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| +Shaun Rein |
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| +Sam Flemming |
Access to Facebook and Twitter has been blocked in China since 2009, but will be lifted by the government in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone (FTZ) which is due to launch this weekend, the South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday - a move that has been popularly dubbed the "Internet Concession".
But it may be too late for them to repeat their success elsewhere in one of the world's most promising, yet most restricted, Internet markets - where online advertising revenues soared almost 47 percent last year to $12.3 billion.
"The Chinese social media landscape is among the most developed, sophisticated landscapes out there," said Sam Flemming, chief executive of China-based social media intelligence firm CIC. "These aren't just niche social networks, these are a major part of the Internet in China."...
Facebook, valued at $118 billion, said in its IPO prospectus last year that its China market share was almost zero, and recent studies say Twitter has no more than 50,000 active users in China. Access to both is limited to people with Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that can bypass China's Great Firewall - the colloquial term for Beijing's Internet blocking mechanism.
"Weibo has similar features to Twitter, but its role in China for the dissemination of news, information and entertainment, that's what's critical," said CIC's Flemming.
"Weibo is the zeitgeist of China, the water cooler of China."More at Reuters.
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| Shaun Rein |
+Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group said lifting a ban on internet access to websites such as Twitter and Facebook is crucial for Chinese companies that are looking to establish a presence globally.
"It's clear that the lack of internet access is hurting Chinese companies from a competitive standpoint. They don't have a presence on Facebook, Twitter; they don't know how to launch marketing campaigns around the world," Rein said. Facebook and Twitter have been banned on the mainland since 2009.
Increasing competition in the telecom space will also be positive for the entire country, Rein said. "It will push Chinese telcos to become more market savvy. They haven't had competition to push them to innovation and new services. Internet access is very slow here on mobile phones and in the home."
"I expect a lot of telecoms companies to invest, it's a good [opportunity to penetrate] the China market," he added.More in CNBC.
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| News Media At The Obama Event (Photo credit: MarkGregory007) |
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| Tricia Wang |
The two most important apps are Renren, essentially a copycat of Facebook, and Weibo, which is like Twitter--but like Twitter on crack. We often don’t think we have a lot to learn from tech companies outside of the U.S., but Twitter should look to Weibo for inspiration for what can be done. It’s like a mashup of Tumblr, Zynga, Facebook, and Twitter. It’s very picture-based, whereas Twitter is still very text-based. In Weibo, the pictures are right under each post, so you don’t have to make an extra click to view them. And people are using this in subversive ways. Whether you’re using algorithms to search text or actual people--and China has the largest cyber police force in the world—it’s much easier to censor text than images. So people are very subversive in hiding messages in pictures. These pictures are sometimes very different than what people are texting, or will often say a lot more than the actual text itself.
A big turning point in China was the train crash last year. Everyone in China takes the train, and it’s a state-run enterprise. So after this big crash there was essentially a large government cover-up. But people were taking pictures and sending out messages on Weibo up until the last minute when the crash happened, and even though it was censored, the news got out because all these pictures were forwarded through social media. As much as the government tries to control information through censorship, there are all these user strategies to overcome it, too. There’s a new thing called “long Weibo,” which allows you to paste in a whole essay, and it converts it to a JPEG. It’s small, but you can click on it and it fills your screen so you can actually read the whole essay right there. It’s something small but critical in understanding how social media operates in China. Likewise, in the U.S., I like observing how users hack around social-media platforms, because ultimately these behaviors are rooted in culture.More at FastCompany.
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| Sam Flemming |
Social networking may have been invented in the US, but the Chinese own it. They’re much more active on social media than their counterparts in the Western world. According to Forrester Research, 44 percent of metro Chinese Internet users can be considered “creators” on social media, compared to just 24 percent in the US. Only the Koreans (49 percent) rank higher.
“Back when our social media analysis industry started in 2003-2004, we would work with partners in the States and we would get, for any one category, two to three times the amount of conversation in China than they would get in the US,” says Flemming.
Word-of-mouth has always been important to Chinese culture, and social media has allowed that to become viral. Online bulletin boards (BBS) provided the first public forum for sharing information in China, Flemming says, and they quickly became extremely popular. Flemming’s explanation? “Entertainment is crap in China. There’s no good TV. The news has its limitations. So the word-of-mouth, especially for news and information, has always been very important.”
Back in November 2002, he heard of SARS via online forums months before the government officially acknowledged the outbreak the following April. “On online forums, people were talking about this strange sickness that people were getting in Guangdong. People were lining up to get into hospitals. Even when the government was not publicly discussing it, or admitting it was an issue, it was all over the BBS.”
The advent of Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo – microblogging services that were modeled on Twitter but have been localized to serve the specific needs of China’s Internet users – has only added to the social media activity in the country.
So why would China’s netizens care about Facebook? “Their social needs,” says Flemming, “are being completely met.”More in the Pandodaily.
When Google decided to withdraw its search engine from China, it was not just a corporate decision, but had large repercussions inside the country's government too, explains business analyst Shaun Rein in the Pandodaily.“I don’t see how Facebook could succeed in a meaningful way in China,” [Shaun Rein] says. One of the major reasons is that China’s more reform-minded government officials felt like they got their legs cut off at the knees by Google. Rein is angry at Google because of that.
“When Google came into the country, they made a deal with the government, saying ‘We’ll follow your rules, and you’ll allow us to operate,’” Rein says. “And I think there was a lot of push-back within the government, saying ‘We don’t trust Google.’ But a lot of the fore-minded officials said, ‘We vouch for them, we’ll do it.’”
When in 2010 Google very publicly pulled its search operations out of China in response to “sophisticated cyber attacks,” including the infiltration of Gmail accounts of China-connected human rights activists, those officials who greenlighted Google got in trouble. In China’s government, discipline is taken very seriously, and in Chinese society, loss of “face” – which can be roughly understood as a blow to one’s reputation – is just as damaging. The consequences of the Google drama are thus hurting Facebook today.
“Nobody in the Internet field is willing to stick [out] their head and go to bat for an American Internet player again,” says Rein. “Because it’s not worth it for them. They don’t want to see their career stunted, like those guys who approved Google originally.”...
Ultimately, Internet media companies such as Facebook, Google, and Yahoo were always going to have a tough time in China anyway, because of the nature of their businesses.
“A lot of people have been saying that China’s government is becoming more protectionist,” says Rein. “That’s not true. China has always been protectionist. There’s always certain sectors, as long as I’ve been here since the mid-90s, that foreign firms cannot operate in easily. And one of them would be, say, media. Another would be electricity, finance, and the Internet. The Internet is actually the worst, because it’s a mix of media, it’s a mix of entertainment, it’s a mix of culture and everything.”More in the Pandodaily.
". More about Shaun and his book in Storify.
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| Benjamin Joffe |
Facebook has been blocked there for years, and there is simply no way around the local definition of what constitutes objectionable content. Any web or mobile company who does not self-censor faces shut down if it local, and blocking if not.
While I’ve heard local entrepreneurs say it is not worse than dealing with Sarbanes-Oxley, the enforcement is roughly equivalent to how other governments might deal with terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime (the “four horsemen of Internet apocalypse”), or how mass media deals with touchy topics that could upset the powers that be, or their advertisers. For foreign companies that offer content – published either by themselves or by users – it is a pretty big headache, compounded by the double set of constraints they have to deal with: those at home and those in China.
The PR headaches are – as Google experienced – pretty solid. And the question is: is it worth the effort? Assuming content is managed, China is not a walk in the park anyway: it is easily the most competitive market on the planet, simply because there are so many entrepreneurs and so much venture money. Social networks? China already has TWO listed on the stock market: Tencent (worth $53.4 billion) and RenRen (listed in May 2011 on the NYSE and today valued at $2.43 billion).More in Techcrunch.
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| Jeremy Goldkorn |
Jeremy Goldkorn, founding director of Danwei.com, a website and research firm that tracks Chinese media and internet, tells us that it was just a temporary bug that is getting fixed. He also adds that this is not a market where Facebook is making much headway at the moment:
“There is nothing Facebook can do to sort itself out in China,” he said in an email exchange. “Any attempt to enter the market as Facebook itself or to sneak in using a smaller company like Instagram is doomed and will lead to world of pain — a PR nightmare in the U.S. and a huge waste of money and energy in China.”
He adds that “the only smart thing” for Facebook to do in China is to invest in or acquire notable startups, “if they can find any.”More in Techcrunch
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| Sam Flemming |
"The Chinese have been social for years, and Facebook would be just one more option among many," said Sam Flemming, founder of Shanghai-based social media consultancy, CIC.
"It certainly would have a certain amount of cache, especially among the more internationalized Chinese and foreigners living in China, but it would need a big push in awareness beyond this small group," Flemming said.More other voices at Reuters
Kaiser Kuo via Flickr…a Facebook entry into China would be fraught with challenges but personally I believe that having Facebook in China, even if it were compelled to abide by China’s strict censorship requirements, would still be better than not having it here. I believe that it would be a net positive for China’s Internet users. More connectivity is better than less. I felt the same way when Google entered China and acquiesced to the demands of censors: Even though they were censored, they nevertheless helped to expand the information horizons of Chinese Internet users, and I’m very thankful that some compromise was arrived at.He admits such a move would not be without problems, in the debate that follows:
But yeah, I agree that it would be difficult. And if they did something like this it would bring down a major storm of condemnation from rights groupsCommercial
