Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

The car market in China is understandably massive, with a population of around 1.4 Billion. To give you an idea around 15,000 new cars go on the road in Beijing each week, over 700,000 new cars hit the Beijing streets in 2010.

The market is big and all carmakers want a slice of the action. All major car models are sold here, foreign car manufacturers like Mercedes Benz and BMW have large scale manufacturing plants outside of Beijing in a city called Shenzhen, to service the ever growing need for luxury cars in China and for export to other markets.

When you start out developing an online Community you always underestimate the work effort required to build and maintain not just content but encouraging people to engage and participate.

I wanted to reflect on this given my interest in maintaining and developing our own Community. What are some of the techniques being used on other Community sites that might help me in getting active, engaged members? What are some of the things that have failed? What seems to have worked?

With many Western Brands wanting to create a voice in the Chinese social media world it is not surprising that most turn to Weibo. With over 200+ million users on Sina Weibo alone (not including the Tencent Weibo users), this rapidly growing microblogging social networking platform offers an easy way for businesses to stay in front of and stay engaged with customers on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, many businesses struggle with optimizing this opportunity, not fully understanding the full potential of the tool. Here I have put some simple practices that should help your business expand its Weibo horizons.

There seems to be a real gap in the marketing of Chinese social media. I mean just look at all the Western bound Agencies promoting social media management. US and European Agencies offering to make Facebook fan pages, run your twitter program and grow your social voice.

Sure, some other marketing firms in China are also offering this for local equlivant sites but after I completed a comprehensive online search of the more established Agencies in China and what they are providing in the way of Chinese social media management services it became obvious their were few options.