In the past, when making a business call in China, it was good form to arrive with a gift tucked under one arm and your business card proffered politely with both hands while you bowed ever so slightly in the direction of your host—a neat trick, if you could manage to stay balanced. Doing business and being social in China can still present challenges and require a sense of equilibrium, but today the challenges are of a different order and the balancing requirements on a vastly broader scale.
In China, as almost everywhere else, “social” has of course come to imply social media, social networks, and social communities. However, even if you and your agency are well-versed in social media platforms such as Hootsuite and Pardot and you know virtually all there is to know (at the moment, anyway) about Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google +, and Digg, you will likely need to acquire still more and different expertise to have an effective social presence in China. With over 635 million Internet users–more than half its population–China compels our attention, and, if we hope to use social means to grow our business there, we must take into account some of the particularities of Chinese social media and even of Chinese culture.
The Same Direction by Different Paths
The Chinese, who have a “collectivistic” culture as opposed to the “individualistic” cultures that prevail in North America and Europe, don’t necessarily use the same Internet platforms or frequent the same social communities that we do in the West. A central element of collectivist cultures is that one must value the interests of the whole above those of the individual, and put the collective good above your own. This characteristic has contributed to pride in and support for Chinese media; like us, the Chinese are very social-media oriented but, by and large, they prefer to use Chinese platforms. This forces Western marketers to reexamine their assumptions about which are the leading social media.
Perhaps because its unique focus on the professional sphere is unmatched locally, Linkedin has done better in China than have most offshore social media. Facebook, however, is not only at a disadvantage, it remains squarely beyond the pale. A 2008 censor-based ban of the community remains in force despite Mark Zuckerberg’s personal efforts at persuasion, which include a promise to read all of Chinese President Xi Jingping’s speeches and the delivery of a speech of his own in Mandarin Chinese at the prestigious Tsinghua University. Because of this ban, as well as for the reasons cited above, local alternatives continue to dominate the social space. A description of the major players and their basic functionality follows.
Weixin (WeChat), is the most popular Chinese social platform and allows users to do a variety of things, including play games, watch videos, shop, hail taxis, buy movie tickets, take out loans, and chat with friends via voice or text. Instead of Twitter—which, like Facebook, is banned in China—the Chinese use Sina Weibo, a microblogging site that limits input to 140 characters, and permits individual users and corporate entities to open accounts and post content, as well as upload links, images, and videos. Qzone, which has over 600 million users (or, to bring the matter into perspective, 24% percent more users than the population of North America and 20% more than that of the European Union), might be China’s most popular social networking site; it permits both personal and corporate user blogging, as well as music, video, and photo uploads. Finally, Youku, the Chinese equivalent of YouTube, is, as one would expect, the most popular Chinese venue for posting videos and music, in part because it offers users the ability to grade uploads.
Expanded Reach for Your Messaging, but is Your Message on the Mark?
Although Chinese social media provide Western marketers with an almost unimaginable expansion of their message reach, one must bear in mind that the difference between China and the West can extend beyond platform choice or preference for a particular kind of content to the very manner in which the content is presented—or, more to the point, to a promotion’s aesthetics. For example, web layouts featuring great expanses of white space might be considered clean and elegant in the West but in China they can easily be perceived as being boring or devoid of useful content. This sort of mismatch can also occur in the messaging itself, which is sometimes more direct in China than in the West and which might require the inclusion of cultural allusions beyond the compass of a Western-oriented creative team whose exposure to Asian culture has been limited to takeout food or stereotypes such as ceremonial lions in a lunar holiday parade. Color choice offers us an example. As most of us in the West understand, red symbolizes good fortune and joy to the Chinese; however, perhaps fewer of us know that yellow, the former color of the imperial family, remains associated with exclusivity and that white is associated with purity and death (just as in Japan), so it is commonly reserved for mourning. The inappropriate use color or the introduction of less than easily understood Western cultural allusions into a Chinese social-media campaign can lead to quick and sometimes irreversible confusion.
In the end, the important thing to bear in mind is that a first-time foray into Chinese social media is an excursion into a new landscape. As such, internal or external marketing staff need to prepare a roadmap that ensures you don’t get lost in the woods but instead emerge at your desired destination—that of a trusted, credible supplier, who understands the needs and sensitivities of the Chinese market. For more information about social media in China, contact solutions@globalmarcomm.com.To add your own perspectives and thoughts on this topic, please comment below.
–Ronald-Stéphane Gilbért, M.S., principal global consultant, and Shirley Zhang, B.S.E., senior APAC consultant, Gilbért, Flossmann & Zhang Worldwide.
However, even if you and your agency are well-versed in social media platforms such as Hootsuite and Pardot and you know virtually all there is to know (at the moment, anyway) about Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google +, and Digg, you will likely need to acquire still more and different expertise to have an effective social presence in China. With over 635 million Internet users–more than half its population–China compels our attention, and, if we hope to use social means to grow our business there, we must take into account some of the particularities of Chinese social media and even of Chinese culture.
This characteristic has contributed to pride in and support for Chinese media; like us, the Chinese are very social-media oriented but, by and large, they prefer to use Chinese platforms. This forces Western marketers to reexamine their assumptions about which are the leading social media.
Although Chinese social media provide Western marketers with an almost unimaginable expansion of their message reach, one must bear in mind that the difference between China and the West can extend beyond platform choice or preference for a particular kind of content to the very manner in which the content is presented—or, more to the point, to a promotion’s aesthetics. For example, web layouts featuring great expanses of white space might be considered clean and elegant in the West but in China they can easily be perceived as being boring or devoid of useful content. 
This sort of mismatch can also occur in the messaging itself, which is sometimes more direct in China than in the West and which might require the inclusion of cultural allusions beyond the compass of a Western-oriented creative team whose exposure to Asian culture has been limited to takeout food or stereotypes such as ceremonial lions in a lunar holiday parade. Color choice offers us an example. As most of us in the West understand, red symbolizes good fortune and joy to the Chinese; however, perhaps fewer of us know that yellow, the former color of the imperial family, remains associated with exclusivity and that white is associated with purity and death (just as in Japan), so it is commonly reserved for mourning. The inappropriate use color or the introduction of less than easily understood Western cultural allusions into a Chinese social-media campaign can lead to quick and sometimes irreversible confusion.
In the end, the important thing to bear in mind is that a first-time foray into Chinese social media is an excursion into a new landscape. As such, internal or external marketing staff need to prepare a roadmap that ensures you don’t get lost in the woods but instead emerge at your desired destination—that of a trusted, credible supplier, who understands the needs and sensitivities of the Chinese market. For more information about social media in China, contact solutions@globalmarcomm.com. To add your own perspectives and thoughts on this topic, please comment below.