One of China’s most popular and successful social networking site Xiaonei, meaning "on campus" in Chinese, changed its name to RenRen.com, meaning "everybody", earlier this month.

 
This change is meant to celebrate Xiaonei’s growth to 70 million users. The network feels its achievements have gone beyond its initial core of university students and it doesn’t want to be exclusively for college students anymore. Renren.com hopes to create the largest and most popular social networking site for Chinese people, which will be loved by internet users and potential consumers alike.

Even though Xiaonei today is recognized as China’s largest online community website among universities with more than 22 million active users and an estimated 40 million users who have registered their real names, it is still facing fierce competition from various rivals. For example, Kaixin001 (literally "happy network"), a Chinese social networking site launched in April 2008 for the white-collar market, has been the fastest developed social networking site (SNS) in China. Compared with Xiaonei, Kaixin001‘s broader target market provides it a much larger audience group. In China, one in four college students does not own a computer and can only access Xiaonei by going to an Internet Cafe and paying by the minute. On the contrary, white-collar office workers spend an average of eight hours a day in front of the computer. 1

Based on this information, it comes as no surprise that Xiaonei is eager to expand its target market by renaming and repositioning its brand. Xiaonei, now RenRen, is taking the first step by changing its name from one which is strongly associated with students to a brand which can apply to anyone. A broader user group should help RenRen to be a successful Chinese social media brand in the future. In addition, their larger audience can be seen as a more lucrative advertising platform giving rise to commercial benefits for the company as well.

You can see how serious RenRen is about building their brand from the words of Joe Chen, CEO of Oak Pacific Interactive, the company who operates RenRen.com. He said: "My dream is to turn RenRen into a major driving force online in China. The first thing our users do in the morning is to log onto our site, even before they brush their teeth."

It is yet to be seen whether Joe Chen’s dream will be realized, but for now, the name change seems to be a positive one.

1 http://in2marcom.com/2009/08/xiaonei-rebrands-to-renren-to-target-the-mass-market.html