Mingtiandi

Grand Wuxi Gateway and Dalian Plaza 77?

May 21, 2009 – 10:59 pm

This post may stray a bit from our usual focus on industrial property and media ventures, but there have been two stories this week of Hang Lung Properties (HLPPY), the developer behind some of Shanghai’s best known and most successful commercial developments making major acquisitions in second and third tier Chinese cities.

The South China Morning Post reported recently that Hang Lung Properties paid 415 million yuan (HK$471mn) for an existing retail site in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, its second acquisition in a week.  This follows the company’s acquisition on May 10th of a piece of undeveloped land for RMB 1.2 billion in Dalian, Liaoning Province.

The Wuxi project is expected to involve a total investment of RMB 2 billion to expand and complete an existing but unfinished retail site.  For those of us living in Shanghai, Hang Lung is well known as the developer of Plaza 66, a premier office and retail complex, as well as the Grand Gateway development in Xujiahui.

Hang Lung also owns properties in Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenyang, Wuxi and Ji’nan.

Although our focus at RightSite is on serving China’s industrial property community and these are commercial project, these developments show the growing recognition of the market potential of China’s second and third-tier cities.  While centres like Shanghai and Beijing are already becoming prohibitively expensive, there are still very affordable sites available in cities like Wuxi and Dalian, where growth rates are likely to be much higher than in Shanghai in the coming years.

Much of this growth is driven by the development in industrial zones (RightSite has listings for 11 industrial zones in Wuxi alone), as well as the continuing improvements in infrastructure in provinces like Jiangsu and Shandong. When developers like Hang Lung, who have a very successful record in China, start making major acquisitions like this, many industry analysts see signs of a market recovery.

Posted in real estate | No Comments »

Get a Chinese Domain Name and Get More Traffic

April 19, 2009 – 8:48 pm

The highways of China are littered with the roadkill carcasses of foreign Internet giants who stumbled, staggered, and got left for dead in their quest for the world’s biggest Internet audience. eBay, Google and Yahoo have all had heaping helpings of humble pie in the Middle Kingdom, and some of them keep coming back for seconds.

At RightSite we don’t plan to join this Internet Abroad Slow Learners Club, and to help avoid this fate, we constantly re-examine our assumptions about our audience and look for ways to make our site friendlier to local users.

As a bi-lingual site, RightSite has to make its content and services work for both local and foreign users, however, most of our revenue will come from local businesses, and since my eyes are round and my hair (even before it turned white) was always a few shades short of black, so this is major challenge.

One big step we have taken to allow local users easier access to our site is adopting a Chinese character domain name.  Most people know about getting a .cn or .com.cn domain name, but this is a very different issue. What many foreigners don’t know is that you can buy a Chinese character domain that represents a URL just like your Western character domain does. We purchased our Chinese character domain name from ZhongZiYuan (中资源网络服务有限公司) in Xiamen, the same registrar where we bought our .cn and .com.cn domains. The cost of the Chinese character domain is RMB 320 per year.

Our Chinese character domain name represents the Chinese name for our company, 领业.中国.  (Our Chinese company name is “Ling Ye” which roughly translates as “high-level assets.” The characters for China are added on the end to make sure that you know we’re in China, I guess).

If you’ve ever laughed at foreign tourists at the Great Wall or YuYuan Gardens who think that by speaking English loud enough and repeating the same sentence enough times, that Chinese people should understand them, then you should laugh at foreign businesses who try to create an online community without a domain name that Chinese people can understand.  And, in case the nitrous oxide hasn’t worn off from your last dental visit, most Chinese people don’t speak English.  Yeah, your tour guide could talk great, and the staff at 5 -star hotels sound like they just stepped off the set of Desperate Housewives, but out in the ‘zhou’s’ where real people live, it’s be Chinese or be gone.

I know because, we almost made the same mistake.  I chose the domain name, rightsite.asia, thinking that the words involved would all be simple enough for most people in China to recognise.  OOPS!  After a few weeks of listening to my staff try to pound out our Roman character spelling over the phone to industrial zone employees in Changshu, Changzhou and Changle, I knew this wasn’t going to work.

The traditional approach to making an easily recognisable domain name in China has been to make your domain a number instead of a word. Thus, 163.com, 126.com, and 51job.com. That’s cool for reading to someone over the phone, but if you’re trying to build a brand that can be differentiated from the crowd, it is pure evil.

So we went with the Chinese character domain name. Now, our team only has to read out the words “领业.中国” over the phone, and anyone, anywhere in China can bash this into their browser’s address bar and get to RightSite right away.

Better still, we have set up a .htaccess file on our webserver that directs all traffic to from our 领业.中国 domain to our Chinese version at RightSite.asia/zh-hans.

Technology and language working together — two of my favorite things coming together to help more people get more out of RightSite. Another reason for a good week at RightSite.

Posted in management, technology | No Comments »

Promoting B2B Media On LinkedIn

April 12, 2009 – 8:07 pm

LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals worldwide.  It provides people with the opportunity to share knowledge, promote their credentials and keep in touch. At RightSite, it is providing us with free tool for increasing our referral traffic by more than 50% in a one month period. If you have a job and you haven’t checked out LinkedIn yet, then don’t think about leaving that job to start your own business.

At RightSite, most of our referrals (traffic to our site from sites other than search engines) now come from LinkedIn.  This is a tremendous source of traffic and it’s all free. If you are starting your own business, or you’re interested in promoting the one that you work for, then here are a few tips.

The easiest people to reach in LinkedIn are members of your own network.  If you are an entrepreneur or marketing professional then you should have a good-sized network.  If you don’t have at least 100 folks in your LinkedIn network, then consider a career in Library Science.

Beyond your own network (who probably know about what you’re doing already) there are a lot of other tools available for letting people know what you’re doing and driving traffic to your site.

General Pointers

• Join as many groups as possible that are related to the industry that your B2B covers, your media (such as the Internet, B2B trade media, etc), the locations that you focus on, or investment/business in your area.
• Be sure to include a link to your site in every post
• Be helpful – don’t just use LinkedIn to pimp yourself or you will build up annoyance rather than goodwill.  Give people information they can use, or give them the opportunity to promote their knowledge both on LinkedIn and on your site. If you provide a real service, then you will get real results from LinkedIn’s users.
• Try to make your posts on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays.  You will get more response when your input is fresh, and users are much less likely to use LinkedIn on busy Mondays or Fridays.

Groups

• LinkedIn has thousands of groups for diferent professions. Find groups related to the media industry or related to the industry that your B2B covers
• Join as many groups as possible, and be an active, helpful participant
• If your contributions make it onto your group’s email digests, then it will be pushed out to all the group’s members.  If you join the right groups, that can mean reaching thousands of professionals every week for free.

Discussions

Discussions is a section available in LinkedIn’s Groups section

• Use Discussions to get advice on sourcing an outside consultant or service
• Use Discussions for finding experts eager to contribute content to your site

News

News is a section available in LinkedIn’s Groups section

• Use the news section to share your editorial content with professionals who may be interested in such information.  Be sure to post each story on relevant groups only.

Answers

Answers is available to interact only with people in your direct network.

• Use Answers for technical questions that you can’t solve yourself, or to source vendors

What are you working on now?

• Use the “What are you working on now?” tool to make small announcements that will let people know about your progress on an interesting project, or to solicit help on finding staff, a computer supplier, or other routine items.

Later I promise to give a few tips on using Xing, Plaxo/Pulse, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and about 50 others, but this is all I have time for today. Look forward to seeing you next time on Mingtiandi, and happy Easter.

Posted in Marketing, technology | No Comments »

Meet the RightSite Team

March 30, 2009 – 7:14 pm

Media companies are all about teams.  A group of people comes together to create the website, fill it with content, spread the word about how great it is, and then sell like crazy.  No media company is a one person project (at least not one that makes serious money), and at RightSite, we take building our team very seriously.

Since Chinese New Year we have interviewed more than 60 candidates for three positions to fill a total of six vacancies.  During the month of March we have successfully brought on board three great new people, and I would like to take a few minute to explain who these new team members are and what they will be doing.

Our first new hire was our new Content Manager, Tina Qiu.  Tina is originally from Chongqing and worked as a reporter and editor in both Chengdu and Shanghai before heading to the University of Missouri in the US to pick up her Master’s degree in Journalism.  At RightSite, Tina is charged with managing our Community section content,, overseeing our listing content creation and helping out with our PR copy.  It’s a busy job, but start-up companies are for energetic people.

Besides Tina, we have also brought on board two marketing interns, Floria Fu and Gong Yi.  Our marketing interns help us with contacting RightSite’s customers to help build our directories of industrial zones and available properties. They also help with the translation of RightSite’s Community content and preparation of our email newsletter.

Floria is a fourth-year student at Tongji University, and Gong Yi is a fourth-year student at Shanghai University. Both of them share an interest in eCommerce and strong language skills.

During the month of April we plan to add two more interns and a marketing executive.  And of course, we add these new members to our existing team of Carol Gao, Winni Chao and that Michael Cole guy.  So the Tongren Lu office will be bursting at the seams as we crank out content and work at making RightSite the best known new B2B site in China.

Posted in human resources | 1 Comment »

The Centre Holds As Things Don’t Fall Apart

March 29, 2009 – 7:43 pm

We are wrapping up a busy month at RightSite and the focus this month has been on team-building. We’ve added three new team members and interviewed more than 60 people.  But as always, we have tried to do all of this team building in an organised way that let’s us grow as quickly as possible without losing track of our goals and our core mission.

One of our major tools in keeping our company on track has been our RightSite Wiki.  While we put the super-trendy “Wiki” name on it, this is really just a site where we share information.  We store training materials and references on the Wiki, and documentation on how tasks should be performed at RightSite is all stored on the Wiki.  When a new intern shows up for work on their first day, their training program is stored for them to download on the Wiki.  If anyone wants to know the best way to write a description of an industrial zone for a new listing, complete guidelines are stored on the Wiki.

Our wiki is a pretty simple site created for free on Google Sites.  I am not sure that this is the best product for creating a wiki, but since it’s free and easy to use it meets my two most basic requirements.  On the downside, the formatting tools for pages are clunky - no tools for creating h1, h2 or h3 styles or other simple CSS type elements that I can get in OpenOffice?  Boo!  Hiss! Still, I continue to use Google Sites in the faith that they will improve the product soon.  Right after they take over the world.  In the meantime, you can feel free to look at competing products like Zoho.

Today’s entries into the Wiki (yes, even on Sunday) included

• Project lists for the week (our weekly set of tasks for everyone in the company)
• This week’s data entry goals
• Revised standards for creating complete industrial zone, property and company listings
• Guidelines for writing effective descriptions for industrial zone, property and company listings
• Guidelines for Mike to get a life and stop working on weekends (Ok, this last point is pure fantasy)

I don’t kid myself that documenting everything on the Wiki will solve all of our problems, and it does require an extra investment of time. However, taking this little bit of extra time to write down how things should be done will help us stay on course as we grow and make sure that the great intentions of our startup days get translated into a pervasive company culture as RightSite grows and prospers.

See you again soon on Mingtiandi!

Posted in human resources, management, technology | No Comments »

Today Babel Is Back

March 11, 2009 – 2:51 pm

It’s another day of interrupted, or at best intermittent, Google service in China today which makes it difficult for us to operate here at RightSite.  In addition to the Google Docs issue that I referred to yesterday, we also are encountering difficulties accessing Google Translate today.

Because RightSite is a bi-lingual site, we make heavy use  of online translation applications, and our Google Translate has been our usuall choice.  While these programs don’t produce text that you would want to submit directly to customers or publish on the website, they can take care of a lot of preliminary translation work and make it easier to produce finished documents. Some online translators also will allow you to translate a web page on the fly and make it much easier to pick up the gist of a page or document.  Makes life much easier for those of us illiterate in Chinese.

In the absence of Google Translator, we have turned to using Babel Fish, an online translator bought out by Yahoo a few years back. And Babel Fish works just fine.  Somehow it seems to know that I am in China, as translating Chinese to English is at the top of the list of translations they offer. And the quality of the resulting text seems comparable to Google Translate.

Now if only Yahoo could give me access to my docs stranded on Google Docs.  See you again soon on Mingtiandi.com.

Posted in technology | 1 Comment »

Problems Accessing Google Docs in China

March 10, 2009 – 2:44 pm

I love Google Docs.  We use Google Documents for sharing files across RightSite.Asia and it has help us work together more efficiently.  Until this week.

• This week we have often been unable to access our Google documents
• When we have been able to access our Google documents, we have at times not been able to save changes
• In our documents home page we, for about a day, were unable to see the update information that tells us who was the most recent person to edit the document

This is disappointing. Cool features like revision history and slick tagging systems make a system much more attractive.  But intermittent service is about attractive to your average business service as a CDO is to a 2009 investor.  We run away in terror.  I’m not sure if this phenomena is related to our location in China or if it a worldwide case.  A quick search (on Google of course) revealed a recent problem with file-sharing on Google docs, but other reports that I could find of others facing interruptions in service.

By the way, we use Google docs to share updates on bug fixes with our developers in India, to develop wiki-type style guides for entering information into RightSite, for sharing candidate CVs for recruitment, and lots of other file-sharing purposes.  If it doesn’t get better soon, we will miss it.

Anyone else facing similar difficulties?

Posted in management, technology | No Comments »

It’s Beta, Baby!

March 4, 2009 – 11:53 am

Hi Gang! I’ve been absent from Mingtiandi again, but this time it’s been for a good reason - because we’ve been working all hours to launch RightSite.Asia into public beta. We were in private beta for a few months, madly chasing out the bugs and adding content to the site to make it ready for public viewing.  Consider this a big shout-out to all the people who helped us test the site and contributed their ideas.

During the last two months we have been able to accomplish some major tasks that make this public beta version of RightSite a huge improvement over the private beta. F’rinstance…

• Added more than 200 factories warehouses and other facilities to our directory
• Dug up another 40 industrial zones to complement the 1,500 already in the directory
• Created some groovy in-house advertising with the help of Paper Stone Scissors
• Added a directory of Shanghai’s industrial property agents
• Made sure the (*&^%$#@! site works right

Besides working on the site, we have been very busy the last month with building our team.  We are currently hiring interns for a few different areas, a content manager, and a marketing person. Overall, the response to our job advertisements has been very encouraging.  While the economic crisis makes it hard to earn money, it certainly makes it much easier to hire staff. I have been recruiting people off and on for the last six years in Shanghai , so I thought I would share a few notes about this year’s process and how it compares to prior years.

• Application volume — we are getting a much large volume of applicants than previous years. (duh)
• Big companies — a disproportionate number of the applicants are coming from big multinational companies.  Is it because these companies have tbe most experience in managing a downturn (and the local companies will catch up later) or is it just that the mutinationals steered themselves into a mess and now are bailing as fast as they can?
• Marketing — out of the positions that we are hiring for, Marketing Executive is by far the most applied for.  Are companies cutting their marketing staff more than other departments
• Hallucinogen use — we have received applications from a number of folks who have run through three or four jobs in the last two years but still want prime salaries. I thought downturns were when reality was supposed to set in?

But the biggest difference in hiring new team members this year is that we can do so at a sane pace.  One of the key indicators that it was time to sell my previous company when I did so back in 2007 was the challenges of recruiting. During 2006 and 2007 in Shanghai, companies recruiting staff were forced to accelerate and simplify their recruitment processes to ensure that they had a chance at the best candidates.  Quite simply, if companies did not take the first chance they had to hire someone, or agree to overpay, then they would have trouble hiring candidates.

That’s no way to run a business.

So in 2009, it seems that a bit of normalcy has returned to the market.  The numbers of truly desperate applicants are still fairly low — it’s more that the pace of hiring has returned to what it would be during the good times in the US or Europe.

With the recruitment opportunities available, and our sexy new beta site, RightSite should be able to rapidly establish itself as a productive forum for the industrial property community. Hope you will stop by the site and let us know what you think.

Posted in human resources, web development | No Comments »

The Resume Shuffle

February 11, 2009 – 3:06 pm

Its a new year (at least it’s a new Chinese year) here at RightSite.Asia, and we are getting ready to tackle one of our major priorities for the next few months — recruitment.

While economic downturns suck for those of us running businesses, one way in which they definitely do not suck is in recruitment.  Finding staff in 2009 should prove to be much easier than it was in 2008 or 2007, but this change in environment, also means that we will have to change our approach to recruitment.  Unlike a year or two ago, start-ups like RightSite no longer have to romance candidates to get them to join.  As one of the relatively few companies hiring at a time when many companies are laying off staff, we have the luxury of choosing from a number of qualified applicants.

However, this increase in applicants also means that a small company like RightSite needs to develop a more sophisticated recruitment process if we are to find the best candidates and make best use of the opportunities currently available.  With this in mind, we have developed a new process for recruiting, interviewing and hiring candidates.  While I am sure that this process can be improved upon, it represents a big step forward for us.  We invite your comments on contributions on the process, as well as your questions.

RightSite Recruitment Process
Pre-Interview Stage

• Post job — we post our jobs on Zhaopin.com
• Receive resumes
• Review and sort resumes to find best candidates — we use the free online service catsone.com to assist us with this
• Contact short-listed candidates for initial interview/start application process

Intial Interview Stage

• Application form - applicants need to fill out a detailed form about their personal histories
• Cognitive Aptitude Tests — we use intelligence tests provided by JWGrace Consulting to test the aptitude of applicants
• Computer Skills Tests — since we are an Internet company, we want to identify people who live online
• Interview — this is an intial interview by our HR Representative
• Review
• Recall

Second Interview Stage

• Interview by manager
• Request References
• Review

Post Interview Stage

• Reference Check
• Offer Letter
• Contract
• Tests

We hope that by following this structured process we can identify the candidates that best fit our company’s needs.  Our goal is to complete the entire process in 30 days from the time the job ad is initially posted for entry level positions.  For management level positions, the process should not take more than 60 days.

Posted in human resources | 3 Comments »

Moving On

January 26, 2009 – 4:04 pm

This morning I left Chiang Mai International Airport bound for Bangkok, and tomorrow morning I will be on the plane again for Hat Yai and headed for the beach.

It was a great stay in Chiang Mai and I will definitely be visiting again in the future. In many ways the last day in town was the best as I got to spend most of the day hanging out with the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Rome Chiranukrom, (St Olaf class of 1984). As I travelled around campus and the city these last few days, the thing that always seemed uncomfortable was being a stranger in this still familiar place. When you are visiting without the 20 other people who went with you 25 years ago, there is no one to hail you from across the street or to tell your stories with. But hanging out around campus with Rome and his family and getting all the gossip on Chiang Mai University made a foreigner feel like a local again.

During our visit, Rome helped me to set up some volunteer work for my mother at a place called the New Life Center in Chiang Mai. If all goes well, mom will be spending some time next winter escaping the Minnesota cold and providing some vocational training to hilltribe girls. Will let you know how this works out.

Besides hanging out with Rome yesterday, I also visited the Rajadamnoen Sunday walking street in the old city of Chiang Mai (inside the moat). Actually, my guest house was surrounded by it, so I didn’t have much choice about that visiting stuff, but I managed to do a bit of early Christmas shopping and get rid of some of that excess baht in my pocket.  Here’s a short video I took that shows how excited people get about the opportunity to buy lacquerware and t-shirts.

I also took a walk through Wat Chedi Luang across the street from my guesthouse.  Nice chedi, but the highlight was their “Monk Chat” service.  They have English speaking monks who are provided to answer questions from the tourists wandering through about Buddhism, Thailand or whatever else you would like to ask a monk about.  There must be a web 2.0 project in this someplace….

Since I’m done with the cultural part of this vacation, you may see a few less blog posts during the coming days, so I hope you’ve enjoyed this online tour of Chiang Mai.

Posted in travel | No Comments »