The leading social networking site in China, renren.com, started out as a blatant Facebook clone – but it now has tens of millions of users. Despite obvious similarities to Facebook, there is one significant difference from the U.S. in how Renren and other Chinese SNS are used. The bread and butter of these sites is social games using virtual items. Indeed, Farmville originated in China!
In this first post of a series, we outline the most popular social network sites in China. In follow-up posts, we’ll look at Twitter clones, …

By Joab Jackson, IDG News Service
During a New York panel discussion on social media and digital activism held Monday, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei secured a promise from Twitter creator Jack Dorsey that his company will offer a Chinese version of its social networking service.
Though Dorsey quickly qualified his response by noting that it may be some time yet before the service will be available for the country, due to technical and legal hurdles.
The exchange took place at the Paley Center in New York, in a session sponsored by …

ChinaTravelTrends.com, new interactive platform for China outbound tourism, launched in Berlin, with backing of PATA

Chinese affluent citizens increasingly like to travel abroad, but distrust official information.
With more than 50 million outbound travellers expected to leave China in 2010, the Chinese outbound market is attracting more and more attention of destinations around the world.
As part of the ITB Convention 2010, a workshop organised by the German-based COTRI China Outbound Tourism Research Institute and the Chinese company Dragon Trail, presented Social Media Marketing as the most …

Business social media can unlock the door to the world’s second-largest economy
A surge in Chinese exports for January has kicked the world’s fastest-growing economy back into life, at least in the eyes of Westerners. But China is still a difficult place to do business. Is there an opportunity for business social networks to break down trade barriers?
China is celebrating its 4,708th year. It is the year of the tiger and the country is safe in the knowledge that its economy is back on track. The trade figures make promising reading. …

The popularity of Twitter has produced a number of clones in China, just as there are Facebook clones. Some of China’s Twitter clones have been closed down by the Chinese government, but some have survived. We take a look at both cases in this post. We also assess Twitter’s chances of success in China, should it ever be freed from the ‘Great Firewall of China.’
Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu were some of the first Twitter clones to become successful in China.
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However all three – plus Twitter itself – were …

Baidu.com:
Baidu (百度) is the Chinese Google. It dominates Chinese language search with about an 80% market share and is one of the biggest sites worldwide. As a local Chinese site it censors it’s search results. Like Google, Baidu offers a number of services apart from search, including Maps, documents, MP3 search, Baidu Space (a social network with over 100 million users) Baidu Encyclopedia, (China’s largest encyclopedia by users) and is launching a new video site called QiYi.com in March.
QQ.com
QQ is a portal that runs a number of services, most notably …

Social networks were once the domain of the young and tech-savvy. Not anymore, as Facebook reports a huge growth in older users last year. Also in China has the 35+ user base of doubled year over year.
Picture a social network user. Once upon a time it was easy – they were pimply teens huddled in messy bedrooms. Or young professionals organising their social lives. These days, however, they’re becoming far harder to categorise.
Last year Facebook reported huge growth in the 25 to 54 age group. After a feverish year of …

We’re sure that by now, we don’t need to tell you how important social media is. What we do need to tell you is that Chinese social media is more important than you think.
If you’re in an industry that markets to the Chinese; whether it’s consumers, tourists, business to business or the public sector, you could be missing out on a huge potential audience.
Here are our top 10 reasons for embracing Chinese social media:
1) China has about 400 million internet users. Never mind all the Chinese speakers that live in other countries.
2) …

Twitter and Google are helping to end China’s stranglehold on information and accelerate the process of democratisation
Google has been widely celebrated for its loud refusal to continue censoring its search results in China. It is still unclear whether Google will continue to operate in China (note: Google is hiring in China), but in any event we are not about to see much change in China’s internet policy. More likely, all this “foreign meddling” will merely cause the Chinese government to dig in its heels.
Even if Google does ultimately leave China, the …

The state-owned newspaper The Global Times has run a particularly open article about the extensive controls on the internet within China and their effect on users and Internet companies. If you’re pressed for time to read the whole thing, DigiCha posts some choice quotes.

Douban, a Chinese social networking service website, received $10 million in venture capital from its second round of fundraising on January 25, after raising $2 million in 2006. Photo: CFP
He couldn’t take it anymore.
When Hong Kong writer and poet Liao Weitang found his online photo album had …

Cissy Ding says she finally gave in at the start of the year and joined China’s social networking bandwagon, setting up an account on local micro-blogging service Weibo.
“If I hadn’t gotten started, I would have felt totally lame, and out of touch,” says Ding, an editor at a women’s magazine.
China’s domestic social media sites like Weibo are booming thanks to their better knowledge of the world’s largest Internet market — and the censorship stifling foreign rivals like Facebook, Twitter, and Google-owned YouTube.
The 384 million people now online in China, where …

Social media remains the hot topic of the digital world and I often get asked about the various statistics involved. This in itself is fairly difficult, as this particular online sphere is constantly shifting, evolving and growing at an astronomical rate.
Bear in mind that these are relatively recent figures – in a few months time (or even less) a lot of it is likely to be obsolete –  but for now, I think they’re a great way of demonstrating the impact that social media is having in the digital …

www.chinatraveltrends.com, COTRI and Dragon Trail are inviting all visitors
to the ITB in Berlin to a China Outbound Tourism workshop during the ITB 2010 – March 11th at 4.30pm to 5.45pm in Hall 7.1.
As part of the ITB Convention Destination day the China Outbound Tourism Marketing Forum @
ITB Berlin 2010 will look at “Social Media Tourism Marketing – The Example of China”.
The Chinese Outbound market is one of the few source markets which continued to grow even during the global economic crisis. Social Media are increasingly important especially for the younger, …

Shanghai Expo 2010 will run for 6 months, from May to October; and is expected to attract upwards of 70 million visitors over those six months. The UK has a truly exciting pavilion, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, on the Expo site – able to accommodate up to 40,000 visitors a day (5-7 million over 6 months). In addition, there will be an extensive programme of business and public events, showcasing the UK’s sectoral strengths and business expertise, the arts, culture, science, innovation and our low carbon agenda. For the first …

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. …

By Lara Farrar, for CNN – December 28, 2009//
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Beijing, China (CNN) — A handful of homegrown micro-blogging sites emerged about the same time Twitter started to gain a small, yet steadily growing, share of Chinese Internet users, beginning about 2007, around a year after Twitter was launched in the U.S. in 2006.
While almost all of the early Chinese micro-blogging pioneers faced the same fate as Twitter, most of the sites …

In a research that explores the motivations of Chinese netizens categorised under seven digital tribes, GroupM revealed online entertainment such as video and gaming is preferred over traditional media like TV and cinema.
While most research on web behaviour in China are examined by city tiers, GroupM has segmented its web users into seven different digital tribes.
The study, using focus groups and interviews, was conducted across nine different markets in China from tier-one to tier-three cities about their attitudes to online gaming, entertainment, social networking services, blogging and online shopping.
The seven …

Observations Suggest Brands That Court Younger Customers Digitally Might Come Out Ahead
New department stores like Lane Crawford in Beijing have increased the number of luxury brands available to potential buyers in Beijing
While many luxury brands are counting on ostensibly luxury- and brand-mad Chinese consumers to bring in steady profits for the foreseeable future, industry insiders — or research groups — with feet on the ground know that Chinese consumers are far from a uniform group. As luxury expert Patricia Pao, of the Pao Principle in New York, recently wrote, contrary …

Using Social Media in China to promote Chile via Chilean Wine
There is a popular saying in politics that all politics are local; and in China the same can be said about the Internet. Local players, in tune to the specific needs of the country’s “Netizens”, rule the digital space, and the numbers are staggering. Currently, the Internet in China is home to over 340 million users who are online for an average of 16 hours per week, the same amount of time they spend watching television. There are 111 million …

The fast pace of change in social media tools and the travel market in China are combining to inspire a search for the best way to reach China’s increasingly affluent, increasingly independent travelers. The future of social media’s role in China’s travel market was a hot topic at the recent China Travel Distribution Summit at the OCT Interlaken Resort in Shenzhen. Online travel agencies like Ctrip and Elong, as well as hotels, airlines, and travel meta search sites—all kinds of companies effected by online travel research and booking—are looking for …