Brain Vibe

In marketing, information is king.  The more you know about your customer the better you are at targeting and promoting your message to control and grow your market.  In China, the ones in control of information have typically been government officials.  However, with economic growth and expansion of capitalistic practices, information is becoming democratized.

Even as information is democratized in China, the pace at which it is happening is creating chaos in a marketer’s ability to get the message out in traditional tried and true mechanisms.  Social media marketing is really the key and future of marketing in China.

For three years I was managing customer data globally for a multi-national software company.  The biggest challenge was the integration and management of global databases and maintaining local language.  Outside of process and technical logistics, China was particularly challenging.  You could almost directly map China’s eco-data system to disruptive technology adoption.

• Huge choice and competition
• Constant churn
• Lack of standards
• New is better
• Jones-ing – “I want what he has”

This is China culture, from technology to everyday life.  Even as our social media usage in the US is beginning to mature, or at least become mainstream, China is still slightly behind.  The biggest reason I see is due to the fast rate of economic growth in individual wealth and fast emergence of a capitalist market.  The other aspect is that the Chinese are much more aware of each other and their relationships to each other making them more apt to shift and adapt.

You may think that this is the reason to avoid social media marketing in China but, I think the opposite is true.  It allows you to transcend targeting issues you are plagued with in traditional CRM or customer data management.

Issues with traditional CRM and Customer Data Management in China

• Emails continually acquired and discarded
• Non-stardard names mixing east and west and English and Chinese
• Mailing address changes, undocumented,  or too new to have consistent delivery
• Businesses go in and out of business in 6 months
• Lack of centralized reliable digital data repositories for reference
• Phone churn, landlines being forfeited for more reliable mobile phone service

What social media marketing offers is the ability to transcend and extend our communications to the China market overcoming issues with traditional communication sources.  The fact that the Chinese are adopting and embracing mobile technology and web interaction aligns the marketer to the customer.  This is not to say that traditional methods are obsolete.  There just may be a shift of how it is used and how it could integrate with China’s preferred method of communication and information gathering.  For instance, billboard usage and signage can be better connected to social media by providing SMS text to mobile phones for discounts or product sources instead of emailing an article or coupon to click and download.

At the heart of Chinese communication is social media.  Blogging and Twitter are pushing out news faster than journalists and the government can react.  New social networking sites are being created daily and gaining members fast.  It is the most reliable and pervasive form of connecting Chinese to Chinese and businesses to their Chinese customers.  Marketing models that don’t weight their communication strategies towards social media will not be positioned to capture the market and create loyal customer bases.

Related Stories:

China Government’s Role in Social Media

Social Media with a Chinese Touch

Filed under: marketing technology, networking, social media, Business, China, collaboration, communications, customer management, marketing, Mobile, Mobile phone, PR, Short message service, social media, social media marketing, Social network service, social networking, Telecommunications, Twitter