Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

Chinese B2C e-commerce website 360buy.com has announced via its official microblog that it plans to recruit 20,000 new e-commerce talents in 2012 to meet the development demands of the company.

Social networking service Renren acquired 100 percent of 56.com, one of China’s video streaming services. The deal is worth $80 million dollars and is expected to be finalized in the fourth quarter of 2011. 56.com is one of China’s leading video sites, though it ranks well below competitors Youku, Tudou, Ku6, and Qiyi in terms of visitors.

There is a long list of US companies that head into China only to find the going much tougher (Look at AOL, eBAY and MySpace as some examples). Now it is the turn of Groupon to follow this path. They announced today that they are closing under-performing offices and will lay off several hundred employees as its joint venture with Tencent has failed to gain traction in China. 

For many Western marketers, the prospect of working within the Chinese social media market is a daunting one. Not only is there a natural language barrier, there is also the additional pressure of navigating within an unfamiliar social networking environment.

It with this in mind that I wanted to write a book that walked Western marketers through the Chinese Internet landscape and then drilled down into the social media platforms that marketers need to consider when engaging with a Chinese audience.