Chinese Consumers and the Digital Landscape

 Charlie Henderson,China

This past week Oprah Winfrey’s Twitter account, with 4.9 million followers, was surpassed in popularity by the micro-blog account of young Chinese actress Yao Chen, which has accumulated nearly 5 million followers on Weibo.  Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, is a new phenomenon among Chinese netizens.  The growth of this micro-blog platform has been explosive, especially among urban youth, and the success of Yao Chen’s Weibo account underscores the burgeoning international importance of Chinese digital platforms as well as the incredible potential they offer as a means for engaging Chinese consumers.

The fact that China has an extremely active internet community shouldn’t come as a shocker.  With an online population of roughly 457 million users as of December 2010, the internet community in China is one of the most dynamic in the world. However, one area that had previously lagged behind in development was micro-blogs, but that’s changing rapidly.

As with many other elements of the Chinese internet; the worldwide heavy-weights of micro-blog platforms have, for a variety of reasons, struggled in China. Twitter, like Facebook, is currently banned in China. But even when these platforms were accessible, Chinese netizens gravitated to homegrown-albeit highly similar-platforms.

One of the most common and detrimental mistakes made by international internet players when entering China is a lack of localization to the Chinese marketplace. Since its introduction in 2009, the Sina Corporation’s Weibo micro-blog has been the dominant player, because it is designed around and aggressively markets towards, the cultural preferences of Chinese netizens. For example, compared to their international counterparts, Chinese netizens use the internet to consume much more entertainment related material, so it’s not surprising to find that some of the most popular Weibo accounts are those of Chinese celebrities. This is no accident; Sina Weibo issued “verified accounts” to a wide range of Chinese celebrities as a promotional activity specifically aimed at entertainment-centric netizens.

The introduction of Smartphones into the Chinese market, and especially the iPhone, has added to the popularity of micro-blogs. iTunes and Blackberry App World both offer a Sina Weibo app.

What does all of this amount to? We believe that public engagement can be significantly enhanced by adding a Weibo element to an integrated marketing/PR campaign. Influencers already have a huge built-in audience and offer a less formal means of engaging an audience. While the use of micro-blogs in China is still developing, especially in second and third tier cities, their potential to tap into powerful influencers and engage consumers is undeniably significant.