白社会 日誌 - 二: 我的SNS,微博客这兩个月的个人体驗

As much as I like to write in Chinese, I must decide between the ability to express my thoughts than the choice of language. I would like to record my experience with SNS thoroughly and my apology that I revert back to English, my more comfortable language for this 2nd diary post.

Someone asks my view on SNS. If I were to sum it up in one sentence, SNS changes my life in many ways. As a Computer Science graduate and high tech professional for my entire career, email and online relationship have been with my entire adult life.

First, it was purely professional use, then it becomes both personal and professional use but within the professional network.

With the introduction of SNS, family and friends are increasingly added to the online network.

And now, we do not only communicate online with people we already know, but often times, we make new friends, contacts of strangers.

With real time micro blogging (Twitter, Digu, Fanfou), we write about what we have for breakfast, our daily schedule, our kids doctor appointments, soccer schedules.. in which we are starting to peek into the lifes of strangers we 'follow'... or the 'daily life' of people we don't normally have a chance to know.

At a certain point in a technology life cycle, we the people take that technology and direct it towards very specific goals and purposes that creates value for us.

Blogs, SNS, micro blogging have entered all of our lives in varying degrees.
Communities are formed around these services.
Decision makings are influenced by our opions of the online communities we belong to.

Being a repatriate from United States and now living in Hong Kong, and starting to spend time in China, the effect and the role of SNS is quite different between the West and China. I'll write about my observation of these differences in my next posting.

白社会 日誌 - 一 : 我的SNS,微博客这兩个月的个人体驗

各位認識我的朋友知道我的中文能力有限. 不过在白社会內我希望盡力用中文. 寫得不好請見谅.

昨天,我删掉了Twitter帳户. 过去四星期,每天安排時間上不同 SNS(Facebook,Linkedin,Wealink),微博客

(Twitter, Digu), 閱讀 blogs, Google Reader feeds; 總是覺得 Twitter 干扰了过往网上研究的集中能力

. 很多following的朋友只是將原來Blog的内容或新聞在Twitter上加以推荐. 发现不知不觉地浪費了不少時間而对研究工作

贡献不大.

但是,在Digu微博平台,有聊天的,也有國内新鲜資信,另有表達各種心情和我較少接觸的中國文化, 不同類的Digu朋友,上Digu時的心惰是很舒服.

之前,一直对 Facebook 不感興趣. 相片喜欢從Flickr分享,有時用Vox做mobile photo blogging, 朋友,家人連係

用Email就完全足够. 不过最近參加了香港Media MeetUp group, Facebook 的Group 和 Event 功能就大派用場.

我一直对 Linkedin 的專業性会員质素十分有好感. 也多次被Head Hunter在Linkedin 找到. 最近參加了幾个Discussion Group. 不幸有不少 "discussion" 都是自我推銷个人,产品,服務等..

下回再跟大家分享: 總括这兩个月的經歷的心德..

China SNS, mobile internet today, Part 2

How ready is China's mobile users ready for 3G handsets

A recent iResearch research report surveys 3000 China netizens for their awareness, and interest in 3G handset and capabilities. A few major take aways are:

1. Majority China internet users express 3G handset should be priced at CNY 1000-2000. This group represents mostly the professional working class. Currently, 2G GPRS users represent a much larger number than this professional group and 3G handset maker needs to prepare for even lower ASP in China.
2. MMS and faster transfer speed are the two major benefits users see in upgrading to 3G.
3. Operators are still slow in offering MMS service in their monthly plan packages and this slowed the take up rate of 3G even though the infrastructure is ready for larger number of users.
4. 3G contents and applications are still limited

The still infancy in 3G content/applications, expensive handsets, MMS featured 3G plan still rolling out rather slowly, users are taking a wait and see approach before upgrading to 3G handsets. Netizens in China use Social Network Services primarily for entertainment. Majority netizens use SNS from their PC and much less from the mobile. For applications such as Twitter, Digu to penetrate into China netizens lifestyle, we should be aware that we are only at the early stage of the education process.


Digu "Meet the Bloggers" Social event, April 18, 2009

Yesterday, I was invited to Digu team's "Meet the Bloggers Social" in Shenzhen. The young and highly enthusiastic crowd fills the room with much sharing and excitement. My Mandarin understanding capability hinders my ability to gain more from the session. Dr. Song Li is very kind in sharing a bit more of his vision in English after the presentation, and with the Digu team helping to translate here and there, I am able to gain a fair amount of information afterall. Thanks to the collaborative internet ecosystem, Digu made the slides from Bollin available on slideshare. It's in simplied Chinese so I practice my slightly improved Chinese reading skill and am quite impressed with the vision of the creative mix of usage ideas. You can find the Digu presentation here.

After the presentation, I posed the following question to the group:

"As an active Digu/Twitter user with many followers, what does having ONE account versus having multiple accounts present to you in "issues" and "opportunties".

Dr. Song Li offered his view of using Twitter/Digu as a personal branding opportunity. After using Twitter/Digu for barely 2 months, I agree strongly that many twitter/digu users today are consciously or unconsciously already doing so: building their personal branding.
Bollin, I look forward to your summary of everyone's response.

Readers. I would very much like to hear your comments on this Twitter/Digu identity and privacy matters. I am aware of TwitDeck, Twirl, and the concept of Seesmic Desktop.

China SNS, mobile internet today, a non traditional Digu user's perspective, Part 1

After three weeks of using Twitter and a week on Digu daily, I observed a distinct difference in the usage behavior between the two services. Twitter has a big community of business users embracing it as part of their marketing strategy. Digu, consistent with most Chinese SNS, is primarily used by individuals as an entertainment channel. Business and technical broadcasting are both uncommon and perhaps unwelcome by the majority SNS users.

How western SNS users use Twitter

Twitter is a three year old service which seem to me has gained explosive growth in the past year. Twitter started out as a realtime short message service that work with multiple networks to overcome the limitations of SMS. Listen for yourself from Twitter founder, Evan Williams, talked about Twitter's explosive growth on the TED show. Evolving beyond individual's chatter about what they are doing 'now', today many businesses, blog sites, trade shows, celebrities as well as TV shows use twitter in very creative and successful marketing efforts. A case in point is my earlier post of theEllenShow twitter page gaining 750K followers in a little over a month. By the way, theEllenShow as of this post has 791K followers, surpassing the twitter page itself which was started over three years ago. Glam Media is launching tinker.com beta, which follows event streams and Tinker will show you relevant real-time conversations from social media sources like Facebook and Twitter. Combining the use of event twitter page and tinker.com, event PR agency can generate buzz and engagement marketing opportunities to target audience who wish to follow particular events.

Digu Senior Product manager shed light on China SNS use

Tonight I met up with Mr. Bollin Lai, Digu's senior product manger, in Shenzhen. Mr. Lai received his degree from Beijing University, worked at Xiaonei and ran a web service business prior to joining Digu. I spent most part of my career in the US and only in the past few years focus in Asia Pacific. Our background and experience of the internet and mobile industry cannot be more different and the first half of our meeting you would think we speak foreign language to each other. As opposed to what one may expect that mobile internet users migrate from PC internet users, the two groups are quite separate groups with only about 10% overlap of PC internet users also use mobile internet. This is primarily the professional iPhone, smart phone group of users. The majority of the mobile internet users use simpler featured phones and lower mobile expense. SNS access are primarily from PCs and very little from mobile. GPRS (2G) instead of 3G service is the primary mobile internet access infrastructure.

No urgency for 3G in China, at least not yet

I am surprise do learn that mobile TV in China does not use the GPRS or 3G data network. Instead, mobile handset in China has additional built in hardware capability, separate from mobile operator network, and receives video content from separate broadcasting towers. Lai also commented that the GPRS performance is adequate for much of the services available today. Until larger number of innovative 3G killer applications arrive in the market and drive revenue growth, operators may not be in a hurry to roll out 3G services to every corner in China.

China mobile industry and Tomi Ahonen's Mobile as 7th Mass Media

Since social media marketing, mobile marketing are not common in China yet, it is not surprising that Lai has not heard of many of the mobile business ideas and business models widely written in Tomi Ahonen's books and in practice in the west. We agree to continue our conversation again in the near future and we will explore further how some of the social media and mobile marketing practices in the west may apply in China.