Why can China bloggers charge brands so much money – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

Western brands are often shocked by the fees they have to pay to retain bloggers in China. Marketing expert Ashley Dudarenok explains why bloggers in China work differently and actually do no need brands for their operation. They can create their own brands, so do not need the Western ones, unless they pay, she says.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your (online) 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.

Crackdowns are in the air again

a crackdown against piracy in Fuzhou

Regular readers of this weblog know I get mildly amused when Western media start writing about crackdowns, especially when the government tries to go after the internet. This week we had even two cases.

First, China's central government promised Germany to crack down on efforts to hack official German sites. A story in the German magazine Der Spiegel said that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had been hacking the computer systems of important German ministries.

The story was stinking like a one week dead fish already from the start and not only because of the lack of proof of the allegations. The "security breach" was already discovered back in May, but only published just ahead of the visit of Bundeskanzlerin Merkel to China. That indicates a clear move to set the political agenda and perhaps give other subjects lower priority.

Let's look at the reality online. We just had this beautiful story about an Australian teenager who unabled twice in one day expensive porn filters the Australian government had activated. Then there is the story of this other teenager who unlocked Apple's iPhone successfully. Of course, when the German state security discovers they have been hacked, they cannot say they have an issue with perhaps a few million bored Chinese teenagers. They have to come with something big, say, the PLA. I side here with some of my Chinese friends who say Chinese teenagers are probably better positioned to crack websites than the PLA.

Equally funny was the pledge by some of China's largest weblog hosts, including Yahoo and Microsoft, to act responsibly and rely on self-discipline, whatever that could mean. Of course, this was the basis of many alarmist articles, I happily ignored. Fortunately, Rebecca MacKinnon decided to read some Chinese bloggers before jumping on the bandwagon of the alarmists.

They seem to view the pledge as a bunch of bureaucrats making yet another meaningless pledge to justify their existence. Keso points to a long list of other self-discipline pledges made over the past few years which, he says "other than giving us joke material, they've pretty much not amounted anything."

Most beautiful saying: "loud thunder with light rain". As Rebecca notes, just following blindly press releases by organizations like Reporters Sans Frontieres or others, without confirming first with Chinese sources, it not done anymore. More at Rconversations.

Old news at NowPublic.com

news from Shanghai

The internet is bubbling again. When you belong to the digital vanguard you might have noticed that the "citizens journalism" site got 10.6 million US dollars in funding. It claims to have 120,000 volunteers in place, able to make the site into a real news wire.

Of course I checked out who their people were in Shanghai and found only news that was more than three weeks old. The news at their home page looks not very to the point, as they only report very smallish incidents that would at best have made it to the local newspaper.

Low on blogging

I just realized that my blogging activities must have been on an all-time low. The heat, the quasi-holiday and increasing activities - including many lunches - for the speakers bureau have kept my attention away from this weblog.
Also, playing around with Twitter and Facebook has provided some alternative, and very easy, outlets for my writing needs. Just a few touches of your keyboard, and the world knows you are around again. Compared to those tools blogging is still a bit harder, although they are very limited in what they can take.
Anyway, perhaps this weekend gives some more freedom.

Philip Toy steals my article

Some bloggers really have a hard time to get something of themselves on their weblog. Take Philip Toy who gladly stole my article. Not very smart these days, since we notice this theft right away.
Philip Toy should also write a thousand times: "I was a thief and I regret it." You can do it here in the comments.

How far can you go in blaming your employer

The case of a disgruntled foreign lawyer at a Chinese law firm is now definitely getting out of hand. Danwei reports they saw (and got screen shots) at Google ads of what appears to be a fake ad of the Zhong Lun Law Firm that in fact leads to the weblog of the lawyer.
I first decided to follow this case. An employee using a weblog to get even with an employer is an interesting case, regardless who is right or wrong. Obvious, Jeff Brauer was angry and it is always nice to have a peek in those private affairs.
The original post has now been deleted, after Jeff got a visit from his former boss and managing partner he perceived as threatening. But at least the managing partner promised him he would get the money he was entitled to and Jeff would delete the blog. He then did delete some entries but went on to disclose some practises at his former law firm that would suggest bribing judges. When you are in it for a compensation, not the best way to please your former employer.
Other, now deleted, posts had already raised my doubts on his ability to make sound judgments on what is really happening in China (here one in the Google-catch).
Obvious Jeff sees China as a country where law has no value and he has now decided to ignore the law himself. That might again illustrate some rather poor judgment skills that would become a major problem in seeking new employment.

Update: Well, the case seems to be settled, out of court and out of the blogs.

Foreign correspondents increasingly source from weblogs

Foreign correspondents covering China rely increasingly on weblogs, writes Rebecca MacKinnon, assistant professor at the journalism school of the Hong Kong University, in a paper for the World Journalism Education Conference this week in Singapore. From Singapore she writes:

Many people here at the conference found it surprising that blogs are already having such a substantial impact on foreign journalists' China coverage. Another finding that surprised people was that a lot of working journalists (unlike most people who study or write about journalism) find it useless to ask whether blogs in general are more or less "reliable" or "credible" than some other medium. Journalists evaluate each blog according to its individual merits, depending on what is known about the blogger's background and track record.

Her paper illustrates the argument that webloggers and professional journalists are not at loggerheads, but increasingly complement each other. There are specific reasons why weblogs have a larger influence on the China coverage than possibly elsehwere in the world, MacKinnon acknowledges, for example:

- The China story in the international media is not dominated by military conflict or any one obvious single storyline;
- The China story is not generally a "breaking story," but rather a "process story" about how this complex and geopolitically important country is changing, and what that change means for the rest of the world;
- There is strong demand for specialist insight, information and analysis on a range of subjects;

More arguments at her weblog. The full paper can be downloaded here.

Internet let's headhunters run for a job

Marc van der Chijs of the Spill Group Asia is using his network to find a new Shanghai-based CFO in stead of using a headhunter. He post the qualifications on his weblog:

The ideal candidate would be a native Chinese with at least 5 years experience as an auditor for one of the big international accounting firms in China, plus preferably several years experience for a company in a financial management position. M&A experience would be a plus. The CFO should be an expert in Chinese accounting and taxation law (CPA title preferred), and needs to be fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese.

If I would be for a headhunter in Shanghai, this would worry me very much, since this is going to cost them clients. The situation is already very competitive and now also viral headhunting chips in. Of course, for obvious reasons this will happen first in the IT-industry, but could easily move to other sectors too, where a large percentage of the staff would be online.
Marc offers a RMB 10,000 finders fee, also for blogs that repost his announcement. But how will he know that the ideal candidate came though this weblog?

Finding this blog back at myspace

My blog at myspace

Now this is very weird. I was checking Google to see if me mentioning Trombly Ltd at this place had any effect on its listing. I was happy to see that my weblog was already number three after Maria's own websites. But I also saw something strange on the fifth position: a headline I had been writing.

I click through as see this.

Myspace is a Microsoft venture, I use Google, nothing to exchange here. All the links go back to my weblog, so there seems no commercial reason to set up a mirror site. I find this very strange.

Update: Found a kind of explanation. Myspace has started a kind of aggregator and they have included me without asking or even telling me. Would have been nice if they would have told me at least. I have now discovered I can opt-out, but opting in would be been a more civilized solution.

A Walking Dutchman comes to China

Jan Vroomans in Romania

A Dutchman had some spare time at his hand, so he started last year to walk to China. Now he has progressed to Kazachstan, so there is a fair chance he will actually make it to China. Jan Vroomans (37) is his name, and he got already quite some coverage in the Dutch media.
Of course he is maintaining this own weblog, in Dutch, Russian and English. A map shows where he has already been, but he decides day-to-day what the next destination is going to be. Unclear yet whether he will make it so Shanghai. I have put him for the time being on my RSS-reader.

Preparing for some corporate blogging

The planning for the launch of our speakers bureau is going well ahead, although we did encounters some delays. Rather than June 1, June 15 seems a more realistic launching date, although we cannot launch much later because of the upcoming holidays for the foreign business community - one of our major constituencies.
One of my colleagues brought up the issue of setting up a corporate weblog that would go along with the new website: I was already happy I would not have to push the issue myself. So, from day one we will have a weblog on our speakers bureau in China, both in English and Chinese. While our website will have two identical sections, we wondered how to synchronize a bilingual weblog.
We decided we actually do not have to. While the announcements and reports might be similar, much depends also on the conversation that emerges with the visitors. That will make both weblogs different, anyway.
Corporate blogging has not yet taken off in the same degree in China as it has in the US. But there is no reason to exclude this tool from our communication kit.

Updating my blog roll

I had today some time to synchronize my current RSS-reader with the blog roll on the left-hand side of this weblog. Divided over different sections, you'll find the online information sources I do not want to miss. Today, I mainly changed the "on-China" section, threw out in-active weblogs and weblogs that were otherwise boring. Added also a dozen or so new ones.
It is also a good opportunity to see how the number of subscriptions work out on my old RSS-reader Bloglines. I have now 190 subscribers there and - following my logic that Bloglines has about 10 per cent of the market - that would boil down to 1,900 people who are subscribed over an RSS-feed to this weblog.
Now, I'm not sure whether that number is high or low, but what I did see was that many of the weblogs I think are very good and deserve a good readership are doing unexpectedly bad on Blogline-subscribers. So, maybe I should pick up an old habit and write some reviews of weblogs that would be interesting for a bigger audience. If I have time, that is, of course.

Blogger Zola investigates

Zola and Mrs Wuping

Most webloggers just sit behind their computer and do not investigate anymore, is a much heard complaint, especially from traditional journalists. But there are exceptions, shows Yee, pointing at blogging hero Zola, who is investigating the Chongqing nailhouse now Chinese media cannot write about it anymore.

The favorite blogger (of this moment) Zola is at the spot and Yee translates.

Internet traffic is up again

Just checked my figures and I noticed that traffic to this weblog has gone up, not dramatically, but still. While we still have a week to go, today I passed the figures of February. Daily visitors according to Awstats is around 1,600 per day, while it was last month around 1,300. The number of visitors through RSS-feeds is pretty stable at 1,850.
Not sure how to explain it, but the change in lay-out seems the main reason for the spike (and the lack of spike at the RSS-feeds, since there you do not see the change). A few people let me know that the navigation on the site is much easier after the revamp, and it was of course about time I changed my awful previous lay-out.

Google China tries to talk to bloggers

China Web2.0 Review points at an exchange that emerged as Google China tried to deal with webloggers that were mostly negatively reviewing a new China-service called Daohang. What happened was that Google's PR-agent in China, Ogilvy, started to reply on those comments by sending those webloggers the press release on that service.
Let's first look at it from a positive side: Ogilvy did react on the comments and that is already much more than what happens mostly. But apart from that almost everything went wrong.
As China Web2.0 Reviews also says, weblogs are conversational media, you have to build up a conversation. Sending a press release is not the way to build up a conversation. So, that means, leaving comments and actually reacting on what the weblogger is saying.
Also, you have to find a real person to react, a company cannot do that anonymously. And, I would add myself, Google China cannot outsource this kind of work to a PR-company. PR-companies might be able to help and give advise, but the person talking to the webloggers should be involved in the work directly, coming from Google China.

Updated my blogroll

Since I was doing some maintenance work anyway, I decided to update my blogroll too. I have to do that manually and sometimes the blogroll does not reflect really what I'm reading. This evening I was in a very generous mood and added close to twenty new weblogs that appeared on my radarscreen or - for the wrong reasons - were forgotten in the past. Seek the differences.

Update: Well, this is working. Already a few people expressed their regret I did not add their weblog to my blogroll. First: I have never been very good in getting things 100 percent straight, so I might have missed you, although you are on my RSS-reader. That happend once. Sometimes I think blogs do not add value, and then I skip them. Sometimes I have missed useful blogs all together. Do not hestitate to let me know, so we can argue about that.

Changing the lay-out

As you might notice, I'm changing the lay-out of my weblog. I was sick and tired of it already a long time, but migrating to another service was really to tiresome. Then Google announced they had upgrade the very out-dated Blogger.com software, but until recently I could not use those, because this weblog is simply too big, they said.
Now it is possible. I'm still working to get the old features party back. I'm afraid that Haloscan might drop out. Having two comment systems was not very effective and migrating Haloscan to the new system is a bit too much. Most parts should be functional again.
The new lay-out is still not really what I want, but the initial choices are pretty limited. Maybe I will play later a bit more with it.