A marketer’s guide to the world of Chinese networking.

Over the past few years, brand presence on Chinese SNS has largely been limited to passive and static advertising and the occasional branded widget. But recently, brands have been pursuing more creative and interactive ways to engage SNS users by upping the level of brand-consumer interactivity. These efforts range from curated BBS discussion forums to interactive contests within the confines of a particular SNS. Compared to other online markets, branded efforts on local Chinese SNS are still in an embryonic stage, however. Still, Chinese SNS are ripe with opportunities for meaningful brand involvement, and in the past six months there has been a noticeable expansion of the efforts brands have been making to connect with Chinese consumers and target-audiences on social networking sites.

Targeting white collars
Known as Xiaonei until last month, Renren is one of China’s leading social network sites. It started out as a Facebook-like website that served a predominantly university crowd, only gradually opening up to a wider audience of young professionals. Renren’s membership drive currently involves recruiting an army of promoters to meet netizens face to face and evangelise for the brand in China’s numerous internet cafés. The company has also introduced rewards for café owners who attract successful account registrations. Renren has also ramped up its efforts to monetise. Brands that currently have a presence on the site include Pringles, with its ‘Crunch Friends’ game; Lee Jeans, with a contest to award 120 pairs of limited-edition gold-buttoned Lee 120 jeans; adidas, which sponsors a women’s page on the site; and Nokia, which offers a music application. A recent promotional campaign from Pizza Hut is targeted at Renren’s predominant user-base of university students and is tied to the start of the school semester. Yummy, a virtual CGI band, acts as a vehicle for incoming students to meet older ones. The band also appears in a video about a student discount offer: a student ID card is good for 20 per cent off orders.

The home of gaming
A latecomer to the Chinese SNS scene, Kaixin jumped from obscurity to one of the big players shortly after its launch in the spring of 2008. The website is popular with urban white-collars who spend their office down time chatting with friends and playing games on the site. Contributing to Kaixin’s success is its web-based games. Taking advantage of this, Kaixin provided gamers with branded virtual props. Parking Wars, one of Kaixin’s first breakout games, now allows users to choose branded themes: a Dell theme, for example, will put up Dell laptop posters in the game environment. Other casual games incorporate brands into the gameplay itself. For example, in the game ‘Sales of Slaves’, users can reward their ‘slave’ by buying him a Pizza Hut business set lunch, giving him a new set of branded clothing, or pouring him a cup of branded Chinese tea. Using a different tactic, Lenovo is sponsoring an online game offered whereby Kaixin users are invited to design their ideal virtual house, sponsored by Lenovo. Meanwhile, in a link-up with offline marketing, Kaixin users are able to redeem codes found on Magnum ice-cream bars for in-game credits.

Appealing to the masses
While Kaixin and Renren battle it out for the share of urban students and young white-collars, 51.com has its eye on the rest of the country. Out of its 160 million registered users, 38.5 million access the site monthly. 51 has been seeking to expand its business beyond simple social networking and it seems poised to leverage its massive user base for the online gaming market. It is also involved in the market research business, using a survey system to gauge the popularity of brands and products by soliciting user opinions. Brands have large presence on 51. For example, Nike, Lady Care and MSI all have specialty pages/mini-sites within 51 that host a variety of online brand activity. Other brands are hosting actual campaigns on the site. In one example, customers who spend in KFC restaurants are given a card with a code. If they type in the code on KFC’s 51 page they will have the opportunity to win prizes including Nokia mobile phones. Other activities are more interactive: Coca-Cola offered an application that digitally inserted users into a Coke ad. The application was hosted through iCoke.cn, but was fully integrated into 51’s pages, with head shots taken from users’ photo albums.

An integrated offering
QQ is Tencent’s umbrella brand for a whole host of online services it provides to ordinary Chinese netizens, from the eponymous instant messaging software to a low-profile microblog. QQ attracts the type of user who uses IM as a fashion statement in addition to a communication tool. Its social network arm is known as Q-Zone, a site that unites its blogging service with SNS tools like friends, personal messages, and games. A number of prominent brands have spaces on Q-Zone. Pepsi recently hosted a special music promotion for China’s 60th birthday; China Merchants Bank is sponsoring a free archery game where users can compete for chances to win prizes in a raffle; Nike Women has a ‘training camp’ and Johnson & Johnson’s Clean & Clear has an ‘acne-fighting’ space. One current featured promotion involves DoubleMint gum and a charity school building project. Chinese actress Zhou Xun represents the brand and introduces the campaign via a series of videos. The whole package includes a game where users get to build a virtual school, and a user-generated video section where users submit clips.

From online to offline
KDS is a more traditional BBS discussion forum that is part of the PCHome family of technology websites. Although the company positions KDS to serve East China in general, the forum is mostly Shanghai-centric. KDS claims a daily active user base of 500,000, with six million registered users, and a daily click-rate of 28.8 million hits and claims that 30 per cent of the entire website’s content is user-generated. In terms of branding, KDS provides a shopping section where vendors occupy their own special channels. Online retailer NewEgg, for example, has been promoted heavily on the site recently as a sponsor of activities related to China’s 60th anniversary. The site has also been used as a channel for offline civic activity, particularly the anti-Maglev protests of early 2008. Brands such as Maxell, AMD, Sony, TCL, and HP have used the online-to-offline community aspects of KDS as well, harnessing the platform to organise and promote off-line marketing activities such as product tours and demonstrations. At the bottom of the front page is a ranking of brand mentions across the site. This is not a paid promotion, but rather a reflection of what netizens are talking about at the present moment.

The new generation
360quan.com positions itself as the platform for those born in the 1990s: hip, trendy, and new. It has strong branding on this by promoting the pages of ‘cool’ kids on the website – for instance those who play parkour, graffiti artists and punks. Its overall alternative aesthetic and the tagline ‘young, stylish SNS’ in the title bar shows this. PK, or users going up head-to-head against each other, is a big activity on 360Quan and online ‘clans’, ad-hoc groups of users linked by common interest or mutual acquaintance, define sub-communities within the giant user base. There is a brand channel on 360quan, where fashion labels are displayed, such as the latest Jimmy Choo collection from H&M. The channel also advises girls how to put different outfits together and is sponsored by the fashion website 27.com. 360quan runs campaigns such as the Opel car campaign, which they displayed on the front page. On the PK page there is also a brand collaboration with Nike ID, which links to the Nike ID page and their fashionable summer shoes and other accessories.

A more educated SNS
Douban.com was developed initially for people to share their interest in books, music and movies and is now used to form online groups centered around being ‘fans’ of people, publications and music events. Each user has their own page where they can share books they read, CDs they have listened to or films they have watched. Douban claims that the site registers 30 million unique visitors a month, with users aged 20 to 35 and usually single. Users are better educated than the average Chinese internet user, with many in college or attending professional schools. As a website that supports independent musicians as well as grassroots, home-grown cultural events, Douban has a host of commercial and brand partners. The nature of these (mostly mini-site) partnerships vary widely, from a nation-branding campaign to promote UK tourism, which was recently completed, to product promotions such as Swatch, 42Below vodka and Ford. Converse has a huge presence on Douban and 14,618 fans. Its mini-site displays brand products as well as indie music in video and audio form. Converse has a long history with Douban: in 2007, it sponsored a photography competition on the site.