I love bingo, I love sitting for formal dinners, I love unpacking my suitcase in one place and, visiting six, I love breakfast buffets, I love being isolated in an ocean with no land in sight; I am a cruiser and I am also a marketer.

Thus I accepted the invitation to speak at the first annual Cruise Shipping Asia Conference with great alacrity. It presented a unique opportunity for me to speak at the cross section of two of my passions. The session, curated by Web In Travel, was "Marketing in the New Age" and I was asked to home in on social media.

Using the lens of Asia, the topic becomes much more interesting given the current business activity.  On balance, businesses across Asia are approaching social media as an experimental foray.  One indication is the nature of the conversations, which tend not to be conversations at all; rather, one-way messages from corporate communications. 

Another indication is that many social media accounts are setup for specific promotions, then abandoned. To that point, a recent study by Burson-Marsteller Asia-Pacific found that over half of Asian companies studied had inactive accounts across four social media categories – micro-blogs, social networks, corporate blogs, and video sharing.

What's lacking is the strategic consideration and business context for meaningful and sustainable conversations between brands and their audiences on social platforms. So I thought it would be most appropriate to speak about a few concepts – localisation, visual media, gamification – that marketers operating in Asia could consider to excite customer relationships and realise the benefits of thoughtful social engagement.

LOCALISE

We are all on the same Internet, and the penetration of social networking sites in Asia is high, but it behooves marketers to look deeper. There is no one size fits all social strategy or engagement plan, and the need for what I call local relevance is just as important as any argument for global consistency.

Whilst Facebook does enjoy high penetration in many Asian markets, and Southeast Asian countries make up 60% of Facebook users, the behaviour of consumers in each country can not be so easily generalised. For example, Singaporeans lead the world in time spent on Facebook per session. An Experian study found that, on average, a Facebook user in Singapore spends over 38 minutes per session, while a Facebook user in Hong Kong spends less than 6 minutes.

As my colleague outlines here, there is social networking beyond Facebook! In Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan, for instance, local platforms boast the highest penetration among their respective netizens. In part, this is because of their cultural preferences and divergent drivers for going online in the first place. The GlobalWebIndex found that the primary motivation for Australian and Chinese people going online is to "stay in touch with friends". That motivation was not even in the top three for the Japanese. Instead their primary motivation for going online, and South Korean's secondary motivation, is to "research and find products to buy".

Given the fragmentation of the Asian region in the social space, those marketers that understand the nuances of their consumer behaviour and preferences in each country, and in some cases individual cities, will enjoy success in the longer-term.

Starbucks and Coca-Cola, two of the top 5 social organisations according to the Social Business Index, are providing leadership for global brands seeking to be locally relevant.  They are not only on Facebook hosting conversations with their audiences on a country-specific level, but also are engaged in rich and interactive conversations on various other platforms. For example, Starbucks China is on Jiepang, the Chinese location-based service (LBS) social network, and Coca-Cola Japan has launched its own content-rich portal site ‘Coca-Cola Park'.

Full story:

www.webintravel.com//blog/3-ways-to-anchor-social-media-efforts-in-asia_2890