Russian Social Network Comes Up with a Very Creative Approach to Competition

Most of the time I am a big fan of everything Russian and a loyal supporter of the majority of the companies and products originating from my country - with a few rare exceptions. But sometimes Russian internet companies offer paradoxical ideas that I simply can’t grasp even after thinking them over for a while. Today is one of such days as I got to know about one of the two largest Russian social networks, Odnoklassniki.ru, coming up with a very unusual approach to competing with their main rival - Vkontakte.ru.

The thing is that the communication tools available on the social network have certain restrictions for users preventing them from mentioning the URL of the competitor in such communications with other users.

Both websites are traditional social networks with Odnoklassniki.ru focusing on finding and keeping in touch with one’s former classmates while Vkontakte is a very basic clone of Facebook - both the interface and the functionality without any of the latest features that we have on Facebook, like applications and news feed.

The two social networks are immensely popular in the Russian-speaking segment of the internet with Vkontakte maintaining the leadership even despite huge promotional efforts the owners of Odnoklassniki.ru demonstrate with product placement of the social network in numerous TV shows and even latest movies in addition to simple advertising campaigns. Both social networks have their loyal user bases but the most tech-savvy users are known to often move from Odnoklassniki to Vkontakte claiming that the latter is supposed to have a richer functionality.

I myself can hardly describe any of the two networks as actually having functionality that could be comparable with what a typical international social network (even a smaller and less-known one) has to offer to its users but still it is a very fierce competition that we are watching here in Russia between the two major players in the social networking field. But even the strongest competition should not justify the approach Odnoklassniki.ru chose to censor certain things related to Vkontakte away from the network.

For example, when a user tries to write a private message to another user of the network and writes “vkontakte.ru” in the text of the message, the message won’t be sent and will produce an error warning the sender that the message contains unacceptable words:

What’s more, some users try to demonstrate to their friends that they no longer use Odnoklassniki and have moved to Vkontakte by displaying a graphical image as their avatar or one of the photos reading “moved to Vkontakte” to avoid the automatic filters for the text messages - but such photos are quickly deleted by moderators of the network anyway.

I have to admit this looks like a creative way to avoid migration of your users to your competitor but at the same time I have a feeling it should be frowned on at the very least. For example, I have seen Odnoklassniki buying ad space on Facebook to display to the Russian users and a Facebook advertising team representative told me that their ToS for the advertising program did not prevent competitors from paying to reach the users of the social network.

But still the idea is a funny one and I can imagine Google preventing us from sharing our Yahoo Mail IDs with our contacts sent from Gmail - just in case we move to Yahoo. I wonder if the Russian Odnoklassniki.ru realizes that they have chosen a very strange competition practice resembling something from the Stone Age more than anything that should take place in the modern internet era.