Hikaru Utada, a New-York born Japanese singer and songwriter, who is one of Japan’s all-time most successfull artists, came up with a new promotion concept for her second English album ‘This is the One’. Utalizing the Japanese Karaoke platform from Myspace, fans can upload their own video recording of Utada’s new lead single ‘Come back to me’. Utada’s Karaoke Contest is featured on the main page of Myspace Karaoke Japan till the end of the contest and Utada herself will select the winner. The grand prize will be a special karaoke party with additional 3 friends and Utada herself in Tokyo.
SNS, USER-GENERATED CONTEND and LIVE CONTACT with fans: that’s what we call ‘MARKETING 2.0.’ Respect!
P.S. Unfortunately the marketing concept got a hype from the ’swine flu panic’ in Japan. In the Kanto area (Osaka) all schools were closed for weeks. “Tens of thousand bored students at home?!”, thought some smart karaoke bar owners and offered special courses for collage students. This generated a big hype and most karaoke bars had long lines of students waiting to sing. Big gatherings of students was exactly the opposite of what authorities intended. Closing school definately didn’t protect students from the virus, but might have helped to the big success of Utada’s karaoke campaign. What a coincident!
Social Network Services are huge in Japan. About 45 million Japanese use at least one of the more than 102 available SNS. However Social Network Services in Japan are still one of the fastest growing online services in Japan and new niche SNS are emerging on a regular base.
Recently so called ‘Oegaki-Chats‘ gain a lot of attention and popularity. ‘Oegaki’ is a Japanese term for “to draw” or “to scribble” and ‘Oegaki-Chat‘ stands for communities where users can share their artwork or communicate through paintings.
The most popular drawing community is ‘pixiv’. Launched in September 2007, ‘pixiv’ now has more than 600,000 registered members, 3 million submissions and about 500 million page views per month (February 2009). Users can share their illustrations and get feedback through ratings or user comments. Most of the illustrations are anime, manga or video game related. Drawings can be uploaded in 3 groups: 2D (e.g. Photoshop creations), 3D (e.g. Poser creations) and analog (e.g. writing brushes). Therefore ‘pixiv’ promotes ‘ComicStudio’, a professional manga drawing software with a special pen tablet. Additionally all uploaded images are organized in an extensive tag structure.
The ‘pixiv’ community grew very fast and top-rated artists even receive a cult like status be fans. Meanwhile there are several live events with competitions throughout the year and exhibitions are held and famous artists give demonstrations. Between February 27th and March 1st 2009, Pixiv held their first convention, ‘Pixiv Festa’, at the East Design Festa Gallery in Tokyo’s Omotesando with exhibitions of 145 different artists.
In October 2008 ‘pixiv’ launched a new community called ‘drawr’. This flash-based system enables users to draw directly in a web application via mouse or pen tablet. This new service is very simple to use, has no search function or tagging system at all and targets a younger user group than ‘pixiv’. Former users of ‘pixiv’ can log in with their existing accounts, but all images and comments can also be viewed without sign-up on both mobile and PC browsers. The interesting feature is that comments can only be made through handwriting or paintings.
Very similar to this community is ‘tegaki blog’. ‘tegaki’ stands for “handwriting”, therefore all images and also comments are also in handwriting. The default widescreen comment field can be changed to picture size in order to reply in whole images. Some artists also use the comment field to write complete manga short stories or continue picture series of other users. There is no real search function except of through tags in this page. All tags are user generated graphics and are managed by users themselfes. In September 2008 ‘tegaki blog’ had 126.000 registered users and 90 million page views per month. Registered users’ age group ranges from early 10s to later 20s.
In early 2008 the Flash Engineer Munehara remembered that when he was in school every student used to write and paint on the blackboards during holidays. Just for fun, he programmed a simple page, now known as ‘kokuban.in’, where you could just write on a blackboard (Japanese: “kokuban”) and save your painting.
By accident some schoolboys found his page on the internet and spread the word. In the next holidays season his page got stormed by thousands of high school students. Today there are more than 100.000 registered users. While in the beginning more than half of the users were Junior High students, today there is a wide range of users. Women in their 40s and man over 65 are the biggest user groups behind school children. The success of ‘Kokuban.in’ can be seen under nostalgic aspects for elderly, but is mostly in its anonymity and tolerance for users who are not good at painting. Everybody can post everything, share it and get a feedback.
Conclusion
SNS drawing is a recent phenomenon that is still at an early stage but already attracts hundreds of thousands of users. We expect this movement to grow much stronger in the next months to come. It is likely that big SNS service like mixi and Gree will start to add these drawing features in the near future. With the latest touch enabled handsets, mobile drawing clients will also start to appear soon. Crowdsourced designs, drawings and idea sketches could open up a new field of opportunities for brands and future business.
That is one of the results from a survey conducted by P+Nest Research Institute on two of their mobile partner sites. Within 1day 1001 female and high school and junior high school students voluntarily participated in a mobile survey about personal homepage usage.
In Japan young people use the word ‘hompe’, the short word for homepage, not only for homepages but also for profile services and SNS on the mobile web. Users can write user profiles, diaries, bulletins and even novels and contribute to each other in real time.
The usage of ‘hompe’ is extraordinarily high in Japan, especially for young girls. Asked about “how many of their friends and classmates have a ‘hompe’?”, 37.7% of female junior high school students and 47.9% of high school students answered: “all of them”. Everyday 45.6% of junior high school students and 48.6% of high school students spend at least 1h updating their own sites or writing real time contributions to other sites. The purpose of writing ‘hompe’ is slightly different between female junior high and high school students. 45.1% of junior high school students’ intention is to “communicate with their friends”. Contrarily female high school students seem to get more self-centered and individual after they turn 16. Their purpose for writing on ‘hompes’is to keep “individual records about themselves” (48.6%). Communication is still the main purpose. But while it’s more like active “chatting” for junior high students, high school students tend to write it more like an egocentric ‘blog’. They write about themselves as an ‘idol’ (star) and want others to be interested in them. Their participation in others gets more passive.
The most popular mobile ‘hompe’ service site is homepe ‘＠peps!’; most used profile sites are ‘Chip!!’ and ‘zentraku profile’
最近ビデオを色々と使う事が増えてきたため（私ごとで・・）videoを使った表現を もっと使いたいと思い色々と勉強中。 videoをタイリングしてコンテンツを表示させたらかっこいいんじゃないかなーと 思いトライしてみたら案外簡単にできた。
TilingVideo.asをimportして、 第一引数にvideoを読み込むコンテイナーを。 第二引数に読み込みが終了したnetStreamを（つまりvideoのもと）。 例 var theNetStream:netStream = loader.getNetStream("video"); //netstream var tv:TilingVideo = new TilingVideo(videoContainer_mc, theNetStream); //videoContainer_mcにtheNetStreamのvideoをタイリングする TilingVideo.asファイル右クリックで保存してくださいです。 アイデアとしては、 一つのビデオを読み込み後、ステージ分のbitmapを敷き詰めてやり、それぞれをenterFrameで ビデオを描写してやれば一つのビデオがタイリングされたように見えるという事です。 つまりビデオを読み込み後、ビデオごとタイリングしたらすごく重くなるので EnterFrameしたbitmapをしきつめてやればファイルサイズも軽いということですな。 使い方としてはこれをボタンが押されたらタイルをしきつめてやり次の情報が表示されたら 案外かっこいいのでは？いや、かっこいいはず。大好き。愛してる。
