China's Evolving Media Landscape Provides Great Opportunities for Brands

Learning how to engage with China's mobile-savvy audiences is vital for brand success

Lynn Liu, Group Manager of Audience and New Media Development at PR Newswire, kicks off the presentation by providing the audience with an in-depth overview of China's current media landscape and tips on how to do better storytelling in China. With the astronomical growth of digital platforms and shifting Chinese consumer preferences in news consumption, the print media industry is losing ground to new media that offers wider reach, faster speed of delivery, and better user experience, according to Liu. "As the China media market continues to become more and more established, marketers must continue to adjust their sails accordingly to remain relevant to China's mobile-savvy audiences, while focusing on producing quality content," said Liu. Some of Liu's key highlights on the current media trends and development in China include:

• Traditional media still has an important role to play. Marketers should consider how to strategically integrate traditional media with new media by taking advantages of multiple vehicles in order to amplify their influence, enhance the reader's experience, and maximize the impact of their communication efforts.
• Search engines have overtaken the traditional media as the most trusted news source. According to a recent study, more than 59% of online rumours propagated last year were disseminated over the Weibo microblogging service. In this new era of media, people are increasingly inclined to believe their own judgement by conducting their own research on the news. 
• In mainland China, mobile news traffic has triumphed over the Tencent, Sohu, NetEase and Sina portal websites. As more Chinese audiences are now consuming news on the go, companies should adapt accordingly for the big shift to mobile news.
• Adding multimedia to content not only helps to enhance readers' experiences, but also drivers toward better engagement.

How to establish and maintain positive media relations in China

Attendees also took valuable notes from Yuan Li, the former PR manager of Walmart China, former senior correspondent of Southern Metropolis Daily and a freelance contributor to FT.com's Chinese website. Besides shedding light on the best practices in establishing positive working relationships with the Chinese media, Li also provided audiences with valuable tactics to work around changes to press release distributions, and shared some ofChina's top new media platforms and applications that are worth noting. "WeChat is a key and must-have tool to successfully maintaining media relations in mainland China," said Li. "It offers marketers and PR professionals an ideal place to build relationships, tell their stories and engage with audiences." Some key takeaways from Li include: 

• Despite a digitalized media landscape, it is still important to establish positive relationships with traditional and influential media outlets that can help you gain maximum brand visibility. For example, if a piece of corporate news is picked up by an authoritative media outlet, such as People's Daily, the news itself is already seen as a successful PR buzz. 
• More and more traditional media in China have launched their own new media channels. One of these channels is "WeMedia", which is an alliance of grassroots opinion leaders who have a large number of followers on Chinese social media, and who are creating high-quality and unique content on their own pages. These influencers are quickly overtaking traditional media as the more influential type of media in China. 
• The way of reporting serious news is becoming ever more witty and humorous, particularly in the new media, as headlines are becoming longer, more colloquial and more straightforward.
• WeChat now has over eight million public accounts, and the channel has enabled many individuals to grow their influence and spread their ideas.
• Media relations, advertising, marketing and public relations professionals in Mainland China are now putting more emphasis on targeted and quality communications to niche media. Mass communications is not always effective, but speed and frequency of communication is key.
• Leverage big data to personalized content to enable better storytelling. 
• Take into consideration all possible channels for communications planning, including press releases, WeChat, Baidu Baike and Baidu Tieba.

About Media Coffee:

The goal of Media Coffee events is to enable communications professionals to hear leading media organisations talk about how their respective companies work, provide insights into their areas of specialty, give advice on achieving coverage and effectively targeting journalists within their sector, and share their thoughts on how to build mutually beneficial relationships.

About PR Newswire    

PR Newswire (www.prnasia.com) is the premier global provider of news release distribution and multimedia platforms that enable marketers, corporate communicators, public relations officers and investor relations professionals to leverage content to engage with all their key audiences. Having pioneered the commercial news distribution industry in 1954, PR Newswire today provides end-to-end solutions to produce, distribute, target and measure text and multimedia content across traditional, digital, mobile and social channels. Combining the world's largest multi-channel content distribution and optimization network with comprehensive workflow tools and platforms, we enable the world's enterprises to tell their stories to the world. PR Newswire serves tens of thousands of clients from offices in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, and is a UBM plc company.

For further information, please contact:

PR Newswire's Asia Marketing Team
+852 2572 8228
asia.marketing@prnasia.com

Source: PR Newswire

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