Mike Sheetal, sits down to discuss the developments of the social media scene in Japan.

Radovic: Given the population of Japan and its traditional savviness towards technology, how would you describe the social media scene here and how would you consider it unique from other markets?

Sheetal: From an environmental and market level, Japan is very much running in isolation, in many ways due to geography, culture, but most importantly, language. Because of the lack of crossover (not many people outside of Japan can understand Japanese and not many Japanese are comfortable with other languages), we tend to have a very insulated industry here. With regards to social media however, many of the global services like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Second Life, among others are very much present in Japan each with varying levels of popularity. The more unique, local services we see are Mixi, NicoNico, a popular video sharing site, in addition to many other applications specifically designed for mobile phones, making Japan very unique from the rest of the world.

Radovic: Technorati reports that around 37 percent of all worldwide blogs are in Japanese, clearly making it the leader. What other social media do you see having the most influential impact for brands in Japan? And of this media which do you think is best reflective of what consumers really communicate?

Sheetal: One social media that has really taken off in Japan very quickly is micro-blogging with services such as Twitter. Microblogs allow short posts, usually up to about 140 characters, about what you are doing now. They are designed to give people following your posts a quick insight into what you are up to and have more of a feeling of a public conversation than a blog post. Japan is already the second biggest language and has the most active city in the world (Tokyo) for microblog market leader Twitter.

Copycat services like Mixi Echo have also started to pop up recently giving the Japanese market local alternatives as well as the popularity of the global Twitter platform.

Another social media area where Japan puts a lot of focus is BBS (or Forums), which is where the Japanese internet really started to go mainstream in the late 90s with sites like 2Channel providing the open platform where people could talk anonymously about whatever they wanted. This freedom and anonymity seems very appealing to Japanese people.

Radovic: Your company recently released a technology service for Japan that helps brands manage and track the various social media interactions that are occurring among their customers online. Can you explain why you felt there was a need for a tool like this here in Japan?

Sheetal: That's right, we just released "Press Army", a service we built and have been using internally for a while, as a commercial service.

Much of the impact our agency creates for clients heavily relies on the online buzz we generate for them here in Japan. Many of our clients have to report internally on the impacts their marketing efforts were having among consumers online and their manual and sometimes crude methods of reporting this buzz was becoming difficult and plainly insufficient for them. Add to that our interest in measuring other social media (it isn't all about blogs) and we had a problem that needed solving. We tried to find an existing service that handled this, but had no luck, especially in terms of solutions that handled Japanese content.

After coming back from a client that was particularly demanding in getting quantified data, I came up with the idea to just build the solution ourselves and Press Army was born.

We identified some key clients to focus the service on. First you have negative press management (i.e. find out when people are negative around your brand so you can do something about it), then campaign evaluation (understand the effective impact of your campaigns, i.e. how many people did you reach) and thirdly, opportunity discovery (locating social media outlets where people may be receptive to your message).

Radovic: Is it difficult to assess what people are really saying online about brands, whether positive or negative? Can you talk a little about the technology that assesses this?

Sheetal: On a one by one basis it is very easy to assess what online content is saying about a brand, but it is when you start to try to assess the huge volume of content that occurs online (and there's tons of it) that you get into trouble. In order to keep up with new content coming in you really have no choice but to automate some or all of the process.

With Press Army we automate all the main parts of finding and assessing the content. We extract things like language, keywords, traffic data and more from the content, but then we also added a module to deal with the specific requirements of the client. You can basically make up any question to pose to the content and measure the response in our tool. This makes the system scalable to the evolving online media scene here in Japan.

Radovic: Are there other technologies in Japan that are offering a similar service and how would you consider yours to be unique for marketers?
Sheetal: Our service is unique in two ways.

One of the most unique ways that we look at the information is that we quantify based on the number of people who experience the social media. When a blog has 100,000 viewers, it will have a much stronger impact that a video with 1000 viewers and so we measure them differently in the statistics we look at.

The other thing that really makes us unique is the way that we handle language. We read content in any language and we have an interface that works in both Japanese and English, allowing English speakers the ability to read about the social media impacts that his/her brand is having in Japan. 

Radovic: What do you think the future holds for social media tracking here in Japan and how do see the relationship of this versus other marketing efforts, such as offline?

Sheetal: Of course the industry is only going to get more complex from here.

For me the future is all in making the information able to be understood for people of all backgrounds and levels of sophistication. At the end of the day when various sources of data get more sophisticated and evolved, we can actually take advantage of them and use our modular system structure to integrate those sources of data into our own dashboard, while concentrating on delivering the best user experience.

Overall, marketing efforts moving forward will take more and more notice of social media and systems like this for understanding where they are making an impact online. This is something we already do in our agency work but you will see mass adoption from the big guys soon. This is where having these systems in place early will give you a competitive advantage in Japan.

Andy Radovic is senior online marketing and SEO consultant of Sozon.