SEO Optimization

As my post-Columbia career is shifting to marketing and enrollment of major international schools in China, some of the future blogs will be focusing on how to apply the digital marketing strategies into specific areas of the overall marketing planning which starts to unfold in the next few weeks, from a very practical perspective. Our website is ready to be launched in mid-November while we have various groups of consultants working at different fronts of the marketing mix. It is crucial that we make the specific requirement of web optimization for a strong SEO.

According to the article- Improve your website’s search rankings in six steps[1], here is what we aim to formulate for our website planning.

1.     Meta descriptions - 150-160 character (including space) meta description that appeal to our audience, and make sure we include key search words such as global perspective, international education, innovation, world-class. Whether it should be done in Chinese, in order to be fully accessible by Chinese parents, is to be further discussed.

2.     Image Attributes – Buried in the source code, images also contribute to the content that the search engine. Use relevant key words as description for  images used on the website.

3.  Body Word -  a 300-word body word that includes not only key words, but also effective communicative messages to our audience.

4.     Page titles – make sure that the page title have accurate page tags so that search engine robots can read clearly.  Keep them concise, relevant and exactly aligned to what our audience is looking for. 

5.     Header Tags – Break up contents into specific categories, potential page titles including “about us, news & events, admission, learning, community, employment, and contact us”.

6.     Avoid Duplication- avoid low-quality duplication on our website which might suffer from penalty. Make a good user of syndication and boilerplates.   

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[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-growth/day-to-day/improve-your-websites-search-rankings-in-six-steps/article19440441/

More online digital marketing events about IPO will happen

Believe it or not. Online digital marketing is changing the conventional world significantly, sometimes in a disruptive way. 

Here is a piece of recent news which draws my attention. 

Harvest Fund Management Co.Ltd, one of China’s largest asset managers, plans to launch a fund focused on giving Chinese investors access to shares in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s initial public offering on the NYSE. 

The fund will give mainland Chinese a new route to investing in overseas stocks, rather than just through a current quota system allotted to fund managers called the Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor Program, a senior Harvest official said. The fund is expected to raise more than $100 million, a person familiar with the matter said.

Alibaba’s initial public offering, pushing beyond $20 billion, is expected to be one of the largest in history. The offering is being planned for the first half of August, although timing isn’t set in stone. Given the size, getting fund managers who haven’t yet invested in Chinese stocks is likely the biggest challenge for the Internet giant’s underwriters. A recent survey by ConvergEx Group showed that optimism about Alibaba’s business model and potential performance as a publicly traded stock didn’t necessarily translate into plans to buy into the company.

It reminds me of  the business model called “online investing in IPOs”. In the past, IPOs were exclusive, available mostly to institutions and their largest investors. It simply was not possible for the vast majority of people to get access to, or afford to, participate in IPOs. IPO companies were limited to a narrower base of investors, and the number of funded IPOs has declined over the past decade. That is how most investment banks make huge amount of money by monopolizing all these financial resources over the past decades. 

As we all know, IPO business sometimes is all about how managements are marketing their company, so as to create investing demand among potential investors. From the company’s perspective, it doesn’t really matter how they get their investors, either from the wholesale, or from the retail. On the contrary, it does matter how to get more highly-committed investors who firmly believe in the prospect of the company in a longer term. 

Some technology companies, which smells the potential opportunities, have already started the IPO retailing business by establishing online platforms. 

The online platform, designed to open up IPO access to large numbers of participants, allows more people than ever to join the bidding, at the same price and time as those big guys. IPO company will benefit as the online platform can uniquely scale millions of users per IPO, creating a large new source of capital. Meanwhile, it helps to improve the financial market to be more equal and fair. 

I won’t be surprised to see there would more online digital marketing events about new IPO launch in the future. 

Why Social Media Is the New Gallery
 

The below article brings another meaning to the term digital marketing.  The fact that artists can share their work and market their services via social media and individual websites is changing the idea of a "starving artist".  While I admit social media can be an effective networking tool as well as a convenient way to keep up with friends and acquaintances, the prevalence of it in today's society sometimes irks me.  Visual artists and people with marketable skills using the social media platform to advertise their work and services is a great example of a benefit of social media. 

 

Industries such as the culinary arts, visual arts and other service providing industries are using social media platforms more and more as a means to promote a skill or talent.  As a result, there seem to be more of these types of artists popping up around the world, regardless of their ultimate success, many people are trying their hand at a marketable talent-based personal business.  I have a few friends who are visual artists, such as painters as well as illustrators, and they have fully taken advantage of creating a platform to share their work on social media.  One artist has been contacted to do logo work for small startup companies, while another has been asked to commission a drawing for a friend's tattoo.  Without this exposure, these artists might not be able to get much work doing what they love.  As much as I believe that social media is taking over younger generations and potentially affecting the ability of young people communicating effectively, this use of social media in industries where networking and word of mouth is essential is a great outcome. 

 

Source:

http://mashable.com/2012/01/20/artists-social-digital-media/

Big potential lies in China-S Korea internet cooperation: Baidu's Robin Li

The online and social media industry in the far east is changing in a dynamic manner. Leading companies of South Korea and China are announcing strengthening of strategic cooperation for the future. Asian nations, in which global players such as Google, Facebook, etc does not yet have the dominating presence, are consolidating the market with their own leaders. It will be interesting to see how global competitive market will evolve in the future.

Original Source: http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20140706000083&cid=1102

Robin Li gives a talk at the forum in Seoul, July 4. (Photo/Xinhua)

China and South Korea see great potential for cooperation in the internet sector as the two nations share the common ground of technology innovation, said Robin Li (Li Yanhong), chairman and CEO of China's search engine giant Baidu, in an exclusive interview with Xinhua on Friday.

"China is a large market and South Korea's close neighbor. Most of their enterprises have a strong willingness to work with China. I also got some first-hand impression on their influence and achievements during my visit to South Korea this time," said Li.

Li was one of the 250 business executives that followed China's president Xi Jinping's official visit to South Korea. This is the biggest ever foreign business delegation to South Korea, according to the Korea Chamber of Commerce.

Li is popular among South Korea's business circle. Oh Young-ho, CEO of South Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA), the country's state-funded trade and investment promotion organization, has arranged a closed-door meeting with Li on Friday, talking about future cooperation.

Li attributed Baidu's fame in South Korea to its commitment in technology innovation. From the core hyperlink analysis technology to the emerging Artificial Intelligence and learning technology, Baidu has always regarded technology innovation as its fundamental of living and development, he said.

"We should be proud that China and South Korea are two among four countries around the world that have core search engine technology," said Li, mentioning South Korea's top search engine Naver.

The Asian internet market, represented by China and South Korea, has acquired competitive advantages through on-going technology innovation in recent years, boosting the development of relevant industry, said Li.

The new technology and products are gradually shifting to Asia, making it a new hub of technological innovation around the world, he added.

Since the 1970s, the United States has been branded as a hub of the global internet development, cultivating most of the technology and products innovation because of large internet user base and best technology engineers. It also leads the internet resources and rules-making.

"But now things are different," said Li, adding that China, with its 600 million netizens, is ranked as the world's no.1 internet market, while South Korea features world's leading rates for mobile internet and broadband and internet speed.

"The combination of a large internet market and a market with advanced infrastructure will give us infinite imagination," said Li.

"The alliance will enable China and South Korea to enjoy more opportunities than the US, facing new demands from users earlier and seizing new chances results from these demands."

Baidu and South Korea-based electronics giant Samsung have cooperated closely on technology fields. Samsung mobiles' photo album has applied "Baidu Cloud," while Baidu's voice technology makes Samsung Gear's fluent man-machine conversation possible.

"At present, Samsung mobile still keeps the largest market share in China. As Baidu also values the mobile market in recent years, the two sides still share many common interests," said Li, adding that Baidu's software advantages and Samsung's hardware tradition will enable a considerable scope for collaboration in future.

Baidu also started to work with South Korea's entertainment industry. Li said Baidu has signed MoU with South Korea's SM Entertainment earlier this year, in charge of SM's official music and video authorization in Chinese mainland.

Baidu Tieba, the online community integrated with the search engine, Baidu Music, Baidu Video and other platform products, will seek deep cooperation with SM on market promotion, jointly producing TV programs and other fields and supplying online promoting platform for SM's K-pop stars.

Baidu Tieba has more than 20 million active K-pop fans, accounting for 40% of South Korea's population.

"An old Chinese proverb says that if two people unite as one, their strength is powerful enough to cut metal, which can be used to describe the future of China and South Korea's cooperation in the field of internet," said Li.

You may have been part of Facebook Experiment .

Last week, Facebook reported that it had tinkered with about 700,000 users’ news feeds as part of a psychology experiment conducted in 2012. The study found that users who saw more positive content were more likely to write positive posts, and vice versa.

The experiment was the work of Facebook's Data Science team, a group of about three dozen researchers with unique access to one of the world's richest data troves and run hundreds of test: the movements, musings and emotions of Facebook's 1.3 billion users. One published study deconstructed how families communicate, another delved into the causes of loneliness. One test looked at how social behaviors spread through networks. In 2010, the group measured how "political mobilization messages" sent to 61 million people caused people in social networks to vote in the 2010 congressional elections.

The experiments ignited outrage from people who found it creepy that Facebook would play with unsuspecting users’ emotions. Because the study was partnered with academic researchers, it also appeared to violate long-held rules protecting people from becoming test subjects without providing informed consent.

However, Facebook are thriving petri dishes of social contact, and many social science researchers believe that by analyzing our behavior online, they may be able to figure out why and how ideas spread through groups, how we form our political views and what persuades us to act on them. And also only by understanding the power of social media that we can begin to defend against its worst potential abuses.

Over the last few years, Facebook has expanded what it calls its Data Science team to conduct a larger number of public studies. The company says the team’s mission is to alter our understanding of human psychology and communication by studying the world’s largest meeting place. So far, it has produced several worthy insights.

In 2012, the data team published a study that analyzed more than 250 million users; the results shot down the theory of “the filter bubble,” the long-held fear that online networks show us news that reinforces our beliefs, locking us into our own echo chambers. Like the new study on people’s emotions, that experiment also removed certain posts from people’s feeds.

Much of Facebook's research is less controversial than the emotions study, testing features that will prompt users to spend more time on the network and click on more ads. Other Internet companies, including Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Twitter Inc. and Google Inc., conduct research on their users and their data. Google has acknowledged running about 20,000 experiments on its search results every year. It once tested 41 different shades of blue on its site, each color served to a different group, just to see which hue garnered the most engagement from users. In the same way, YouTube offers different suggested videos to different people, to get them to watch more videos. Amazon manipulates its store design – offering different deals and layouts - so that people spend more money.

The responses to the experiment were overwhelmingly negative. But, there is little likelihood that Facebook and others will stop this kind of A/B testing. Still, there’s hope that these companies would become more transparent in experiment process. That could include reviewing more risky or controversial tests with an independent ethics board, or allowing users some way to find out if they’ve quietly been placed into an experiment. Facebook and other companies could also provide some open access to privacy-protected anonymized data to outside researchers. There are benefits to understanding humanity locked in the data of these big tech companies that might never be researched if they don’t have profit potential.

Main Source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/facebook-experiments-had-few-limits-1404344378

At 20 Amazon is bulking up. It is not—yet—slowing down

In June 21st, Economist had an article discussed about the invincible secret of Amazon's success over the past 20 years and forward future.

Everything started from a book. In 1995, Amazon sold its first book in the company's history. Since then, the world has witnessed the rise of a book sales site, and that, after all, an online bookstore Amazon. However, Bezos's ambition is far more than this. Books into online retailing is indeed a good channel: Once you are familiar with the online textbook process, people will buy more of other commodities.

Amazon will therefore be able to grab more data about consumer demand. If someone purchased goods commented on the move will enrich other shoppers shopping experience. Bezos also found a virtuous circle within the industry: low prices can boost sales in order to attract customers and merchants, and the high volume, in turn, facilitated the decline in prices. As long as the company will give top priority to the interests of customers, then this virtuous cycle of growth for the company will be able to.

In June this year, Amazon launched its first smartphone, Fire Phone. In addition to its slim design outside, Fire Phone also has a prominent aspects of character design, 3D screen is one of them. The object recognition Firefly is to identify specific objects, two-dimensional code, images, sound, video and other information, then you can also guide the user to identify the relevant purchase products on the Amazon site.

Although the Amazon has become the largest online retailer in North America, Amazon's e-commerce revenue growth rate is still higher than the market average of 17%. In Europe and Japan, Amazon also is the top online retailer, and began to layout the Chinese market. Calculated in accordance with annual revenue last year, Amazon is the world's ninth largest retailer. In 2018, Amazon is expected to become the world's second largest retailer. In addition to the retail sector in the network has achieved great success outside, Amazon also opened up two other subversive activities. Kindle e-book reader to read the lead of the people like to shift from paper books e-books, e-books current annual revenue size of the U.S. market share of the book market in the U.S. has more than 10 percent, while Amazon has become the U.S. book market leader.

Compared with rivals Apple and Google devices, Amazon's hardware devices not only favorably, but also has a price advantage. Amazon does not want to profit from hardware sales, but want the hardware device and the company's other services perfect integration into the Amazon to make hardware devices become shopping paradise carrier. Amazon offers for the Fire Phone purchaser Prime free membership for one year, aims to encourage consumers are familiar with Amazon's streaming service and free delivery service.

Faced the challenges from the market, Bezos always insisted Amazon continues to "customer-oriented" development strategy. Bezos in 1997 had sent a letter to shareholders listed on Amazon that Amazon can only focus on long-term development strategies. However, long-term development strategies need to adhere to invest large sums of money. The reason why the company was founded early in Amazon can be win-win cooperation with retailers is because the company did not build and maintain financial pressure warehousing. At present, a large number of established data center storage center and also changed the funding chain relationships Amazon.

Compared with traditional retailers, Amazon's capital expenditures are currently still relatively small. For a market capitalization of up to $ 154 billion of the company, this net is really insignificant. Investors, however, has been the rapid growth of Amazon hopes can increase net profit level. In a TV interview last year, Bezos agreed that Amazon will one day be subversive, but he does not want this scene staged in his lifetime. At least this scene appears difficult in the near future, it is not because the Amazon can always make the right decisions, but because Bezos betting customers, investors patience, technology and scale of the decision seems to have paid off. Moreover, Bezos has been willing to take all the risks he always insisted.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21604559-20-amazon-bulking-up-it-notyetslowing-down-relentlesscom

Twitter 101

For anyone interested in Digital Marketing for a company especially startups - it is essential to master the beast that is Twitter. As the Marketing Manager for a startup called Chef’s Basket, I had zero budget and no training in Digital Marketing, or for that matter any sort of marketing. What I did know was that Twitter was fairly popular amongst the audience I was targetting. This brings me to my first point:

1) Audience - Make sure your target group is on Twitter. The best way to check is to see if your competitors have an active presence on Twitter. If not, it’s more likely that Twitter will not work as a Marketing medium for your brand. However if your competitors have an active Twitter presence - learn from them:

• Follow the companies they are following
• Look at who is retweeting their tweets and follow those people. Also tweet at them as they are the ones that will most likely engage with the brand and follow you back.
• See the kind of posts that are getting retweeted the most and ensure your posts are in a similar vein.
• See the posts schedule - are they tweeting daily, hourly and if so is there a specific time?

2) What is a tweet - a tweet is a 140 character sentence used to give bits of information. It is considered acceptable practice to ignore grammar and use phone accronyms such as LOL, BTW, u, pls, w/ (for with) and w/o for without etc. Remember that links and photographs will take up some of the characters of a tweet. For longer tweets - use 1/2, 2/2 at the end or beginning of the tweet.

3) Handle - if you have a common name - it is most likely taken on twitter. If you’re a new brand - it’s better to create a name so that you can get the handle you want on all the social media portals including your own domain name. But if that’s not a possibility then it’s best to add numbers to your name. For e.g. if your name is John Doe and @JohnDoe is taken - don’t put @Itsjohndoe or @Thejohndoe. If someone is trying to tweet at you they will likely just write @Joh hoping witter will automatically give them suggestions. So it’s better to make your handle as @john_doe or @johndoe1

*If your brand name is a registered trademark and is being used by an inactive account  - you can submit a report to Twitter to transfer the handle to you. If you don’t have a registered trademark then Twitter will not help get the handle.

Will higher education have the fortune of the newspaper industry due to technology disruption? According to The Economist, yes



This topic affects us all who are studying at a traditional institution. In our case, ours is renowned for its faculty among other attributes.

Last week edition of The Economist claimed interestingly that technology will disrupt higher education as it did newspapers and music industries by offering online courses  to listen to star lecturers at a fraction of the cost of attending traditional university.

As happened with newspapers, it is claimed that the high quality institutions will benefit from this trend by expanding their online remote courses portfolio, while the mediocre universities will end up disappearing or having to adjust their fees significantly to be able to compete with remote learning.

Main source: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21605906-cost-crisis-changing-labour-markets-and-new-technology-will-turn-old-institution-its

Why organizations struggle to go digital?

A survey conducted among senior executives in several medium and large companies by McKinsey reveals that the main challenges to grow their digital programs are the lack of talented individuals and their own organizational structures.

For most respondents it’s evident that digitization has become a critical asset in many companies’ quest for growth. More than three-quarters of executives say the strategic intent behind their digital programs is either to build competitive advantage in an existing business or to create new business and tap new profit pools. However, the mentioned challenges prevent companies from scaling up their digital efforts and seeing clear returns on their investments.

 

 

Main source: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/The_digital_tipping_point_McKinsey_Global_Survey_results?cid=DigitalEdge-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1406

Online video: the future for customer engagement

Online video advertising is growing and becoming more and more effective, along with the unstoppable diffusion of smartphones and tablets, which allow users to interact with the online world continuously.

Facebook decision to buy LiveRail, the third biggest video ad seller, is a clear signal of the importance that online video is achieving as a channel to engage and call customers to action.(http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-buy-biggest-video-ad-seller-liverail/293992/)

Interactive video is the next frontier of customer engagement: consumers, especially younger generations, want innovative, evolving content, capable of attracting their attention and engage them. Technology evolution allows to do that: online video ads are no more just a way to deliver content to users, but they provide them with truly engaging experiences, easing the path to action or reaction on the consumer’s side by placing calls to action directly at the point of passion, within the video content itself. Social rewards, real-time commerce, inline gamification, timed surveys, embedded contact forms, local store finders, and other interactive layers encourage and facilitate customer action and are the next step in brand engagement.

Source: http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/articles/interactive-video-the-future-for-consumer-engagement/744

The digital revolution reaches higher education

With smartphones, tablets and other devices providing digital content anytime anywhere to anyone with a stable internet connection, higher education - a trillion dollar market - can also feel the digital wind of change.

Featured last week as The Economist's cover story, 'The digital degree' disrupts established higher education practices on three fronts:

1. Funding
   While governments are decreasing there support, colleges are increasing their investment in teachers, technology and admin. This leads to higher tuition fees for some students, and possibly bankruptcy for colleges where students are no longer willing to pay the premium.
   
2. Online learning
   Formerly expensive courses can now be found for low or no charge online, which significantly increases access and scalability of courses. Will this replace or complement classroom learning?
   
3. Lifelong learning
   Training and retraining for a large number workers throughout their careers is gaining in importance.

Even though providers of digital higher education, among others, MOOC, are still struggling with low degree completion rates and some technical difficulties, they could particularly challenge mid-tier undergraduate universities. Limits to online degrees currently seem to be highly complicated subjects (where digital participants' failure rates are extremely high) and Ivy League institutions where the value of the network of classmates is still unrivaled.

Overall, we can expect digital higher education to provide opportunities to many who could not afford - financially, time-wise or logistically - to attend university, to anyone seeking lifelong learning in their field, and to new educative content providers like Google and Bertelsmann.

World Cup marketing on digital overdrive

Here is an interesting article from Wall Street Journal talking about why traditional off-line marketing is not that popular in the World Cup this time.

Sao Paulo: As you pull out of the Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo, neatly arranged billboards lined one after another come into sight. The city will host the opening ceremony of the World Cup, as well as the opening game and a semi-final down the line. But the 30km drive from the airport to the city centre features only eight billboards related to the tournament. 

There is a reason for this absence of traditional advertisement, and to understand that, you need to go online. Viral videos, static digital banners and box advertisements, contests, cola promotions, insurance offers and footballers asking you to start banking with the best in Brazil bombard you. 

The World Cup has always been a marketer’s dream, perhaps the single greatest marketing event in the world. “The last World Cup was viewed by over 3 billion, 715 million for the finals alone. To put things in perspective, the Super Bowl this year was viewed by only 108 million,” says Juhi Manwani, account director for advertising agency Grey Group, Singapore. “While there was digital advertising present in the last World Cup (in South Africa in 2010), it wasn’t to the degree of the content quality, reach and the scale that we now have.” 

The numbers make a compelling case for the digital. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa) sponsor, Budweiser, which has created a digital and social hub for all content generated during this time and is also doing an entirely social-based selection for Man of the Match, has 11 million likes on Facebook. Fifa partner Coca-Cola’s ‘Todo Mundo’ video for the World Cup has had 3 million views since its release on 8 May. Portugal and Real Madrid forward Cristiano Ronaldo has over 24 million followers on Twitter, and Spain international and 2010 World Cup-winner Andres Iniesta has 16 million Facebook followers. Nike’s ‘Winner Stays’ video, featuring top footballers, had over 64 million views in just three weeks. Nike’s digital community is about 200 million strong, about the same size as Brazil’s total population. 

“The wired generation is at all times a very demanding audience,” says Arjun Chatterjee, CEO of Mumbai-based digital solutions firm Run-Time Solutions, explaining the reason behind the brands’ shift in focus from the traditional out-of-home and print marketing campaigns to the digital media. “Since most of them have high-powered, data-driven gadgets, their demands are not unjustified. It is, therefore, a challenge for marketers and advertisers to make this available to them in as real-time as available. Digital is straddling across viewers and users by democratizing access.”

 Nike marketing director for India, Avinash Pant, says his company’s focus will remain on the digital. “We will utilize our resources to be extensively present on those platforms that today’s youth are active on,” says Pant. Brands don’t only want to be seen, but they want to hear what their consumers have to say about them. Online marketing brings in a great degree of analytics which moves the needle from the past marketing style of spray and pray. Digital campaigns allow brands to measure every click and ‘like’ to create a sketch of the consumer so that marketers can target their spendings more effectively and aim towards rationalizing the return on investment. Digital campaigns that engage users longer are in demand as of now. “Brands want their agencies to develop ideas that don’t just tell people what the brand is about, but ideas that will encourage consumers to interact and spend time with their brand,” says Manwani.

Tablet Edition Ads Get Same Recall as Those in Print

The very idea that tablet ads are as recognizable as print ads suggests that we are entering into a new phase of mobile expansion.  The fact that mobile magazine ads on tablets are as impactful as print editions proves that we are in an ever-increasing mobile-driven world.  Not only are these ads being recalled at the same rate as their print counterparts, but they also can be interactive, which may lead to an increase in effectiveness down the line.  Tapping on an ad to interact may eventually make these types of ads more effective.

Since 2011, minutes per person a day spent on a tablet has increased from 112 to 156 in 2013. Moreover, there has been a 21% increase in the number of tablet ad units from 2012 to 2013.

"Consumer adoption of tablets has also fueled a large and rapid increase in the number of magazine apps available on digital newsstands. According to iMonitor, the number of U.S. magazine apps reached 2,859 in the third quarter of 2013, nearly three times as many as the 990 apps available just a year and a half previously in the first quarter of 2012."

Sources:
http://www.magazine.org/insights-resources/research-publications/guides-studies/tablet-magazine-advertising-insights-kantar

http://adage.com/article/media/study-tablet-ads-recall-print/294011/

World Cup from 1998 to 2014 - A transition from PC Era to Mobile Era

Two years ago, influential web portals in China began planning topics related to the World Cup. In addition to compliance with the "high invest, high return; low invest, low return", they also focus on how to maximize the ultimate user experience in order to establish their reputation and brands.

Besides these web portals, a growing number of Internet companies begin to enter the game with the development of the Internet technology. The most popular technology terms, such as big data, cloud computing, O2O, social dividends, and inter-screen strategy, have become the weapons of these technology firms to get a slice of cake from the World Cup.

From the 1998 World Cup in France to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Sina not only dominated the Internet coverage of the contest, but also led the PC-era version 1.0 reporting mode: PC-side plus Sina blog, and lots of information, pictures, and videos. However, this is the last carnival of portal era.

With the continuous evolution of Internet technology products, microblogging began to play full force in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

The Internet technology began to rush to news apps during the 2012 London Olympics. In 2013, video apps came. Nowadays, everything moved to mobile end. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil witnesses the shift from PCs to the mobiles.

Compared to the PC era, the mobiles emphasize more on user activity and stickiness. Quite different from the simple pursuit of huge numbers of clicks, mobiles pursue better user experience.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/27/in-nadellas-post-post-pc-era-apps-trump-devices-and-information-finds-you/

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/post-pc-era-or-not-we-are-firmly-in-the-mobile-era/4766