Executives at Alibaba’s Taobao, the dominant Chinese online marketplace, suggest its 9 million merchants provide more customized products or services to mobile shoppers who account for more than half of traffic. Mobile and differentiation were the key words when Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s top executives introduced their strategy to 800 merchant attendees last week at the annual meeting of sellers on Taobao, its largest Chinese web marketplace. About 9 million merchants sell 1 billion items on Taobao.com, according to Alibaba. Mobile …

Quality Community Management Metric #1: Measuring Community Health The community manager’s role is to get people to talk, share, and react to the brand in the social media communities. KPI or Key performance indicators  should be set for each social media community based on the brand’s objectives for that community and the community manager’s scope of work. Example metrics of community health (and therefore, the quality of the community manager’s output) are: Community Growth Metrics: Net new Likes, new followers, etc. Community …

China, with the world’s largest population at a whopping 1.357 billion individuals, also represents the largest market in the world when it comes to social media users. But because China’s government has instituted a strict system of controls over Internet usage in the country and has blocked access to many Western social media websites via the Great Firewall of China, it is also one of the most unique social media markets. Much has been written of late about the PRC government’s …