Mop.com: China’s “MySpace”; The SNS for Self-Proclaimed Crazy Chinese People.

Mop.com is a combination of an informative web portal, a China “Myspace” (hi.mop.com), along with a powerful forum (dzh.mop.com). Originally founded way back in 1997, Mop has evolved into a rich interactive entertainment platform with a specific focus on keeping crazy Chinese people entertained.

Mop.com: A typical Chinese web portal… with a focus on crazy.

Now when I say crazy, I don’t mean clinically mentally disturbed, I mean people with interests and opinions that border on the fringe of Chinese society; in Chinese: Bian4 Tai4. Compared to Western society? I think these people would be considered on the “inside” fringe; they have yet to surpass their Western counterparts (one trip to certain sections of Craig’s List will convince you of this point).

Mop’s average visits are about 150 million/month, with 22 million registered users. The active group is aged 18-32; these members are passionate with strong personalities and opinions. The key benefit to visitors then is in part the entertaining content, but mostly the crazy commentary. For the Chinese, Mop is where you go to have a few laughs and read some shocking content.

It’s interesting to note that while technology is important, content is king. Mop’s USP over major competitor Tianya (covered in this article) is the distinct content focus of entertainment first, culture and social matters second; while for Tianya, the reverse is true. Between these two powerful sites they command over 1/2 their total target traffic in China (50/89 million/month). Since both are simply huge user generated forums, this gives a bit more credence to the “content beats technology” theory, a point China’s social marketers should keep in mind.

A sample of what you’ll see on Mop.com.
Now while you will see interesting cultural issues on Tianya covering marriage problems, government scandals, and the pulse of China’s masses, what you’ll find on mop.com generally light and cheerful, with an emphasis on entertainment and visuals. Take for example this recent post, where users take turns photoshopping a man jumping on the beach.

It now becomes clear why Mop has a reputation for craziness; but hey, it’s a hard soul that wouldn’t find at least one of the pics above funny.

User Forum; The Heart of a great China SNS.
The heartof Mop.com isn’t it’s “Myspace” clone; the forum is the main draw. This was at first a bit confusing as you’d think it would be the SNS aspects, rather than a decidedly web1.0 forum (all you other technology snobs will agree). However, upon contemplation, it seems that the additional level of social interaction from forums is a huge requirement to a successful SNS in China; this is in part proven by Kaixin001.com – a SNS to be sure, but one that rocketed in popularity due to its online games which encourage involved “right now” social interaction, rather then periodic updates which are a main feature of Western SNS.

Mop’s forum.

The theory? Chinese don’t really want to talk about each other, more they seem interested in getting away from the daily grind. Crazy stories and online games help to achieve this goal; evidenced by their hosting sites massive popularity.

Myspace Clone; keeping everything connected.
Mop’s Myspace clone is a functional SNS; including a personal Space, community pages, blogs, BBS, chatting, etc. While offering the same suite of web 2.0 services, Mop’s offering ranks as the top product in China.

Who advertises on Mop.com?
As a mid-sized China portal, Mop doesn’t have a lot of traditional banner ads interspersed in its content. Rather, Brands have taken advantage of Mop’s social communities to launch viral campaigns.

For example, McDonald’s launched a campaign, with the slogan: “Are you niu (means both ‘ox’ and ‘cool’ in Chinese ) enough?” To complement the campaign, McDonalds sponsored a video competition held on Mop. Consumers uploaded their original videos showcasing their definition of “niu”. This helped brand McDonalds through intensely involved consumer participation.

Another example; during Chinese New Year, Pepsi cooperated with Mop to develop a “Pepsi New Year Greeting Card” online promotion. By getting users to email their Mop “Friends circle”, Pepsi virally spread its message via an interactive “Pepsi Card” accompanied by their “Joy of Sharing” branding. The campaign was successful in spreading the word, and getting communities to participate in Pepsi’s promotion.

Mop’s competition.
Mop’s got some serious competition in China, but has managed to avoid direct confrontation by focusing on light and funny topics. It’s major competitor is Tianya; but these two forums seem to complement each other, rather then directly compete.

According to information gathered by iUserTracker, in April 2007, Mop and Tianya cover half of China’s online forum users. Online forum traffic totaled 87,539,000 Chinese netizens, and among them, Mop, with 28,685,000 netizens, ranked 2nd while Tianya, with 24,021,000 netizens, ranked 3rd. Both the two forums were built in the early days of China’s internet, and have held strong positions for years.

Personal Experience with Mop.com
From BA360′s intern, Veronica:

Mop has a great niche: It’s classified as a portal site, but is mostly famous for its forum and Space. All services stick to having fun. So among competitive portal sites in China, such as, sina.com, sohu.com etc, Mop has more to offer—forum and SNS service; you can’t simply compare it with other forums, because Mop also has “space” and official organized information; neither can we compare it with SNS sites for the same reason. Mop succeeds in finding a right position for itself so as to avoid face-to-face confrontation with its competitors. It is very “functional” both because one can use it for 3 different online usages, and it labels itself as a fun providing site.

I have seen quite a few netizens saying they skip from Mop to Tianya.cn. The two work similarly with a slight opposite content weight order. As we can see from their forum layouts, Mop is more random and Tianya is more plain and serious. Mop forum is too confusingly organized but it suits its entertainment spirit. Under a serious interface like Tianya’s, users wouldn’t be easily inspired by funny and crazy thoughts.

I don’t see any friends around using Mop, I believe its feature is not mostly favored by tier1 college students and white collars. Relatively, Tianya’s clean look and cultural-social focus will serve better among these people. Although many Tianya users say they come to Tianya for fun, I don’t doubt Moppers go to Mop for more complete and simple Fun—almost a stream of consciousness, with no mind to filter their thoughts.

Random comments from Chinese users.

A discussion from tianya.com: What do you think is the difference between tianya and mop? Do you like Mop?

zhangnanyuan
I don’t feel like it. The first time I went there saw a post about Premier Jiabao Wen. I was shocked by so many intense speeches; I think Tianya has a better atmosphere.

叶果鲁西卡大王
I first knew Mop then Tianya, but I didn’t go to Mop after. Mop makes me feel sick, Tianya is of richer content.

scummy
One word: Mop is like a woman, Tianya is like a man, although Tianya is more and more like a eunuch now.

zbrz2002
I liked Mop a lot when I was studying in college. Those superb replies could always make me laugh… After, I started to feel it was full of morons. Then when I came to Tianya, I first thought the information it provided was too overwhelming. Now I haven’t used Mop for at least two years.

binout
Mop was very good in its early days, no worse than Tianya. Now…because of people, there is too much trash, but the same trend is also happening in tianya.

烤羊腰
Before 6, 7 years ago, Mop was quite cool. Now ~~~My ID hasn’t been used for years.

歪歪虎是谁
There are too many low-lifes in Mop, you can’t reason with them.

xiaomoli1976
Mop is too colorful and random with very small texts, feels stuffy.

塞上珍珠米
I was about 18, 19. I was wandering and reading posts in Mop, then shocked by a sexual intercourse of a female and a male sex organs picture. OMG, it was the first time I saw such a clear “inserted” picture. I feel it’s too obscene there; even their thoughts and words have no logic, but sex implications…

不想当主持的和尚
Strong in entertaining.

kuibobo
Older people like tianya, younger ones like Mop.

内小咩
Mop is still a kid!

初生小猫不怕鼠
Mop is more entertaining; tianya is higher end, just like QQ and MSN.

内小
Mop is somewhere you can disobey rules and relax. But a relaxing place is gradually polluted by some people’s politic speeches. Tianya is where you will lose your confidence to your country, I’d rather not go.

See the original post

China Social Media; Kaixin001.com: Making people slightly less bored.

I’ve covered Kaixin001.com before in a previous entry: Kaixin001.com; Spamming to the top; How Kaixin became China’s most popular Facebook-esque Social Media Site. This time around, let’s look a little closer at Kaixin001 in the context of it’s main competition, Xiaonei and Kaixin (Kaixin, and Kaixin001 are competitors; yes its confusing, which was the goal of Kaixin; more on this later).

“Kaixin” means happy in Chinese, or literally “open heart”; why kaixin”001″? I guess it’s the same reason why you’ll find it hard to purchase happy.com, but likely easily get happy001.com.

When comparing Xiaonei and Kaixin001, we’re really dealing with 2 versions of Facebook for China. However, looking deeper, we find a good marketing lesson in user interest targeting; ’cause really, there’s only so much utility to be derived from filling out your profile and then looking at pictures of your friend’s cat doing cute tricks. What’s an upstart social media network to do? Well beyond a hardcore spam campaign (covered in the first article), a focus in making people a little less bored with their lives is a genius stratagem.

How bored would you have to be to play a game where you steal your friend’s vegetables? …there’s your silver dollar insight into the mind of the average Chinese white collar worker.

Kicking your competitor’s digital butt won’t go unpunished however. Kaixin001 started in 2007, and in two short years has decidedly trumped Xiaonei, which was started in 2005. Xiaonei, backed by its Japanese parent company Soft Bank, launched a counter attack: Kaixin.com.

For those of you in the back row: Xiaonei is a direct copy of Facebook. Kaixin001 is a copy of Xiaonei. Kaixin is a copy of Kaixin001. Now in one sentence: Xiaonei, the copier of Facebook, created Kaixin which is a copy of Kaixin001, who had previously copied Xiaonei.

This begs the question, if Kaixin001 was so successful, why didn’t it go ahead and purchase the apparently extremely expensive kaixin.com domain? Kaixin001′s CEO will likely ask himself this question every single morning for the rest of his natural life.

Kainxin001: killing time.
The main interaction on Kaixin001 is similar to Facebook, but with a focus on games; while all the “Facebook-ish” tools are there, they get used very little in comparison to the games section.

This layout is getting pretty familiar.

The vast majority of users on Kaixin001 are white collar workers. Why is this? Well here’s my theory: When playing these games the overwhelming commentary is that the players are bored; the implication is that they were likely more bored before playing the game, and now though they are still bored, they are a little less bored then before. Now imagine Facebook or Xiaonei, which is really a way of staying in touch with others. So lets assume everyone is bored; two options: go to xiaonei, and see your friend’s boring lives, or go to kaixin001 and play a game with your friends to somewhat lift this crushing boredom.

In the end social media really isn’t rocket science; it’s just understanding these finer psychological details; which gets back to the age old concept of “value”. It reminds me of an important business concept: in horseraces, the winning horse many times wins by only a fraction of a second. The winner becomes a stud, the loser becomes glue, all for that fraction of a second. So Kaixin001 doesn’t need to be a lot better than Xiaonei, it only needs to excel in one area to achieve success. This is how Xiaonei beat Facebook China; all design elements the same with interface localization being the primary variable (another “fraction of a second phenomenon).

Advertising on Kaixin001
Product placements seem to be the primary advertising done on Kaixin001, with banner ads coming in at a very distant second. We see the typical FMCG products featured in “gifts” sections.

Send a lollipop, a diamond, an angel, a teddy bear, or Biotherm’s new make-up base product with 50% less oil residue, perfect for maintaining fair skin and that teenage youthful glow (no animals were harmed in the making of this product).

Happy001 vs. Happy.
Xiaonei’s strategy of confusing people into believing Kaixin.com was Kaixin001.com worked well, but not well enough. When you view the graph above, you’ll see that while Kaixin is grabbing a good portion of the SNS market, it certainly doesn’t seem to be slowing Kaixin001 down.

Kaixin.com’s homepage: This cute fake dog cannot compare to stealing your friend’s fake vegetables. Sorry doggie.

Personal experience with Kaixinoo1:
From BA360′s intern, Veronica:

Just in yesterday, when my classmates and I were taking photos, they suggested, “Let’s share photos on kaixin001.com tonight.” Since I have been working on SNS websites for a couple of days, I asked: “Why are you all using kaixin001.com?” One of them answered, “For vegetable planting!” (A popular virtual games on kaixin001.com) The other said, “I don’t know why…” (And this is actually a common phenomenon for many SNS users) Then I added, “kaixin001.com, not kaixin.com, right?!” “Ya, of course! “

I was somehow pushed to register kaixin001.com and kaixin.com. For the former site, I surrendered to friends’ endless invitations; for the latter, pure curiosity. Here’s a few messages I received on Kaixin001:

“Your friend “S” bought you at ￥5000 and made you his slave.”

“Your master “S” took you for a free trip to Singapore, and you are so happy.”

“Your friend “Z” bought you from “S” at ￥ 8102 and made you a nanny working for 3 hours earning money for her.”

“Your master “S” treats you to 30 new courses of Pizza hut, and you are so happy.”

My current “value” is ￥10190, and I am “so happy”, so…What’s the point?! I got nothing from “friends for sale” –a popular application copied from facebook–except an indirect “Pizza hut” ad.

All of my friends have Xiaonei IDs and half of them use kaixin001. But according to my experience in work, I have seen more colleagues with kaixin001 pages open during work. This might explain why kaixin001 can surpass Xiaonei in traffic; its white collar strategy does work. However the games seem too simple to capture my interest for long.

Besides, I don’t think Rand would feel happy seeing me stealing a cabbage from other’s garden during work (another popular “vegetable stealing” application).

[from Rand: I have a strict "no stealing vegetables" policy.]

Some random comments from Tianya:

断翅的风筝
I just started play games on kaixin001 on last Wednesday, and have forgotten to check in tianya everyday till now. Dangerous.

断翅的风筝
Yep. Added “Parking War” on Friday, and worked on it during weekend. I have earned 9 cars.

英国小木匠我来了
Haha~ my colleagues all play together~ it’s been months~

灵魂囚禁在本田
Many people invited me, but I felt it boring and didn’t register.

脑残教教主
Played for a few days and started to feel bored.

徐端
Virtual community games, why would it be interesting…

狐沙沙
I changed my car to a cheaper one and upgraded a seashore scene. Then everybody told me to sell my cars because they wanted to park there… Actually it’s really boring, or you can play that friend for sale or poking, but in a word: still boring.

monica_bxn
Yes, boring but will still be there. It shows there are so many bored people~~

o0ovip
It is boring, but as you play you find that actually moron is also a pretty good living status, wish us all happy. (kaixin means happy in Chinese) I personally think it’s similar to xiaonei, but more fun.

借我一块钱
Not at all. I totally lost in the situation and was then bought as a slave, and also kept in a little cold dark room.

fyfan1223
kaixin001 is very boring, time wasting, and how can such easy games be called happy?

狼假寐
That shitty kaixin001, very, very boring. Just polling, friends sales, poking, these 3 tricks. So dull and boring. You can fall into it and forget tianya? Why not say you fall into Tetris to forget World Of Warcraft!! You are killing me!!!

纳兰珈珈
I also registered yesterday~~I am logged in right now, but I don’t think it’s very interesting~~I admit I am old-fashioned~~~~~

linyad
No matter how you play, it’s just buying people, parking cars and voting…but increase more communication with old friends lost in touch.

夜静更深
Bored during work and started to continuously vote for others…

o0ovip
I play it just because I’m bored, no one that isn’t bored will play it. The site is targeted at this feature of consumers, or how can it gather millions of people in such a short period of time?

o0ovip
I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and parked my car to a different location…faint..

细细个米娜
Logged in twice, but really can’t see any fun from it. Why so many people saying it’s fun? It’s not innovative and is boring. And I don’t know why my classmate wanted me to register, and she was so happy making me her slave. Can’t figure out any fun from this. Totally naïve + boring.

See the original post

China Social Media; Xiaonei: China’s Facebook Replica.

As copycatting goes, China is King. Now while we normally associate copies with inferior quality or some odd defect from the original, Xiaonei, on the other hand, is a great example of digital copycatting done right. It’s funny how I’ve turned copying someone else’s work into a positive. This is just one of many signs that I’ve been in China too long.

Xiaonei.com is the biggest and most influential SNS website in China. It’s an unabashed straight up copy of Facebook; and provides users with groups, instant messaging, albums, marketplaces and other online service experiences to meet their needs for association, information, entertainment and trade.

As of today, Xiaonei has over 40,000,000 registered users, 400,000,000 PV, 22,000,000 daily visits. These stats are from Xiaonei, and are a little on the extreme side, but hey – when you reach success by completely copying another well established website and received no IP repercussions, then what’s a little fudging of the numbers right? That’s small time stuff.

A familiar friend: Facebook.

Xiaonei.com: Digital Déjà Vu.

Xiaonei was created in 2005, and similar to Facebook, was favored primarily among college students. At the end of 2008, Xiaonei decided to broaden its target market to include a wider user base… like Facebook (hmm I’m sensing a trend). It currently has groups of 1000 oversea colleges, 3000 domestic colleges, 8000 high schools, and 85,000 companies.

According to chinarank.org.cn, Xiaonei ranks 52 among all websites in China. It’s daily traffic is around 7200 out of every one million netizens.

Why Xiaonei beat Facebook in China.
This one is just embarrassing. While Facebook has a Chinese version, many users complained that the translations lacked accuracy. If you’ve ever tried to learn Chinese, then you know it’s a very complex language. I mean c’mon, all the words are pictures for godsakes; and that’s just the beginning. With its 5000 years of history, the Chinese know how to turn a phrase in their own language. So when coming across Facebook’s obvious obliviousness to the Chinese language, many users got turned off.

Facebook’s localization lacked the finer points of the Chinese language.

How important is the correct localization? We’ll clearly important enough to launch Xiaonei into the internet stratosphere, while Facebook China took a backseat. Design-wise, Xiaonei’s inner and outer pages are pretty much copies of Facebook, localizations seem to be the biggest variable factor.

Primary User Interactions.
Unlike other BBS or forums like Tianya.cn, Xiaonei is a pure social networking site; it’s simply an online version of your life. You can meet friends, chat, gossip, share, etc.

Primary Target Group.
校内（xiaonei，means at campus in Chinese), thus Xiaonei’s main targets are college students, age 18 – 25; especially students in 1-tier or 2-tier cities.

Xiaonei dominates the Chinese college online market. For example, Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) group on Xiaonei has 23,089 members now, while the number of native students studying in SISU is currently about 7,000… alumnus outnumber students. This provides a positive social impact on many student’s lives, both during and after college.

Who Advertises on Xiaonei?
Pretty much any company trying to reach college students. This includes the usual suspects of FMCG; from Coke, to Maybelline, to P&G.

Xiaonei Tests the SNS Profit Waters.
I’ve always thought that the new trend in social media is akin a modern day goldrush; seems easy to do, the people who do it first will reap huge rewards, and its hard as hell if you’re the 2nd+ mover. Most social media networks in China do not make a profit; but Xiaonei on the other hand has tested out several ways to bring home the bacon beyond the simple banner ad.

Buying virtual gifts for friends? Perhaps you have too much money.

Expanding its user base was an obvious move; however, what is it about Chinese that can accelerate the user base registration process? Taking a cue from QQ, China’s top instant messenger service, Xiaonei began selling virtual goods, virtual pets, virtual gifts; it has even created its own virtual currency to purchase additional services; partnering with online banks like Alipay.

Who Competes with Xiaonei?
Kaixin001.com competes directly with Xiaonei; the current trend is an online exodus from Xiaonei to Kaixin001 after graduating from college.

Kaixin001 is another social media network with a big focus on online games. I guess Chinese have more time to play games after school than during school? Time to take a closer look at your Chinese employees!

Another reason Kaixin001 is taking over could be related to Xiaonei’s recent sale to a Japanese company, Soft Bank. When mixing China’s general negative sentiment toward Japan for atrocities committed during WWII, many Xiaonei users feel their information isn’t safe anymore. Is it a valid fear? Irrelevant; perception will dominate logic; and as the graph shows above, Xiaonei may get left behind.

Personal Experience with Xiaonei
From BA360′s intern, Veronica:

It took me a long to decide to use Xiaonei. To me, it was just another windows live space, blog… etc. But since all my friends and classmates were using it, I finally went ahead and signed up after a year.

Xiaonei is actually something different. Let’s leave the fact that it’s a copy of Facebook aside. Xiaonei is a combination of blog and social interaction. It inherited the alumni website phenomenon going on around 7 years ago by narrowing down Facebook’s usual targets to students. The interface is quite well designed. Clean and clear color with user-friendly format. I like it. Considering the original Facebook’s evolving look is getting worse, Xiaonei is doing a good job as a copycat SNS.

As a young netizen, I never use BBS, but I do use Facebook and Xiaonei every day! At first, I couldn’t believe I found so many primary school classmates who I thought I lost forever! I like to see what’s going on among my friends. As it’s obvious that we are apart in different countries, areas, have different matters to deal with; we communicate online, write down notes, moods, upload pictures, publish information.

Now my college teacher is using Xiaonei as a college information publishing platform. She put university job info, admin info in her Xiaonei page. She usually SMS us “I have put job info in my Xiaonei.” So I have no reason not to use it, do I?

See the original post

Why do I blog?

Over time, this blog has built up traffic, but revenues are still almost zero.

So why blog? (Hint: The final reason and note from Candy Chan is what prompted this posting.)

1- Revenue: I do make some money. I would characterize it as “liquor money”. A few dollars a month from Amazon when people buy a book I recommend and a few dollars a month from Lexis/Nexis. I once tried putting up Google advertising, but pulled it down after seeing the type of ads it felt appropriate for my blog. (I did make US$20 in a few days time, but it is not the way I want to earn money!)

2- Community: Through this blog I have met and interacted with a wide range of people both online and many eventually in the real world. These have included some of the smartest people about the topics that interest me. (Social Media and Asia)

3- Knowledge: The knowledge held by the community following my blog is incredible. That is why I sometimes seem to post incomplete postings. They are incomplete because I am hoping to get further insight and information from the people who read this blog.

4- Helping people: I often get asked if I know anyone appropriate for a range of jobs, particularly in journalism and Social Media. Rather than search for the right individual, I have started posting the job ads online. The result is that quite a few people have got jobs thanks to my blog, including the person below.

When I graduated from journalism school in the States in early 2009, I was desperately searching for a journalism-related job in China.

For days and nights I browsed hundreds of foreign media websites and checked their “career” pages. Sadly, most sites do not post their vacancies and even when some media do, most of the listed jobs are non-journalism related like “auditor” or “webmaster”. At that time, I think the best way to look for my dream job is to find an “agent” that is well connected with the media.

By chance, I found the Foreign Correspondents Club of Facebook and the creator, Thomas Crampton. I am was so excited to see the list of jobs posted by freelancers and foreign media there. One day, Mr Crampton posted a note on FCC FB about a researcher job in Shanghai for a German media. I applied for it and a few months later got the job!!!

I really love my job now and I would say, this site is of paramount importance for those graduates like me, who are not well connected, to get to know more about the news of different media in the Asia pacific region.

Now, whenever someone asks me how do I got this job, (it is not common for Hong Kong journalists to work for foreign media in China) I say via Facebook!

People are stunned, but I tell them it is a group set up by Mr Crampton. I tell them: Please, do not look down the power of social media. You can dig out something incredible if you make good use of it.

see the original post

Sustainable Models for News Media

Check the video out below. It's striking to learn that how much people spend time on newspaper websites vs. on facebook!

Attending Hong Kong University’s International Media Conference today. Below are some snippets from a panel I took part in on the sustainable models for journalism. (We did not find the answer). Impressive team from HKU has been throwing up multimedia as it happens. Behind the team has been Diane Stormont using Cover it Live as the way to aggregate and quickly publish.

More on the conference via Twitter hashtag: #IMCHK

See the original post

Evolution of Asia’s Luxury Obsession

The role of luxury goods in Asian societies is a fascinating topic. Among those from whom I have learned most about the subject are Asian luxury specialist Radha Chadha and co-author of the book The Cult of the Luxury Brand.

Ipsos, the research firm, recently presented their take on the progression towards luxury by various markets.

The description of Japan highlights the unique way that Japanese relate to luxury, relative to the rest of Asia (and perhaps the world).

Ipsos describes Japanese as “Locked into Luxe habits”. Others speak about Japan as an example of “Mass Luxury”. Both concepts are apparent contradictions in terms - luxury is supposed to be something special, not everyday - but how else can you explain the obsession by Japanese consumers for luxury goods?

According to Ipsos, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore are headed the direction of Japan.

See the original post

Demographics of China’s Wealthy

Interesting research report from McKinsey & Company about the wealthy consumers of China.

In addition to concluding that 80 percent of China’s wealthy are below the age of 45 - think about that for a second! - they also demarcated seven kinds of wealthy Chinese consumers.

See the orignal post