May Featured People: Andre Pan
Interview / Zhou Me Translation / Alice
orignal link : http://xindanwei.com/lang/en/2012/05/may-featured-people-andre-pan/

1. Welcome to Xindanwei.com, Please introduce yourself. Could you tell us where you’re from and how you got started in the current business?

   My name is Andre Pan, but most of my friends call me POPO, which is an abbreviation of my nickname POPOEVER used for over 12 years. I’m Shanghai local people. I started a social media consultancy company named Brandigg Strategy back to 2010 with my friend Isaac Mao. The business is based on our studies and researches of China social media market through years, at that moment, we both thought it’s the right time to bring social media practice to China market, so we did it.

2. Can you tell me about Brandigg Strategy, the company you founded, and what you do for them?

   I’m working as the Managing Director of Brandigg Strategy. Brandigg is a business service providing social media consultancy to enterprises and organizations, help them shaping their digital strategy, training social media team, building and tuning social pipelines, analyzing social data. We position ourself as a social media strategist and evangelist, entrepreneur strategic partner as well. Our structure is simple and small, and we mean to keep it that way since it’s a smart business. Basically my daily job is telling our client what they should do and should not, and telling our social media expert what the clients want and do not, it’s much like a coordinator. Meanwhile I’m also the networking tentacle of the company, join events to meet fresh connections and have talk with potential clients. I’m also acting as the amplifier when engage campaigns.

3. As you’ve been working on social media consultancy, can you tell me the experiences you had for these years?

   We’re lucky, just after started the business, we’re introduced to our first client, USA Pavilion(USAP) of Shanghai EXPO 2010 who were looking for a digital media solution provider. We had couple rounds of happy talk and negotiation, then successfully be contracted as the official solution provider. We still keep some audio memos of the project meetings, that’s a happy memory, bunch of brainstorming ideas and laughters. In 2011, we served Standard Chartered Bank(SCB) promoting their Breeze Living product line, helped them shaping online strategy and engaged several online/offline campaigns including Apple Store event, Geek conference at The Apartment and McDonald’s McFlurry QR redeem. Comparing to USAP case, SCB has more strict internal rules and procedures, which help us learn how to cooperate with enterprise of that scale. So far, we served full hand clients from all kinds of industries adopting our social media methodology of Connectivity, Conversation, Credibility (3C). And for 2012, we’re working with some credible partnerships to build a brand new social network platform applying our understanding of social media.

4. Of course a follow up to the previous question is, what do you think about social networking phenomenon and how has it impacted or effected your life?

   It’s a consequence of massive information volumn brought out by world wide web, people and the society need a new form of how to receive and consume daily information, I can’t tell if social networking is the most optimized methodology, but it indeed help us reach to what we want more convenient than before, and those we don’t want as well, for sure it has pros and cons. Talking my own experience, social networking dominates most of the time of my life now, help me finding routes of driving, venue of meetup, recommendation of lunch, updating with my friends in realtime, and keep an eye on my work as I play all these around, making me more accessible to answers and solutions, it infiltrates into every bit of my life already, I’m still well known among my connection by “Twittering When Driving”, OOPS. But in some case it’s annoying, say, I’m a gadget fan who have 3 Android devices and 4 Apple products, all connected to my cloud service, so when an email or message comes in, my devices will become a small chorus, it’s ok in day time, but imagine the night :)

5. You are an active, well-known blogger and twitter user. Please provide your insights on high quality knowledge sharing among local geeks community.

   I’m kept thinking about the Positive Energy these years. During some discussions with friends and connections, I found people who be negative with sharing was mostly concerned about its productivity. Actually sharing is one of the instincts of human being, and the fundamental methodology of how we build personal network. Trust, reliability, credibility, all these positive characteristics are expectable consequences of selfless contribution. The society is an ecosystem, we must believe contributing with high quality will invest positive effect into the system, returning positive results is only a matter of time, but don’t forget the productivity of social network, which expanding our life span than its length, as we say about Sharism, the more you give, the more you receive, it’s a way of life.

6. Thanks again for providing Xindanwei.com this opportunity to interview you. Any final thoughts for our readers?

   Same to you, thank you. Like I said above, social networking in the past few years evolved our information consumption behavior by paving a easy way of getting and reading or broadcasting, but that’s two ends of information consumption, we still need effective method or pipeline to connect these two ends, delivering on-demands information metaphor by adopting some intermediate service, I’ve seen some tryings already, and I believe there will be more in the coming years. People not only need information, but also need information ready for their own eye on arrival, just like the old time.