Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve revisited why I never pursued a career in research – it’s seriously hard work! However, many weeks of hard slog have resulted in a great pay-off, with the launch of the Asia-Pacific Digital Brand Index (DBI), a regional study of online conversations about major technology brands that Edelman APAC conducted with our partners Brandtology. All the details are on this site – but it spans eight APAC countries and incorporates 800,000 mentions of 233 major technology and telco brands, spread across over 4,000 online sites. Whew!

After looking through the data, we decided to focus on country-by-country launches and results, because (mock shock, horror), when you roll the results up at a regional level, the insights become less meaningful. If anything, this exercise has reinforced just how hyper-local social media environments, channels, topics and successful brand engagement really is.

It’s a point well-made by Blair Currie in a recent MEDIA post. However, my point is not that regional social media strategies are not important, but that any expectation that regional silver-bullet targeting, content and engagement strategies exist is misguided. The recent downturn really stressed local over regional and for social media this is also true. Regional marketers still have a very important role to play – esp. in terms of social media policy and strategy formation, driving best practice, benchmarking/measurement and central creation of strong online content. The more that regional marketers can gain a deep understand what’s hot in key markets, which people and sites are most influential for a particular topic and what other firms are doing that is successful or can be learnt from, the more valuable they become.

Shared insight and measurement also helps to better connect regional and local colleagues, so we hope that the DBI helps in the age-old debate about measuring the impact and effectiveness of social media. This is especially so in comparing the performance of brands in markets and across the region - that’s why we created a series of indices that help local and regional marketers to find a common language and measurement benchmark around important areas such as conversation volume, engagement (or mentions per unique voice) and channel volume and breadth.

Just because I know you want to know, here is the ranking of the most discussed technology brands across the eight markets in Asia Pacific:

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Nokia
4. Samsung
5. Sony
6. Intel
7. AMD
8. Apple
9. Yahoo!
10. Dell

Disclosure: Edelman represents technology brands around the world, many of which are included in the Digital Brand Index.

With 800,000 pieces of data to review, there’s a whole range of other interesting insights, but more on those at a later date. Would love any questions or feedback you have on the DBI (apart from how bad I look on the below video, ok?!) - let me know.

NOTE: This is a mirror of a post that I did for the MEDIA blog

Mobile Marketing to Become Reality by 2011?

I love the Silicon Alley insider chart-of-the-day feed (and it’s well worth subscribing to). The chart belowwas especially surprising, because I knew that the smartphone (esp. touchscreen) market is hot, but it seems that we’re only 2 years away from the pivot point where the phone really starts to become a seriously major way to access web and social media sites.

Mobile Marketing for real by 2011

However, the reality is that I’m still hearing (and seeing case studies of) very few brands talking about mobile marketing in a serious way. Asia still has a way to go before broadband is ubiquitous, but it is the fastest region in the world for mobile adoption. I’m still not having many conversations with brands about mobile marketing – many are still not optimising websites for mobile. However, forecasts like this show it’s a format that will soon be impossible to ignore. Will that be enough – I hope so!

I presented at last April’s Mobile Marketing forum in Singapore and the general consensus remained that mobile remained a massive opportunity unrealised (SMS Gupshop not-withstanding). I’m looking foward to discussing the Asian reality of the opportunity further around mobile marketing further at SPIKES Asia in September and will actually probe clients and industry people I’m meeting more about mobile in the next few weeks and will share what I hear/find.

Interested in your insights and perspectives about mobile marketing – it is massively interesting – but from a marketing perspective is it for real, about to happen, or still a fad? As always, let me know.

Note – this is a mirror of a post I wrote for the MEDIA blog.

Paul Holmes – Why Edelman is Asia PR Consultancy of the Year

Paul Holmes talks about why he named Edelman the Asia Pacific Consultancy of the Year and why Edelman is the first firm to win Agency of the Year in all three regions

Shameless self-promotion – I love it!

 

Wanna know about social media in China?

Last week I was in Beijing with Edelman regional president Alan VanderMolen. Alan has been deeply involved on the mainland since the early 90s. A trip with Alan to any regional market always includes meetings with a range of interesting personalities, from in-house leaders, to top-tier media, to online influentials.

Currently, there’s no doubt about the number one topic for the marketing industry in China – how to successfully plan for and integrate social media into programs. Luckily Alan had his video camera and has published a fascinating range of posts and interviews on his ‘Full Count’ blog that gives a great overview of the latest perspectives around the internet in China, including:

- Roger Chen, GM Image and Citizenship for Microsoft Greater China

- Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of leading Chinese internet and media firm Danwei

- Rui Cheng-gang of CCTV-2 (dubbed by Fortune Mag as China’s Lou Dobbs)

- The recent China Trust Barometer results

- a perspective on China from Edelman Europe head David Brain

If all else fails, Alan can also point you to the best place for beer and ribs.

Alan is passionate about the evolving online opportunity and probably the most senior regional agency leader blogging and active on Twitter today (keen to know who else you’d place on this list?).

Upcoming market visits include India, Japan and Korea – where he’s got another range of interesting meetings and interviews planned – worth staying tuned into. I also know he’d welcome any feedback on what content/interviews people would like to see in the future.

NOTE: this is a mirror of a post I wrote for the MEDIA blog.

Genius: Social Media Addicts Association Viral

Clever, clever viral campaign by Sony Vaio. The Youtube videos show a meeting at the social media addicts association, trying to get real and kick the habit. Videos are supported by www.stopwritingonmywall – a website that helps people to kick the habit, including the genius steps to overcome the addiction:

Step 1. Admit you have a problem, but don’t tweet about it
Step 2. Accept that you don’t need up votes to feel validated
Step 3. Understand the risks of poking strangers
Step 4. Repeat after me: “Twitter and alcohol don’t mix”.
Step 5. Don’t go cold turkey! Just delete one friend a day

 

 

You can also purchase t-shirts and other memorabilia to get over social media – just remember to use a Sony Vaio to make it happen. I actually think this concept has long legs to it – look forward to seeing the sitcom. Love it!

Megawoosh

Tweeted about Megawoosh two days ago, but:

1. can now confirm it is fake

2. still makes me laugh when I watch it

Kudos to Microsoft (disclosure: client) for showing its fun side by sponsoring this with MS Project and showing the back-story as to how much planning and project management would go into pulling something like this together.

 

Hitler’s Ad Agency Doesn’t Get Digital

Ok, so it’s not original and not sure how they get around the copyright laws that got the ‘I got banned from Xbox Live and ‘Burning Man’ Downfall parodies taken down, but it’s always entertaining!

Moov, an agency in Denver shows the world what it would’ve been like to work in an ad agency run by Hitler. Do look for previous examples of subtitling – this meme might run forever…

 

How Not to Use Social Media to Impress Your Boss

Will probably be found to be fake, but for now, priceless…

John Hughes – Soundtrack to the 80s

Don’t want to turn this into a memorial blog, but as a big-time child of the 80s, today’s news of the sad passing of film-maker John Hughes has me reminiscing about ‘back in the day.’

Pretty in Pink is one of my all-time favourite films (still have it on VHS, not on DVD – yikes!) and so captured the mood of the time and being a teenager. Have watched this clip a couple of times…

5 Social Media Tips for Marketers

Last night tier-one social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter were subject to a huge attack (known as distributed denial of service -DDoS). It got me thinking as to how many marketers now just starting out with social media might be negatively impacted by today’s big news? I hope none!

Imagine that you’ve set up an event and you’re projecting aggregated tweets onto a large screen for all the attendees to see. Or that you’ve set up a competition on Facebook that runs for 24 hours. Would you shrug your shoulders and say ‘that’s just the Internet,’ or would you be seriously concerned?

Hacker attacks and DDOS are nothing new, but I don’t think there is massive awareness as to some of the risks that marketers and communicators need to factor in when using the internet – esp. if you’re leveraging a third-party platform that you don’t have direct control over. Don’t get me wrong, this in no way is supposed to be a ‘the Internet is too scary to use’ post(!!), but I do believe that last night’s events reinforce how important it is for brands and agencies to have a deep and ongoing understanding of the platform that they’re working with.

To that end, I came up with my 5 Social Media Tips for Marketers:

1. First rule of using technology – always have at least one back-up plan. We’ve all had the situation where the PC or projector wouldn’t work at an important presentation and out have come the print-outs, or flip-charts. Even though the cloud is very robust at the moment, fortunately, many social media platforms allow you to download client versions that you can run if the live connection doesn’t work. You can also load your content up to multiple sharing sites if one doesn’t work and try to have a broadband USB connector, just in case the internet doesn’t work like it should at your venue.

2. Be extra vigilant if embedding content from a third-party site (e.g. Youtube, Slideshare etc) onto a corporate or branded website. Create super-strong passwords and limit then number of people who have access to them. Often if content from third-party links are changed, the link stops working. However, the last thing you want to see is someone else’s mash-up of your CEO’s speech playing on your home page.

3. Reduce the risk of phishing. If you’re going to use email to communicate with customers or consumers, be very public about what email address/domain people can expect to see things from and publish a list of guidelines on your site about what people should and shouldn’t expect from you (e.g. you wont ask for their back details).

4. Where possible, moderate. Hashtags are an awesome marketing tool, but the issue is when someone starts to also use your hashtag in a less than complimentary fashion – www.skittles.com is a great example of this and why they ask for your age before you can log in. If you’re all for free speech, then all good, otherwise you can use third-party software to moderate tweets that appear at your event (but won’t work for www.search.twitter.com). Also, if you have a corporte (or personal) blog, make sure comments are set for moderation first before they are published – this is good standard practice and should be outlined in a social media policy.

5. Always believe there’s someone out there smarter than you who doesn’t like you! It may or may not be conincidence that the largest hacker’s conference in the world happened the week before last night’s outage. The number of people with amazing hacking skills is huge. I suggest a psychology of ‘what if they gun for me?’ is taken into any planning to create a program that balances the risks and opportunities of the internet. Again, this is not fear-mongering, it’s good common sense.

Maybe we should also celebrate the fact that our timezones mean many of these DDoS attacks happen while we (and our customers) are safely tucked up in bed.

That’s my quick thoughts – there is no doubt another DDoS is around the corner – keen to hear any other of your tips to add to the list!

 

Please note: this is a mirror of a post I wrote for the MEDIA blog.