CRM-lite from QQ

We last wrote about QQ in February when we reported on its staggering 572.3 million registered users. I was really interested then to read the China Web 2.0 Review post today about QQ's decision to launch an instant messaging-based CRM service.

Apparently, small businesses in China have already been using QQ to maintain contact with their customers but have been running about scalability issues in a service designed primarily for personal communications. This has some echoes of the way in which small businesses in the 1990s turned to mobile telephones to run their businesses at a time when access to land lines was still much more restricted for anything but large, State-owned organisations. A whole sub-culture of mobile telephone-based business practises emerged as a result. Here we now see the same thing happening online. Fascinating.