First official day at Chinabiz Speakers

t Today was the first official day of Chinabiz Speakers, the project that might pop up here every now and then. What makes this project special for me is that it also offers an opportunity to test some of the new-media techniques I have been reading, learning and talking about in a very practical way.
The morning began by sending off press releases to media outlets and through mailing lists of different Foreign Correspondents Clubs. The classic press release is more or less passe, but I do think it is for a lot of purposes useful to write up in one page what you are up to and where people can call you. Otherwise, sending off press releases to the old media was only a way to pay tribute to my old occupation, since I do not expect too much off it for our project.
We are - in terms of news - squeezed between 12 million recalled toys and a collapsed bridge. You have to know your place. But where in the past you could only hope somebody would still notice you, today a project like ours can follow the long tail. We do not have to be Harry Potter's to get things done.
Using your networks and relationships is key in the new-media toolkit, building up conversation with your different constituencies. Fortunately, the speakers' business is very much a people's business, even better, people who are supposed to bring in huge networks themselves.
Plan one was to get a core group of now slightly over 30 speakers on a closed mailing list to start forming a group. Some of the speakers do not each other, but some don't.
Plan one also failed, at least today, since the Google mailing lists have a quota of 30 people and by putting 31 on my list, I triggered off the Google spam alarm. My list was not activated and I seem to on a waiting list while a real human being looks at it.
Plan two was the mobilization of my own network. I had prepared emails to my friends and contacts that could be interested in the project and started to blast them off. What I first noticed was how many people are still on holidays: many out-of-office messages came back. What was further striking is the huge number of people who changed email addresses in the past two years. Then the Google spam guards hit again: after 500 emails they thought I should take a brake and they blocked my account for 24 hours. Fortunately, there is still Outlook.
Then we started to reactivate Chinabiz with a piece on KFC by one of our speakers Warren Liu. With over 20,000 subscribers interested in business in China Chinabiz is a network of itself and we are going to ask our speakers, if they are not yet one of our columnist, to join that stable of writers every now and then.
My digitally advanced friends suggested I should also start a group on Facebook. I did so, but this might not yet be the tool for the biggest part of my constituency. But in terms of networks, you can never have enough of them. In less than 24 hours, I have now already 26 members there!
That is very short my virtual marketing strategy for ChinaBiz Speakers. I will report now and then about the results.

Update: Ah, forgot to tell you that ChinaBiz Speakers has of course its own weblog. It focuses more on operational issues but shows also how the network is slowly getting into place. I think.

The lagging online ad market, more

Kaiser at Ogilvy reports about a meeting he had with 50 Tsinghua EMBA-students, all senior executives of Chinese companies. He asked them about their explanation for the fact that consumers spend a huge percentage of their time online, while ad companies keep on pouring most of their marketing budgets into TV-stations.

The answers were intriguing, honest, and often very funny: One gentleman basically said that at least in China, people in a position to determine ad spend spend all their days actually running their businesses, and their evenings getting drunk at Karaoke parlors, and they can’t be bothered with learning about the Internet. Others said that marketing decision-makers extrapolate from their own Internet use, which is very purpose-driven: they hunt for specific bits of information and never bother to look at ads. Most boiled down to “it’s a generational thing,” and everyone was confident that the gap will close.

Upcoming: online ad revenue

I'm preparing a new media training I will be giving next week in Shanghai. The sluggish online ad market has been passing by at this weblog more than once. So, it is nice to report some positive trends that have been showing up at my radar screen during the preparation.
First, last year the online market was according to ACNielsen/Netratings between four and five billion Renminbi worth. They only started to measure online activities last year, explaining why the real interesting figures will only show up this year.
While the figure is still small compared to the always leading TV ads (25.6 billion Rmb over 2006) it had already passed the ad revenue stream going to the magazine market (3.1 billion Renminbi), according to again ACNielsen.
What is really interesting are their figures about the first quarter of 2007. The online ads are good for 1.4 billion Renminbi, an increase of 40 percent. Leading is Baidu, holding 21% of the market, followed by Sina (19%). Those figures are for sure encouraging.
What the online media need is more creativity to make it worthwhile for the advertisers. Like here what happened for a French internet provider. Really well done.

The lagging online ad market

Jan van de Bergh of Boonbloggle (was I-Merge) complaints again but rightfully about the lagging market for online advertisements. According to the latest figures the online ad market in the UK, with an annual expenditure of US$110 per year, is worldwide leader, while the US market is good for about US$70 per internet user. In China advertisement companies spend about US$4 per internet user.
From the positive side: this figure can only go up.

Lost: 13 billion US dollar in ad spending

Jan van de Bergh is on a slippery slope: he starts to compare figures in China. He compares the figures on ad spending in 2006 of two research firms, Nielsen and CTR and finds a substantial gab between the totals (US$ 49.5 billion and US$ 36.9 billion).
Why is that dangerous, you will ask? Because figures in China are not facts, they are tools to make companies spend more money in China. They are not a reflection of the reality, or better, they are reflecting that we can have different conflicting realities next to each other at the same time.
Of course, if you are living in China for a while, you know how to deal with those differences in articles, business plans or whatever. We are not looking for the truth anymore, just a reality that meets the demands of today.

Counting your visitors, part II

Figuring out how many visitors you site has is not only problematic for me. Jan van de Bergh of the online advertising company I-merge recalls an experience with a website that overestimated the number of visitors about ten times, at least that is his estimation.

Digital ad spending can only really start here in China when all online media who want to attract advertisers were audited by independent third-party firms. A recent survey in the US "asked online planners and buyers in North America about key issues in digital marketing. More reliable metrics came out as the top concern." Read the complete article here. Want More Ads? Get Better Metrics.

It is of course a tradition that started in the non-digital media, where print publications keep their real circulation also secret.
O yes, I lost the code of Google Analytics again when I changed the lay-out of this weblog. I decided to kick it off, since the huge differences in patterns with Awstats made me only confused. I will later look into Jan's link about Better Metrics.