Asiajin

Japanese pop singer and song-writer Kohmi Hirose[J] (@kohmi), who has released a number of popular songs in ’90s and been singing winter dating stuffs for young couples, is also one of the celebrity twitterers.   Kohmi exchanged many tweets with Kazuyo Katsuma[J] (@kazuyo_k), a friend of her, economist and the best-selling business book author in Japan, and found out what Twitter is and how it can contribute especially in giving her a good opportunity for the better interactive communication with her fans.

Kohmi calls Twitter a nickname “he-we-he-heey” (an onomatopoeia) as she pleases, and today she released an original theme song[J] titled “Viva! he-we-he-heey!”.

As far as we’ve learned from several news sources, Kohmi composed the song on her voluntary basis, and she didn’t seem to be asked to do so by Twitter’s management or its Japanese business partner Digital Garage.   In the future, Twitter might have several aliases especially in non-English speaking countries, but this could be also an essential combination of ultimate translation and well-localized marketing strategy to be required when a new service goes into a different country from where the service originates.

Meanwhile, Digital Garage announced it would co-develop a localized mobile interface for Japanese Twitterers this fall, which caused its share price to mark limit-up on Thursday.

Author Information  Masaru IKEDA has co-founded several system integration companies and consulting firms in Tokyo. He has been contributing serial columns to nationwide newspapers and IT periodicals, also he's currently serving as tech consultant for several web companies. See this for more bio. His private blog is here.

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