This week we saw the yet another marketing event being held in Beijing. This one, simply called, "Marcom Beijing 2010"was billed on their website as "the first international conference with exhibition on marketing and advertising covering the whole value chain of the marketing & advertising industry. It is designed to become the premier annual meeting place of media professionals from all over China and abroad".
I was pleased to be presenting yesterday on one of my favorite topics, 'social media marketing'. I was joined on the panel by Chris Tang, Managing Director of The Hoffman Agency Asia Pacific, Simon Adriatico, VP Sales & Marketing and Donna Li, GM of Strategic Marketing & Media Planning, Renren.com
There seemed to be able 60-70 people attending this session and the each of the panelist gave a fairly introductory, basic appraisal of the Chinese social media environment (including myself). Given Donna and Simon work at SNS properties they spoke specifically about what Renren and P1 respectively are doing in social media.
The point of interest for me was when Donna mentioned that Renren had developed a 'Groupon' type product and it confirmed my view that we will soon be seeing more S-Commerce (social commerce) augment the sites revenue models. The core point from P1 was that they did 60 offline events to support their online community and I was left wondering if this was because of the 'lack of value' in a pure digital community or was it an attempt to have a differentiated offering to the other SNS in China.
Chris Tang gave more a 'state of the nation' view on social media and spoke generally about this space. Given her company is a PR firm, she spoke from a perspective of communications in Social Media. A good speaker and was nice that she appeared to have engaged the audience. Only downside was a focus on Twitter (where we don't have this service in China). I could not make out if she drew a relationship to Sina's micro-blog or alternative media's.
My presentation pulled a number of charts from CNNIC that showed just how big the Internet space is and gave stats on usage, mobile access, motivations for using social media etc.... Seems as a presenter, you have got to draw stats from CNNIC as I saw the saw charts a few times in the various talks. Also, I provided 5 points for companies looking to do social media marketing and spoke of the importance to do monitoring (listening) prior to starting any smm activity.
Here is my presentation
Marcom Beijing 2010- Social Media Session
If you were there or have some comments then please put a note below.



