Fighting fake followers: hard to do - Ashley Dudarenok

Ashley Dudarenok

Your number of followers might be an important metric for popularity, but figuring out who are fake or not is tough, in China, even more than elsewhere, says marketing expert Ashley Dudarenok. And at Weibo the problem is even tougher, she tells at Abacus News.

Abacus News:

“On Weibo, fake fans are a very big problem,“ said Ashley Dudarenok, founder of Chinese social media marketing agency Chozan. Pop idols in China, many of whom gained fame through various singing competition shows, are known to compete with each other to get more fans, she added... 

It’s not just celebrities that are using fake followers, either. Even government-linked social media sites were warned to stop engaging in the practice. 

Not all bots are created equal. Some are simple bots that are easy to spot. More expensive and harder-to-detect fakes might come from click farm factories with thousands of connected phones. 

“It's very difficult to distinguish them from real users. They are using phones and apps like real users,” said Dudarenok. 

Weibo and other social platforms have been trying to fix the problem. 

In February, Weibo promised to support the government in cracking down on fake engagement for celebrities. It has also been changing algorithms to weed out the fakes. The platform now limits the number of shares and likes shown on posts to 1 million. 

However, the problem might not be so easy to fix. Weibo is different from Twitter because it hosts a lot of bloggers and promoted content, Dudarenok explained. 

Weibo owes a lot of its popularity to the type of content put up by creators, many of whom are getting paid by specific brands. To attract those brands, influencers are incentivized to keep their follower counts high.

More at Abacus News.

  Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more marketing experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Drug scandals will dwarf China's food scandals - Jeffrey Towson

Jeffrey Towson

Beida business professor Jeffrey Towson gives on his weblog reasons why China's drug scandals will be larger than any of its past food scandals. Morbidity is larger. Drug scandals are harder to detect and the profitability of the fake drug industry is higher. More troublesome: the industry is going global.

Jeffrey Towson:

#4 Unlike most food scandals, drug scandals are a global problem. 

If you are taking a pill in the US, part of it probably came from China. Over 80% of the world’s active pharmaceutical ingredients are now made in China and India (but mostly in China). So these drug problems have global reach. 

The most famous example of this was the 2008 Heparin scandal. Tainted Heparin from China ended up killing over 240 Americans. As a result, 34 China facilities (via Baxter International) were banned from exporting. 

And it gets more complicated. A lot of these quality problems are actually in the chemistry, as opposed to just in the final drug or in the active pharmaceutical ingredient. In 2012, police in China detained +60 people who were making chromium-tainted gel capsules with industrial waste. The police seized over 77 million gel capsules and shut down 80 production lines. Think about those numbers for a moment. 77M capsules and 80 production lines. 

But the biggest “global” aspect of this problem is likely in other developing economies. Fake drugs are everywhere in SE Asia and Africa. And many are coming from China. The morbidity and mortality resulting from this is hard to overstate. For example, the Wellcome Trust estimated that one-third of the malaria drugs in Uganda may be fake or substandard. 

Final Point: Pharmaceuticals in China are going to grow. But absent improvements, drug scandals could also become much bigger as well. 

Healthcare spending today in China is about 6% of GDP, up from 4-5% a few years ago. It is likely on its way to 12-13%. And China’s pharmaceutical market, already big at $108B (2015), is growing along with this. All of this is good news. It follows naturally from growing domestic demand (aging + increasing wealth + more chronic disease) and a continued movement of pharmaceutical production to China. 

So this is a big market that is growing fast and developing in sophistication. But it logically follows that any future quality problems will also be larger in scale. That is worrisome.

More at Jeffrey Towson's weblog.

Jeffrey Towson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you interested in more strategic experts on the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.