Robert Ness, is a welcome new addition to those writing about the emergence of China's venture capital scene. His blog, TheChina Venture is extremely informative and well written. He also has an interesting podcast, Chinabusinesscast and is a regular contributor to the impressive media driven site, Danwei.

In one of Ness's recent posts he introduced a company, still in a beta stage, called TongTong.com, another social networking site connecting people (bloggers) interested in China and the world. Ness writes:

Tongtong and other social network sites in China need to be proactive about building these communities of devoted early users and recruiting them to evangelize new users and scale the site. Venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki has a set of rules for building a community:

1) Create something worth building a community around. In the terms of social networking, this means focusing on the functions that define the category or theme of the site. Tongtong is a social website about cultural exchange. Its goal should be to develop a great set of features that will attract and keep that kind of audience.

2) Identify and recruit your "thunderlizards" immediately. For a start-up social network, these are the most active, connected, and otherwise important users on the site. Malcolm Gladwell might call them the connectors, mavens, and salesmen of the site. The guys at Tongtong have no problem identifying these people, they even meet them for pizza. The next step would be to recruit them for a word of mouth campaign focused on scaling the site.

3) Assign one person the task of building the community. The importance of this is self-evident, since social networks are all about communities. Still, I suspect some site administrators take a troubleshooting-ish reactive approach to building their site rather than having someone devote her energy to hashing out and implementing a proactive strategy.

CVN will certainly be checking in on what Robert Ness is witnessing in China on a more regular basis.