Contributors A-Z | Top contributors | Edit profile

Thomas Crampton: In China

As Asia-Pacific director of 360 Digital Influence for Ogilvy, Thomas Crampton heads a team stretching across 23 cities in 15 Asian territories that helps companies conceive, develop and execute strategies in Social Media.Prior to joining Ogilvy, Mr. Crampton spent 18 years as a globetrotting newspaper correspondent, mainly for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, reporting from five continents and dozens of countries.Passionately involved in digital since 2004, he writes a widely read blog, thomascrampton.com, and is a frequent keynote speaker and moderator at high profile conferences around the world, from the World Economic Forum in Davos to Le Web in Paris.While at the International Herald Tribune, Mr. Crampton launched the newspaper’s first blog, wrote a weekly column about Asia, was a Paris-based feature writer on media and technology, covered the 2004 US presidential election for The New York Times, reported on the 1997 Asian financial crisis from Thailand, the SARS outbreak from Hong Kong, the civil war in Sudan, rebel fighting in Sri Lanka, Taiwan’s largest earthquake, US hurricanes, the Cannes Film Festival and many more topics.Currently on the board of the The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong, Mr. Crampton has served as president of that club as well as president of The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand and on the board of the New York-based Overseas Press Club.In addition to publisher’s awards from The New York Times and citations from Amnesty International for his articles and photography, Mr. Crampton has served as a judge for numerous journalism awards and worked to promote freedom of expression and the training of journalists. He has served as an awards judge for the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers, the Society of Publishers in Asia editorial awards, the Southeast Asian Education Ministers Organization and numerous others.He is co-founder of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club Charity Fund that has raised more than US$3 million to support the higher education of disadvantaged children from the Po Leung Kuk. Check out our amazing scholarship winners here!Mr. Crampton was educated in the United States at the University of Virginia, in Ireland at Trinity College, Dublin and in France at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. He speaks English, French, Thai and is learning Mandarin Chinese.

RECENT POSTS

• Chinese online dating: It’s all about narrowing choice

  In contrast to online dating in the United States and Europe -- where people turn to the internet to increase choice -- Evan Osnos writes in The New Yorker this week about how Chinese netizens use dating sites to narrow their choices.“I once watched a twenty-three-year-old woman search for dates in Beijing, where there are four hundred thousand male users,” the chief engineer from Chinese dating site Jiayuan told Osnos. “She narrowed it down by blood type and height and ...

• Facebook: Benchmark of F-Commerce services

  One of my recent obsessions is social commerce, the idea of shared shopping experiences online. On a global basis, Facebook has been leading the charge with socialising commerce in stores (check-ins at retailers) and online (using Facebook connect to link people in their activities across various sites.)One of the most interesting permutations, however, is when the commercial experience takes place entirely within a social network. There are a few companies specialising in this domain, a selection of which we have ...

• China social networks: Expat foreigners, cool girls and hipsters

  Facebook holds sway as the default social network in many parts of the world across all internet demographics. In China, where Facebook is blocked, a handful of homegrown social networks attract segmented audiences, ranging from upmarket urban youth to university students and migrant workers.While the world’s big focus these days is on Renren preparing to go public, these other networks deserve a look:Douban -- a more specialised social networking site, attracts art students and those passionate about books, cinema, culture, ...

• Twitter use in Indonesia on the rise

  Indonesia is now the source of 15 percent of the world’s Tweets, coming in third place globally behind the US and Brazil, according to the below recent analysis by Saling Silang.Indonesia’s Tweets peak on Thursdays, but weekends are highly active……On weekends, Indonesians send out more Tweets per person than at any other time during the week……Not surprisingly, mobile Twitter clients are highly popular, particularly on Blackberry (Indonesians are obsessed with Blackberry)……Indonesians share a great deal, re-Tweeting more than they Tweet...

• Facebook’s India-style viral curve in Brazil

  If history proves a guide, Facebook will soon take over from Orkut as Brazil’s dominant social network. The curves on this graph show a familiar story of what happens when Facebook’s growth curve shifts into a sharp upwards direction.Similar curves were seen, for example, when the once-dominant Friendster died in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.In this case, I made a comparison to Orkut in India, since India and Brazil were the few major nations where Google’s social network dominated.The data is ...

• Evolution of social media in China [Infographic]

  Six months ago Ogilvy's China social media team created an infographic to show some of the local platforms thriving in place of the major international equivalents.Since then, new social media platforms have become relevant – on both sides of the Great Firewall – and so the team reworked the infographic. They have also widened the scope to include more platforms within some of the categories.Major changes include:Three new categories: professional social networks, which may become more important with LinkedIn’s China ...

• Social media in China: The same, but different

  Much has been written of late about the Chinese government’s efforts to control and censor the internet. The government’s censorship of websites is an important issue, but it is not the top priority of the country’s 420-million internet users (netizens). Their top priority? Connecting with other Chinese online.The internet has opened access to information for ordinary Chinese citizens in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Coming from a world where information was pre-filtered by editors at ...