I’m in Guangzhou, China getting ready to talk at Tencent Mind 2009 Forum . Tencent’s conference for its biggest advertisers in China. It’s a great honor to be talking with QZone‘s General Manager Peter Zheng about social networks trends in China and in the world at large. Of biggest interest to the 500 advertising executives invited to the conference is probably the return of investment for advertisers on social networks. 

QZone – the Worlds biggest Online Social Network

Many people are not aware of that China hosts the biggest online social network in the world, namely QZone with than 200 million active users. Of whom around 50 million are concurrently chatting on it’s immensely popular IM service QQ. 

While some social networks are struggling to find a sustainable business model beyond standard online advertising, Tencent clearly shows the way. There is a lot to learn here, and that is actually a point I am going to make. While many accuse Chinese Internet entrepreneur for taking the easy way out by “Copy-to-China” (C2C), the Chinese is actually leading the innovation on the Internet in terms of business models. 

Virtual goods and micro-transactions are well established here and I think that there is a lot the Chinese can teach the rest of the world when it comes to monetizing the social Web. And with the advent of the iPhone OS 3.0 enabling micro-transactions on iPhone apps, I strongly believe that we are going to see an explosion of monetization opportunities for the social Web. 
If you are an iPhone game developer or publisher. Check out OpenFeint! The mobile social gaming platform.