Presenting our 3 interviewees: Mr. Park Sang-Hwan, CEO of HANATOUR Mr. Kim Chang-Won, co-CEO of TNC Mr. Choi, CEO of NAVER our thankyous

It is wonderful to speak to you Mr. Choi! How do you see the current South Korean Social media environment and its future outlook?

Social media environment in Korea has been progressing fast through the development of various tools such as individual homepages, online cafés, Knowledge iN, social networking sites and blogs. One important current trend is that users started to regard the tools such as cafés and blogs as their personalized branding space and have started to demand more personalized services.

Previously, the users used to be satisfied with the standardized UIs and Layouts provided by the major portals. However, more of them are now starting to move into settling on independent domains and even reap profits from Ad platforms.

Another vivid trend is that social media has been gaining power as the new media channel. Contents posted in blogs have been used by the major press media as press resources. In addition, marketing attempts in utilizing ‘blogger power’ have been getting more popular. Vogue Korea held a number of events to spot power bloggers in the fashion field to get quality content and reviews on current fashion trends. Consumer electronic companies such as LG Electronics have also started to capitalize on the power of bloggers as early reviewers for the new product launches. This shows that power bloggers have already achieved certain levels of influence in the Korean market.

As we can already see from the current trend, social media are evolving into more interactive and personalizable formats. It will further facilitate the net users’ active participation on the net. On top of that, as an ubiquitous environment emerges, the users would be able to enjoy the content without physical limitation of spaces and devices.

How have corporations been making use of Naver for their businesses? Any future trends in that area?

As the Internet environment has been changing and the Internet has become more and more influential, the internet usage paradigm has been completely changed as well. The users not only merely use the net for the search purposes, but also create contents and share them with other net users.

According to the changes, the way companies promote their brands/products through the web has been shifting through different states.

• The first state: Simply exposing company banners

• The second state: Brand search (Search brands/products using search engines)
  

• Most recently: Utilizing sponsorship ads which allows direct interactions between companies and the end users

There are various ways to promote the sponsorship ads but the important point here is that they all make use of social media. It benefits the companies greatly too since it allows the companies to directly communicate with the end users without much effort.

Below are some examples:

• Coming out with various online events-utilizing services provided by Naver such as Boom/Toon/Mosaic/UCC/Image, which offer interesting missions to the net users to actively participate on various web events such as UCC (User-Created Content) competition etc. In this way, the end users can ‘enjoy’ the brands and get them more familiar with themselves.
• Open a ‘Brand Café’ (corporate online community) or a ‘Brand Blog’ (Corporate blog) which allow the direct communication with consumers.
• Promoting a brand through interactive Q&A via the ‘Knowledge iN’ service, Korean version of Yahoo Q&A.

One good example of an effective use of such tactics is the successful online promotion of the movie ‘The Host’ in 2006; The Host is recorded as the biggest hit in Korean movie history. The movie benefited from words of mouth through the net which eventually derived from the effective sponsorship ads.

Various Q&A pages were created through Knowledge iN regarding the movie, and a number of online cafés, were created under the name ‘The Host’ voluntarily. In the café, members actively, and voluntarily, posted and shared any information about the movie from the actors to the reviews, and the information was then redistributed through individual blogs.

NHN has also launched an online charity service ‘Happy Bean’ which helps companies to actively participate in social contribution activities. This provides a blog service called ‘happy log’ which helps small size companies to raise charity funds and recruit volunteers for social works. Through the blogs, the net users can either donate directly or indirectly using the 'Happy Bean' funded by sponsor companies. This helps the companies to promote a healthy corporate image.

Having said all, I personally see that promoting active interaction between the end users and companies using social media tools is the key essence for the success of online marketing not only for now but also for the coming future.