Hello, Mop Hi – New Social Networking Site by Oak Pacific

With a constellation of online news, entertainment, gaming communities, Oak Pacific Interactive has become one of the largest and influential web firms in China And they are just warming up make another big move – this month they announced a new social networking site called Hi.mop.com.

Oak Pacific already runs two successful social networking sites, calledRenren (formerly Xiaonei.com) and Kaixin. In China, social networking sites seem to launch every week, but most of them have the exact same page layout and cookie-cutter functions – the volume of sites means even unique sites can have trouble making their voice heard in the crowd.

According to Oak Pacific, Renren was designed for people to build their social circle, while Kaixin.com is positioned as an online entertainment and gaming center. However, Oak Pacific has not clearly defined the positioning for Hi.mop.com.

Based on our observations, Hi.mop.com is simply a social networking extension of the original mop.com, which is their online news and forum site. In other words they may just be trying to maintain traffic by duct taping down visitors with social network offerings. However, Hi.mop.com’s main page is filled with online game ads and it seems unnecessary in the current market. Lacking a differentiation strategy it is likely their site brand will become diluted and drive away key champion users.

Making social networking simply an attraction, rather than the main focus, is increasingly a common gambit in China with few examples of innovation. The usual focus tends to be online gaming; even Renren has many online games on the site.

This is natural simply due to the economics of China – game are more profitable given the absence of an ingrained ad-driven business culture. The online gaming angle does have its risks – the Chinese government already has shut down games related to gangs on Oak Pacific’s primary sites.

How to position Hi.mop.com is critical for Oak Pacific, since it could easily cannibalize the gains made on their other properties. The key question is whether by duplicating Silicon Valley’s dotcom era mistake of figuring out the audience and monetization after building Oak Pacific will also face a rapid fall from its current heights.