By Ren Fang | April 27, 2010

Online Marketing 101: Lessons From Hello Hollywood

We started our online marketing campaign for our entertainment show, ‘Hello! Hollywood’ a few months ago. As most of the Chinese online websites don’t have a conventional way to treat traditional online marketing techniques (for example, pre-rolls / banner ads / etc. are charged on a per day basis), we put our thinking caps on and thought about spreading the word virally. Needless to say, we had our ups and downs, but here are some of the few things we’ve learned along the way:

Fan-base VS Friend-base

We first tackled the social-networking sites as a way to promote our program online After all, with sites like RenRen and KaiXin001 is really one of the birth places of viral marketing. It starts here, it lives here, and it grows here.

Before we started any social-media initiatives, we did a best practice study on our competitors’ shows. Initial results show that having a television show on-air does give you a certain advantage online. However, notoriety is just one half of the equation… (to be discussed in a little bit).

Back to the social-networking sites. Just by being part of these social networks and continually updating it with fresh content, news stories, ‘tweeting’, etc., will continually grow the fan base. I equate it the way you would treat a plan – you water it everyday, give it the sunshine it needs, and it’ll eventually keep growing.

After a few days of us on the social networks, the number of ‘friends’ steadily grew… unfortunately, that is not a direct correlation with our online viewership of our program. More so, as soon as we stopped adding ‘friends’ to our profiles, the ‘steadily growing’ rate slowed down to a trickle. Yes, we had a few comments, few revisits, and few re-tweets from ‘friends’. And yes, we tried different content, increased our update frequency as well as match content with our ‘friends’ interest, but the awareness and the branding of ‘Hello! Hollywood’ was still low.

We were not alone in this endeavor as our competitors exhibited the same folley – large ‘friend’ base doesn’t always translate or convert into a large ‘fan’ base.

Beyond Social-Networking

So, the dilemma of ‘friend’ base versus ‘fan’ base spurred discussions with what to do beyond that of just the social networks. We decided going after related online forums where ‘Hollywood’ would be more relevant and targeted. To our surprise, responses were vey active and we started to get our momentum back again with marketing our show.

For starters, users of the social networks started to add us again as ‘friends’ because they read and like the posts from those outside forums. We took advantage of the short burst of interest, started to re-tweet the posts, and really focused on building a more credible and interesting brand position for ‘Hello! Hollywood’ in these social-networking sites. As a result, we had an 84% increase of re-tweets of our posts, a 56% increase in our online views brought by the social networking sites, and exhibited over 60% of the content that was updated on our social-networking sites were actually re-posts of the text / media posts that we had from our outside forums.

Bottom line, you can add all the fresh new content as much as you like, but credibility trumps all. Chinese social network users relish in gaining ‘social credits’ (what I like to call it) by becoming the primary source of information for their friends and peers. Who would have thought that being ‘cool’ was going to be one of the backbones of our social-networking strategy.

Picking the Right Partners

Syndicating content to the online communities and forums did increase the views of our show – no doubt about that. However, we’re all very big believers of ‘interactivity’ with our audience and increasing the number of ‘viewers’ doesn’t necessarily mean generating audience engagement. The way we see it, the viewing experience will ultimately be our the base branding of our ‘Hello! Hollywood’ show.

We tested different ways to engage our audience – inviting them to leave comments, encourage them to participate in online polls, rewarding our audience who shared our posts to friends; however, at the end of the day, I think there’s an element of not enough motivation for viewers to participate more.

We did notice that most of our ‘regular’ visitors to our sites were the folks we really wanted to approach and engage. They were the ones who kept the spirit of ‘Hello! Hollywood’ alive and regularly submitted questions about Hollywood. That’s when it hit us – if we can engage this core group with our program, they would eventually drive the rest of the community (thought leaders).

We formed a strategic partnership with one of the top online Hollywood-centric communities to collect questions from movie fans across China. A new segment was made for the television program where our hosts would answer those ‘fan questions’. When every new episode premiered, the segment would be posted back on the community for everyone to view.

Results: we received hundreds of questions within the first week and total traffic to our official ‘Hello! Hollywood’ site increased 66%. Goes to tell you that picking the right partners means everything.

Organic Marketing VS. Push Marketing

People have argued that, due to the ‘free’ nature of the Internet, that viral marketing should be organic. A good viral content will spread and will drive the buzz by itself. Purists would argue that it should be completely grass-root driven and viral means just that – without any assistance.

Yes, in an ideal world, that would be the case… but we’re talking about China here. For myself, while keeping the spirit of viral marketing alive, creating close relationships with the thought-leaders or ‘gate-keepers’ can really help elevate the viral campaign to the next level – saving plenty of time and costs.

I like to define our relationships with the online communities as a way to take an ownership in how our program will look, feel, and present. We tried our best to keep the content we posted fresh and to encourage all the members to continually post questions to the site. However, results weren’t quite as exciting as when we first launched and didn’t understand why.

Here’s the secret – the community managers / administrators played an extremely crucial role in building our credit level on these sites. They are ultimately the ones who bless or disregard whether there’s any worth to the posts / content to begin with. As a result, we traded our pure grass-root driven model with developing the good relationships with these key folks. To date, I’m proud to say we’re continually breaking new grounds and seeing great results as it pertains to our show.

Conclusion:

There is a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of research out there that talks about online marketing the age of Web 2.0. I feel, on one hand, that these people have pioneered the way for online marketing. These guys INVENTED online marketing in many cases. Yet, on the other hand, I’m deeply confused whether applying these real applications to China makes sense… yet. For now, the verdict is still out there and I’m more than happy navigating through the way we see it fits for our program. After all, if it’s not broken, why fix it?

Ren Fang is the Director of Business Development at METAN Development Group. For questions/comments, email ren@metanmedia.com