Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research as well as an insanely prolific and incredibly insightful web strategist blogger based in the US, recently visited Hong Kong where he had multiple meetings with Internet players who provided him various impressions of the Asian, and especially the Chinese, Internet. Too bad he couldn’t make it up to the mainland where I think he would have gotten an even richer view of what’s happening in China.

Jeremiah has detailed some of his learnings in several posts, including this one. This post, as well as the whole blog, is an interesting read.

I have copied my comment to this post below.

RE “Tencent QQ is a chat feature that’s used as a Social Network for young teens”: It’s IM client is of course THE client of choice in China, but you should not neglect QQ.com. It has an incredibly active BBS community. Compare QQ, Facebook and Myspace on Alexa, you will see QQ’s reach is in the same ball park.

RE “BBS (bulletin boards) are popular and China, so why would Social Networking be important?” This is an important point. BBS, or online message boards, absolutely dominate IWOM and social media in China. For example, we track over 5 million messages every month from automobile fans and owners in the mainland now. According to CCNIC, there are more people on BBS than on blogs. Netizens are already communicating with each other on BBS, on QQ IM chat and QQ IM group, do they NEED social networking sites like MySpace, Xianei etc. in a massive way? I am not so sure they do, at least in the form of traditional western SNS. With BBS, you at least have the option to remain anonymous (it is the default option), which may fit better with Chinese culture that does not necessarily reward standing out among the crowd (perhaps another reason why blogs popularity is less then BBS). Interestingly, we have seen multiple cases where consumers, when they want to get to know each others’ “real names” will simply initiate a topic inviting everyone in the online community to post their names and emails and QQ numbers.

RE: “Chinese Culture [mainland] doesn’t do a lot of real world social activities, so applying that to the web is challenging” Not sure what is meant by “real world social activities,” but we do see BBS communities serving as conduits for offline activities (and vice versa). There is even a net slang term for organizing offline events called FuBai (see my blog post about this and other net language terms here). For example of an online auto club’s “offline” activity, see here).

RE: “Chinese bankers don’t have time to use social networks, they’re going to use the newspaper and their blackberries” Bankers may not go to social networks/BBS, but the “regular” consumers who are driving the current stock market boom definitely are. On a side note, not too many blackberries in mainland China (yet).