The game is the brainchild of Hasbro’s U.K. agency, Tribal DDB and the concept itself is fantastic. But there seems to be a long way now from the original concept of creating a massive multi-player game to leverage the Hasbro brand and promote the coming 3D version of the board game and what we have.

By all accounts there are 1.7 million unique users and the interest seems to have overwhelmed the servers leading to frustration and disappointment. Further, the game has already prone to chronic cheating. I think people are cheating by creating more than one account and then selling the property cheaply to their main account. I just don’t want to see it turn into a cheating feast to see who can create the most accounts and money launder the most. But Perhaps cheating is how the real world works anyways.

Not surprisingly, what was touted as the “biggest land grab of 2009″ has turned into another online fiasco of overloaded servers and massive cheating. This has resulted in yet another brand damaged by poor execution and consideration for the details. I give the folks at Tribal DDB 5 stars for the idea. 1 star to the team supporting and managing this imploding disaster. To add insult to injury, I believe that they are going to ‘re-start’ the game and those poor soles having invested many hours finding streets, selecting just the right location for that building and even trying build a neat community will loose this and need to it down to ‘a learning experience’. The official blog site is now littered with frustrated posted and company apologies.

Clearly, a lesson in not what to do for a client in viral marketing.

DeNA?
DeNA is the biggest mobile social network in Japan. Currently it has 632 employees with a market cap of USD1.5 billion. Their most popular service is called Mobile Game Town (Mobagetown), a service that primarily attracts users by offering free games and that monetizes through advertising. Other services of DeNA include several successful m-commerce related portals such as Mobaoku (mobile C2C), Pocket Affiliate (Japans largest mobile advertising affiliate network), Mobagetown L (services targeted at Ladies) and Mobakore (fashion retail, 79% female users). DeNA has around 14.2 million users in Japan that are good for 18 billion page views per month.

As one of DeNA’s most popular services Mobagetown was launched back in 2006 it offered games for free. As a result users were rather young at that time: over 70% were teenagers. This has changed in the last few years, currently over 60% of DeNA users are over 20 years old which means they can spend money and are worth more to advertisers. DeNA has over 500,000 partner sites to advertise to mobile users. Wong explains that, among others, advertisers can place ads on the front-page, place text ads between search results, and advertise through (mobile) mail. Moreover Mobagetown has partnerships with big brands to integrate their brand in the service. For instance users could at some point get a Coca Cola avatar.

Content
The most important content for DeNA is avatars. “Avatars are very important content for us, avatar sales are still the biggest” says Wang. Actually DeNA was the first company to offer avatars on mobile. Users can choose from many ways to interact with their friends through their customized avatar. They can chat, play games, compete, give gifts etc. Users are even able to have a pet that they can feed and interact with. This year DeNA will roll out 3D avatars and will start providing options to “go outside of the DeNA world.” For instance users can bring their avatar into games at game centers or use them at karaoke bars by uploading it. I’m not sure what this is going to look like, but it is certainly something to keep an eye on.

MUGC
User generated content (generated on a mobile device!) is very important for DeNA. A few almost unbelievable examples: in Mobagatown users have created over 530,000 novels and there are over 26,000 songs made by users themselves. Moreover users create their own recipes and upload + share their own karaoke videos. A more recent services launched in February 2009 allows users to upload their own illustrations made on their mobile.

China = Tough
After introducing DeNA Wang continued to talk about what DeNA is doing in China, and as it turns out: it’s not much. DeNA has been ‘active’ in the Chinese market for over 2 years, mainly doing market research. But Wong seems to be rather humble, almost pessimistic about DeNA succeeding in China. The main reason he mentioned for his rather negative attitude is that in contrary to Japanese users, in China users are not willing to pay for content.

As a result DeNA will start attracting users the same way they did in Japan 3 years ago: by offering free games and setting up a free mobile gaming portal. “In China our strategy will be creating big games with big brands and make money through virtual items” explains Wang. But this will not be the main focal point; offering games will merely be a tool for attracting attention as “we are very good in mobile social services, so we will try this first”. Besides social services another point of focus will be mobile commerce services, Mobaoku is the largest mobile auction site in Japan “we will try this in China also, but it will be hard.” Wang understands that a key factor for success in the Chinese market is flexibility. He thinks DeNA has always been quite flexible, unlike most other Japanese companies that traditionally do not want to change. Other than the fact that Chinese mobile users are not willing to pay for content a whole range of challenges were discussed:

• In Japan there are only a few devices so the market is pretty standardized. In China there are many mobile device players: screen sizes differ, operating systems differ, which makes it a lot harder.
• In China the competition is much harder compared to Japan. Japan is small and closed. “Here we need to start from the beginning” explains Wang.
• In November 2008 mobile traffic exceeded PC traffic in Japan. This is the result of fixed data plan. It will likely take a while before the 3 mobile operators in China start offering fixed data plans.
• China mobile launched a mobile SNS last month. This indicates that they are willing to interfere in the mobile services market which is a big threat for all mobile service providers. The big operators have all the research, a huge user base and the power to change the fee for their own good. Wang: “I worry about this, but I also think there is always need for other services.  Therefore we have to differentiate.”

Wang concludes with: ”We will not be able to copy our success. We are here to meet friends and share insights. This market is very different so we need new ideas for China.”

One solution we found to this is PitchEngine. It was created last year by Jason Kintzler a veteran in traditional PR and now will start its operation in China, led by Prof. Lonnie B Hodge, CEO of CultureFish Media (CFM).  Jason said he had seen several failed attempts to create a Social Media release tool that could be used by new adopters of technology. None of the services he investigated seemed interactive or user friendly enough so he created one. PitchEngine makes it possible for PR pros, brands, and agencies to build and share digital, social media releases with their contacts for free.

Using the online tools offered by PitchEngine, everyone can build a press release easily with zero or very low cost. Once the releases are built, they are indexed within minutes in Google News. Unlike traditional press release service, PitchEngine allows the readers to comment on the releases and it also integrates with social media service such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook etc. Each release can be easily submitted to those social media platforms to reach huge number of audience. (Check out a sample release I created which is easy job indeed.)

CultureFish Media (CFM) is based in Guangzhou and focus on Social Media, Localization, CSR, PR and SEO work in China’s digital space. Since CFM is now the Asian arm of PitchEngine, I asked Lonnie how he’s going to pitch Chinese local social media. He said, “PitchEngine will be completely localized for China in a few days and easy for even newcomers to the web to operate. Releases can be written in Chinese and Google automatically picks them up and releases them in the areas most appropriate. Baidu and other engines, of course, give priority to Chinese language listings, but best practice SEO, honest backlinks and good content will always drive a keyword or site to the top of the listings.”

Talking about Social Media in China, some people think it actually is in China for a long while as we have BBS which plays very important part of Chinese internet life, some think it is also hard for social media to compete with mainstream media because of the portals and media control in China. As a social media expert, Lonnie gave us his opinion:

“There are no insurmountable hurdles, only exciting challenges and opportunities on the road to digital success in China. China is the most exciting market we work in because the use of the Internet is so different here: gaming, messaging and BBS interactions have unique Chinese use patterns unike that of any other geographical or cultural marketplace in the world. I do consulting for a lot of US companies and fund managers looking to invest in the Chinese Internet. Invariably their main concern is the risk involved in advertising via portals that might be closed down or adversely affected by  governmental rather than market forces. I don’t see this as a cause for worry. where companies should be investing time and energy is in involving mainland developers, marketers and media specialists in any China campaigns. Most businesses rely on Hong Kong and Singapore or large out of touch advertising agencies to manage campaigns that really require strong internal relationships with ISP managers, Bulletin Board key players, and native market analysts with a broad knowledge of the multitude of geographical tastes and preferences in a country with 56 ethnic groups using hundreds of regional dialects. “

The launch party of PitchEngine Asia, PR Optimisation Workgroup will be held next week. “Alvin Chiang, Marketing Director for Xiaonei, will be one of the speakers. We are both interested in maturing the South China market and helping local businesses and webmasters understand how to integrate Chinese Web 2.0, PR 2.0 and Social Media platfroms for maximum return on their advertising and SEM budgets”, Lonnie added.

1. Joe Chen, CEO of Oak Pacific Interactive, the owner of Xiaonei which is the leading SNS and the most successful Facebook clone in China said in the iResearch VIP dinner, its Kaixin.com is now bigger than the super hot Kaixin001.com. I am not sure what metric Joe is referring to, but at least Alexa says it is not true.

2. On the other side, the rumor about Kaixin001 is that it will secure its $20 million second round fund very soon. So will that prove that the winter in China web is not that cold?

3. The time for Chinese microblogging is probably coming soon. Reason: a). Recently I found some Chinese VC friends are on twitter, and I guess you do not need me to tell why they are there; b). Digu was launched two months ago and Maopao, a new twitter liker founded by a co-founder of Xiaonei is currently in private test; c). The big news is that some friends said China Mobile was planning its own microblogging service. Yep! Chinese twittersphere is getting hot!

4. Although Netvibes was suffering some complain from blogosphere and people question whether personalized homepage can work in the end, Baidu seems working on a similar project: http://220.181.6.16/.

5. How many SNSs do we have in China? The answer does not really matter. Another Chinese portal will join SNS war: Sohu’s SNS is in private test.

6. It is confirmed that AOL China will be closed soon. Another failure for foreign internet service in China.

[image from closet-inc]

Basically the way BloggerInsight works is that: Companies looking for marketing knowledge in China create campaign on BloggerInsight which help find and connect knowledeable Chinese bloggers and ask them for their personal opinions. BloggerInsight will wrap up these opinion into a formal report with analysis and give it the company. The bloggers who gave valuable opinion will get paid.

The Chinese BBS online culture has gained loads of attention after we wrote this post. You simply can not disregard the voice from BBS if you concerns about Chinese social media. But you should be also very careful about this type of social media because Chinese BBS now can be easily abused. There are many so-called social media agencies out there, you pay them a small amount of money and they can guarantee you thousands of posts up on all sorts of BBS the second day promoting your products or cursing your competitors. So the question hitting me everyday is that How much we can trust Social Media?

Interesting enough, the TNS just released a report discussing which media channels we should trust most. Let’s picked three points here:

1. Globally, a roughly equal number highly trust TV news (41%), online news (40%) and newspapers (39%).

2. Blogs are almost universally distrusted with only one in ten trusting them globally.  Norway, The Netherlands, Germany and Sweden are particularly distrustful at only 5%.

3. Here is the most interesting point for me: The Chinese and Koreans were much more trusting of the blog medium at 24% and 22% respectively. In the US 9% of respondents trusted blogs.

Because of #3 above and BloggerInsight connecting to knowledgeable bloggers individually for their insight, BloggerInsight’s business model should work. The key issue might be: How to scale it?