My colleague Antony shared this with me and I wanted to be sure to draw attention to it because it is important. The number of netizen in China has reached 210 million, according to a report just released by CNNIC, the government-linked Chinese internet information organization.
The fast growing online population has made the Internet a new forum for average Chinese to, among other things, express opinions in a way rarely seen in Chinese traditional media. The report underscores the importance of considering online media in China as part of broader corporate marketing strategies.
The report is currently only available in Chinese on the popular Chinese portal Sina.com, but an English version is expected to be available later. This is a summary of the report:
- The CNNIC predicts that at the beginning of 2008, China will become the country with the largest online population in the world. China’s online population was only five million less than the
US, which currently has the largest online population in the world. The US had almost 216 million internet users by the end of 2007, according to research firm Nielsen//NetRatings.
- The 210-million figure marked an increase of 53 percent (73 million) over 2006, fueled by rapid user growth in rural areas and a boom in wireless access. The number of rural Internet users reached 52.6 million by the end of 2007, up a whopping 127.7 percent from a year earlier. The number of Web users accessing through their mobile phones nearly tripled to 50 million. This means about one out of every 10 mobile users use their phone to surf the Net, despite the higher fees and lower speed of wireless access.
- It noted that China’s Internet penetration rate, the ratio of Web user numbers to the country’s total population, was only 16 percent, lower than the global average of 19.1 percent. The figure in the
US is more than 70 percent.
- The most used online service is music, followed by instant messages, movies, news, search engines, online games and email.
- About 24 percent of Netizens had updated their own blogs within the past six months, while only a third of respondents believed what the bloggers write. News in the cyberspace, by comparison, enjoyed more credibility as 51 percent Netizens believed the reports to be true. The first step for 1/5 netizens online is to check online news.
- China’s online gaming population grew 23 per cent last year and is expected to exceed 84 million by 2012.
- Nearly 2/3 netizens have posted their articles/opinions on BBS/forums/blogs in the past one year.
- Chinese netizens spend 16.2 hours per week online.
- The number of internet users under age 18 and above 30 increased rapidly.
- Beijing boasted highest internet penetration ratio, which was 46.6 percent and slightly higher than the 45.8 percent in Shanghai.
The article below can also be seen in this month’s edition of Marketing Interactive Magazine China online at http://www.marketing-interactive.com/news/4467
Overcoming New Media Challenges
How To Engage In Online Conversations, While Avoiding The Pitfalls
By Scott Sykes, VP & Director, Asia Pacific, screengrab New Media Practice, Weber Shandwick I, like many people my age, am a digital migrant, not a digital native. For many of the younger generation the online world is engrained in their DNA. As marketing and PR practitioners, engaging in on online world can feel uncomfortable, because the ground rules are different than many of the tactics we have been using for many years.
Brave New World
What do we do online? Don’t we lose control of the message? How do we know who reads this stuff online? Why does it spread so fast? Why can anyone can have an opinion and make it known to the rest of the online community? What about the well-known flogging PR disasters large corporations have experienced recently? What about the companies that were outed for unfairly modifying their Wikipedia entries?
The reality is that consumers inherently have more trust in opinions from like-minded consumers, than they do in information on branded Web sites or in traditional media. And that’s exactly what is happening online. The capabilities of the Web today make it easy for anyone to have an opinion and make it known to everyone, like it or not, people are talking about your company.
In China where I live, for example, today there are more than 160 million people online. And they are spending more and more time online, an average of about 18 hours per week. There are huge numbers of people creating and consuming information via popular new media bulletin board system (BBS) portals, search engines and video sharing sites Sina, Sohu, Baidu, Tom and Tudou.
Naked Conversations
In preparation for a speech I gave recently in Hong Kong about new media, I contacted Shel Israel, coauthor of Naked Conversations, the now-famous book about social media. I asked Shel for his perspectives, about what had changed since the book was published about two years ago, his thoughts are posted on his blog. This book is amazing because it is so on point — Israel and Scoble called the revolution ahead of time. This book is a must read, in addition to Cluetrain Manifesto, and some other newer books including Infotopia and Wikinomics.
Israel’s three top perspectives about the changes since the book was published are:
- Blogs were the thing then, but so many interesting and powerful social media tools have blossomed since;
- Companies need to embrace social media or perish, at the very least they will lose their young customers to a company that understands the importance of real conversations with customers; and
- The future will again explode with new social media tools that we can’t even dream of now, just like what has happened in the past two years.
That’s not to say that the days of traditional PR and advertising are over, far from it, these types of media are still extremely useful for helping marketing and PR practitioners reach target audiences that care about their companies, products and services. But at the same time, if companies do not include new media elements in their broader plans, at the least they are missing and opportunity to engage all of the people that consume information and entertainment online, and at the worst, they are allowing competitors that are executing campaigns online to steal their business.
Tips For Overcoming New Media Challenges
So given this new media world we now live in, what to do we do about it as marketing and PR practitioners, and how do we avoid the pitfalls? Here are some helpful tips.
Consumers are creating media content themselves. Traditional PR experts who are used to dealing with journalists are now faced with the challenge of how to reach those individual “reporters” and ensure your messages are delivered to the right targeted audiences?
- Identify the most influential new media in your industry through research
- Respect them and talk with them in a polite manner, be aware of their importance
- Communicate with them via e-tools: MSN, QQ, email, but do not be afraid to call them directly or even meet them face to face if possible
- Provide multimedia materials as much as possible including video and audio
- Invite them to attend the offline events including press conferences, product launches, or other events
- For consumers, communicate directly via ecommunications including news letters, corporate blogs, BBS interaction and search engine listings
- Be transparent and ethical, be upfront about who you are and what you are doing, the online community can quickly spot a fake and this could seriously damage your reputation and business
New media can spread good and bad, correct and incorrect information to the world very quickly. How can we ensure we use the most effective, timely and correct response to it?
- Listen and learn, build an online media monitoring and alert system, not only for portals, but also for BBS, and blogs, and take appropriate and moderate actions when necessary
- Provide more background information, fact corrections and multimedia materials as soon as possible, since new media has unlimited space and allows instant interaction
- Build your own new media including websites and blogs, and keep it updated, new media reporters visit these frequently to seek latest information, especially when there is a crisis
- Don’t hide and hope it will go away, prevent an issue from becoming a crisis
- In China, official media, such as xinhua.net are still the most effective online channels to deliver official and influential information
- Encourage influential online portals to post reports from the above media
More and more consumers do not read printed media any more. Is it still effective for us to use traditional PR approaches?
- Traditional media outreach is still an important part of any marketing communications campaign
- At the same time you need to respect and engage with new media
- Do not treat new media the same as traditional media respect the differences
- Don’t be afraid, be brave enough to communicate with the consumers directly
- Use new media tools to communicate with your audiences
- Don’t get left behind, take the time to learn about new media and become an expert
- Know that you can not control new media conversations
- Ultimately, devise dedicated new media programs that complement your marketing strategy
How do we evaluate the effectiveness of a new media campaign?
- Measure how much traffic (page views and clicks) a campaign drives to the targeted website
- Measure how many online conversions were recorded during the campaign
- Monitor how much media coverage was generated
- Monitor how much and what kind of online buzz is happening
- Evaluate impact on sales performance
- Evaluate effectiveness in building consumer’s loyalty to your products and brands
In summary, some of the rules of engagement are different and it is possible for things to go wrong if we don’t give the online community the honesty, transparency and respect it deserves, but make no mistake, the online world can be a critically important part of a broader marketing or PR campaign, and we need to pay attention to it.
