Littleredbook has teamed up with Social Media Today; we're working together to bring established best practices of creating niche social media communities to China for select clients looking to build loyalty through strong value-added relationships with their customers. The press release is below - check it out and take a look at the new Chinese version of Social Media Today here.
SOCIAL MEDIA TODAY, SHANGHAI-BASED BA360 LAUNCH SMTODAYCHINA WEB COMMUNITY
New York, Shanghai (July 15, 2006) - Social Media Today LLC and BA360, a Shanghai-based marketing, advertising and communications support firm, have unveiled a Mandarin-language version of SMT's popular Social Media Today web community. The new site, SMTodayChina, aggregates and moderates content from China's leading bloggers and thinkers on social media. The site is updated daily by content managers at BA360. SMTodayChina is SMT's second foreign language site; Social Media Actualities, the company's French language site, has been operating for more than a year.
"With more than 300 million internet users, China is by the far the largest and most alluring online market for western firms," said Robin Carey, co-founder and CEO of Social Media Today LLC, which builds, manages and mines content-focused BtoB web communities for companies like SAP, Oracle Corporation, Teradata and Siemens.  "But, it has proven to be a frustration for big communities like Facebook and MySpace which are lagging badly behind China's homegrown social networks in terms of users and influence.
"We believe that our proven business model-building influential, niche communities around content that connects the interests of our sponsors to those of potential customers-will translate much more successfully, Carey said. "A key requirement for success, obviously, is having a knowledgeable and entrepreneurial local partner. We are thrilled that BA360, a talented young agency, founded by Rand Han has agreed to work with us on this and other China-oriented projects. We met, Rand, incidentally, because he added his China marketing and advertising insight blog, Little Red Book, to our English version of Social Media Today a few months back."
Born in California and educated in Singapore, Rand worked for a couple of big agencies before deciding to open his own shop in Shanghai in 2006. Since then he has acquired an impressive roster of clients, including Coca-Cola, the NBA, GM, Schindler, Acxiom and many other international and local companies. A full service shop, BA360 (the BA stands for "Bloody Amazing") provides marketing, digital marketing, design and media support.
"We're excited at the opportunity to work with Social Media Today which has so successfully attracted the best content for all of its English-language sites ," Han says. "There are a lot of wonderful Mandarin-speaking bloggers writing about social media, and most other topics, who deserve a wider audience. Working with SMT, we hope to bring that great content together to build communities of interest and provide an opening into China for western companies."
For more information: contact Robin Carey [email protected]  973.763.2829 Â
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