Social Media Success: China video sites critical factor

It is well understood that consumers are viewing a significant amount of video online. It is quickly becoming the CMO's media of choice for online marketing. However, creating a video is not in and of itself sufficient to make it successful. There are many variables that can effect the success of online videos. This post focuses on social media video views based on hosting location and the top sites from data collected between December 2008 and May 2009. The two main locations where consumer uploaded video is hosted are China and US/Europe.

The videos tracked were part of social media campaigns launched by Prosperity Research for a range of clients which include fashion, sports, legal, charities, hospitality and many others. During the period from December 2008 to May 2009 101 videos were released. The majority of the videos were English language videos with Cantonese and Mandarin subtitles. The break down of number of Chinese and US/Europe video hosting sites were about equal at 24 US/Europe and 22 Chinese. After review, sites with negligible views or were closed during the study period were excluded. The remaining sites totaled Chinese (18) and US/Europe (19).

The videos were posted to the sites using the same title and description across all sites. The only differentiating factor was that on Chinese language sites the title and description was translated into Chinese. The views tracked were those recorded by the site. This study makes no claims to the accuracy of view counters on these sites with one exception. The China site www.9mv.com recorded view rates that appeared too exaggerated to be accurate and the site was eliminated from the analysis.

The two comparisons of video views are a comparison of total views during the period on the sites included in the study. The second comparison of views on the top 3 sites from China and US/Europe.

Total views of videos by location:

Top viewed sites for China and US/Europe

Summary:

The results of the analysis provided some surprising information. The expectation was that the US/Europe sites hosting predominately English language videos would receive the majority views. However, the China sites significantly outperformed based on number of views. There was also the expectation that popular China video sites www.youku.com and wwww.tudou.com would have been top performers but they did not make the top 3 spot for China. This first analysis does not provide clear reasons on why China video views outpace those of US/Europe at this point, but the results clearly point to the importance of China video hosting sites as a critical component of a social media campaign.

We trust family and friends more than strangers

It may come as a surprise to some, but a recent study by Mintel revealed that online recommendations from "virtual" friends is the second most accepted form of advice for making a brand decision. As you would expect, family and friends ranked as number one.

If you are a digital marketer this is very encouraging. However, as they say, the devil is in the detail. A closer look at this study provides some interesting details.

According to this study of consumers making brand decisions:

34% look to friends and family
25% ask their spouse (not quite family I guess)
5% use online friends

So even though online recommendations is the second most accepted source for brand decisions it still only represents 5%! That is very low. If online recommendations in the form of social media, blogs, forums and other consumer feedback is largely ignored 95% of the time where does this put TV, print, radio and other forms of advertising? Well, I have a thought on that.

The path that most of us take in making a decision to buy is usually not a snap one. It is usually a process of research and talking it over. The more important (more money) the more time we put into making our decisions. That influence which nudges us one direction or another at the final moment is most often from family and friends. However, before that final decision was made such influences as social media, TV, print and radio all played a role in helping us to do two things:

• Learn that we needed something
• Learn what it was that we needed

To summarize: Traditional advertising will be here for a very long time. Social media is very real, and as always, we trust the people we know more than those we don't.

Much success,

Doug

Hong Kong My "Real" Home

Today's blog was supposed to be about something quite different. But yesterday something very significant happened to me. This and some dramatic events of the last week, made me feel compelled to write about the effect these have had. The two events are my application for permanent residency and the other is the controversy set off by a series of videos my company marketed for a local hotel chain.


Recently I passed my 7 year mark in Hong Kong. For those that don't know, this is the time a person can apply for their permanent residency which provides a life time visa and more importantly a sense of belonging. I had looked forward to this day from the moment I had first stepped foot in Hong Kong more than 7 years past and with it came a flood of memories.

By many accounts Hong Kong is an unlikely city for me to live. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest with cold winters and dry summers. Hong Kong humidity makes me sweat so much and I wonder if I will ever adjust. Try as I may, I have never managed more than a few words of Cantonese, and over crowded places tend to make me uncomfortable; preferring the quiet of my small Sheung wan flat to the bustling streets. So what is it that made me want to stay?

It is all those things and more. It is the uniqueness of Hong Kong that makes me want to stay. And, arguably, it is what makes others want to come as well and quickly fall in love with this city; opposites attract? I don't know, but I do know that if I wanted sameness I may never have had left the US. Whereas shopping malls, high end restaurants and luxury shops maybe the mark of a good city, and Hong Kong has clearly won this race, those things can be found in most places. So what compels a person to choose one destination over another to visit? Partly it is the familiar but mostly it is for that something different, something special. What makes a person choose one place over another as their home? That is connection.

I remember the big lunch I was taken too when I arrived in Hong Kong. It is the long running tradition and joke, repeated over and over that the new Westerner gets taken to Dim Sum. Inevitably the chicken feet arrive. The Hong Kong hosts chide and smile while the guest shows shock. For my initiation the shock was on my Host's faces when I stuffed one in my mouth easy as you please. Not my favourite Hong Kong cuisine, but can't get that back home for sure.

Language is seldom a barrier in Hong Kong, less so than in some other English speaking countries. My most flabbergasting experience was during a trip to the U.K. While trying to buy tickets to the theatre, the language barrier of a common language was so frustrating for us both that the sales person ended up presenting a printed list of times and prices to short cut the embarrassing exchange. In Hong Kong I still often face issues with language, but in a different way. For those of us that do not speak Cantonese and those that do not speak English a second language has emerged. Simple sentences, gestures, smiles, patience and on rare occasion a reach for the mobile to call a helpful interpreter. Hong Kong has held strong to its unique and ever evolving Cantonese language, even when English was dominant in the governing class. Hong Kong has adapted to accommodate those that find Cantonese undecipherable and that some say you need to be born to in order to speak. So even when I listen to Cantonese and understand all most nothing at all, I realise I maybe separated by a language but not a language barrier.


I highlighted these two experiences because they were the focus of the two videos mentioned earlier. There are four videos in total, but only two were released. The videos received warm to neutral reviews for three weeks. Over 50,000 views and no negative comments. But when it was suggested that the videos portrayed Hong Kong and its people in a bad light some strong, but isolated, negativity started to emerge. The possibility of negative interpretation is not lost on me, but I see if very different. The real situations shown were ones I have lived through and can be seen repeated every day. Real people, real culture, rich and alive, intriguing and inviting. Tourists stream up and down the side streets every day looking at things they would never see at home. Some jump in and others maintain a distance, but they take pictures and, I would imagine, smile when they tell their friends. These videos showed a reality that is seldom seen in Hong Kong promotion. When you pull back the faux facade of the picture postcard-esque promotional campaigns usually associated with Hong Kong what lies below is the real essence of Hong Kong; the people and its culture. Hong Kong has strongly protected it culture and selected the best of the West to build a modern city steeped in long standing traditions. These make the real stories that are remembered and told over and over long after the memory of the generic luxury shop indistinguishable hotel room has faded.

So what is the point of this winding blog post? It is that I came to, and fell in love with Hong Kong, like I believe so many others do, not because of the picture perfect promotional campaigns but because Hong Kong is a real and vibrant city full of contrasts and culture at every turn. So after 7 years I wrote and signed to the Immigration department that

"I have, do and will consider Hong Kong to be my only place of residence".

Signed:

Douglas White

Twitter: are we smarter or dumber?

Recently Thomas Crampton wrote on Twitter that he was giving his interns at Ogilvy a Twitter test. He received some interesting comments, most negative, but mine was in the affirmative and I would like to explain why using more than 140 characters.
I had been thinking for sometime what this hyper abbreviated world we live in has done to our mental capacity. Are we dumber, as some think, because of our short attention spans or are we becoming super speed human computers? This is worth a brief moment to explore.

Our not too distant past:

Not so long ago we received our information in regularly scheduled, carefully packaged, and formatted requiring no action or response. The average person may have read the morning paper, listened to a bit of radio and tuned into the 6 o'clock news. It didn't matter what channel -- it was all the same news. During the day there were few interruptions because of no mobiles, email, faxes, msn, social sites or other such distractions. A nice leisurely pace to quietly digest a bland diet of well processed news and information. It is not a stretch to think that you would require a long attention span just to keep from going CRAZY! Imagine having no stimulus coming in between the morning paper and the evening news.

Today:

The average person probably now processes more information in an hour than a person just a short time back did in a week? year? lifetime? Using myself as an example, I receive several hundred emails every day, maintain several msn conversations, read 30 news feed, manage a team of 11 people, check out what my colleagues are doing on Linkedin twice per day, comment and giggle at new posts on Facebook at least 3 times a day, spend more than one hour a day researching online for business and a bit more for fun stuff to do after and watch a stream of twitter messages. This is only a portion of what passes my, or your, eyes and ears on any given day. It starts to become more clear that the appearance of a short attention span is, in fact, really a finely tuned brain that is able to process volumes of data, sift at lightening speed, and make quick and concise decisions with out missing a keystroke.

So how does this pertain to a Twitter test?

I could summarise most of my high school and university education in one concise Tweet. What I quickly learned in high school and University was that there were always enough, if not too many, facts around. Research was the easy part so keeping stuff in your brain did not make a lot of sense. It was always just a short reach away. What was valuable was being able to organise and communicate these facts.

• Context -- relevant to conversation
• Continuity -- maintain the thread
  
• Concise and well formed -- 100 characters
  
• Syntax correct @,#, DM, RT,
  
• Correct references included (tinyurl)
  
• Correctly sited (@douglaswhite)
  

YouTube a distant 3rd: Behind Facebook and MySpace

Surprised! Not really. Last week I wrote a blog, Social Sites a whimper or a Yell!, on the 3 stages that a social site must go through to be successful and not linger or fail. I pegged YouTube as having failed to successfully reach the third stage. This week Hitwise released data confirming my theory. I find no satisfaction in being right on this point. YouTube is a hero in my book. This application revolutionised communication by allowing free and unlimited sharing of videos. The world opened up in a way never before imagined. This was not a "me to" application, but a real revolution. But that said, if it wasn't for the deep pockets of Google it may not be around today. Why?

Top 10 Social Networking Websites & Forums - April 2009 via kwout

The 3rd important stage a viable social media/network site must evolve into is "Strong and Stable". This is recognised as the phase where the social site adds value to the end user and through this enjoys a stable user base and is able to generate revenue through channels aligned with the sites business model. There is no question that YouTube is widely used. YouTube videos can be seen everywhere. It is currently estimated that 67% of online videos streamed are through YouTube. But what does this really mean? It all seems OK but is it really?

The difficulty with YouTube is that it lacks functionality that bring people in and holds them. It is my guess that we all view more YouTube videos on Facebook or embedded on other websites than on YouTube itself. There are few, if any, functions on YouTube that make it an enjoyable experience for anyone other than those posting and managing their videos. So how does a site with enormous infrastructure costs that are disproportionate to their member numbers survive. This is the conundrum for YouTube. Whereas, Facebook and MySpace have evolved to make their sites a destination, YouTube seems to being moving further away from this target goal while providing no revenue stream to fill the gap. At this point I could paint a disappointing picture that YouTube will fall back on old school tactics of forced in-video advertising and possibly paid hosting. I hope they arrive at a more innovative and less intrusive solution, but I am not optimistic. In the mean time I assume they will continue to reach ever deeper into Google's pockets.