don’t lie to Chinese netizens ::
Friday, January 9th, 2009
:: be authentic, don’t get burned.
Whether you are an individual user or a company / brand, participating online must be done within a certain code of conduct. Authenticity, honesty, and transparency are core principles of online citizenship and digital ethics. Not playing by the rules can have serious consequences.
Chinese netizens don’t like being the victims of deceitful or unscrupulous attempts to influence their opinion or grab their attention…and they aren’t afraid to speak up about it. Underhanded marketing / PR practices are, rightfully so, often met with angry backlash from the online community.
Astroturfing, seeding, spamming, bogus campaigns / information / content, “fifty-cents gangs,” etc. don’t get by shrewd, eagle-eyed Chinese netizens…they are quick to pick up on anything unnatural or phony, and react fiercely. Marketers and PR professionals must contribute value, not spam or lies, when engaging online audiences.
Below are five examples (from MANY) of those that didn’t follow the rules and got burned online in China…if you would like to add to this list, please feel free to do in the comments section.
1. Roewe Kavachi wins a fake award
In February, 2008, a news post, “Roewe 1.8T Kavachi engine wins international award,” popped up on domestic car BBSs. The post contained a screenshot of an English-language website, “Car News,” announcing the “2008 Best Engine Awards.” However, Car News was not a legitimate website: it was shoddily put-together, and its registration information matched that of an employee of EnergySource, a marketing firm hired by Roewe. Most netizens thought it was a viral ad concocted by Roewe, although others said that the ease with which it was debunked suggested that it was a poor attempt by one of Roewe’s rivals to discredit it. The company’s reputation took a hit, regardless. The original posts have been removed, but here’s a Beijing Business Today article that includes a screenshot of the fake site. Once the mainstream media picked up on the hoax, the exposé was republished on auto and general-interest forums, which mocked Roewe and netizens who had initially believed the Car News post ().
2. Woyo.com’s viral video
In April, 2008, an extremely wealthy woman named Lan Dong started posting a series of videos in which she spoke disdainfully about the quality of China’s post-80s and post-90s generations and claimed to have taken actor Takeshi Kaneshiro as a lover. Lan’s videos drew huge traffic as young netizens assembled to blast back at her criticisms. However, instead of being a real symptom of the generation gap (Lan was born in the 1970s), the whole thing turned out to be a ploy for publicity by SNS website Woyo.com. Netizens, particularly post-80s and post-90s who were the target of Lan’s insults, were incensed and started anti-Woyo campaigns, while others mulled the possibility of a lawsuit against Woyo and its parent company, Shanghai Blessed Technology. Netizens used “human flesh search engine” techniques to identify the exact location of the office where the videos were filmed: Lan worked at the company, which had designed the viral videos to increase its own name recognition. Since Woyo’s target audience is precisely the people Lan insulted in her videos, it seems to have been operating on the principle that all publicity is good publicity. A major donation to the Sichuan earthquake recovery effort got the company back in netizens’ good graces, although lingering suspicion from the Lan Dong affair led many to see the donation as yet another opportunistic attempt at self-promotion.
3. Sanlu pays Baidu for “PR protection”?
After the melamine milk scandal broke, a document surfaced in which Teller, a Beijing-based PR agency, advised Sanlu to take advantage of Baidu’s “PR Protection” which, at the cost of 5 million yuan, would ensure that Baidu search results for Sanlu would be scrubbed of negative information. indicated that Sanlu had already handed over a down-payment, and suggested other strategies the company could use to manage the scandal. All three companies denied having such an agreement, and Baidu denied the existence of any “PR Protection” plans that would affect search results. However, A Powerpoint file later surfaced that described Baidu’s crisis PR package for managing conversation on its own BBS platform. The episode indicates the sensitivity of China’s netizens to evidence that companies are conspiring to withhold information and manipulate public opinion. Baidu took a hit over the incident as many netizens announced that they were switching to Google.
4. Yili and the news portals
Other dairy companies were implicated in the same melamine scandal. Based on odd search results, netizens suspected that Yili Dairy had paid news portals to keep its company name from being associated with the melamine scandal. At first, articles about the scandal re-posted on sites like Sina separated the characters in its name with a space (伊 利), which search engines handle differently from the single word 伊利. Shortly after netizens began discussing this, the spaces were taken out. However, a non-printing character had been inserted into the HTML code between the two characters: 伊利. This would not affect how the company’s name was displayed, but it still prevented it from turning up in search results. (As reported by the Southern Metropolis Daily). The substitutions were incredibly widespread and not particularly subtle: even instances of 伊利 that did not refer to the dairy company were altered. Although a number of news portals were involved, the first examples and screenshots came from Sina, which bore the brunt of netizen outrage.
5. DoNews
Sometimes the scandal works in reverse. Liu Ren, a well-known IT entrepreneur and a senior executive at IT news and blogging portal DoNews, was arrested in October for threatening to write negative stories about other Web sites unless they paid him “PR fees.” Qihoo, a well-known Web site featuring a popular Q&A section, had been the focus of vicious, largely-fabricated attack articles published on DoNews until it started paying the fees. However, Liu’s demands skyrocketed, and eventually Qihoo got the police involved. The revelation of Liu’s extortion scheme drove many former DoNews users away from the site.
// AJS
