2. 30 million accounts early 2012
Launched 2004 - 21.6m users as of May ‘08
8m users in May 2011 to 17m in May 2012
Nearly 50m Japanese users since ‘11 launch
3. How are these services being
used?
What are the
implications for brands?
17. Private, Public & Anonymous
Spaces… Identified
Anonymous
Closed Open
Private Public
Anonymous
18. ‘Online Meishi’‘Private Booth’
‘Open World’‘Release Valve’
Share positive life
moments with wide circle
– visuals NOT opinions
Hold casual & emotional
conversations with
individuals
or groups
Connect to liquid
stream of info
around my interests
Express my innermost
thoughts in a free
environment
19. ‘Online Meishi’‘Private Booth’
‘Open World’ ‘Release Valve’
Open to brands as one more
voice amongst many
Brands struggling
to maintain
conversations
High self-
consciousness about
brand associations
Just a bit of background – to see what phenomenon this is in Japan you only need to look at the numbers – and the explosion that has happened since smartphones have come into the mainstreamWhat is also interesting about Japan is the way that the landscape has evolved with a different service seeming to grab the headlines each year recentlySo this is something that we wanted to understand – and given the numbers we know a lot of our clients share the same interest
So we set out to answer to – very small questions – as you can see here... because we like a challenge!
And so partly to restrict the scope of the study – but also because we saw them as a potential barometer for where things are heading – we restricted ourselves to young usersThen to get different perspectives on a problem we always tried to mix up our methodologies....
....and so in this case we started wide with a ‘semi quant’ stage of short open-ended interviews and then got more intimate with a series of small friendship groups – which really helped to explore how these services are actually being used amongst friends as well as cut quickly to more emotional reactions....
....then to complement this ‘bottom up’ stage, we also talked to a series of experts working in and around social media for their take on the challenges and opportunities facing brands
Just before we get to the findings... many, many services came up over the course of the research but three in particular dominated conversations, with the almost all of our sample using at least two of them – and these will form our focus today.Just quickly on Mixi, whilst most had accounts, it was now mainly just legacy use and the community seemed to have largely moved on –one notable explanation was that it was now like a deserted, ramshackle hotel – a trend that seems likely to continue for the mass unless it does something drastic to change its offer
