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Hong Kong: Cultural Issues
Language
There are three primary communities in Hong Kong. The expatriates, who favour English, the local Chinese whose first language is Cantonese and the increasingnumbers of mainland Chinese immigrants who use Mandarin. These differences are important to businesses as based on their target audience, their medium of advertisement has to change. The Top 20 sites further, with Yahoo! HK and discussion forum hk both making the top 10 proving that language is of supreme importance to online visitors in HK.
Here is a little snippet from a conference held in HK on new media in December 2005 in which Roland Soong from EastSouthWestNorth, talks about the disconnect in information that exists between different communities in Hong Kong due to the varied sources that are used.
Due to the different languages and the variety of scripts used in Hong Kong (English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese) search engines often fail to optimize results across different segments. Google and Yahoo for example allow for searches in all three languages, whilst Technorati only allows searches in English and Simplified Chinese. As a result the Hong Kong market, which predominantly uses Traditional Chinese is largely ignored.
The Follower Mentality
Because international web based services have been accepted in Hong Kong there is little incentive to build a ‘new community’ when many of the resources are already present, explaining the low presence of local sites. Unlike China, clones to popular sites are also not found in HK. This has also been the reason for slow adaptation of social media as an advertising tool. According to Irene Low, Director of Digital Zenith Optimemedia "Advertisers in HK are very cautious. They are very prudent in the way they handle media. They are still unsure of how to handle social media. It is definitely past infancy, but it is still in a trial and error stage. Engaging social media is not a definite goal for many MNCs. It is still a very new medium in HK and they don’t know about it. They mostly look for direction from the UK/US. I mean seriously, HK has never been known to be a pioneer. We’re better at following. Most companies are waiting for the established players to make a move. " (See interview notes for full transcript. )
Environment
Hong Kong Internet users have the highest volume of visits to Net Communities & Chat (HK 16.6% compared to US 11.9% w/ending 7/7/07); and Stocks & Shares (HK 3.1% compared to US 0.7% w/ending 7/7/07). At the same time, Shopping & Classifieds is still considered a major challenge by businesses. According to Sandra Hanchard who writes here, this latter could be a result of the culture. Shopping to Hong Kongers is a “social activity” and the solitary nature of online shopping just does not suit their taste. This reluctance to shop online was highlighted by Irene Loh too, who said that only businesses like cinema houses (online ticketing) and firms providing photo finishing seem to be successful as “users are willing to access” these.
Source: Hitwise
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, May 28 2008, 3:42 AM EDT
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