China Comprehensive

“Weibo is media, while WeChat is social”. This was the main point stressed by Wu Liang, director of corporate communication and sustainable development at Unilever North Asia, during a discussion on the topic of corporate social communication at the recent PR Newswire Summit. As a large B2C company that has been in existence for nearly a century, Unilever has, in recent years, done its share of experimenting in how to best use social platforms to disseminate news about the brand. The company implemented differentiated communication strategies for Weibo and WeChat…

Brands spend a lot of time and resources creating news and branded content, surprisingly some of these news-worthy content are just sitting on their websites. Of course not all news are suitable for wider distribution, that is why you have to plan and strategize what goes further than your owned channels, and what doesn’t. That’s a topic for another blog post, but if you do want to distribute your news, what should you be considering? 1. Surfacing content in a sea of information With a growing number of social media…

How do you get the most out of your news release distribution with social media reach? I recently attended an event from the Interactive Advertising Bureau Singapore, and got a chance to learn some of the new development from Twitter especially for this region after its IPO. Hosted by Ken Mandel, Managing Director of Hootsuite APAC and Shailesh Rao, VP – Asia Pacific, Latin America & Emerging Markets Twitter, they shared some great tips for marketers and PR professionals on how to better utilize social networks, and integrate them to the…

There’s an interesting debate going on among the expat community in China these days. The conversation is focused on the merits of living in this country and its ebb and flow is a great example of how people in small communities (there are only about 250,000 expats in Beijing & Shanghai combined) speak with themselves and how trends evolve and change as a result. Back in August of 2012, a longtime expat with a great story (and friends in the media) opined in an essay, “You’ll Never be Chinese,” that…

Like Heraclitus said, the only constant is change. And in the digital age, change comes fast and furious, indeed. When we last left WeChat, their registration numbers for 2012 had just come out and the service was making its first forays into the West. There were over 300 million users of the free messaging service in China, and the first few million users outside of China had started signing up. Six months on from our mention, WeChat (or “WeiXin” (微信) as it’s known domestically), has boomed steadily within China and…