How Is Weibo Influencing the Entertainment Industry in China

In my last two blogs, I discussed the topic about how companies are using social media for marketing and the advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing. In this blog, I will enter a specific business world – entertainment industry, and mainly talk about social media’s impact on this promising industry in China, where I grew up and experienced the social media significant impact on the business world.

A Quick look at the Entertainment Industry in China

Unlike the entertainment industry in America, the entertainment industry in China was far from mature and growing slowly in the last three decades. The last golden era of Chinese entertainment industry have to date back to 1980s, during which Hong Kong movies and music were booming across Asia and even the world. After that, Chinese entertainment industry had been depressed for a long time. In recent year, however, the situation seems have changed as a result of social media’s prevalence, particularly the advent of Chinese Twitter – Weibo.

A Brief Introduction about Weibo

As Wikipedia defines “Weibo is the Chinese word for “micoblog”, it refers to mini-blogging services in China, including social chat sites and platform sharing”. Actually, Weibo is often used generally to refer to Sina Weibo, which created by the leading Chinese online company, Sina.  Because it is the most visited sites and it has the most users. According to Sina Corporation, Sina Weibo has 368 million registered users as of mid-2012 and above 100 million messages are posted each day.

The New Logo of Sina Weibo

How Is Weibo Changing the Entertainment Industry in China

Since Weibo has such an enormous number of users, all the entertainment companies really don’t want to loss this great opportunity to generate more revenues by expanding public awareness of those celebrities, movie and music stars they have signed with. So what did those entertainment companies do to achieve their goals through social media?

Expand Company's Presence on Social Media Platform

Like many other business, entertainment companies open their own account on Weibo, QQ, the Chinese MSN and Weixin, the Chinese KIK. But since they are entertainment companies, they know better about how to do a marketing campaign and take advantage of the hype for their products and signed artists. For example, film companies may use the photo of the most popular star in their companies as a profile picture. They could also release the preview of the movie by sharing a video on Weibo and encourage their followers to share it by saying that “This is the first kissing movie of Jackie Chan, please stay tuned. And it will be coming soon on June 1^st.”

Help Signed Artists to Have and Manage Their Own Weibo Accounts

It is fair to say that entertainment stars benefit the most from the Weibo’s prevalence. Believe it or not, the top ten persons who have the most followers on Weibo are all from entertainment industry. They are actors/actresses, singers and talk-show hosts. The No.1 is Yaochen, an actress mainly for TV drama, who has 4,430,000 fans on Weibo, followed by Xu Xidi and Cai Kangyong, two hosts of a popular talk show called Kang Xi is coming. This number means if Yaochen post a status, more than 40 million people are available to see it. To some degree, her Weibo's power even more than some TV channels, though sometimes she even let somebody else help her to manage the account. In the social media world, everyone itself is a media. So entertainment stars could simply post information about their new films or music and the result may be even much better than an official press release. By using social media platform, there is a win-win result for both the entertainment stars and companies. Entertainment Stars can expand their public awareness and attract more fans. As a result, entertainment companies reach more target market and generate more revenues.

Encourage Fans to Create a fans’ Club on Social Media

For any kind of business, customer is always the king. For entertainment business, the customers are mostly fans. Thus, entertainment business have to try their best to maximize the benefit from the fans of their signed artists. What they have done is to encourage fans to create a fans' club on Weibo and other social media, such as Jackie Chan’s Community and Andy world club. Through the fans' club, entertainment companies can discuss with fans and answer their questions, sometimes maybe stars would answer questions themselves. Another advantage of having a fan’s club is that fans themselves would try their best to expand their idols’ public awareness and new works. Most importantly, entertainment companies are able to know the comments and evaluation of their products by using the data from the fan’s club as an sample.

Jackie Chan Fans' Club on Weibo

Most importantly, don’t forget to notice that all these three ways could have a mixed effect, which will have a more powerful influence on their products. The company’s Weibo can share what its signed artists post. The fans' club Weibo can share what its idols’ comments and so on and so forth. From this specific example, we should understand that social media has a big impact on entertainment industry and nowadays companies could not neglect this fact. What they all need to do is to find out their own strategies on social media.

The Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing

In my last blog, I discussed about how companies are using social media for marketing and how social media are changing the business world. As we known, any coin has two sides. There is no doubt that social media marketing has a lot of advantages that traditional media marketing may not have. However, social media marketing also has some disadvantages which could result in a devastating blow on business. So what are the advantages of social media marketing? The answer to this question could also explain why social media is so important for companies’ business strategies. Meanwhile, what are the disadvantages of social media marketing that companies may neglect? Here I would like to share my opinion on the main pros and cons of social media marketing:  

The Pros of Social Media Marketing

Brand Awareness – As you create your own account on social media platform, which has an enormous number of users in the network, more people will recognize your company name, logo, products, the link to your website and other information related to your company. Therefore, you establish more brand awareness among your tremendous potential client base.

Building Community – Unlike traditional media, such as newspaper and TV, social media has network effect, which would benefit the company significantly. Social media platform offers a unique opportunity for the company to participate in discussion, answer questions and provide customer services at any time of the day. This keep the user engaged and build an exclusive community for you and your customer day by day.

Cost Effectiveness – This is the main advantage of social media marketing. Most of social media sites are free to access, join and post information. Those who are interested in your company could easily follow you by a click. This means you could reach your target market without spending lots of money. As we known, in the business world, cash is a critical asset for companies to run their businesses. By using social media marketing, there is nearly no cash investment and companies could use those cash to invest in other area, such as R&D.

Market Research – People called the 21^st century is the information era, where information maters a lot for business. Companies could benefit from social media for market research in two respects. First, companies are able to access competitor’s presence in social media and know their business strategies, especially marketing strategies. Therefore, they could adjust their strategies and maximize their competitive advantages. Second, it is easy for company to track customers’ behavior through social media. Companies are able to know customers’ preference and evaluation about their products and services by analyzing their comments. With the powerful social media, companies would save a lot on market research since they don’t need to pay for the information. 

The Cons of Social Media Marketing

Time Consuming – From my personal experience, getting involved with social media is really time-consuming. So you can imagine that how much time and work a company should commit to. Usually, a senior people with knowledge about the company and products should take in charge of the social media presence. Customers may ask tons of questions on your Facebook page and these questions could probably be a social concern about your company. As a responsible company, you need to answer them quickly and appropriately. Otherwise, customers may leave your page and even leave your products or services. This is one of the reasons why few small companies choose to have social media presence since social media platform is easy to create but it is hard to maintain. So, the cost in time means that social media for marketing is not completely free.

Hidden Risk – Social media carries some hidden risk that potentially could ruin a company’s reputation and therefore their business. As we know, all the comments of your customers and employees are public and everyone is accessible to them. If someone posts a breaking bad news or comment, before the company even don’t recognize, the news could spread to millions of people in a very short period of time. As the good news can benefit your company, bad news can go viral as easily as good news and can do your business irreparable harm. For example, imagine that one employee of food company post a status on the company’s page saying “People add some unknown chemicals to the product of my company in order to make it more colorful”. Even this new may not be true, but since it is released by the employee, people may share this news crazily and it could ruin the reputation of the company. 

As a Chinese saying goes, anything could be a double-edged sword. Social media marketing is not an exception. It has its own advantage over traditional media, such a bigger user base. In the same time, it could also ruin a company in a short time by just a piece of news. Overall, the advantages of social media marketing weigh more than disadvantage. If a company devotes time and effort on social media marketing, its payoff could be far beyond your expectation.

How Are Companies Using Social Media for Marketing

I have given a broad view of social media in my last two blogs, including what is social media and how is it important to business. Today, I would like to go deeper in the business world. As we known, for any kind of companies, marketing is crucial part for them to expand public awareness and attract more customers so as to generate more revenues.

As we are in an information age, companies are more and more aware that their business could not live without information, in particular, the information from their customers because customer is the life of companies. As social media is popular everywhere around the world, companies definitely know how it is important to their marketing strategies? But how do they use social media for marketing and did it work?

What Is Social Media Marketing?

According to WordStream, Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet marketing that involves various social media networks in order to achieve marketing communication, branding goals, product promotion and customer proximity and etc. Social media marketing primarily covers activities involving social sharing of content, videos, and images for marketing purposes.

Four Steps to Social Media Success

The interesting video below reveals four steps to social media success, which would also be a good answer to the question "how can company use social media for marketing?" 

First, find interested people -- We do not make money with social media, we make money by doing business with people they know, like and trust us. We market with social media to develop with relationship with people, so they know I can trust you and then and only then would they buy from us. There are a lot of popular social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. They have an enormous number of users, some of which are potential to be our customers.   

Second, deliver quality content -- Provide content, not commercials. For example, you could share a video on YouTube or write a blog on Blogger. The content you delivered can show your expertise and improve your credibility.

Third, capture information -- Through social media platform, you are able to know more about not just your customers but also your competitors. For example, based on the previous customers’ preference and comments, you could adjust your business strategies and improve quality of your products or services. Moreover, by analyzing your competitors’ data from social media, you can know your competitive advantages.  

Last but not least, stay in touch -- Social media is good platform to keep in touch with your customers. Unless they have no interest in you anymore and cut the relationship with you by social media, you are always be able to know what their new demands and expectations are.  

All in all, all these strategies make you top of mind.  

A Real Example: How American Express Used Social Media for Marketing

One good example is what I have learned from my Digital Marketplace class – Social Strategies at American Express.

As we know American Express is credit card issuer and providers, it has nothing to do with social media. But what she has done just proved that if you are wise enough to use social media, no matter what business you are in, you can benefit a lot from that platform.  

What Did American Express Do by Using Social Media Marketing to Achieve Its Business Goal?

1.  Launched several proprietary social platforms.

2.  Established thriving social media Presences on Facebook and Twitter

3.  Developed major partnerships with Facebook and Foursquare

How Did American Express Use Social Media Marketing to Achieve Its Business Goal?

1.   Members Know Program: Card members help other card members identify great locations that they visit, hotels where they can stay and restaurant where they can dine.

Benefits: Identify all the steps that need to take place before a card member spends more money that she   otherwise would not spend as a consequence of finding out information through the members know project.

2.   OPEN Forum: It is a platform that offers its member a “Connectodex” that allows the members list what they can offer to other business and what they need from other business.

Benefit: Members may arrange transaction by using American Express account and therefore American Express can charge a fee. Another benefit is it increases the credibility of American Express since it offers a lot of opportunities for its customers.

3   Link/Like/Love: Customer would start on a dedicated Link/Like/Love page on Facebook and spend some dollars at a particular retails and get back some dollars from American Express bill.

Benefit: Expand its public awareness and motivate people to become a card member. Increase the number of transaction though American Express system and therefore generate more revenue.

Overall, the main goal for companies to adopt social marketing strategies is to expand their brand awareness and attract more customers so as to generate more revenues. There are a lot of ways to achieve this goal, such as presence on social media, promotion through social media and conduct market research by using data from social media. 

Why Social Media Is Important to Business

Last week, we mainly discussed what social media is. This blog, I would like to enter the business world and focus on the topic why social media is important to business.

Why social media is important to business? There is a TV program on CNN every night through Monday to Friday, called Quest Means Business. I think this name is a perfect explanation to tell you what social media means to business. As we known, for any kind of business, customer is always the king. For those for-profit businesses, customer is where you profit comes from. For those non-profit businesses such as NGOs, customer is who you want to help or deliver your service. So how can companies reach out and attract their potential customers? Yes, they need a platform, which is easy to draw people’s attention. This is the main reason why social media has been such a great and significant power on business, which no companies can ignore. Now, let’s look at some real statistical data about some popular social media which would help us to better understand how important is social media to business.

Graph 1: The growing number of Monthly
Active User, released by Facebook

Facebook, one of the most

Graph 2: The growing revenue of Facebook
 from 2010 to 2012, released by Facebook

well-known social media in the world, now has more than 1 million users and this number is still growing rapidly. On January 30 this year, Facebook executives threw out a lot of numbers during the company's earnings call, showing the network's steady growth in users and how much money those users bring to Facebook. 

Facebook announced that the 
social network was reached at 1.06 billion monthly active users. In addition to a 25 percent increase in monthly users from last year and a 28 percent rise in daily users, Facebook saw 57 percent growth in mobile monthly users. 


Here are some of the figures  released on January 30, 2013:

• 1.06 billion monthly active users (MAU) as of December 31, 2012

• 618 million daily active users (DAU) for December 2012

• 680 million mobile MAUs as of December 31

• $1.58 billion in revenue for the last quarter

• $5.32 in average revenue per user in 2012

Yao Chen's Weibo Home Page,
extracted from Weibo

Now, I would like to give you some example of social media in my home country, China. QQ, the Chinese MSN, had 784 million active user accounts with approximately 100 million users online at a time by 10 September 2012. Weibo, the Chinese Tweeter, has already become the biggest information exchange platform for those well-known people in China, such as politicians, artists, celebrities, business figures. Yao Chen, a famous Chinese actress, has more than 4,4430,000 followers, which means what she writes or shares on Weibo, nearly 4.5 million people are available to see it. More importantly, most of them are loyal fans who give her more credibility than give to some traditional media. Now, I think you may have a broad idea about how important is the social media for business because of its enormous number of users and unlimited business opportunities. But how are companies using social media for doing business marketing? What kind of marketing strategy they should take? I will focus on this topic in next blog.  

Reference: "Facebook by the numbers: 1.06 billion monthly active users", by Donna Tam, CNET

What is Social Media?

Nowadays, we live in a world where we are all connected in a network by virtue of a new force—social media. It is undeniable that social media impacts nearly every aspects of our daily lives. But how do social media impact on the business world? This blog will take you to the colorful world of social media and give you an insightful vision on how this growing force influences business around the world. The topic will include what is social media, why social media is important to business, how companies are using social media for doing business, how it changed the way of marketing and advertising and etc.

As a MBA student, who was born in the early 1990s, without a doubt I am big fan of social media and use it from day to day and even from minute to minute. This is not only because I need to communicate with my families and friends, but also because I need to expand my network for business purpose. As we known, networking is a big part of an MBA student’s life. So we can’t live without social media, which is one of the most convenient, effective and efficient way to do so. LinkedIn, the most popular professional social network platform, is a good example of how social media impact my life. 

So what is social media? When we are being asked this question, it seems that we all have a lot words to say, such as Facebook and Tweeter. This is mainly because we live with them every day and even every minute. However, it is still not easy for us to give a general idea about what social media really is. So how can we define social media?

Wikipedia answers the question what is social media, by stating that:
 "Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. Andreas Kalpan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.” Furthermore, social media depend on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content. It introduces substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities and individuals."

To help you better understand the nature of social media, here I would like to explain a little bit about Web 2.0 since the advent of social media is based on the development of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a relatively new name, compared with Web 1.0, for the all those same type of internet applications. The main feature of Web 1.0 is to help user gain information through Internet explorer. Unlike web 1.0, Web 2.0 focuses more on the interaction of users. In other words, the users will not only be the receptors of the internet content, but also the creator of it. This is also the critical difference between social media and traditional media.

To simply the definition of social media,  social media, from my perspective, is a multi-functional platform, based on the information and communication technology (ICT), on which people can create, share, exchange their personal experience, such as music, pictures and videos, and personal thoughts, such as preference, comments and critiques. My first blog would like to end with a formative video that will tell you about what social media really is, why it has been recognized the biggest shift since the industrial revolution and how it changes our world, particularly the business world. This video will also help you to know what topics will be covered in my future blogs. 

Reference: 1. videos taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mid8p4A6Eg
                 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media