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Jon Yongfook
Interview with Jon Yongfook - October 2009
Email correspondence:
Read more about Social media in Japan:
| Jon Cockle (aka Yongfook) is a popular web developer and blogger, based in Japan where he started out as a JET teacher. He is the founder and CEO of Egg Co. and recently, he launched Sweetcron, OpensourceFood and the now defunct 8apps. He has also been featured in “The best blogs of Asia” View his business blog, zygote, and his resume. |  |
Email correspondence:
| Us: | Jon Yongfook: |
| As social networking sites tend to attract the attention of a younger crowd, do Japanese businesses perceive it as being more of a new toy than something serious? If so, can this perception be changed? | I think they are taken quite seriously. Just take a cursory look at Mixi's advertisers and you'll see big brands, movies, bands etc. Then take a look at Mixi's advertising price list and you'll see that they are not "new toy" prices :) If anything, I think Mixi as a social network and an advertising platform is taken far more seriously by brands and advertisers who are willing to shell out cold, hard, cash (tens of thousands of dollars) to reach users than say, Facebook where brands can set up a "page" for free. Advertising isn't very social of course, so perhaps this is an unfair comparison. The fact is though that brands do take mixi seriously as a place to reach eyeballs - but perhaps not so much as a platform to interact with customers in a social sense. |
| “MySpace is about me, me, me, and look at me and look at me and look at me…In Mixi, it’s not all about me. It’s all about us.” – Tony Elison, Senior Vice President at Viacom International Japan. What do you think makes Mixi stand out to Japanese consumers in comparison to MySpace? Does the collectivistic culture in Japan influence the choice of social networking sites that consumers prefer to use? | I think there is far too much discussion on the ideology of Mixi and how it relates to the Japanese persona and whatnot. The fact is that there is no direct competitor to Mixi so users do not have a choice. There are other social networks with a different focus (GREE and Mobagetown are both massive gaming-centric social networks for mobile) but Mixi is the king of general-purpose social networking in Japan (mobile & pc) and it has no serious competitors in that space. So I think we often jump to the wrong conclusions. It's not a proven science that Japanese users resonate with Mixi because it's all about "us" instead of "me". They could just as well resonate with Mixi because it's entrenched and there are no other choices (Japanese ones, I mean). However, until some Japanese company comes along with $100 million in funding and makes a serious attempt at building the next Mixi, we're never going to find out. |
| 99% of the Japanese population use the Japanese language as their main language medium. Do companies that want to reach out to the Japanese audience need to master the language or can they use English? | Absolutely not. Anything remotely English will fail hard. Not only that, there's a vast difference between speaking Japanese and understanding all the social nuances, cultural references etc that are necessary to engage with a Japanese person in a way that truly feels social and 2-way. |
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, Nov 11 2009, 11:46 AM EST
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