A source of light

It is no secret that Illuminant Partners is closely aligned with the Australian business community in China. While we have team-members with a wonderful diversity of ethnic and cultural heritages, our Chief Exec is an Australian, and he has brought a lot of Australian corporate clients onto our roster.

Our involvement with Australian businesses operating in China and Hong Kong is not the last word in our Australian roots: we also work very closely with the various departments of the Australian Embassy in Beijing (primarily, Austrade and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), and our Chief Exec serves as deputy chairman of the Australian Chamber of Commerce in Beijing.

This week, we are proud to further demonstrate our support for Australian business interests in China, by our sponsorship of the Australian Ball, to be held at Beijing’s China World Hotel on Australian national day, January 26, 2008.

We’re a “bronze” sponsor, and by coincidence, our two fellow bronze sponsors are good friends of Illuminant’s: Woods Bagot is an important client of ours, and GNS is our corporate advisory firm.

We decided to provide sponsorship for this flagship event in the Beijing expatriate calendar because (a) it is a demonstration of good corporate citizenship, (b) we want to put our money where our mouth is, and (c) sponsorship will expose our brand to a great many influential business people, both clients and prospects. Since we entered our “fast growth” period four months ago, the added profile for Illuminant will (hopefully) support our business development objectives.

Tickets went on sale from the Austcham secretariat in Beijing on Tuesday this week. Last year, they sold out in only three days — they’re a hot property!

After years of speculation, China’s central government has decreed that the national public holiday schedule is to be reformed from calendar year 2008. A call for public comment on a proposed schedule was made some weeks back, and although there has been no official announcement as to the results (yet), we have it on good authority that the following schedule will apply, nationwide and for all people, from January 1st, 2008:

Western New Year
3 days vacation (1-Jan-2008 through 3-Jan-2008)

Chinese New Year (aka “Spring Festival”)
7 days vacation (6-Feb-2008 through 12-Feb-2008)

Grave Sweeping Day
3 days vacation (4-Apr-2008 through 6-Apr-2008)

International Socialist Workers’ Day (aka “May Day”)
3 days vacation (1-May-2008 through 3-May-2008)

Dragon Boat Festival
3 days vacation (8-Jun-2008 through 10-Jun-2008)

Mid-Autumn Festival
3 days vacation (14-Sep-2008 through 16-Sep-2008)

China National Day
7 days vacation (1-Oct-2008 through 7-Oct-2008)

Certain pundits have been predicting full flexibility of vacation time for workers. It seems that as fast as China is reforming, the national economy is not quite ready for such a move, as yet.

Thanks to the hard-working and creative efforts of our internal website team (principal of which are our Art Director Olivia Ye, Account Manager Melanie Ho, and Corporate Services Manager Anja Knass) we launched our new website today.

In an effort to get it up fast (our new branding is only a few months old) we opted for Flash/Shockwave for version 1. Hence, it is simple but complete.

In the 9 years that I’ve been responsible for client’s interactive marketing work, I’ve learned to keep the number of features limited to clearly defined version releases. Feature-creep invariably means death (or permanent disability) to an interactive project. Always best to get an achievable target up in the time and budget allocated, then to re-scope and add more features as stand-alone projects.

Going forward, we’ll be launching our matching Chinese language version, followed by a re-write in Web 2.0 technologies du jour. We may expose part of our internal media database at some stage, and we’ll be sure to keep this blog updated with our observations on doing PR and strategic comms in China and Hong Kong.