More than 117 million people in China used online forums in 2009, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Since the 1990s, online forums have become an increasingly important gateway for expression of public opinion. Internet usage in rural areas, such as western China, has increased at a quicker rate than in more developed urban areas. China had 384 million internet users by the end of 2009.

Source: Xinhua News Agency via @AdAgeChina

Also read::China Internet Statistics 2009 Summary

Research from Fleishman-Hillard found that while internet users in China overwhelmingly felt more comfortable with companies that microblog, those in North America and the UK were largely unmoved.

China Internet users also show very positive attitude toward companies monitoring microblogs:

Edison Research found that while 87% of US consumers had heard of Twitter, only 7% used it. How many people have heard of microblogs? Still not many. Not to mention the number of users who frequently use it.

Also read::Consumer Confidence in China Back to Pre-Recession Levels

Tencent last week launched a new social networking website in China called “Peng You” which means “Friends” in English.

Pengyou clearly targets two groups of audience, “students” and “white collar workers”. At first login, users will be asked to select which group they belong to:

The “students” SNS features come from Tencent’s previous product called “QQ alumni”, which was launched last August and claimed to have 10 million registered users this January and 20 million in Feb.

After selecting “I’m studying” at first login, the user will be asked to register via one of two ways:

1. Get invitations from friends who’s already in qq alumni network (initially users can log in using their QQ instant messaging id and password at pengyou.qq.com)
2. Submit invitation code if any

For those who are working, they will be asked to register using their company email address. However, not all companies emails can be used to register at the moment. I tried a few; none worked. Got a tip from a friend, right now only Tencent’s company emails are accepted. It’s still in internal testing stage.

Social networking site is not new to Tencent as they have a very large social networking site called “Q Zone” which has over 428 million users by this March. The difference between qzone and pengyou is clear: qzone is a social network of qq instant messaging friends while pengyou is a network of friends in real life.

Also read::China social networking sites statistics 2009 (updated)

As little as 10 cents, you can “grow” your fan base in China social media such as Baidu Post Bar, blogs, micro-blogging platforms, etc.

With less than 3,000 yuan (USD 440), you can get tens of thousands of fans for your social media channels. And guess what? You can find many such sellers easily on Taobao.

Most sellers are quite “transparent” about their services; you don’t get true fans but you can very “real” fans with photos, locations, and profiles information. Of course, most of these fans have either one or no fans at all.

A few sellers seem very advanced. They provide huge number of fans (such as 30K) each of which has 5 to 300 fans, complete profile, and certain number of blog posts.

Where are those fans from? Team work. Some utilize the collective efforts from a team; some use software; and, some use both techniques.

Should you buy fans?

I don’t recommend you buy fans. If you do, you not only lie to others but also to yourself. What’s the point of building a business and making it look like attractive only to yourself?

If the number of fans increase too rapidly within a short time frame, it might trigger red flag and the administrator could shut down your account.

One thing you should have learned is, there are many people in China whose mind can be only in love with short term goals – quick money.

Also read::Baidu Post Bar Updated with Twitter Features

Chanced upon Sina’s smart “assassin” embedded in the feeds. Take a look at a normal blog post (above) first.

Atom OR RSS feeds are not popular in China; not at all though blog platforms like Sina Blog does provide RSS feeds (you can get it from firefox address bar for example) though it’s not obvious on the interface. Social networking sites like RenRen offers blog like function which also allows users to import blog posts by providing blog URL into its platform.

Sina inserts one line of texts with link to a special landing page promoting Sina Blog service:

I asked friends previously when I was importing self-hosted wordpress blog and no one actually realize I have a self-hosted blog, not to mention which platform I was using. The above imported blog post is in my current renren account and it’s a pretty good tactic from Sina to promote its blog service and win more users.

However, from usability perspective, it could confuse normal users and some may think blog author inserted it. On the other hand, Sina seems not ready to monetize the feeds yet.

Also read::Rumor: Microsoft to Acquire Sina

Baidu Zhidao, similar to Yahoo Answers, launched API platform. There are so far nine partners including abang.com (about.com in China) who have implemented Baidu Zhidao API.

Users can ask and answer questions across different websites directly or indirectly via its powerful APIs.

Baidu Zhidao APIs allows two types of partnership: one for high traffic volume, called channel partnership, provides not only APIs, but also free web space and data transfer. Channel partner websites users can log in with their own id and password to ask and answer questions, which will be synchronized with Baidu Zhidao.

The other partnership is for small to medium websites with similar features; but no free webspace or data transfer will be provided.

Baidu Zhidao Open

Also read::Baidu Launched Discovery Channel

comScore last week released its March 2010 rankings of the top video properties in Hong Kong based on data from its comScore Video Metrix service.

The report found that 88.5% of Hong Kong’s Internet population viewed video online in March, with visitors averaging more than 10 hours of video viewing per person during the month.

In March, Internet users in Hong Kong (age 15 and older) watched 447 million videos, with Google Sites ranking as the top video property with 234.2 million videos, representing 52.4 percent of all videos viewed online. YouTube.com accounted for more than 99% of all videos viewed at the Google property.

Tudou Sites ranked second with 16.3 million videos viewed, representing 3.6 percent of the market, followed closely by Youku with 16.2 million videos, also at 3.6 percent. Facebook.com (12.3 million videos, 2.8 percent share) and Oriental Press Group (6.4 million videos, 1.4 percent share) rounded out the top five.

More than 3.6 million viewers in Hong Kong watched an average of 123 videos per viewer during the month of March. Google Sites attracted the largest video audience with 2.4 million unique viewers during the month (97.5 videos per viewer), followed by Facebook.com with 1.3 million viewers (9.6 videos per viewer) and Youku with 786, 000 viewers (20.6 videos per viewer).

Source: comScore

Also read::Hong Kong Internet user spends over 25 hours online per month

Hope this chart gives you a better idea of the top five social networking websites in China.

Also read::China social networking sites statistics 2009 (updated)

Close to 300K views within the first 12 hours. Over 1.6 millions views so far since it was posted on YouKu two days ago.

Peugeot 207CC Viral Video

Also read::Top Video Sites in China & Market Statistics

AppLeap, a social media application consulting firm, released their 2010 report on social media gaming. According to the report, China social networking websites have a total number of 124 million users. 20% chose SNS for online gaming; 34% SNS users login every day.

Also read::1/4 Internet Users in China Log in Tencent QQ at the same time

Baidu is to launch its HD video portal site QiYi.com in March. It announced its ambition in HD video in early January this year and hired former 12580 COO Gong Yu to be its CEO.

QiYi.com aims to provide FREE and legal high definition video to Internet netizens and try to duplicate Hulu’s business model in China.

Also read::Baidu Raises $60m to Expand into Online Video

The People’s Daily, the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCP), recently launched its own Twitter clone to compete in Chinese microblogging.

It’s clearly a different microblogging provider to me (probably because of its link with the government) as most “Tweets” are about matters vital to national well-being and the people’s livelihood.

Surprisingly to many Chinese netizens, People’s Daily Microblogging has got China’s President Hu Jintao as a certified user:

President Hu’s got 13,671 followers so far without a single “tweet”:

About The People’s Daily

The People’s Daily is a daily newspaper, the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCP), published worldwide with a circulation of 3 to 4 million.

As the CCP’s mouthpiece, the newspaper generally provides direct information on the policies and viewpoints of the Party.

Also read::MySpace China Launched Twitter Clone 9911.com

I’ve been testing a few social media monitoring software for Chinese market (mainland China) lately and found very few good ones. Let me share some tips on sourcing social media monitoring software or online applications for mainland Chinese market.

Language capabilities. If an application does a good job of monitoring online conversations on English keywords, it’s not hard to add in support of double byte characters like Chinese characters. But, it’s important the tool can tell the difference between traditional Chinese (official language in Taiwan, Hong Kong) and simplified Chinese (used by mainland Chinese).

If your English brand name (or your competitors) is very well known in China such as BMW and LV, you do want to monitor English brand keywords as well while no content from English content are returned at the same time.

BBS online forums. I came across a tool this morning that did a good job of monitoring online content according to the specified keyword; however, no forum results are included at all. Social networking sites and microblogging sites are popular; no doubt. But, online BBS forums are still the place where most online conversations take place.

Do a search in Google and Baidu and identify some popular forums where your brand is mentioned. See whether they are included in the returned results from the social monitoring tool.

Filtering function. Whether you like it or not, people in China copy articles from other sources including the top portal sites. You can expect news content appearing across news sites, blogs, and forums. If the social media monitoring tool can filter out news content from blogs and online forums, it will definitely be very helpful.

Advanced aggregation and summary feature. If a piece of news gets published across different sites, and many people leave comments on these sites, you want to have aggregated comments in one place instead of having to click into each matched item and view the comments separately.

Last tip: ask yourself what actionable results the social media monitoring tool can generate for your China marketing / PR team.

Also read::Netpop: Chinese Social Media Use Surpasses US

According to Tencent Tech, someone from Baidu confirmed yesterday that Baidu will set up a new business through the investment holding company to expand into the Internet video space; the ex-CEO of 12580 Mr Gong Yu will be the CEO of the new company.

The new company has received 60 million U.S. dollars from U.S. private equity fund investment and it’s set to launch in March 2010.

China’s central television (CCTV) launched CNTV.cn at the end of year 2009, Shanda Interactive Entertainment (operator of online games) acquired online video portal ku6.com last November, and Youku raised $40 million for expansion about two weeks ago…We can definitely see a lot of competitions in the online video industry this year.

Also read::China Central Television Launched Online TV Station CNTV.cn

A few readers asked whether there is a similar site widget as “AddThis” or “ShareThis” for social bookmarking and social sharing. So, I’ll share one social bookmarking widget here.

The widget I want to share has exactly the same name “AddThis” on org.cn. AddThis.org.cn provides social bookmarking and social sharing website widget for publishers as well as browser plugins for Internet users (under development).

As shown above, the social bookmarking and sharing widget allows visitors to share the site content to 49 services (17 shown in the above screenshot).

The subscription widget allows visitors to subscribe to the website content by RSS, instant messengers, and twelve other services.

Widget Plugins for Wordpress and Z-blog (an ASP blogging platform) are also available.

Also read::Popular Bookmarking Services in China

Baidu has updated its Post Bar service, integrated with microblogging features.

About Baidu Post Bar

Baidu Post Bar (Chinese: tieba) provides users with a query-based searchable community to exchange views and share knowledge and experiences. Any user can set up a post bar or post bar club. In Post Bars, anyone can post; but in Post Bar Clubs, only members are allowed to post.

The updated Baidu Post Bar revealed a new featured called “i Post Bar” (Chinese: i tieba) with more social UI.

i Post Bar

Every registered user (Baidu has Baidu account similar to Google account) has his own i Post Bar, and celebrities can set up its own verified i Post Bar as well.

Baidu i Post Bar UI (Click for Larger Image)

You can absolutely take i Post Bar as Baidu’s attempt into microblogging sphere. Each i Post is limited to 32 characters (either English or Chinese) with image and video attachment. However, clicking on a “text” icon will enable the user to input unlimited extra words.

The first tab (blue bar) shows all “tweets”, second one excludes user’s own “tweets”, the third and fourth one shows the user’s own status and i posts (“tweets”) respectively, the fifth displays who the user is following, and the last shows the user’s followers (or fans).

i Post Bar shows statistics including total visits, yesterday’s visits, total replies, total re-posted posts (like retweets).

Verified i Post Bar

Example of Verified i Post Bar

Verified i Post Bar has a red “i” logo beside the celebrity’s photo thumbnail with the following extra features:

• “i” posts (tweets) at verified i Post Bar will be shown in the celebrity’s respective Post bar.
• Move and stick any i post to the top

How to Apply for Verified i Post Bar?

To apply, a corresponding Post Bar must exist with no less than 100 posts or 10 fans. Follow this link and apply.

1. Submit application form
2. Provide identification via email
3. Verify by phone

It takes about three days.

The introduction of i Post Bar showed Baidu’s ambition in social media; however, it needs better integration with the previous Post Bar not to confuse users. It definitely has its potential.

Baidu should work on easy posting (tweeting) of its i post bar: from instant messengers (especially its own IM “Baidu Hi”), emails, and more.

Verified i Post Bar is a good feature and it’s not clear yet whether Baidu charges for this verification. However, it could have great marketing value if it’s extended beyond celebrities to brand owners.

Also read::Baidu MP3 Homepage Updated

China Central Television (CCTV)’s new online TV website CNTV.cn was supposed to launch on December 28, 2009. But, CCTV launched CNTV.cn quietly this morning. Currently CNTV website includes five categories:

1. News
2. Sports
3. Entertainment
4. Ai Bugu
5. Ai Xiyou

According to CCTV, more categories will be added in 2010. Ai Bugu (Love Cuckoo) and Ai Xiyou (Love Grapefruit) are more like two columns than categories.Users can watch live and history TV programs on Ai Bugu while Ai Xiyou promotes user uploaded videos.

CCTV looks very ambitious about the newly launched CNTV website, trying to be one stop portal for everything related to video. It not only competes with video portals like YouKu, Tudou but also video streaming players like PPStream and PPLive as CNTV already provides client side video streaming software.

Also read::Baidu Raises $60m to Expand into Online Video

By the end of June 2009, China BBS online community sites have reached on average 43.806 million unique visitors and apparently lots of conversations take place on online BBS forums.

With the growing popularity search engine usage among China netizens, it’s becoming very important to manage your online reputation online. I’m going to discuss briefly the bad word-of-mouth on online discussion boards.

Who Speak Ill of You

You customers. Just like any other markets, if you piss off your customers, they could try really hard to harm you online. Bad words of mouth build obstacles to acquiring new customers.

You competitors. Your competitors could disguise as a pissed off customers of yours and “share” very passionately about your bad products or service in big online forums of your target markets.

Media. Media could be damaging. Instead of offering fuel in snowy weather, they could pour cold water onto you. Many big news sites in China repost stories without verifying them; one popular post at a forum about how bad you are could turn up on all major news sites over night.

What Chinese Companies Do About Bad WOM

We all know the right way: engage customer and join the conversation online; improve the products and service from customer feedback. However, many companies are just not interested in the “right” way; instead, they pay to get the “bad” posts removed.

Pay to get hackers to remove the posts. Some “professional” post burners hack into the online forum backend and have the posts removed.

Some post burners have connections with owners of hundreds of online discussion forums. They will help “persuade” website owners to remove the posts.

This paid service is not cheap, which is usually above 1000 yuan. There was a post which served as a company blacklist in Zhongshan City to alert consumers. While over 166 users joined the conversations, a post claiming to be a professional post burner turned up.

This guy charged 1,000 yuan to remove first two pages and 100 yuan for every extra page. As there were four pages of blacklisted companies, the total charge was 1,200 yuan.

How are you managing your online reputation in China? Feel free to share in the comment.

Also read::Brief Guide on China Online BBS Community

A screenshot of new Baidu Post Bar is recently leaked, which looks like Google Wave. Baidu got the idea from Google Wave? Maybe. More will come when the new Post Bar is launched.

Also read::Baidu Post Bar Updated with Twitter Features

MSN China unveiled “MSN Juku” – a microblogging service which MSN China claimed it not a microblogging service but a product of local innovation. Whatever.

Juku can be accessed here: http://club.msn.cn

The shout box is on the top allowing users to send a message of up to 139 characters (either 139 English characters or 139 Chinese characters). A timeline will show on the top:

It looks like Plurk to me. Users can also show the update to their Windows Live Messenger (by clicking on the smiling face icon on the lower right Juku homepage) which is very popular in China, especially among office workers.

I think the reason why MSN China doesn’t want to tag “Juku” as a microblogging service is, they have a higher expectation for this service. This site is also integrated with some applications (mostly games at the moment).

Also read::MySpace China Microblogging Site 9911 Allows MMS Update