Motoko’s weblog

While Japan’s popular Social Networking Services (SNS) still increasing the number of registered users (mixi with 14 million users and Gree with 4 million users), it’s a fact that the “newness” of these services has worn out. Many people are now on these SNS sites less frequently and spending less time.

goo Research and Internet.com’s survey results show that people started to lose interests in SNS sites about 10 months ago. Since mixi opened in February 2004, has the SNS market in Japan peaked out already? If so, what do SNS sites need to do to survive or even to increase active users?

With my experience, it was fun to be invited and to invite friends to join these sites at the beginning. Till then, I was visiting lots of websites owned by my friends to communicate by posting comments on their BBSs. It was getting to be a lot of work, and was definitely time consuming. When mixi opened in 2004, we invited each other to join so that we can all communicate at one place. It was great. Then we started to join other SNS sites. I’m now registered at 20+ social media sites. Trying to check in and update these sites is like 2003 all over again. Since there aren’t much differences among these SNS sites, you just need 1 or 2 sites where most of your friends and contacts are. And, I’m sure that’s what many SNS users in Japan are thinking. If you are not mixi, differentiating your services from others is the key to success or survival in next 12 months. That fact that many Japanese are now looking into “specialized SNS sites” (i.e., music only, local area specific, or age specific) backs up my point. Sure, these sites may never become as big as mixi or Gree, but they would probably have more active user rate.

When I was speaking at SES London, I started to lose my voice after 5 min. or so in. Yes, it’s just my luck. I apologize to people came to the session, I didn’t sound good at all. While I was speaking, I couldn’t help myself but calling “riiiiicolaaaaa” in my head. Now, that’s the power of advertising and marketing, isn’t it? The search is great, and it’s going to be even better, but in my opinion, it will never replace TV ads. Through the search, the businesses can only connect to people if and when they happen to search what you offer. On the other hand, TV ads push what they want you to know, again and again. Then I was thinking, what would be the closest thing on Internet to TV ads… Perhaps it’s the banner ads, but we all know that many banner ads are ignored, people skip right over the ads and read what they want to read on the page. It’s like when people skip TV commercials and surf channels. Those paid ads can be effective, then again, it only works when someone is searching for it. What works really well and similar to TV commercials maybe those “word-of-mouth” marketing and ads. It’s what they talk about on blogs and what’s on videos that your friends send you. You may not be searching for it, but it comes to your way from your friends and your favorite bloggers in the form of text (blog), images and videos. The thing is that while you may not always buy things you see on TV, you are more likely to try something that your friends recommend.

According to Yano Financial, “Kuchikomi blog” (word-of-mouth blog) advertising market in Japan grew to more than 3 billion yen market in 2007 from 0.9 billion yen market in 2006. Their another survey shows that more than 80% of net users have actively taken the advise/information they got through “word-of-mouth” on the net. Almost 50% of female in 30s responded that they talk to other people about their experiences and opinions about the products and the services that they purchased. In 2008, success of ad campaign may be up to how well you incorporate word-of-mouth campaign into your cross marketing strategies.

2 weeks after Google released its Google Social Graph API, Yahoo Japan opened “Yahoo Profile” service. The service integrates their Social Networking Service, Yahoo Days’ profile pages and Open ID user profiles. On Yahoo Profile page, you’ll see friends list, and feeds in addition to profile information. It looks much like SNS’s member top page.

Yahoo Days members aren’t as active as other popular SNSs in Japan such as mixi and Grree, and if and how many users they can maintain and hopefully gain in up coming months are Continue Reading »