Over the past few weeks we have noted how more individuals and companies are flocking to Chinese microblogs in an effort to reach out to Chinese people. The premier of Victoria Australia Ted Baillieu as well as opposition leader Daniel Andrews both took to Sina Weibo last month to reach Chinese speakers in their city. And now former Australian prime minister and foreign minister Kevin Rudd, who actually speaks Mandarin Chinese, has finally jumped on Weibo as well.
For Rudd’s first tweet, he sent a short thank you note to CCTV International host Rui Chenggang:
@ruichenggang hello. Thanks for encouraging me to start using weibo! I hope to have many opportunities to chat with my Chinese friends. Lao Lu.
He also noted that he hasn’t used Chinese characters in a long time, and when noting that his characters are like a five year old, he used the wrong character for ‘five.’ The error was quickly corrected by his followers, but many reacted that the mistake was ‘cute.’ Rudd then said perhaps his writing is closer to that of a four year-old. Indeed it’s this kind of genuine interaction that’s likely to win him an even greater number of admirers.
So far Rudd has over 116,000 followers since joining back on April 18th. His approach certainly contrasts with that of London mayor Boris Johnson, whose own weibo blunders we wrote about last week.
As we recently noted, Chinese is reportedly soon going to overtake English as the dominant language on the web, so expect more high-profile people and brands [1] to use weibo as a means to reach out to this portion of the web.
[Via Sydney Morning Herald]
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Social data platform Gnip tells us that their clients are demanding data from Sina Weibo specifically, a strong indication how important the platform is for companies outside of China. ↩
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