Alibaba invests $294M in China’s top online mapping company AutoNavi
Two weeks after taking an 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo, China’s biggest e-commerce company has announced another investment of $294 million in AutoNavi. This investment will take up 28 percent shares of the company. AutoNavi is China’s top online mapping company, beating search giant Baidu and even Google Maps in terms of mobile maps market share in China. As an industry leader, AutoNavi seems to be a perfect partner for Alibaba in seeking opportunities to explore and develop new location-based e-commerce services. It is also clear that this deal will give Alibaba access to a huge pool of consumer behavior data based on location. With Alibaba’s acquisition of the social music service Xiami last year and their more recent stake in Sina Weibo and AutoNavi, Alibaba has quickly become equipped with big social data and strategic alliances to explore a new kind of e-commerce service—one that will integrate three big things: social, mobile and location. It will be interesting to see what kind of revolutionized services Alibaba will bring out to the market in the future.

In Japan, politicians leverage Line to deepen ties with supporters
The importance of mobile messaging apps is growing. Many brands already know it and try to leverage the increasing impact of mobile messaging app to engage with their consumers. Politicians in Japan are no exception to this recent trend. According to Japan-based mobile messaging app Line, ten political parties in Japan have opened official accounts on the app. This was after the ban on the use of internet-based mediums for election campaigns (including social networks and blogs) was lifted. Line provides politicians an opportunity to engage with their supporters more directly and actively, by allowing users to opt-in to receive message from political parties, as well as leave feedback and comments on their accounts. Will this impact on the way politicians in Japan communicate with public?

IGAWorks joins KakaoTalk to increase game releases and app traffic
Korea-based mobile messaging app Kakaotalk has announced a partnership with IGAWorks, the local in-Game advertisement provider. The partnership will involve integrating IGAWorks’ adPOPcorn into Kakaotalk that will provide “in-game and in-app incentivized offers, as well as pop-up adverts that link through to social and mobile media channels.” This collaboration is intended to strengthen Kakaotalk’s video game offerings—features that have contributed to distinguishing Kakaotalk from other mobile chat apps. By allowing all game developers on Kakaotalk to access adPOPcorn, Kakaotalk is looking to create a new channel of income for video game developers and publishers. The goal is to encourage more game releases which will drive more user traffic to the app. This also reflects KakaoTalk’s desire to attract more brands as well, to tap into Kakaotalk as a mobile advertising platform.

Japan’s Quan-inc partner with AIS to roll out sticker maker app “AIS myStickerShop”
Japan based mobile application maker Quan-inc has partnered with AIS, Thailand’s top mobile network operator. Quan-inc is well known for developing Lounge - a mobile messaging app with unique features of collaborative drawing and message decoration. The partnership is intended to release an app called “AIS myStickerShop”. The app allows users to create their own stickers for their mobile messaging apps. Currently, only Android users can enjoy the service. iOS users will have to wait a while for an iOS version to come out later this month. Quan Inc’s partnership with AIS could be indicative of a desire to expand their presence in Southeast Asia, as the deal with AIS may open up an opportunity to launch future apps for Singtel, Singapore’s top mobile network operator and a stakeholder in AIS.

We recently spotted this great video over at Vietnamnay‘s YouTube Channel.

They’ve remixed much of the info we shared in our recent report on Vietnam’s online ecosystem, but they’ve translated it all into Vietnamese, and they’ve added some great new stats and insights into the mix too:

We’re big fans of remixed content, so let us know if you’ve made one too, or if you spot any others you think we should feature.

WeChat now has 190M monthly active users
WeChat is a giant amongst chat apps. It has a user base of over 300 million users with projections that it will surpass 400 million in a few weeks. So it comes as no surprise that WeChat has reached 190 million monthly active users. As noted by TechInAsia, this number suggests that WeChat is closing in on Whatsapp territory, which has 200 million monthly active users according to the most recent data. On the other hand, an overwhelming majority of WeChat users are based in China, whereas Whatsapp–and even other Asian chat apps like Line–enjoy greater success on an international level. Nonetheless, WeChat has experienced growth at breakneck speeds in the last two years, an incredible accomplishment as illustrated in the graph below.

70% of brand engagement on Pinterest is user-generated
Mashable cited a recent study by Digitas and Curalate and found that 70% of brand engagement on Pinterest is generated by users as opposed to brands. The disparity between brand- and user-generated content is much larger for some industry categories. With brands in the fashion industry, for example, only 18% of content engagement comes from the brands, while 82% comes from the community. Similarly, 75% of content engagement for the automotive industry came directly from the users. By contrast, the study found that brands in the electronics industry were split more evenly, between user-driven and brand-driven engagement; while 47% of content engagement came from brands, 53% came from the community. Ultimately, these findings indicate that there is massive potential for brands to join the conversations and direct engagement on the platform.

In India, PC users watch 3.7 billion online videos per month
According to TheNextWeb, 54 million PC-based internet users in India watched videos online in March 2013. This number has increased from 32 million in March 2011, indicating a rise of 69% over the last two years. Equally significant is the growth in the total number of videos watched each month; the figures have risen from 1.8 billion in 2011 to 3.7 billion last month. It is interesting to note that the top two platforms for video consumption are social to some degree; Youtube and Google sites ranked first with 31.5 million video viewers, while Facebook came in second with 18.6 million. When it comes to the average time spent on video consumption, DailyMotion outranks Facebook’s 21.9 minutes by a significant margin, with 59.6 minutes spent on average.

Google+ has 359M users, ousts Twitter as second largest social network
A recent report by Business Insider details the recent growth of Google+. Citing new data released by GlobalWebIndex, the findings suggest that Google+ is growing at a rate that may ultimately oust Twitter as the runner-up for largest social network (with Facebook and its 1.1 billion users remaining at the helm). Google+ currently has a staggering 359 million active users. This is up by 33 percent from June 2012, when they had 269 million active users. Twitter is growing at a faster rate, however, as it experienced a 44 percent increase during same timeframe, from 206 million users to 297 million users today.

Chat app Zalo has 2M users, plans for 5M soon
While well-known Asian chat apps like WeChat have continued to gather a massive following, this trend has also been demonstrated as strong in other Asian markets. According to TechInAsia, Vietnamese chat app has passed 2 million users, and has stated plans to reach 5 million in the near future. With 10 million smartphone users in the market, 5 million seems like a lofty goal at first glance. Vietnam is currently at the threshold of rapid mobile growth, however, and given Zalo’s recent uptake in growth, 5 million may not be such a stretch after all.

[Bonus Fact] Chat app to cash cow: Line revenue is up by 92% this year
The Japanese chat app Line has recently revealed that its first quarter revenue for 2013 was 5.82 billion yen (71.1 million SGD), The company’s revenue for the fourth quarter of 2012 stood at 3.03 billion yen (37 million SGD), indicating a staggering 92% increase on Q4 2012. The results were retrieved by TheNextWeb, as shown in the graph below:

Roughly half of these earnings come from in-app payments and social gaming features–components of the chat app that have been heavily developed in recent months. In particular, Line’s gaming feature reached the milestone of 100 million downloads earlier this year. Stickers raked in 1.7 billion yen (20.8 million SGD), or about 30% of the revenue for Q1 2013. Ultimately, these numbers suggest that there is serious potential when it comes to the monetization of chat apps.

The only constant is change, and that’s all the more evident in the social media landscape.

Only recently, all that chatter was about Pinterest and Instagram; today it’s moved on to WeChat and Vine.

But beyond these platform trends, what does the future of social media look like?

That was the topic of my presentation at The Internet Show 2013 last week, where I shared We Are Social’s ‘provocations’ on the key things that will, or should, define and shape the future of our social and digital world in the months to come.

You’ll find my full presentation in the SlideShare deck embedded above, but here’s a quick summary of what our provocations are all about:

01. Simultaneous Social Transmedia Experiences (That’s a mouthful!)
The phenomenon of ‘second screen’ and the user’s ability to multitask across devices simultaneously present an opportunity for brands to create interconnected experiences, where a brand’s story is told across various mediums. The prologue could start on television through a commercial, carry the story into a digital destination, before letting the audience take ownership and contribute to the storytelling through social networks.

02. Communities vs. Platforms
The network effect has taught us that people go where their friends are and where the action is. Case in point, MySpace. They came, they left, and they’re trickling in again. Brands should create communities around their audiences’ shared passions, not around platforms. We’ve said it before, it’s about social – people and the relationships or interactions they have with others; not necessarily about the media. For MySpace, it’s rebranded itself as a community of music lovers. Just so happens it’s a platform in itself too.

03. Mobile Life vs. Mobile Phone
The devices in our pockets and our bags, which we carry about everywhere and keep by our side at all times, are the ‘most important’ medium to us. In the 50s, it was the TV. Mobile was a big topic in 2012, and similarly, if you’re not thinking about mobile as part of your bigger communications strategy, you’re missing out on capturing your audience’s attention as they’re on the go. Beyond creating mobile-optimised platforms, it’s also about understanding your audience’s mobile habits.

04. Content Tapas
Let’s admit it, not everyone can pull off a Gangnam Style, or Grumpy Cat. Everyone wants a piece of ‘viral’ action, but epic content isn’t the only way to engage people. What brands can work towards is creating ‘content snacks’ – bite-sized, easily digestible, unknowingly addictive – and leverage the window of opportunity in the moments ‘in-between’ when people can consume these while on the go. Refer to 03.

05. Commitments, not Campaigns
Many brands still use social media to run short-term campaigns in bursts and spurts. There’s a greater opportunity in forging enduring relationships with your audience through committed, consistent interactions. Like with any relationship, it could have started off with a pick up line, and sweetened with one-off celebrations throughout the year, but there is also the everyday conversations that allow you to understand each other better.

06. Socially Interactive Customer Service
People demand for and expect customer service whenever they want it. Brands can’t expect to get away with posting “Only open 9.00am – 5.00pm” on their Facebook page or Twitter account, especially when actions are dramatically amplified on social media and there’s no opening hours for that. There’s no reason why brands can’t extend their extensive CRM system online, in real-time, to cater to online customers. Brands already doing so with dedicated customer service accounts on social include Best Buy’s TwelpForce and e-retailer ASOS.

07. Social Buying
People struggle with the plethora of brands and choices available to them, and often look to reviews and friends’ recommendations for help. Social recommendations will become the key driver of referrals that brands have to facilitate, in order to leverage word-of-mouth, and peer-to-peer recommendations.

08. Social Sharing as Currency
I personally love services like ‘Pay with a Tweet’. With services such as these and bitcoin, the power to valuate what a piece of content or item is worth lies in the consumer’s hand. By incentivising social sharing, the brand gets a social stamp of approval from the consumers, which is a more credible form of endorsement.

09. Social Inside
Rather than just being a brand that does social, be a brand that is social. There’s no better way to do so than inculcating this attitude within the organisation, and facilitate collaboration via social networking. Platforms like Yammer, Facebook Groups and LinkedIn Groups already exist. You’ll have succeeded when your employees become ambassadors of the brand on their own social networks.

10. Crisis and Opportunity Management
Events and news spread like wildfire through social media. Apart from mapping out a comprehensive social media crisis plan, brands can do more by monitoring real-time activity to react to or assert their stand on certain current events or news. This could help reinforce the brand’s mission or association. Brands like Oreo during the Superbowl blackout, or Google setting its Person Finder page during the recent Boston Marathon incident, are examples to draw from.

Which ones do you think will be the biggest priorities? Did we miss any? We’d love to hear your thoughts – let us know in the comments.

Indonesian airlines’ presence on social media
Brand24.co.id, a social media monitoring company in Indonesia, has released an infographic as reported by TechinAsia, depicting the country’s airlines and its presence on social media. AirAsia Indonesia leads the follower count on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Local airlines’ social media presence on the other hand are not as strong, especially for LinkedIn. Garuda Airline, Indonesia’s flagship carrier, has less than half of Air Asia’s number of Facebook fans and about one-eighth of Air Asia’s total Linkedin fans. Despite the differences in follower count, online conversations and social sentiment are still far greater for the local airlines Garuda Airline and Lion Air, as compared to AirAsia Indonesia.

Sina Weibo introduces a Snapchat-inspired tool called SnapWeibo
Similar to the popular mobile app Snapchat, Sina Weibo has recently introduced SnapWeibo where users can use hashtags to make their posts vanish within a certain time period. The procedure is as simple as signing into SnapWeibo using one’s existing Weibo account details and including time-related hashtags in either English or Chinese. The hashtags can be set to minutes, hours or days such as #2m# or #5h# or #1d#. Even if the tweet gets retweeted before it’s due to disappear, the missive will later appear to be blank.

Baidu overtakes Youku-Tudou as the biggest video platform
As reported by TechinAsia, Baidu is set to be China’s biggest video platform with its acquisition of PPS.tv. The acquisition bolsters Baidu’s existing video offerings, with PPS.tv becoming a sub-brand of iQiyi. This purchase puts them in a good position to compete with market leader Youku-Tudou for a bigger slice of China’s web video marketplace, which Baidu has already overthrown them in as the largest video platform in terms of user counts. Moreover, the shift to mobile gives Baidu an edge over Youku-Tudou, with their mobile user base being much larger at 200 million mobile users compared to Youku-Tudou’s 150 million. Despite their dominance being challenged, Youku-Tudou welcomes the competition and expects the acquisition to help further streamline the industry and reduce the issue of piracy.

Kakao Talk updates its Plus Friend platform to Plus Friend Home
Korean chat app, Kakao Talk is rolling out a new feature update to its existing Plus Friend feature. The initial feature was launched in October 2011 for the purpose of allowing users to interact with their favourite brands and celebrities, and currently has over 400 partners availing the feature and more than 26 million active users following 100 million Plus Friend accounts. The upgraded version, Plus Friend Home, allows brands and celebrities to have dedicated homepages and custom design tools but is currently only available in Korea. As reported by TheNextWeb, the feature upgrades will allow brands to have their mobile homepage accessible within the chat room itself, and divided into three sections – ‘mini profile’, ‘chatting room’ and ‘brand home’ – as well as the ability to add links from websites and blogs to enable free interaction within and outside the page.

Facebook report Q1 earnings & increase in monthly
Facebook has reported its earnings for Q1 2013, announcing revenue of $1.45bn, up 38% from Q1 2012. 85% of total revenue came from advertising, amounting to $1.25bn, up 43% from Q1 2012.

LinkedIn passes 1 million users in Singapore
According to a recent report by TheNextWeb, LinkedIn has officially hit the seven-digit mark in Singapore. The professional networking platform announced that this makes Singapore the fourth country in Southeast Asia to reach the 1 million user milestone. They also revealed that Singapore’s user base has doubled since 2011, to reach a staggering 70 percent of professionals and students in the market. Although LinkedIn has over 200 million users worldwide, 1 million in Singapore is an incredibly impressive feat given the fact that it currently reaches a substantial 20% of the country’s total population of 5 million.

Path has 10M users, adds 1 million per week
The previously rocky road has finally led to smooth sailing for Path–a private social network that experienced  legal troubles and slow growth in the past–as it currently has over 10 million registered users. The number is small, relatively speaking, but also indicative of a sudden increase in the platform’s growth rate in the last few months. As TheNextWeb notes, Path only had 2 million users in February 2012. When they reached 3 million in June 2012, they were adding about 250,000 users per month. According to the founder Dave Morin, this rate has ballooned to a whopping rate of 1 million users added per week. Indeed, this recent uptake would suggest that things are finally looking up for Path–at least, they are for now. But whether or not these users will stick is another story, and one that will be interesting to witness as it unfolds in the social media landscape.

Chat app Line has reached 150M users
TechInAsia recently reported that Japanese chat app Line has reached 150 million users worldwide. This news doesn’t come as a surprise given the recent boom in chat apps across the globe. What is astonishing, though, is just how quickly they announced this milestone. When Line doubled its user base from 50 million to 100 million last year, it took over seven months. Impressive, but to put this in perspective: the next 50 million users took just over three months. The magnitude of this steep climb is illustrated further,  in the line graph the company produced to celebrate the occasion. In any case, it seems more likely that we will see the next 50 million soon–perhaps much sooner than expected as well.

Chat app KakaoTalk approaches 90M users
In more news of chat apps milestones, KakaoTalk has also seen impressive momentum in the growth of its user base. As TechInAsia reports, the Korean chat app has recently closed in on the 90 million user mark. As indicated in the graph produced by TechInAsia, KakaoTalk has continued to see rapid growth since early 2012, adding about 10 million new users per quarter. There is still a considerable gap to be broached between KakaoTalk’s user base and Line’s 150 million (not to mention WeChat’s 300 million). But as the 90 million milestone is approaching any day now–and 100 million can’t be far behind–KakaoTalk has surely put some pressure on its Asian chat app counterparts to try and stay ahead of the curve.

Facebook has 1.11B monthly active users, 751 million on mobile
According to a recent report by TheNextWeb, Facebook has continued to grow its user base and surpass milestones, beyond the famous ten-digit landmark it reached last year. Earlier this week, the social network announced that the user base now stood at 1.11 billion monthly active users, with 665 million of them active on a daily basis. The monthly active users are up by 26 percent year-on-year, while daily active users is also up by 23 percent for the same period. The biggest increase comes from active users on mobile: the figure stood at 751 million users at the end of March 2013, indicating a significant year-on-year increase of 54 percent. Last quarter, Facebook reported having 1.06 million active users, of which 618 million were mobile. While 60 million users were new or became active, about 133 million users were added to the number of mobile users. As noted by TheNextWeb, this figure also means that more than 67% of active Facebook users access the platform through mobile devices.

Last week’s iMedia Brand Summit in Bali was an action-packed event, with a host of presentations, panel discussions and roundtables. This post summarises my key take-outs from the second day – you can find a write-up of the opening keynote from Kellogg’s Bob Arnold in a previous post.

Integrating Online and Offline Activities

A the start of day two, I moderated a session on the challenges and opportunities associated with integrating online and offline channels, with marketers from Mondelez, Nokia and Tiger Airways sharing their experiences and questions with a number of other agency participants.

A common theme in the discussion was participants’ difficulties in tracking and measuring the conversion of digital activities in offline channels, although Alex from Nokia shared some invaluable insights into his brand’s use of mobile coupons in Indonesia to drive actual sales of their new Lumia phones.

Rudi from the Mondelez team also shared some insights into their use of attribution modeling on Oreo, explaining how they’re building systems and processes to correlate audience activity in social media with offline sales of the brand’s cookies.

Tiger Airways’s Yingchun said that her brand has also been trying to tie consumers’ online travel research to eventual offline sales in markets like Indonesia, where online purchase of air tickets is not ubiquitous. This prompted a wider discussion about the challenge for marketers in developing markets in Asia to build momentum in eCommerce, due to low levels of credit card penetration and continued low levels of trust in digital payments.

The overall consensus from the discussion group was that traditional purchase funnel models are now redundant, with ‘always on, everywhere’ devices like smartphones – which one participant called ‘new outdoor media’ – completely changing the dynamics of how people move through the cycle of awareness, interest, desire and action.

As a result, the brand marketers in the group stated that they usually don’t have enough data to to make confident, big decisions, and as a result are resorting to quite tactical activities, particularly those that use conventional approaches like coupons but translated to a digital setting.

However, they all agreed these activities  fail to take advantage of the bigger opportunities that broader integration would bring, and concluded that this was one of the areas they are most keen to explore in the coming months.

Digital Strategy in Asia

A little later in the day, the BBC’s Babita Sharma brought marketers from Nike, BMW, Philips and Kao together for an insightful panel discussion on the challenges of planning and creating content for Asia’s diverse audiences.

All participants highlighted the vital importance of cultural understanding, insight and sensitivity when trying to connect with audiences, whether that’s in Asia or anywhere else in the world. Nike’s Brooks brought this to life succinctly by sharing his brand’s experiences in the running category, highlighting some of the stark differences between the way men and women view, and take part in, running throughout the region.

The collective recommendation from the panel was for global brands to stop looking at Asia as ‘one market’, and to invest in building a much richer understanding of the region’s audiences.

BMW’s German also stressed that marketers can’t take anything for granted in Asia; we often make assumptions about audiences, but that often leads to missed connections and opportunities. To illustrate his point, he noted that the youngest average age for buyers of BMW’s top-of-the-range 7 Series in Asia are in Vietnam – a surprise given the country’s ‘developing’ status.

Kao’s Homma extended this point by stating that half of all Pampers buyers on Amazon.com are ma

.36.9w4sle – something that surprised many in the audience.

Philips’s Ashton noted that context and relevance are also vital to creating meaningful digital connections, stating that Philips have been focusing considerable attention on crowd-sourcing and CSR activities in order to build more audience-centric communications.

The concept of the ‘dynamic purchase funnel’ came up during this panel too, with e-commerce being one of the most important – but disruptive – changes to the current ecosystem. The panel agreed that there’s still a long way to go before Asia’s markets become fully ‘e-sales enabled’, but all said that they were very excited about the opportunities digital transactions would bring.

However, the panel all agreed that there is still a considerable ‘expertise gap’ when it comes to digital in Asia. Kao’s Homma said that, despite Japan’s image as a highly digitally-savvy nation, many of its marketers are still incredibly conservative, with the majority of Japanese brands spending just a tiny fraction of their budgets on digital media.

Even at Nike, Brooks said that the brand’s current 60% : 40% budget split between ‘traditional’ and digital channels didn’t go far enough to take advantage of the wide variety of digital opportunities at their disposal, nor did it factor the actual amount of time the brand’s audiences spend on activities across all digital media.

The collective recommendation was to look at new product launches as a golden opportunity to try new marketing approaches, and to trial new ways of harnessing digital channels. However, the secret to success is to balance real audience insights and strategy with technology, and brands need to be careful not to get distracted by ‘shiny new toys’ at the cost of adding real audience value (something we’ve talked about before on the We Are Social blog).

The consensus was that digital still needs greater support from senior management though, and the panel concluded that the greatest challenge in coming months will be to build that top-level buy-in. However, panelists conceded that brand marketers need to get much better at measuring the right things in order to make it easier for senior stakeholders to understand the tangible value that digital marketing can offer.

Nike’s Brooks wrapped the session up by encouraging all attendees to spend some time understanding attribution modelling, and challenged everyone to identify at least one way they could start using it as soon as possible.

Sponsored Sessions

The rest of the day involved specific presentations from agencies and vendors, but a few key themes recurred a number of times:

Programmatic buying was clearly the hot topic of this year’s iMedia Brand Summit, with agencies and client-side marketers alike agreeing that it offers a variety of opportunities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of digital media buys.

On a related note, many of the presenting agencies stressed the importance of, and opportunities associated with re-targeting. While privacy issues around cookies continue to muddy the waters here, it’s clear that re-targeting has the potential to dramatically improve ROI efficiency across the digital spectrum, including areas like social media and email marketing.

The importance of focusing on people rather than technology echoed in a number of presentations too – something we take every opportunity to stress here at We Are Social as well.

Lastly, here’s a great little social case shared by Phalgun Raju from InMobi:

We’ll share the final summary of day 3′s activities soon, here on the We Are Social blog.