No, this isn’t urban legend. I know the “classmate of cousin” part sounds like it, but I really doubt if anyone could hammer such a picture out of Photoshop. The banner was apparently designed/distributed by “Command center for public services and commerce development, Luwan District”. Thus I assume that the intended audience of this banner is Shanghainese working in banks, transport hubs, shopping malls, newspaper stands, etc. The purpose seems to be teaching general Shanghainese in the service sector the most English in the shortest time possible. As a matter of fact English letters are beyond a lot of Chinese, not to mention those quirky phonetic symbols. But to prepare the whole city for World Expo, that isn’t a problem. They used Chinese characters to mark pronunciation. Some examples on the banner are:

English: Welcome to our store!
Pronunciation: 维尔抗姆突奥窝思道
Pinyin: Wei2 Er3 Kang4 Mu3 Tu1 Ao4 Wo1 Si1 Dao4
Comment: Totally gibberish in Chinese. And in my case it takes me 30 seconds to pull off the tongue twister.

English: I’m sorry, I can only speak a little English.
Pronunciation: 俺么骚瑞，俺坎翁累丝鼻科额累偷英格历史
Pinyin: An3 Me0 Sao1 Rui4, An3 Kan3 Weng1 Lei4 Si1 Bi2 Ke1 E2 Lei4 Tou1 Ying1 Ge2 Li4 Shi3
Comment: Oh man, you can only speak a little English, but I see you fire a hell of great Chinese tongue twister. My eyes and mind get mingled merely looking at that line!

English: Just a moment, please.
Pronunciation: 杰丝特哞闷特，普立斯
Pinyin: Jie2 Si1 Te4 Mou1 Men1 Te4, Pu3 Li4 Si1
Comment: This… should… work…? It’s just that I’m not sure if that rarely used 哞 could be picked up by the majority of people…?

In general I think this is a failure. High school students tend to use this trick for their English lessons, and that’s OK, since they are only marking single words. But forging such long lines of gibberish, I’m not sure which is easier, start from the rightful phonetic symbols, or try to master this twisted gibberish? In my case, with the same time and effort to burn that “Wei2 Er3 Kang4 Mu3 Tu1 Ao4 Wo1 Si1 Dao4” into my mind, I can pretty much master how to deliver “welcome to our store” in 5 different languages…

Another reason why this is a failure is that the tutorial given here is far from enough. Based on this English-in-(supposedly)-30-seconds tutorial, let’s imagine the following scenario:

Mr. Wang (let’s say, 50 years old), who runs a small newspaper stand by a main street, saw a bewildered foreign tourist standing nearby. In good faith, helpful mind, and augmented by the quick English lesson he just picked up not long ago, he approached the foreigner and initiated a conversation:

Wang: Kan3 Ai2 Hai3 Er3 Pu1 You2? (Can I help you?)
Foreigner: Sure, thanks so much, gentleman! I’m trying to figure out how to get to [fill in a preferred place name] from here. All my gratitude if you could show me the route!
Wang: …
Foreigner: ???
Wang: …
Foreigner: … ???
Wang: An3 Me0 Sao1 Rui4, An3 Kan3 Weng1 Lei4 Si1 Bi2 Ke1 E2 Lei4 Tou1 Ying1 Ge2 Li4 Shi3! Bai2 Bai2! (I’m sorry, I can only speak a little English! Bye bye!) [Retreats into his booth]
Foreigner: [High on triple dose of bewilderment]

Doesn’t make much sense, right? And I’m in serious doubt if any Mr. Wang could really get around the “I’m sorry blah blah blah” line. So come on, Shanghai, cancel the joke, do it properly, hire some professionals, or recruit college volunteers. You saw those volunteer booths in Beijing a couple of years ago, and they worked like a charm.

Or if this is how things go in reality, and you happen to be in Shanghai, and you are really confused by your Mr. Wang, here is a little Chinese-in-30-seconds, delivered in similar fashion, for your reference. Oh you’re welcome, don’t have to thank me. We share the planet, we help each other out.

Chinese: 这个多少钱?
Meaning: How much is this?
Pronunciation: Drill Girl Dough Shall Chant?
Notes: As a matter of course it’s not perfect match, but repeat it a handful of times and keep pointing to the item you want to buy, they will get it eventually.

Chinese: 请问几点啦?
Meaning: Excuse me, what’s the time please?
Pronunciation: Cheering When Gee Diane La
Notes: You’re asking about *time*, and there is a “when” in this line. Perfect logic. See? You’ve already remembered 1/5 of the whole sentence in a blink of eyes. It’s so much more efficient than Luwan District English.

Chinese: 可以借用一下卫生间吗?
Meaning: May I use the bathroom?
Pronunciation: Cur Ill Jay Young Ill Share Weight Shown Jan Ma?
Notes: Not an easy one, but now you should get the idea what your general Chinese may feel when he/she stumbles upon the Luwan banner.

Chinese: 太贵了，我不买
Meaning: That’s too expensive. I won’t buy it.
Pronunciation: Thai Gale Le. Wow Bull My.

Chinese: 你好
Meaning: Hello / Good morning / Good afternoon / Good evening
Pronunciation: Knee Hall.

Chinese: 对不起
Meaning: Sorry / Excuse me
Pronunciation: Dale Bull Cheese.
Note: All nouns, short, easy to remember.

Chinese: 谢谢
Meaning: Thanks.
Pronunciation: Shy Shy
Note: Not the ideal pronunciation match. Can’t do better, Dale Bull Cheese. Remember to keep a big, bright grin on your face to enhance the scene. Don’t literally go shy.

Chinese: 没关系
Meaning: No worries / It doesn’t matter / You’re welcome / So be it
Pronunciation: May Gum She

Chinese: 再见
Meaning: Bye bye.
Pronunciation: Zap Jan

Sincerely wish you enjoy your stay in Shanghai during the World Expo. Please find our wishes and greetings as:

上              海            欢              迎             你！
Shang4    Hai3      Huan1     Ying2     Ni3!
Sharn       Hi           Juan         Ing          Knee!

Post by Kane Gao, Illuminant’s head of research

The clone, or technically half-clone or double-clone, depends on your perspective, is called 拉手 (la1 shou3, “holding hands”). It’s about 50% Groupon clone, 50% Foursquare clone. You can find the website here.

Sorry, you will have to register to do anything on the website. I’ve tried it a little bit though, and the hands-on report comes as this:

Interesting name. The name of the Foursquare-clone part is “拉手四方” (La1 “holding”, Shou3 “hands”, Si4 “four”, Fang1 “square”). Actually I was thinking 四方 was a good name if Foursquare makes a Chinese manifestation. Four is 四, square makes 方, and combined the two characters mean “everywhere in the world”. Now it seems the initiative is lost. If Lashou has registered the term, there will likely be an unpleasant fight over a simple name. Meanwhile, the “Check-in” function of Foursquare has been mapped into a bilingual term, with English aspect exactly “Check-in” and Chinese facet “踩点”. Coincidentally, this is also what I thought best translation for the function of THE Foursquare. Another initiative lost.

Limited but essential client support. Lashou’s Foursquare-ish client comes on S60, iPhone, and also on web if you don’t have the right phone. Both clients are downloadable on official site, with the iPhone version also available in Apple’s App Store. My HD2 is rendered rather useless in this case, thus all tests has been done on its web version.

The game rules are pretty much the same as Foursquare’s, with extra tweaks to support the other (Groupon-ish) half of Lashou:

• At least the web interface has absolutely nothing to do with GPS. You can check-in to anywhere sitting in your office. And those check-in all count.
• Each check-in grants 6 points. Check-in and leave a tip gives 8 points.
• Users who have bought stuff with this website’s Groupon Clone service have extra treat. Adjusted points granted = 6 + (6*0.3*how many times you bought stuff on Lashou). You bought three items there, your average check-in will be worth 6+(6*0.3*3)=11.4 points
• Active user who SPENT MORE MONEY on its Groupon aspects also has a 1% extra bonus to check-in points.
• Users who installed the client on iPhone, and bound the account to a Sina Weibo (the leading Twitter clone), and have over 1,000 followers on Weibo, also gets 1% bonus to check-in points.
• The website ranks users in accordance with check-in points every 24 hours (0:00 to 24:00). Top 3 point bandits get CNY 25 coupon at a rather popular hotpot franchise (呷卟呷卟, if you are interested). User points are cleared every midnight.
• Yes, there are also badges to unlock, you bet. It’s not clear how many badges are available and how exactly to unlock them yet.

Some interesting findings during the experiment:

• For the lack of GPS factor, you can check into wherever you like, or invent places out of thin air to check-in. I saw funny venue called “Abcd” with an address “asdf, Beijing”. And sure, there are duplicated venues.
• There doesn’t seem to be any check-in limit counter. You can check-in every single venue available everyday.
• The real-time check-in board pops up at least 1 new check-in message every 2 seconds. The board was still rolling rapidly after 3 hours into the observation.
• Threw a peek at leader scores during the process: top star had 974.9 points. Big white hot “WHUT?!”.  Dare you challenge this record on THE Foursquare, man?
• After one morning’s observation, there were at least 10 new users popped up in the check-in board.

Conclusion

Pro:

• One-two punch, nice. Rally Groupon-clone users into Foursquare-clone, and maybe vice a little versa.
• Great choice of client platform. iPhone is getting popular, and S60 is the emperor. Let’s forget WinMo (sort of minority), Android (absolutely minority), BlackBerry (you ever heard of this thingie, bro?).
• Solid stimulation. Hotpot coupon! Yay! And that’s from the service provider, it’s always available.
• Encourage cheating. Heats up user competition for the current stage. Users were dedicating a whole morning checking into hundreds of places.
• Chinese UI for everything. Of course.
• It’s getting media heat! Dubbed as “the Foursquare of China” and kind of regarded as the next golden boy.

Con:

• Encourage cheating. This is bound to be bad in the long run.
• Badges seem to be limited, and lack of interesting ones like “Jobs”. Actually, I failed to find a complete badge list anywhere. Not knowing what’s around the corner isn’t good.
• Limited phone support. In case, just in case, some day Android or WinPho7 devices gain popularity here…

That’s about the size of it. Good over bad, by quite far. I don’t think it’s time to worry about the genuine Foursquare though. Initiatives are lost, yes; the clone is doing good, yes; the war is far from over though. According to my previous timeline, they are still in phase 2. The first clone is only less than 2 months old, and it doesn’t seem to have gotten any venture capital. For quite some time Foursquare doesn’t have to worry about clone swarm. Given proper action and timing, everything could be changed.

But this Lashou should not be overlooked either. As previously mentioned, Chinese netizens are super faithful to the 1st thing they stick to. Like the Parking War and Friend for Sale game module on Facebook, they were cloned into Chinese websites, too. Unlike elsewhere, those two petty “games” went through “popular” stage into “frenzy” land. People were giving up sleep time trying to outdo their buddies over a virtual parking slot. This phenomenon (right after World of Warcraft) contributed to the “internet addiction” fuss haunting the whole society. That’s how far dedicated Chinese users can go. Things can be quite tricky if Lashou reaches that goal.

OK. So far, I’ve written a big chunk of subjective observation and assumption. Personally I’m rather interesting in what direction this not-really-competition would go. Lashou will be paid close attention. Interesting twists and turns will be covered.

Post by Kane Gao, Illuminant’s head of research

It’s going to be lengthy, and mostly I will spin the whole thing around the case of Foursquare, the rapidly emerging location-based social network, or I’d rather call it a social game. In case you feel bored in the reading process (I’m quite positive you will), I guess it’s better to put my conclusion before the actual body, to save you some time, or maybe create a little suspension. I believe that:

China is not a piece of virgin land with infinite opportunity. Actually it’s sort of a closed parallel universe. Everything has a counterpart here, or will soon have a couple of them if there isn’t one already. Residents seldom get out, but whoever ventures inside the border must fight its shadow self before anything. Shadow self here means those who clones foreign services atom-to-atom, in order to duplicate their international success.

Now let’s cut into the boring part.

On the morning of April 16th (Beijing time), 163 Tech, one of the major tech portal sites in China, posted a story about Foursquare. Link here.

It’s not even worth translating. The whole article is about Foursquare releasing a new version of client pack and gave a thorough instruction on what Foursquare is. To my knowledge, this is so far the first time Chinese web media covers Foursquare. 1:54pm the same day, QQ tech, another major tech portal here picked up a similar story from Forbes. This time it’s not on the front page though. But given the copy/paste spreading nature of Chinese portals, with some luck, there will be a chain-reaction soon. And unlike the western world, portals are what’s big here. SNS and micro-blogging fall into the secondary team.

Media coverage is good, however, not always so. Current stories about Foursquare on our portals emphasize that Foursquare is “fresh start, fun, growing at stunning speed”, and most importantly, “been shown a lot of love by venture investors”. According to 163 Tech story, it has already got 1 million US dollars from VC. Typical Chinese chemistry of business works like this: you get a glass of pure business, put in 1 pinch of venture investor love, 1 teaspoon of rapid growth, 0.5 gram of fresh start, and finally add 0.1 gram media coverage. Boom! You get an assembly of nice carbon-clones. Foursquare has already got everything. Give a little more here and there, a swarm of clone legion will shut it out of China for good, in case it may want to join the “let’s conquer China singlehandedly” team somewhere in the future.

The thing is, overgrown population leads to heat competition (for everything), which in turn leads to the high demand on response speed, ready-for-use business model and cash support for mere survival. Thus Chinese start-up businessmen are always keen on internet sector (fast to deploy and profit), on venture capital (to make start-up business boom a.s.a.p.), and successful templates from the western (saves a ton of feasibility research, also works as material for lobbying more and more careful venture investors).

The now-massive Instant Messaging giant QQ started off as an ICQ clone. World-dominating Alibaba (Taobao) was an eBay clone (good job though, it got much better than eBay in the long run), Dangdang was an Amazon duplicate, and the earliest 3 portals (Sohu, Sina, 163) were all “inspired” by Yahoo. That’s only the early days of Chinese internet sector. Facebook was cloned as Kaixin001.com, which was later further cloned by a couple of other companies into Xiaonei.com, 51.com, etc. Now Facebook the GFWed is said to be plotting a China entry, guess who’s daddy when it lands here? Twitter was cloned as Sina Weibo even before it got GFWed. Not to mention the micro-blogging frenzy rallied by 163, Tencent, and Sohu. Craigslist inspired a swarm of classified information sites a couple of years ago which unfortunately all died out. With everyone getting into the clone-VC-marketing-dominate model, newbie starters are more than ever paying attention to foreign examples of success. Chatroulette was discovered by majority of Chinese netizens about a month ago, and its stories spread rather wide. Now there is at least one Chatroulette clone working full force to duplicate its success and attract VC here in China already.

Now Foursquare has been proven to have remarkable growth, and VC-charm. I’m quite positive Foursquare clones will begin to show up in about 3 months (it’s technically harder to clone than Chatroulette). My suggestion is, if Foursquare would ever possibly consider gaining a share of Chinese market in the short or long future, it should get into action now, to defend its not-really-presence here. Chinese internet users have some unique natures: A) as a group, they tend to pick up new stuff much slower than westerners B) once they do, it will be harder than moving mountains to make them switch to any other equivalent, except if God wills so. It would be a good idea to start the defense battle right now, gain some distance before the Attack of the Clones could ever hit the big screen. I’m not talking about all those trouble incorporating here. It could be achieved easily: make a Chinese UI for Foursquare client.

English-only is a hell of a deal breaker here. Why so little Chinese (consider the population) use Twitter even before it’s GFWed? Why, despite the fatal lack of utilities on that platform, are Chinese Android users refusing to install Advanced Task Manager? More on Android’s case, why users here tend to avoid the stock app market at all? It’s all about language barrier. Chinese are mandated to learn English from junior high, and we can’t get a bachelor diploma without passing CET level 4 English test. Getting master degree requires even higher marks. The majority of Chinese are *forced* to swallow it, and they resent this language once they no longer need it, which in most people’s case means right after graduation. And you know people lose language skill faster than a free falling hippo when they don’t use it, or even hate it, right? With years spent on game/software localization and movie subtitle making, I’m rather confident to say that a general Chinese will automatically reject any software with more than 5 English words, or 1 full English sentence on its UI.

If that is done, they could do some extra work to sweeten the situation up: the phone client. Right now Foursquare has a client for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, webOS, and Windows Mobile (this buggy WinMoSquare thing doesn’t seem to be official release though). Of all the major smartphone platforms the only one missing is Symbian S60. I know Americans in general and geeks everywhere laughs at Nokia. Me, too, thinks S60 is a pathetic piece of cultural relic. However, not even 65,536 gigawatts of distain can warp the reality. Outside the United States, Nokia and its S60 legion rules, reigns, and kills, particularly in China. I’ve been doing a hobby project #PhoneWatch on twitter (@chassit). Put it simply, I identify every single smartphone or other smart-looking gadget bumps into my sight on my evening subway trip back home (Beijing, Sanlitun – Dawanglu, Line 10 then Line 1 through the busiest CBD area), and count them as groups. Not a long trip, but quite good timing IMO. Actually I’ve been doing this for kind of an occupational disease for a couple of years, only not keeping clear record. To my knowledge, Nokia S60 is always the winner. Now I’m 2 days into data-keeping, each day ending up with S60 topping the list, with a number as good as all other groups combined (groups are: S60, WinMo, Android, BlackBerry, Palm OS/webOS, iPhone, Moto Linux, shanzhai phones, Kindle, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS/DSi/DSL/DSi XL, tablets). As to why S60 beats iPhone by so far, I think I’ve got some reasonable theory, but that’s story for maybe another day. Anyway, not supporting S60 in China is quite far from a wise move.

What’s done is done. Under the current situation, which is not bad actually, if Foursquare will someday be interested in a China-entry, my suggest plan is (as in phases):

Phase 1 – right now: Grant the software a Chinese UI, also give a Chinese facelift to the website if possible. Stop here, wait for to-be cloner’s move. Do this as early as possible. Save energy, stay alert. Develop a S60 client pack if time allows.

Phase 2 – marked by the 1st sign of cloners: Post the install package (BlackBerry, iPhone, Android) on pirate app sharing hubs. BlackBerry users are the minority. iPhone users (those who actually use them as a smartphone) all rely on jailbreaking. Android users, as mentioned before, resent the stock market as a whole. Pirate app sites (mostly BBS) are the major resource of phone applications here. Foursquare doesn’t count on sales of app for revenue anyway, so no hard feelings.

Phase 3 – marked by any cloner getting the 1st batch of venture capital: Dig further into Chinese smartphone user communities. Influence them in QQ chat groups in addition to piracy share BBS. Offer prize to most active Chinese users. Incorporate in China if necessary, as required to start further cooperation with venue owners.

Phase 4 – marked by Tencent joining the war: Unlikely, but highly dangerous if it happens. All-out war is required. More viral marketing. Spread advertisements if things are not going well. Tencent is the most horrible enemy out there. Their QQ IM service has hundreds of millions of users, and they are surprisingly faithful. Spiraling from IM service, Tecent has attached online games, SNS, blogging, search engine, C2C sales platform, email, file sharing, news portal, and various “big things” at different times to the QQ client. Stimulate QQ IM users -> rally them to the new (closely bound) service -> instant boom -> kill competitor in mere months. This is the normal routine for it. Up to date, their clone products have claimed kings of hills, with only less than a handful of unbeaten opponents namely Google, Baidu, and Taobao. Foursquare could stand on an even ground with those three giants? I doubt so. QQ mobile client is a must-have for Chinese smartphone users, and Foursquare sound like a rather nice and easy-to-implement add-on to its current clients. They don’t even have to do any marketing, just send a system notification “have you updated your QQ to the latest version?” Without the human power and user base of Tencent, response speed is the only weapon if Foursquare ever gets in a toe-to-toe deathmatch with it.

Well, that’s it. If Foursquare marks China-entry as a mere possibility, they should start making small things happen right now. Here the key rule is: the 1st to capture the flag always have a better chance of succeeding. The same also applies to other rapidly emerging service providers. If you have a plan of getting a Chinese branch down your schedule, start planning *right now*. Do not treat China as just another country. It’s more like a parallel universe where things tend to be self-dependent and seldom go out. Always be prepared for your shadow self.

Post by Kane Gao, Illuminant’s head of research.

Foursquare Day 2010 Beijing Swarm Badge, originally uploaded by Illuminant Partners.

Social media enthusiasts gathered at the Apple Store in Sanlitun Village on April 16 with the common goal of unlocking Foursquare’s coveted Swarm badge. A small group soon grew to more than 50 people, all of whom had a mobile device in their hands.

And then… we did it. The Swarm Badge was unlocked for the first time in five thousand years of Chinese history on Foursquare Day 2010 in Beijing.

A group of Illuminant’s clients and friends (new and old) trekked down to FUBAR speakeasy, where the Foursquare Day celebrations continued.

Monitoring the number of check-ins

Checking-in with Nate Bonilla-Warford, creator of Foursquare Day

Live video check-in with Foursquare Day creator “Mayor” Nate Bonilla-Warford (@NateBW).  Illuminant’s Beijing practice manager and art director Joel Danielson (@lhiver) took on Mayoral duties for the Beijing Swarm end.

Charlie Flint was the lucky winner of the Illuminant Partners prize voucher

Lucky Charlie Flint (@charlieflint) won himself one of three prize options in the Illuminant Partners Foursquare Day draw:

1. Logo design
2. Business card design
3. Outdoor photoshoot – 5 final images with basic retouch

Jim Boyce (BeijingBoyce) after finding out he didn't get his Swarm badge!

So what do you say Beijing? Now that most of us have gotten our Swarm badge, Super Swarm in 2011?

Illuminant Partners was enormously proud to have facilitated the world’s first “social media holiday” in the capital of the world’s most populous nation. Many thanks to our friends and colleagues for supporting this fun initiative!

Beijing was one of the first of major cities to lead and implement the recent idea to globally celebrate“Foursquare Day” on April 16^th, and our team at Illuminant is super excited to champion the event in China’s capital. Our chief executive, Simon Cousins, has been a key driver on the global Foursquare Day organizing team from our new office in Tampa, Florida.  The Beijing Illuminant team has been responsible for organizing and promoting the Beijing day’s activities, and we’re getting help from local bloggers, Twitter users,and businesses.

Foursquare, for those who don’t know, is a location-based, geo-social networking website and mobile application available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Palm devices (with more platforms currently under development). The app is rapidly gaining popularity in a city where we are continuously and voraciously on the hunt for hip new restaurants, shops, nightlife, and drinking establishments. Users rack up points on a weekly leaderboard as they “check-in” to venues, categorising, tagging, and tacking helpful tips on them along the way. Special “badges” are unlocked for certain milestones or achievements, such as numbers of “check-ins” on a weeknight,or “checking-in” to specifically tagged venues such as gyms, aiports, and ferry terminals. By frequenting their favourite haunts, users in the local community often generate friendly competition among venue clientele by attempting to earn and hold down the title of “Mayor”. It’s rather amusing (if not discouraging) to be “ousted” by a more active user when they steal the title!

Foursquare.com describes the application as “a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. We aim to build things to not only help you keep up with the places your friends go, but that encourage you to discover new places and challenge you to explore your neighborhood in new ways.”

So, you might ask, why April 16?

Well, to put it plainly, April is the fourth month, and 4²=16 = 4/16 

The idea for Foursquare Day was dreamed up in Tampa, Florida, by optometrist and social-media maven Nate Bonilla-Warford. He posted the idea on Foursquare’s feedback site, GetSatisfaction.com, and within weeks, dozens of cities around the world had jumped on board to get involved in the grass-roots planning.

One of the most exciting challenges on this day is to unlock the “Swarm” badge, which is achieved when more than 50 users are “checked-in” to the same venue at (or around) the same time, and for the third time in history, Foursquare Inc.  have decided to open the “Super Swarm” badge especially for Foursquare Day. This may be unlocked and awarded at any venue that draws 250+ “check-ins” over a 3-hour period on Foursquare Day. We are all feeling the excitement about Foursquare users meeting up aftercrossing paths (and stealing Mayorships from each other) all around town, from Wudaokou and  Zhongguancun to Sanlitun and the CBD.

We’re set to gather at The Village in Sanlitun and begin our round of “Swarm check-ins”at the Apple Store at 8.30pm, with drink specials available at Blue Frog (also in The Village), Purple Haze’s new Bistro location (at Dongsiliutiao), and at Fubar after 9pm for the wrap-up party. Additional specials may pop up through the week.

Like many other cities and venues participating in Foursquare Day, (#4sqday on Twitter), Fubar has issued a friendly “challenge” to the infamous The VIPER Room club on LA’s Sunset Strip, to see who will reach the highest number of “check-ins”, and we’re hoping to blow the roof off Beijing with the Super Swarm badge (can we pull it off?)

This is a fantastic opportunity for small/medium businesses to engage the rapidly expanding social-media savvy clientele with free advertising and exposure by creating and promoting special offers. Geo-social media is increasingly on the top of the trend, andbusiness owners would be wiseto jump on board and check out atFoursquare.com/businesses.

Follow @4sqdayBeijing on Twitter and visit http://4sqday.comfor more information.  And talk to Illuminant Partners for a world class social media campaign for your business!

北京_­

ACBA09 flyer, originally uploaded by Illuminant Partners.  Illuminant’s Chief Executive Simon Cousins and Director Catherine Davis are pictured front-and-centre.

The 17th Annual AustCham Australia-China Business Awards were held in Beijing for the first time on Thursday 3 December 2009.

Illuminant was the fortunate winner of the ACBA08 award for entrepreneurial excellence. We want to congratulate all the winners of the 2009 awards, and especially Galaxy Resources, who won the entrepreneurial award this year.

The full media release issued by AustCham Beijing can be read here.

Think with foot. GWEAT

Brand is an interesting thing. Brand is many things, including the personification of a product or service.  Brand is like the name or nickname of a person for the product or service.

Branding gives others something to remember and address this very person by, especially when he has done something great and expect others to be grateful.  Thus the fundamental purpose of brand marketing is to make consumers remember it, consume it, and continue to consume it.  This should be very easy in theory.  Just expend your effort build something really fantastic, and go around shouting “hey guys, please be aware that this piece of work is proudly brought to you by [insert your brand here], and we will do even better in the future!”  But in the China marketplace, things always have some tendency to go wrong, especially in a market where everyone speaks a language very much different from most other languages available.

One such occasion is when one company has too many brands. In a recent market research project for an Illuminant client, I was surprised to learn that most consumers we interacted with did not know that Gatorade is a Pepsi brand. This isn’t necessarily bad, but in China, attaching a small brand to a globally respected name could have even better effect.

Or on other occasions when there are so many brands involved, it’s rather hard to maintain one single brand from the hellish brand warfare.  An example would be the computer industry in China.  In early 1990s, when Great Wall was the dominant PC brand, everyone was referring to computers as “386” and “486” (as in 80X86).  Manufacturers such as Great Wall and Compaq were so easily overshadowed by the processor maker. Things didn’t go better until, according to my observation, the coming of Lenovo (then named Legend: they changed their name years later when sued). Even “Intel” and “Pentium” went lost in the initial communication where the new processor brand was simply called “586” for habit’s sake. The problem was later solved by Intel’s carpet-bombing campaign of “Intel Inside” advertisements. And that’s good.

Things get even more confusing as time goes by and global collaboration becomes commonplace. Still taking our power-eating buddies for example, smart phones are the big thing right now. Currently there are brands for RAM, processors, OS providers, OSes themselves, phone manufacturers, cellular carriers. Putting them together, the a given handset’s brand profile could get really chaotic.

Take Android phones. The OS is called Android, and the maker goes by the name of Google. The ground-breaking phone manufacturer is HTC, and HTC’s phones are sold under a wide range of carrier brands such as T-Mobile (America), TIM (Italy), MTN (South Africa), and HTC itself. Product model names could also vary such as the first generation is called “T-Mobile G1” and “HTC Dream”, the second “T-Mobile MyTouch” and “HTC Magic”, while the latest two generations are simply “HTC Hero” and “HTC Tatoo”.  The chaos redoubles when it officially gets into China under HTC’s sub-brand Dopod. Consumers can now buy a Dopod A6188 (in other sense “HTC Dream”) and Dopod A6288 (in other words “HTC Hero”).  Arguably, the problems are: A) Too many brand names blind people. The brand-blind could be very serious when there are multiple mega-names among them. B) Language barrier. Chinese consumers are not so sensitive to English words or letters.

In many countries this shouldn’t be much of a problem since most people only care about their local version. But this is China, where local release, especially for phones, tends to be an expensive undertaking with newness equating to premium pricing, while consumers simultaneously have wide access to a black market. The brand war turns out to have an interesting effect. Here people always address all phones that works upon Android platform as “Google Phones”, and HTC’s great works are named in an unintended fashion as G1 (HTC Dream), G2 (HTC Magic), G3 (HTC Hero), G4 (HTC Tatoo). With HTC announcing or leaking new plans, I’m already expecting the wide usage of G5, G6, and probably G7. Gadget collectors are talking about the difference between “T-Mobile G1”, “TIM G1”, “MTN G1”, oh, and “HTC G1” only when they don’t know how this particular phone should be categorized. Poor HTC becomes the invisible man, and everyone is feverishly thanking Google for the hardware as well as software. This isn’t so great, by my standard, when HTC is selling phones under its own name and the Dopod alterna-brand.

The point here is, it’s necessary to have a brand identity, but it’s also important to make sure the brand is put into proper usage. You’ve got to pay attention to how people are talking about your stuff. Not only comments, but also how they recognize it. Advertising and other above-the-line marketing is one way to sort that out, however effective management of media exposure and other below-the-line techniques are of high importance. A failure media management program could result in something like this:

iPhone. This is the name that completely changed the smartphone business. Even before it’s much belated release in China, there were already around one million smuggled units running on the GSM networks of various carriers here. For traditional lack of creativity and marketing-oriented thinking, both China Mobile and China Unicom now are busy developing their home-grown (although technically on Android) smart phone OSes called “OPhone” and “UPhone” respectively in order to catch up with the trend begun by Apple. Intended unimaginative branding caused a brand avalanche. Since there are “iPhone”, “OPhone” and “UPhone” already, Chinese journalists begin to automatically re-brand every other player in the field on their own accord. In this fashion, Microsoft, who so proudly announced its “Windows Phone” campaign not so long ago, is now called “WPhones”. And Android is now commonly addressed as “GPhone”. Multiple tech portal websites (Chinese) have worked out thrilling big headlines going like “FIVE [X]Phones fight to be king of the hill in China!”

Although every bit true in OPhone’s and UPhone’s cases, this isn’t so good for Microsoft or Google (well, and HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, etc passively represented by these two giants) because such unofficial branding renders them instantly, in the minds of millions of consumers as little more than iPhone copycats. You will see this concern stands when you see so frequently Chinese netizens commenting like “to hell with WPhones and GPhones. Our iPhone is the first and best!” A fundamental rule to market competition is, if you want to do better than iPhone, you first declare very clearly “we are definitely not an iPhone, and we don’t want to be”. Things will look much better if vendors are more serious about their media work, and spend 5 more minutes talking to the journalists which can simultaneously influence public opinion and help clarify these muddy waters.

Another solution to achieving brand integrity in China includes defining a real Chinese brand name that makes some vague sense rather than being plain transliteration. Then, and the most important, ensure that brand name is correctly used. Contributing all your good reputation to a partner is bad, but making yourself look like a no-brainer is worse.

So, behold, BlackBerry and Palm. You guys are talking with China Telecom for China entry right the moment. Do not make yourself into “BPhone” (or “BBPhone”) and “PPhone” by doing nothing! This is China, where many things could go wrong at the least unlikely point. Know what you are dealing with. Keep yourself known in a preferable way. And make sure the message is delivered correctly through the whole process.

Authored by Illuminant’s Head of Research, Kane Gao

Sino-Austrian Economic Forum 2010 (1), originally uploaded by Illuminant Partners.

Sino-Austrian Economic Forum was held in Beijing on 20 January 2010. Illuminant Partners was proud to be engaged by the Austrian government to support and photograph the proceedings.

Translation Center, originally uploaded by Illuminant Partners.

As we all know, language is, in most cases, far more than just a number of symbols and expressions. Instead, language is a reflection of a nation’s civilization, its unique thinking and behavior patterns and its geographic location as well.

我们都知道，在大多数情况下，语言不仅仅是一系列象征和表现形式。相反，语言能够反映一个国家的文明程度、独特的思维与行为模式以及地理位置。

As a result, translators must do more than merely translating from one language to the other. Translators are also playing the roles of editors and copywriters, as they need to polish their translated work and make it sound as natural and elegant as possible in the target language. Here arises an inevitable dilemma for translators, as they are expected to be faithful to the original language and are usually not encouraged to change the content and sentence orders in the original language and are thus influenced by the original language. That’s why many knowledgeable Chinese call translators “dancers with shackles”. Most of the time, translated texts are slightly, if not too much, different from those directly written by a native copywriter due to different ways of thinking and structure development. At Illuminant, to maintain the high quality of our translation work, our language team always tries its best to offset the abovementioned influences by polishing the text afterwards and by always having a designated internal third party to contribute as a polisher to proofread our finished translation work in an objective manner.

因此，译员要做的不仅仅是将一种语言翻译到另一种语言。他们同时还发挥着编辑和撰稿人的作用，因为他们需要润色自己的翻译成果，从而尽可能地使翻译的目标语言变得自然而优雅。而译员在这里就难免陷入一种困境，因为他们仍然需要忠实于原文，不轻易变更原文的内容或是语句的排列顺序，所以他们将或多或少受到原始语言的影响。这就是为什么人们将译员称为 “带着枷锁的舞者” 。在大多数情况下，翻译出来的文本与直接撰写的文案，二者有一定的区别，这是因为不同的语言总是有不同的思维方式和文章构架。为了尽量减少上述影响，在朔光，我们翻译团队总是尽力保证在翻译完成之后对译文进行润色与审译，并在交稿之前让其他同事以客观的角度再次审查译文，从而保持翻译工作的质量。

So our translation procedure is usually consisted of three parts: translatio； internal proofreading and polishing； external polishing, before we hand our work over to our clients, and from time to time, post-translation communication with clients is carried out to best understand and satisfy our clients’ specific needs and requirements.

因此，我们的翻译工作程序通常包括三个部分：翻译；翻译团队内部的校对与润色；其他同事的审译（有时是我们亲爱的媒体部门的同事）。另外，我们会不时地与客户展开积极的沟通，从而更好地了解并满足他们的特殊要求与需要。

Also, the Illuminant language team takes pride in a number of house glossaries we have compiled for each of our major clients based on their specific fields, such as architecture, mining, high-tech, tourism, and other sectors which our agency is expert in. Glossaries are very important for all of our language-related work at Iluminant, because most of our clients are long-term retainer-based and thus keeping our copywriting and choice of words professional, accurate and consistent is a key priority for our language work. That’s when our glossaries come into play: ensuring accuracy and consistency.

此外，令翻译团队倍感骄傲的是我们针对主要客户以及他们所处的领域而汇编的词汇表，这些领域涉及建筑、矿业、高科技等等。这些词汇表对朔光而言，是一种非常重要的语言工具。这是因为我们的大多数客户都是长期客户，所以保持语言服务的准确性、一致性与专业性是语言工作的重中之重。而通过使用我们所编撰的词汇表，我们就可以简易地找到过去使用的所有专业词汇以及它们的特殊用途。

Graceful language and elegant wording is always appreciated and enjoyed like a refined art. But there are occasional cases where clients don’t want their copywriting – words that powerfully represent themselves and their products – to be “high-brow”. In other words, they want “plain” language to represent them (in the Western sense, this might be thought of as “tabloid” language). When this happens, we will actively communicate with them to know about their specific needs and “play down” our choice of words accordingly, in order to cater to their special requirements. After all, clients’ needs and satisfaction form the priority. But the good news is: most clients LOVE beautiful language the way they appreciate refined arts.

优美的语言、典雅的措辞，如同精致的艺术一般，是一种愉悦的欣赏与享受。但是，有时有些客户却不希望我们为他们撰写的文案太过“风雅” 。换句话说，他们希望用“平实”的语言来表达自己。在这种情况下，我们将积极地与他们展开沟通，从而了解他们的具体需求，并在措辞方面为他们量体裁衣，以满足他们的特殊要求。毕竟，客户的需求与满意是市场经济的重点所在。而好消息就是：我们的大多数客户，正如喜爱精致的艺术一般，也喜爱美丽的言辞。

Article by Illuminant’s head of language services, Monica Lin （林敏）