Yesterday I attended the CIC Internet-Worth-Of-Mouth conference at the School of Management Fudan University, Shanghai. CIC is the first and leading IWOM research and consulting firm in China. They are on the forefront of exploring Chinese digital culture, utilizing patent pending technology to mine an ever growing archive of over 2 billion consumers comments taken from Chinese media sources. The founder and chairman of CIC, Sam Flemming, opened the event. “There’s a lot of buzz about buzz”.
There were various speakers from agencies, the university, as well as a case study from the brand Dell, which appears to be doing an amazing job on social dialogue with its customers.
First speaker, Scott Spirit, was one of the most relevant to me as he’s doing the kind of job I’m thinking also doing in that branch in some years. He’s the global chief strategy officer at the advertising agency WPP. But to be honest, apart from an awesome video he showed, he didn’t tell me anything really new. The numbers are there: social media is big, sure, but we already know this, no? Perhaps this was of course a good introduction for people not working in the social media or communication scene but have their own business and are totally new to the subject. Another thing I rather found strange, as this also continued mostly during the whole conference: while we were talking about social media in China, most social networks used as an example were Facebook and Twitter, which both are blocked here in the country. Anyway, good narrator, good opening for what was about to come.
We then came to Dr. Zou Deqiang, assistant professor of Marketing at Fudan University. He showed us some mobile examples from car rental and car sharing companies. As I was some months ago at the ‘Mobile Marketing Conference’ in Brussels, this also didn’t blow me away, but it was a cool insight to show how big mobile applications can go and how they can help brands, customers and perhaps even the environment (in this case: care sharing). A win-win(-win) situation. Mobile is the future, I am damn sure of that as well. Soon everybody will own a smartphone and we can’t even image at this moment what all the possibilities in the future will be to do with it. For those who have been reading this blog, you know I’m already totally exited about this.
Next speaker was Clement Yip, chief creative director and managing director at the Chinese digital agency Agenda. Pity time was running short, so he had to hurry up and was only able to show us one case study his agency did. I totally forgot what it was. Sorry.
Then, to my humble opinion, the best speaker of the event: David Liu, Founder and CEO of Jiepang. The Chinese equivalent from the western ‘location-based’ social network Foursquare. I don’t believe he was making any promotion for his business, but was driven by a passion and personal belief when he stated “location is the future”. He had an awesome slide in which he displayed the future of social networks. While we first started sharing our interest with people we don’t know (best example: MySpace), we shifted to the need to share with people we do personally know so we can show what we’re doing and how our life is being lived (of course best example: Facebook), while at the same time we want people to know what we’re doing at this particular moment or what we’re busy with (best example again: Twitter). Something interesting between those two happened as well: while first Facebook saw Twitter as a competitor, they both seem to grew largely at the same time and did not take users away from each other. Why? Because the information you share on Facebook is personal and is (hopefully) to be shared with personal contacts only, while Twitter is content-based, to share with people you don’t know but have the same interests you have. The next step will be “where are you” he claimed. With app’s which are run more efficiently through GPS-systems, and more and more people owning a device on which applications can be run: this will be the next thing. People, companies, restaurants and bars, .. you name it, the device will find it. Perhaps if you know your friend is in the same city and you’re up for a drink, you even don’t need to text him anymore to ask where he’s located. You’ll just see it on your screen right away. I do have to confess I find this extremely frightening. His opening idea “the shelter”, about how social people are (meeting place for a coffee and a talk) reminded me again we still should aim for offline social interaction, more then online. Sorry, but that’s still my idea Mister Liu.
After the break, we came to our last speaker: Jacqui Zhou. She’s Dell’s social media globalization manager. Apparently Dell is doing an amazing job on social media and social interaction with the customers. I’m not only saying this because she gave me that impression; other speakers as well were full of this case study and a quick look at Dell’s website and online shop shows you they do. Dell is also setting up a ‘Social Media Mission Control Centre’ at their headquarters: a 24h operation room with people to help you wherever you are and whatever your (Dell-related) problem may be. Perhaps something the people from T-Mobile can learn from (people in Holland and perhaps Belgium understand this I guess). Her metaphor between social media and transportation (starting with the invention of the wheel) during the presentation also left a nice open question at the end: ‘Will we miss the beginning?’.
After her presentation we had a Q&A-round of which I didn’t understand a word (at least from the question part). The microphone for the people in the audience was to quiet and when I heard the answers from the speakers: Or they gave the people an irrelevant answer, or the questions were not that interesting. Apart from one question: We seem to have talked the whole time about B2C social interaction, what about B2B? As this answer applies for every marketing rule which tries to explain the B2C and B2B difference: the field is more outspoken in its own unique way; different for every company. Some rules will apply for it and some don’t, chose wisely the ones you’ll take.
Conclusion, I was very glad I was there, no doubt about that. I didn’t hear a lot of new things, but the location-based idea I’m definitely keeping in mind. Thanks for the free invitation from Chander Quo. Hope I can attend more of these events the time I’m here.
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