social media

The No. 1 Japanese social site mixi’s President Kenji Kasahara invited Hisami to moderate their Mixi Meetup 2010 panel to discuss social media, to be held at The Prince Park Tower Tokyo.

Mixi Meetup 2010 Panel A Theme “Social x Marketing”: With the arrival of Social Media, how will marketing evolve? What is the essence of social media, why is it so significant, and what is its future? Four social marketing experts of Japan will be invited for this discussion.

Panelists:

• Hiroto Ebata, Director, iMarketing, Coca Cola Japan
• Toshinao Sasaki, IT Journalist
• Hideyuki Nagasawa, CEO, Cyber Communications
• Ryuji Yokoyama, CEO, ADK Interactive

Moderator: Hisami Ohshiba, Founder/Partner, JaM Japan Marketing LLC

There are already more than 3,000 registered to attend on a lottery system.

As witnessed during the recent World Cup, an unprecedented number of people from around the world enjoyed using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to share their thoughts and have conversations with others in real time. There is tremendous growth in Japanese Twitter users, reaching 16% among active Internet users, passing the US user rate of 10%, and in the month of June, US Facebook user rate was 71% of Internet users, further establishing their position as leading online utilities. What are brand marketers doing via Facebook - a virtual online operating system - and other social media, to engage with users? And furthermore, what should they be doing? We’d like you to join us in this discussion at our upcoming JaM Media Session in Tokyo (in Japanese).

JaM Japan Marketing hosts the 6th JaM Media Session in Tokyo - Latest US Marketing Trends: How do & how can marketers engage with people through social media?

• When: July 27, 2010 (Tues) 6:30pm registration opens, 7:00~8:30pm session
• Where: Tokyu Agency, 2nd floor Large Conference Room (map)
• Limited to 40 attendees
• Cost: 7000 yen (payment & receipts at sign-in)
• Copy of Hisami’s book, “The Presidential Elections in the YouTube Era” will be given to all attendees

Register: by July 23rd (Fri) via email

Hisami Ohshiba will speak again at the Nikkei Net Marketing Forum + MMC 2010 on July 13th at the Shinagawa Prince Hotel in Tokyo.

Following last year’s keynote, this year’s main theme is “Marketing’s Big Transition — A Shift from Brands to Consumers.” Hisami will participate as one of the four speakers in the Special Seminar “Capturing the Digital Generation — 4 New Trends in Relationship Marketing.” This session from 1:30 - 5:30pm will also include Ogilvy & Mather Japan’s President, Kent Wertime, AdMob Japan’s President John Lagerling, and Cyber Agent’s General Manager Kounosuke Takeishi. Details are below.

4:30-5:30pm Hisami Ohshiba Presentation “How Facebook is Breaking New Ground in Marketing — The Forefront of US Social Media.”

Presentation: With over 400 million active global users, and 50% of them logged on at any given time, Facebook is the world’s largest social network. With that level of activity, the speed and power of information shared between users can be a huge advantage for marketers. How are leading US companies utilizing social networks like Facebook to engage with users? How companies can best use social media will be explained citing the latest case studies.

You can register for this seminar here.

The May 10th Nikkei BP Online column (in Japanese) “US NetMarketing Chawa,” titled “Twitter’s New Ad Play ‘Promoted Tweets’” talks about the April 14th announcement that Twitter will donate all (US) public tweets to the Library of Congress for their archives. The Library of Congress recognized tweets as a valuable record of people’s lives and thoughts, and plans to archive the data beginning with the very first tweet on March 21, 2006, and going forward.

In the meantime came the “Promoted Tweets,” Twitter’s 140 character-style ads based on keyword searches. Currently companies who have a strong presence on Twitter for customer relations and branding such as Best Buy, Virgin America Airlines, and Starbucks, have started advertising via promoted tweets on a test basis.

Research found 34% of Twitter users dislike targeted ads, and if users don’t respond to the ads, they stop appearing, so it is still unknown how companies will understand the Twitter ecosystem in engaging with users. The column (in Japanese) can be found here.

Facebook, now in its 6th year with 400 million global users, ranking third in terms of population after China and India, and Twitter, with close to 60 million worldwide users, shows how social media plays a major role in generating consumers’ call-to-action. Companies’ social marketing activities are developing through trial-and-error, and in this Session, we’d like to take a moment to really observe what is happening in this rapidly changing landscape of communications and marketing. “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about” (Cory Doctorow) is a key concept, and we’d like to invite a deeper discussion with everyone on this theme. The last Session was very interactive with lively discussions by attendees, and we look forward to seeing everyone again at this next Session. Seminar info: 5th JaM Media Session in Tokyo, Latest US Marketing Trends: Now that social media has become an online utility for consumers, what are marketers’ strategies for social media marketing (SMM)?

• When: March 11, 2010 (Thurs) 6:30pm registration opens, 7:00~8:30pm session
• Where: Tokyu Agency 2nd floor Large Conference Room （map）
• Limited to 40 attendees
• Cost: 7000 yen (payment & receipts at sign-in)
• Copy of Hisami’s book, “The Presidential Elections in the YouTube Era” will be given to first time attendees
• Register: by March 5 (Fri) by email to jaminquiry@jamjapan.com

The Feb. 1 Nikkei BP Column in NetMarketing Online (in Japanese) “US NetMarketing Chawa” titled Giving, the Social Marketing Keyword” covers how social media helped disseminate information and spur giving to Haiti’s earthquake victims, through cell phone text messaging, Twitter and Facebook. It also analyzes Pepsi’s move to skip its 23-year history of Super Bowl ads in favor of a $20 million social media campaign, Pepsi Refresh Program as its new marketing strategy. Below is an excerpt of the column, which is found here (in Japanese).

Feb. 1: Giving, the Social Marketing Keyword

Social Media becomes hub of information and generates huge WOM for aid to Haiti

According to social media research company Sysomos, Tweets that included the keywords “Haiti” or “Red Cross” reached 23 million during the three days between January 12 - 14, of which 59% were Retweets. Texting “Haiti” to 90999 on cell phones allowed people in the U.S. to donate 10 dollars to Red Cross, which would be billed to people’s phone accounts. Among the Tweets, there were 189,024 mentions of the Red Cross text to 90999 for donations to Haiti, showing how word of mouth by so many helped spread the message. Nielsen’s BlogPulse Jan. 15th data on U.S. blogs indicated that 3% of all blogs involved posts about the Haiti earthquake.

The column continues (in Japanese) here.