Renren, one of the biggest Chinese social networks, has been selected as the first social networking application for Windows upcoming Windows store. The Windows 8 version of the application uses the famed “Metro” look, with various large, colorful rectangles. The “HD” refers to the fact that it’s optimized to be used on a large screen tablet.
China’s dammed Internet wall is common knowledge — Chinese users are blockaded from looking at Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other sites that their government doesn’t allow. With all that pressure building up, though, the dam seems to have had a small crack, and it led to Obama’s Google+ page.
Just because you can travel the world with the click of a mouse doesn’t mean you should. To stay competitive in a global market, brands need to back their social media efforts with a strong presence in the real world. At a Social Media Week panel on social marketing for global markets, a panel of experts shared their best practices for marketing with RenRen, Mixi and other international networks.
Renren, after a pretty tough couple of months that’s seen the stock come down from an IPO of between $12 and $14 to around $5 today, has joined other Chinese stocks in some of their best rallies of the year. Renren CEO Joseph Chen pointed out that mobile demand is boosting the user numbers. This could mark a revolution in the way Chinese users use the social network — mobile has always been a popular form of networking in the East, as proved by the Japanese social networks GREE and DeNa.
Despite government crackdowns on social media users, social games continue to grow in China. Sohu’s (NASDAQ: SOHU) fourth quarter financial results are in, and the largest share of the company’s revenue came from games, which brought in $123 million and showed an increase of 34 percent year-over-year and 6 percent quarter-over-quarter.
Investors have put some serious volume into investing in Renren, the “Chinese Facebook” over the last three days, seemingly identifying the site as a possible social media growth stock that can ride the coattails of Facebook. Between January 29th and the end of the 30th, the stock rose from around $4 to a high of $6.50, but has since come down to around $5.50. The question is whether the stock will continue to grow as the Facebook IPO goes through.
On December 13th, 2011, Twitter users all over Japan broke a record by tweeting about during a television screening of Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky — it’s a famous anime that is known by all Japanese and Japanese tweeters tweeted quotes from the show during the entire program. That was the world record for message per second on a social network until the first minute of Chinese New Year, Monday January 23rd, when Chinese users broke the Twitter record on their own version of Twitter, Sina Weibo.
This is a guest post by Christian Arno, founder and managing director of professional translation-services provider Lingo24.
It’s hard to find a part of the world where social media isn’t popular. One ninth of the population has a Facebook profile, while hundreds of millions of tweets circle the globe each day. The opening of a Facebook-themed nightclub in a remote part of the Brazilian Amazon illustrates the network’s reach.
So it’s not surprising 90 per cent of marketers think social media is important for their business, according to a recent industry report. With Google’s decision to take social searching into account, this is likely to rise. Read more
When people talk about the legalization of drugs it’s usually followed by a rumination of the idea of ‘drug stores’ like beer stores. What’s less obvious is what would happen online if it was all legal. Even when it’s illegal, people still use the web to sell drugs, and recently two men in Japan were caught using mixi — the most popular social network in Japan — to sell stimulants.
Over the course of the last few years China has been running a trial of getting social networks to collect the full real names of all of their users. Currently on popular networks like the Twitter clone Sina Weibo and Facebook clone QQ, users have the ability to be anonymous. The government states it is simply doing this for accountability purposes, but in 2010 a woman was sentenced to a year in a labor camp due to a retweet.
They’re now expanding the trial program to all over China.
