Webwednesday Part 2.0 - a review

I was attending the second Web-Wednesday tonight at vibes (thanks by the way to Chris Tran and the other organizers, great job folks). The main topic was "How is the current situation of social networks in Vietnam after Yahoo closed its 360 service?".

We saw the usual suspects there, Caravat, Zing, YuMe and - Webtretho. While the big guys tried to impress with numbers (yes, zing.vn just overtook facebook with 1 million active users), Nguyen Hoang anh, Marketing Manager, pointed to her core business: parents. Webtretho isn't even a social networks, it's more a forum, has about 300.000 members, mostly with nicknames, publishing not much about themself. But when it comes to problems with kids, the users are posting like crazy. That what you call "active users".

I really love that idea. I was always a fan of niche marketing, because that's the way you target the right audience. Forget the 20somethings on facebook, if you want to sell diapers, go to Webtretho. That's where your customers are.

So what we learned from the webwednesday was, that all the players still want to become number one and trying to get huge numbers of users, while niche products getting a nice piece of the cake of advertising.

The best question came from Simon, who asked the speakers, if one of them is using facebooks fanpages. None of them do it. They call themself a network, but don't do real networking. They just abandon on 900.000 users.