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.

I’d like to draw your attention to a very interesting report, recently published by Wetpaint and Altimeter: “The world’s most valuable brands. Who’s most engaged? - ENGAGEMENTdb Ranking the Top 100 Global Brands”. The report tries to objectively evaluate marketing efforts in social media by quantifying the depth of a company’s engagement in different social media channels.

The key findings:
The report finds four different types among the surveyed companies, depending on the quantity of channels they use and the depth of their relative engagement in those channels. Furthermore, and now it gets really interesting, the report manages to show a certain positive correlation between social media engagement and financial performance. The authors relativize their findings (maybe they were a little scared by their own success?), but still.

Some details:

Overall, Starbucks gets the highest score, followed by Dell and eBay, while Allianz, AIG, Wrigley and Mercedes-Benz have an almost non-existing social media engagement (p.23-25). Judging by industry  averages, the report shows that technology and media firms are the most engaged in social media, while financial or food and beverage firms lack both in channel quantity and engagement depth (p.4).
Additionally to these quantitative results, the report also includes four case studies, trying to establish best practices in social media engagement by showing what Starbucks, Toyota, SAP and Dell do.

What do you think? Do the results match your own perception or is there something the report misses? Tell us on Twitter!

Ian Drew, Sr. VP Marketing at ARM

A new excerpt from our e-book “How to Market in ICT Today” is now available at techmarketing.ch. It features Ian Drew of ARM, the world’s leading semiconductor intellectual property (IP) supplier. The ARM business model involves the designing and licensing of IP to a network of partners that includes the world’s leading semiconductor and systems companies. These partners utilise ARM’s IP designs to create and manufacture system-on-chip designs found in OEM applications ranging from digital set top boxes and more than 90% of the world’s mobile handsets, to car braking systems and network routers.

To provide you with a little amuse-bouche, here’s Ian’s view on marketing failures:
“The answer is, we’ve never failed, but sometimes we haven’t been successful! Some of our early online stuff didn’t go very well, because we thought the web was more of a front door to show our products, but really what people wanted from our website was a home with various ways to get in, a very porous place.”

This week, I mainly did translation work for the e-book. Now the first draft is finished. This is a very detailed job and needed much patience to do it. At first the speed of translation was a bit slow, because I am not very familiar with some terminology in this field and I needed to look up some terminological dictionaries and some related Chinese books as well. But gradually I got used to it and started to increase efficiency. However, there is one thing that always haunted me from the beginning to the end of the translation. When I translated English into Chinese word by word, sometimes it made no sense because different languages may have different logics when referring to deeper meaning. If I do it by free translation, it will be more in line with the Chinese habit of using language. However, I prefer keeping it as original as possible, therefore you get a sense of how these experts think. You always have to make a choice.

After two weeks hard work, I finally finished the first draft of the Chinese version of the e-book. I read this e-book for several times and find it’s a good book to read, not only for marketing guys, but also for people who are interested in social media marketing or online marketing. The six experts from ICT companies have lots of experiences of product management and product marketing, and most of them are actually VP Marketing. They have done lots of traditional marketing such as trade shows, big events, etc. However, they are making use of more and more online ways and benefit from them. All of them have positive attitude towards online marketing stuff. I think it’s a trend.

Online marketing in China is just at the very beginning stage, Chinese companies really need good examples set for them, especially those who would like to expand their business to European and American markets. In this e-book, the six experts all talked about the differences of doing marketing in Europe, US, and Asia. Even for different regions in Europe, the style could be totally different. For those Chinese companies who have already succeeded in Chinese local market and also want to win in international markets, there is a gap between them. For me this is natural, because we do have different culture, which leads to a different way of doing business.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we’re running a discussion forum to follow-up on topics from our e-book “How to Market in ICT Today”. The current question being discussed:
“Will face-to-face meetings still be necessary or do you think that with the rise of digital video conference systems, webinars, online communities etc. this will come to an end? How much are you doing now already if any?”

We’ll pass on the results of the discussion to you once the discussion concludes, so be sure to drop by the blog from time to time. In the mean time, we’re very much interested in your opinion. Please feel free to either drop me a note by email or to visit our Facebook group.

The e-book is now available for sale and we’ve set up a payment system via paypal, directly from our website. We might add other options in the future, but right now, paypal is the easiest and also least expensive way. Since we’re donating 100% of the income generated to “Terre des Hommes”, we don’t want to pay a lot of commission to stores and other intermediaries – 100% of your 5 Euros will go to charity!

Now, let me tell you a bit about “Terre des Hommes” (TdH). The TdH movement first started in Switzerland in 1960 and today numbers eleven independent, national organisations in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain, Switzerland and Syria. Together they form the International Federation of TdH.
The federation’s global income for 2007 was over 100 million Euros, of which 80% went to actual field projects, 14% to administration and 5% to advocacy and information. Almost half of the funds were donated by the general public, while government and EU funds contributed another quarter. TdH runs development and humanitarian projects and provides advocacy programmes in order to advance children’s rights on a local and international level.
One very important engagement, in my opinion, is TdH’s fight against child trafficking. The value of the global human trafficking trade is estimated at 32 billion USD, and the exploitation of children is the most abominable form of this modern day slave trade. TdH has succeeded in encouraging anti-child-traffic legislation in Africa and South Asia and has played a major part in establishing child protection units on a local and national level in European countries of origin of trafficked children (Albania, Kosovo, Moldova, etc.). (sources: Terre des Hommes)

Children are both our future and our biggest responsibility and TdH takes a stand here. A worthwhile cause to donate to.

We’d like to announce that our e-book project now has its very own website. This site will serve as a hub for all the activities to come and for all the information you might need. You will find excerpts of the interviews, a list of participants, information on the charity it supports and where to buy the e-book. The first interview excerpt features Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and Founder of the well known IT security company.

One thing we’re especially thrilled about is the discussion forum we are running. Right now, our interview partners are privately discussing the topic “How is online marketing influencing your company strategy right now?” We believe that such a follow-up discussion will yield additional insights and we plan on releasing it to the public soon. So, please keep an eye out for it.

For those of you who like Facebook, we’ve set up a Facebook group for the e-book, too (Techmarketing - How to market in ICT today). The idea is to keep it streamlined with current topics discussed in our forum. So, if you’d like to post your own view on how online marketing is influencing your company strategy, please refer to the Facebook group.

Last but not least, the e-book is also on Twitter now. Following Tech2Market, you’ll be the first to know about news and events concerning the e-book and the topics discussed.

As Ralf mentioned in his blog earlier today, there’s now an iPhone app for Geert Hofstede’s set of five cultural dimensions to use when communicating or doing business across borders. The dimensions are Power-Distance, Masculinity, Individualism, Uncertainty Avoidance and Long-Term Orientation. Hofstede’s distillation of his and others’ work in cross cultural management, drawing on business experience, social science and anthropology studies, is impressive, and a great instant guide to cultural background and perceptions. But just how useful is it?

The first thing to note is that the 5 dimensions are generalized — different regions and even different companies also have their own cultures, and so doing it country by country means a level of generalization. The terms themselves also mask detail. For example, Switzerland rates slightly higher on masculinity than the UK, and it is certainly a more patriarchal society. But at the same time the Swiss (at least in the North) are noticeably less “macho” than in much of the UK. A further issue is that reflexivity is also important - so, while a US businessman may be aware of how the Japanese prefer to do business, the Japanese will also be aware of how US businessmen do business. The final point is that all views of culture also reflect a cultural viewpoint and a particular agenda. To be fair, the disclaimer on the download site hints at these limitations. In a sense, then, this app is a bit like a travel phrase book, something that addresses the basics that you need to avoid misunderstandings and causing offence.

If you’re interested in taking the idea further, a great place to start is Edward T. Hall’s classic book from 1976, Beyond Culture. Hofstede’s 3rd scale, individualism, is similar to one of the key ideas in that book, namely high- and low-context societies. High-context societies typically discuss everything that seems to be of any importance at all within the “in-group” — close colleagues, friends and relatives. So, for example, business meetings are often simply formal ratification of decisions that have been reached already, and companies are likely to hire and to do business with people they are already connected to by family or social ties. Examples of high-context cultures are most Asian countries, France and Italy. The US is very much a low-context culture and, according to some, so are the UK and Germany, so information is discussed on a need-to-know basis, with less distinction between in- and out-groups. One application of this is that when low-context people bring fresh information and issues for discussion and decision at meetings, this strikes people from high-context cultures as abrupt or unnecessary, as the idea of a meeting is so different.

The slight caution I would offer offer over the app is that Hofstede over-emphasizes cultural differences. In my view, it is important to see the other side — differences stand out because we look for commonality, and the search for commonality is important. It is actually at the heart of developing cultural competence, so to focus solely on differences should not be the main thing. To find commonality, it’s important to learn as much about the way a society works — history, governance, entertainment, customs, culture — as possible.

So these indices are really a helpful first step to developing cultural competence, a quick guide for instant use and to clearing up or avoiding major misunderstandings. The next steps you could characterize as “learn, imagine, enrich”. Firstly, learn more about the culture. Secondly, imagine yourself as you might be perceived from a different cultural mindset - not just your behaviour style, but your way of thinking. The final step is to see that another frame of cultural reference offers things that are not included in yours, so offering opportunities to enrich communication, and move beyond do’s and don’ts.

A couple of weeks ago, Seth Godin did a nice blog post on why cartoons work, referring to Tom Fishburne’s book This One Time, at Brand Camp on the subject. Three days later, Google announced its Chrome browser using a cartoon strip - either a coincidence or a response even faster than the browser.

When you look at the Chrome comic strip content, it presents exactly what Google wants to say, but makes you read it, too. They don’t do a sort of phony FAQ-style “it’s interesting you say you’re always typing your search in the address bar – because that’s exactly what you can do with Chrome” dialogue. They just illustrate the product history, aims and benefits in real detail in a way that makes you want to read on. As cartoons go, it’s OK: you keep reading, but you wouldn’t buy it in the news-stand. As marketing, it’s brilliant - there is so much here that would take ages to say in prose, and the combination of white paper and user manual would be a horrible structure that few readers would struggle all the way through. To circumvent that problem, Google cleverly uses a tab and address bar structure.

I was impressed by the readability of Google’s strip, as it switches seamlessly between visuals and prose and has characters point at features in the graphics and ’speak’ at the same time. Some of the stuff in there is pretty technical, but I was still happy to keep reading even where it went beyond my knowledge (e.g. the garbage collection page - I still got the point, i.e. no memory leaks and more efficient and faster garbage collection).

The number one advantage, as Seth Godin points out, is that we love dialogues, because folks are talking in front of us rather than at us. I agree. There’s something that reminds me in this of people-watching. It’s plain interesting (though I wouldn’t pay to do it). And I’m not alone. Go to any discussion forum and you will see the number of people reading it is always more than the number actually submitting. For marketers, the beauty of this is that you represent your customer benefit in a way that is interesting and appears authentic.

A word of warning, as always when a medium catches on. You need to do it well, and subtly, otherwise it will be either too “me-too”, funny in the wrong way, or plain cheesy (if plain cheesy isn’t self-contradictory). Just show it to your friends first, and tell them they have to be cruel to be kind sometimes.