I was just in China — and missed Tweeting.     In 2009, the China Government disallowed Twitter in the country. 

Whilte twitter brought the concept of the microblog to China, now there is a China version that the people of China showed me.  It is called Sina Weibo.  

Around 3/2010, Sina’s CEO Cao Guowei revealed there were 5 million registered users of the service but claimed in May that  they had doubled the number of members. In comparison, it took Twitter nearly 30 months to attract the same number of users.

From what I saw, the service is a Twitter mini me!  It allows users to post 140  Chinese characters. However, my team in China told me that 140 Chinese characters can say a lot more!!!

I am very interested in finding out more about how this is used.   If anyone has used Sina, could you comment back to me as I’d like to chat to you!

Top 3 Tools for Small Businesses Using Social Media!

So in our latest onine survey of 1000 small businesses, we found that the top social media tools by small businesses were  — in order — are: Linked In, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

• 80% use LinkedIn on a monthly basis, and 56% visit it daily or weekly.
• 68% use Facebook on a monthly basis, and 46% visit it daily or weekly. (YouTube 77%/37% and Twitter 50%/29%)

Results show that partners from smaller companies and in executive roles have a higher usage of these four predominant social networking sites.

Consistent with Experian:

These numbers are on par with new media survey results from Experian Simmons issued this summer.

The survey showed that 66% of all online adults today have visited a social networking site in the last 30 days — and these numbers are up from 53% in 2008 and just 20% three years ago in 2007. (see here!  http://www.smrb.com/web/guest/2010-social-media-report )

IBM has what it takes!

It was also great to see that an overwhelming 97 percent of respondents described IBM’s social computing capabilities as moderately to much better than other competing large IT vendors. It means they value what we’re doing — our expertise and technology.

So we did this video for our IBM business partners on the 5 Don’ts!

I’d love to see your comments!!

Driving new revenue!

We just received results from our online survey of 1,000 of our partners, and we found some interesting results.   45% of our partners — which are primarily small and medium businesses — are beginning to experiment with social media to generate new revenue streams.  Not just to communicate but to actually drive new revenue!

Seeking Education!

The other interesting item was that  74% said that they would seek education in social media because, while they knew it was an effective sales tool,  they are still uncertain of how to apply it.

While the majority agreed that there’s a proliferation of social media outlets and there’s a potential to capitalize on social networking to boost sales, many are still not yet engaging in social media as part of their business strategy.

What’s the reason why they have not deployed more readily?

Our survey showed that Privacy concerns, lack of time, and confusion on how to measure the results were the top three most often-mentioned reasons for a lack of interest in using social computing for business purposes.

One partner wrote: “ With Twitter, there’s no worthwhile business information that can be expressed in 140 characters or less.” This reminds me of early days of the Internet and skepticism we saw then.!

Our announcement today from IBM announces a new Social Media Interactive Series to help our business partners in this quest!