Silicon Hutong

Two Ears. One Mouth

Starbucks, China World Trade Center 2
Chilling by the window
0946 hrs.

Shanghai-based Yann Lombard Platet gives vociferous voice on ChinaTechNews to something I have been telling my clients for some time about running online campaigns on social networking sites.

He says "just listen."

He's right.

He and I differ in our ideas of what it means to listen - I favor a much more passive approach to engagement on social networking sites, but in direction we agree.

There is an old saying that we were given two ears and one mouth, suggesting we should listen twice as much as we speak. Marketers are not traditionally wired to listen, but to find more effective ways of talking. Yann's point is that when marketing online, this is not appropriate.

My point is that with any kind of marketing, the relative value of a marketers ability to talk is plunging, and the value of his/her ability to listen is growing. It is not only the growth of Web 2.0 that is driving this change, but the skyrocketing importance of word-of-mouth, quantitative measurement, analytics, customer relationship management, and one-to-one marketing. Every single one of these is about listening, not talking.

Marketing changed since grad school, guys. Catch up.

Saying "SNAFU" in Chinese

Heqiao Tower, Guanghua Road, Beijing
Waiting for another meeting to start
1535 hrs.

Melinda Liu over at Newsweek blogs on the run-up to the Olympics in her Countdown to Beijing blog. Covering the Olympic ticket website meltdown, Melinda asks some really good questions.

She also quotes yours truly.

BOCOG Don't Get Web.

Worth a read. Her point is simple: right now everyone here is wondering what has gone wrong with the systems at BOCOG to allow this to happen. Clearly, the IT problem stems as much from radically incorrect assumptions about website usage, if not a complete breakdown of communications between the people building the web capability and the people giving them orders.

It would be really easy to point the finger at the IT suppliers, system integrators, and the like. Ugly truth time: Lenovo has the institutional memory of all of IBM's past Olympic IT sponsorships on their side. It strains credulity to believe the problem was the lack of advice from the tech team.

I think the issue is more systemic: none of the old folks running BOCOG - or even the IOC - truly understand how much of an online Olympics this is going to be. If 8 million people hitting the site sounds like a lot, what about 80 million, or 280 million, on the day of the opening ceremonies?

Good Morning, gentlemen. This is your Wake Up Call

The ticketing fiasco is a wake up call. BOCOG should by now realize that the online infrastructure for these games will be just as critical as the new airport, the new venues, the new public transport, and new hotels. Failure to address these issues will leave as much egg on Beijing's face come next August as any problems in meatspace.

WSJ Database Marketing is a Dud

In the Hutong
Digging for my American Chopper DVDs
2127 hrs.

One of the great promises of computer technology was a thing called Database Marketing.

The theory behind database marketing is that a company with which you have a relationship will record information it learns about you and it will send you solicitations that will not only be relevant, but indeed will anticipate what you want.

So much for the theory.

Let's take, for a moment, the Wall Street Journal. I have had a long and mostly satisfying relationship with the publication for many years. I was one of the early subscribers to the electronic edition, and I've maintained that almost consistently since they began offering the service. ($339 per quarter to fly dead trees to my doorstep just seemed like a bad idea all around.)

You'd think they know me by now. They've got my billing information. They know where I live in China. They know what I do, how old I am, what I read, what my interests are, what I download, how much I make. They even know I'm a white male.

So when I get an invitation from the WSJ inviting me to a Career Fair (I own my own business, thanks), a "Diversity" career fare, no less (white man I am), in about two weeks at the very-inconvenient-to-me Embassy Suites Hotel Old Town in Alexandria, Virginia, I realize that either Dow Jones is totally incompetent at marketing, since they don't know the difference between "database marketing" and "SPAM," or they just don't care about who I am and don't care if I know it.

I'm starting to change my mind about Rupert Murdoch and Dow Jones. Surely their database marketing couldn't get much worse.

Hutong Events: Under the Digital Influence

In the Hutong
Listening to Radio Pyongyang
1628 hrs.

For those of you who will be in Beijing in the next couple of weeks - especially those of you with membership in the American Chamber of Commerce in China - you might want to set aside the afternoon of September 19th.

At the Renaissance Hotel Ballroom, AmCham China will be hosting two panels of people talking about digital marketing, the online scene, and the business of blogging.

With the sole exception of yours truly, the panelists on both panels are superb.

The first panel, on China's Internet scene, includes:

• Sam Flemming, CEO of CIC, the company that brilliantly decodes and mobilizes online word-of-mouth for companies in China. In short, he's the guy that did what the guys at Technorati couldn't with Chinese blogs and the insanely popular bulletin-board systems.

• Andrew Lih, who is probably the leading expert on online collaboration in China specifically and globally. Don't let his pedigree in the ivory tower (Columbia and Hong Kong University) fool you - this is a guy a real feel for the subject at the ground level.

• Matt Roberts, who will be moderating, and who comes to his current employer (About.com) from venture capital firm BlackInc and a stint as the chief rep of Dow Jones China. Matt has been exploring the underside of Internet in China for years, and my recent conversations with him have only underscored that he is one of the truly knowledgeable thought leaders on the subject.

• Me.

The second panel will cover off on the business of blogging, with four professionals who blog talking about the affect it has had in their business and careers, and how to blog wisely both generally and when covering the issues surrounding China. That team consists of:

• Dan Harris, better known to most of us as ChinaLawBlog.com and founding member of law firm Harris & Moure pllc. People who read Silicon Hutong will tell you I am not a fan of the legal profession generally, but Dan is in that pantheon of attorneys who exemplify the genuine value of legal counsel.

• Chris Devonshire-Ellis, from tax, accountancy, and business consultants Dezan Shira & Associates, who runs china-briefing.comBu and 2point6billion.com and exemplifies in his profession what I am trying to do in my own - raise the practice to a level that transcends simple operational excellence and turns that functional area into a competitive advantage.

• Will Moss, Director at Burson-Marsteller in Shanghai and celebrated author of Imagethief.com, where his funny, insightful, and highly readable posts put the rest of us to shame.

• Jeremy Goldkorn, (moderator) founder and archduke of media site danwei.org and founder of The Standards Group. Haymarket and other industry publications notwithstanding, danwei.org is without question the best window onto China's new and traditional media industries. Even if you don't care about the media business in China in particular, danwei is a cultural thermometer for China in a form we foreigners can understand and appreciate.

All of this will be followed by a party (naturally.)

For details, check out the event site here.

China Leading the World in e-Tickets. M-Tickets anyone?

In the Hutong
Back from the Hutong Summer Holidays
1950 hrs.

After a month's physical holiday and a month's writing holiday - in succession, not in parallel - the issues surrounding air travel remain fresh in the mind. So it was with great interest that I read cNet's report noting that the International Air Transport Association (IATA) was confirming that it would meet its June 1, 2008 deadline to eliminate paper tickets everywhere in the world, completing a switch to e-tickets.

Here's the kicker: China will be the first country to completely switch over.

This makes a lot of sense. Chinese airlines need all of the help they can get: constant price wars have driven profits in Chinese air travel into the sewer. $9 per ticket may not sound like much, but I'm sure the airlines of the PRC will take it. China Eastern Airlines, for example, lost US$365 million last year on 35.04 million passenger journeys. In other words, it could eliminate $315 million of that loss. It would have nearly doubled Air China's profit for the year.

Needless to say, that's significant. The question is, how else can this technology be applied in the industry to either improve efficiency or make flying more convenient?

Today, E. Tomorrow M

The systems that were the toughest to put into place for e-ticketing in China were reimbursement policies and ways of handling travel agents and ticketing offices that were, er, technology-deficient. Stunning as it is to believe, there is actually still an embarrassingly large number of places to buy air tickets in China that don't have computers or printers. No single solution appears ready to bridge this technology gap.

What would go a long way, however, would be a system that would send the e-ticket information directly to a mobile handset from a central office. I have no hard data, but apocrypha and experience suggests that the vast number of airline passengers in China are shlepping cell phones. All that would need to happen to make this system work right now would be to whittle down the information so it would fit into 1 or 2 SMS messages.

This way, a travel agent without a computer could call a central office with the necessary information, and that office could generate the m-ticket and send it to the customer's mobile. There would be all kinds of other benefits as well, including the ability to buy a ticket without having to set foot in a ticket agency (or, indeed, buy it as you drove up to the airport.) In other words, it would go a long way toward making air travel more convenient.

eBoardingPass

The mobile handset is going to be the key to the airlines' next step as well: the eBoardingPass. IATA is helping to work out the kinks in a uniform system to allow passengers to print their boarding passes at home, using a unique barcode, with which some airlines are experimenting already. At the same time, IATA is pushing self check-in systems that have been installed in some two dozen airports around the world.

Combine the two, and self check-in with the mobile handset, with the airline sending an MMS with the bar code and some basic information would be a logical next development step for China's busy airlines and overcrowded airports.

At least it would eliminate the problem of a dozen people cutting into the check-in queue at the airport.