With an eye to the many Sina Weibo users who access the Twitter-like service via mobile, two of China’s web giants have formed an interesting partnership today. The buddying up deal sees Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) agreeing to promote videos on Sina Weibo from Youku Tudou (NYSE:YOKU), the merged company that runs two of China’s top video sites.

Youku’s announcement points out that 76 percent of Sina Weibo’s daily active users access Weibo through mobile devices; meanwhile, Youku Tudou have around 170 million daily mobile video viewers right now.

The video content promotion will start throughout Weibo in July. The promos will take “multiple forms including through personalized recommendation section embedded between micro-blogging posts.” Less annoyingly – and actually pretty usefully – “search results for movies and TV dramas will provide direct thumbnail links to watch the title instantly”. There’s something that would never happen on Twitter.

Creating and sharing content is at the core of the Internet, and Youku Tudou’s cooperation with social networking sites such as Weibo is a powerful move towards deepening consumers’ online video viewing and sharing experience.

Youku is, by most measurements, China’s top video site, with a mix of user-generated content and Hulu-like streaming of licensed TV and movie content from around the world.

Sina Weibo has over 500 million registered users, but only about 46.3 million of them are daily active users. Plus, many people use third-party Weibo apps, so not all of them will necessarily see the new promoted video content once it comes online.

It’s only been about five weeks since e-commerce titan Alibaba invested nearly $300 million to take a significant stake in Sina Weibo, China’s hottest Twitter-esque site. But already there’s been a major social commerce melding going on with the launch of daily deals on Sina Weibo. The brand-new deals portal on Weibo is centered around tuan.weibo.com, but users (of which there are over 500 million registered) will likely find these group deals popping up in their social stream.

If it’s a paid deal (as most are) anyone who clicks the deal is lead from Weibo to the respective vendor’s e-commerce site. Yes, there are no actual transactions going on on Weibo. But if it’s a free or promotional deal and a Weibo user fancies a chance at claiming and winning it, he or she will first have to follow the vendor and retweet the deal – as seen in this screenshot of a free travel package offered by travel booking site eLong directly on its official Weibo page:

Nearly 10,000 people have retweeted that particular travel deal pictured above with three days remaining on the offer.

The new Weibo deals (spotted by the TechNode crew) are not tied to Alibaba, and they appear to be an open platform for Sina Weibo’s corporate users to sell things directly to their followers. It should help greatly with the monetization of Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) leading social service, which has been proving costly to run.

But of course, with so many smaller vendors in China using Alibaba sites like Taobao and Tmall, the new Weibo deals will prove to be a great traffic driver for those C2C and B2B2C stores.

Sina Weibo added Taobao ads shortly after Alibaba’s investment was announced. Those ads are not yet targeted. Between the possible targeting of those ads and a conceivable evolution of social commerce on Sina Weibo so that things can be purchased directly on the social site, there’s still a lot of interesting things left to be implemented.

The parodies of Line’s characters are making the rounds on Sina Weibo right now (see the compilation below). The cartoon-ish cast of Moon, James, Brown, and Cony are featured as huge emoticons in the social app, and are popping up in Line TV cartoons and in merchandise too. But the Japanese impressions focus on Moon and James, who seem to be the most fun to copy. Check them out:

(Source: @史上第一最最搞 on Weibo)

If you’ve got friends all over the globe, those buddies are probably scattered across not just lots of nations but also several social media services. It’s even more fragmented if you’re an overseas Chinese, working or studying far from home, as your new workmates or classmates are using stuff that’s blocked in China – like Twitter and Facebook. To bring all these sites, conversations, messages, and buddies together is a new app that launches today called MelonFriends.

Launched initially just on Android, MelonFriends brings Sina Weibo and Renren into the mix with Twitter and Facebook. You can choose to view those streams separately, or aggregate them into one.

It’s a nice idea, though it comes at a time when lots of people are using apps like Whatsapp or WeChat for more and more communication. MelonFriends designer Duan Tingliang – based with the three-man ‘Melon Sail’ startup team in Singapore – tells us that the idea of the app is to keep the group dynamic alive:

The core feature for MelonFriends is to help overseas Chinese to manage their social network connections across China (Renren, Weibo) and overseas (Facebook and Twitter). So the usage of MelonFriends is very different from WeChat and such messaging focused apps. In a nutshell, WeChat is focusing on one-to-one communication with friends (which can be in China or overseas) while MelonFriends is focusing on the sharing, interacting, and managing of one’s entire network of friends. But there are opportunities in the one-to-one messaging business that are worth exploring in future.

To keep the conversations flowing, MelonFriends will add in interest-based ‘channels’ at a later date that work across different social networks. A social shopping/gifting service is also in the works. Duan explains:

For instance one of the channels which I will definitely build and use personally would be “Food back home”. Through this channel, we can introduce users with service providers who give bulk discounts on buying food from China (maybe via Taobao) and overseas shipping solutions for group buying, etc. As such, a channel services not just information but also a viral shopping/gifting solution for overseas Chinese. Eventually, this could extend its reach to overseas Chinese’s connections in China and overseas also.

That social shopping aspect would also be a form of monetization for the app, along with upcoming in-app-purchases for customizations like themes and emoji.

MelonFriends for Android has a two-day exclusive on Chinese app store Wandoujia before launching on Google Play on Wednesday (June 5th).

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)

China’s Top 10 iOS Apps

1. QQ
2. WeChat
3. Sina Weibo
4. Taobao
5. UC Mobile Browser
6. Alipay
7. QQ Spaces
8. QQ Mobile Browser
9. QQ Mobile Music
10. Kingsoft Battery Doctor

China’s Top 10 Android Apps

1. QQ
2. UC Mobile Browser
3. WeChat
4. 360 Mobile Guardian
5. Sina Weibo
6. Taobao
7. Alipay
8. QQ Mobile Browser
9. 360 Mobile Helper
10. QQ Spaces

The biggest difference between the two lists is the rather conspicuous absence of Qihoo products from the iOS list. In fact, Qihoo has four products on the Android top 20 list, but not a single Qihoo product made the top 40 on iResearch’s iOS list. Apple has a history of not being particularly fond of Qihoo’s apps, and it banned them from its App Store back in early 2012. That time, they were quickly reinstated, but they were banned again in late January of this year and are apparently under special investigation and still haven’t been re-approved months later.

It’s also worth pointing out that not a single foreign-developed app is featured on either list.

Of course, a more interesting way to measure app popularity is to monitor apps’ time usage; luckily, iResearch has a list for that too (combining both Android and iOS):

Looking at all these lists, if you had to pick a winner the pretty obvious one is Tencent, given that its products (QQ IM, QQ Browser, WeChat, etc) hold the top spot — and a bunch of other spots to boot — on every list. But since most of the apps listed offer free services, we might well call Alibaba another winner, given that its Taobao and Alipay apps exist almost exclusively to help users spend money and yet still made the top ten.

(All data via iResearch)

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.

Qian’s post, which was retweeted over a thousand times and attracted hundreds of comments, says that Weibo is overvalued because Weibo users are fleeing the service because of real-name controls, because their private social interactions have moved elsewhere (i.e., to WeChat), and because they’re very sensitive to advertising (which makes monetization difficult). Kaifu Lee disagrees:

Sina Weibo activity has gone down, but the gloomy predictions are greatly exaggerated: 1) the fact that Weibo is being so tightly controlled shows that it has vitality; 2) with regard to private interactions moving elsewhere, Sina Weibo was never really the place for that in the first place, so that’s not much of a loss; 3) to deal with user opposition to advertising, Sina can try user behavioral analysis along with targeted ads and e-commerce integration. Of course whether or not that will work depends on how it’s implemented.

Lee’s first point is something that had never occurred to me as a reason to hold out hope for Weibo, but it does make sense. Censors wouldn’t bother keeping such a tight grip on Weibo if it wasn’t considered an important and influential service anymore. Lee doesn’t mention this, but it’s also hard for me to see the real-name system as much of a problem for Weibo users (as Qian suggests it is) because the real-name system has been so poorly implemented. I have been a weibo user for years and at no point during any of these real name campaigns have I actually had to provide Sina with my real name or ID information. Users who want to get around that “requirement” definitely can.

Lee’s second point is also quite salient, as Weibo and WeChat are very different services. The rise of WeChat has undoubtedly made Weibo less active, but from a user’s point of view, I wonder how much of that lost activity was meaningful for the broader userbase and how much of it was private chatting between friends that has since moved to chat apps like WeChat. My guess is that it’s mostly the latter that was lost, and while that make’s Weibo less active, it probably doesn’t make it any less interesting.

Of course, that’s not likely to be much consolation for Sina, and the question of Sina’s value and its monetization efforts is still very much an open one. If Lee thinks ads on Weibo are a viable monetization option, I’m inclined to believe him — after all, he spends an awful lot of time on Weibo and knows the service very well — but as he says, ultimately it’s all going to come down to the execution.

Last Friday, Sina Weibo quietly announced that it would be entering Thailand thanks to a partnership with Thai company Jiaranai Entertainment. Weibo Thailand is aiming to break even within six months and generate more than $1 million in revenue in its first year. It aims to have 1.6 million active users in Thailand by the end of the year.

Admittedly, I am not all that familiar with the Thai market, but this sounds like an absolute pipe dream. Generating some revenue is one thing — Thailand is a popular destination for Chinese tourists and I’m sure some Thai businesses will appreciate the chance to get in closer contact with their customers — but 1.6 million active users in a year seems like a stretch, especially for a service that (as of this moment) doesn’t even have a Thai language option. (In fact, the service didn’t even have English until earlier this year).

Twitter, which has been in Thailand for years, currently has between 1.5 million and 2 million users in the country by most counts, and I don’t see any reason why Sina Weibo is likely to be any more popular or pick up users any faster. That is especially true given that Jiaranai’s strategy seems very focused on picking up corporate accounts that want to interact with Chinese users, not on getting regular people to use the service. Are there really 1.6 million Thai businesses that are aching to microblog with potential customers in Chinese?

More broadly, I have to wonder what the hell took Sina so long. Baidu has been expanding into Southeast Asia and researching there since last year. Tencent’s WeChat is all over the world map and has already racked up 40 million overseas users. If Sina wanted Weibo to go international, they should have made this move years ago while the concept was still trendy. I still believe that aside from the censorship, Weibo actually offers a superior service to Twitter. But why give Twitter years to get entrenched in Southeast Asia before finally dipping a toe into the Thai market at a time when microblogging seems threatened by the rising popularity of mobile chat apps?

If Sina was going to go global, the company should have moved much faster and much more decisively, especially into Southeast Asia. This is not to say that there is no opportunity at all for Weibo outside China, of course, but Sina has taken so long to take the market outside of China seriously that its hard to imagine the company having much success there at this point even if it did throw its weight behind a global push. (And since Jiaranai is only looking to spend about $300,000 marketing Weibo Thailand, it certainly doesn’t seem like Sina’s full weight is even behind this Thai push).

China’s market is huge, of course, and it’s possible to make a lot of money without ever stepping outside it (although historically Sina Weibo has struggled to make the kind of money one might expect from a platform with so many users). But I have a feeling that a year from now, Sina’s executives are going to be looking at a less-than-ideal situation with Weibo Thailand, and perhaps wondering how things might have gone differently if the company had taken Southeast Asia more seriously earlier in the game.

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)

Among all these social sites, we identified two of them headed for an epic battle this year: WeChat and Sina Weibo . Weibo needs to win but its popularity appears to have slowed and expansion plans have gone nowhere so far. On the other hand, WeChat is hitting multiple overseas markets, accumulating more than 300 million users. CEO and founder of Tencent, Pony Ma, is apparently convinced that WeChat is the next big thing, ready to spearhead the brand onto the international stage.

If there’s one social network that can dominate both inside and outside of China, WeChat looks to have the best chance. But having said all that, it’s not like Sina Weibo is in trouble. It’s recent social commerce test with Xiaomi was especially impressive. Though it’s certainly possible that was just an isolated case, we look forward to more such promotions. (Source: CIC)

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.

A couple weeks ago, Sina admitted its flagship product Weibo is threatened by WeChat. Then last week, I wrote about why the Weibo vs. WeChat battle is hugely important, and later in the week Han Han even chimed in. But the latest sign that this is the year of the Weibo-WeChat battle (and that Weibo might be losing) comes from TechWeb, which is reporting that Sina Weibo is conducting internal testing on a new WeChat-inspired “Public Platform” feature.

Like WeChat’s platform of the same name, the new Sina Weibo feature would allow users to send group messages, although right now it is apparently targeted only at large media outlets. The chief advantage of this platform, aside from the fact that it’s designed specifically for mobile, is that it would allow for the posting of messages longer than 140 characters. This means that news media, for example, could share full stories within the platform and their followers could read them directly within Sina’s app, without having to click a link and shift to a mobile browser. The same thing, of course, is also possible with WeChat.

Since Sina’s “Public Platform” is currently still in internal testing, it’s not clear what it will actually look like by the time it’s released — if it ever does get released. But one question raised by the folks over at TechWeb that’s worth pondering is whether media outlets will really be interested in engaging with a platform that doesn’t direct readers to their own websites. If users are reading full stories right in Sina’s app, that’s great for Sina, but it deprives those media outlets of website visitors, and thus advertising dollars. Aiming the Public Platform right at media outlets might make it a tough sell.

Whatever happens, it seems clear that both Weibo and WeChat are gearing up for a clash over users. While Sina tests a way to make its service more like WeChat, Tencent is rumored to be adding Tencent Weibo functionality into the WeChat app to make it a bit more like Sina Weibo. It’s not clear what either company will ultimately actually push out the door, but it’s quite clear that the space between Sina Weibo and Tencent’s WeChat is going to be a battleground as two of China’s biggest internet companies fight over the hearts and minds of China’s social and mobile web users.

(via TechWeb)

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)

Oftentimes, people like to compare Vietnam with China. In some ways, the similarities are pretty obvious. The Chinese dynasties ruled Vietnam for one thousand years. Vietnamese people celebrate Lunar New Year, and our names have Chinese roots. But online and in the tech industry, things look really different.

In Asia, there are four communist countries: China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. Laos and North Korea are so small they’re not really on the tech map (even if North Korea is finally using mobile internet). That leaves China and Vietnam. In China, Baidu, Tencent, and Sina Weibo are the search and social media giants. In Vietnam, Google and Facebook are tops and Twitter isn’t blocked. What happened?

Search

China began interfering with Google’s search service in 2010, and it frequently fails to load but is not fully blocked. It’s due to China’s effort to manage the content that the majority of its population has access to; it’s also, some have argued, a big part of the protectionist success of Baidu and Sina Weibo who fill the shoes of Google and Facebook/Twitter. Today, Baidu gets an average of five billion search queries per day, and Google gets over 100 billion searches per month. But with Google partially locked out of China (it’s still the fifth most used search engine there), Baidu basically has near-exclusive access to the biggest market in the world.

In Vietnam, Google.com.vn is the number one search site and Google.com is number three. Vietnam has some new locally-made players like Wada.vn and CocCoc, but they’ll have a hard time up against Google’s dominance. In the mid 2000’s, Google was already slowly creeping into Vietnam. Youtube was and still is one of the most used and viewed websites in Vietnam and so Google was allowed to slowly creep in.

The interesting thing about Vietnam is that Google never officially opened up an office here. It still hasn’t. Google slowly entered, its value was assessed by users, and then it slowly rose to dominance. Now, if Google were blocked in Vietnam, it would leave a huge black hole in the Vietnamese cyberspace.

This is the trend in Vietnam. Let them in, assess how politically harmful they could be, and then realize it’s too late to cut them. For social media, it’s a little more complex. But the same principles apply.

from Doubleaf via Flickr

Social Media

China began blocking Facebook in 2008 and Twitter in 2009. In China, the Great Firewall has been very hard to get through, so China’s users have flocked to local social services like Sina Weibo ¹. Although many would argue that Chinese sites would still have more users even if others were not blocked. I don’t buy it. If Facebook wasn’t blocked in China, Zuckerberg would open up an office there and/or be collecting the same wealth of data that Weibo now collects on its users. Today, Sina Weibo supposedly has 500 million users. That’s more than Twitter’s 200 million and less than Facebook’s billion.

Vietnam started blocking Facebook in 2009. But the block was relatively casual. Most users still get on via DNS tweaks or using HotSpotShield with no problems. This is exactly why we’ve seen such explosive growth in Vietnam – doubling its numbers in a year. It’s currently the fastest growing Facebook country in the world, and Facebook has surpassed Zing as the nation’s top social destination.

Vietnam let Facebook in and let it grow until it was too late. Recently, I learned from an undisclosed source that Facebook supposedly has 15 to 20 million users in Vietnam already, so if authorities pull the plug it would be disastrous for users in the country. Hundreds and thousands of businesses have set up shop in Vietnam with Facebook Pages and advertisements.

And although the block has strengthened along with the political tides, that has more served to educate the population to self-censor more than deterred use of Facebook. Today, the block is as light as ever. And because of this, Vietnam has effectively avoided the need to build its own Weibo.

Oh, and as far as Twitter is concerned, in Vietnam, microblogging still hasn’t caught on. That’s probably why it’s not blocked.

from Vietnamese comic artist Thanh Phong

What this all means

Although Vietnam and China are neighboring socialist republics and Communist comrades, they’ve taken very different political stances towards the internet. China sees the internet variously as a battle field, a business goldmine, and a threat to social stability. China’s allegory is one of a large empire controlling the biggest population in the world and eventually leading the world. Information is essential to that and it must be tightly controlled and it must be Chinese. That was underlined this week by China’s tech ministry taking a dim view of Android.

Vietnam, with about 92 million people, is smaller in population than China’s most populous province, Guangdong, with its 104 million. The allegory in Vietnam is catch up and adapt. There isn’t a global agenda. That has allowed Vietnamese users to reap the rewards of the two tech giants – both Silicon Valley and China’s web companies – but that’s at the cost of not building giants of its own. Vietnamese social media and search startups struggle to compete with Facebook and Google with no government protection, financing, or encouragement.

There are two sides to this coin. In China, the result is a lot of space for startups and mega-tech companies like Baidu to build for the local population. But they sacrifice a connection to the world. In Vietnam, startups have to compete with outsiders while also getting a little more globally connected – although many would argue people here are still very isolated. The end result may be that some Chinese tech successes are inflated because they have no “real” competitors beyond their borders; and Vietnamese startups are stunted because they can’t out-execute the big guys or regional startups who expand into the country.

But the truth is, it’s a very hard comparison. Although they’re run under relatively similar governments, the scale alone puts everything out of proportion. Chinese companies immediately have access to a huge population while also competing with a host of other fellow Chinese companies. How they triumph over these odds is what really fascinates me.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, comment below at your leisure.

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)

Weibo and WeChat are in an old-fashioned duel.

When it comes to Chinese social media, it’s increasingly clear that there are two real players: Sina Weibo and Tencent’s WeChat. Oh, sure, there are others, but they’re all a bit passé these days. Renren and the other traditional social media networks are starting to look very outdated. Tencent Weibo and other microblogging competitors may have big user numbers, but there’s a reason that the big stories always break on Sina Weibo. And while some Chinese BBS forums still boast massive user numbers, they appeal to a limited demographic — chances are your grandmother is never going on Tianya.

So it’s down to WeChat and Sina Weibo for the crown of who’s the coolest and who can grow the fastest. Outside China, WeChat has already won that race, and Sina isn’t even attempting to attract non-Chinese users to its weibo service. But inside China, Weibo boasts an intimidating 500 million users (although most of them aren’t active). WeChat broke 300 million users last month, and although not all of those users are in China, the service is growing fast and poised to overtake Weibo within the next few years.

If you’re not a shareholder in Tencent or Sina or a Chinese social media user, it might seem like this doesn’t really matter. But because the services themselves are so different, who wins the Weibo vs. WeChat war could have a significant impact on Chinese society.

As weibo has grown over the past several years, it has also made a dramatic impact on Chinese civil society and politics. Information spreads very quickly on microblogging services, and because of this Weibo has put a spotlight on social issues from censorship to corruption to environmental problems. I would argue that Weibo has quite literally redefined the way many users think about China, as it has taken what were previously understood to be “local” problems and demonstrated them to be national ones.

Five years ago, for example, you might think that the pollution of a local river was just a problem with a nearby factory, but thanks to Deng Fei’s weibo campaign and others, it’s easy to see on Weibo that many rivers nationwide have similar problems. So, what you previously considered a local problem is now a national one, and when that happens, you’re more likely to try to push for national changes instead of just complaining about your local authorities.

The access Weibo grants to unfiltered information (if you check it fast enough) from across the country instantly has already changed Chinese society, forcing both companies and governments to be more transparent, more responsive, and more willing to interact with the people they affect. Obviously, Weibo hasn’t transformed China into a representative democracy or anything, and there are plenty of problems with the service itself (starting with its draconian censorship practices, though they’re often circumventable). But even so, I think Chinese society is better off with Weibo than without it.

That’s why Weibo’s fight with WeChat is so crucial. WeChat is a totally different service with a very different focus, but the more time users spend on WeChat, the less they’re spending on Weibo. And while chatting with your friends and following celebrities is fun, the service just isn’t designed for the swift passing-along of information the way that weibo is. WeChat’s focus is your circle of friends and your local area, Weibo’s focus is far wider. To return to our polluted river analogy, on Weibo you share your photos of the river with your followers all over the country, and they pass it on to theirs; quickly, it can go national. But on WeChat, you bitch with your friends and coworkers about the river and it stays in your (mostly) local social circles. Even if it does spread, that spread isn’t easily visible or trackable, which makes it seem like fewer people are talking about it and thus reduces its impact.

WeChat is still an evolving service, and obviously there are ways of using it to move information quickly and distribute it widely (for example, getting a celebrity to share a message with all of their followers). But because it’s simply not designed for this kind of information sharing, I fear that the social impact that Weibo has had — which in my opinion has been mostly positive — could be undone if Chinese social networking users start spending their social time on WeChat instead of Weibo.

Unfortunately, things are already looking grim, and even Sina has admitted it faces a stiff challenge in WeChat. 2013 looks to be WeChat’s year, but I hope that it doesn’t come at the expense of Weibo and the impact it has had on Chinese civil society.

(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.

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.

How is the river in your hometown? While you’re home for the holidays, take a photo of the river or stream in your hometown and upload it to weibo for us to see.

It took off thanks in part to retweets from other influential weibo users like tech angel investor Xue Manzi (you may remember him and Deng Fei from their panel at GMIC 2012), and on Friday became one of Sina’s trending topics, with thousands of net users responding to the call.

As you might have guessed, results vary but many of the rivers look kind of disgusting. Here’s a collection of photos of some bad ones I came across while browsing:

What’s interesting about this is not so much that some Chinese rivers are full of trash — this should not come as a great shock to anyone — but that it is a clever way of making a local issue into a national one. Sina Weibo has proved to be fertile ground for this, and we have seen the same story play out with corruption over the past few years and more and more weibo users realize that corruption isn’t just a local issue after reading weibo accounts of “local” corruption all over the country. Deng Fei appears to be trying something similar here, as while one river being full of trash is a local problem, everyone’s rivers being full of trash might point to a larger problem.

(Of course, not everyone’s rivers are full of trash, and Deng’s campaign has taken off in part because some people just want to show off the nice rivers in their hometowns.)

Whether or not anything comes of Deng’s river campaign, this kind of movement will be quite a bit more difficult to engineer if Chinese users continue to move to WeChat, making that their primary social network of choice. WeChat, of course, is all about local, which is great for a chat app, but I wonder if some of the social issues weibo has helped to publicize will disappear from the public consciousness again if everyone moves to WeChat to get their social fix.

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.

Read any news report out of China today, and chances are it’ll include a smarmy comment or two from a netizen on Sina Weibo. The 400 million-strong microblogging site is almost synonymous with the voice of the country’s young urbanites – so much so that there’s an online cottage industry (Tea Leaf Nation, Ministry of Tofu and China Digital Times among others) dedicated to translating cross-sections of it for an English audience.

But without fluency in Chinese (and a street-smart awareness of online slang), most of Weibo is near incomprehensible. That’s where Hong Kong-based startup Surround App comes in. It’s an upcoming English mobile client for Sina Weibo, with its first release planned for April 2013, offering a mix of machine and human translation to help you make sense of the content on China’s vast social networks. From trenchant social commentary to…um…Brad Pitt.

“It was inspired basically by my own frustration,” says co-founder Jeffrey Broer over my Skype interview with him, admitting that he can only speak about five sentences in Mandarin. “I’ve been in and out of mainland China for over 10 years, and there are all these fascinating people online that I want to follow, but I can’t. It was a whole world that I couldn’t grasp.”

Broer, the founder of another Hong-Kong based startup, Grayscale, put together a team of four late in 2012, and Surround App received about US$15,000 in seed funding (plus office space and technical guidance) from HK Accelerator.

Targeted at “language students, bloggers, micro-celebrities and managers in China”, Surround App plans to follow a freemium model – the free app will allow awkward machine translations (like copy-pasting a block of text into Google Translate) of all Sina Weibo content, helped partly by a slang database that the team is planning to build into future releases. Broer adds:

We’re still playing around with the specifics. But we’ll have monthly subscriptions that will feature human translations of specific accounts, a ‘curated’ human-translated daily news section, and packages for corporate clients.

Even with translation, the two challenges in engaging with Sina Weibo are figuring out who to follow:

We’re developing our own strong search databases for that, and we’ll present users with recommendations based on keywords.

Users will be able to make sense of the dense web of punning and wordplay that the network is famous for, and understanding those images people keep swapping. For that, Broer says:

We have a few ideas, such as optical character recognition (OCR) that we could use for images, but not planning to address that in our first release.

Built as a hybrid HTML5 app, Surround App will be available on all major mobile platforms. The UI will let you switch back and forth between the original Chinese posts and the English translations – a potentially interesting feature for language learners.

Surround eventually hopes to support multiple Chinese social networks – Broer mentions RenRen and QQ – though dealing with Sina Weibo’s 34,977 posts per second might keep the team occupied for a while yet.

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 ‘read it later’ app Pocket has looked to China for some inspiration for its newest update, and added the ability to share articles to Sina Weibo. This uses the in-built Sina Weibo account in iOS 6 and above. Pocket also added the same functionality for Facebook in iOS.

This is not Pocket’s first big play for more Chinese users, as an update in November allowed for sharing to YinXiang Biji, which is the official Evernote China. Today’s v4.3 for iOS update fixes a bug with that to ensure ‘Evernote International’ users in China (like myself) can now log into that service within Pocket.

Pocket supports Sina Weibo today. Click to enlarge the update log.

Pocket has plenty of local competition from general reading apps and also some ‘read later’ services in China. One we looked at recently, called Wumii, combines both those aspects while claiming to cleverly suggest articles you might like to read based on your previous reading habits.

Of course, if you use Pocket for Android, then you already have system-wide sharing between any apps that you have installed, so you’ve had this “feature” since day one on absolutely any version of Android. Just sayin’.

Get the v4.3 update of Pocket for iOS in the App Store.

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.

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.

We’ve written much in the past about how individuals and organizations outside of China are making use of Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo microblogging platform in order to reach Chinese speaking netizens. Whether it’s famous celebrities (see Tom Cruise, Emma Watson, Brad Pitt) or politicians (from Australia, England, Japan) or brands — Weibo appears to be the medium of choice.

College recruiting appears to be the latest use for Weibo, as Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering recently held a group chat on its Sina Weibo page in order to answer questions from prospective students for its graduate program.

In total, there were 150 participants, with 80 questions posted in the short span of an hour. Graduates and current students in the program were also available to answer questions. You can get an idea of the type of inquiries that were asked here.

Duke is also active on Renren as well, giving it a pretty progressive Chinese social media strategy.

While it’s no surprise that more and more schools are enlisting the help of social media tools in recruiting these days, it’s interesting to see U.S. schools go so far as to join Chinese platforms to recruit Chinese students. I wonder how active most Chinese universities are in comparison, assuming they are active at all?

On a somewhat related note, we recently wrote about India’s top business school, IIM-A, which partnered with LinkedIn to help connect students to recruiters.

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.

It’s difficult to confirm this, and most of the weibo celebrities I’ve seen mentioned haven’t said anything about their experiences on weibo. I was beginning to think it was completely made up, and then I came across this post Kaifu Lee made last night.

It reads, quite simply: “disgusting tea” and is followed by a vomiting animated emoticon. A coincidence? Possible, but unlikely. In the censored world of China’s web, oblique hints like this are often favored over direct statements, especially when the poster has been instructed by police not to say anything. If the comments are any indication, almost all of Lee’s followers are assuming that this post is a confirmation of Lee’s interrogation by state security officers, not actually a commentary on tea flavors. Ren Zhiqiang even left Lee a comment asking if it was his first time, which seems unlikely to be an actual reference to drinking tea.

If Chinese state security really is detaining weibo celebrities over their support of Southern Weekend, they are playing a dangerous game. Often, “tea sessions” are used as an intimidation tactic to scare people into shutting their mouths, but they can also serve as a kind of provocation, and provoking someone like Lee, who is capable of putting any message he likes in front of millions of Chinese weibo users instantly, could certainly backfire. Whether or not it will remains to be seen.

In the meantime, for all the weibo users out there getting tea invitations this week, we hope that at the very least your tea goes down smoothly.

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.

photo: autoblog.com

While we’re not attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we are paying close attention to news coming out of the annual tech event. Among all the headlines, American car-maker Ford (NYSE:F) made a play to bring more mobile applications to its Sync voice-activated system, and surprisingly China’s most popular microblog, Sina Weibo, is one of nine new apps to be added.

According to the announcement, Ford’s collaboration with Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) makes the Weibo mobile app available in the vehicle via the AppLink API, allowing drivers to access news, weather, microblogging, and location-based services using voice control.

Drivers can connect their phone to the Sync system, and use apps which Ford supports. But the car-maker says it doesn’t allow certain kinds of apps that would be a visual distraction, such as any video or rich imagery apps, games, or any application that requires extensive reading.

Other new apps to join Ford’s AppLink ecosystem are The Wall Street Journal, Amazon Cloud Player, Rhapsody, Glympse, and Aha Radio.

The timing for Ford to offer support for Chinese services with AppLink couldn’t be better, as a new ban on using cell phones while driving just went into effect on New Year’s Day ¹, and we subsequently saw numerous reports of consumers buying up hands-free Bluetooth headsets as a result. It will be interesting to see if Ford can benefit from the new law in a similar way.

(Via LiveScience.com)

The wonderful folks over at Global Voices Online have made a fascinating discovery on weibo: a long weibo post from a user who claims to be an employee in Sina Weibo’s censorship division. It is difficult to confirm whether or not the poster really is who they say they are, but for whatever it’s worth, the message of the post is quite similar to what we often hear behind closed doors from employees at Chinese web companies that are forced to censor user content. Even if it isn’t genuine, I think some parts of it are very worth reading. (The quotations that follow are mostly Global Voices’ translation, but I have made a few minor adjustments where appropriate).

The poster — responding to the growing outcry surrounding the Southern Weekend incident — makes several points in defense of weibo’s censorship. The first is quite simple: “If we didn’t delete your posts, that might mean we had to stop you from posting altogether.” Deleting posts, the writer argues, is still better than deleting accounts, and things may not entirely be in Sina’s hands anyway:

Since the day when Weibo’s comments function was suspended for three days, a special group of people have the authority to decide on the criteria for giving out alert signals, and can make Weibo go “game-over” as simply as treading on some ants without giving a damn about people’s needs.

The people need Weibo to project our voices, but when the hand behind weibo wants to manipulate the discussion, something has to be sacrificed. We live in a country full of special and sensitive barriers and we have to operate within a set of rules.

The poster’s second point is that censorship isn’t actually in Sina’s interest, and that the company has as little choice in the matter as regular net users. This is something we hear time and time again from Chinese internet companies, but then the author makes a rather shocking implication that Sina Weibo may be intentionally delaying censorship of messages to allow them to spread for a little while:

You can see the messages before they are deleted, right? You still have your account functioning, right? You are all experienced netizens, you know that the technology allows us to delete messages in a second. Please think carefully on this.

The author’s last major point follows in this vein, further suggesting that Sina has been actively trying to spread political messages like the news of the Southern Weekend incident before they are deleted:

Before this incident occurred, and at its very early stages, we were under a lot of pressure. We tried to resist and let the messages spread and won a difficult victory. Our official account @Sina_Media reported on the suspension of the Southern Weekend instantly, and the news was retweeted by @headline_news, which was again retweeted again 30,000 times in 10 mins. Then we got the order from the Propaganda Department and we had to delete it. Fortunately, the message had already been distributed. A friend from a Penguin website left a warm message in my microblog: This is a battle. Sina is a human flesh shield. It is a courageous act.

To be quite frank, I think the idea that Sina is selflessly acting as the voice of the people is a bit naive. We know that Sina does push the envelope in terms of censorship every now and then, but this is likely less about self-sacrifice for the greater good and more about maintaining its user base and its reputation as the most open and active platform for discussion on the Chinese web (without which it would start losing users rather quickly, I suspect). Of course, it’s debatable whether Sina’s intentions really matter if the effect is the same regardless, but it’s still worth pointing out that the writer’s rosy portrait of Sina here may be a bit biased.

The message concludes with the author saying that his bosses at Sina will be “invited to tea” again, a euphemism that refers to being interrogated by the police or other state authorities.

While I have some doubts about the poster’s identity, there’s little doubt that much of what he or she wrote is true. Censorship really only hurts Sina by reducing their users numbers and annoying users, and it has been clear for quite some time that Sina sometimes tries to follow the letter of the law but not the spirit of it, erring in favor of more user freedom. But from the post quoted above, it also sounds like propaganda authorities are exercising an unprecedented level of control over the service. It’s impossible to be sure whether that’s true, but given the unprecedented controls being implemented for other parts of China’s internet, it certainly isn’t implausible.

Still, this kind of directness about the system is very rare, and if the author really does work for Sina, he may already be looking for a new job.

[via Global Voices Online]

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)

For those of you who were still in holiday mode during the past week, we’ve done our best to keep tabs on what was happening in the China tech space. Looking ahead to the new year, we expect that China will be in the news every bit as much as it was in 2012 — although we do hope that it’s for more favorable reasons.

1. Gougou, Notorious Chinese Pirate Search Engine, Shuts Down

Having been added to the U.S. Trade Representative copyright offenders report, Gougou.com has finally been shut own. Gougou is operated by Xunlei, who is hoping to clean up its act, perhaps in preparation for another attempt at an overseas IPO.

2. KuaiYong: Chinese Startup Enables iOS App Piracy w/o a Jailbreak

This Windows desktop application lets users install pirated apps without a jailbreak. It went offline briefly last week, but as I write this the KuaiYong site appears to be back up. It will be interesting to see how long this can remain available.

3. 3D-Printed, Smartphone-Controlled Drone by Chinese Startup AngelEyes

3D printing made a lot of headlines in 2012, and we expect that to continue in the new year. Here’s one example of a hardware startup from China which is crowdfunding an exciting 3D printing project. Sure, the HeX looks a lot like the AR Parrot Drone, but it’s still pretty fun. We hope it does well.

4. Chinese Trains Now Capable of Time Travel, Apparently

Yes, it’s a brand new year, but some things seem to never change. China’s Raily Ministry’s website is a prime example of this, as it doesn’t look to have improved very much over last year’s abomination.

5. Sina Weibo Breaks New Record for User Activity Over New Year’s Eve

If you thought Twitter was busy on New Year’s Eve, don’t forget about China’s favorite microblog Sina Weibo, where the first minute of 2013 saw 729,521 messages.

6. Gome Enters Into $160 Million Partnership with Qinqinbaby.com

In an effort to bring more mother-and-baby items onto its online shopping mall, Gome has tied up with Qinqinbaby.com. This helps it compete with Suning, who acquired Redbaby last year.

7. Study: Actually Only About 20,000 Twitter Users in China [INFOGRAPHIC]

Precise Twitter numbers for any country can be hard to pin down, and for China – where the service is blocked – that’s especially true. But this week we saw a fun graphic from one programmer who figures that there are only about 20,000 Twitter users in the Beijing time zone.

8. China’s Biggest Tech Trend of 2013 Will Be The Wall

Perhaps the most interesting story on China from the past week was Charlie’s look ahead at what could be a dismal year for the internet in China. Censorship looms large, but there are some other factors worth exploring here too.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

That’s an awful lot of messages per minute, you might be thinking, but how does it compare to the messages sent in the first minute of the Chinese New Year (Spring Festival), which is a much more important holiday in China? We’ll have to wait and see what happens on Spring Festival this year, but the first-minute-of-2013 posts smashed the old record (set last Spring Festival), beating it by more than 50 percent.

The increased activity was due in part to a lot of New Year’s Eve variety shows on television, but the fact that Weibo has significantly more users now than it did during last year’s Spring Festival also certainly plays a role. When the confetti drops on the rabbit year this February, I expect this new Sina Weibo record to get broken.

[via Sina Tech]

China’s tightened internet controls were passed into law earlier today. As well as requiring broadband and mobile internet providers to have full ‘real name’ details of their customers (which pretty much happens already), the new 12-article law also mandates how all web companies operating in China must control what people post. That effectively legalizes the deletion of posts that contain what authorities deem to be “illegal” content or information.

Again, that’s close to what happens already in practice with the blanket self-censorship and fast-paced moderation that goes on on the Chinese web, as seen very clearly on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo. And so the new law will criminalize companies who do not censor the web with the kind of speed and efficiency that the law now dictates. That has huge implications for social companies like Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), Tencent (HKG:0700), and Renren (NYSE:RENN), and search engines from Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), and Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU). In fact, it’s an extra strain on the whole internet sector in the country, with possible extra costs involved in the already weighty and arduous practice of removing dissent, as well as other genuinely illegal acts on the web.

It’s surely only a matter of time before one Chinese web company is held criminally responsible for content posted on its service. And what will happen then? A fine? The jailing of the relevant member of staff?

Using Xinhua’s presumably official version of events, the news agency summarizes this aspect of the new law:

Service providers are required to instantly stop the transmission of illegal information once it is spotted and take relevant measures, including removing the information and saving records, before reporting to supervisory authorities, the decision says.

It empowers supervising departments to take technical and other necessary measures to prevent, stop or punish those who infringe on online privacy, requiring relevant service providers to give support during investigations.

There are some positive aspects to all this, as it also puts into law measures that, Xinhua says, “will protect digital information that could be used to determine the identity of a user or that concerns a user’s privacy.”

But as with all new web controls in China, a country where the web is already massively locked down, many will worry that the tightened legal framework will be used to identify people who post online some ‘sensitive’ information, such as – to take a topical example – evidence of corruption among officials.

In practice, a lot of this is happening already, as with recent real name requirements for microblogs like Sina Weibo, or the long-standing need to show ID when buying a mobile SIM. For now, a lot of questions remain unanswered, such as how this affects wifi hotspots, or people who rent homes and whose broadband account will be in the name of the home-owner – and a lot of other issues and unknowns.

The major Chinese web portal Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), maker of the hugely popular Sina Weibo, is keen to avoid the stasis of Yahoo. And so this morning, Sina’s CEO Charles Chao sent out an internal email outlining the company’s new “mobile first” strategy that’ll come with a major corporate restructuring.

In the email, seen by 36Kr (via TheNextWeb), Chao reviews the outgoing year and looks ahead to what it needs to do in 2013. He calls the monetization of Sina Weibo – with things like social commerce, social gaming, and its recently rebranded e-payments service – “a good start” without explicitly saying that Weibo is making very little money from its 400+ million registered users.

Going mobile is at the heart of the forthcoming restructuring and monetizing, as Chao writes [in our translation]:

In the upcoming 2013, the core of the company’s strategy will be “mobile first,” and at the same time we need to focus on the core business and enhance the company’s overall efficiency.

“Mobile first” demands the company, from top to bottom, consciously embrace mobile, and requires the ability to enhance the understanding of mobile, and shift to mobile resources. […] We need to break the organizational structure that binds PC and mobile businesses.

And so each of Sina’s main products will be split into a mobile and non-mobile arm, it appears from Chao’s email. The most crucial of these – the Weibo division – will be run by company VP Wang Gaofei as Weibo general manager, alongside Chu Dachen in charge of Weibo’s open platform and business development. Sina’s music business will also be jammed into the Sina Weibo department.

Chao acknowledges towards the end of the email that it has been years since Sina last restructured. He calls the mobile internet “an opportunity and a challenge for Sina.” It’s one that all major web companies are facing, especially now that some markets are seeing more users online via smartphones than laptops and PCs. There’s no mention, however, of ongoing rumors that China’s top e-commerce company, Alibaba, is trying to make a sizeable investment in the Sina Weibo division.

Chasing the mobile money

Sina runs China’s fourth-largest web portal business by revenue, though it’s proportionally too reliant on ad income which can be particularly fickle and prone to cut-backs during times of economic stress. Tencent (HKG:0700), China’s biggest web company, is way ahead of the pack in terms of monetizing mobile, with 9.5 percent of its Q1 2012 revenue coming from mobile value-added services. Here’s the corresponding graph:

Sina is also up against a growing social challenge from Tencent in the form of the latter’s WeChat app (known in China as Weixin). Though WeChat is primarily a messaging app like Whatsapp or Line, it also has broader social elements that threaten Sina Weibo, such as WeChat’s Path-like ‘Moments’ feature, and a growing brand platform that might soon expand into localized deals and payments. WeChat is expected to hit 300 million registered users next month.

[Source: 36Kr; via TNW]

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.

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]

Remember that interesting little social commerce experiment earlier this week in which Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi sold phones via Sina Weibo? Well, that two-day promotion has now ended, and Xiaomi has revealed that it generated about 1.3 million reservations on its way to selling the allotted 50,000 Xiaomi Mi2 phones in just five minutes and 14 seconds.

Not bad considering the Mi2 was being sold at full price (1,999 RMB, which is US$318). As for the social side of all this, Xiaomi’s original post about the promo on Weibo ended up getting 810,000 comments and 2.33 million retweets/reshares.

With the whole experiment being way over-subscribed, a lottery will decide who are the 50,000 people that can go through with the transaction. They have just 24 hours to sort it out, so their credit cards better not be maxed out already.

This all looks to have been an e-commerce test for the Twitter-esque Sina Weibo, which has been piling on new features in the past couple of years as quickly as its accruing new users. It surpassed 400 million registered Weibo-ers last month, and assuming that it has not reached a plateau it could well hit half a billion users before next summer. But it’s still not milking monetizing all those folks very well.

As for Xiaomi, we noticed last night that the Beijing-based phone-maker was teasing the prospect of its expansion into Hong Kong. So far it has focused solely on selling online within mainland China.

[Source: The Next Web; Xiaomi]

Oh yes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year: the time when everyone starts releasing end of year lists. And while most of them are about as compelling as lukewarm microwaved pizza, it’s always interesting to see what’s going on on Sina Weibo, arguably China’s hottest and craziest social network. Sina has released the full lists and you can read all about them here, but here are some of the highlights:

The year’s hottest topic? The London Olympics, which was mentioned nearly 400 million times on the service. Other hot topics include popular memes from the year like a slang term for “loser” and the “aircraft carrier style” meme, the Diaoyu/Senkaku island dispute (mentioned 42 million times), the 18th Party Congress (17.8 million times), Beijing’s deadly summer rainstorm (which your humble correspondent very nearly ventured out into, because he is an idiot), and more.

Sina also released a list of the hottest weibo accounts, but there’s not much interesting there in my opinion — as you might expect, many of the accounts listed are joke/novelty accounts. But it also released a list of the most-discussed celebrities on Weibo, which is more interesting. Topping the list is — who else — Korean pop star PSY, but tech star Kaifu Lee also made the list at number six, with more than 37 million mentions. Blogger Han Han also made the list, with 46 million mentions. And what list of popular people on the Chinese internet would be complete without Japanese porn star Sola Aoi, with 19.2 million mentions?

Anyway, the full lists are here, and I expect we’ll hear more from Sina over the next few weeks about how the year went for Weibo. Incidentally, if you’re interested in what people were talking about on Sina Weibo in China this year, this is a great alternative list with some things on it that Sina probably wouldn’t want to advertise people were talking about.

[via Sina Tech]

If you’re not willing to face the Mayan’s mooted apocalypse on the 21st while clutching your lousy old phone, then Xiaomi has some good news for you. The young Chinese phone-maker is doing some clever social commerce today, selling two of its new Xiaomi Mi2 devices every hour via Sina Weibo, China’s hottest Twitter-y service.

The Xiaomi Mi2 on sale on Sina Weibo. Click to enlarge.

Sales of the Android-based Xiaomi Mi2 run through to the 21st – but note that only 50,000 units of the popular phone are available in this promo. The most unique part of the whole exercise is that, as a Xiaomi representative tells us, “Ordering and payments are all done within Sina Weibo,” so you don’t even need to leave the social site so as to snag your new smartphone. Ordering can be accessed via a special events page on Weibo, here (pictured right).

To make it truly viral and social, all orders also get posted as Weibo ‘tweets’. The hashtag attached to this event is seeing lots of action, and the original Xiaomi post about the sale (here) has so far racked up nearly 617,000 retweets and over 281,000 comments.

This promo is also very likely to be a test-bed for Sina Weibo shifting more fully into e-commerce, so we can expect more like this on Weibo in the future.

Xiaomi has always taken social media – especially Weibo – very seriously as a key way of building up its small brand as it takes on giants such as Samsung and Huawei in the country. The newest Mi2 model went on sale in October.

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).

Friends and online contacts are a great source of app recommendations. And Sina Weibo, China’s top Twittery service, seems to agree. In the newly updated Sina Weibo for Android (v.3.2.0 beta 1), the social network adds cards to your stream (pictured above) whenever someone you follow installs an app from Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) own third-party app store [1].

It’s all pretty useful. Though an unwary individual might find himself or herself – well, more likely ‘himself’ – downloading an app of a saucy nature, such as Japanese Beauties Bouncy Boobies Live Wallpaper [2], from Sina’s Android app market, and then seeing it broadcast to all your followers.

In addition to that, the newest Sina Weibo for Android app shows a similar app card, replete with the app’s icon, whenever someone links to an Android application on an array of third-party download sites. It’s a bit like the preview that Google+ implemented recently whenever someone links to an app on Google Play – except that the system is a lot more inclusive on Weibo. If you fancy installing this app yourself, then the link in the Sina Weibo for Android app takes you to a landing page from which you can install that app directly to your phone – all from within the social app. It looks like this:

Just yesterday we looked at how the latest Sina Weibo app update was also bringing tentative support for Sina’s own e-payments service, including on the iPhone version.

You can get Sina Weibo for Android from pretty much any third-party app store, but it seems apt to snag it from Sina’s own App Center, here.

[Images: Techweb]

When Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), makers of the Twitter-like Weibo, launched its social gaming platform and virtual currency in July of 2011, it already had an online payments service in place so that it wasn’t reliant on e-payment services created by its Chinese web rivals. That was called SinaPay, which is a lot like PayPal. But it looks set to get a major rebranding very soon, giving it the more socially-oriented name WeiboPay.

Whatever the thing is called, WeiboPay still has a lot of local competitors, with more established e-payments systems already in place from the likes of Alibaba (with Alipay) and Tencent (TenPay).

WeiboPay will soon get a new homepage at Weibopay.com, but for now that redirects to the older branded site at the not-so-catchy pay.sina.com.cn. But the remit of the online payment service remains the same, in that it can be used to pay for things like Weibi (Sina Weibo’s own virtual currency) which is used for in-game purchases in many of its social games. Plus it’s used to pay the developers who publish on the Weibo gaming platform.

One expansion in WeiboPay comes with its inclusion in the newly updated official Sina Weibo app – though for now its mobile usability is quite limited. But with rival Tencent looking to be taking its smash-hit messaging app WeChat into the territory of local deals and social payments, Sina can’t afford not to develop WeiboPay into a more broadly useful service on smartphones.

Though Sina Weibo now has over 400 million registered users, it’s proving hard to monetize, and Sina on the whole is over-reliant on revenues from advertising – a flakey business – on its web portal properties.

[Source: Sohu IT (article in Chinese); via Marbridge Daily]

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]

From a regular user perspective, the interface is really intuitive. Large buttons at the top of the homepage make it easy to do what you want to, whether that’s donating money, donating specific items, volunteering to help an organization, participating in charity auctions, or just re-tweeting messages from NGOs and other nonprofits in the hopes that it brings them more attention and donors. There are lots of organizations already signed up, so whether you want to help out poor children, feed tigers, or rescue cute puppies, there’s probably something on Gongyi for you. And it’s nice that the site gives users lots of options beyond just donating money. I’m not sure how valuable retweeting messages really is, but it’s better than nothing, and allowing users to volunteer their time to some organizations is also an excellent option.

The site also encourages generosity with a sort of leaderboard of giving. Angel investor Xue Manzi (also known as Charles Xue; you may remember him from our GMIC coverage) currently holds the number two spot right now, and while it might seem impossible to out-charity a generous millionaire, remember that Gongyi gives points for more than just donating cash.

From an NGO perspective things are also pretty smooth. The signup process is relatively simple, although at present only verified users (with the V next to their name) can sign up. Although I’m not generally a fan of that kind of restriction, it makes perfect sense here as it allows Sina to verify that organizations are who they say they are, and ensures that users aren’t being asked to donate their money to scams. For those legit NGOs that do get signed up, Sina has the same options users get — everything from financial donations to charity auctions — so that nonprofits can choose the kind of campaign that’s right for them.

All in all, I’m very impressed with the new Gongyi weibo platform. This is the sort of thing that I wish Sina would push harder. Enterprise weibo may bring in the big bucks, but it’s platforms like this that can really show people what weibo brings to the table that can benefit society.

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]

Tencent’s mobile messaging behemoth Weixin (known as WeChat outside China) is, like other Chinese messaging services, legally responsible to some extent for the content its users share. And although the service is extremely popular, users have expressed concerns about how safe it is when strangers can pretend to be whoever they want. For these reasons, the company had previously initiated an optional real-name verification system, but recently suspended it temporarily. Now, it’s back open with a brand-new auto-verification option: users who have verified accounts on Sina Weibo or Tencent Weibo can log in via those accounts to have their Weixin accounts verified automatically.

The new verification system appears to be only in effect within China, and should not affect overseas users of WeChat in any way.

The system is a smart move on Tencent’s part, for several reasons. First, it greatly reduces the workload of the verification process, which would otherwise require each verification request to be processed by a Tencent employee. Second, it increases the ease of verification for new Weixin users in China and thus increases the likelihood that they will choose to verify their accounts. Finally, it allows users who would prefer to, ahem, circumnavigate real-name verification to verify via their Sina Weibo accounts (since Sina’s implementation of real-name requirements has been pretty half-assed by the company’s own admission).

As a chat app, the need for any political censorship on Weixin that would be facilitated by a real-name system is probably not as significant as it is on weibo, but the location-based nature of the app could facilitate stalking in such a way that real-name verification might become something that users actually demand. If that happens, allowing users to verify their identities via Weibo could turn out to be a bit of a mistake, as users are well aware of the holes in weibo real-name registration. But if that doesn’t happen, this change will have been a smart move for Tencent to ease the verification process both for users and for itself.

[Sohu IT via TechWeb]

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.

Now Sina thinks that my real name is Zhuge Liang. Perhaps I should have used a test account for this instead…

Interestingly, Sina has also changed the default login credential from an email address to a phone number, although users can still register with an email address if they choose by clicking on a link. That’s a good thing for overseas users, because Sina still doesn’t recognize any overseas numbers; phone numbers must be 11 digits and begin with 12, 13, 14, 15, or 18 (i.e., they must be Chinese mobile numbers) to work in the system. And while we’re piling on Sina for not making any real attempt to serve overseas users, there’s still no support for English or any other foreign languages. Perhaps that’s why Sina’s system won’t accept names that aren’t written in Chinese characters; the company still has no interest in catering to any other demographics.

As of today, Sina reports that it has more than 520,000 verified users, which isn’t a very impressive number at all given that the company claims more than 300 million registered users. In fact, it’s such an unimpressive number that I have to wonder if perhaps it wasn’t a typo in the report or something. After half a year of campaigning to get people to verify their accounts with their real identities, has the turnout really been this dismally low?

Weibo’s system has also been upgraded in other ways, including a new feature that allows users to report falsely-verified users. Sina has promised that it will punish users abusing its real-name verification system harshly, and in an online poll asking users what punishment they preferred, most users chose “revoke their user verification.”

Sina’s implementation of real-name requirements has always been a bit questionable, and it doesn’t make much sense for the company to limit its new users or cull its userbase of unverified users, especially when its verified user numbers are apparently so dismally low. But the company does have to compel with both regulatory requirements and user frustration at how hard it can be to tell real from fake and rumors from the truth. I would argue that Weibo’s problems with rumors is simply the reflection of a much larger social issue, not something that’s wrong with the platform. But Sina can’t change society, so I’d expect these platform “upgrades” to keep coming from time to time.

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: