What does Runet buy online? According to Nielsen’s global research about online behavior (January, 2008) – Russian users more often prefer to buy via e-commerce books (42%), electronic stuff (33%), video, DVD, games (29%), music (23%) and software (23%).

Russian users not often buy clothes, accessories and shoes – just 19% (In Germany 42%, USA – 41%, South Korea – 70%). Food is very rare product for e-commerce users in Russia – just 8% for 3 months. The middle average of this data globally is 14%, and in Japan – 36%.

Russians used to pay for online products mostly by cash (59%), by credit cards – 21%.

The most popular e-commercial sites of Runet are:
Ozon.Ru, Yandex.Market, Molotok.Ru, Torg.mail.ru, Auction.ru

We are growing! Faster and faster. Our accounts in social networks count more than 80 mln when in general Runet has little more than 30 mln users.

How to balance our digital lives? Of course we need services which will allow us to accumulate all our content from all our accounts.

We prefer Russian analogues like Odnoklassniki.ru, Vkontakte.ru to Facebook, which is not so popular among us (we use it to communicate with foreigners). Of course, we use Twitter and love this microblog – but it’s more popular among geeks, social media specialists and IT trend-setters, not among common users. We use FriendFeed for aggregating our accounts. But… we are in LiveJournal, My.mail.ru, ya.ru (Yandex), and other local social services. So we need our local aggregators. And now we have them.

Recently Rambler.Ru launched the new project Planeta.Rambler, which let us use besides all communication functions the aggregation of all our accounts.

Bestpersons.ru – also allows to gather all accounts together and to balance our digital lives in Runet. By the way, amazing rating of social nets is available here according users profiles of Best Persons.

And here you can find all social services you’d like add on your The one account:

While surfing the web I founded a very interesting design project “A brand new site about Russia” made by Elena Marus as a graduation from British High Design School, Moscow.

This site is supposed to be a presentation of Russia for foreign people, where the author collected all the stereotypes that foreigners have about our country. And I enjoyed every text that Elena wrote with a great sence of humor. Check out some of examples:

About the country  – “everybody knows that there are two cities in Russia – Moscow and St. Petersburg. The rest of the country is called Siberia – pretty simple geography”. 

About national emblem – “Russian eagle is the only Siamise eagle in the world!”

About Vodka and cut glasses – “good company in Russia always means 3 people, 3 cut glasses and 1 bottle of vodka. No other way of drinking vodka is allowable”.

 “Russian brides – one of the leading Russian export items”.

“Chelsea is the most famous Russian football club in the world.”

Preved Medved – “one more kind of famous Russian bears which lives on the internet.”

If you haven’t seen this project before, I strongly recommend you to check it out and by the way - grab your attention on “phrases to survive”.

Much has been lately said about Russia – either about its world policies or state of domestic economy. Still, much of the coverage is biased by some reasons – foreign media tend to portray Russia’s assertiveness worldwide as a new threat to the world, while Russian media are committed to state interests.

With this bulletin Edelman Imageland Russia, that has been prepared by our experts, will try to provide Edelman colleagues and clients worldwide with a kind of unbiased insiders’ general outlook that might be helpful, when it comes to the relations with Russian partners.

You can download it russia-bulletin_dec-08.pdf or read more in blog.

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Happy New Financial Year!

Within Edelman day in Moscow, that we celebrated today at our office, our digital department has prepared a flash-video devoted to integration of Russian agency Imageland in global Edelman.

All photos in this flash I’ve got from our colleagues from different offices of Edelman within the project Views from Edelman offices. Now in this collection 17 offices from 54. By the way, if you don’t find your view here, please, make a photo from your window and send it to me via orasulova (@) imageland.ru.

In October’08 Publishing house Kommersant in co-operation with Edelman digital Russia launched mutual social media project “Print your Money”. The print media “Kommersant Money” decided to develop content on internet for the first issue of the magazine in new 2009 year – “Money 2.0” with the help of its readers and bloggers.

The project consists of three stages:

1. Research

Before the official launch the online survey at www.kommersant.ru was conducted among readers, where they answered about their readiness to participate in “Print your Money” project. More than 80% appeared to be highly interested in “Money 2.0”.

2. Cooperation with readers

Readers vote for the media via their interest to its content, so it’s very important to know what they prefer to see in this experimental issue of the magazine. On the second stage readers sent to kommersant.ru/money2 the topics they want to read about, voted for or against appeared themes and discussed the possibility of its realization. In the middle of November the hottest of them (14 the most popular topics according to results of readers voting) were chosen for the new issue.

3. Cooperation with bloggers

The third stage is content development, where bloggers, who are the experts in specific subjects, and journalists of Kommersant will together develop the articles of chosen topics. The best materials will be published in the first in the year issue in January.

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While crisis goes globally and America is going to vote, Russia prepares for the first frost and becomes more social in digital. There are some interesting events of Runet:

News from Social networks:

- My.mail.ru welcomed in October the 25-th million user.
- Odnoklassniki.ru (22 mln users) at the end of October has started to take $1 for registration on its socialnet. To pay for registration new users can via SMS. Without payment new account works in the limited mode: so it’s impossible to look through profiles and to chat via instant messager.
- The social network Vkontakte.ru (20 mln users) has started project Userapi.com which can be used at creation of social networks.

New social projects:

- Socialzm.net – new social network where experts of social media tell about trends and Runet’s experience.
- Dengi 2.0 – new social media project of publishing house Kommersant. The main idea is to engage bloggers – experts in economics and other spheres – in mutual content development for the first 2009 issue of Kommersant’s magazine Dengi 2.0 (eng. Money) together with journalists.
- And a very actual event – Crisis-2008.ru – the new project completely devoted to crisis in Russian economics.

Edelman Health team launched Health Engagement Barometer that talks about the changing dynamics of health communications and engagement. The survey was conducted last summer with a total of 5,000 people across China, US, UK, Russia and Germany.

There are some pretty powerful insights in the findings most relevant to engagement in Health 2.0:

• 70% of adults demand engagement especially for personal health issues that matter most to them

• Top three mandatories for health engagement: trust, authenticity and satisfaction 

• 22% of the population are Health Info-entials – people who are informed, involved with their health and actively engaged in the health conversation

• Most frequently accessed channels of health information:
- Conversations with friends/family (69%) 
- Conversations with “my doctor” or healthcare provider (65%).

• Social media is more credible when coupled with health expertise: 
- Top social medium: Health expert blogs (86%)
- Other most credible media include personal blogs, social networking sites, video-sharing sites, and Wikipedia.

And in Runet it’s more than true not only in health sphere because over 70% users trust experts and authority resources, 47% trust doctors and medicine specialists when 28% trust “people like you” (Edelman Trust Barometer).

The deck is available on the blog.

Participating in open global webinar «All Social media is local: a guide to Global Stakeholder Engagement», that Edelman provided on 7th of October, as a panelist from Russia I represented Social media trends of Runet. Here I just like to resume the key trends of social media market in Russia.

Potential growth rate of online market in Runet is extremely high – particularly in boom of new media and social networks – for example the audience of the most popular Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru welcomed more than 20 mln people just for two years! Vkontakte.ru – 17 mln people, My.Mail.ru – 15 mln people.

But most popular Russian social networks used for personal communication or instant messaging. They are effective for contacts not for engaging campaigns.

At the same time average Russian blogger and opinion leader (internet-savvy, highly educated middle class consumer) is generally more critical and suspicious of any information, than its average western user, as well as able to obtain information by himself. Expert opinions usually placed on Internet forums, discussion boards and blogs (over 6 mln). Most preferable blog hosting platform for this blogger – is LiveJournal.Com.

Internet campaigns in general are more effective in Russia as a part of offline complex marketing campaigns.

More popular and long live communities in Runet are those which have continuation in real life (offline regular meetings on Auto.ru etc.)

Microblogging in Runet is not as popular as in global Internet due to poor ability in expression – 140 characters are available for Latin symbols and only 70 – for Cyrillics. Russians need more space to express their thoughts!)

The more localization of internet-campaigning – the better. Global Google looses to its competitor Yandex due to localization – services that appeal to particular Russian consumers interest (for instance Yandex-guru consumer advisory feature or Moscow traffic online navigation feature etc.).

So, if you are going to come to Russian online market, or are already present here – try to use at least several independent information source and communication tools, to know more how you could be more local and effective here providing your global company’s strategy.