tracking your impact on Twitter across various @ replies, retweets and favourites, you can monitor these activities within each individual weibo with Sina Weibo.

Discover
On Twitter, you can now discover stories, activities, who to follow, find your friends and browse categories through the new ‘Discover’ function. Users might embrace ‘Discover Stories’ if they wish to discover news or information that they wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to via their followers. In a way, it’s like StumbleUpon for tweets, instead of websites.

Twitter’s ‘Browse Categories’ function under the ‘Discover’ tab allows users to browse for topic-specific information. Sina Weibo appears a little more sophisticated, as a weibo user can browse for topics of interest through his personal word cloud, which displays topics that the user himself has indicated before, or is aggregated through his weibo hashtags. The search function on Sina Weibo is also quite advanced in terms of scoping hashtag mentions from tweets, user profiles, Sina Weibo Groups, and in photos.

Brand pages
Brands who use Twitter as an important social media tool for engaging audiences would be impacted greatly by the new Brand Pages. There are customisable elements that would really differentiate between brand pages, one of which is the main overhead banner. Brands can use that to headline messages, taglines or welcome a visitor, much like a customisable Facebook welcome tab. Another addition would be ‘pinned tweets’, where brands can ‘pin’ a particular tweet that will appear at the top of their activity stream, This will be particularly apparent in tweets with embedded images or video, which can be set to remain open, and will definitely aid in engaging audiences visually.

Similarly for Sina Weibo, its brand page allows brands to host a video on its homepage, which is separated from the rest of its weibo activity.

[Image of JetBlue's Twitter page taken from this Techcrunch article]

Try it for yourself
Regardless of these similarities, we think the new Twitter features look like they’ll make a great addition to a service we already love, so we’re looking forward to seeing how they influence people’s adoption and usage behaviour around the world.

Oh, and if you’d like to find out for yourself how these updates change the Twitter experience, you can download the latest versions of Twitter for iPhone or Android mobile devices:

iPhone: click here
Android: click here

Continuing our series of reports into the social, digital and mobile landscape across Asia, today we’re delighted to share our country report on China.

Unsurprisingly, this is one of the bigger reports in the series, with some spectacular numbers – some highlights include:

• The number of internet users in China is greater than the total population of the European Union;
• Netizens in China aged 18-27 use the internet for an average of 5 hours per day;
• China’s web users conduct 10,000 searches every second.

More than all these facts, however, it’s the speed of growth in China’s social and digital use that is so exciting. Adoption of Weibo microblogging services has exploded in 2011, while location-based services like Jiepang are taking off in a very big way. And if this year is anything to go by, the rate of change will only continue to accelerate in 2012.

However, the accuracy of statistics in China remains an issue. We see numerous reports on the social and digital scene in China each week, and each one tells a slightly different story.

There is also a lot of misinformation about the social and digital scene in China, with political agendas often getting in the way of objective reporting. These range from sensationalist stories on censorship, to reliance on old data that no longer represents the actual interests, preferences, or behaviour of Chinese netizens.

An interesting example of this misinformation came in the form of this infographic from G+ (not the Google network) that Mashable shared last week:

There is clearly plenty of juicy info in there, but there’s a distinct Western bias in the reporting. It’s vital to understand that, while there are many parallels between platforms around the world, Chinese (and other local Asian) platforms are not automatically ‘knock-offs’ of Western equivalents.

Indeed, some of the Western services outlined in the infographic above launched after their Chinese equivalents – a fact discussed at length in this article on the Asian tech blog, Penn Olson. As the author, C. Custer, points out:

“…if you’re going to talk about copycats, please spend some time using these services first. Calling Sina Weibo a “copycat platform” is just dumb. Calling Youku a copycat platform might have made sense once, but it doesn’t anymore. Calling Happy Farm a copy of Farmville is straight-up ignorant, lazy, and wrong. And being lazy when writing about Chinese censorship does readers a disservice if you want them to actually understand the market.”

It’s the last sentence that rings truest for us – in order for brands around the world to be able to develop an effective, strategic approach to global social media, they need accurate and balanced data that allow them to examine platforms and behaviours beyond what they already know and are comfortable with.

What’s more, this is only going to get more important as brands’ audiences become ever more global.

It’s clear that the US and Europe continue to be highly socially active online, but as our report above shows, the ‘population’ of QQ alone is almost as big as the population of these two regions combined.

We all know that China is big. It’s the fact it’s still getting bigger – to the tune of 10 million new internet users every month – that matters. That’s huge.

To put that number in perspective: in the time it’s taken you to read this post, more than 1,000 Chinese people will have used the internet for the first time. Given that the average web user in China spends 2½ hours on the net every day, those people are only going to add even more weight to China’s online momentum.

It’s time to get to know China in much more accurate detail.

Hooray for Friday! We’re into the final 10% of the week here in Singapore, which means it’s time for another edition of our #5FF. First and foremost, though, for anyone reading this in the early morning in the Western hemisphere, don’t forget to look out for 11:11:11, 11/11/11 today!

Effect of social media campaigns
According to TNS Digital Life, 50% of all social media campaigns go unnoticed. Consumers in the US and the UK are the most cynical, compared to 59% of those in developing markets who view social networks as an excellent source of information about brands and products.

Sharing music on Facebook
Since music apps started appearing in Facebook’s ticker just a few weeks back, the network’s users have shared their listening activity more than 1.5 billion times. The biggest winner appears to be Spotify, who have added more than 4 million new users since f8.

Facebook’s largest market
India is set to become Facebook’s largest market. Currently third in the world in terms of Facebook usage with 34 million users, India is expected to leapfrog Indonesia’s 45 million users to second place soon.

China’s microblogs
Sina Weibo revealed that it has more than 250 million registered users and 25 million daily active users, but only 300,000 of these are verified users. Not to be overshadowed, Tencent Weibo claims to have over 300 million registered users.

Photo-sharing on Twitter
After finally launching its photo-sharing service in June 2011, Twitter has now seized first place from the third-party apps that used to dominate its social network, gaining a 36.1% market share.