WeiboSuite should prove an invaluable tool for China researchers and journalists who don’t speak Chinese but still want to keep track of what’s happening on China’s most happening social network. Obviously, with billions of posts, WeiboSuite hasn’t — and cannot — translate every single post into English, but it indexes and auto-translates the 1,000 most recent deleted posts, which makes it valuable for journalists who generally only need to see recent posts anyway. For example, when I searched for “Tibet,” WeiboSuite turned up an interesting post from yesterday alleging that there was a fairly major anti-government protest in Naqu Biru County in Tibet on Sunday.

WeiboSuite also includes an image-to-text translator that should be effective in helping journalists deal with those pesky “long weibo” posts that include long sections of text uploaded as an image to circumvent Weibo’s character limit (not to mention its keyword blocks).

Finally, WeiboSuite also comes with an image splitter. Weibo users often upload multiple photos in one long image, and while that format is convenient for Weibo it’s not great for other platforms. WeiboSuite’s image splitter helpfully breaks those images down into separate image files for each photo without the need for any editing software or tiresome cropping.

In short, WeiboSuite is an awesome tool for journalists or anyone with an interest in following what’s going on on Weibo. My hat is off to the team at Hong Kong University that created these tools; they have really done something quite cool here.

(via SCMP)

Yesterday, Sina Tech sub-site Startup Stories posted an interesting op-ed from T.H. Capital CEO Hou Xiaotian entitled “Why is Sina’s Stock Undervalued on Wall Street?” In it, Hou argues that given that Alibaba valued Sina Weibo at $32.56/share for its big Weibo investment, when you add in the value of Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) other services, the company’s stock ought to be up around $73, yet it continues to languish in the $50-$60 range instead.

Of course, some have argued that Alibaba gave Sina a pretty sweet deal in terms of Weibo’s valuation, but Hou asserts that the Alibaba number is actually quite reasonable, and lays out five reasons why this is the case:

1. “Weibo has a monopoly on the market.” Hou says that 85% percent of all time spent microblogging in China is spent on Sina Weibo, and it has more than 500 million registered users. Tencent Weibo has big numbers too, of course, but Hou says that it’s much less actively used.
2. “Weibo is a real-life platform.” Hou argues that beyond real-name registration, users actually build real “micro-lives” on Weibo complete with their own social circles, entertainment, news, and a lot of voluntary sharing about their real lives. It’s almost like an online journal in some ways.
3. “Weibo creates web 2.0 content.” To explain this, Hou compares Weibo search — where users can find the answers to questions (because the hottest posts on any given topic tend to be what most people are looking for) — to traditional search where users find “a pile of indexed links” that can be hard to sort through”. Weibo, Hou argues, produces a ton of content that sorts itself more or less automatically, and it’s always timely and based on what users want.
4. “Weibo is an entrance point for the mobile web.” Hou says Weibo’s daily traffic exceeds 1 billion pageviews per day, and that 75% of it comes via mobile clients.
5. “Weibo is a kind of self-run media.” Hou points out that Weibo has been exceedingly valuable as a way of spreading information and has arguably increased transparency in Chinese society, even if the information it spreads is sometimes of dubious veracity.

I’m not an investor, or an expert in how companies are valued, so I won’t dispute any of Hou’s specific numbers. But I do think that she’s viewing Weibo with a particularly rosy set of glasses — perhaps it’s not a coincidence this article was published on Sina Tech — and there do seem to be some legitimate reasons to think Alibaba’s Weibo valuation was a bit over the top.

To begin with, some of Hou’s numbers are pretty shocking. She doesn’t cite sources for any of them but I’m guessing most of them come from T.H. Capital’s own research, but even so a few jump out as questionable. For instance: Sina Weibo gets more daily traffic and pageviews than Baidu? That would be pretty surprising. And while yes, Weibo does have 500 million registered users, only a small fraction of them are active (a study published in March found that only 200 million or so users had ever posted, and only 30 million users wrote unique posts in a given week).

Hou’s point about Weibo’s search being more valuable than Baidu’s is interesting but, I think, misleading in some ways. Weibo search is extremely effective at helping users find certain kinds of information. If you want the latest trends, to see what people are saying about a particular actress, or to hear the latest about a political scandal, for example, Weibo search is probably better than Baidu. But at the same time, if you’re looking for biographical information about a historical figure, a link to a popular e-commerce site, or information about the lineup of an NBA team (for example), Baidu is going to be far more effective than Sina. At one point in her article, Hou asserts that Sina’s Weibo search should be valued at double what Baidu’s search is worth per capita because it is more effective, but that is only true for a specific sort of search. Personally, I do a fair amount of searching for my job, and while sometimes Weibo search is the right tool, most of the time my search begins and ends with Baidu.

Finally, I think Hou is understating the threat that Weibo faces from WeChat. Granted, WeChat doesn’t offer the quasi-journal-like features Weibo has, but frankly Weibo isn’t that great for journaling either. Both platforms are best at communicating the here and now, what’s happening within your circles of contacts, and while there are significant differences between the services, WeChat’s growth should still be pretty alarming to Sina — even CEO Charles Chao has said WeChat poses a threat — and it’s no surprise it’s also affecting Sina’s stock price. Users, after all, only have so much time in the day, and the more time they spend on WeChat, the less time they’re spending on Weibo.

There are other reasons to be bearish on Sina — Weibo faces regulatory threat constantly, Sina has had a really tough time monetizing it — but generally speaking, I do think Weibo is a very valuable service. Is it as valuable as the $32.56 per share that Aliababa paid for it? Right now, I’d argue it’s definitely not, but then again, Alibaba didn’t invest just to make a quick buck, and over the long term if it can help Sina make Weibo profitable, the service certainly could be worth that, and a great deal more.

(image via Sina Tech)

First of all, Ma clearly recognizes that some observers have been a little nervous about the e-commerce company’s step in to social media. After all, nobody wants to see Weibo turned into a glorified advertising platform, and Ma knows that. On the topic of how the services will be separated, he said:

If we turned Weibo into an e-commerce platform, we would be condemned by its users and also condemned by history [...] We’re now 18 percent shareholders in Sina Weibo, so if Weibo is doing well that’s good for us. We want Weibo to do well before we discuss what it can give Alibaba. Weibo is Sina’s thing, but if [Sina] needs us to do something, we will support them. That’s the only way this cooperation can continue.

Alibaba didn’t invest in Weibo for no reason. “The investment in Weibo is an important step in Alibaba’s future development,” said Ma. He didn’t name any specific reasons; we can think of a few.

But at the same time, Ma seems to suggest that the investment is also designed to help what he sees as a valuable service that might be in trouble. He says Weibo has increased transparency in Chinese society, and that Alibaba wants to help it be healthier and more successful. It’s no secret that Sina has struggled to monetize Weibo effectively, and although Ma never suggests that Alibaba is the white knight swooping in to rescue a damsel in distress, it sometimes feels a little like that’s what happened.

Everyone — Jack Ma included — agrees that Sina Weibo has really changed China’s society (mostly for the better), and everyone knows it faces a threat in WeChat. Users likely would never have guessed that a partnership with Alibaba might be the thing that really lets Weibo flourish, but that could prove to be the case. In ten years, we may well believe that Jack Ma saved Weibo with the Alibaba investment, allowing the service to continue changing Chinese society.

(via Sina Tech)

If you’re a fan of Sina Weibo but don’t like the idea of your posts swirling around the web for all of eternity, you might like to try out a tiny little tool called SnapWeibo. Inspired by the time-limited messages on Snapchat, SnapWeibo lets you vanish your Weibo post after a set time.

It’s really simple to use: just sign into SnapWeibo with your Weibo account details, and then any post you make (in the usual way, via any Weibo supporting app) that contains a certain time-related hashtag – #10m# would indicate 10 minutes, for example – will self-destruct after that time period.

Its flexible hashtags allow you to set times by minutes, hours, or even days. If anyone retweets your Weibo before it gets deleted, your missive will later appear blank – in the normal way that it does on Sina Weibo anyway.

You can set self-destruct hashtags in either English or Chinese: like, #2m# #5h# #1d# or #2分钟# #5小时# #1天#.

Yes, it’s a bit silly, but someone might find it useful.

Of course, there is a simpler way to make your Sina Weibo posts disappear quickly – say something controversial.

(Source: 36Kr – article in Chinese)

The report notes that the best newcomer, in the eyes of Chinese netizens, is Tottenham Hotspurs’ Gareth Bale. Interestingly, Spain’s La Liga players are a lot more popular than those in the English Premier League (BPL). La Liga’s top six most popular players on Weibo have eight times – yes, x8 – the number of followers compared to BPL’s top eight players.

One interesting thing to note is that Japan’s Hidetoshi Nakata – who retired a few years back – is the fourth most popular European player on China’s leading social networks. Although he’s Japanese, he’s played in a few European clubs like AS Roma and Parma in the past.

The last time the Mailman Group, which helps celebrities do social marketing in China, assessed football mania on Weibo, it noted that European football clubs have 15.6 million supporters online in China.

Here’s the infographic for you football fans:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

At present, the ads don’t seem to be very targeted. For example, the ads pictured above, on my own personal weibo feed, were exclusively for women’s clothing items (which, as a man, I don’t have much use for). So it certainly seems as though, at least for the moment, Alibaba probably hasn’t started thoroughly mining Weibo’s mountain of data yet. But we’re confident that it will, and Weibo users should get ready to start seeing more carefully targeted ads as time goes by.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to see if these new ad placements have any effect on Taobao’s sales numbers.

Now that we know it finally has happened, the next immediate question is why. It’s not hard to figure out why Sina went for this deal; the company has been having trouble monetizing Weibo and having an extra $586 million in the bank certainly (to put it lightly) helps. But what’s Alibaba up to here?

As my colleague Steven pointed out in his article yesterday, it’s clear that Alibaba has been interested in becoming more social for some time, as evidenced in (for example) its apparent investment in chat app Momo and its acquisition of music service Xiami. OK, so Alibaba invested in Weibo because it wants to get more social. Why?

Getting Customers Where They Spend The Most Time

The most obvious answer is that that’s where all the customers are. Weibo has over 300 million registered users, and while only around 50 million of them are daily active users, my guess is that Alibaba is less concerned with how many users there are — everyone in China who’s on the internet already knows about Taobao anyway — and more about how users are spending their time, and how much time is being spent on Weibo.

Alibaba’s e-commerce sites, after all, aren’t really fun places to “hang out.” But people hang out on Weibo all the time. It seems likely Alibaba is looking not so much to increase its userbase as it is to increase the amount of time users spend with products from Alibaba platforms in front of their faces. After all, many people go on Taobao only when they need something, but 50 million people go on Weibo every day to discuss the news, follow their friends, etc. Putting products there should help give Alibaba better access to the impulse buy than it currently has, simply because people do not generally load an Alibaba site unless they’re already planning to buy something. Alibaba, I suspect, is hoping that Weibo will help it snag users who had no plans to buy anything but fell in love with a product they ran across while browsing Weibo (or chatting or listening to music on the other platforms the company has invested in thus far).

And of course, it has already been demonstrated that people will buy things from Weibo. The Xiaomi Weibo sale, with over a million phones sold via Weibo in just five minutes, must have impressed on Alibaba’s leadership that Weibo users will fork over their cash via that platform when given a product they’re actually interested in. And if there’s one thing Alibaba has a lot of, it’s products.

Access to a Goldmine of Data

Of course, the other side of the coin is that Weibo’s massive databases can also probably provide Alibaba with tons of useful information about consumer behaviors, desires, and trends that it can use to optimize marketing and maximize sales. We know the folks at Alibaba like data, and Weibo has literally billions of public posts that can serve as useful data points on everything from sentiments about a particular brand or product to general insight into the thoughts and desires of particular demographics. And with full integration into Weibo, Alibaba platforms’ marketing could be tweaked to respond automatically and in real time to new trends as they emerged.

Think, for example, about Beijing’s “Airpocalypse” earlier this year. Now imagine that for Beijing-based users, next to every Weibo post about the pollution there’s an ad for an air filter or a mask on Taobao. That, I think, is why Alibaba is so interested in Weibo that it is willing to pay what many analysts feel is a pretty generous sum for an 18 percent stake.

Of course, there could be more to it than that. Or I could be missing the forest for the trees. We’re hoping to head more from Alibaba about its specific strategy here soon, but in the meantime, what do you think about Alibaba’s investment in Weibo?

China’s top e-commerce company has secured what could be the biggest web deal of the year in the country. Alibaba, which has been a lot more keen to venture into social media recently, has taken an 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like microblogging service run by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA).

Sina Weibo has over 500 million registered users, and has been China’s most talked about social network in the past couple of years. Despite all that enthusiasm, only 46.3 million are daily active users of Weibo, and the service has been a headache for Sina in terms of real-time censorship and great difficulty in monetizing it.

Alibaba’s stake in Sina Weibo comes with an option to increase that, notes the New York Times’ Dealbook blog, to 30 percent in the future. The deal also involves cooperation between these two Chinese web giants that will fuse social media and e-commerce. Sina and Alibaba expect such projects to bring in about $380 million in revenue from Weibo in the next three years.

What forms could such social commerce take? Last year, the startup phone-maker Xiaomi made use of Sina Weibo to sell some of its phones. This little experiment – it was not a long-term sales channel – yielded amazing results, with 1.3 million reservations for the phones made in just five minutes. We’ll likely see Sina Weibo do more like that – but on a more permanent basis, and with Alibaba’s consumer-oriented e-commerce sites, Taobao and Tmall.

Alibaba has invested in a few social media startups in the past few months, such as a funding round put into a flirting app, and the acquisition of one music streaming site.

In a statement this evening, Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma said:

We believe that the cooperation of our two robust platforms will bring unique and valuable services to Weibo users, as well as making the mobile internet a core part of Alibaba’s strategy.

Surround App is free and allows one-click machine translation of any Weibo post from someone you follow. In addition, it gives you a full English UI for the most common Weibo functions, like making retweets and comments. The Hong Kong startup admits that many features are omitted in this beta, with things like translation of comments, slang translation, image uploading, and paid-for human translations all coming at a later date. Here’s the current beta that I’ve been playing with:

There are a few confusing aspects to the new beta. What looks like the retweet/repost button (pictured above) is actually for comments, and what’s apparently a refresh icon actually serves to repost the content. It’s not made very clear how to activate the translation – it turns out you need to hit that arrow button in the bottom-left of the app. Hopefully the icons will be rethought. If it sounds like I’m being too tough on a free app, that’s just because I’m keen for it to be good as it could prove so useful for many people.

Surround App is now in Google Play for Android users, but the iPhone version hasn’t yet shown up in iTunes.

Headlines in the China chat app scene have recently been overtaken by WeChat. Only two years old, the mobile chat app has already accumulated a user-base of over 300 million users with a large majority of them in China. Understandably, WeChat is huge in terms of users, but before we think it has become the single dominant force in social/communication, it’s worthwhile to remind ourselves of the other apps that the Chinese use to connect with each other.

Leveraging TNS’s Mobile Behave (1) panel, we can measure the time smartphone users spend with any one particular app as a proportion of total time spent facing their smartphone screens. This enables us to get a handle on the relative time spent on different social/communication apps.

Looking first at Android – the top five mobile apps account for 34 percent of time spent on a smartphones. Predictably, the top five is dominated by the usual suspects such as UCWeb mobile browser (#1). However, it is followed closely by Mobile QQ and WeChat which account for nine percent and seven percent of time respectively. Sina Weibo comes in at four percent.

With iOS, users gravitate most towards Mobile QQ, which has 15 percent of the total time spent on iOS devices. This is followed by Weibo (13 percent) and WeChat (10 percent). Finally, as one would expect with Apple users, entertainment is an important aspect of their lives – in line with this, PPS (a peer to peer streaming video network) is next in the top five and accounts for three percent of users’ time.

Clearly, people spend a large proportion of their mobile device time on apps like Weibo, WeChat and Mobile QQ. Be it Android or iOS, these three apps have secured a place in the top five and together account for a substantial amount of activity on the smartphone. Connectivity in the form of enhanced instant messaging is a key need in Chinese smartphone users’ lives.

While WeChat is garnering lots of attention, it’s useful to note that both Mobile QQ and Weibo are also apps that the Chinese are using extensively to connect with one another. Not surprisingly, Mobile QQ gets more use than WeChat given that it has a longer history (it has roots as a desktop IM app before coming up with a mobile app for smartphone users). But regardless of whether WeChat or Mobile QQ leads the pack, it’s a win-win situation for Tencent, since it owns both platforms.

However, given the rapid pace at which the mobile app scene is developing, it’s anybody’s guess what the chat app scene will look like several more months down the line. Who would have known that WeChat, which only had 100 million users a year ago, would enjoy a growth trajectory that would rival the likes of Whatsapp on the international scene?

(1) TNS has actual behavioral metrics captured via an app installed on our smartphone user panels.

Since China is on holiday break right now and as a result there’s not much going on in the tech industry, we hopped onto Sina Weibo to see what the digital consensus was about North Korea.

A lot of what we found was jokes. In fact, one of the most widely-retweeted comments on North Korea was this one, which links to a Chinese-subtitled clip from American comedy news show The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It’s pretty funny (which is why we’ve embedded it below), and Weibo users clearly agree as almost all the comments on that weibo post are positive. Chinese users are also enjoying the North Korean propaganda film about the terrible lives of Americans (who can only eat birds and drink coffee made from snow) that has gone viral in the West (this popular weibo post has the video subtitled in Chinese).

Another popular post expressed the hope (somewhat sarcastically I believe) that Kim ratchet up the tension even more so that he can “either let the Juche Ideology shine upon all of humanity or join Gaddafi and Saddam’s party [i.e., die] as quickly as possible.” Still another points out that in the event of the war, China might be obligated to fight itself, as its treaty with North Korea requires it to support the Hermit Kingdom, but its position on the UN Security Council could obligate it to provide troops if the UN resolved to send peacekeepers to North Korea to stifle Kim’s agression.

All in all, China’s new users don’t seem to be taking North Korea’s threats all that seriously. Kim Jong Un, known as “Fatty Kim” among many Chinese commenters, remains the butt of jokes and scorn, and by and large people don’t seem to worried about an actual war breaking out. Perhaps Lil’ Kim will take this as a sign — when even your closest allies are laughing at you, perhaps it’s time to change strategies.

(image via The Daily Show with Jon Stewart)

Kaifu Lee explains:

Here’s the graph he made:

You’ll see that he’s had more Weibo posts than ever deleted in March, right after his forced hiatus. An accompanying table explains that he was discussing two topical and hot-button events in recent weeks that caused the spike in censorious deletions: the 13,000-plus dead pigs that keep appearing in a Shanghai river, and the just-finished session of Chinese parliament that appointed the country’s new political leadership. Just the kind of things that are being discussed in stores, taxis, and restaurants all over the country – but when posted online, these topics are often ordered to be eradicated from Weibo and other social media.

Along with those numbers, the data also shows that the largest section of China’s social media users – a full 30 percent – are aged 26 to 30. The perfect target for advertisers. As a whole, 91 percent of Chinese netizens have social accounts, which is way above the 67 percent in the US.

So what are those top 10 sites about? I’d categorize some of them like this:

• Twitter-like - In second and third place are the Twitter clones, Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo. The latter one gets most of the media attention, both in China and around the world.
• Facebook-y - Four of the sites are a lot like Facebook. Tencent’s QZone, Tencent’s Pengyou, Renren, and Kaixin are all focused around a mix of social profiles, albums, buddies, and social gaming. Interestingly, they don’t get so much hype these days, and feel rather like the past generation of sites on China’s web.
• Whatsapp-ish - The much talked about WeChat is like Whatsapp, and is one of a number of Asia-made messaging apps – like Line and KakaoTalk – that are battling to get onto the smartphones of young Chinese and Southeast Asian web users.

Here’s the full infographic:

(Source: Go Globe)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

If you wanted to learn more about Sina Weibo’s censorship patterns, today is your lucky day. A group of computer scientists from Bowdoin College, Rice College, and the University of New Mexico have, along with an independent researcher, released the results of an academic study of Sina Weibo’s censorship practices. The study, which we came across via MIT Technology Review, used “architecture [that could] detect post deletions within one minute of the deletion event,” giving the researchers perhaps the most precise look yet into how quickly Sina’s content team takes down sensitive Weibo posts. The results? Sina is pretty darn fast:

We found that deletions happen most heavily in the first hour after a post has been submitted. Focusing on original posts, not reposts/retweets, we observed that nearly 30% of the total deletion events occur within 5-30 minutes. Nearly 90% of the deletions happen within the first 24 hours.

So Sina’s censors are pretty fast. But what, exactly, are they deleting? Researchers used a variety of analytical tools to look at what content was most quickly deleted, and found that:

The topics where mass removal happens the fastest are those that combine events that are hot topics in Weibo as a whole (e.g., the Beijing rainstorms or a sex scandal) with themes common to sensitive posts (e.g., Beijing, government, China, and policeman).

Researchers also found that, unsurprisingly, users with more total deleted posts tended to get their posts deleted more quickly than other users, suggesting that Sina’s content team was watching their accounts more carefully. The following chart from the study shows the downward trend in post lifetime as a user’s number of total deleted posts increases:

Of course, it’s not all humans doing the deleting. In fact, by the study’s estimations, for an all-human team to censor Weibo, 4,200 team members would be required, assuming each team member could read at the blazing rate of 50 posts per minute. The study points out that as a result of that, weibo’s censorship system has become an incredibly complex system, employing both human and software censors, employing multiple blocked keyword lists that trigger different censorship responses, search filtration systems, and more. (Of course, none of that should come as much of a surprise to longtime weibo users, who have likely experienced many of the different types of censorship on Sina Weibo firsthand).

If you’re really interested in Weibo censorship, the full paper is worth a read, and although it’s a bit dry and quite technical in places, the good news is that it’s only ten pages long.

(via MIT Technology Review)

Late yesterday, he broke his silence on to share a short post on his blog in which he discusses his impressions of Sina Weibo and Tencent’s WeChat. It’s a pretty interesting post, so we’ve translated select sections of it below for you to enjoy (links added by us, though).

On Weibo Followers:

Personally I think weibo follower numbers are just a way of fooling both yourself and others. I won’t comment on other people, but among my followers [he has more than 11 million], there are definitely plenty of zombies, and weird and inactive followers. In short, there’s definitely some water content [i.e., padding in the numbers].

[...] The way some internet companies count things, this short essay is already 300,000 words long. If Weibo lasts long enough, I look forward to the day when the first V user has more followers than there are Chinese internet users, or even more followers than the world’s total population.

On Weibo Culture:

Weibo definitely has its advantages; it makes it harder to hide news stories, makes speech more free, and in some very specific moments it’s the only thing you can use. But at the same time, it also makes us deceive ourselves; if you say some sentence or some line is taken from your post and retweeted thousands of times, you feel like everyone on the street is passing along your now-famous saying [...] and even the cacti in the Taklamakan desert are talking about it.

[...] The state of things on weibo is actually a lot like Chinese society, one in a thousand people has a little bit of an identity and the ability to speak out, four out of a thousand people are just trying to promote themselves, and the other 990 are just grass people. When the wind blows dirt across grass, optimistic grass believes it is the wind and pessimistic grass believes it is the sand. As for the last five people, they’re out pretending to be the one-in-a-thousand [who can actually make an impact with their posts].

On WeChat Culture:

Now it’s much more likely that [I will] open WeChat instead of Weibo. My circle of friends is getting more and more active, and a lot of the people around me who would fit into the group of 990 people [mentioned above] can find more of a feeling that they actually exist in their friend circles on WeChat. At least on WeChat their posts will be seen by the people who should see them, and it won’t be like being ignored and overlooked with zero reposts and zero comments on Weibo.

On Tencent and Microblogging Also-Rans:

I’m not trying to come off as advertising for Tencent here; Tencent has also done some crappy things. And as far as other websites’ weibo services [besides Sina and Tencent] [...] I suspect there are fewer active users on these sites than there are people in my residential community.

On smartphones and life:

As a writer, taking a non-smartphone out with me is very necessary. I haven’t done enough, haven’t traveled far enough. [...] This is just my personal mindset and reflection, but there are so many lively faces and beautiful scenes [out in the world], I think this year I can waste less time looking at screens. These two “micro” services [Weibo and WeChat] are good, but they can’t encroach too much on my life. The world is vast; if you’re Chinese get out and have a look around.

When I wrote recently about the Weibo vs. WeChat war, a number of commenters expressed skepticism that the two services were really competing given how different they are. In Han Han’s post, we can see that the services compete at the basic level of fighting for users’ attention in the limited time they’re willing to spend on social media, but I think Han Han’s point about how Weibo and WeChat make you feel is also a very important one. Weibo can make you feel very important when a post goes viral, but that’s mostly an illusion. WeChat doesn’t offer that same kind of thrill, but it does give the feeling of actually being heard to the many people who don’t have massive followings on Weibo and have trouble getting anyone’s attention there.

(Han Han’s blog via his Weibo, image source)

As we explained way back in 2011, if someone wants to boost their popularity on Sina Weibo, they can buy new followers. But those will be zombies – soul-less Weibo accounts that post no original content, run by the shady individuals who take your money in exchange for these new ‘fans’. Now that Sina Weibo has surpassed 500 million registered users this week, we need to take a closer look at the active user numbers also revealed by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) a few days ago.

Sina, in its post-report earnings call, said that it has 46.3 million daily active users. That’s just under 10 percent of its registered user-base. Also, it admitted that over the course of a year, nine to 10 percent of users are active. There’s that number again. Surely it means that 90 percent of Weibo users are zombies.

Or perhaps, even worse than being zombies – in social media terms, not in the context of a horror movie – is that these users are dead and gone. They came, they saw, they posted a couple of times, and they left. At least zombies – or spammers, of which there are also many on Weibo – would be defined as “active” sometimes. But, the sad fact suggested by these new numbers is that Sina Weibo is kept alive by a very chatty and social core of 50 million users, and everyone else has vanished.

Anyone alive in here?

Indeed, of those 50 million left over, how many are actually real people? If it’s still true – as we wrote last year – that half of all retweets on Weibo are from spammers, then the actual genuine, honest-to-goodness human user-base on Weibo could be as low as 25 million, which is not much more than the population of Shanghai.

That’s speculation of course, but the 500 million figure seems to be an empty shell. The active numbers also make a mockery of Sina’s claims that its implementation of ‘real name’ registration, which was pushed by censorious authorities in March of last year, would help cut down on fake accounts. To be fair, we observed the activity on trending Weibo topics after the real name deadline and found that the real ID requirement did not impact user-ship of Weibo – but it also didn’t seem to solve the problem of zombie and spammer accounts

While Sina Weibo is a fun and full-featured social network – which started out as a Twitter clone but is now as expansive as Facebook – it must be worrying for Sina that so few on Weibo are that active over the course of a year. Things always fall out of fashion, so there’s a risk that Weibo might have reached its saturation point, and could soon fall out of favor despite the $280 million that the web company has invested into Weibo in the past two years – and without seeing much financial reward for all that monetization.

Sina also knows that it must monetize more and put more of its features onto mobile, which is surely the only way to bring in more genuine users to the service. While it doesn’t have any very similar competition that might usurp it – just as Twitter seems fairly solid in its place right now – the messaging app WeChat is fast becoming a rival, allowing its users to do things that they’d previously enjoyed on Weibo, such as sharing photos and following brands and celebrities.

So Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) announced its not-so-good Q4 financials today. While the Chinese web company has multiple businesses, all the scrutiny is on its microblog, Sina Weibo. Our friends at 36Kr have pointed to several more interesting statistics revealed by Sina. Definitely the biggest, as revealed in the earnings call, is that Sina Weibo has now surpassed 500 million – yes, half a billion – registered users in total. Sina Weibo passed the 400 million milestone just in time for its Q3 report.

Out of those 500 million, 46.3 million are daily active users. Impressively, 75 percent of its daily active users use Weibo through their mobile devices at some point in time. Over the course of a year, nine to 10 percent of users are active.

In terms of raw money, Sina has ploughed $280 million into Weibo, its flagship social product, which explains why its income is going down despite slowly rising revenues.

Monetizing not mobile enough

Looking at the statistics, it is fair to assume that most eyeballs and engagement comes from mobile. If Sina is looking to monetize its microblog service, the solution has to be a mobile one, not web. Unfortunately for Sina, its monetization channels, like social gaming and brand partnerships, work better in the full web browser, not it official or third-party apps.

But one thing that makes Weibo attractive is that messages can potentially turn uber viral and become a conversation among millions of users (rival messaging app WeChat really can’t do that, yet). Combining mobile (location, push notifications, etc) and its viral potential, it looks like a potential mobile commerce solution to me. One that could pull and push relevant m-commerce content to users based on location, allow them to create a conversation around it, and possibly buy things through Weibo itself.

We know Sina tested e-commerce with phone-maker Xiaomi and the test was a success. Though the non-mobile problem was seen even in this effort – the arrangement with Xiaomi was more of a “viral push” based around the desktop/full website, and hasn’t really taken advantage of mobile or mobile commerce.

There’s so much more to explore in m-commerce and I’m positive that Sina’s investment in Weibo will pay off if it makes some adjustments this year. The mobile is a device that sticks to the users wherever they go and I see Weibo (together with WeChat) staying for a long time. Banner ads stink, so a better solution is needed. Mobile commerce, and acting as a games platform – perhaps replicating the success of Line app in this area – are likely the foreseeable revenue engines for Sina Weibo. Sina’s income and share price took a slight dip yesterday on its Q4 data showing Weibo being so expensive to run without much to show for it. Apart from half a billion registered users. But it is investing heavily in the future of mobile and it’s in one of the best positions to do it really well.

Chinese web company Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) wheeled out its Q4 and full-year 2012 financials last night, revealing slight growth in net revenues and advertising revenues – but no end to rising operating costs for the company and its popular Sina Weibo social platform. The company explained:

2012 was a year of investment for Sina. We are delighted that Weibo continued to gain popularity and Weibo monetization was off to a good start. In 2013, we will continue to improve user experience and expand the scale of Weibo monetization, while [we] turn our focus to mobile internet for all of our major product lines.

Sina chairman and CEO Charles Chao said during the earnings conference call, as spotted by TheNextWeb, that the company is not worried about the messaging app WeChat. Though WeChat and Weibo are different beasts, there are areas that clash, such as WeChat allowing users to follow brands and celebrities.

Charles Chao did admit that Sina Weibo – which has over 400 million registered users – had seen a dip in the amount of time that users were spending on the Twitter-like service. He called that reduction “inevitable”, and maintained that Weibo was more established than WeChat (which is called Weixin in Chinese), and generally mainstream enough to compete with the 300-million-user-strong messaging app.

Indeed, Sina seems comfortable enough with WeChat as a rival to Weibo that the Android version of the Sina Weibo app recently added a dedicated ‘share to WeChat‘ function.

Sina Q4 financials

Going back to the newly-revealed numbers, Sina posted net revenues of $529.3 million for full-year 2012, up 10 percent year-on-year. Advertising revenues were up seven percent for the quarter, and for the whole year amounted to $412.9 million, up 12 percent from 2011. But all that investment in growing Weibo, which is Sina’s most popular product, once again resulted in rising costs for the company as a whole – income fell sharply to $2.4 million in Q4, down from $9.3 million in Q4 2011.

Weibo monetizes mainly from advertising and brand partnerships, with some income also coming from its Facebook-like social gaming platform, which launched back in 2011.

$SINA fell in Tuesday trading after the numbers were revealed, dropping 4.5 percent to stand at $53.48 per share. Sina’s shares peaked at over $130 in April 2011.

Jike’s frontpage. Click to enlarge.

Authorities, who are effectively also China’s web censors, don’t want news of Jike’s failure getting out. Along with rumors of Jike – which is run by People’s Daily Online, which also publishes the Party mouthpiece newspaper, the People’s Daily – planning to lay off 100 workers, censors are putting pressure on websites and social sites not to cover the news. The small Chinese tech blog that broke the news, Huxiu.com, was forced to take down its article, but it lives on in English on the site’s repository of occasional translations.

Plus, it turns out the the Jike bad news was the reason for one of China’s top entrepreneurs and investors, Kaifu Lee, being suspended from Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo for three days. Lee’s temporary ban seems to have been caused by his criticism of Jike’s chairman, well-known Olympic table tennis champion Deng Yaping, for her failure to turn RMB 2 billion (US$318 million) of investment – presumably with taxpayer money – into anything other than a flop that’s used by pretty much nobody. Deng had little prior experience running a web company.

A waste of taxpayer’s money?

Let’s remember that all China’s search engines – except the renegade and oft-blocked Google.com.hk – already censor search results in line with the country’s increasingly heavy media monitoring and censoring. So the three state search sites – Jike, Panguso, and CCTV Search – just look like very expensive ways of cutting out the inconvenient middle-man (aka: the private sector) so as to streamline the Party angle on all news. Chinese consumers, however, have decided that they want to stick to the search engines – like Baidu (the market leader), Qihoo’s 360 Search, Soso, Apple’s Siri, and Google – that are already embedded in their web browsers and smartphones. And that won’t change unless the nation goes full-on North Korea.

As for Jike, it’s strongly denying that a quarter of its current 400-strong workforce is about to be laid off.

It appears that the media censors are defending state-run Jike. The Huxiu blog explained in English what happened to its controversial article:

In the noon of February 17, 2013, Huxiu.com received mail from the relevant departments that request us to delete the Jike Search article reports. Soon after, we found all the reprinted articles that on the Chinese Internet community within the scope were disappeared, at the same time, related information on weibo was also lost. That afternoon, Huxiu.com published another article try to analysis the gain and loss for Jike Search under Deng’s management. Again, Huxiu received another mail from the relevant departments that request to delete the article. Without any effect negotiations with the relevant departments after inconclusive, Huxiu is forced to remove this article.

This morning, in the midst of yet another messy and massively depressing media and censorship scandal – after last month’s huge blow-up over the Southern Weekend‘s spiked editorial – Kaifu Lee reaffirmed his belief in Chinese social media – though he had to do so on LinkedIn due to his ongoing Weibo ban. He defended the robustness of China’s social media landscape, and pointed out how he – and many others – had voiced their opinions online recently:

In the past three years, I’ve been one of the most vocal members of the Chinese social media, and have accumulated 30 million followers on Sina (and another 24 million on Tencent Weibo). I am not an activist and have no agenda. I am regarded as a moderate but direct microblogger. People follow me because of my content (covering parenting, leadership, personal growth, current events, high tech, investing, overseas news), my style (I tell it like it is, and work hard to tell a good story despite limited keystrokes), and my diligence (I tweet every day 10-20 times, except last few days!).

(Sources: Huxiu, Shanghaiist, and PandoDaily)

Entrepreneur and former Google country manager for China, Kaifu Lee, is often outspoken on his Chinese social media presences – and not just about technology issues. Now Lee says that he has been banned from two such services, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, for a period of three days. Lee has 30.4 million followers on Sina Weibo alone.

It’s not clear what caused Kaifu Lee’s ban from two totally separate social sites, but it’s obvious that this was mandated by authorities. Being unable to post to either of the Twitter-esque Weibo services, Lee took to actual Twitter to say, in Chinese, “I’ve been blocked from Sina and Tencent Weibo for three days; you can find me here [on Twitter].”

This isn’t Lee’s first brush with censorious authorities due to his Weibo missives. Just last month, Lee hinted cryptically – a necessary safeguard on the Chinese web – that he had been questioned by police over his support for one outspoken Chinese newspaper in a heated battle over what tiny remnants of editorial freedom of speech remain in the country.

Even more recently, Lee was vocal in his objection to the temporary web blocking of Github, the social programming site used by many Chinese developers.

If you’re wondering how authorities can order such bans be put in place, then the answer is they just can. Last year we chronicled 10 of the most extraordinary cases of Weibo censorship – and there’ll surely be enough cases for a similar list at the end of this year.

Lee should be back on both Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo by the 20th.

Fans are using the rather awkward hashtag “I want to speak to Kobe” to leave messages in both Chinese and English for the basketball star, and according to the AP some fan groups have promised to help translate some of them. Of course, whether or not Kobe will respond is entirely another story.

Last month, Brad Pitt joined weibo (though his account has since been deleted), and Emma Watson’s on there too so it’s hard to argue that the cool celebrities aren’t on weibo (even if the service also has Tom Cruise). But if Kobe really wants to be hip, he ought to follow the group of Western celebs that have already signed up for WeChat. As much as we love weibo, WeChat seems to be where the really cool kids are flocking these days.

(AP via ESPN)

American actor Brad Pitt has been banned from China proper for some time thanks to his performance in Seven Years in Tibet, a film that China’s government was not a fan of (to put it mildly). But now, it appears Pitt may also be banned from Chinese cyberspace, as a Sina Weibo account he set up last month has apparently been deactivated.

Pitt’s account had been verified as legitimate by Sina, and under the handle @Brad_Pitt he sparked quite an uproar when he joined weibo and posted the cryptic message:

It is the truth. Yup, I’m coming…

But apparently Pitt spoke too soon, as his weibo account is now gone. Pitt’s account, which had been located here, now results in Sina’s default “page doesn’t exist” error message (pictured below) and the page’s URL indicates that the user account itself no longer exists.

So Pitt is no longer on weibo; that much is clear. Everything else about this story is a bit more opaque. Among other things, it’s not clear exactly when the account went down, or how. It’s possible that Pitt dismantled the account himself, though I’m not sure why he would do that barely a month after setting it up. It’s also possible that Sina itself removed Pitt’s account. Finally, it could be that Sina allowed the account but then was ordered to remove it by Chinese authorities after word of Pitt’s weibo presence got out.

Personally, I find the second explanation — that Sina removed Pitt’s account itself — to be the most likely. Admittedly, it sounds a little odd given that the company had already verified the account and thus was obviously aware Pitt was joining. But it’s possible that the speculation surrounding Pitt’s first message — and the fact that it led to net users discussing Pitt’s ban from entering China and Seven Years in Tibet — made the whole thing a bit too political for Sina’s taste, so the company bailed on Brad. It’s also possible that one department of Sina verified Pitt’s account before the content (read: censorship) department got a chance to take a look at it, and when the content guys finally noticed, they pulled the plug.

Whatever happened, there’s no more Brad Pitt on weibo. I’m sure the actor is very disappointed, but hey, there’s always WeChat.

Perhaps some wires got crossed, or perhaps someone on weibo got even more tired of the spring festival news lull than I am and decided to drum up something interesting. Whatever the reason, something strange happened on weibo this week: people started reporting that Tencent CEO Pony Ma had died. Specifically, the fabricated report, which was passed along by thousands of people, said that Ma had died of a heart attack due to fatigue and excessive drinking at the People’s Hospital in Shenzhen. This, of course, was total bullshit.

The rumor was debunked by Ma himself, who after learning of the rumor, posted this message to his weibo account:

I just got off the plane and got a WeChat message from a colleague, apparently an irresponsible verified weibo user is starting rumors; is this intentional or accidental?

It might well be intentional. According to the Beijing Times, rumors of Pony Ma’s death by heart attack have been surfacing and resurfacing on the web since 2010, although there doesn’t seem to be any basis at all to them as Mr. Ma is clearly not dead. This most recent outbreak of rumor seems especially unfounded given that Ma is apparently an ardent smoker but not a big drinker. Perhaps next year’s rumor will be that he has died of lung cancer?

In any event, if you see this information floating around on the Chinese web, have no fear, the inventor of QQ and WeChat is alive and well.

(Beijing Times via Sina Tech)

We already saw that Sina Weibo had a bang-up morning this past holiday weekend, with over 34,000 posts in a single second commemorating the new Year of the Snake. But in recent years, Chinese people sent most of their new year’s greetings via text message, and this year has been no exception. According to estimates from China’s three major telecoms, Chinese people sent a whopping 1.16 billion new year’s greetings texts this holiday. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

While the total number of texts is up slightly from last year’s 1.1. billion, the per-capita new year’s text rate has actually dropped because China has picked up millions of new mobile users over the past year. In Beijing, for example, people sent an average of 36 texts this holiday, down from 42 last year. The culprit? Newer media like Weibo and WeChat. WeChat was especially popular this year because it allows for the sending of voice greetings, which feels more intimate and personal than a simple text message.

Obviously texting isn’t about to die out, but we have already looked at how Chinese people aren’t sending as many texts as they used to, and as apps like WeChat become more popular that trend is likely to accelerate.

(Beijing Morning Post via Sina Tech, image source)

Yesterday saw the ushering in of the Chinese New Year. It seems that everyone who wasn’t busy setting off fireworks at the exact moment that the year of the snake started was instead posting to Sina Weibo. Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has just revealed that the very first second of the new year saw 34,977 Weibo posts. Yes, in just one second. That’s a new record on the Twitter-esque service, which last year saw 32,312 missives fired off in the very first second; back in 2011 it was a mere 12,374.

Sina also says that 731,102 Weibo posts were made in the very first minute of the lunar new year.

During the seven hours of state TV’s traditional “Spring Gala” show, some of Sina Weibo’s 400 million registered users live-tweeted the TV show using the “chunwan” hashtag. In total, that hashtag was used 19,582,947 times while the show was on air. Perhaps everyone was wowed by the appearance of Celine Dion, who sang her Titanic tune before launching into a duet, in Chinese, of a jazzed-up Chinese folk song.

The social media posting platform HootSuite ventured into China last October with support for Sina Weibo, which is a crucial avenue for social marketing to Chinese consumers. Today Canada-based HootSuite has added a bunch of new features for Weibo, the biggest of which is advanced scheduling for posts (pictured above).

In addition to scheduling, HootSuite’s Sina Weibo support now allows you – and its enterprise customers – to add multiple accounts and save searches to monitor keywords. That last one will be useful for brands wanting to track what netizens are saying about your company or products, making it easier to respond positively.

HootSuite added China’s Facebook-esque Renren back in November, and that social site gets some loving today as well. The Renren plug-in within HootSuite also adds scheduled posts and multiple accounts, along with new streams for tracking your photos and shares.

HootSuite’s community VP, Dave Olson, explained to us a few months back that much of what HootSuite is doing in China is in reaction to feedback it’s getting from local users. A possible next step for the Vancouver startup is integrating some Tencent-run social networks.

As we saw in a recent report about luxury brands engaged in social marketing to China, Sina Weibo is the go-to platform. Indeed, 88 percent of surveyed high-end overseas brands have an official Sina Weibo page.

While that’s all very nice for Tencent Weibo, it still doesn’t change the fact that it’s not as cool as Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) offering. And, more importantly, Sina Weibo has more active users:

Thanks to We Are Social for the graphics. Yes, at 2012 Q3, Tencent Weibo had 10 million fewer active users a few months back. Xing Hongyu also revealed yesterday that Tencent Weibo has 100 million daily active users.

But the main reason for all the buzz going to Sina Weibo is the nature of its user-base. That’s because Sina’s users are mostly living in China’s wealthiest cities (tier one and two areas, from Beijing to Wuhan, Shanghai to Hangzhou), while Tencent Weibo’s users are in poorer cities or rural areas, and are not worth as much for social media marketing and are not the kind of folks who can set the national agenda when discussing issues online. Here’s the comparison:

Of course, Tencent Weibo does do some cool things; its coordinated approach to the London Olympics coverage was fun and popular, and you can even buy cars directly within the social service. But its Sina rival remains the “Weibo” that people are actually talking about.

An article in today’s Beijing News states that a number of propaganda department heads have agreed to a plan to blitz social media with state-approved news and ideas. This will involve just over two million – 2.06 million to be precise – propaganda workers and paid commenters.

The deluge of truthspeak is specifically being aimed at Weibo, the two Twitter-style social networks (Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo) that have hundreds of millions of active users. The South China Morning Post first spotted this, and describes how the paid posts and comments are designed to guide “online discussions of sensitive topics in a ‘positive’ direction.”

Paid propaganda commenters are not a new phenomenon in China, where they are derogatorily called “50 cent” posters by many netizens, in a reference to the supposed payment per positive comment given to these carriers of the Party line. (And not because of their musical tastes). The report says that, of the two million figure, only 60,000 people are directly employed by the propaganda wings of various departments, while the rest involved in the campaign are “outside the system” – with means they’re 50 cent shills.

We can expect these commenters to be posting the State-approved line on touchy issues, and perhaps even actively commenting on Weibo posts to balance out an argument.

Sina Weibo is the most actively used of these real-time social sites in China, and is already strictly controlled by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) and its moderators so that the official media censors don’t have to weigh in too much. We recently saw one such Weibo staffer take the extraordinary step of speaking publicly about the dilemma that the social site is in, describing its position as a “a human flesh shield” between censorious authorities and netizens who are pushing the limits of what can be said.

(Sources: Beijing News; Via BeijingCream and South China Morning Post)

The Chinese social media scene has, of course, seen huge growth alongside growing web penetration. 50.9 million new netizens were added in the country in 2012. There are now 597.6 million people (out of 1.34 billion in population) active on the nation’s top social network, QZone, which is made by local web giant Tencent). With 41 percent of the populace being under the age of 40, that’s good news for social networks – and social marketing – in China.

Before looking at the full report (embedded below), you might to see some of the standout slides. This is what they like to get up to online:

Focusing on social media in China, you’ll see that the Twitter-style Sina Weibo might be the most talked about, but it’s not the market leader as such:

As the full infographic report points out, Tencent’s QQ instant messenger app (which is linked to QZone) has the most number of active accounts, with a staggering 784 million active users per month. But then QQ numbers (aka: accounts) are about as ubiquitous here as phone numbers.

In terms of social marketing, it’s worth looking at the following few slides (starting at page 60 in the embed) to see the huge scope for engagement for brands in China, especially by having a presence on Sina Weibo:

You might also like to check out a different report about which overseas brands are doing the best social media marketing in China – and how they’re doing it.

Here’s the full presentation from We Are Social, which also ventures into mobile and e-commerce, in all its 200+ pages glory:

(Source: WeAreSocial SG)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Here’s the scene now, in which the red line shows the rate of penetration:

On the mobile side of things, China now has 420 million mobile web users. That’s not to be confused with the billion-plus total phone subscribers, or the 200 million who have signed up for 3G on their smartphones. CNNIC credit the popularity of e-commerce and social media like Sina Weibo for this area of growth.

With a still rising number of mobile web users, the red line now shows the percentage of total web users who are browsing on their phones:

309 million Weibo users

Another substantial stat is that, according to CNNIC, China now has 309 million microblog users on the Twitter-like services such as Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo. That means 54.7 percent of all netizens are active microblog users. Of those, 202 million access one of the many Weibo/Twitter clones on their phones.

Sina Weibo announced that it has 400 million registered users back in November of last year, but it didn’t indicate how many of those are active.

Other fun stats

• Desktop PC access dropped from 73.4 percent in 2011 to 70.6 percent in 2012

• Laptop usage dipped slightly, to 45.9 percent

• Mobile web usage went up from 69.3 to 74.5 percent from 2011 to 2012

• 20.5 hours is the average amount of time per week spent on the net. That’s up from 18.7 hours in 2011.

• There are 242 million e-commerce shoppers online. I’m surprised this is not higher. Also, daily deals customers amount to 83.21 million.

And here’s the gender and age balance on the web in China:

[Graphs from Sohu IT]

Like most of China’s big tech investment gurus, Xu Xiaoping is on Sina Weibo. And although fellow tech investor Kaifu Lee just spent some quality time with China’s State Security officers for advocating more press freedom in China, Xu Xiaoping has apparently not been intimidated into silence, and recently posted this call for greater internet freedom to his weibo account:

As China opens the door to development, it needs to reduce [the degree to which] the internet is closed off. For example, the extremely valuable international movie database imdb.com; at the very least that ought to be unblocked. China wants to be a big cultural power, but it is castrating itself by keeping the most valuable treasure trove of cultural information [the internet, in the global sense] locked outside. How can we do this [and still] accomplish the goals of the 18th Party Congress? I suggest that the relevant departments actively modify internet site-blocking measures, and unblock those sites that can be unblocked immediately.

Xu’s point here is one that has been made by many before (including me, although I stole it from Han Han), and has continued to fall upon deaf ears. It also touches on one of China’s most bizarre site blockages, the longstanding and thoroughly inexplicable blocking of imdb.com. Xu’s words aren’t extreme enough that he’s likely to get a tea invitation, but it’s still good to see that tech celebrities like Xu still aren’t afraid to speak out after the state’s attempt to intimidate a number of high profile weibo users.

(Xu Xiaoping’s Weibo)

A few days ago, I wrote about a rant posted to Sina Weibo and spotted by Global Voices Online in which an alleged member of Sina’s censorship team explains the company’s censorship in part by saying that Sina doesn’t want to censor weibo posts, but it is required to do so in order to follow Chinese law.

That’s a refrain we hear from Chinese internet companies over and over again when it comes to censorship: ‘we don’t want to be doing this, but these are the rules of the game in China, and we have to play along.’ That is true, of course; any company that didn’t censor its user-generated content for the domestic market would be on the fast track to being shut down. But it is also a little bit of a lie. If these companies only censor because it is mandated by the Chinese government, why are their services still censored for users abroad?

Just a few hours ago we noticed that Tencent’s WeChat app was censoring “sensitive” words, even in some cases where both the sender and the receiver of the “sensitive” message were outside China. But Tencent is not an outlier. Weibo posts from overseas that contain sensitive words still get deleted, and politically sensitive searches are blocked for everyone, not just users in China. If I search for “Tiananmen” on Baidu from the US, I still get heavily censored responses. Every other Chinese web platform I’m aware of operates the same way; all content is censored according to Chinese law, even content that is being sent and received outside of China’s borders.

The obvious reason for this is that most of these companies have their servers within China’s borders, so content sent and recieved outside China still has to go through China along the way. When I post a message to weibo, for example, even though I am in the United States, that message has to be transmitted to Sina’s servers in China, which ostensibly have to be scrubbed in accordance with government policy. The same general principle can be applied to most other Chinese internet companies, too. So they really are trapped after all then, right?

Well, yes and no. Technically and legally, it should be possible for any Chinese company to set up servers and offices outside of China, from which it should be free to serve uncensored content to users without violating Chinese law, so long as those users were not in China. In fact, they could probably do it legally from Hong Kong (despite being technically a part of China, Hong Kong has different internet laws). And while that certainly would require some effort, many of the companies we’re talking about (especially Tencent and Baidu) already have extensive operations abroad, and virtually everybody has an office in Hong Kong.

If these companies were truly committed to freedom of speech, they could establish overseas servers and a technical process such that when I post to weibo, for example, the post might need to be hidden from domestic users but could still be displayed to Sina’s international user base. Yet none of them (that I’m aware of) actually offer this sort of service. The reason is not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it isn’t a priority.

(Granted, the vast majority of these companies’ user bases are within mainland China. But most of them also have millions of users collectively in Hong Kong and overseas in Taiwan and among the immigrants and students living in the West.)

I do not mean to suggest that Chinese internet companies are evil, or that they benefit much from censoring content. The reality is that they all know their users would be happier with uncensored content, but even in a space where Chinese laws do not technically apply, un-censoring “sensitive” things could potentially damage their relationship with the government. It seems all of these companies have made the calculation that the potential benefits gained from un-censoring overseas content do not yet outweigh the risks such a move would generate for the company’s domestic operations and continued relations with the government.

That is each company’s choice to make, and I do not condemn them for making it. To a certain extent, I buy the Sina censor’s argument that a censored weibo (for example) is still better than none at all. At the same time, though, I think the narrative of victimhood many of these companies present to the outside world — that they are forced by the government to censor user-generated content — is misleading. Any Chinese internet company could offer completely uncensored service outside China’s borders if it so chose. Most have them have simply decided that doing so would be bad for business.

That, of course, is a perfectly fair decision for a business to make. But I wonder at what point that decision is going to harm these companies’ aspirations of overseas growth. How much faster would Sina Weibo grow in Taiwan if it was uncensored? How big could WeChat be if it didn’t have the stigma of political censorship draped around its neck like a dead albatross? For most overseas users, censorship of China-related topics is going to be a little-noticed minor annoyance, but it is absolutely terrible for marketing and branding. That is doubly true if the companies are also not transparent about what is allowed and what isn’t, which is often the case on Chinese content platforms.

Just as global internet companies adjust their practices in accordance with Chinese laws and customs when they enter the country, Chinese internet companies need to embrace a freer global internet culture as they move increasingly outside their home country if they want to have any hope of competing with other global brands. Most users are not going to choose a censored platform over an uncensored one voluntarily, so if Chinese internet companies really want to make waves abroad, they’ll have to do more than just complain about their legal obligation to censor. The level of transparency and free exchange many users demand may be illegal in China, but the barriers stopping Chinese companies from implementing a freer exchange for overseas users — both existing users and ones that they hope to attract in the future — are financial and (corporate) cultural, not legal barriers.

Yesterday we discovered that Sina Weibo appeared to have rolled out a partial English-language interface, a revelation that Sina later confirmed to us. That’s great, and it has been a long time coming, but it also raises an awful lot of questions?

Why is it so late? This is perhaps the biggest and most puzzling question. Weibo has been around for nearly three and a half years; why is the company just now getting around to an English version of the web site? If Sina was still squarely focused on China, it might make some sense — although there are many overseas brands that would love an English interface to help them market to China via weibo — but that clearly isn’t the case. Sina launched a fully localized version of the Weibo iPhone app in English all the way back in April of 2011, why has it taken the company so long to catch up on the web?

Why is the translation so awful? What we saw yesterday was not exactly great, or even complete, localization. A commenter on that story claims to have seen an internal version of the English interface that is far more advanced, but we know even from just looking at the Weibo iPhone app that Sina can localize much better than this. Just compare these two images; the top is the new “English interface” we’ve been seeing on the Weibo web site, and the bottom is the Sina Weibo iPhone app released in April, 2011:

Why is it so buggy? The current English interface is being rolled out for Southeast Asia, but no one, regardless of their location, seems to be able to get it to work properly. Clicking this link seems to help temporarily, but then the English often disappears when you click another link within the site. We assume this will be fixed one way or another soon, but even so, it’s a little unlike Sina to release something this sloppy-looking publicly.

Given that Sina hadn’t actually announced the English interface yet, we probably discovered it before the company was quite ready for it to go primetime, so that may suggest an answer to the latter two questions. But the first one — why did this take so long? — remains entirely opaque. Especially with Tencent’s WeChat snatching up domestic and overseas users, if I were Sina I’d be working hard to localize fast in English and a bundle of Southeast Asian languages to be sure I was keeping up with Tencent, especially outside China’s borders.

Obviously, I’m not Sina, and Sina doesn’t seem to be doing that. Why not? I really have no idea.

All the ladies who make up Sina Weibo’s 400 million registered users take note: Brad Pitt has just joined Weibo. The movie star’s verified account (here) saw its first post at noon today:

It is the truth. Yup, I’m coming…

In the space of just two hours since that post, Pitt’s first missive has had 8,000 comments and 20,000 reposts on Weibo. The front half of Brangelina has a whopping 73,000 fans already.

Although lots of celebrities from around the globe have joined Sina Weibo – mostly for social marketing purposes, Brad Pitt is perhaps the most controversial of all these. No, not because of his very awkward and stagey new ad for Chanel, but due to the fact that Brad Pitt is supposedly banned from ever entering China after his starring role in the 1997 movie Seven Years in Tibet, which was deemed by authorities in Beijing to have been too sympathetic to the exiled Dalai Lama.

It’s not clear why Pitt has joined Weibo at this specific time. It’s most likely driven by marketing concerns, either for an upcoming movie (IMDB indicates that Pitt has four movies in post-production at this time), or for a brand that he represents. Perhaps Chanel.

In the past we’ve seen Tom Cruise join Sina Weibo, followed a while later by the Harry Potter actress Emma Watson.

(Hat-tip to @MissXQ on Twitter for spotting this)

It has been a doubleplusgood year for Sina Weibo in terms of doubling its registered user count to 400 million. But, as China’s hottest Twiitery, real-time social medium, Weibo has once again been a political hot potato for Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) – and it’s still not turning a profit.

Just as with all media in China, Sina Weibo is heavily censored; but doing this in real-time, under the weight of hundreds of millions of users, and in a year of tumult, corruption and a leadership changeover, looked to be a huge challenge for the web portal company. In 2012, Weibo has seen some astonishing new censorship ploys, and, at one point of the year, every single Weibo user was very publicly punished by authorities. Looking back on it, it was all pretty insane.

Here are 10 stand-out cases, in chronological order, of Weibo – at the behest of authorities – gagging its users:

1. Weibo blocks searches for police chief’s defection [February] -

Sometimes, the seriousness of a news story is unintentionally revealed by the severity of the Weibo cover-up that it merits. In February of this year, that’s exactly what happened as the biggest scandal of the year – perhaps the biggest political scandal in China for decades – began to unfold with the defection of a top police chief to the US embassy in Chengdu. Eventually this story was made known to the Chinese public via state TV (and it led to the downfall of top politician Bo Xialai), but for a while it was only via Sina Weibo and some other social media that the news was flowing.

2. Coup rumors lead to ban on Weibo comments [March] -

And it’s precisely because state TV is so economical – and/or slow – with the truth that Sina Weibo is often full of rumors. That went to an extreme in March when Chinese web users got themselves into a frenzy over some photos of several military vehicles on the streets of Beijing. Those images somehow frothed up into coup rumors. That prompted an amazing and massive slam-down by authorities, who ordered Sina to ban all comments for four days while those rumors were cleaned up.

Those who spread rumors were called “lawbreakers” by Xinhua, the official state wire service. It was interesting that this happened despite recently implemented real-name registration requirements for users on Sina Weibo and all other Twitter-like social media – a move that was designed to clamp down on rumors and other online behavior that authorities deem to be unhealthy.

3. Escaped dissident puts Weibo on the run [May] -

After all that excitement, we had only to wait a few weeks before another astonishing story emerged that really put Sina’s censors on red alert. In this case, we observed that Weibo was not blocking posts being created that contained the newest-of-very-many ‘sensitive’ terms, but was instead not indexing them in Weibo’s own search engine (at s.weibo.com) so as to make it seem like less of a popular topic.

4. An old anniversary sees Weibo censorship jump the shark [May] -

By the time we reached May, Sina Weibo was so over-sensitive that it just seemed to have folded in on itself and then got sucked up its own ass.

5. Forget ‘terms and conditions’ – here’s what Weibo doesn’t want you to do [May] -

Soon, Sina had drawn up a ‘user contract’ that outlined what users could discuss on the social platform. It included points such as a ban on “calls for disruption of social order through illegal gatherings, formation of organizations, protests, demonstrations, mass gatherings, and assemblies.”

6. Loose lips sink Weibo users [May] -

To back up that user contract, Sina came up with a points-based system so as to encourage users to be good stewards of the web and not post rumors, or repost or comment upon harassing or dubious posts. While it might stop harmful or unsavory content from spreading, it was also a means to stop the spread of ‘sensitive’ news.

7. Weibo censors whole of Hong Kong as protests hit the streets [July] -

As we reached summer, the kind of thing that authorities don’t want being spread on Weibo was being spread on Weibo. And so all users based in Hong Kong were temporarily wiped off the map.

8. Truth no longer exists [July] -

A short while later, the Chinese internet began imitating The Onion as searches for the word “truth” were banned on Weibo.

9. ‘Free Weibo’ search unleashes the tweets that are too hot to handle [October] -

After such an infuriating year of Weibo obstruction, we were delighted to find FreeWeibo, which allows you to search for search terms that are blocked on the Sina Weibo site. It was clear all year that Weibo’s own search tool was more of a hindrance than a help – and that only got worse during the year…

10. Sina Weibo now delaying mentions of ‘sensitive’ words by 7 days [December] -

Confirming that Sina’s own social search engine is now largely useless, the web company began a surprising new tactic. Welcome to purgatory.

So that was an eventful year for “China’s Twitter.” But Weibo has so many features that it has become China’s Facebook as well. But despite all its many features – from brand pages to social gaming – Weibo is still defined by the power it has to amplify the voices of its Chinese users. That’s just the kind of voice that authorities would rather not have reverberating around the web, and so Weibo will be just as popular and problematic – and gagged – in 2013 as it was this year.

Sina Weibo is not making money. Not yet at least. But it may have found a way to do so, as we saw from last week’s Weibo social commerce test with Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. The manufacturer offered 50,000 MI2 phones to Weibo users, which they could order through tweeting. Payments are all done within Sina Weibo.

The result was staggering, with 1.3 million reservations made for those phones in just over five minutes. That was pretty shocking, and I chose it to be my pick for the top news story of last week. As I noted then, we have to give credit to Sina Weibo as a platform as it enabled Xiaomi to capitalize on such high demand. If Xiaomi could to fulfill each request, that would have meant $416 million!

I can’t help but feel that this is something that Twitter could try too. In fact Twitter has already tested something like this with its @EarlyBird experiment. That turned out to be a flop.

But the mechanism is different. @EarlyBird helped brands tweet out deals, but that’s about it. In contrast the Xiaomi-Weibo experiment last week was led and spread by Xiaomi. Folks who made a reservation also had to tweet their orders. And the result of this brand and fan push was a viral one.

Another key difference between Weibo and Twitter’s @EarlyBird is that payment is made through Weibo credits, thus providing a seamless process of ordering and paying for a Xiaomi MI2 entirely on Weibo.

I’m not sure if Sina Weibo will open this up for all brands, but given this Xiaomi success, my guess is that it probably will.

Users of Sina Weibo that mention things somewhat more controversial than cats or food might find their posts being delayed – by seven whole days. The Twitter-like Sina Weibo is supposed to be a real-time social platform, but that no longer applies to posts that mention ‘sensitive’ terms such as the names of China’s top leaders.

The huge delay was spotted by the FeiChangDao blog, which reckons that this Weibo purgatory came into effect earlier this month. At the time it was thought that Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) hugely popular social network – which now has over 400 million registered users – was relaxing its censorship after the recent leadership changeover. But now it appears that apparently sensitive terms are being monitored and then delayed, with users not informed that this is happening.

We’ve verified that the Weibo delay is real. Searching for the name of China’s upcoming new leader, Xi Jinping, on Sina Weibo’s own social search engine returns a mere three results from today and yesterday (try it here), all of which have been tagged as “hot Weibo topics” as if sanctioned by Sina itself. But then there’s a gap of precisely seven days – back to December 14th – before a flood of Weibo posts from regular users that mention the nation’s new leader. The Weibo search engine doesn’t give the usual warning that results have been removed due to relevant laws, which is the usual schtick that’s shown. Check this out:

This might be the new normal for Weibo, with political and other sensitive issues being forced into this bizarre time-warp. Of course, very controversial topics in China are still fully blocked on Weibo, as they are in all other media.

Sina investors might be concerned about how much extra pressure this self-censorship is putting on the web portal company. We’ve already looked at the eight key ways that Sina Weibo censors its users, and now it seems to have a new tactic with this political posting purgatory.

[Source: FeiChangDao]

Last year this Digital IQ report ranked three global companies as having “genius”-level marketing chops: Audi, Burberry, and BMW. This time around, four luxury brands get this accolade, led by cosmetics firm Estée Lauder (see the top ten table below).

So how is this calculated? To make the grade, brands need to do a lot of optimization, social outreach, and clever online marketing. For this report, the grading structure is 30 percent each for doing social media and localizing your site, and 20 percent each for digital marketing and mobile compatibility:

With all that factored in, here’s the top ten. Note that Audi once again appears as a “genius” brand when it comes to its online work in China:

As for the winner, the L2 Think Tank team notes that Estée Lauder has a web “presence on six social platforms [which] yields a social universe of more than 1.6 million fans.” Not the biggest number among these global companies, but the report states that its strategy is very social and well integrated.

Being social in China

Aside from things like search engine optimization for Baidu, luxury brands in China need to get themselves on the right social platforms. The report finds that social media adoption is up on every site, with Twitter-esque Sina Weibo still number one. A big winner this year is the video site Youku (NYSE:YOKU) where 60 percent of the analyzed brands in this report now have a social media presence:

That sure has been a long time building up, as we reported on brands like Cartier and Burberry opening brand video channels on Youku way back in the summer of 2011. Once again we see luxury automakers doing especially well, this time exploding their number of channel video views on Youku in 2012:

Of course, there are new platforms emerging, and brands need to be aware of reaching out via the messaging app WeChat (as we’ve seen Starbucks do so well this year), or on the Pinterest-like Meilishuo. Plus, the Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) owned video site iQiyi is aiming to challenge Youku for classy brand video channels, so that outlet needs to be considered as well.

Keeping the conversation flowing on Sina Weibo

Car makers again make a strong showing on China’s most important social service – Sina Weibo. Cadillac is top in terms of fans/followers on Weibo in this luxury segment, and fashion labels Dior and Coach are playing catch-up this year:

For more information about these brands and their strategies, catch the full report here. Plus, L2 has made a nice video overview that runs to three minutes:

(Mobile readers: Digital IQ Index®: China 2012 from L2 Think Tank, on Vimeo).

Opera has revealed a report today regarding the browsing habits of its 194 million Opera Mini users in October. The data is particularly interesting for top social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Here are some of the key stats about Asia-based users of the mobile web browser:

Tiny Macau is Big on Facebook

With 90.59 percent of all Opera Mini users in Macau visiting Facebook at least once a month, Macau has become the number one country in the world in terms of unique users percentage for Facebook. The only other Asian country making it into the top ten is Brunei, in 10th place with 82.23 percent.

Japan <3 Twitter

When it comes to Twitter, Japan, Indonesia, and Brunei are amongst the top ten countries for the number of unique users percentage. Japan is second with 14.94 percent, Indonesia is sixth with 12.96 percent, and Brunei is eighth with 12.40 percent.

Who Loves Weibo?

Unsurprisingly, using the same criteria for Weibo, China tops the chart, with Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia in various spots in the top ten. Though the result says that only six percent of Chinese users visit Weibo at least once a month. That doesn’t sound right to us – but perhaps they’re all using the Weibo app, and not accessing the service from Opera’s web browser.

Social Savants

In terms of unique total users for Facebook and Twitter, Indonesia and India take the first and second spots respectively for both social media websites.

To read the full report, you can see it here.

Sina Weibo, China’s hottest Twitter clone, already has lots of spin-off features. And this week it has one more in the shape of Wei Renmai (‘Weibo Connections’ might be a good way to translate it), which is a business social network that challenges LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) in the country.

Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) newest attempt at monetizing Weibo is currently in invite-only beta mode, and can be found at renmai.weibo.com. Inside, the new service is essentially just a partitioned variation of the main Weibo service, with all the usual features like follows, comments, retweets, and putting people into circles. Perhaps the most powerful part of the new Wei Renmai is the search engine up top, which lets you do some serious business networking by searching for ‘people’, ‘companies’ or the more mysterious ‘opportunities’. See the main feed screenshot here, courtesy of Tech2IPO:

The Sina Wei Renmai launch will be bad news for LinkedIn in China, as well as for other professional networks such as Tianji, Ushi, and the startup Guanxi.me.

Sina Weibo recently passed 400 million users, so all those are potential converts to Wei Renmai with just a few steps worth of additional information.

The new service launches with some promising tools on offer, such as a map of mutual contacts among friends on Wei Renmai, and that aforementioned ‘opportunities’ section sounds like a great way for entrepreneurs to connect with people who are going in the same direction. All in all, Sina’s latest effort looks really promising.

[Source: Tech2IPO - article in Chinese]

It seems Alibaba’s plan to buy a 15 to 20 percent stake of Sina Weibo (which just hit 400 million user accounts) has hit a little snag: no one can agree on a price. Morning Whistle, citing an “industry insider,” says that talks between the two companies have stalled because the Weibo team wants more money than Alibaba is willing to pay.

Although any story coming from the anonymous and vague “industry insider” should be taken with several dump trucks full of salt, this particular story would not be surprising if true. Sina has long felt that Weibo is one of its most valuable properties, but its financials have, as yet, failed to live up to the hype. Things are improving — weibo advertising revenue doubled during Q3 — but I suspect that what may be happening in the boardroom is that Alibaba is offering a price based on what is actually on the books, and Sina is demanding a higher price that reflects their beliefs about how valuable the service will be when they finally figure out how to monetize it properly.

I suppose we’ll have to wait and see whether these reports are even accurate, but it’s hard to see why Alibaba is even bothering. The company certainly doesn’t need the money, and I’m not at all clear on why a highly profitable e-commerce company would want to put its hands into the highly volatile, politically sensitive, and thus-far-not-that-profitable microblogging sector.

Anyway, here’s hoping the companies can work it out in the end so that they’ll have a chance to adopt the lovely logo I’ve designed for them (above).

[via Morning Whistle]

Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has just released an interesting report filled with facts and stats about users of its Sina Weibo service, which passed 400 million registered users earlier today. Combing through the report, we see it has lots of Weibo user demographic facts that would be super useful for brands and marketers, so we’ve picked eight of the best for this list.

1. Gender and Age

Weibo users are split evenly along gender lines, with 180 million each. That doesn’t add up to Sina’s newest 400 million figure, so it seems the data was compiled a few months ago. Anyway, users are mostly people born after 1980, making it a very young user-base. The biggest group is those born between 1980 and 1989 – who are China’s first boomers and netizens. Those born in 1990 or thereafter are the ones to watch, and the group that might require a change of marketing strategy:

2. Education Levels

As well as being quite young, Weibo users are also skewed towards those we are well-educated, with the majority having a university degree or higher. Indeed, 30 percent of current Weibo users are current university students, making them the biggest single professional user-group. The next largest subset is white-collar workers, representing 19.6 percent:

3. Monthly Income and Spending Levels

The chart on the left relates to monthly disposable income among Weibo users, while the blue chart relates to income. Clearly, the bulk of users say that they spend 1,000 RMB to 2,999 RMB ($159 to $478) per month. Tallied with the afore-mentioned preponderance of white-collar and mid-level office workers (in #2) on the social site, there’s a fairly sizable chunk of income set aside for spending each month:

4. Spending Power

All of Sina Weibo’s users have an annual theoretical spending power of RMB 16 trillion ($2.55 trillion), which equates to the GDP of Italy. OK, so Chinese tend to be conservative with spending – prefering to save for college funds and to counterbalance a lack of a social safety net – so this one is not so meaningful for brands. Instead it’d be better to look at education and income levels (see #2 and #3) and carefully cross-reference that with regional distribution (see #5). Nonetheless, this is a fun factoid:

5. Where are Weibo Users?

Weibo users are – as the above stats give a clue – scattered across China’s richer coastal areas and hi-tech manufacturing hubs. On the heat map, Guangdong stands out in red, with the most Weibo users of all, then Jiangsu province and Beijing municipality. All three provinces have a similar weight of middle-class and wealthy inhabitants, and its interesting that they share a strong Weibo user-base as well:

6. PCs, TVs, Mobile

Basically, this is what media Weibo users are interested in, compared with folks on Facebook or Twitter. Note the greater love for mobile usage in China:

7. Weibo Usage on PCs, Mobile

For now, Weibo users spend more time accessing the service on their PCs – an average of 5.8 hours per day for a user. On a mobile, that’s down to 3.9 hours. Both stats, Sina claims, are higher than for either Facebook or Twitter:

8. Ad Blockers?

Lastly, how receptive are Weibo users to adverts? Sina claims that the majority find ads “quite useful” – a greater number than those who dislike ads:

Check the the full report for further details (and to see specifics of its methodology), though note that it’s all in Chinese. Get it from Sina Weibo’s official reports page (login required), or we’ve put it up here for your convenience.

Chinese web portal Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has released its third quarter financials and revealed that its top social hit, the Twitter-esque Sina Weibo, has now surpassed 400 million registered users. Chairman and CEO Charles Chao credited the summer’s biggest sporting event for the boost: “The London 2012 Olympic Games could very well be termed in China as the ‘social’ Olympics, pushing Weibo.com’s daily active users to a new record.” Last quarter, Sina did say that Weibo had 36.5 million average daily active users, but this time there were no specifics on this.

Aside from that bit of excitement, it’s still clear that Weibo is not helping Sina bring in much in the way of profit. On net revenues for this quarter of $152.4 million, Sina saw net income of $9.9 million. On the plus side, non-GAAP net revenues of $147.7 million (up 18 percent on same time last year) were at the top end of analysts’ expectations.

But Sina predicts lower non-GAAP net revenues for Q4 of “between $132 million and $136 million.” On the markets on Thursday, $SINA fell sharply in the morning after seeing these financials, before recovering to be up slightly in the day’s trading. It now stands at $53.10 per share.

I really wonder how much censorship costs Sina, and how they manage to bury it in their financial reports. As China’s top social media service, it’s under huge pressure from authorities to implement all the same monitoring and censorship as any media company – but Sina must do it in real-time with tens of millions (or sometimes hundreds of millions) of daily active users.

Sina Weibo topped 300 million users in May of this year, and surpassed 200 million back in August of 2011.

One example of a government weibo account: the Ningbo police’s official page

We all know Sina Weibo has a massive number of users, and over the past year as it has become clear to everyone that this really is a new sphere for public discussion and not just a passing fad, government bureaus have rushed to make their presence known on the social networking service. Police departments were among the first adopters, and now according to a recent report released by Sina, there are 50,947 different government entities with weibo accounts. That number is as of late September, though, so the actual number now is likely higher.

Although the number shows there is still a ways left to go before China’s bureaucracy has fully joined the information age, it also reveals things have been improving at breakneck speed. Indeed, the number of government weibo accounts has more than doubled since December of last year.

As of September, 33,132 of government weibo accounts represented government organs while 17,815 represented specific government officials. Departments and officials from every province are represented, but unsurprisingly the places with the most accounts are more developed areas like Beijing, Jiangsu, and Guangzhou. Public security, public health, and tourism departments are (unsurprisingly) among the most likely to have Weibo accounts.

It’s clear there is still plenty of room for growth, but it’s good to see local governments embracing communication and jumping onto weibo to interact with their constituents.

[Beijing Times via Sina Tech, Image source]

Austrian startup RealLifeConnect is adding support for China’s Sina Weibo to its social media check-in stations. To back that up, RealLifeConnect is launching in China, pushing its RFID/NFC-equipped hardware to allow people to shout out to Weibo from these terminals, either from events, exhibitions, or stores.

The idea behind RealLifeConnect is that it links real-world spaces with digital networks, forming what CEO Michael Ionita-Ganea calls “offline social media.” The two other founders are Christoph Wagner (CFO), and Juergen Hoebarth (CVO). Juergen tells us that its Asia operations are run out of Hong Kong, and that the company is now working with partners in China to develop “solutions for certain consumer brands” – to be revealed at a later date. With Sina Weibo now added to the line-up, the startup can tout access to the Twitter-like Chinese site and its 300+ million registered users.

RealLifeConnect doesn’t rely on people using their own phones, since NFC uptake in smartphones has been lackluster. Instead, says Juergen, “We are doing it with RFID/NFC cards or tokens – they have an RFID/NFC chip inside which is linked up with your Weibo profile during the registration process” (pictured below). The chips inside these things are cheap, so they’ll be given to folks for free by brands or event organizers. And then, if you opt to interact with one of the stations, you’ll be able to quickly and seamlessly do things like check-in to an event or store on Weibo, or post about your experience there. In theory, this is a way for brands to get more people posting about them on Weibo, bolstering their social media marketing efforts.

As for the idea’s genesis, Juergen explains:

The RealLifeConnect cards and token, equipped with NFC and RFID tags. Click to enlarge.

The initial seed to linking up the physical world with the digital one and RealLifeConnect was born back in summer 2010 during a roadtrip to a conference between me and Michael Ionita. This was just a few days after Facebook released Facebook places which allows users to check-in at venues. We were brainstorming ideas and came to the conclusion sooner or later we will check in to all things around us not only places and visioned about what would be possible with this.

Michael was at this time already involved and made a major contribution with his knowledge around Facebook’s API and its possibilities. Both me and Michael presented the concept to people around us which are working in the advertising and social media space, and we recognised a demand for a easy to use one shop stop solution for a service like this which resulted into incorporating RealLifeConnect finally in May 2011 where we already started to do the first smaller projects as test pilots before going fully operation with our platform in autumn 2011 supporting social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Linkedin.

Variations of its social media check-in stations can do other things like transferring files or contact details via NFC or RFID. The hardware can be rented or bought, depending on how long the store or event wants to have the installation.

RealLifeConnect says it has seen 50 successful cases of its kit in action across five continents in just the past 10 months. Right now it’s hiring and scaling globally, and attracted some useful seed funding of $120,000 at the end of 2011.

Here’s a three-minute demo video mixed in with scenes from RealLifeConnect’s recent China launch:

Image via Jason Lee/Reuters

Social media in China — especially weibo — is huge, and much has been said about its ability to replace or at least augment traditional media. In yesterday’s China Youth Daily, Cao Lin wrote a piece about social media that I think is worth exploring further, even though I don’t personally agree with it.

Cao begins by sharing a saying that has been passed around on weibo, explaining how influential a “media outlet” you are based on how many followers you have on weibo:

When you have more than 100 followers, you’re a company newsletter. When you have more than a 1,000, you’re a bulletin board. When you have more than 10,000, you’re a magazine. When you have more than 100,000, you’re a city newspaper. When you have more than 1,000,000, you’re a TV station. When you have more than 10,000,000, you’re a provincial satellite station. When you have more than 100,000,000, you’re CCTV.

Sounds pretty cool, right? But, Cao writes,

I must throw cold water on this idea; “self-media” is a concept that has been greatly exaggerated. No matter how omnipotent weibo is, how powerful the internet is, or how active social networks are, personal accounts are still just a space for interpersonal communication, and they can’t serve as a kind of media.

Cao argues that while weibo is great for distributing information, the veracity of that information is ultimately usually confirmed by traditional print and TV media outlets, not by weibo users. Here, I tend to agree with Cao, although there are many examples of information transmitted via weibo that comes along with enough confirmation to satisfy most weibo users (generally in the form of photos). Moreover, in China’s atmosphere of controlled media reporting, there are instances when the average weibo user probably considers weibo “reporters” more reliable than any traditional media outlets simply because the collective output of weibo is far too big to be as tightly controlled as the output of official media.

But then Cao goes on to argue that social media can’t be real media because while actress Yao Chen’s weibo account is popular, nobody is going to load her weibo to find the answers to questions like “Did Mo Yan win a Nobel Prize?” This is a bit of a red herring; certainly no one would expect Yao Chen to be a great source for that kind of question, but Cao is fooling himself if he thinks that thousands of weibo users don’t load their weibo accounts and search for the answers to questions like that every day.

“Anyone can transmit information,” Cao writes, “but to become ‘media’ you must collect, confirm, and transmit information and win the trust of the public.” Indeed, but aren’t those things weibo users can also do? Certainly, the average weibo rumor hasn’t been properly reported by any of the people passing it along. But there are plenty of weibo users, and users of other kinds of Chinese social media, that collect information, conduct interviews, and confirm stories before posting them (see, for example, Youku’s paike community). And as far as trust goes, there are certainly some social media power users whose word is considered quite trustworthy, just as there are some traditional media outlets who are not considered trustworthy at all (ahem).

Cao’s argument ultimately boils down to a kind of elitism — I can report the news because I have training and a newspaper; you can’t because you just have the internet. Social media like weibo is just a platform for entertainment, interaction, and scattered [information]; it has no power to produce news,” he writes. And while it’s undeniable that journalistic training of one sort or another helps produce more professional reporting, the basics of reporting — discovering, confirming, and sharing a story — are something that anyone can do if they set their mind to it.

This is not to say that social media will replace traditional media; that’s obviously not the case and Cao is right to criticize those weibo users who expect to replace newspapers. Nor is it true that the average information on weibo is as reliable as what’s in Southern Weekend. But weibo and other social media are simply publication platforms; they are just as capable of distributing real reporting as any other platform. Similarly, print publications and television are also just platforms, and just as capable of distributing crap journalism as weibo or any other internet technology.

Most weibo users aren’t any kind of media, and they’re not trying to be. But to suggest that no one on weibo — including the many professional reporters who post exclusive content there — is doing real reporting just because Yao Chen isn’t a great source for political news is ridiculous. And to suggest that the platform itself isn’t suited to being “real” media simply doesn’t make sense. Any platform that allows you to type words and share them with others can be a ‘media outlet’ of sorts with the right person doing the typing.

The average weibo user may not be a journalist, but there are journalists on weibo. Moreover, the intense speed of weibo makes it a good counterpoint to more traditional media platforms by allowing it to propagate stories too “sensitive” to ever see the front page of a mainstream paper. Sure, it can be tough to sift the truth from the rumors and the outright falsehoods. But if you follow the right people, weibo can be an excellent source of information and it’s just as much a media platform as anything else.

That’s my take, anyway. Cao obviously doesn’t agree, and perhaps neither do you. Can social media sites also serve as platforms for journalism, or are newspapers and tv stations the only real “media” out there?

“Weibo” is the generic term for microblogging in Chinese – and when somebody utters the word, it’s usually in relation to the hottest of China’s Twitter clones, Sina Weibo. On occasions, it’s referring to Tencent Weibo. But rarely is the individual actually talking about Netease Weibo. Nonetheless, the Netease (NASDAQ:NTES) social service has exceeded 260 million registered users, according to numbers issued by the company.

Netease Weibo remains the third-largest of the numerous microblogging services in China. The biggest in terms of registered user numbers is actually Tencent Weibo, with an eye-watering 469 million at 2012 Q2. Sina Weibo is the one that has all the buzz – and much of the social marketing focus of brands – and it had 368 million at the halfway point of this year, with 36.5 million average daily active users. Netease Weibo did not reveal how many of its users are active on a daily or monthly basis.

Netease, perhaps best known in China for its gaming platform, reckons that the boost in numbers is due to its Weibo service adding new content channels and a refreshed UI. But the growing numbers equally could just come from people with a Netease account trying it out and then rarely using it.

Launched in March 2010, Netease Weibo is also up against similar social sites from other major web portal companies in China, such as Sohu Weibo. Indeed, in China’s ever competitive tech scene, there are even some state-run microblogging sites, such as People’s Weibo, which is run by People’s Daily Online (SHA:603000). Despite Netease Weibo catching up with Sina Weibo in terms of user numbers, there’s little danger of Sina losing its crown of being “China’s Twitter” anytime soon.

[Sources: Netease Tech, via Techweb - articles in Chinese]

HaoYouMeiShi (“mei shi” means “good food” in Chinese) is a Beijing-based startup that aspires to serve up fresh dining recommendations. Unlike some traditional food recommendation services that are already on the market, HYMS is making good use of China’s largest micro-blogging site, Sina Weibo, to deliver better recommendations for users.

And so HaoYouMeiShi (HYMS) collates users’ dining experience on Weibo through data mining and restructures the results into a list of recommendations. Weibo, of course, has many users sharing their dining experience and choice of restaurants. The ranking of the restaurants and meals is also determined by the users’ sentiments and comments on the microblog.

I gave the app a test run, and it’s pretty easy to navigate. But most importantly, the quality of the restaurants looks good. I suppose this is because the pool of Weibo users from which it is generating those recommendations is really huge, thanks to its 300+ million registered users.

This is another example of social media bringing a new dimension to the online to offline (O2O) market as we continue to see startups engaging this concept.

Currently there are quite a few renowned food-recommendation services in this market like Shi Shen Yao Yao or Dianping. Or you could use some fun foodie app like Burpple and look at the user-submitted photos. It will be interesting to see how HYMS will compete against the big players with its Weibo data crawling algorithm. The app was launched one week ago and it’s available for download on iOS.

HootSuite and its owl have flown into China, adding support for the country’s hottest Twitter-like service, Sina Weibo, in its social media dashboard. This could be of great use to many brands who need to use Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) wildly popular Weibo for doing social marketing to Chinese consumers, as Sina Weibo still only has Chinese-language support on its site.

Along with the Sina Weibo rollout, HootSuite now also has support for traditional Chinese, as used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and among many overseas Chinese. Hootsuite has been blocked in China for some time (it was a useful workaround for using Twitter, which got blocked way earlier, until Net Nanny slapped it down), but it doesn’t really matter as local Weibo users and Chinese companies are not the target of this. The Weibo support is instead aimed at HootSuite’s paying customers, especially for its enterprise packages, which include major brands like Seagate and Pepsi.

HootSuite announced this on its blog yesterday, as spotted by TheNextWeb, and describe it as a mere “first step” into the Chinese market – next up is a simplified Chinese localization of the site (which is currently being crowdsourced). There’s now also a HootSuite Chinese presence on both Twitter and Weibo (see here and here) so that clients and users can better interact with the HootSuite team.

The Weibo integration extends to all the usual HootSuite features, such as posting text and images, Weibo searches, and analytics so that brands can better monitor how their posts are going down with Chinese consumers. We’ve seen something similar come already from an Australian startup with its Hubblr site, which additionally supports China’s facebook-esque Renren site.

Canada-based HootSuite has been busy in the region recently, adding a version for Indonesian a couple of months ago.

[Source: HootSuite blog (in Chinese); via TNW]

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

So OK, big deal, it’s not exactly hard to find clones like this on the Chinese web! But I was a little intrigued when I noticed that images work slightly differently on Godpark than they do on Weibo. I also noticed that Godpark offered integration with Tencent and Sina Weibo, as well as other Chinese social networks. That seemed odd for a copycat product.

It turns out that Godpark is just one implementation of pre-built microblogging solution called JiShiGou. JiShiGou is a for-sale weibo solution that seems to be targeted mostly at corporations. At first I was pretty skeptical about this, but the more I thought about it, the more it makes sense. It’s basically Sina Weibo with a slightly different paint job but — here’s the important bit — it’s hosted on your servers. That could be hugely important for companies that want to leverage microblogging technology in their workflows (god, I hate myself for typing that phrase) but aren’t comfortable with using the “groups” feature on Sina Weibo because private information about their company would have to be stored on Sina’s servers.

So what does it cost to buy your own private weibo clone? It depends on the package. You can get the basic web package for just 10,000 RMB ($1,587), but numerous add-ons are also available, from iPhone/iPad and Android phone and tablet apps ($2,380 for iOS apps and $1,587 for Android apps) to text messaging support ($126 per 10,000 texts). With just a few thousand dollars, it seems, you can buy your own microblogging system, complete with apps, texting support, and even auto-backups, updates, and training if you go for the higher-end packages.

I’m still not sure what Godpark is trying to do, but JiShiGou is an interesting if decidedly uncreative solution to the problem of how corporations can use microblogging technology while controlling the system themselves to make sure their data remains safe. JiShiGou is definitely a Sina Weibo clone, but a clone might be just what some companies are looking for.

The show is set during the rise of weibo platforms in China (around 2010) and tells the entirely fictional story of a trade war between two competing weibo companies. If you’re thinking that sounds like a thinly-veiled story about Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, it unfortunately isn’t. It’s a good versus evil story of the hip yuppies versus the evil older businessman, and while the show still has a lot of episodes left to go, I have a few guesses as to who is going to win this microblog war and get the pretty girl at the end. If there are any real-world parallels, I didn’t notice them in the bits of the show I watched.

"We must create a new social networking site."

If the first episode is any indication, the show is a pretty typical Chinese drama down to the super-cheesy love story, the completely dubbed dialogue, and the ridiculous special effects (check out the car crash that appears in the opening credits). I’ll be honest; I absolutely hated it, but my tolerance for Chinese TV drama is pretty low. I’m not sure whether the show will be able to find a big audience in China, but if nothing else the show’s appearance is an indication that weibo is now a fully mainstream phenomenon, and big enough that TV producers think they can use the concept to sell TV programming.

(I’m not sure that the concept of microblogging is going to be cool enough to save this show, though. I watched part of the first episode with my wife, who has a much higher Chinese drama tolerance than I do, but she offered the following four words in review of Micro-blog Master: “fake,” “boring,” “stupid,” and “bullshit.”)

[Beijing Evening News via Sina Tech]

Sina Weibo’s advertising department has just announced on Weibo that it is currently testing a new ad product, called “Fans Headlines.”

Fans Headlines ensures that the promoted message will be shown at the top portion of the Twitter-like Weibo stream to all of the advertiser’s fans. The promoted message will only be shown once within 24 hours – a relief to folks who hate ads. Once the promoted message is seen, it will move down the stream just like any other Weibo message.

Companies using the Fans Headlines ad product will be charged on a cost-per-fan impressions basis. Currently, there are already some companies using the new product as beta testers. I’m pretty sure this won’t be the last ad product introduced by Sina Weibo, which last week silently dropped the beta tag from its logo, probably signalling that its product and users have matured – and the social network is now ready to go full throttle on monetization.

[Via friends at Techweb]

Sina CEO Charles Chao

Chinese internet company Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has just released its second-quarter financial report, with net revenues up 11 percent to 131.6 million. The company’s advertising revenues are up 12 percent over the previous year, despite a difficult advertising market in China.

Sina’s bright spot is — as you might expect — its Weibo microblogging service, which it says has strong growth even with a ‘tightened regulatory environment.’ CEO Charles Chao ran down some key metrics from Weibo in their earnings call:

The total number of registered accounts for Weibo reached 368 million at end of June, up 13.6 percent from 324 million at the end of March. More importantly, the average number of daily active users […] grew by 21 percent from the month of March to the month of June and […] reached 36.5 million. The average number of daily active users as a percentage for the registered account increased to 10 percent in the month of June, as compared to 9 percent in the month of March, a strong indication of increased user activeness for Weibo platform. Among the daily active users, 69 percent used the mobile terminals to access the Weibo in the month of June, as compared to 64 percent in the month of March. [bold is mine]

Regarding the mobile vs PC breakdown of users, he says that about 69 percent access via mobile, with 30 percent of those overlapping onto PC (i.e. 40 percent are ‘pure mobile’). And as we pointed out last week, Sina is certainly nervous about how to successfully monetize mobile users.

Chao also noted on the call that Sina Weibo’s number of enterprise accounts sits at about 200,000 currently.

The company is expecting a third quarter boost as a result of the London Olympics and increased adoption of Weibo advertising. It also says that there are plans to launch Weibo version 5 in that quarter as well, which will bring ‘significant changes’ to profile pages as well as give users the ability to share with closed circles privately, possibly resembling Google Plus in that function.

But Sina is still postured for more of a marathon with Weibo than a sprint, saying that monetization ‘will largely dependent on the scale of its user platform,’ and so it will continue to invest in growing its users and improving user experience.

Aside from all that news to read, Tencent played host to Olympics TV streams, and lots of social media talk about the Games on its QQ forums and Twitter-like Tencent Weibo. But, as we reported earlier this week, rival microblog service Sina Weibo won the hypothetical gold for getting more traffic during the event.

Nonetheless, Tencent’s users across all its services actually won out. Of all those, 77 percent of posts were made from a PC, with just 23 percent from a mobile. The most talked-about sportsperson during the Games was Kobe Bryant, betraying the Chinese obsession with basketball. Surprisingly, no Chinese athletes made it onto the most-discussed list. One oddball entry is South Korean swimmer Pu Taihuan, who was up against local hero Sun Yang in the 1500m freestyle swimming. Though Sun won the gold, a bit of a beef between the two men propelled Pu to social media notoriety for a while.

One consolation for Tencent in its rivalry with the Sina Weibo service is that the former has a greater number of sports stars among its verified users. Here’s the whole infographic:

For more fun graphics like this, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Weibo Reach offers a “regular version” and an “advanced version.” The regular version is free; the advanced version is not yet available but presumably will cost a little money in return for more advanced services. After trying out the regular version, though, I have to say I’m pretty damn impressed.

Signing up was a snap; all I had to do was click a button, authorize the Weibo Reach app, and then we were off to the races. I don’t have a lot of followers on weibo, but I picked a recent post I made about the trailer for my documentary film (shameless plug!) to see how that post had been spread. As you can see from the image below, the results were pretty damn thorough!

As you can see, Weibo Reach arranges everything into a neat-looking infographic of sorts, which contains all kinds of data. I can see, visually, how my tweet was spread. I can see a demographic breakdown of the people who spread it, and a list of which users were the most influential in moving my tweet forward. I can see breakdowns of the geographical locations of my re-tweeters, the overall sentiment of discussion about my tweet, the rate of real users to adbots, and even more. If this is the regular version, I expect the advanced version of Weibo Reach is going to be pretty damn impressive.

Of course, my uninfluential tweeting and low follower counts don’t lend themselves to any particularly cool visuals. But it’s worth noting that when Weibo Reach tracks tweets that are retweeted and discussed much more often than mine, the results can look pretty awesome:

If you’re a weibo user, it’s definitely worth checking out Weibo Reach just for kicks, and if you’re a corporate user, you should be looking at this service very carefully. Even the regular version offers significant value, and the advanced version sounds promising.

It’s great to see that China is finally starting to crank out really cool (and well-designed) apps and services for weibo (see also Weibo Bridge, which I talked about last week). Weibo Reach is really impressive, and I hope very much that it catches on!

Leveraging on the Sina Weibo API, TaoU is a China-based startup that aims to help users find the right connections and content on your microblog.

Using it is as simple as allowing TaoU to connect to your Sina Weibo account. Once done, you can see how your friends perceive you based on keywords, who your closest weibo friends are, and also what your professional network on Sina Weibo looks like.

As you can see in the screenshot below, a lot of my connections are entrepreneurs. Clicking on the Entrepreneur (创始人) bar will allow me to find out what some of my entrepreneur friends have been weibo-ing about.

TaoU also allows you to find content based on interests, which could be anything from education to travel. Interestingly, it also has a bar that filters all the job opportunities people offer via Sina Weibo, making search easy for job seekers.

The application, in summary, really allows busy folks to get all the right weibo content on one page, minimizing the chance that you will miss any of it. So far, the app has attracted over 220,000 users and should attract more. You should give it a try too.

As everyone knows, PC use in China is dropping as it’s replaced by mobile. Wang says that in terms of Weibo, PC use has dropped 13 percent over the past year even as mobile use has risen by 14 percent. This means that now 52 percent of Sina Weibo users are accessing the site from a mobile client, as compared to just 32 percent accessing from PCs.

Those numbers shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone, but they have become sort of a big problem for Sina. Monetizing weibo with advertisements has proven difficult enough on the website, but monetizing the mobile app is even harder. And as Sina struggles to make money from weibo, the move to mobile also threatens some of its other core businesses, like its portal site. Wang points out that Sina Mobile has about one-third as many users as Weibo’s mobile app. That means something has been lost in the transition between the regular web and the mobile web. The problem, as Wang puts it, is that Sina’s portal was the “entrance” to the internet for many users on traditional PC connections. But in the mobile world of differentiated apps and platforms, portal sites aren’t the entrance anymore.

How can we become the ‘entrance’ to the mobile internet — we’re all bewildered by that, and we’re anxious or perhaps even frightened by it. If we can’t become that ‘entrance’ then the value of our business and our market share will not change [i.e., improve] significantly.

It’s an important question for Sina, and one the company has yet to find an answer to.

In the course of discussing Weibo, Wang also shared some interesting statistics about Weibo users. Android users now outnumber iPhone users (and all other phone users), for example. Among Android handsets used to access Sina Weibo, Samsung handsets are the most prevalent. Perhaps more surprisingly, Symbian users still outnumber iPad users, although that trend is presumably in the process of reversing itself. Most mobile users (60 percent) are China Mobile subscribers, and that includes iPhone users (more than 50 percent of them). It’s no surprise, then, that most mobile weibo users are still connecting to the service via wifi and 2G connections rather than 3G.

[Sohu IT via iMeiGu via Sinocism]

The official Weibo page of the US Consulate in Shanghai has met its end, today being blocked by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) with no explanation. Formerly on this page, the US Consulate joins the ranks of the New York Times and the Bloomberg accounts in all being blocked in recent weeks.

Instead the US Consulate has taken to a rival microblog service, Tencent’s (HKG:0700) Weibo, and is posting there instead. It was actually set up before today. See it here. The Tencent account is now that consulate’s primary outreach mode on the web. It has far fewer than the half million and more fans that were on its Sina Weibo page, with 102,000 at present. Other US Consulate pages remain online.

Its most recent post at 5pm local time today on Tencent Weibo is about the closure of its Sina Weibo account:

This morning we discovered that Consulate Shanghai’s official Shanghai page was not accessible. We are working to find out why, and we plan to resume normal operations as soon as possible.

It’s not known what has caused the apparent ban on that page. In such instances, it’s often the case that a tweet has crossed the line in terms of what can be discussed – especially in the realm of politics – and such tweets, or the entire microblogging accounts, will be deleted. Although the US Consulate has pointedly fled to a rival social media service, no one can say for sure if Sina is really the source of the censorship or if it’s acting on the instructions of authorities to avoid certain sensitive words being posted. Sina Weibo, being the hotter and more active of the two major Twitter-like services, is the one that sees the most high-profile censorship-related issues. Like this, this, this, this, this, or this. And there are plenty more examples. But Tencent Weibo, too, has content censors with fingers poised over the delete key.

Responding to the US Consulate’s banishment from Sina Weibo, the prominent China-born blogger Isaac Mao said:

I’m seeing the demise of Sina Weibo once all foreign consulates in China migrate their social media channel to Sina’s competitors. Just do it.

He himself has boycotted Sina Weibo in recent weeks, and has moved to using Tencent’s service instead. Meanwhile, Beijing-based investor and analyst Bill Bishop said:

Sina has now shut weibo accounts of Bloomberg, new York times & us government. And yet they enjoy all the benefits of the us capital markets

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) July 12, 2012

One world, two internets. And china’s overseas soft power push will fail as long as it maintains its repressive Internet policies

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) July 12, 2012

At what point do major us mutual funds decide they shouldnt hold $Sina because of its egregious censorship of us orgs? twitter.com/niubi/status/2…

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) July 12, 2012

[Old screenshot source: BeijingShots]

Photo: interbrand.com

Here’s a fascinating and detailed report on how luxury brands use social media in China, created by the good folks at CIC (which got acquired earlier this year).

The report details interesting insights into how luxury brands are using social media and online platforms, such as Weibo, BBS, and e-commerce channels, to target users. It also includes a comparison of the cultures and habits between westerners and Chinese in terms of their purchasing behavior.

And guess who did best on Weibo in China? Scroll down to page 36 and you will see that Burberry is doing a great job, at least based on the number of retweets and comments generated from January to May in 2011. Admittedly, the results are a little old but it does at least give a snapshot of how well luxury brands were doing last year. L2ThinkTank’s report last year also confirmed that Burberry is doing a good job in China.

An analysis by CIC revealed that Burberry has done very little in the way of product introductions (see page 37). Rather it focuses mainly on producing content centered around celebrities, designers, and fashion events. That’s a good point to take note of. Most netizens don’t like getting blasted by product info. It’s annoying.

You can catch the full report embedded below. And in case you’re also a fan of infographics, check out China’s “Social Media Landscape” infographic for 2012 that was also made by CIC.

The Hubblr dashboard now support's China's Renren (pictured) as well as Sina Weibo.

Last winter we looked at Hubblr, a dashboard for global social marketing that includes support for China’s Sina Weibo as well as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Back then it was in private beta. But now the startup’s founder, Michael Lam, informs us that it’s launching officially this week with lots of refinements and also brings support for brands to engage consumers on Renren, the Facebook-esque social network. Now that it’s fully open, Michael says that the Australian startup’s “target market is brands or organizations who engage with their customers in both Western and Chinese social networks.”

The main web app at Hubblr.com is where all the posting and analytics (pictured below) action happens, and the slick service is reminiscent of HootSuite – except that Hubblr includes China’s two hottest social media that have the kind of moneyed, blue collar workers that brands chase after. The startup has given us some stats from its beta testing period: over 200 organizations signed-up to make use of it; those beta users were managing over 2,200 social profiles with an average of 11 social profiles per organization that participated; and, users came from 15 countries, including China itself, Hong Kong, the U.S., Canada, Vietnam, and beyond.

The Hubblr team has also made some technical changes, such as fine-tuning its pricing system, which has three tiered packages that offer access to a greater number of profile pages. Also, Michael says:

We added representation in Hong Kong [and] migrated our solution across to Amazon Web Services to make it scalable.

Whether you’re a fellow startup that needs to reach out to Chinese consumers on Weibo or Renren, or a major brand with multiple campaigns to run, check out the Hubblr tour, and share your social marketing thoughts in the comments below.

One element of the social media analytics in Hubblr (Click to enlarge); Below is the new Renren login.

Yesterday I dropped into the MobileAsiaExpo – which is still running in Shanghai through to Friday the 22nd – and got a look into the future of tech and fashion melding together. It comes in the form of an exhibit that features QR codes, NFC, augmented reality, and some daring new clothes.

It’s curated by Anina, the China-loving entrepreneur and former model from America, and covers two main ideas: showing off the work of some Beijing young designers (that’s where the clothes, NFC, and QR codes come in), and also giving visitors an AR-powered guide (pictured above) to the history of Chinese contemporary fashion since the first-ever western-style show here in 1994. For that, the iPad brings the photos on the wall to life with videos and more information about the rise of China’s style industry.

Your correspondent sidles up to a model. (Click to enlarge)

After taking the afore-mentioned tour, you can check out the clothes on display that were created by Bas Kosters with lots of surreal mobile prints, and – more inspiringly – see the work of lots of students at the Esmod fashion school in Beijing who have incorporated some actual tech into the clothes. Some are made of advanced materials and feature designs that are printed on, not weaved in; some designs have light-sensitive areas which, under a camera flash clearly reveal a QR code (pictured right) that can be used, for example, by a brand to promote itself.

There are other practical areas, Anina explains, such as possible incorporation of NFC chips into clothes so that, for example, their brand authenticity can be proved; or silk-thin and flexible LED panels that can be programmed to say anything.

As for Anina’s 360Fashion startup, it quite recently launched the Anina Dress Up app, which is an interactive fashion game that support English and Chinese languages, and allows your ‘dress up’ designs to be shared to some Chinese social media such as Sina Weibo. The iPhone app can be found here.

Find the ‘mobile and fashion’ zone and exhibit in Hall N2 at the MobileAsiaExpo in Shanghai today or tomorrow (Friday the 22nd). Anina will be speaking at 12 noon on Friday on the Innovation Lab stage that’s also in Hall N2.

Sina Weibo, China’s 300 million user strong Twitter-esque social network, now has a VIP subscription service that charges a membership fee to users who opt for some extra features. It’s a new push by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) to monetize its popular but costly community after last year implementing social gaming and a virtual currency. Sina reported losses of $13.7 million in 2012 Q1, in part due to the costs of running the microblogging platform.

The VIP subscriptions on Weibo cost a flat 10 RMB ($1.57) per month for things like more personalized pages, voice posts, more mobile features, and better security (such as password reset via SMS). There are 15 VIP features in all. Discounts are available if users subscribe for longer periods, up to an annual fee of 108 RMB ($16.99). They’re available on the new vip.weibo.com page when signed-in.

(Click to enlarge)

It’s questionable how much Sina can raise from these kinds of premium subscriptions – and it’s not the first time it has tried, having earlier offered greater SMS tweeting support for a fee. Its other forms of monetization, such as via advertising, the strength and ubiquity of its Weibo brand pages, and its social gaming elements, will surely bring in more money. But if, for example, only 2 percent of Weibo’s active users opt for this annual subscription (being very optimistic in every respect and saying that 100 million are active), then this would net the company over 200 million RMB ($34 million) per year. Though that’s a lot of ‘ifs’.

A VIP Weibo user will be shown to the outside world by a golden crown icon on their profile page, as seen with the user @wenxiaogu (pictured above) who opted to pay for the service as soon as it launched yesterday.

Though an uncommon method of monetization on western social networks – where the right kinds of users tend to be worth more to advertisers than could be brought in by fees – it has been done long before by Sina’s rival, Tencent (HKG:0700), with its early social network QZone. But Tencent’s own microblog network, also called by the generic Weibo name, remains free.

[Source: Xinmin - article in Chinese]

Sina Weibo has a fun new experimental feature called ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ [1] which will show you your tenuous relationship with any other user of the popular microblog service. Named after the concept that everyone in the world is connected to someone else by a chain of no more than six acquaintances, it did indeed show me that, for example, I’m only three steps removed from the leggy Hong Kong pop star Karen Mok (pictured below) – well, in terms of who’s following who on Weibo. Since the American actor Kevin Bacon is not on Weibo, the running internet joke and parlor game involving him cannot be replicated on the Chinese Twitter-esque site.

The little feature is hidden away in Weibo’s data labs and can be found here. Aside from providing a little fun, it could be a useful way of finding connections between people who use Weibo – such as with a view to making a business connection. After all, this is China, and so guanxi – interpersonal relationships – can give a huge boost when trying to get ahead.

While you’re rooting around in the Weibo data labs, check out some of the other neat social analytics it offers in the sidebar, such as showing you what kind of topics those you follow are into, and which nearby tweets are trending. I really wish Twitter – which in some ways looks sparse and featureless compared to the fast-growing Sina Weibo – would add such easy to access user analytics as well.

China’s most popular Twitter-esque social network, Sina Weibo, has just rolled out a major update to its official mobile app that adds support for online shopping. The refresh brings the app to version 3.0 on iOS and Android, and most significantly brings the ‘nearby goods’ feature into its ‘Discover’ tab that allows users to browse nearby e-commerce items and then purchase any of them from within the app.

The new feature brings Weibo – and many of its 300 million registered users – into the realm of mobile commerce, but is not currently supported on the Weibo.com homepage. In my tests, only version 3.0 of the iPhone app, and not the Android one, has this new shopping element. Currently, it filters online items only by location, and so it’s clearly a very early – and rough – implementation that lacks support for specific searching. It seems to list only items that are on Taobao, the amateur shopkeeper site that first sparked China’s e-commerce boom, and allows Weibo users to pay online within the app using Taobao’s Alipay system – as pictured here:

Aside from the new Weibo mobile commerce rollout being a bit rough around the edges, it’s also a bit baffling why the location element is so important, as surely an online purchase is generally made regardless of how far away the Taobao seller is. But it’s likely that this will evolve over time, and perhaps soon become a key element of how Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) can monetize its popular – but expensive and politically troublesome – social network.

Plus, in a perhaps unnecessary and over-complex move, the app – on both iOS and Android – now emulates the American microblog startup Path in allowing users to stick a choice of emoticons onto a tweet. This brings up the choice of interactions on Weibo to three: retweet, comment, and apply an emoticon. The emoticon can optionally be in the form of a retweet. If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is.

Users of the newly updated Weibo for iOS (App Store link) don’t seem too pleased with it, giving it an average rating so far of two-and-a-half stars with many comments saying it has become more complex to do simple tasks.

[Screenshots adapted from Leiphone - article in Chinese]

I was just reading a piece from Xinhua that says Chinese authorities suggest that it could use forms of social media to “educate the public about disaster mitigation.”

This is good.

But where various forms of social media and new internet services can really shine are in collecting and disseminating information after a disaster. Here in Japan after the 2011 earthquake, we saw almost the entire repertoire of Google’s services being used to spread information, ranging from Google Picasa, to Docs, to Calendar, to Maps, to App Engine, and more. Similarly, for the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, Google put forth a similar effort.

As I’ve pointed out before, if we think about services on the internet using a food metaphor, Google’s services can be likened to ‘ingredients’ which can then be used to create ‘meals’ of information [1]. And while there are many such ingredients on the Chinese web, many of the tools that citizens could use to self-publish information in the wake of a crisis are hindered, if not blocked, by censorship.

Back in early 2009 when the CCTV building in Beijing caught on fire, some Chinese netizens improvised websites using Google Docs or Dropbox to share information. It would be far more difficult to do this now, unless you had a VPN – and most citizens don’t [2]. Google still has operations in China, but access can be sporadic as my colleagues in Beijing and Suzhou are well aware. Trying to bring up Street View in a Chinese city, for example, doesn’t quite work like it used to.

I think that in many ways services like Google’s are nearly approaching essential emergency infrastructure. And it’s a shame that Chinese authorities prefer to block many of those services. Instead they usually censor people’s voices in the wake of big events, in the hopes of silencing potential criticism.

Indeed hosting impromptu websites from any cloud storage services can be very useful in most countries, but to my knowledge, many of these services appear to have the public sharing function neutered, which is unfortunate [3].

Now I’ve also noted in the past that social media can not reach everyone in a disaster, especially in a demographic like Japan where we need to find a way to get information to order people, for example, as a lower portion of elderly people are likely to be frequently online. That’s where mobile services and carriers need to step up, I believe.

But I hope that in China, that Baidu can continue to develop cool offerings, even though it too is hardly immune to the problems of government censorship. And while we’ve seen a lot of government concern over Chinese microblogs, I hope they can thrive as a useful emergency communications platform as well.’

[Image: Technology News]

China’s most vibrant Twitter-esque service, Sina Weibo, has a stylish new third-party iPhone app in the form of Moke (pronounced ‘mor-kur,’ as in the Chinese). The new app looks a lot – perhaps a bit too much – like Tweetbot (see the comparison below), the popular Twitter client created by Tapbots.

Moke was made by Chinese developer Ling Wang, who gained some global recognition earlier this year for the elegant ‘to do’ app Voodo. The new Moke is a free app that supports English and Chinese, and contains a ‘pro’ in-app purchase for US$2.99. It’s a welcome addition to the three alternative Weibo mobile apps that I looked at last year, and a strong challenger to the most attractive of those, Weico.

While it would’ve been nice to see a more original design used, Moke looks like a sweet way to access all the main Weibo functions, such as comments, retweets, private messages, new followers, user profiles, etc. While we’re all fans – though also harsh critics – of Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) microblog service here at TiA, the official Sina app is textbook bloatware, crammed with all the social gaming elements that Weibo has, plus location-based checkins and local weather and trends and the kitchen sink. It’s all just too much. And so Moke – and the fine-looking Weico as well – offers a respite from that, and a speedier way to do the essentials such as fire off Weibo tweets and sees who’s interacting with you. That’s all that’s needed. Plus some eye-candy is nice too.

Get the Moke app – which requires iOS 5 to run – from the iTunes Store, or follow along its progress on the app’s new Weibo page.

Fan Lixin pointed out early on that the internet offers a lot of opportunities for filmmakers. Mobile devices allow basically anyone to be a director and the internet allows people to broadcast their creations to the masses at the touch of a button. At the same time, he said, from the perspective of a professional filmmaker, it provides new distribution channels and promotional opportunities that filmmakers can have more direct control over. It also allows for new forms of expression, like “mini-docs” — short documentary films about social issues designed specifically for an internet audience. Fan said this is a very powerful way of communicating because people tend to understand and empathize with the plight of people in impoverished areas when they can see those people.

Deng Fei spoke about how helpful weibo microblogging technology was in promoting his “Free Lunch” program, allowing information to spread quickly and virally and allowing people to participate in the project easily from their own homes and offices.

The star of the show was Xue Manzi, though, who spoke forcefully about how important projects like “Free Lunch” and his anti-kidnapping weibo campaign are. “This is one of the most meaningful things to happen on weibo,” he said, arguing that campaigns like this, in combination with new media, have created a new civil society in China. “This is the great power of weibo,” he said.

He pointed out that his own weibo account — which has over two million followers — is popular not because of him, but rather because of the people he cares about. “I’m not a singer or an actor,” he said, but he’s able to amass followers because they want to participate in solving the problems his anti-kidnapping campaign addresses, and helping the people Xue writes about (like the parents of kidnapped children).

Xue championed social media and online activism as a way to get real results. In addition to Free Lunch and the anti-kidnapping campaign, he noted that the pressure and campaigning on weibo were largely responsible for the Beijing government giving in and agreeing to publicly release PM2.5 data about the most harmful particles in air pollution, which is a serious problem in Beijing. Getting the government to release data on PM2.5 will allow Beijingers to make better decisions about when they need to wear a mask, and should make a real difference in improving public health in a city where cancer rates are rising at alarmingly rapid rates.

The panel was unfortunately quite brief, or at least it seemed that way — perhaps everyone was in a rush to get to lunch. But I’m very happy to see that in addition to all the talk about user numbers and business models, GMIC has dedicated some time to the issue that really matters: how all this new technology affects people.

This post is part of our coverage of GMIC 2012.