SWR3 is Germany’s favorite radio station, daily reaching 3.82 million people across the country. The program is accessible through FM, cable, the Astra satellite or web radio - so, theoretically, you can listen to your SWR3 everywhere there is internet. But that’s not all. The station also offers a social community to its listeners and fans, dubbed “SWR3land.de”, German for SWR3 country. Currently, there are 39139 members and 1246 groups online there.

Those groups are searchable by activity or by number of participants. Additionally, there are photos, forums, blogs, a chat and a studio webcam available to users. The groups are mostly topical, e.g. fan groups of certain shows and their hosts or numerous groups for lovers of cats, bbq or travel. Among the more unusual ones are one for singles, one to combat smoking and a continuous, user driven story about a character called Alfon Erbsengrill. This group actually is among the most active at the moment. It was started in June 2009 and already features 54 pages of forum posts, together making up one huge story - or fairy tale, as the original poster calls it.

This example shows the whole point of creating a social community and at the same time demonstrates what is needed for it to succeed: People need to be motivated to participate and fill the community with life - and thus be positively inclined towards the brand behind the community. Such a favorable opinion creates positive word-to-mouth advertising, or viral marketing, if you will.

Now, how to make this happen? Well, first of all the platform needs to be as open as possible, i.e. leave people room to express themselves and use the community in the way they want. Because who better to know which topics the users might be interested in than the users themselves? Nevertheless, there are certain to be some fail-safe, premier topics a company can create in order to seed activity in the community. In the case of a radio station these would obviously be fan groups of its signature shows, like SWR3’s “Wirby & Zeus” show for example. Reference the community group in your show, host “bring your own content” competitions, ask for listeners opinions and so on. Once the community gets under way, more groups will start to sprout and the users will “take over management” of the community content and activity.

What else is out there? The very popular KIIS-FM, from Los Angeles, also lets its listeners sign up online. The KIIS VIP club isn’t really a social community, though, more a straightforward means for marketing and marketing research. Users can earn points by participating in surveys, listening to the station and referring friends. Points can then be traded in for special prizes and promotions. In short, there isn’t much interactivity or user generated content. America’s most popular radio station, talk radio WABC from New York, offers a similar insider club, where people benefit from promotions and special alerts in exchange for their personal information. Additionally, WABC has an official fan site on Facebook, though only 1798 fans, which doesn’t even come close to the numbers of SWR3!

So, what can businesses learn from SWR3land.de? Well, certainly that it helps to have a positive and distinct brand to serve as a label for the community. But THE winning arguments for a community are its openness and the liberty of use it offers to users, as opposed to being “just” another marketing platform. People tend to notice this and are more inclined to participate if they feel that their efforts and opinions are genuinely appreciated. And that’s what viral marketing is all about. If people feel they are being coaxed into providing free advertisment or buying stuff, however, they won’t take part and the community won’t work.

Did you know that (depending which survey you read) between 25 and 54 per cent of the US companies block social networking sites such as Facebook at work. Eight per cent also fire employees for posting criticism of the company outside of work. That is one way to handle such problems, but in fact that is both wasting talent and squandering an important opportunity. The cause is misunderstanding that different generations work differently.

Companies are right to have concerns about how employees use work time and about activities that affect their brand. However, most of the time, the employee’s intention is not destructive - if it is, then there certainly is a need to act. But in the typical case the issue is not a breakdown in trust, poor work attitude or even inefficiency, but just different perceptions and habits. Young, highly social employees need to be thought of and treated differently.  There’s been quite a lot of research on this over the last year or two, particularly comparing “baby boomers” (now aged in their 40s to 60s) and generation Y,  aka “millennials” or the “net generation”. A company with a good mix of ages can gain from the strengths of both generations - but only with knowledge and careful management. Here are the key findings of the research:

What makes the generations different

• Generation Y like to share personal information and thoughts on social networking sites and make little distinction between company and personal stuff. Baby boomers  are more cautious.
• Generation Y often judge people’s abilities by their technical competence. For baby boomers, technical competence is more of an add-on.
• Baby boomers tend to perceive knowledge as a useful card to hold onto until needed - a private source of power. Millennials gain kudos by sharing it.
• For baby boomers, who had been brought up with a linear, teacher fronted learning style, knowledge is assessed by coherence and depth. Generation Y prefer to learn by selecting from a mass of information, and judged it more by relevance than coherence.
• Generation Y’ers are attracted to jobs by how interesting they are. Can they be creative, use their own technology, express themselves? Job-hopping is seen as normal. Baby boomers, on the other hand, are more likely to look at the overall employment package, and pay more attention to the promotion ladder.
• Generation Y are particularly intolerant of being told  “This is the way we do it. We’ve always done it this way” and like to experiment: new is good. For baby boomers, experimentation is what you do when the normal methods have been tried and found wanting.

Now a certain amount of this is simply differences that have characterised the generations for centuries. But there are deeper differences. Millennials have not learned about the world from books, but from the Internet. What they have been learning is changing year by year, requiring a different and more flexible attitude to knowledge.

Working together

The main thing is to value the different generations within the company so each learns from each other. How would that work in practice?

1. Safety vs. self-expression - employees need an outlet to share experiences and be creative but be aware of consequences for the company of careless online behaviour (they of course also need to understand and adhere to well deisgned policies).
2. Internet time is not downtime - many creative and younger employees use all kinds of resources for information. Imposing rigid rules about how to use the Internet at work will feel too restrictive and insulting, will stifle creativity and create resentment. If an employee wants to do a good job, they need the tools that suit them.
3. Balance different knowledge bases - wikis need to work alongside accumulated specialist knowledge in formal documents, and companies should not forget the institutional knowledge that senior employees have - which can be sorely missed when they leave.
4. Be transparent - being explicit about differences in work attitudes and openly seeking practices that make good use of all talent will motivate employees and increase their productivity and creativity.

Three weeks ago Baidu’s CEO Yanhong Li introduced the “box computing” concept at the Baidu Innovation Conference 2009. As you may know the Chinese search engine giant Baidu has already overtaken Yahoo as the world’s second-largest search engine, according to Comscore.

Now what is “box computing” and what kind of functions does it offer? Basically it’s like an input field (box) being the your interface on the PC or mobile. You key in what you want to do and then Baidu identifies the search requirements, connects to relevant services running in its backend (and probably in third party services), retrieves the result and returns it to the user. The technical framework of box computing was shown here. Box computing provides a one-stop online service by intelligently identifying clients’ demands before giving optimized treatments and responses. For example, a man who wants to buy a BlackBerry in Beijing would only have to type in the sentence “Where can I buy a BlackBerry in Beijing” and then the box engine will provide a product list attached with more detailed information. After you click on the product it may lead you onto another website to finish the payment; or you can do it with Baidu. In some way it is kind of similar to the App Store model. At first, service providers submit service programs to Baidu, after verification Baidu will embed these programs with the box computing platform. Box computing is used to transform Baidu from a pure search service provider to a much broader services provider.

It has been claimed that box computing concept is not a new technical achievement and has already been realized by other search engine companies, such as WolframAlpha, Microsoft’s BING and Google Square.

In the past three Innovation Conferences Baidu focused more on marketing activities and announcements, but this time many people got the impression that Baidu wants to deliver the message that it is a technology-driven company and leader. Other experts still think though that “box computing” is only another marketing focused activity rather than a technical revolution.

There is not much concrete information about Baidu’s box computing out there right now and even on the official website you can’t find much details. In any way it’s probably a good thing, if it’s true, since it will make Chinese internet users’ life much easier. So we have to wait and see what it really is once they open it for trials…

Four out of ten Chinese claim to read blogs at least once a week. This is a higher percentage than is known for any Western country. Three out of ten people interviewed in China are likely to be motivated to take action after reading a blog, which is significantly higher than in Japan (18%) and South Korea (19%). Many of them prefer reviewing blogs instead of news portals. Actually, blogging only started in China in 2002 and became popular in 2004. It has now become an important part of life for Chinese internet users. There are dozens of blog service providers in the market such as Qzone, Sina Blog, Baidu Space, Blogbus and Hexun Blog, who are the top five (according to statistics from Chinalabs.com in July 2009).

Compared with the vigorous development of personal blogs (the number of blog users was 181 million by the end of June 2009), the use of corporate blogs is still in the warm-up phase in China. Only a small number of enterprises have set up their own corporate blogs.

Since there are not many cases to be learnt from, many companies have taken a wait-and-see attitude and some companies who have set up a corporate blog have adopted a more conservative approach. Take the Google China Blog (Chinese: 谷歌黑板报) for example, there is no function for leaving messages or comments for readers.

Since so many Chinese people like reading or writing blogs one could draw the quick conclusion that making a profit from writing blogs in China could be quite easy. But this is actually not the case. Take keso (the most famous IT blogger) as an example. He signed an agreement with Hexun, which is the biggest finance portal in China, to put some ads on his blog. After the expiration of the contract, keso decided to not extend the contract since he made razor-thin margins from it only. Keso is already a big shot in the Chinese blogosphere but even he can’t make a good profit from advertising, so one can imagine how difficult it is for Chinese bloggers to do so.

The banking services branch of the Swiss Post, PostFinance, has recently launched “EventManager“, an educational game for kids and youths between 14 and 20. Its goal is to educate young people on how to be responsible consumers and manage their own finances. It’s designed along the latest didactic insights, conveys financial knowledge in an understandable way and is mainly meant to be used by teachers during class.

How does it work?
Students are asked to plan and run an event, real or fictional, using EventManager. In doing so, they develop knowledge and competencies related to running projects. Initially, you have to create your group or join an existing one. Then there are three different rounds of play: Budgeting, Financing, Investing. Each of these educational modules offers different clips for participants to watch, e.g. “account types“ or “my budget“. The idea is for students to work on these educational modules and clips and prepare for the event manager job. To give feedback and check on progress, there are five test questions to be answered afterwords. And then the actual game starts: Firstly, the event has to be planned by booking artists and providing infrastructure. Then the whole thing is run and, finally, the results of the job are analyzed and feedback is given.

I think that this is an interesting project, as it isn’t your typical one-size-fits-all social community.  Still, it shows the main ideas behind using social media for business purposes:

• interactivity; students budget, plan and run their own events, fictional or real
• entertainment; students are educated by guiding them through a game instead of just a textbook lesson
• benefit; educational software usually costs something while EventManager is free, making it easy to use for teachers
• viral; of course, PostFinance’s logo is there, but the game itself does not bear the typical hallmarks of a marketing campaign, giving credence to PostFinance’s claim of primarily wanting to educate young people on consumption and money.

What’s your take? Please comment here or send me a tweet.

After one month of effort, we finally finished the Chinese version of the e-book and set up the e-book Chinese website, embedded with the most popular Chinese payment platform, Alipay. As of July 6 AliPay had more than 200 million users and a daily transaction volume exceeding RMB700 million (around CHF100 million), through more than 4,000,000 daily transactions. So we decided to use Alipay instead of Paypal in our e-book Chinese website.

I have started the promotion this week using many different approaches. Chinese internet users get used to keeping 2 or 3 different IM tools on at the same time, like myself — I keep QQ, MSN, and Skype on when I am online. So I used IM tools to promote our e-book. First I updated my QQ/MSN/Skype signature with “This is my first e-book I have translated, and please go to our e-book website to take a look. If you can help me promote it, I will appreciate it”, of course in Chinese. Then I sent the message to all of my contacts with the same content, informing some guys who are not always online. I have 200+ contacts at QQ and 100+ contacts at MSN, it’s already a good base, if some of them help me promote it that would be great. I also used QQ or MSN and posted some messages in group talks, which may have bigger influence.

I wrote some emails to Chinese general portals, tech portals, and specific IT or ICT portals, asking them to take a look at the e-book website and see if they are interested in promoting the e-book or not. Some bloggers and tech events have a big influence on the public opinion. It is definitely worthwhile sending them emails as well. Often they protect their e-mail inboxes from spammers and you need to subscribe first before being able to contact them.

Social media networks are actually a very important way to do promotions nowadays. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) are a very popular way in China to deliver information. I wrote some posts in the most popular BBSs in China, such as MOP.com and Tianya.cn to talk about our e-book. Maybe I still need to find more professional BBSs related to IT or ICT, which are more targeted. Social Network Services (SNS) started to boom in China since 2006, I set up some group sites in Kaixin001, 51.com, Myspace.cn and Weaklink, which are similiar to our Chinese e-book website. Since Facebook and Twitter are disabled in China, I prefer using local stuff, naturally.

Thanks to Alex’s efforts, the e-book and website are now also available in Chinese (Mandarin). Here’s a little reminder of what the e-book is all about (the English language version can be found here):

Published in June, “How to Market in ICT Today” is a collection of six interviews with marketing professionals from leading European ICT companies. Why European companies? We wanted to give voice to a perspective outside the US-centered mainstream and see how world-leading businesses based in Europe view marketing across the world.

As we hear every day (every minute, even), social media and digital marketing seem to be the new magic words, especially in the US. Is the buzz coming to Europe, too? We wanted to learn about these experts’ views on the numerous tools and services that are out there. What is useful, what do they use now and what do they plan to use in the future?

Additionally, we asked them about the applicability of US marketing strategies in Europe and about the need (or lack thereof) to locally adapt them. Last, but not least, our interview partners talked about marketing during difficult times and shared there opinion on the question: When the going gets tough, do less or do more?

What do you think? Reply here or talk to us on Twitter!

Senior Apple staff are to visit China to get into top level negotiations with China Unicom, the second largest telecommunications operator in China. They will discuss the launch strategy for the iPhone in China, a source told Sina.com.

China Mobile (the largest Chinese telecommunications operator) has officially announced a customized interface OMS (Open Mobile System), which is Android-based. As we all know, the mobile web is not like the World Wide Web. Not every device can run on every mobile network; not every mobile app can operate on every mobile device that is connected to the mobile web. Google did a good thing with Android, which is going to be a big success. They’ve got the right approach to the market, they are open in every way possible. To add to this current dynamic, Lenovo, which is China’s number one mobile phone vendor, is going to launch the oPhone (the 1st OMS mobile) and are now accelerating its time-to-market. According to one mobile phone assessment report, the Lenovo oPhone has good performance and looks well designed. However, as this report says, the OMS still has the same large number of residual defects as the Android system. And its weak third-party software support is an another shortcoming as well.

Overall, though, the oPhone is on eye-level with the iPhone and is not to be underestimated. They are following a different application distribution model, which also shows why Apple and China Mobile have so far not warmed to each other: oPhone apps are embedded with many services from China Mobile, such as Fetion, newsletter, phone mail, etc. Some people think that even when the iPhone enters the Chinese market, it’s still doubtful that the apps of the App Store will become popular among Chinese users. The iPhone is hugely popular in the US and Europe because Apple has many loyal fans there and it has been able to extend the success of iTunes to the launch of the App Store. China Mobile knows this model and it will focus on the localization of design and promotion as much as possible when they promote the oPhone. It is to launch the Mobile Market in August, which had already provided 582 games, 178 mobile theme, and 344 apps up to July 3rd. Whether Mobile Market can be equally as successful as the App Store or not still depends on China Mobile’s operational and organizational abilities.

Some people may think that the oPhone will even kill the iPhone, but I do not share this view. The iPhone is not an ordinary mobile, so its launch will have some deep influence in the 3G market of China. That’s why both China Mobile and China Unicom are thinking a great deal about the iPhone’s launch in China. I believe competition will be increasing in the 3G market day by day. For a large number of Chinese mobile users, this is actually not bad news.

Since 2006, Chinese Social Network Sites have started to boom. After Myspace and Facebook became more and more successful in US and Europe, some Chinese Social Network Sites started to imitate the idea and gained momentum over the last several years, such as Xiaonei and Kaixin001. US is the origin of Social Network Site, and some of them also want to take market share in Chinese market. However, we can witness the fact that although Facebook recently celebrated 200 million active users, only 300,000 of those users are in China (only about 0.1% of Internet users in China). I’d like to talk about two most popular Social Network Sites in China nowadays, Xiaonei and Kaixin001.

Xiaonei, meaning “inside the campus”, has 40 million members already, and most of them are students. Actually, Xiaonei is known as “Facebook clone”, as it mimics Facebook in many ways. So why is Xiaonei much more successful than Facebook in China? It’s the issue of localization. When Facebook had a Chinese version, many users complained that the translations lacked accuracy. So when coming across Facebook’s apparent obliviousness to the Chinese language, many users got turned off. In a word, Facebook doesn’t understand Chinese culture. They thought other countries and cultures would adjust to US style. Xiaonei is more like a combination of blog and social interaction. It inherited the alumni website phenomenon which was very popular around seven years ago in China, by narrowing down Facebook’s usual targets to students. The interface is quite well designed. Clean and clear color with user-friendly format. Xiaonei is actually doing a good job as a copycat Social Network Site.

Kaixin001 (”Kaixin” means happy in Chinese) is another social media network with a  big focus on online games. It targets white collar workers. “Growing vegetables”, “snatching parking lots” and “friends for sale” are the most popular game applications of Kaixin001, and some people (called Kaixiners hereafter) are crazy about these games. This could be the most important reason why Kaixin001 can realize “viral marketing” among many companies. It’s not very good if you are too close to your superior or a female colleague in the company (in China, at least), but it’s OK to play Kaixin001 with them. Many white collar workers keep Kaixin001 pages open during work. This might explain why Kaixin001 can surpass Xiaonei in traffic: its white collar strategy does work.

Someone says Xiaonei imitates the idea of campus-oriented and real-name registration from Facebook, while Kaixin001 imitates game applications from Facebook. None of them imitate the whole thing. So actually if you want to be successful, you don’t have to be a lot better than Facebook, you only need to excel in one area to achieve success. Some Chinese Social Network Sites did some imitation and localization, and achieved some success as well. However, if they still want to beat the competitors and be more successful, they need to find their own path. Some large Chinese Social Network Sites have started to launch open API platforms one after another, I think it’s a good start.

This is a map of the world that demonstrates the most popular social networks by country. You can see at a glance that Facebook is the dominant social media in North America and Europe. However, as we mentioned previously, the largest social media forum all over the world is actually Tencent QQ in China (generally referred to as QQ).

QQ is definitely the most popular instant messaging network in China with 300 million users. However, QQ is not a pure social networking websites, it’s a “complex”, which includes IM (Instant Messaging), online gaming, online music, social networking services, etc., and that makes QQ different from other social networking websites such as Facebook, Myspace, or Chinese local SNS websites like Xiaonei, Kaixin, etc. So you might question whether it should really count in this table.

What is clear, though, is how successful it has become. QQ has its own IM base. At the beginning, it was just a simple IM tool with no difference from others (Picq, Ricq, Ticq(TQ), Qicq, Micq, PCicq, Oicq, OMMO, who all imitated ICQ’s idea and were published in China in 1999). But why did only QQ succeed while the others all failed? One of reason is QQ had a very friendly user interface from the very beginning, that’s why QQ has been able to retain the same style from the start. Later on, QQ integrated multiple mobile communication methods, enabling users to send messages to mobile phone users through the platform. QQ also offers several other services such as QQ.com (news portals), QQ Game (online gaming), QQ Show (virtual image design system), Paipai.com (e-commercial transaction platform), and QZone (social networking service). So if we want to compare QQ with other social networking websites, we can only count in QZone, maybe as well as QQ Xiaoyou, launched in January 2009, which targets students in high schools and universities.

So actually QQ is a special case. The service first built a huge base of users, then they tried to make use of this base to promote their social networking service, a different approach to those original social networking websites. A ranking list of Chinese SNS Websites from CR-Nielsen in December, 2008 shows: 51.com, Xiaonei.com, Chinaren.com, Kaixin001.com, Myspace.cn, 5460.net, Wangyou.com, Ipart.cn, 360quan.com, and Cyworld.com.cn. QQ (or Qzone) is not included in the top ten SNS websites in China. I agree more with this viewpoint, that QQ is more like a combined IM tool. Tencent have declared many times that in the future they will focus more on the idea “community-based instant messaging”, which could lead to their future success. All in all, social networking has just started in China!