To get an idea about our team dynamic, you can look at this YouTube video.

Send a CV and cover letter to: jonathan.nguyen AT ogilvy.com.

Organization: Social@Ogilvy, Ogilvy & Mather Asia-Pacific

Title: Social@Ogilvy, Director of Operations, Asia Pacific

Job Summary

Do you want to help build a next-generation social media team in the heart of the largest marketing and communications agency in the Asia-Pacific region?

Social@Ogilvy’s fast-moving, intellectually challenging and highly creative Hong Kong-based regional team seeks a director of operations to help bring structure and manage capacity gaps in a rapidly growing team.

The ideal candidate creates order from chaos through persuasion, not enforcement.

A strong personality, entrepreneurial, intellectually engaged, curious and passionate about social media, the candidate is actively involved in social media.

They should have a point of view about what is next and ideas on how to get there.

Key Responsibilities & Accountabilities:

Job Description
• Entrepreneurial project management skills
• Able to understand unstructured projects in early development and help manage them through to execution
• Lead team capacity planning for a Hong Kong-based Regional Team
• Support business and financial planning for the Regional Team
• Experienced in managing partners and external vendors
• Able to adapt, coordinate and interact with teams across a vast geography from different cultures
• Assist in the hiring and recruitment process for a fast-growing team
• Help identify award-worthy work and shepherd it from submission to victory
• As a knowledge manager
• Lead the collecting and sharing of social media best practices across the region
• Oversee social media research that contributes to thought leadership

Skills Required
• 8+ years of service company or agency experience
• Financial planning and capacity planning experience
• Able to manage interns and communicate with CEOs
• Able to balance a love of spreadsheets and flowcharts with the realities of an entrepreneurial team
• Asian languages and/or Asian experience are a plus
• Ambition and drive required

About Social@Ogilvy
Social@Ogilvy is the largest, fastest-growing and most awarded social media team in the Asia-Pacific region. Launched three years ago, the team now numbers more than 200 people in 19 Asian territories.

About Ogilvy & Mather
Ogilvy & Mather is the largest marketing communications company in the Asia-Pacific region. Through its specialty units, the company provides a comprehensive range of marketing services including: advertising; public relations and public affairs; branding and identity; shopper and retail marketing; healthcare communications; direct, digital, promotion and relationship marketing. Ogilvy & Mather services Fortune Global 500 companies as well as local businesses through its network of more than 450 offices in 120 countries. It is a WPP company (NASDAQ: WPPGY). For more information, visit
www.ogilvy.com.

“I once watched a twenty-three-year-old woman search for dates in Beijing, where there are four hundred thousand male users,” the chief engineer from Jiayuan told Osnos. “She narrowed it down by blood type and height and zodiac sign and everything else until, at last, she had a pool of eighty-three men.”

Jiayuan asks people to define their looks and character. For looks, you can be asked to define your face as oval as a “duck’s egg” or narrow like a sunflower seed.

The character qualities which men can use to describe themselves are:

1. A filial son
2. A cool guy
3. Responsible
4. A penny-pinching family man
5. Honest and straightforward
6. A perceptive man
7. A career-driven man
8. Wise and farsighted
9. An unsightly man
10. A humorous man
11. A travel lover
12. A solitary shut-in man
13. Considerate
14. Gutsy
15. Loyal
16. Managerial
17. A handsome devil
18. Steady, staid, sedate.

As with so much of business in China, a key aspect of online dating involves ensuring authenticity.
Jiayuan has a system allowing people to verify their biographies with copies of pay stubs, government I.D.s, divorce filings, and housing certificates. You get extra stars beside your name based on the number of documents you send.

Some great details on bachelors without assets:
“According to a poll reported last year by Xinhua, the state news service, although only ten per cent of men on Jiayuan own a home, nearly seventy per cent of women said they wouldn’t marry a man without one. James Farrer, a sociologist at Sophia University, in Tokyo, who studies Chinese dating habits, calls this phenomenon “a bubble in the marriage market.” New Chinese terms have cropped up: a man without a house, a car, and a nest egg is a “triple without.” If he gets married, it’s a “naked wedding.”,” Osnos writes

A comparative look at European vs Chinese love stories:
“Love stories didn’t become popular in China until the twentieth century, after European novels inspired a genre called “butterfly romance,” in which the lovers all “weep a great deal,” according to Haiyan Lee, at Stanford. In China, it seemed, love rarely ended well. While European protagonists occasionally found happiness, Chinese lovers succumbed to forces beyond their control: meddling parents, disease, a miscommunication. The love stories were categorized so that readers knew which doom to expect: Tragic Love, Bitter Love, Miserable Love, Wronged Love, and Chaste Love. A sixth genre, Joyous Love, was not as successful. (In the mid-nineties, the researchers Fred Rothbaum and Billy Yuk-Piu Tsang analyzed the lyrics of eighty Chinese and American pop songs, and found that Chinese songs conveyed more “negative expectations” and “suffering,” a sense that, if destiny did not help a relationship, “it cannot be salvaged,” Osnos writes.

Turns out that not everyone Osnos spoke to is interested in the psychoanalysis or authenticity. One Chinese banker uses a single criterion on Jiayuan — height — to filter through to seeing only fashion models.

Click on the invitation to request a seat! (or go to bit.ly/advancedfacebook)

Here are the references (my comments in bold):

Facebook sees China’s social networks as key competitors
We face significant competition in almost every aspect of our business, including from companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Twitter … We compete broadly with Google’s social networking offerings, including Google+, and also with other, largely regional, social networks that have strong positions in particular countries, including Cyworld in Korea, Mixi in Japan, Orkut (owned by Google) in Brazil and India, and vKontakte in Russia. We would also face competition from companies in China such as Renren, Sina, and Tencent in the event that we are able to access the market in China in the future.

China’s blockage is a risk that Facebook may face elsewhere
It is possible that governments of one or more countries may seek to censor content available on Facebook in their country, restrict access to Facebook from their country entirely, or impose other restrictions that may affect the accessibility of Facebook in their country for an extended period of time or indefinitely. For example, access to Facebook has been or is currently restricted in whole or in part in China, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. In addition, governments in other countries may seek to restrict access to Facebook if they consider us to be in violation of their laws.

Facebook is still very hungry to enter China
We plan to continue the international expansion of our business operations and the translation of our products. We currently make Facebook available in more than 70 different languages, and we have offices or data centers in more than 20 different countries. We may enter new international markets where we have limited or no experience in marketing, selling, and deploying our products. For example, we continue to evaluate entering China. However, this market has substantial legal and regulatory complexities that have prevented our entry into China to date. If we fail to deploy or manage our operations in international markets successfully, our business may suffer.

China’s lack of Facebook penetration highlighted as a key hurdle for Facebook’s ambition
There are more than two billion global Internet users, according to an industry source, and we aim to connect all of them. We have achieved varying levels of penetration within the population of Internet users in different countries. For example, in countries such as Chile, Turkey, and Venezuela we estimate that we have penetration rates of greater than 80% of Internet users; in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States we estimate that we have penetration rates of approximately 60%; in countries such as Brazil, Germany, and India we estimate that we have penetration rates of approximately 20-30%; in countries such as Japan, Russia, and South Korea we estimate that we have penetration rates of less than 15%; and in China, where Facebook access is restricted, we have near 0% penetration. We continue to invest in growing our user base, particularly in markets where we are relatively less penetrated.

Admission that China may, in fact, be impossible for Facebook
China is a large potential market for Facebook, but users are generally restricted from accessing Facebook from China. We do not know if we will be able to find an approach to managing content and information that will be acceptable to us and to the Chinese government.

One board member’s China fund garners a mention
James W. Breyer has served as a member of our board of directors since April 2005. Mr. Breyer has been a Partner of Accel Partners, a venture capital firm, since 1987. Mr. Breyer is also the founder and has been the Chief Executive Officer of Breyer Capital, an investment firm, since July 2006. Mr. Breyer is also a co-founder and has been co-lead on the strategic investment committee since inception of the IDG-Accel China Funds.

In reporting an article about music copy protection for The New York Times, I attended a press conference in London at EMI. Steve Jobs, the CEO of EMI and members of band Blur attended.

As the press conference wound down, I had an interesting side-conversation with Jobs, which never made it into the article.

It was a fairly small event and Jobs stepped down from the stage afterwards to chat with myself and a couple of others.

We were talking about people, technology and music.

The conversation started around about DRM – systems that protect music from being copied – but Jobs eventually launched into the explanation of what he said drives Apple in meeting consumer’s needs.

“We must always balance simplicity and freedom,” he said. “If you give the consumers too much freedom, they are overwhelmed by choice and confusion. If you limit their freedom by too much simplicity, they feel constricted.”

To me, this explained the difference between the first iPod – which had one button and few options – versus the MP3 players by Creative Technologies. Arguably, Creative Technologies invented the market for MP3 players, but their system was rather complex. You had so many options that you felt like a programmer.

I think about Jobs’ concept each time I test a new Apple product.

You surrender freedom to Apple products, but if they deliver value you do not mind. They made it so simple to download music that people are willing to pay 0.99 cents per song rather than download them for free.

Driving this same logic further, could lead to the interesting conclusion in an essay by writer Umberto Eco: Apple is Catholic, while PC is protestant.

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.
You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.
Naturally, the Catholicism and Protestantism of the two systems have nothing to do with the cultural and religious positions of their users. One may wonder whether, as time goes by, the use of one system rather than another leads to profound inner changes. Can you use DOS and be a Vande supporter? And more: Would Celine have written using Word, WordPerfect, or Wordstar? Would Descartes have programmed in Pascal?

Finally, one of the more popular among my blog postings related to Apple: Steve Jobs’ Moleskine.

Following a panel discussion at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong on social media and journalism, Marketing Interactive did a quick video interview. They summed up my comments as: “Social media is a bigger threat than opportunity.”

Among them are friends like Joi Ito, who now heads of the MIT Media Lab and who launched my blogging career by inviting me to write on his blog, along with Dan Gillmor who always has a fascinating take on the future of journalism. Meredith Artley, who was a colleague at the International Herald Tribune and who is now the vice president of digital at CNN as well as Paul Steiger from Pro Publica, the investigative news startup.

With this great line-up, they keen to find China speakers to talk about the online world, news and journalism. Below is a note written by the organizer, Bertrand Pecquerie.

Do you know the right people to suggest from China? Email Bertrand.

Tom

Object:
News World Summit (NEWS!) to be held in Hong Kong from 27 to 30 November 2011

My name is Bertrand Pecquerie and I am the CEO of the Global Editors Network gathering editors-in-chief and senior news executives from all platforms (print, broadcast, digital, mobile…). We are 400 members from 50 different countries.
See http://www.globaleditorsnetwork.org/gen-members/ and our Manifesto: http://www.globaleditorsnetwork.org/manifesto/

We are organizing our first major event in Hong Kong from 27 to 30 November and it is called NEWS! for News World Summit. We will be around 400 editors-in-chief from 80 countries and we expect a strong participation from China.

At the moment, my main request is about Chinese speakers: we need very innovative speakers about media convergence, future of journalism and newsrooms’ strategies. Please contact me for sharing ideas, suggestions and I will come back to you asap: bpecquerie AT globaleditorsnetwork DOT org

This year, our motto is “Go East! What to learn from Asian Media”
Our main themes are: Adopt a four-screen strategy (mobile, tablet, PC, ipTV), When your smartphone becomes your newsroom, paywalls and paid-for apps, visual journalism and data journalism.
URL: http://www.news-worldsummit.org/
(programme in Chinese, see the Home Page)

40 Keynotes and speakers (including Thomas) will share their views on why news brands have to rethink media convergence and news cycles:

- Joichi Ito, Director of the Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Steve Grove, Head of News, YouTube
- Wadah Khanfar, Director General, Al Jazeera Network
- Meredith Artley, Vice-President, CNN digital
- Per Mikael Jensen, CEO, Metro International
- Paul Steiger, Editor-in-Chief and Founder, ProPublica
- Dan Gillmor, media thinker…

We want to set up the Summit as an exchange between Europe, the Americas, Africa and China and we consider Chinese innovations and best practices are still unknown by editors from around the world, especially regarding mobile news and mobile journalism.

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions

Bertrand Pecquerie, CEO
www.globaleditorsnetwork.org
www.twitter.com/editorsnet
www.facebook.com/editorsnet
www.youtube.com/GlobalEditorsNetwork

An infographic produced by our social media team to show how Facebook now dominates Asia. Enjoy!

Really pleased!

This image, taken from the video, shows me asking the gods of creativity to bring on more great ideas from our team.

Facebook also made a written case study in PDF form.

Posted on Sina Weibo, China’s largest Twitter-like platform, he had 400 forwards and 50 resumes in his inbox within 10 hours.

Here’s a translation:
Would you be as kind to co-workers, as smart, as willing to debate and challenge as we try to be?

Are you passionate about social media to the point that Weibo is the first thing you look at in the morning?

Can you make a ppt pretty? Can you photoshop? Could you make this picture look even better?

Could occasionally work every minute you are awake, as I sometimes do?

We are a company of marketers, not linguists. If your English is not perfect, please do not let this stop you applying.

You know my Weibo name (Angry Editor)… Do you have impeccable attention to detail?

Send us your resume!

Over the last few weeks, I have been diving into the topic of F-Commerce, or Facebook Commerce. Much of this is in preparation for a training that our team will be doing with The Wall Street Journal in a few weeks.

Space is limited: wsj-asia.com/webinar

Here are the details, please join!

With 139 million users in Asia an more than 600 million user globally, Facebook is no longer just a social networking site. Facebook and other social networks have evolved into major revenue streams for some of the world’s most innovative brands

Less than one year ago Mark Zuckerberg said social commerce “is the next area to really blow up” and many brands have moved quickly into that space.

Fan counts are giving way to sales numbers, offering excellent case studies for a new industry. There are a range of tools, software, and analytics has sprung up, allowing marketers looking to convert fans to customers.

On Thursday, July 21 at noon Hong Kong time you can join Ogilvy and Mather’s award-winning Asia-Pacific social media learn for a 30 minute presentation on how brands have cracked Facebook as a way to grow their business.

As always in these lively sessions, we will take questions during and after the presentation.

Hosted by Ogilvy’s Thomas Crampton, Brian Giesen and John Stauffer, this session will focus on:

- How to Use Facebook as a Sales Channel;
- Case Studies from Brands are Using F-Commerce;
- Strategy for Building a Virtual Storefront on your Facebook Page;
- Resources and F-Commerce Vendors
- A Facebook Measurement Model.

Preview and participate in our research at: http://bit.ly/ogilvyasia

Register now for a seat at this FREE webinar, space is limited: wsj-asia.com/webinar