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10.3.2012

A recent survey by Celent has uncovered some interesting statistics that may shed some light on how financial services firms in Japan differ from their Western counterparts in their use of social media platforms. According to this survey, about 88 percent of all Japanese financial services firms are using social media platforms to reach their customers. In fact, more than half of those are using several social media networks simultaneously. This is a particularly interesting fact when one considers that Western banks have been particularly slow in adopting social media as an effective way of reaching their customers.

A deeper look at these surprising statistics

While banks in many countries are just starting to move towards social media networks in order to provide their customers with better services and to advertise to potential new clients, almost all Japanese banks have a robust social media presence. This interest in social media among banks has grown impressively in the last couple of years, with many banks now using social media networks as a core part of their overall marketing and services strategy. The survey examined social media usage trends as well as patterns in social media consumption in the Japanese market. The results were surprising.

How Japanese banks are using social media platforms to their advantage

The main advantage that social media networks offer banks is allowing them to communicate with their customers in real time, making it an extremely efficient form of market research as well as a great platform for providing certain services. According to respondents of this survey, social media networks have also had a great impact in improving financial institutions’ brands and their recognition among the public. Other ways in which social media networks have helped Japanese banks include allowing better communication between people involved within a single financial institution, as well as improving the efficiency of offline interactions by allowing many transactions to be completed online by the customers or employees themselves.

Interest in social media among Japanese financial firms is projected to grow in the future. Those banks not involved in social media show strong interest in participating while those already using social media to their advantage are looking for ways to expand to a strategy involving multiple social media platforms.

How does this differ from how non-Japanese banks utilize social media?

Financial institutions in the United States and Europe have been comparatively slow in adopting social media. According to a similar survey carried out by an independent financial information source used for investment purposes, these banks have a very poor social media strategy. Out of the top fifty banks outside of Japan, the vast majority are using ineffective social media strategies with a token page on Facebook which usually receives no activity. Their attitudes toward other social media platforms also seem to be ineffective.

In fact, about a third of these banks had no Facebook page or profile and the banks that did would not accept friend requests or interact with their users. The statistics for Twitter and YouTube were similar. Only about half of the banks surveyed had active Twitter accounts that were regularly used to post, and about half of those used Twitter to engage with the public about wealth management and financial issues. In the case of YouTube, less than half were using this platform to engage with their audience.

The bottom line

Today, most consumers take social media for granted, considering it is almost a given that most major companies will have an active social media presence. Western banks can learn from Japanese financial firms’ usage of social media. Unlike their Western counterparts, they are active on the same channels as their consumers, reaching them more effectively in the process. It is also important to understand that a strategy that utilizes multiple social media networks is the best since it casts a wider net. Unfortunately, it seems that banks outside Japan have not grasped the core concept of social media usage: an inactive account is worse than no account at all. Social media as used by Japanese financial services firms is a tool for engagement with the public. Setting up an account and abandoning it conveys a poor image of a company to potential customers.

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About the Guest Author:

Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.

10.2.2012

Japan remains to be a sturdy and voracious market for social game creators. But unlike the Western countries, Japan focuses on mobile gaming—from regular to smart phones to portable consoles. With these platforms, the social gaming in Japan grows into both a dynamic and highly competitive market and producer. The giant developers in Japan that started it all are Nintendo, Sony, Capcom, and Sega.

Decades passed and a new breed of game developers emerged and caught the interests of Japanese as innovative social games swept across the web and mobile phones. The social gaming in Japan is led by three social network media, namely, Mixi, Gree, and Mobage-town. They are accessed by consumers using their mobile phone rather than a web browser. Half of the population in Japan has social gaming as among their past time. This data is given by Pikkle developer, David Collier, who believes the Japanese market for social gaming is as huge as the American.

M-create ranking revealed that as of August 2012, Nintendo continues to dominate the local gaming market with an allocation of 70 per cent. Such figure does not constitute both the hardware and software, however. But with hardware alone, Nintendo owns 75 per cent of the market, followed by Sony with 23 per cent. Nintendo also owns the list of the top 10 bestseller consoles—five 3Ds, four Wii, and one DS.

Gree, on the other hand, shifts to feed the voraciousness of hardcore game players with a goal of bringing video game market to smartphones.

Entering the Japanese Social Gaming Market

With a promising market, it is not a wonder then, why many game developers from the United States, the Western countries, and neighboring Asia express a desire to join the competition in social gaming in Japan. In fact, there are already many foreigners who came to Japan to develop social games for the Japanese.

Translation of the game to Japanese is the foremost consideration of foreign game developers. Of course this is implied considering that while many of the Japanese speak English, almost the entire social gaming market prefers their native language. Both in history and culture, Japanese turn their backs on games with any foreign language.

Culturalization is another factor. To make the social games more attractive to gamers, game developers structure their game contents to reflect the real life scenario in Japan. This only makes sense as Japanese have been used to playing social games with streets and sceneries in Japan graphicalized on game consoles as what the pioneering game developers did from the beginning. And given the patriotism character of Japanese, there is no reason why new game developers should deviate from such culture.

Uninterrupted and smooth game experience is important as well. Imagine the scenario of hot gamers at the height of a game, only to be obstructed by bugs. Such can turn gamers off. Debugging the game is as essential as each component of a social game. Before the game is launched in the market, the same should be run-tested and reviewed for any error and incompatibility with devices.

Social game is similar to an online shop, a customer service or online banking in the sense that it should be running all throughout the day for 24 hours. Though this may not be difficult to achieve, it may have issues from time to time. Game developers understand, of course, that their servers need to be high-performance capable of accommodating hundreds, if not thousands of online gamers.

A “must” feature of a social game is the online game support accessible any time by the game users and inquiries responded upon within the 24-hour period.

Not the least of all is the social game’s promotion. Needless to say, any promotional event of a new social game requires a big capital. But with the dynamic and multifunctional social networks in Japan, the expenses for advertisement are reduced reasonably. But even if promotional campaign is of a huge cost, such investment is worth it notwithstanding that Japan’s social game market is expected to rise to $3.4 billion profits by 2012.

Japan is a leading market in technology and its perks. The high standards of Japanese in social and online game are epitomized in multi-million dollar film adaptations of Japanese epic games that awed the world.

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About the Guest Author:

Rodolfo Lentejas, Jr. is a fulltime freelance writer based in Toronto. He is the founder of the PostSckrippt, a growing online writing business dedicated to producing top quality, original and fresh content. To know more about him, please visit www.postsckrippt.ca. Like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

10.1.2012

In the mayhem surrounding the economic problems in Japan in 1989, the Long Term Credit Bank (LTCB) underwent a surgical transformation. Ten years had passed since the economic downturn and the bank was still lurching from one problem to another. Many felt that the end was near. Finally, in 1998, the bank was sold to an international group and this group restructured and renamed the bank and that was how the Shinsei Bank was launched in the year 2000.

LTCB’s IT infrastructure was mainframe-based and over the years, it had developed haphazardly with a number of different applications and systems supporting a number of card products that had only minor variations. The new owners were very keen to consolidate all of these into a single product, but they were very anxious that the customers of the bank did not face any further disruption to their work. While the bank could have closed all its competing cards and issued a common card to all customers, this was not an option because it would have caused a major service disruption.

The path Shinsei followed was this – each of the card type was called a business and a new IT application was created to deal with each of these businesses. Over five years, the bank transferred each of these ‘businesses’ to a common platform and application. Existing customers were slowly moved to a common hardware and operating system without ever becoming aware of it. All mainframe and legacy systems were ported and the cloud had won yet again. A full bank was ported to the cloud in small steps, with no disruption to its already fragile customer base.

Starting from this case study of the year 2000 and later, there have been thousands of such transformations. The cloud itself has evolved enormously over the years and become far more advanced and user friendly. In the second section of this article, we see how the cloud has changed over the years –

In recent years, the public cloud has become far cheaper than what it would have cost Shinsei Bank. The difference in costs between public and private clouds has increased due to the economies of scale possible in the public cloud and this difference will increase.

Security in the cloud has got a lot better and this is removing one of the major reasons to stay with a private cloud. Automatic patching and updating of cloud based systems is already making systems safer and reduces the window of opportunity available to hackers. Already experts are getting around the view that public clouds are in many cases far safer than private clouds or in-house IT setups.

Cloud systems are becoming much more compliant of various regulations that govern computing practices. This is an evolving area and as technology evolves and our understanding of security and inter-operability requirements improves, compliance issues become better defined and cloud systems are improving in their compliance with standards. Look at digital signatures – for a long time, e-commerce was held back by the lack of reliable digital signatures. This has now changed and we take these for granted. Today you can even take out a bank loan with a digital signature. As the number of subscribers to the public cloud increases, they will drive progress in the development of compliance mechanisms. Enormous computing capability and practically unlimited storage is making compliance much easier than ever before.

The low costs of cloud computing are making people develop applications privately. This is sometimes even called rogue IT. One of the best known examples is of Derek Gottfrid wanting to put all of the New York Times archives on-line. Instead of waiting for the Time’s IT set up to give him the equipment, he went ahead and set up a cloud instance and hosted the archives on it without the knowledge of the IT department. The archives came on line in a fraction of the time and the cost it would have taken otherwise.

The path shown by the Shinsei Bank in the early part of this century is now taken by thousands of businesses regularly. Cloud computing is getting more cost effective and more robust with time.

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About the Guest Author:

Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.