Bullish on exports

Much of South China's B2B media is still driven by exports, so it was interesting to see two of the key players making bullish noises about the prospects for 2010 this week. In a review of the prospects for the Hong Kong economy, the Bangkok Post says that Hong Kong Trade Development Council is forecasting 5% export growth this year.

The article quotes Subrina Chow, director of the HK government's Economic & Trade Office in Singapore saying that the relative improvement in China's external trade should augur well for better performance in Hong Kong's trade.

The surge in China's investment has directly and indirectly benefited Hong Kong's exports of capital goods to China. The trend is likely to continue in the coming months, she said.

"China's strong domestic demand has buttressed Hong Kong's exports of goods to China, which is its largest trading partner, accounting for about 48% of our total trade value," she said. "The declines in exports experienced by Hong Kong since the latter part of 2008 have been slower than those in many other Asian economies."

Meanwhile, JLM's Pacific Epoch quotes Alibaba.com CEO David Wei saying that Chinese exports could surge as much as 20% this year:

Online trading has bounced back faster than the traditional markets, Wei said. Alibaba.com's fourth quarter statistics demonstrate that consumption of developed markets like the U.S. has recovered more quickly than expected

Social Media in Asia

Lots of good data in this SlideShare Presentation from Ogilvy's Thomas Crampton. I'm delighted that he's going to join us for the UFI Open Seminar in Asia next March. Check out the web site and watch up for Twitter with the hashtag #ufitaipei

Social Media in Asia

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Harvard and BA on F2F

Now it does seem that BA is about to make it hard for us to follow through on its proposal to get face-to-face with what that great bastion of moderation and toleration the Daily Mail calls its "kamikaze staff" about to go on a merry Christmas strike. However, don't let that detract from this interesting promotion highlight by Fleishman Hilliard's Napoleon Biggs in a post title Forget Facebook, get Face-2-Face! BA is giving away tickets to businesses trying to build their activity through face-to-face sales and marketing activities. Of course, when you'll be able to use them is anybody's guess.

Dig into the BA microsite and you'll come across a report by Harvard Business Review called "Managing Across Distance in Today's Economic Climate: the value of face-to-face communication". As Brussels, only recently free from its straight banana crisis, grapples with the idea of adopting the WWF's proposed 20% reductions in business travel, this will come as a breath of fresh air to those in the events industry.

A couple of highlights from the HBR report's executive summary:

• Virtually all survey participants (95%) said that face-to-face meetings are a key factor in successfully building and maintaining long-term relationships.
• 89% agreed that face-to-face meetings are essential for sealing the deal
• 79% said that in-person meetings are the most effective way to meet new clients to sell business
• 52% said that restrictions on the number of flights they take for business would hurt their business

Of course, if the airline you want to use is on strike (or, in due course, out of business), it makes taking those flights a bit harder.

The virtual fairs are coming

UBM Asia Launches Virtual MBA Fair
The press release from UBM Asia has really set me thinking. I talked about it last week in Australia (thanks EEAA for your hospitality) and have been noticing that, 10 years after event organisers were panicking about the prospects of virtual trade fairs during Dotcom v1.0, there has been a real surge in events like this. Some of them (e.g. Red 7 Media's FolioShow and Expo Tech) have replaced existing real live events while others, such as this UBM announcement look like brand new, stand-alone events.

To me the technology is still pretty clunky and I don't like the Second Life style of the graphics some of the systems use, but that's probably just a symptom of my advancing years. It also seems unlikely that we'll see a wholesale draft from real life events to virtual shows but we are getting quite close to a tipping point where virtual events can take there place as part of the marketing mix, combining some of the convenience and cheapness of a web site with some of the interactivity of a real, face-to-face experiences.

China Digital Trends from AdAge

5 Really Cool Digital Trends Heading to China in 2010 - AdAgeChina - Viewpoint

Great piece here on the AdAge China site which I notice has quietly gone "free to air" (it used to be behind a subs wall). Read the whole piece. It has all sorts of interesting facts to back up the claim that these five will be the key trends next year in the mainland:

1. Apple iPhone Apps
2. Online Games Will Continue to Grow
3. Mobile Social Networking - mobile almost anything I'd say, but they have a good point and some good numbers here.
4. The Shanghai World Expo
5. Augmented Reality - I'm hearing a lot about this at the moment and am not sure I fully understand it or how it will work. But, those out there on the bleeding edge are quite convinced that this is a really important wave and one which will have a big impact on events too.

Asia is where the action is

HSBC to Refocus on Asian Markets - NYTimes.com: Good piece here in the New York Times about HSBC's decision to move its CEO from London back to where he should be: in Hong Kong. He's not the only one: I gather that Fidelity International's Investment President Anthony Bolton is heading this way too along with Goldman Sachs head of global capital markets, Dominique Jooris.

What's this all got to do with business media? Well, two things possibly:

1. Asia is where the action is. It's been that way for a while, but this is very clearly the story of the next 2 - 3 years at least. The BBC recently reported the OECD's improved global outlook with the headline "World economies rebound but China set for best growth". And Hong Kong looks poised to take big advantage of that: property markets are booming here, back to almost record levels, and the mood is far more upbeat than either Europe or N. America.

2. The financial media based here should reap dividends from these moves: companies like Haymarket with its Finance Asia title, Euromoney plc with AsiaMoney and the various specialist titles of Incisive can only benefit from the moves which are being announced. Interesting that Incisive has just launched its new Professional Advisor title in Hong Kong with the now compulsory Twitter feed up and running on day one. I suppose all those bankers are going to need some good advice on how to work their own money harder.

Virtual World Expo

An interesting post here at Ogilvy's Asia Digital Map blog which feeds my current fascination with the evolution of virtual events and social media: Asia Digital Map » Blog Archive » Take a virtual tour of World Expo 2010 Shanghai

There is a real buzz beginning to build about the World Expo which is very interesting: the tired old cynics in other parts of the world who dismiss these things as something old-fashioned and not for the digital native generation may be in for something of a surprise. The numbers are staggering and the organisers seem well on the way to hitting their targests: they're already 30% over their ambitious sponsorship targets which is pretty impressive in this tough crisis year.

Hu Shuli's Exit from Caijing...interesting commentary

This is an interesting commentary on the muddle at Caijing magazine, the crusading financial magazine closely associated with its editor Hu Shuli. Hu, in a much rumoured move, recently parted company with owner SEEC Media's chairman Wang Boming along with a sizeable portion of the magazine's staff.

Hu Shuli's Exit from Caijing: Mostly over Money-ChinaStakes.com

The commentary linked here at ChinaStakes.com suggests that it was a good old-fashioned media power struggle rather than a life and death fight over press freedom as it has been portrayed in much western media commentary.

Ogilvy On: Twitter for Business

This SlideShare Presentation includes the slides used in yesterday's very interesting webinar run by Ogilvy's Thomas Crampton and his colleague Brian Giesen. I was one of the minority who voted that Twitter was of most interest for creating buzz around events but that is clearly of particular interest for our industry.

Ogilvy On: Twitter for Business

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Virtual Meetings Will Be Replaced by Live Meetings? | The Power of LIVE

There's been a lot of talk of late of real meetings being replaced by virtual events. Some organisers appear to have taken this route as a last resort to keep ailing events at least on some sort of life support. Folio with its magazine show and Hanley Wood's Big Builder Conference are just two examples I've noticed recently. The smart money, however, still appears to be on the combination of intelligent online strategies that make the best of the strengths of the face-to-face and virtual worlds.

That was what UFI's outgoing President John Shaw was saying to Vincent Everts at the Zagreb Congress last week and that's basically what this interesting piece suggests too: Virtual Meetings Will Be Replaced by Live Meetings? | The Power of LIVE