April 2010 - Chapter One:

The uncontested rise of social media in Asia

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It is human to feel the need to connect with other people. Traditionally people have formed tribes and societies, and gathered in towns and cities. Connection used to be mainly via face-to-face meetings. Now, digital technology makes it easier to connect, and those connections can be anywhere in the world via the Internet. In the past half decade, two of the biggest developments in terms of digital connections are social media and social networking.
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In 2009 the global marketing company OgilvyOne published a report about online activities in the Asia Pacific region. The report said 456 million people in the Asian region participated in social media that year. This represented 31 per cent, or just under a third, of the world’s entire online population. The report also said three in four (74 per cent) of the world’s 17 trillion SMS messages originated from the Asia-Pacific region that year. The report said online advertising was expected to experience compound growth of 25 per cent between 2009 and 2011.
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A report by Universal McCann entitled Power To The People: Wave3 declared the Philippines the “social networking capital of the world,” noting that 83 per cent of Filipinos surveyed were members of a social network. That attitude has spilled over into Filipino cyber-culture. Politicians use social networking for election campaigns and the police use it as a tool in criminal investigations. Filipinos are also the top up-loaders of photographs and viewers of web videos. Filipinos are also the world leader in SMS or text messaging via a mobile phone. Social networking has evolved onto the mobile phone ahead of the desktop computer because many more people have mobile phones than Internet connections.
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>>> PDF Download: The uncontested rise of social media in Asia

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