Award For Social Media Journalism in Asia

The World Association of Newspapers has launched a set of digital media awards for Asian publishers that includes a category for Social Media. Deadline is September 30.

To enter, you must be a publisher in the Asia Pacific or Middle East. Sorry, looks like they don’t accept any independent bloggers.

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Social Media’s Silent Giants: Naspers and DST

Naspers and DST are not household names, but they have long fascinated me for their huge level of ownership and influence over Social Media globally.

If the global evolution of Social Media interests you, watch these companies. They have a track record of being smart, fast and highly intelligent investors.

Their strategy: Arbitrage Internet experience across geographies by investing in developing world markets where most Western investors are reluctant to go.

The graph to the left, from a Naspers document, outlines the company’s investment strategy matrix.

The investment world now seems to be taking more notice of the companies, with The Economist writing a short but informative piece about Naspers and DST.

Some highlights:

Naspers:
- Based in Cape Town, Naspers is nearly 100 years old and is the publisher of the Daily Sun, South Africa’s biggest newspaper.
- Using cash thrown off by print and pay TV sales – 28 billion rand ($3.6 billion) in the year to March – it has invested around the globe in Social Media and Internet.
- Naspers owns part of mail.ru, was an early investor in Tencent (now holds 35% owner).
- Naspers has the largest portfolio of internet firms in developing countries, for instance in Brazil (BuscaPé, a comparison-shopping site), India (ibibo, a social network) and at home in South Africa (24.com, a portal).

DST
- Created in 2005 when two Russian Internet investors, Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger pooled their interests in mail.ru, a Russian web portal
- Today the firm controls many of the country’s leading websites and account for more than 70% of page-views on the Russian-language internet
- Eclectic ownership which includes Goldman Sachs and Alisher Usmanov, a Russian billionaire, who holds 27%.
- The websites of Digital Sky Technologies (DST)
- DST’s prime investment territories include Russia and neighbors, with investments that include social networks such as VKontakte.ru and Nasza-Klasa.pl
- DST paid an estimated $800m for a 10 percent stake in Facebook. When Elevation Partners recently invested $120m in Facebook, that deal put the company’s value at $23 billion, implying that DST’s investment has almost trebled.
- Some analysts say that DST overpaid for Zynga, the world’s largest online-gaming service, and for Groupon, a website that aggregates buyers and gets them special deals. But DST may prove these critics wrong again.
- DST has experimented with a range of revenue models for social networks and online games, such as charging for services and selling virtual goods. In December it merged mail.ru with Astrum Online, a gaming firm—in effect forming a Russian equivalent to China’s Tencent. Free communication tools such as instant messaging are creating the audience that then pays for other services and virtual goods, according to the company.

Tencent follows suit?
China’s Social Media giant, Tencent is interlinked with both DST and Naspers. For those unfamiliar, Tencent is the Shenzhen-based company founded in 1998 that has grown revenue to $1.8 billion in 2009. Although best known for QQ, a popular instant-messaging service with 567m users, much of its profits come from online games and a virtual currency, called Q coins. Users purchase this with real money and use it to buy digital wares, such as virtual weapons to increase the powers of their avatars.
- Tencent bought 10 percent of DST in April for $300mn (Giving DST a valuation of about $3 billion)
- Tencent has an interest in the Indian arm of MIH, Naspers’s internet division.
- Tencent may be following the Naspers and DST in overseas investment, having purchased a minority stake in Vietnam’s VinaGame.

h/t to David Tiltman and Arun Sudhaman

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Technorati Tags: DST, Naspers, Tencent

In China: $184 for a Virtual Dragon

In China, if you spend US$184 on your credit card you can now get a virtual dragon. For US$147, you get a virtual horse.

In what may be the first of its kind, a social network has linked up with a bank’s loyalty program: Chinese
social network Kaixin001.com and China Merchants Bank this week announced the Kaixin Credit Card (Happy Credit Card).

For those not aware of the growth of virtual currencies in China, they have become a shadow economy important enough to attract the attention of China’s financial regulators. As I have written previously, virtual items – avatar outfits, animals, decorations etc – are a major source of revenue for social networks in China and Japan.

Instead of airmiles or points for a hotel visit, cardholders get one Kaixin credit for every RMB20 (Roughly US$2) spent on the card.  Until July 31 2011, card owners can exchange their Kaixin credits for Kaixin coins at an exchange rate of 50 Kaixin credits for eight Kaixin coins. (Eight is a lucky number in China)

Kaixin coins can be used to buy a dragon (12 coins or US$184/1250RMB spent on the credit card); a horse (8 coins or US$147/1,000 RMB spent on credit card) or hire a garden keeper in Happy Farm for a month (5 Kaixin coins per month) or a range of other small gifts that cost 2 to 3 Kaixin coins.

As part of the launch, China Merchants Bank has bombarded current cardholders with emails to encourage them to become fans of China Merchants Bank on Kaixin001.com, offering Kaixin game cards to people who register as a fan from August 17 until the end of the year.

Currently, China Merchants Bank has 397,219 fans.

h/t to Xie Qing.

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Ogilvy On: Foursquare for Business (The Slides)

Here are the slides from the latest presentation by our team at Ogilvy, presented as part of the series done with The Wall Street Journal and GoToWebinar on Social Media for Business.

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Foursquare China Clone: Jie Pang

Like many other foreign Social Media platforms, Foursquare is blocked in China. (Check out Herdict to see what is blocked.)

The result is that people visiting with a non-China phone, such as me, can easily become mayor of many locations. That said, there are locally created options for people in China who are eager to Check In.

Among the current Foursquare clones in China are: Wan Zhan, Si Wang, Zai Nar, Bedo, Jie Pang, Da Zhong Dian Ping. In addition, similar services are coming online from: China Mobile, Tencent, Sina.com, Baidu.com. Renren.com, Kaixin001.com and Kong.net

A few days ago Jie Pang sent over some slides about their service and Jeremy Webb, a colleague at Ogilvy, did an interview with Jie Pang’s founder, David Liu (All below)

h/t to Tim Ho for creating the Foursquare China badge.
(more…)

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Technorati Tags: China, Foursquare, Jeremy Webb

Asia Social Media Stats: The Video!

This video on Social Media in APAC was created for a recent internal meeting of our regional Digital Influence team. Below is a transcript of the statistics. Enjoy!

Asia is a diverse continent with different cultures, different languages, and different levels of economic development. One of the most exciting differences today, however, is the difference in digital ecosystems.

Countries with a similar level of development can have extremely different ways of approaching the Internet. In Korea, broadband connections are available virtually everywhere, while Japan’s Internet population is highly reliant on mobile.

Strong digital ecosystems are not only present in the most developed countries in Asia. In fact, Indonesia will soon overtake the United Kingdom as the second largest Facebook population in the world.

The average youth in China has more friends online than offline, while Australia has one of the highest levels of social media engagement in the world. Australians spend an average of 6 hours and 52 minutes a month on Social Media.

Most of China’s social media users are spread across three main social media Websites: Kaixin (30 million accounts), Renren (40 million accounts), and QQ (376 million accounts).

Chinese netizens use domestic social media rather than international versions like Facebook primarily due to government blockage of foreign social media, but also cultural preferences.

In Asia, Internet life is highly mobile:

· Vietnam had an 846 percent growth of mobile Internet users in 2009.
· In Japan, 84.3 percent of the population goes on the Internet with a mobile phone.
· In Taiwan, 73.3 percent of mobile Internet users have 3G.
· The population of smartphone owners in Hong Kong is 48.6 percent.

Asia’s social media sites also have diverse source of revenue. In contrast to Facebook, the primary revenue source for many Asia social media sites is the sale of virtual items online.

Facebook, QQ, Mixi, and Cyworld collectively generate $392 million (USD) in revenue a year from the sale of virtual goods in the Asian online market.

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Technorati Tags: China, social media, Stats

How big is Social Media? (A video interview)

While in Sydney last week to chair the Web 3.0 conference, Sam North in the Ogilvy office cornered me for a “Red Chair” interview about the future of Social Media.

We spoke about the evolution of Social Media and how companies should assess whether to get involved.

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Technorati Tags: australia, Ogilvy, Sam North

Coke on Wednesday, Red Bull on Weekends

Social media monitoring occasionally reveals interesting habits within society, such the increased number of conversations on Wednesday by people saying how they need energy, so will drink a Coke. Halfway through the week, they must be flagging in energy.

How did we generate these graphs? Using the Radian6 social media monitoring tool for English-language conversations online. As for Red Bull, it is not surprising to see conversations about the clubbing drink to peak on weekends.

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Ogilvy on: Blogging for Business

@bdgiesen and I had great fun today presenting this deck from Ogilvy’s Sydney office. Incredible live interaction online with 107 Tweets reaching an audience more than 63,000 total followers.

Join our webinar next month when we do “Foursquare for Business”!

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Why do I blog?

Over time, this blog has built up traffic, but revenues are still almost zero.

So why blog? (Hint: The final reason and note from Candy Chan is what prompted this posting.)

1- Revenue: I do make some money. I would characterize it as “liquor money”. A few dollars a month from Amazon when people buy a book I recommend and a few dollars a month from Lexis/Nexis. I once tried putting up Google advertising, but pulled it down after seeing the type of ads it felt appropriate for my blog. (I did make US$20 in a few days time, but it is not the way I want to earn money!)

2- Community: Through this blog I have met and interacted with a wide range of people both online and many eventually in the real world. These have included some of the smartest people about the topics that interest me. (Social Media and Asia)

3- Knowledge: The knowledge held by the community following my blog is incredible. That is why I sometimes seem to post incomplete postings. They are incomplete because I am hoping to get further insight and information from the people who read this blog.

4- Helping people: I often get asked if I know anyone appropriate for a range of jobs, particularly in journalism and Social Media. Rather than search for the right individual, I have started posting the job ads online. The result is that quite a few people have got jobs thanks to my blog, including the person below.

When I graduated from journalism school in the States in early 2009, I was desperately searching for a journalism-related job in China.

People are stunned, but I tell them it is a group set up by Mr Crampton. I tell them: Please, do not look down the power of social media. You can dig out something incredible if you make good use of it.

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Social Media in Asia Webinar, The Slides

Social Media Today recently invited me to present on the state of Social Media in Asia. Below are the slides that I presented along with those from fellow presenter Peter Auditore of SAP. Their blog links to an audio recording of the discussion, which had some great questions.

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Social Networking Habits Across Asia-Pacific

ComScore today announced some interesting new statistics about Social Networking Habits across Asia-Pacific.

ComScore’s methodology does not include visits from public access computers such as Internet cafes, mobile phones or PDAs. In many markets, including India, Japan, China, Indonesia and others, many people access the Internet in ways other than a home computer that they own. Nonetheless, ComScore’s statistics are very interesting, particularly when looked at in terms of change over time. A major change being the migration towards Facebook.

Half of Asia’s Internet population visited Social Networking sites in February…
According to ComScore, 50.8 percent of the total online population in the Asia-Pacific region visited a social networking site in February 2010, reaching a total of 240.3 million visitors.

…Facebook dominates…
Not surprisingly, Facebook.com ranked as the top social network across eight markets – Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Vietnam. Local players led in Japan (Mixi.jp) and South Korea (CyWorld), while Google-owned Orkut ranked as the top social networking site in India and Yahoo!’s Wretch.cc led in Taiwan.

…the Philippines are top users of Social Networks…
In February 2010, Internet users in the Asia-Pacific region averaged 2.5 hours on social networking sites during the month and visited the category an average of 15 times. Across markets, the Philippines showed the highest penetration of social networking usage with more than 90 percent of its entire Web population visiting a social networking site during the month, followed by Australia (89.6 percent penetration) and Indonesia (88.6 percent penetration).

…and the Philippines show the highest level of engagement on Social Networks…
Social networkers in the Philippines also showed the highest level of engagement on social networking sites averaging 5.5 hours per visitor in February, with visitors frequenting the social networking category an average of 26 times during the month. Strong engagement was also exhibited by Internet users in Indonesia (5.4 hours per visitor and 22 visits per visitor), Australia (3.8 hours per visitor and 20 visits per visitor) and Malaysia (nearly 3.8 hours per visitor and 22 visits per visitor).

ComScore’s report can be seen here.

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