|
Industry News, 22.07.09
| In the last few years social media has exploded in China. The latest research from CNNIC reports that China now has over 162 million bloggers. It is estimated 54% of netizens in China contributed to a blog, compared with 12% in the US. Chinese netizens like to get connected for various reasons, and their habits around getting to know new friends and finding old ones mimic those of their Western counterparts. However, social media has another purpose within Chinese virtual communities. Social Networks are quickly becoming a main source of validation for information Chinese users receive. The “trust level” in China is generally low, as one seldom believes all they see or hear without double confirmation from friends or sources from the net. A recent study from TNS revealed that the internet is rated the second most trusted source by Chinese users, just after friends and families. This perhaps helps to explain the rapid development of social media in China. |
Royce Lee, Managing Director, Razorfish Greater China |
Key viewpoints from Razorfish on Social Influence Marketing (SIM)
- Social Media usage will result in more influence.
As social media adoption climbs exponentially, so too will the influence conversations in a social context have on brand affinity and purchasing decisions. Participating in a conversation online, sharing an opinion and influencing a purchasing decision explicitly or implicitly are becoming second nature for more and more consumers. The only thing that will prevent these messages from spreading is that a lot of this influence happens in small groups within the walled gardens of the social networks and therefore goes unnoticed. That will change in 2009 as social network analysis vendors help us peek over the wall and, as a result, marketers pay more attention.
- The focus will shift to influencers.
Who are these people that influence your customers and how does their influence actually work? This will come into sharper focus, as reaching the influencers gets easier via the social graph and the plethora of technology vendors that make targeting easier. Different influencers will matter at different stages of the marketing funnel too. For example, at the point-of-purchase, friends and family may matter the most in determining what a consumer buys while at the awareness stage key influencers, like those contributors at Dianping.com (a popular Chinese restaurant review and directory website), carry more weight. We’ll also find a way to put a valuation on each consumer’s potential influence for specific product categories. Google and a few others are already taking a crack at defining your influence rank.
- Top-down branding will experience growing importance.
Most brand managers are used to defining their brands in relative isolation of the marketplace — or they do extensive customer research and see it as their job alone to define the brand (or the manifestation of the brand) in different forms. That’s going to change as consumers define brands by the sheer volume of their opinions; they’ll be shaping the brands more than the brands will be shaping them. As a result, in order for them to be remembered, brands will be forced to deliver much stronger value propositions to their customers. Cute advertising won’t be enough as the focus shifts to value exchanges. If you’re a brand manager, you can either fight this or treat it as an opportunity to take your career in a different direction.
- Social advertising will grow up.
We’re all tired of hearing about the failures of advertising on social platforms. Not surprisingly IDC calls advertising on social networks “stillborn,” as it has been plagued by low click-through rates and confusing advertising formats. Although there are many formats, such as so-called app-vertising, hyper targeting and engagement ads, we haven’t found what really works. That will change in 2009 as ad units evolve to work more harmoniously with user behavior on social platforms. Display advertising in the broader Web, too, will become more social, as linking display advertising to forms of social marketing — like blogger outreach, social credits, engagement programs and widgets that let you mix in your own content — become more important. However, there are no guarantees that this will be completely figured out within the course of the year.
- Marketers will organize around Social Influence Marketing™.
In today’s organization, SIM is everyone’s stepchild. It is part public relations, part direct response, part brand marketing, part customer intelligence and part sales support, just to name a few categories. That will change in 2009 as marketing organizations discover the benefits in approaching it holistically. Budgets will be put behind SIM and it will be treated as the third dimension of marketing with its own team, objectives and initiatives. This will also force corporations to rethink how they are organized, including agencies. Niche social media consulting firms will find it harder to compete as SIM goes mainstream.
 |
|
|
