Microblog Marketing Becoming a Dubious Business in China?

The nature of marketing is to attract as many eyeballs as possible, or place yourself where everyone is looking. So when most people are riding the social networking wave, it’s perfectly natural that marketers try their best to get involved.

In China right now, people are on Weibo (microblogs), and all major internet companies have made their attempt to to get a piece of the action. Sohu, Sina, Tencent, and NetEase all have their own versions of weibo, while older social websites such as Douban and Tianya are trying to merge microblogs into their existing business models.

The future of microblogs should be VERY bright. However like in any shooter game, when your Gatling gun overheats, you know it’s gonna jam and nasty things will happen.

Today Chinese blogger Wang Hero revealed a rate card from a certain “microblog marketing company.” There are some very interesting items on the list. Among them are:

• Create and verify an official microblog account, and add up to 5,000 followers (5000 RMB per company)
• Add a huge horde of zombie followers (10,000 followers per 200 RMB)
• Add a small heap of real followers (1,000 followers per 100 RMB)
• Paid retweets (1,000 retweets per 100 RMB, from different accounts)
• Retweet to specified microblog users (1,000 target users per 200 RMB)
• Management of official microblog account, with guaranteed 2 updates posted per day and at least 3,000 new followers per month (3000 RMB per month)
• Retweet or endorsement by popular microblog users with 100 to 800 thousands of followers (500 RMB per retweet, 550 RMB per endorsed tweet)

In terms of marketing efficiency, all these services might easily sum up to a grand-looking heap of nothingness. Because what we can see from it is:

• This company clearly has tens of thousands of bot-controlled “zombie users” on popular microblog sites. And that most likely costs it nothing.
• Since zombie users come from zero cost, making them follow somebody costs nothing too.
• And telling zombie followers to retweet something costs nothing too.
• Creating a “zombie king” with 100 to 800 thousands of followers costs… how much? Still nothing. Just tell all those zombies to follow this, this, and this. A few clicks of a button and Bob’s your uncle.

Rate card from microblog marketing company

To wrap it up, whoever trusts his/her marketing objectives to companies like this might spend quite a lot of money on zero-cost services, and have the all-important marketing message being ricocheted among a legion of zombie followers. Does that sound like good marketing? Of course not. A company who relies on this will get nothing but two rather meaningless numbers: a follower count of bots, and a retweet count (with no real human actually reading their message).

This is obviously another dent in the reputation of China’s already badly criticized online marketing sector. It’s not the lone case. If you try searching for weibo/microblog on Taobao, you will find a huge number of people selling zombie followers there, and it’s quite cheap. 1,000 zombie followers on Sina Weibo is generally sold for around 3 to 4 RMB there. If you boost the order to 10,000 you’ll get a nice discount bringing the total price to 25 or 30 RMB. OK. What I’m trying to say is, if you really feel in bad need of some zombie juice, go to Taobao, because it’s vastly cheaper than some “professional marketing agents.”

Zombie accounts are a big problem on China's microblogs

To illustrate the effectiveness of such microblog marketing agents, Wang Hero gave an example. On September 29th a company created a reward-for-retweet event to celebrate the successful launch of China’s Tiangong number one space lab. Despite a modest follower count of 1800, it generated over 13 million retweets in the end, out of which only slightly over 2000 were attached with any comments (clearly made by humans).