• Peer Index
• Klout
• Quora
• Yahoo! Answers
• Facebook Questions

When I woke up this morning and got online, I went to Google Buzz! and found this Youtube video from the vernerable Robert Scoble, in which he interviewed the founder of a new Twitter social influence tool, Peer Index. Basically, Peer Index goes one level beyond what Klout does; instead of just ranking people as influencers, curators, pundits, etc., it goes one level beyond, and divides people into vertical groups, and the identifying the groups in which they are influential. Just to give you an idea of how it works, here is my profile on Peer Index.

Partway through the video, I got a little surprised and my ego puffed up a bit when the China economy and biz section was brought up and I was mentioned. Always thankful for nice little mentions!

This looks like quite an improvement over Klout because of the finer granularity than Klout. I have been disappointed in Klout lately because they don’t seem to have kept their index updated. Give you an example: Here is my profile on Klout; notice how my tagline hasn’t been updated compared to my Twitter page.

For this reason, I much prefer Peer Index to Klout.

Another area I have been interested in are online questions forums; these really started with Naver in Korea, which has the predominant search engine in Korea. At one time, Naver marketed itself as the leading human-powered search engine; it relied on human vertical sector experts to answer questions. Eventually, some of these people first became experts in their field and became well-known first on the Internet, then on TV and through society. A few even achieved fame and riches through Naver.

One of the interesting side effects of this was that when people become well-known for the right reasons, they want to use their real names. Naver enabled this to happen.

Yahoo! noticed the success of this, and created Yahoo! Answers , which was largely a copy of the Naver model. Since it did not have the rigorous enforcement, policing and feedback which Naver did though, the quality of the questions and answers quickly went down in quality, with the result that the audience which used it also went down.

A recent variation on this has been Quora. This is a well designed question and answer model, which has good design and a good clean interface, and is heavily policed by editors. I tried it out for most of July and generally like it, but I found the editors too intrusive in the way they tried to edit questions. The community which is there is heavily slanted to ex-Facebook people, and the venture capital community. For a while I found this amusing, but after two weeks I found it boring, since I found both communities to be navel-gazers. As a side-point, I found many of the editors to be either Taiwanese who were deep-green pro-independence folk, or Indian. (Not that I care, but it is interesting how sub-communities shown through.)

For me, the straw broke when I asked a question in Chinese: 能用中文发问吗？(Translation: Can I ask questions in Chinese?) My motivation in asking this question was to engage some lively discussions in Chinese, since there is a significant number of Chinese on Quora. This question was quickly deleted by one of the Quora editors, and I was told to send an email to feedback at quora dot com. This was too much, and told me that their rules were too inflexible to make it a truly global Q&A forum, and I had had enough of the ex-FB and VC community, so I left and haven’t been back.

Facebook Questions is now undergoing closed testing; I expect this to be much better than Quora because it will associate people using their real names with their FB identities. For advertisers, this will be a very powerful tool because it will identify who really knows their stuff, and it should quickly replace Quora because of Facebook’s huge user base. In my opinion, Quora is too little too late, and their community is too narrow, and their editors’ overzealousness will prevent it from growing significantly.

After seeing Peer Index and the Q&A portals, I have decided that the Peer Index approach is much better. When people go to portals, they want to strut their stuff and show off, or of that doesn’t work, they just leave. In my own case, I like it much better when people can build their crowds based on their tweets, and you can build and lose followers according to Twitter. This is why I like Twitter and Peer Index much better than any of the Q&A portals.

I hope that Peer Index represents the trend of the future so that we get better quality as well as quantitative research when looking for influencers and knowledge experts on Twitter and the Internet.

Some individuals, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, and Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, have gone so far as to embrace the concept that people should have almost no secrets at all, and that if you do have secrets, you are either backward, or have something bad to hide. Basically, they put forward the view that if you want to hide something, you are old, out-of-date and out-of-fashion, and that you SHOULD embrace openness as the way of the future. Mark Zuckerberg has gone so far as to say that if he had the chance to re-architect Facebook all over again, he would make it completely open, with no privacy controls.

Many in the west, especially libertarians, have embraced this idea without even debating the merits of this argument. People in the IT sector especially are sympathetic to this POV, so much so that it has become a white god. The white god syndrome is the widespread belief is that those in the west have always known what is best for the rest of the world, and that it upholds the precious values of personal liberty and individualism. After all, hasn’t the west been the leader in the struggle for human liberty and progress, fighting two world wars and numerous small wars so that others could be free? Many in the west adhere to this point of view, forgetting to question why accountability in the west is often applied selectively, in spite of all the claims made by its proponents.

If you accept this historical narrative, then anyone, or any government, which dares to object are either ignorant or evil.

Throughout the argument for free flow of information, there is no room left for defining the role of what a government does. There is only 1) information and 2) the rights of the individual to access that information anytime and anywhere.

Because the argument is framed this way, the Chinese government’s claims for Internet sovereignty have been met with derision and even contempt by the western press. The Chinese government’s claim is simple enough: IT companies in China must adhere to PRC laws. Looking at it from the surface, there is nothing revolutionary or different about the PRC claim; other governments, including those in the west, require IT companies to follow the laws of the country they do business in. If there is a difference in China, it has to do with due process, and what the government needs to do in order to obtain data from the IT companies. This is where things get blurry.

The infrastructure for the Internet was built in a way which did not clearly follow national borders. A US IT company may have web servers in Iceland, which now has the most stringent laws protecting data privacy. The data may or may not sit on the company’s own web servers; it could just as easily sit in the cloud, on servers provided by Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Apple, adding yet another layer of abstraction. Just thinking about the legal aspect of this is likely to throw lawyers into a tizzy of billable hours.

In contrast to this, the Chinese government has been very protective of Chinese consumer data. In China, consumer market research is a restricted industry, meaning that non-Chinese market research companies are not allowed to enter the field. In order to enter the industry, most western market research firms need to form joint ventures or partner with multiple Chinese market research firms. While the western market research firms do the analysis, the data is usually kept in the hands of the Chinese market research firms. This way, the data about Chinese consumers is always kept in the hands of the Chinese market research firms, and never leaves China’s borders.

The only exception to this rule comes with regard to personnel files in western multinational corporations. Most US and European firms have centralized HR departments at company headquarters; these include detailed personnel files for all staff and management, regardless of country and location.

Throughout this discussion, it has become very clear that the Chinese government does not adhere to the currently dominant western notion that information should flow freely across borders. This position has been made crystal clear in the showdown between Google and the Chinese government over censorship. I see the Internet sovereignty assertion as the first step in a systematic pushback against the free flow of information argument.

How could the Chinese government push back further? The simplest and most logical argument would be to claim that all personnel and data files on PRC citizens must not leave the PRC’s borders, and giving the security services the right to go to western MNCs’ HR departments to perform data audits to make sure that they are in compliance. Such a move would throw their HR departments into chaos, as it would mean that headquarters would no longer have the personnel files of PRC employees.

If the PRC government were to make this claim, it would effectively claim that it has control over all data about its citizens.

To sum up:

• There should be a healthy debate about the free flow of information across borders. For too long, this is a position which has been supported without question in the west, and those who have challenged it have been routinely tarred and feathered by the press. This lack of an open debate about this aspect of the white god is not a good thing.
• The PRC government should clearly state its position on data, and express how far it intends to go. If the government stakes a claim to all PRC citizen’s personnel data, will they extend that to their medical information and later, genetic data, too? Will the individual have any control or recourse over their own data, or will the government always be the final arbiter and decision-maker? The Chinese government should makes its position clear, without resorting to slogans and nationalism.

This would be best for everyone, especially the Chinese people.

The most important and vibrant part of the economy are the Chinese private sector. In spite of being out of power politically, occasionally suppressed, lack of capital and resources, it has managed to the point where it now employs more people than the public sector.

Let’s take a closer look at the media industry, just to cite an example. All official media, including newspapers, magazines, books, television and radio are owned, in one way or another, by the government. These might be the central government, provincial government or municipal governments. The performance and careers of these government officials are often measured by how these media perform: if they perform, the careers of these officials go up, if they perform less than well, then it goes into their performance evaluation, and has an effect on their careers.

The challenge for the official media in China now is that they are, generally speaking, losing audience to smarter and more creative challengers from the private sector in fields like online gaming. When this happens, and audience and circulation go down, these officials have to think of ways to address the situation. If that doesn’t work, they cover up the bad numbers.

Virtually all of the challengers in the Internet media field are private companies which are venture capital funded. In short, they are all private sector. When the audience moves to the private sector companies, public sector media companies tend to lose first audience, then revenue.

Many westerners look at the media ownership issue in China too much from a political and social oppression angle.

Actually, there is a lot more to it than that. It’s about what industries will still stay in Chinese state ownership, and how they will remain competitive in the hyper-challenging Chinese market. The official media has tried to counter-balance this trend by showing women in bikinis and other devices, but the trend to the private sector media (or user-generated media) is continuing. This is what Chinese ministries are thinking about all the time.

After all, if there are no longer competitive industries in the state’s company portfolio, how will it get revenue?

So far, the prevailing wisdom re ecommerce in China is that while the potential numbers are impressive, it’s going to be a while before the upside of the hockey stick becomes apparent. There are some reasons for this: low trust, fear of fraud, etc. So far, the only place where online commerce has performed well has been in online gaming with companies such as Shanda and Giant Interactive leading the way. The trouble with the demographics for online gamers is that it includes early adopters with low incomes who spend a considerable amount of time in China’s Internet cafes. These are people who are using the Internet for cheap entertainment, and are not likely to spend too much money on products sold in in-game ads.

Now, a new report released by the Research Institute Data Center of China Internet claims that online spending has increased to 37.5B US dollars for the first six months YOY, an increase of 58.2 percent over the same period in 2007. This is very good news, and suggests that we are beginning to see traction after many years of investment in the sector. In short, we are beginning to see the upside of the hockey stick, since according to the report, Chinese spend an average of 211.9 yuan on products/services on a monthly basis. If the trend continues there will be a double boost: the number of new spenders online will grow, and the monetary amounts spent by those already in will also go up.

This suggests that many upwardly-mobile Chinese are losing resistance to ecommerce and are overcoming fears to spending online. I believe that this represents the beginning of a secular uptrend for this sector. Within this field, companies which have a successful track record in fields such as Chinese online education will perform well. If Chinese consumers are convinced of the quality of these online companies’ products and services, it would be safe to assume that interactive advertising and Internet word of mouth will also gain greater traction.

The great irony is that for the most part, both sides agree on one thing: that China should become more open. It’s just that many westerners think that they should set a timetable which the Chinese should march to, and the Chinese believe that they should make the changes according to their own internal considerations. I believe that by publicly criticizing the Chinese government and policy, many well-intentioned western critics (and some not so well-intentioned), actually slow down the pace of China’s opening up because if the Chinese government and society changed more quickly, they would be seen as bowing to western pressure. That is something no Chinese government can afford to seen doing.

This is the core reason why I have so little time for most western critics of Chinese government and Chinese social reforms. At the end of the day, the Chinese government and people will have to proceed at a pace they are most comfortable with.

Some say that this is a naive approach which favors the government since, after all, they are in power. I don’t agree with this view. Thirty years of reforms have unleashed social forces which not even the Chinese government can hope to control and completely contain.

One interesting story is that of Fan Paopao, the teacher who ran away from his classroom, thinking first of his own personal safety, ahead of those of his students. Then, he wrote about it in his blog. This week, he was fired from his school, and has now become the subject of widespread ridicule.

But the true significance of the story is that Fan Meizhong is alive, and can freely speak and defend his actions and views in China. If he had had the temerity to do this 40 years ago during the Cultural Revolution, or even 20 years ago, there is a good chance that he would have been publicly denounced for the very least, and maybe have even been killed.

But he has not, and continues to defend his actions on his blog.

China has changed a lot.

It is becoming a much more open society, where different views can be heard. There are borders where the government will not countenance criticism, but as the society changes, those areas are becoming fewer and smaller. The society is becoming more and more what was called in Taiwan 多元化 or what is known in China as 多角化. This means that there are more different groups and subgroups, some of which will evolve their own subcultures within Chinese society.

Mao was never comfortable with this approach, he wanted society to be the same, right down to the dress code, not thinking and not criticizing, just obedient to him and his apparatus. Those days are gone. Like Fan Paopao, people are much more individualistic, and are not afraid to speak their minds. And they are willing to stand up for their views and take the consequences.

Without a doubt, there are groups and individuals in the Chinese government who are not comfortable with some of the changes this is leading to, but they cannot turn back the clock of reform and opening up. There may be many admirers of Mao Zedong in China, but you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would want to have another Cultural Revolution. (In the Chinese government’s official version of history, the Cultural Revolution is referred to as a “national disaster”.)

I think of the past eight years in the US as being much like America’s version of the Cultural Revolution. After 9/11, this administration tried to push its own agenda on the American people and on the rest of the world. Their interpretation was that those who attacked New York on that day hated America for its freedoms, and that the world is divided sharply between good and evil, with no room for anything in between. This meant that there must be a confrontational struggle which will end in final victory for good and defeat for evil. Ironically, in order to defend freedom, torture, the suspension of habeas corpus and other means which most Americans abhor had to be used.

Most Americans don’t subscribe to this view any longer. We’ll find out in November.

So maybe looking past all the political and social rhetoric, the west, America and China are not that different from each other after all? The challenge is that these changes are evolving in China, and do not make the western press because they are not “news”. This is why many western critics are hopeless ignorant. They don’t understand the social context of China, choosing instead to focus media attention on single issues.

In China, most of the most important things which happen do not make news, but in the aggregate, they are indeed revolutionary in scope.

If the west and China understood each other better and looked at each other in these terms, maybe there would be a lot less misunderstanding.

On the surface, this makes a lot of sense, especially with regards to generally ignorant US politicians, movie stars and others, who would have a hard time finding places like Tibet and Darfur on a map, but are moved by some of the images they see on television. For them, China and Chinese policies are a very convenient whipping boy, even though they have very little context and understanding of the real underlying issues.

This naturally puts the Chinese government on the defensive and more recently, some Chinese have become angry at the overseas criticism.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? Those who argue against interfering in another country’s internal affairs, or those who say it’s OK to do so?

The fact is that if a country is big and has a strong economy, whatever it does has an effect on other country’s economies, and on the global economy. Even though only American citizens’ can vote in their elections, the gross stupidity and ineptitude of American economic and trade policies in recent years do not end at America’s borders.

They go far beyond it.

And the Chinese government has started complaining about it. After all, they hold huge amounts of US dollar-denominated treasuries which are losing their value daily as the US dollar loses value, and their sovereign wealth funds are blocked from making investments in Europe and the US, mainly on political and not economic grounds.

So aren’t Chinese government officials interfering in US internal affairs? Yes, but the two countries’ economies are so tightly intertwined, the US policies are having an effect on the Chinese economy. When they are so tightly bound together by trade and economics, there is no borderline. It’s as silly as the right arm complaining about the left arm.

The fact is that the US and China are like two handicapped people: one is blind and the other is deaf. They need each other in order to survive.

The sooner politicians, officials and miserably deficient media on both sides recognize that, the better. If they don’t, ordinary people will continue to get caught in the middle and distracted by bad policies and ignorant offline and online media pundits getting them to chase red herrings while the real problems get worse.

In 10 years, we probably we won’t talk about blogging, we will just call it writing, and writing will come to include the term blogging almost automatically in everyone’s vocabulary. It’s just that now, the technology and its capabilities are new enough, that some people have become enamored with its possibilities. Blogging, from my point of view, is just a new form of writing.

I’m convinced that a good part of the reason for the popularity of blogs has been because the mainstream media has done such a bad job of explaining for example, China and the west to each other. In particular, the US mainstream media, under the pressure to achieve profits and ratings, has turned everything into a gladitorial epic struggle. One moment it’s between China and the west, the next day it’s between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the following day it’s between the rulers of Myanmar and the international community. And on and on it goes.

Part of my reason for writing this blog is to highlight issues and bring to peoples’ attention issues which I believe are not shown correctly and intelligently in most of the western media. There is an awful lot going on in China, and 99% of it cannot be analyzed intelligently in terms of a gladitorial contest between opposing forces. Besides, gladitorial contests are a Roman form of entertainment! The Chinese much preferred strategy games to achieve their ends. Chinese heroes are Sunzi (writer of the Art of War) and Zhuge Liang, who used his wits to achieve his strategic goals.

The server logs indicate that most visitors to this site come from the US. If the articles on this site show visitors from the US and the west that there is more than one possible interpretation to events in China and Chinese behavior, then it has done a good job. It would be presumptuous to ask anyone who has not lived in China for more, but it certainly is a good first step. This is why I like writing about China as a medium. The reader can think things over, and then decide to agree or disagree. When they want, they can post a comment. I must say that I have been very impressed with the intelligence, thought and perception behind the vast majority of the comments, even when my opinions may be different. This is the kind of dialogue which engenders respect, even when people are separated by time, distance, language, culture and even opinions. The world needs more of this kind of dialogue.

I have become disconcerted at what I call the dumbing down of American society. Too much, issues have been reduced to 15-second sound bites and become trivialized. The relationship between China and the west is far too complex and complicated, and the relationship is so deeply intertwined, that it simply cannot afford to be trivialized.

It would be great if American bloggers visited the sites of Chinese bloggers, and western bloggers with a Chinese angle, such as this one, and posted thoughtful comments and questions about China. In my opinion, it would be entirely improper if well-known American bloggers came to China, lectured the Chinese about freedom, human rights and freedom of speech, without even making a dedicated effort to understanding what the Chinese bloggers were thinking about and discussing on their blogs. The Chinese would feel insulted, and I would agree with them. They would be insulted, yet again, by yet another example of arrogance, ignorance and stupidity. And then the Americans would move off, completely oblivious to all the damage which had been done to an event which had the best of intentions, but then didn’t play out right.

If China is about to become the great power that many think that it will become in the 21st century, wouldn’t it make sense to start reading the blogs of Chinese bloggers to find out what they are thinking about and saying? What’s so difficult to understand about that?

Why is it that Robert Scoble is so quick to condemn China’s lack of rule of law (as he recently has), and then quickly changes subject to something totally unrelated to China? The answer is simple: Robert Scoble is a media gadfly who is seeking new subjects which he can feed to his followers. He is not really interested in his subjects; he wants to stand in the spotlight and serve his own agenda. And he will move wherever the spotlight moves, as long as he is in the center. China is interesting to him only so long as it serves his purposes. After that, it becomes yesterday’s newspaper. He is incapable of going deep on any subject.

When are people like Robert Scoble actually going to make an effort to understand what Chinese are thinking about before they lecture them about how they should run their country? Is that too much to ask?

I hope that this event is not turned into a spectacle. The way to do that is to start talking to each other, through our blogs, NOW.

That is what real dialogue is about.

Hope you find it informative.

China has always had a larger population than other countries, and the country has had very bloody periods in its history. Some 20M Chinese were killed in the 19th century during a civil war, the Taiping Rebellion, and possibly another 20M were killed in WWII, when Japan invaded China. Millions also died because of bad political policy decisions in the 1950s and 1960s, which reached their culmination in the Cultural Revolution.

Unlike in Washington DC, where you can find war monuments to Americans killed in WWII, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, there are no war memorials to Chinese soldiers or civilians killed in these wars, or to any who died as a result of bad government policy decisions. For the most part, they have just become unknown individuals who died and are now forgotten.

This is why the decision to lower the Chinese flag for ordinary civilians is so different and marks a break with the past. For the first time in its history, the Chinese government is saying that it is OK to mourn for ordinary civilians. This did not happen during the Tangshan earthquake, which killed some 450,000 civilians in 1976, or in 1989, or even so much during the SARS crisis of 2003.

For the first time, a Chinese government has embraced the idea that any human life, even that of ordinary human lives, has value. Actually, this is a very western concept, and is a very important step on the road to democracy. Is this not a valuable change in China’s reforms and opening up? This will make it that much more difficult for any Chinese government to dismiss the value of any Chinese lives which are lost in the future, whether they are due to natural disaster, or war, or for political reasons.

The Chinese government and party have activated their media, and issued an edict that entertainment websites should shut down over the next three days, entertainment programming should be curtailed, along with three minutes of mourning each day.

This move immediately attracted strong criticism from many members of the Twitterati in the US who, to put it frankly, have embarrassingly little understanding of China, and continue to see China in over-simplified black and white stereotypes, as you can see in this feed from Robert Scoble’s Friendfeed account.

When I think that the people who have Friendfeed accounts represent smart, well-educated, tech-savvy people, and they say these things, I just get depressed. The stereotypes and distrust of China just run so deep.

I get a very different view simply because I read Chinese, and I know what many Chinese say and think on the Internet, where people have much more latitude to express themselves than on TV and the print media. Sure, the government has an agenda and is spinning and exploiting this to make themselves look good. And in some ways, they are doing it in a clumsy way. But the government is now accountable to protect the lives of ordinary Chinese.

After 9/11, the US government claimed all kinds of special powers, including surveillance wiretaps, the need to kidnap and torture terror suspects, and the need to invade Iraq because the government of Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and the government needed to keep these weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists. If there is one thing we can learn from all tragedies, it is that all governments have agendas, and they will exploit every opportunity to push their agendas in the event of a tragedy.

But it does not mean that the original intent should be completely dismissed out of hand as the actions of a dictatorial regime.

Maybe I’m asking too much, but can some people, Americans especially, try to look at China through the eyes of the Chinese, and not always try to scare and frighten other Americans into asking what the “rise” of China means to the US and the west? Is it too much to think or ask that maybe, just maybe, Chinese don’t spend everyday plotting how to steal their jobs and turn America into a third-world economy? And that maybe, they are just ordinary people who are trying to get along in life, and raise their child and get him/her in a good school, and buy a house? And that the government is far from perfect, but it has allowed ordinary Chinese to have a much better standard of living than before, and is now, for the first time, beginning to care for and mourn the loss of ordinary civilian lives?

There’s a very simple rule: If you reach out and treat people like friends, they tend to act like friends, and if you treat them suspiciously, they become enemies.

In the beginning, it’s hard to reach out and trust people you don’t know well as friends because they seem so foreign and different, but it’s always works out better in the end.

UPDATE 5/20/08: I was interviewed by Christine Lu of China Business Network about this article and you can read that interview here. This article is also referenced in a blog article for the Guardian (UK).
EastSouthNorthWest has an article about how the Central Publicity Department, which is a Chinese government and party organ in charge of making sure that the official line is carried in the Chinese media, dealt with the earthquake crisis.

There is a very simple answer to all this: a large part of the organization is done on the Internet in China, specifically on BBSes. While the BBS (bulletin board system) is something outdated and antiquated in the US Internet, it has been a very important part of the Chinese Internet, and I would argue, it is growing and becoming more influential. For the Chinese government, it is a headache because in spite of Chinese government regulations, it is largely unregulated. For western corporations it is a good place to gather information but is useless for advertising, but for many Chinese it is the most important part of the Internet (along with online gaming and their IM client, which is most likely to be QQ or MSN Instant Messenger depending on their age and demographics).

Don’t believe me? Go to your nearest Chinese Internet cafe and watch what people are doing.

Most westerners who come into the China Internet market have no idea of its power and influence, and instead think that the Chinese Internet is largely the same as the US market, but it isn’t. The Chinese government doesn’t really like BBSes because it really is free (as in free speech), and is the breeding ground for all kinds of weird stuff. And while it is important for gathering buzz on products (as CIC, based in Shanghai, does) for corporations, nobody has really been able to monetize it. And, western journalists fail to monitor it, which is why they miss on so many big stories, and end up giving credit to some sinister Chinese government policies. ( I guess it’s kind of flattering for the Chinese government to be given credit for something when most Chinese know that it isn’t that powerful.)

Isn’t it amazing that such a huge and important part of free speech in China has been entirely missed? Fortunately, Tom Melcher’s new blog Live from Beijing! has a very good introductory article to BBSes (h/t to Andrew Lih). I got something of an introduction to the BBS in 1998, shortly after Sina was formed from the merger of SRS and Sinanet. One of the first web applications created by Wang Zhidong was a simple BBS which he demoed to me in the summer of that year. It really took off in popularity with the US’s accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in April 1999 when millions of angry Chinese hit the Sina news forum. Please don’t think of the Strong Nation forum on the People’s Daily site as being at all representative of Chinese BBSes; it is official and closely monitored for content. The interesting BBSes are all unofficial or semi-official.

Most of the angry Chinese in China, or fenqing, are organized on the BBSes, where they gather and shoot the breeze. These people have time on their hands, and play games, spend time in QQ, and gossip on the BBSes of their choice at the moment. They spend almost no time on what we would call the official Internet, except going to get news on Sina, Sohu and Netease. It is very hard to reach them with advertising.

Now, let’s talk about their persona. For the most part, they:

• They distrust the official media and do not buy magazines, and get as much information as they can from unofficial sources, such as BBSes. They only go to the official media for some sports information and major news information.
• They trust unofficial news more than news which comes from official sources.
• They are the perfect audience for spreading rumors, because they can be quickly organized by anonymous leaders, or “honeybees” as Tom Melcher calls them in his article.
• When organized, they can be huge, in the millions, and they can move like a swarm.

In simple terms, the characteristics of this unofficial crowd are:

• Chinese official government influence is very limited
• They are mostly self-organized
• The numbers are in the millions
• They move extremely fast
• They disappear just as fast as they appeared
• They are almost always anonymous and do not use their real names, preferring instead to use their own handles

In simple terms, they are an issue-focused flash mob. For corporations, they are:

• Not susceptible to traditional PR methods since you are dealing with an anonymous group
• Very tightly focused around one issue
• Move much faster than corporations and their decision-making apparatus is diversified,
• Do not trust/ believe in information from any government, including Chinese

My estimate is that more than 60% of non-IM traffic in China is to these unofficial BBSes, and that number is growing.

When it comes to advertising, most adspend hits that remaining 40% of the official and semi-official Internet, without reaching where many people are. CIC acts as the eyes and ears of corporations, but corporations have not been able to do anything yet with that information and are still reliant on mainstream advertising approaches for both online and offline which are largely out of date. This is the background for my article on why agencies need a new approach to online marketing in China.

So, BBSes are the real social media marketing tool, and as usual, the Chinese are ahead of everyone else, but just haven’t figured out that part themselves. While the west talks about social media and Web 2.0, China has had a version of it for the past ten years. It may not be pretty, but it works.

It’s just that vast majority of outsiders haven’t figured it out yet.