China’s People’s Daily, the nation’s authoritative Party newspaper

On January 19th, China’s People’s Daily (the official national daily newspaper of the Communist Party of China), ran an intriguing article entitled “Micro blogs crucial to firm’s PR” (its China Daily’s translation, not ours).

Quoted from the article:

Chinese enterprises are slow to recognize emergency situations and perform poorly when handling public relations crises, according to a recent report.

The report, compiled by the public opinion research laboratory of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, looked at the 50 most prominent PR events in 2010 and analyzed the responses made by the enterprises concerned.

“We found Chinese enterprises’ ability to respond to a crisis is basically weak in areas such as problem solving, issue management and communication,” said Xie Yungeng, deputy director of the university’s Institute of Arts and Humanities, who helped write the report.

He singled out a lack of judgment as the cause of many enterprises’ failure to handle crises as and when they arise.

The article is intriguing as it marks somewhat of a “coming out” for microblogging in the People’s Republic of China.  As a medium which arguably has supported widescale popular calls for social and political change in countries such as Tunisia and Iran, the article’s contention that China aught microblog more is of interest to China watchers.

The article’s focus is on the Chinese state-owned sector’s use (or disuse) of microblogs, and serves as a “call to arms” for these government-owned businesses to equal what “private enterprises” achieve with use of social media:

Many State-owned enterprises have been slow to adopt the new media and tend to rely on traditional outlets for their messages, which are not as effective in reaching the public, Xie said.

In contrast, private enterprises are generally able to respond to PR crises quickly and positively, efficiently using new media, such as micro blogs, to win the support of the public through effective communications.

In our experience, its quite correct that the Chinese state-owned sector (which is massively larger than the relatively recent private sector) is indeed grappling with the velocity of information sharing within China’s borders. Only a handful of years ago, a crisis could be easily controlled through the reliable old tactics of ignoring or downplaying and manipulating the message in traditional media (which was, naturally, itself state-owned). However, microblogging (or social media networks in a broader sense) have swiftly brought about a collective of millions of ordinary Chinese grass roots.

Although the jury is still out, there is a feeling within China that social media cannot be manipulated by a large enterprise in a time of crisis.  The old western PR crisis management advice, “don’t remain silent” used to work in China.  Today, with the rise of Chinese microblogs and social media, it works no longer.

According to company-released numbers, Sina Weibo, China’s first answer to the rise of Twitter, reached a user base of 50 million by the end of October 2010. Tencent (the owner of the dominant “QQ” IM service) is hurriedly pushing its IM users into its new microblog platform. With 600 million QQ IM users already in existence, its microblog userbase quickly rocketed to 80 million by January 2011.  These are only two of a surprisingly broad range of microblogging services recently launched in China.

Chinese microblogs bear some resemblances to Twitter, however there are important differences as well (“Twitter with Chinese Characteristics”, perhaps):

• Many Chinese microblogs directly copied the 140-character cap from Twitter. However, due to the information-rich nature of Chinese language, the short text length that is troubling to many English speakers is enoughspace  for Chinese people to write a short story. Actually Sina has held microblog story competitions already.
• Chinese micro blogs are mostly ran by companies that have remarkable business in other sectors of the web sector. Like Sina, Sohu and NetEase, who own dominating portal websites in China, they push microblog highlights to their portals. Tencent goes even further. It’s microblog is reflected on its portal site and IM services. That means in China, the power of “new media” is channeled into the traditional gang, creating a media avalanche.
• Notable microblog messages will zip through the microblog initially, immediately echo across the vast plain of portals, to then boom all over newspapers and TV channels and reach the eyes and ears of a billion Chinese citizens.

In short, microblogging is now a very important component in Chinese-oriented marketing campaigns, and is probably even more important than its role in western markets.  We believe that the article in People’s Daily is testament to the Chinese government’s admission that microblogging is not going away anytime soon.

The danger of Chinese microblogs to your public profile

Dang Dang CEO Li Guoqing

Do be aware that although presented with opportunities to develop and disseminate positive messages via Chinese microblogs, a backfire in a Chinese microblog can be tenfold devastating. Only last week, Dang Dang (a Chinese ecommerce startup with the stated goal to become the Amazon.com of China) had a legendary cat fight with investment bank Morgan Stanley over the suspicion that the latter intentionally kept the IPO funding of Dang Dang lower than it could have been.  The conversation quickly boiled down to personal and obscene insults flung by Dang Dang’s CEO Li Guoqing towards Morgan Stanley personnel, creating China’s joke of the month, if not of the year.

We’d go as far as to say that the People’s Daily article, coming only days after Li’s tweets of rage at Morgan Stanley over a Chinese microblog is no coincidence.

There isn’t enough evidence to propose a connection to the significant fall of Dang Dang’s stock on NYSE in the days following the blow-up.  But it does remind one to be careful. Chinese consumers do care what you do with the “new media”, and they pick up damaging stories fast.

We encourage foreign companies in China engage with Chinese microblogs. Many of our clients are already doing great corporate communications on Twitter. Remember, though, that Twitter is blocked to China’s netizens, and there are gulfs of cultural difference to consider. Allegravita is pleased to offer guidance and help to anyone who seeks to ride the new Chinese microblogging wave.

Article by Allegravita’s head of research, Kane Gao, with contributions by chief exec Simon Cousins