Today, Reverb Communications settled with the FTC over a claim that it misrepresented itself by having staff post positive comments and reviews about a client’s video game on iTunes without full disclosure of the paid relationship between the brand and the endorser – otherwise known as sock-puppetry, or simply fraud.

Every client meeting, every conference and every colleague debate I’m involved in has the mobile marketing opportunity across Asia as a central theme (ok – I’m a bit sad like that!). However, I finally got a chance to go through the always-excellent and recently-released Asia Digital Marketing Association 2010 Yearbook (freely available here – Neilsen Asia social media report also worth a read) and among the array of big numbers that jumped out, three in particular struck me:

1. There are now over 2 billion mobile subscribers in Asia Pacific, with the expectation that this will grow to over 2.5 billion by 2013, an increase of 25%. I still remember the celebration that was crossing the 1 billion threshold for PCs in 2008… seems like small change now…

2. Around 30% of the global market for smartphones is in AP, with Asian (ex-Japan) smartphone users expected to number 347 million by 2015. This despite the fact that only 6% of mobile users in Southeast Asia subscribe to 3G and that 3G is still in its infancy in China.

3. The mobile phone is becoming (I believe has already become) the favoured device for young Asians to connect to social networking sites, with more than 50% of Chinese, Indian, South Korean and Thai mobile users preferring to use their handsets over their PCs. All you have to do is walk the streets of any Asian city to know that this is a trend that will accelerate fast.

When I presented at the Mobile Marketing Association Forum (MMAF) Asia in April and at a mobile marketing conference last week, the convergence of real-time social media, mobile broadband and smartphone usage was clear to all. Everybody was also violently in agreement about the importance of themes like: “putting the consumer at the centre of social media,” the “higher interaction of consumers via mobile handsets versus desktop” and the need to “move from content campaigns to deep engagement.” In fact, I don’t think I’d heard the words “deep engagement” used so often at an event – the overall buzz-wordiness was jarring…

What was hardly touched on at all was the strategies and practical tips for brands/agencies to actually roll their sleeves up and get involved with mobile internet users via social media. Six of the top 10 mobile internet sites accessed from most Asian countries and two of the top five applications downloaded are to access social media. It felt like words such as content and application were being used as ways for brands to keep the consumer at arms length, while still “doing social media.”

However, during the networking opps one theme was clear – the incredible spread of Facebook, Twitter and the mobile internet has left communicators and marketers no choice but to get engaged – I mean really engaged. However, it’s still slow going. I just hope it doesn’t require us to get to 4 billion subscribers in order to get it right.

What do you think – has the boom of the mobile internet and social media in the past 12 months made online engagement inevitability, or are we still miles away?

One of the most debated (and I believe pointless) questions asked in our industry today is “who owns social media?” Through five days the end of September in Singapore, we won’t have the answer, but pretty much every viewpoint is sure to be covered. Only realized today that from 19-21 Sept SPIKES Asia will take place, followed directly on 22-23 Sept by the Social Media World Forum Asia.

Both have great speaker line-ups, but while SPIKES will be graced by the great and the good of the advertising industry, SMWF’s stage gives voice to marketers, social luminaries and communications agencies. There is no doubt that every part of the marketing industry - from PR to direct, interactive to media has a different point-of-view about how brands can take advantage of digital. This variation is the exciting element that is creating innovation - even if it does drive internal marketers and communicators crazy!

Anyone attending all five days (my goal) will either walk away very confused about the hottest topics in digital today - incl. creativity, content, social media and mobile - or find surprising commonality for the first time (my hope). While innovation is always important, there’s no doubt that some common ground needs to be found across industries and agencies - and quickly, esp. in the areas of planning, engagement and measurement.

Let’s hope the end of September finds the industry running the right balance between the two. I’ll share my perspectives, but until then what do you think?

- which event do you think you’d learn more from?
- who should own social media? Why should we care?
- is attending just an excuse to go to the Formula 1 race the following weekend?

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve revisited why I never pursued a career in research - it’s seriously hard work! However, many weeks of hard slog have resulted in a great pay-off, with the launch of the Asia-Pacific Digital Brand Index (DBI), a regional study of online conversations about major technology brands that Edelman APAC conducted with our partners Brandtology. All the details are on this site - but it spans eight APAC countries and incorporates 800,000 mentions of 233 major technology and telco brands, spread across over 4,000 online sites. Whew!

After looking through the data, we decided to focus on country-by-country launches and results, because (mock shock, horror), when you roll the results up at a regional level, the insights become less meaningful. If anything, this exercise has reinforced just how hyper-local social media environments, channels, topics and successful brand engagement really is.

It’s a point well-made by Blair Currie in a recent MEDIA post. However, my point is not that regional social media strategies are not important, but that any expectation that regional silver-bullet targeting, content and engagement strategies exist is misguided. The recent downturn really stressed local over regional and for social media this is also true. Regional marketers still have a very important role to play - esp. in terms of social media policy and strategy formation, driving best practice, benchmarking/measurement and central creation of strong online content. The more that regional marketers can gain a deep understand what’s hot in key markets, which people and sites are most influential for a particular topic and what other firms are doing that is successful or can be learnt from, the more valuable they become.

Shared insight and measurement also helps to better connect regional and local colleagues, so we hope that the DBI helps in the age-old debate about measuring the impact and effectiveness of social media. This is especially so in comparing the performance of brands in markets and across the region - that’s why we created a series of Indices that help local and regional marketers to find a common language and measurement benchmark around important areas such as conversations volume, engagement (or mentions per unique voice) and channel volume and breadth.

Just because I know you want to know, here is the ranking of the most discussed technology brands across the eight markets in Asia Pacific:

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Nokia
4. Samsung
5. Sony
6. Intel
7. AMD
8. Apple
9. Yahoo!
10. Dell

Disclosure: Edelman represents technology brands around the world, many of which are included in the Digital Brand Index.

With 800,000 pieces of data to review, there’s a whole range of other interesting insights, but more on those at a later date. Would love any questions or feedback you have on the DBI (apart from how bad I look on the below video, ok?!) - let me know.

I love the Silicon Alley insider chart-of-the-day feed (and it’s well worth subscribing to). The chart below was especially surprising, because I knew that the smartphone (esp. touchscreen) market is hot, but it seems that we’re only 2 years away from the pivot point where the phone really starts to become a seriously major way to access web and social media sites.

Mobile Marketing for real by 2011

However, the reality is that I’m still hearing (and seeing case studies of) very few brands talking about mobile marketing in a serious way. Asia still has a way to go before broadband is ubiquitous, but it is the fastest region in the world for mobile adoption. I’m still not having many conversations with brands about mobile marketing - many are still not optimising websites for mobile. However, forecasts like this show it’s a format that will soon be impossible to ignore. Will that be enough - I hope so!

I presented at last April’s Mobile Marketing forum in Singapore and the general consensus remained that mobile remained a massive opportunity unrealised (SMS Gupshop not-withstanding). I’m looking foward to discussing the Asian reality of the opportunity further around mobile marketing further at SPIKES Asia in September and will actually probe clients and industry people I’m meeting more about mobile in the next few weeks and will share what I hear/find.

Interested in your insights and perspectives about mobile marketing - it is massively interesting - but from a marketing perspective is it for real, about to happen, or still a fad? As always, let me know.

Last week I was in Beijing with Edelman regional president Alan VanderMolen. Alan has been deeply involved on the mainland since the early 90s. A trip with Alan to any regional market always includes meetings with a range of interesting personalities, from in-house leaders, to top-tier media, to online influentials.

Currently, there’s no doubt about the number one topic for the marketing industry in China - how to successfully plan for and integrate social media into programs. Luckily Alan had his video camera and has published a fascinating range of posts and interviews on his ‘Full Count’ blog that gives a great overview of the latest perspectives around the internet in China, including:

- Roger Chen, GM Image and Citizenship for Microsoft Greater China

- Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of leading Chinese internet and media firm Danwei

- Rui Cheng-gang of CCTV-2 (dubbed by Fortune Mag as China’s Lou Dobbs)

- The recent China Trust Barometer results

- a perspective on China from Edelman Europe head David Brain

If all else fails, Alan can also point you to the best place for beer and ribs.

Alan is passionate about the evolving online opportunity and probably the most senior regional agency leader blogging and active on Twitter today (keen to know who else you’d place on this list?).

Upcoming market visits include India, Japan and Korea - where he’s got another range of interesting meetings and interviews planned - worth staying tuned into. I also know he’d welcome any feedback on what content/interviews people would like to see in the future.

Last night tier-one social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter were subject to a huge attack (known as distributed denial of service -DDoS). It got me thinking as to how many marketers now just starting out with social media might be negatively impacted by today’s big news? I hope none!

Imagine that you’ve set up an event and you’re projecting aggregated tweets onto a large screen for all the attendees to see. Or that you’ve set up a competition on Facebook that runs for 24 hours. Would you shrug your shoulders and say ‘that’s just the Internet,’ or would you be seriously concerned?

Hacker attacks and DDOS are nothing new, but I don’t think there is massive awareness as to some of the risks that marketers and communicators need to factor in when using the internet - esp. if you’re leveraging a third-party platform that you don’t have direct control over. Don’t get me wrong, this in no way is supposed to be a ‘the Internet is too scary to use’ post(!!), but I do believe that last night’s events reinforce how important it is for brands and agencies to have a deep and ongoing understanding of the platform that they’re working with.

To that end, I came up with my 5 Social Media Tips for Marketers:

1. First rule of using technology - always have at least one back-up plan. We’ve all had the situation where the PC or projector wouldn’t work at an important presentation and out have come the print-outs, or flip-charts. Even though the cloud is very robust at the moment, fortunately, many social media platforms allow you to download client versions that you can run if the live connection doesn’t work. You can also load your content up to multiple sharing sites if one doesn’t work and try to have a broadband USB connector, just in case the internet doesn’t work like it should at your venue.

2. Be extra vigilant if embedding content from a third-party site (e.g. Youtube, Slideshare etc) onto a corporate or branded website. Create super-strong passwords and limit then number of people who have access to them. Often if content from third-party links are changed, the link stops working. However, the last thing you want to see is someone else’s mash-up of your CEO’s speech playing on your home page.

3. Reduce the risk of phishing. If you’re going to use email to communicate with customers or consumers, be very public about what email address/domain people can expect to see things from and publish a list of guidelines on your site about what people should and shouldn’t expect from you (e.g. you wont ask for their back details).

4. Where possible, moderate. Hashtags are an awesome marketing tool, but the issue is when someone starts to also use your hashtag in a less than complimentary fashion - www.skittles.com is a great example of this and why they ask for your age before you can log in. If you’re all for free speech, then all good, otherwise you can use third-party software to moderate tweets that appear at your event (but won’t work for www.search.twitter.com). Also, if you have a corporte (or personal) blog, make sure comments are set for moderation first before they are published - this is good standard practice and should be outlined in a social media policy.

5. Always believe there’s someone out there smarter than you who doesn’t like you! It may or may not be conincidence that the largest hacker’s conference in the world happened the week before last night’s outage. The number of people with amazing hacking skills is huge. I suggest a psychology of ’what if they gun for me?’ is taken into any planning to create a program that balances the risks and opportunities of the internet. Again, this is not fear-mongering, it’s good common sense.

Maybe we should also celebrate the fact that our timezones mean many of these DDoS attacks happen while we (and our customers) are safely tucked up in bed.

That’s my quick thoughts - there is no doubt another DDoS is around the corner - keen to hear any other of your tips to add to the list!

Recently, Google Japan started a Youtube Q&A site for upcoming Japanese general election, with artists, movie directors, actresses etc posting questions to the candidates via YouTube. This marks the first time Google’s moderator service has been used for politics in Japan and follows the strong influence and impact of social media in elections across many other Asian countries (also, let’s not forget Obama ‘Change, we can believe in‘….). Despite a 10 week crash course in 2002, my Japanese language skills are non-existent. However, examples of the Youtube videos can be found here.

According to Asahi Shimbun, the site opened on 13 July and by 28 July:

• 6,256 people had already participated in the moderator and 4,536 questions are posted.  Pro or con posting are over 25,000,
• Candidates have not uploaded answers yet, they will be uploaded on 30July
• This system was first used on Obama’s predidential election in 2008 and was very popular in US, but this is the first time used in Japan.
• Yahoo started a “minna-no Seiji” (everyone’s politics) site 3 years ago and this time average page views per day are about 1 million, which is twice as large as last general election.

Japan has very much been at the bleeding edge of digital/mobile adoption and marketing. The evolving importance of social media as an additional channel to reach and impact people in advance of the upcoming election will be fascinating to watch. In such an important country for our region, I’m expecting great innovation, but probably after this year’s election is finished (e.g.  Twitter not being allowed this year).

Interested to see how Japanese brands react to the governments growing use and whether this further increases the integration social media into marketing and media strategies going forward… To go with its powerful advertising and direct heritage, I also believe Japanese online/social media marketing can be truly world-leading, what do you think?

HT to my colleagues at Edelman Japan for this information.

Stumbled on this chart via the excellent Business/Alley Insder ‘Chart of the Day‘ on Twitter. Even senior PR leaders now realise that a massive consolidation and reduction of traditional media is not good for any marketing service provider. Sometimes visuals are so powerful not much more needs to be said…

Business Insider: Business Magazines Headed for the Abyss?

Two months ago, I posted this on Twitter: “Doing a survey - will share results. Mandatory for agency people to disclose client r/ships when writing online? Best way how?”

It’s a well-covered topic and from that tweet, I received 17 DM replies and have had follow-up one-one-one conversations with another 7 people. It’s all very unscientific, but these were the results:

- 18  peeps pretty much said yes, absolutely, every time
- 4 said, yes - but only if you’re promoting something you’re working on
- 2 said no - it doesn’t matter/takes up too much space

In terms of how to disclose, this was all over the place, but with a common theme and included:
- disclosure:XX is a client (good for blogs, tough for Twitter)
- disclosure
- disc. client
- #client

This Tweet needs a disclosure

Two people said that if you need to disclose a relationship, then don’t post about it in the first place! One, an in-house comms pro, said that their company code of ethics forbids them being seen to actively promote their own products online at all.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association, which every major agency is a member of,  is absolutely clear about agency/client disclosure is required, esp. in the following excerpt:

“We comply with FTC regulations that state: “When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product which might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience) such connection must be fully disclosed.”

Despite the delay in posting the results (sorry bout that!), I’m currently seeing an increasing number of tweets, posts, social network status updates etc from agencies promoting client events. One that drives me really nuts is when I know an individual/firm has authored a post/tweet and sent it out from a branded asset (e.g. Twitter), then re-tweeted, or re-posted it through their personal social network. Even with disclosure, this seems questionable.

Where I net out is that I  don’t see a problem promoting client activities, news and events - as long as there is a very clear disclosure about the agency-client relationship that allows the average reader to understand that there might be some form of relationship or commercial consideration driving the post. It’s something that I touched on in a previous post - people deserve at least that level of respect.

The disclosure that I use and have urged everyone at Edelman Asia-Pacific is #client (esp. for twitter), or disclosure XX is an Edelman client.I’m sending another email out today to reaffirm just how important these disclosures are to protect both our client’s brands, as well as our own.

Nobody and no firm is perfect, but constant visibility and reinforcement is crucial. I urge all my fellow agency digital and marketing leaders to continue doing similar and take personal responsibility to act as disclosure champions online. In order to have credible social media I really believe it is that important!

Thoughts, as always, much appreciated.