Microsoft’s search engine, has teamed up with Shenzhen Winhi Technologies Co to promote its business in China. Microsoft treasures Winhi’s rich experience in eCommerce for some 30,000 small medium enterprise in the country, said Bing China’s manager Huang Dinglong. Winhi is Microsoft’s first Chinese partner. The Chinese search market grew 45% to ¥4.6 billion in the first half of 2010 compared to a year earlier. Bing took just a 2.4% share of the revenue.

Source: http://tech.qq.com/a/20100930/000063.htm

Image of Chinese smart car from Time.com

Chinese eBay site Taobao launched a group purchase for Benz Smart Car on Sep 9. Mercedes-Benz expected to sell 205 cars in 21 days. Surprisingly, all cars were sold out in three and a half hours, which set a price record for a single deal in the shortest time span.

Taobao offered a 23% discount for group purchase (RMB 40,000 discount with the original price of RMB 176,000), and buyers only had to put under RMB 1,000 down to reserve their purchase.

The first car was sold after 24 seconds, 55 cars were sold after six minutes and 205 cars were gone after three and a half hours, according to People’s Daily.

“This is an astonishing surprise for Mercedes-Benz as the initial plan for the Chinese online group buying campaign was for it to stretch over 21 days, but in the end all 205 cars were sold out in slightly over three hours,” said the company’s release.

Although group shopping sites in China tend to keep prices below RMB 100 to attract the most customers, this sale showed that China’s growing affluent class are looking for more than a cheap lunch or home appliance deals.

Source:

http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/shop/taobao-sells-205-benzes-just-over-three-hours-65363

What do the Chinese do online? Here is a BCG study of urban users. Movie watching and chatting top the charts in Chinese user behaviour. This explains the popularity of platforms like QQ in China. What is interesting too is that Chinese search less than Americans but other studies (including eye-tracking ones) have shown that they in fact search more thoroughly when they do

At the SES conference last week it was interesting to see the varying levels of SEO competence in Hong Kong. At the conference were companies from Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing and I must say the mainland speakers took the prize. SEO simply seems to have lagged behind in Hong Kong and it is still being sold using fear tactics and as some sort of exotic snake oil. IMHO, Hong Kong, once the lynchpin for a company wanting to work with China may lose a big opportunity to build a new competency as China develops its direct channels to market.

This is  just a quick post to share my four tips for pitching to a Chinese client gleaned from my experiences this month. Excuse the brevity of this post – it should have been a Tweet but it was too long:

1) Keep it really simple. Assume no Search knowledge (it took 10 minutes per slide rather than 5 minutes as I had expected)

2) Have backup slides to go into more detail (it took me 10 minutes to explain why a 70% Bounce Rate was a bad thing rather than a good thing)

3) Be aware that Marketing Managers sometimes do not have the decision-making ability that they do in the West, you may need to present many times, all the way up the chain

4) Make sure you double check if the coders will be there. The coders appeared in the middle of the presentation when I was going through the W3C errors on the site (I had to give them “face” by saying it was entirely normal)

Social Media training in China video. This is a growing field with many mid-tier players and a few high end players like Ogilvy. This humorous video shows how some agencies are trying to gain a reputation for reputation management in China

social media training china

This is a great infographic by Zerodegrees showing China’s diverse and developing Social Media players

From jianli.blog.com

Getting annoyed with online looping advertisements? Todou and VivaKi (digital media operations of the worldwide Publicis Group) have jointly rolled out a new online video advertising format “AdSelector” in the China market – a placement that lets users select video ads for viewing prior to streaming content

While pre-roll advertising has become the standard and the most popular video ad format globally, AdSelector allows users to select their preferred video advertising before watching a program, hence giving users more choices.

“Consumers have an insatiable appetite for online video content, [but] they dislike the irrelevant disruption of pre-roll, and the industry was simply struggling to adapt the advertising model to keep pace with evolving consumer behavior,” said Tracey Scheppach, svp, innovation director, VivaKi.

The AdSelector format has been tested in the U.S. market and is applied by Hulu (http://www.hulu.com). Aside from Hulu, MSNBC.com and Yahoo.com in the U.S. market are said to launch AdSelector in the next few months

As an expanding initiative, Publicis is introducing the new format and collaborating with top media partners in selected markets to test and collect more case studies. Based on the prior research, the AdSelector format delivered click-through rates that were 106 percent higher than pre-roll ads. The online ad-recall scores were 290 percent higher than pre-rolls.

“We believe a pleasant branding experience involves deeper user engagement,” said Gary Wang, Tudou Founder and CEO. “We believe our younger audience likes to feel that they are more in control, and in fact they are.”

Top tier brands such as GE, Lancome, General Mills, Dettol and Veet joined the AdSelector roll-out on Tudou.com. All data will be collected and analyzed to determine Chinese user feedback to this specific new format. So far around 80% users who were exposed to AdSelector on Tudou responded positively to the experience.

Original Story

http://www.tudouchina.com/2010/08/tudou-and-publicis-rolled-out-%E2%80%9Cadselector%E2%80%9D-video-ad-format/