1. Social media is very much existent in China, but it’s like it’s on steroids: 298 million internet users, 105 million bloggers, 91 million members on their Bulletin Board Systems or BBS (discussion forums around different topics), and 58 million people on social networks. It’s all about perspective: Facebook has only 200 million users WORLDWIDE. 

2. BBS have a huge influence on consumer purchases - over 80% look at reviews there or go there to ask questions before making a purchase. Much as I like Amazon, that’s not where I go to decide what to buy: but could Amazon or something like it channel prospective buyers in such vast numbers successfully?

3. QQ, China’s largest social network, has a revenue model that surprisingly very few other social networks have replicated: they don’t make money off ads but through digital micro-transactions with their own currency: QQ Coins. In fact, QQ Coins have become so successful that China’s central bank is considering cracking down on it because of its increasing use to buy real-world goods. 

4. Group purchases, in the model of Dell Swarm, are on the rise. This has interesting implications for brands, who can easily reach their target audience on BBS. 

5. Brands get inspiration for new products by tracking discussions on these forums. When Chinese sports apparel brand Anta wanted to create a new line of products for their ambassador, basketball player Luis Scola, they realised that fans were referring to him as ‘Four Carat’ on the web, so created a line inspired by this which went on to become a success. 

6. This is a phenomenon which clearly marks the difference between the East and West: more people access the internet on their mobiles than they do on a PC. 

Here is CIC’s White Paper on the role of iWOM in making purchase decisions, which Sam presented:

..and here is another interesting one on the development of iWOM and online communities in China.

There is so much talk about Facebook, Twitter and the like that sometimes we forget there are much more wide-reaching platforms - in a different part of the world. Surely there are lessons there that we’re not taking the time to learn?

He also presented Alan Murray (executive editor of the Wall Street Journal)’s 5 tips on charging for content, something that we often discuss at Made By Many, and that will be useful to everyone who has thought of the micro-payment system. Murray’s tips are:

1. The best model is a mix of paid and free content.

2. You can’t charge for exclusives that will just be repeated elsewhere: A timely example was the news of Michael Jackson’s death as reported by TMZ - if they had restricted access to that content, everyone else who reported it on their (free to access) blogs or sites would have got all the traffic and traffic-supported ad revenue.

3. Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site. 

4. Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches. 

5. The narrower the niche, perhaps the better. 

You can read Murray’s thoughts in detail here. 

In Anderson’s words, the best model is not paid vs. free but ad-driven free vs. ‘freemium‘. 

The newspaper industry had to be touched upon, of course. In fact, Malcolm Gladwell has focussed on this aspect of the book in his review of it in the New Yorker. Anderson mentioned during the talk that he responded to Gladwell on his blog, and said that he felt that as far as journalism was concerned, the world has changed from traditional journalists being the authors of most forms of (paid) news in the past, to anyone becoming in author in today’s times and publishing their content for free, thanks to the web. So his solution is ‘to scale the economics of media down to the hyperlocal level’ - get people who are have alternate day jobs to contribute in return for non-monetary gains. Specifically, he was speaking with regard to his experience with GeekDad, a community that he runs. Now this is unlikely to be the salvation of the newspaper industry but ad-driven free vs. freemium is the model that remained with me as most likely to succeed. Co-incidentally, in response to a question from the audience following the talk, Anderson said that he did not think that micro-payments as a system would necessarily work because it was a question of the psychological vs. the monetary downsides of paying for a news article (’what the hell, I have to pay, can I be bothered’) - so personally though I wouldn’t mind paying £1 for a good piece (and with a proper audience that can multiply to very profitable heights - YouTube was an example someone from the audience quoted - 75 billion videos x (hypothetically) even 2p would be a decent sum of money), it’s a question of whether psychologically you think the benefit is worth the money, and that’s not always easy to gauge. 

A few thought-provoking ideas I left with:

1. Joseph Bertrand (1883) said that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. Is free anti-competitive, because it sets the default price to zero?

2. Anderson’s book is also being released as an audio-book in 3 hour and 6 hour formats. They are going to charge for the 3 hour format but not the 6, because in his words, ‘time is money’. So at what point does a piece of content become valuable enough to pay for so you don’t waste your (probably more important) time?

Here’s the presentation: it’s the same one he gave at the Wired business conference in New York 2 weeks ago.

That’s something we’re very interested in here at Made by Many, so we’ve invited world-renowned author and futurist Howard Rheingold to present an evaluation of the outcomes and predictions he made in the 2002 best-seller “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution”.

Howard’s talk will be followed by an open discussion - I’m sure it will be a lively one! The event will appeal to anyone interested in new models of mass collaboration, crowd-sourcing and emergent intelligence that are made possible with the advent of ubiquitous social computing. We’ve only got a few free seats left, so if you’re interested, get in touch with me asap at elin@madebymany.co.uk and I will try to get you on the guest list.

The event will take place next Wednesday (July 8th) at 15:30 - 17:00 in BBH’s offices at 60 Kingly Street.

Below is a video clip of a talk Howard gave for Ted on collaboration, and Smart Mobs has also got it’s own blog over at smartmobs.com. And of course, don’t forget to follow @hrheingold on Twitter!

1. Twittersheep: See the key characteristics of your Twitter followers.

2. Business Guys on Business Trips: Solving global issues, such as page registration procedures

3. The Vendor-Client relationship in real world situations: Very entertaining - we all need to laugh at ourselves!

4. Twitter on Paper: Because none of us can get enough of Twitter. It closed shop on June 12th, having set up on May 26th, so I guess it’s too late to order your own tweet on paper now, but you know, I’m sure it was good while it lasted.

5. Boone Oakley: Because some of us are mildly jealous of their YouTubesite. 

6. Siri: A virtual assistant for iPhone users. I’m assuming the name is a play on ‘Sir, I’ (’need this’ or ‘want that’)? What do you think?

7. Twootles: Google and Twitter together? What’s not to love?

8. Fluid dynamics simulator in JavaScript: This one is very data-heavy, so be warned. But it is so SO cool.

9. BookSeer: Lovely little project that comes up with ideas for the next book for you to read. Sort of a combination of Amazon reviews with LibraryThing. Also worth reading this post by the creator that explains the concept behind it.

10. UK Hols: Where are you going this summer? Vodafone-backed project that plots the holiday destinations of people in the UK based on tweets with a specified hashtag:#ukhols. 

11. London Audio Guide: A location-aware app for the iPhone and iPod touch that takes you through key London spots. 

12. Collecta: Possibly the world’s first real-time search engine. No patch on Google…yet. 

13. Dunkin’ Run: You know when you have to run out and get coffees for multiple people in the team? Well, let’s assume you did. Then you’d find the Dunkin’ Run rather useful. 

14. Mig33: The ‘world’s first global mobile community’. Not quite sure if that’s an accurate description, but still interesting to know. 

15. Squares: And squares and more squares in different colours. Psychedelic. 

16. BBC Memoryshare: Plot your memories alongside a timeline of famous historical events. 

17. Happn.in: Find out what Twitter users in your city are discussing.

18. Mad Avenue Blues: Advertisingy spoof on American Pie.

19. JCDC vs. Lego: Lovely animated Lego fashion show. Lego = fun. Rocking music = cool. Fashion = sexy. All together? This is what it’s like!

JCDC Versus LEGO from Four H on Vimeo.

20. YouTube War: Jeff Crouse and Aaron Meyers have written a blog post about this augmented reality card game played in front of a live audience.

We’re very excited about today’s launch of Facebook Connect for Protect The Human, Amnesty International UK’s digital campaigning platform. Facebook Connect is great for external websites because of the huge social potential it offers (for those of you that have doubts, look at this presentation), but it is even more important for a site like Protect The Human because of the worthy causes Amnesty International supports. Protect The Human is all about rallying your friends behind human rights causes that you as an individual care a lot about. It is about transforming the power of an individual into the power of many. And, as Barack Obama said,

One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world. Your voice can change the world.

It’s pretty simple, really – all you need to do is sign in to Protect The Human, connect to Facebook with the Facebook Connect button, and start inviting your friends to join. Also, when you take specific actions on Protect The Human such as sending an email to ensure there is no crackdown on protests in Iran, you can post a notification to Facebook, alerting your friends there and (hopefully) encouraging many of them to do the same.

THIS is why the internet is truly powerful. 

What I like most about Mike’s post is this bit, about inviting a bit of creative destruction into the design process, something we feel very strongly about at Made by Many:

No matter how clear, simple, relevant, engaging, interesting, entertaining, usable or smart you believe your communication or interactive media is, the end-user will always destroy it for you in a heartbeat. Which is why you need to get people destroying your ideas before they grow so that you can get on and create something that really does make sense to the people you want to interact with.

The offender is trendy furniture store Habitat, who appear to have been sold some kind of automatic tweet-spam generator. Said tool goes off and fetches hashtags for trending topics and inserts them into lame tweets about product. The result is unbelievably crass, as you can see below, and includes hashtags for those following the Iranian Election, with the result is a tweet that reads, “#MOUSAVI Join the database to win a £1000 gift card Now!”

Someone, somewhere is responsible for this. They should pay the ultimate price. It’s one of the worst ideas EVER.

As William says in his blog post:

I don’t buy my internet news in a newspaper, I pick it out from a broad and fast-moving stream of fragments and favourites and recommendations garnered from twitter, blogs, feeds and aggregators and it’s all free. I might want one little piece of the Guardian one day, two little pieces of the Times the next, I don’t want either all the time so why should I buy 12 month’s worth?

That’s how I consume content as well - piece by piece, fragments from a large number of websites. This, it seems to me, is the key issue: people don’t mind paying tiny amounts of cash for little pieces of content, it’s just that there isn’t an easy-to-use, trusted third party system like that in place for news content.

There are in music and movies. iTunes and NetFlix, and LoveFilm in the UK, all provide users with the ability use a single system to buy movies and music (and games and apps) from many different publishers. Xbox users can use NetFlix on a subscription basis, and last week Virgin and Universal made the announcement that they are launching an eat-as-much-as-you-like service for MP3s.

So, there are models out there that seem to work, or look extremely promising, and it’s clear that people will pay for certain types of content if you make the experience seamless and brainlessly easy.

Now, it appears that similar services may exist for newspaper and magazine publishers. Journalism Online are launching a service will provide users with a password-protected website where they can buy subscriptions that work across multiple sites, and individual articles from many publishers. The Publisher has some control over setting the price and  Journalism Online will add value by negotiating licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries provide insight data that will help publishers optimise circulation revenue and maintain traffic to support advertising revenue.

That sounds pretty interesting.

Just to be clear, I think it would be madness for newspapers to try and put everything back behind a pay wall. The most likely model to emerge is a hybrid one where I continue to enjoy a lot of free content and the conversations that exist around that content, but when I want to go deeper or consume richer content then *sometimes* I should expect to pay a small amount for it.

After years of getting it for free on the Web, it won’t be easy for publishers to start charging for even some of their content but there may be no choice. Personally, I am willing to pay a small amount to make sure that I am properly informed, and although I think citizen media is often quicker than traditional media I still want to live in a world where there are professional - and accountable - news organisations. I know this is not a view that everyone will subscribe to, but it’s not clear how else news media in particular will be able to remain in business.

The answer is almost certainly a bit of everything:

• Ecommerce - newspapers and magazines already sell directly to their readers, but could do a lot more of this, including providing more paid-for online services. The role of online community in this is obvious
• Micropayments and subscription - along the lines envisaged by Journalism Online
• Advertising and sponsorship - an important but smaller part of the mix

Anyway - these are my half-formed thoughts. I’m willing to be persuaded either way. I’ve also heard that the new iPhone SDK makes it easy for developers to build micropayments into the apps they make. Not sure if this is true but does this hold out the tantalising possibility that the iPhone and iTunes could be the digital wallet we’re all waiting for? I already find it a bit too easy to spend money on iTunes!

In that exciting news, the new IPhone will have a video-enabled camera and a compass. This means just one thing, with a GPS-enabled device, internet device that can now tell where it is pointing we are going to get a flood of Augmented Reality applications/games showing meta-data, social data and content onto the phone video screen. Combined with things like Google Streetview and Latitude (soon to be released on the IPhone) people will be viewing their world through the IPhone, with reviews of restaurants/bars, transport services (and bus times) projected onto their iphone-world. This could lead to an explosion of social geo-tagging for the IPhone carrying-set.

I for one welcome our new augmented overlords and will be producing a line of AR-symbol carrying baseball caps for instant identification of Twitterers on the streets.

For now the Sekai Camera iPhone application gives an early vision of this world.

The videos are from a 1999 programme on ABC’s Nightline, and track a team at the company as they go about fulfilling a challenge to build a new kind of shopping cart in 5 days. I was intrigued by the fact that most of what Tom says in the book was in fact said in the videos by David a decade ago. The host of Nightline says that the programme was a huge hit with viewers and resulted in a lot of publicity for Ideo. It’s not difficult to see why. There are hundreds of business books that give some tired trite titled ‘how to make your company better than the rest’ and so on, but these videos show exactly how this is done in Ideo and the book doesn’t sound false in the least. I think the book is extremely useful because it is a sort of bolt-on to the video. The content stays true to the company’s mantra of years ago, even as it expands on their beliefs. 

I found a couple of things mentioned in the video particularly interesting: David Kelley says that ‘being playful is of huge importance to being innovative’, so he actually encourages things like people throwing darts at each other and part of an aeroplane wing being used in the decor of the office. The other thing was an Ideo employee saying ‘enlightened trial and error succeeds over the plans of a lone genius’, emphasizing the value of teamwork as he explains the company’s prototyping process.

I’m glad to say we at Made By Many do some of the things Ideo mentions - prototyping, for example, and building what we call ‘cool walls’, full of our research and ideas.