1, http://www.zuitu.com

2, http://www.jiuder.net/

3, http://www.tttuangou.net/

4, http://www.dede5.cn/

5, http://www.meituancms.com/

6, http://www.51ecshop.com/

What MicroBlog will bring to Chinese internet business? How to commercailize MicroBlog app? Let’s see…

 (to be continued)

BBScall is a kind of IM specifically for Discuz BBS, it will help users receive BBS updates instantly, and connect the relationship inside of BBS. It’s a commercialized software, and support languages including Chinese simplified (default), Chinese traditional, English, Vietnamese so far.

BBScall basic features:

1, support all versions of Discuz BBS;

2, custom Logo；

3, custom icons, including desktop, installation icons, copyright icons, etc.

4, custom ringtones;

5, custom software copyright;

6, custom skin;

7, minimize windows, and automatically run after windows start (setting).

8, specific forum tips setting, tips and tones setting, and updates setting;

9, visit BBS control panel and message box directly from software;

10, custom advertisement delivery;

11, one to one chat, group chat;

12, open API.

Following is the free version demo screenshot:

2. Prestashop is better in modulization.

3. Western e-commerce open source programs including zencart, magento, prestashop, are more friendly in SEO than chinese ones.

Almost all Chinese SNS has the same layout, and similar features. However, recently one SNS website aiming to make friends (dating) is a little bit different.

Background info: taobao.com accounts for around 82% of e-commerce in China, and people called commodity there as ‘treasure’, therefore, ‘treasure’ is the symbol of commodity on the Internet business.In Chinese, the handwriting and pronunciation of ‘treasure’ is the same as ‘baby’, in pinyin, it’s ‘bao bei’, and taobao’s bao represents ’bao bei’, therefore, Chinese give taobao’s tao the meaning of ’looking for’ as a verb. 

51taonan.com, a ‘feminist’ SNS website which is the supermarket only for women, all ‘bao bei’ are men. 51 in Chinese means ‘I will’, ‘tao’ still means ‘looking for’, and ‘nan’ means ‘men’. It’s in fact the dating site, but the manner of dating is that women choose their ‘bao bei’ and put them into cart. The layout is friendly to find men, like, on the left column at homepage for women, there are’bao bei’ at the same city, and ‘find bao bei’ at top banner which leads to advanced search. There are still lots of interactive features and feeds like normal SNS website, but more focus on looking for, interacting with, and dating with men.

The site is still new, its slogan is ‘we are not looking for men, but looking for romantic’, which tells us, the more fanny thing is about the precess but not only the result. It has been released at the second half of Jan this year, and has now 26K+ daily average IP, and 448K+ daily average PV according to alexa.

More information about this site, please refer to: http://www.globaltimes.cn/www/english/metro-beijing/lifestyle/education&careers/2010-02/507799.html

According to CNNIC, Chinese netizens reached 384 million by the end of December 2009, which increased the penetration to 28.9%. Mobile netizens increased 120 million during one year, and reached 233 million users, which is 60.8% of all netizens. There are 30.7 million users that surf internet only through the mobile, accounting for 8% of all netizens.

Broadband users reached 346 million, increased 76 million compared to the year of 2008. Countryside netizens keep increasing also, and reached 106.81 million, accounting for 27.8% of all netizens.

According to CNNIC survey, 83.2% of netizens choose to surf internet at home, 30.2% choose to access internet at office. The top usages of internet in 2009 are online music (83.5%), news (80.1%), search engine (73.3%). However, the e-commerce related usages increased dramatically last year, by 68% on average. Payment usage increased by 80.9%, which is the fastest one. Travel booking, stocks online dealing, e-bank, and online shopping users increased by 77.9%, 67.0%, 62.3%, and 45.9% respectively. According to CNNIC, online shopping transactions scale reached 250 billion RMB in 2009, and will increase more in the coming year of 2010.

1. CMS (Content Management System):

 1) PHPCMS www.phpcms.cn/

 2) DEDECMS www.dedecms.com/

 3) PHP168 www.php168.com/

 4) SupeSite www.supesite.com/

 5) Empire CMS www.phome.net/

 6) KingCMS www.kingcms.com/

 7) AKCMS www.akcms.com/

 8)  BlueCMS www.bluecms.net/

2. SNS

 1) UCenter Home (php+MySQL) u.discuz.net/

 2) SpaceBuilder (asp.net) www.spacebuilder.cn/

 3) ThinkSNS (php+MySQL) www.thinksns.com/

3. shop/e-commerce (B2C, B2B)

 1) ECSHOP (php+mysql) www.ecshop.com/

 2) ECMall (php+mysql) ecmall.shopex.cn/

 3) YxShop (net+sqlserver) www.yx-shop.cn/

 4) Destoon B2B (php+mysql) www.destoon.com/

 5) MvMmall (php+mysql) www.mvmmall.com/

11. make the interaction convenient

In most cases, users will not leave message or dont know what to say after reading a blog or photo, even they have some feelings. In Chinese SNS, there are some action icons by click which readers will show their feeling easily. Normally these icons represent pass by, throw eggs, give flower,  shake hands, shock!

You will also choose to leave your footprints, or in some SNS site, you will leave your footprints automatically when reading but you can delete it if you like.

12. help users to promote their own profile

It’s a kind of self promotion item. User could use this item to give visitors scores when they visit his profile.

13. small and medium SNS business model

In China, there are a huge number of SNS sites, most of them are new, local, and small or medium, but they can still survive thanks to the SNS value chain business model.

In China, when a site owner wants to build up a SNS, he can use UChome which is an open source SNS program. It takes only half an hour for one who has some basic knowledge to install a SNS. Then, SNS owners can install some plug-ins like specific game applications by themselves, but they can also choose Manyou as their application platform.
Manyou works as application platform, collects, develops, operates, promotes all kinds of applications in the market, and give commission (35%) to SNS sites for they working as Manyou’s games entrants. 

This model is very helpful for some SNS websites which has no enough resource to operate games, and it also improves SNS stickiness. For example, concerning that SNS games are always played with same site users, a new SNS website will have not many users to play together. However, most Flash games allow users play with others from different entrants, therefore, flash game players will enjoy playing with popularity and keep coming back to the SNS site and playing this flash game no matter if there are many or not players in the same SNS website, others in the same SNS will see the feeds and join the games also. Therefore, Chinese small and medium SNS website is easier to earn money leveraging inside users competition by SNS games, and outside users competition by Flash games.

14. interactive items

Chinese SNS will also provide some items to achieve differentiation. Like ‘make a shock when come online’, ‘make the article title colorful’, some avatar related items, ‘invisable card’, etc. There are more than 20 items that can be exchanged by scores, and are showed everywhere they can probably be used by users in the SNS website.

15. contents moving tool

It’s a kind of synchronization tool. Users can synchronize blogs and moods from other spaces if the spaces are open to everyone. This tool does not need users to login but just provide the url that they want to sync up. Currently, this tool support QQ (QZone), sina blog, netease, and taotao (also Tencent product).

1. set ’/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html’ as permalink

2. install plug-in SEO Slugs

3. install plug-in All in One SEO Pack

4. create a file ‘robots.txt’ and upload to root of wordpress, to avoid useless recording.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /trackback/

5. install plug-in Sitemap Generator

6. active or install plug-in Akismet

7. write tag when post any articles

8. dont change randomly blog name, link structure, link url, and domain name

9. update more often your blog, and post some high quality contents.

6.  a page named ’have a look around’

The senario of a new user in SNS will always has not much buddies and activites, what they can do then? Chinese SNS will always have a page with the link on top banner, which is ‘have a look around’. Administrator can set the contents in control panel, like show the latest album, blogs, profiles, votes, manually recommended members, groups, etc. for new users can get some interesting contents more easily.

7. Group

It’s hard to accumulate popularity for a new SNS at the beginning, Group is a way, but how can make users come into the same group instead of setting up different groups with the same topic. Some Chinese SNS administrator will setup some fixed group according to location, constellation, sports (like basketball, tennis, etc.), which will help new users to come into the same group before setting up any new one.

8. email alerting

Besides the usual ways that users can choose which kind of feeds that they would like to receive by emails on daily or weekly base. Admin can also setup email alerting for users that have not come back within a certain number of days.

9. Leverage Forum

Because Forum came firstly before SNS in the market, some sites has already good Forum when they build up SNS. So, there are several ways to active SNS leveraging Forum.
 1) setup specific area for SNS discussion
 2) scrolling head icons of SNS ‘star’ users on the top of forum
 3) show list of photo of latest updated profile, wall/comments/mood, feeds of game application on the left of forum
 4) change the link of ‘add forum buddy’ to ‘add SNS buddy’
 5) add SNS ads (image, or wording) into Moderator’s signature
 6) raise some activities/tasks in forum to encourage users to try SNS

10. enable and encourage more ‘DIY’ work

It works better in young Chinese generation who like very much decorate their space. SNS owner could provide more attractive templates, or enable users to upload their own pictures with certain requirement as the background of profile. They also can provides some decoration items that users can change by scores.
This features need more technical and contents operation support.