“So far, Youku hasn’t removed the entertainment shows for which we own the copyright,” a Tudou public relations executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Global Times yesterday.

“They have shown a poor attitude in handling this issue,” the executive said, adding that Tudou was busy removing videos that Youku accused of infringing its copyright.

Tudou and the Taiwanese TV station Cti TV jointly announced Friday that they would take legal action against Youku for allegedly reposting episodes of a popular Taiwanese entertainment show “Kangxi is Coming” on Youku’s platform.

Tudou said it will ask for a compensation of up to 150 million yuan ($23.63 million).

Following that, Youku announced that it will file a lawsuit against Tudou, accusing the latter of allegedly pirating more than 60 television serials from Youku.

“If we receive any formal allegations, Youku will deal with it properly,” Jean Shao, director of international communications at Youku, told the Global Times yesterday, adding that the company respects copyrights, but has not yet formally received any allegations from Tudou yet.

“We call for an end to misleading PR battles, which Tudou is still engaged in,” Shao said.

Cti TV could not be reached yesterday.

The two companies, both listed in the US, are close competitors. Since Chinese authorities have enhanced efforts to prevent intellectual property infringements, disputes over contents have intensified among online video companies.

In April 2009, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television slapped many video websites with an order to remove any content for which they did not have copyright or individual broadcasting license. And later, the administration effectively banned hundreds of file-sharing websites as part of an effort to fight pornography and piracy.

According to Qu Xiaodong, general manager of CCW Research, the main factor behind the fight between the two companies is the pressure to earn profits as they are both public companies, and video copyrights have become increasingly important to their profit-making ability.

“But the way they deal with the copyright infringement is strange,” Fang Xingdong, a Chinese Web entrepreneur and founder of chinalabs.com, a web research consultancy, told the Global Times yesterday. He noted the video-sharing companies should focus on sharing.

Source: Global Times

Inevitably, B2B firms are restricted by their marketing budget. Recently with the development of technology and opportunities in social media, B2B firms have found new ways to promote their business online. Resultantly money can be spent in may ways such as website design, email campaigns, search marketing, and social media. Claudia, at Marketing Sherpa, has sighted search engine optimization and email marketing as the best methods. Her findings are validated by the graph below that shows 11 percent of B2B marketing budgets are devoted to email, while 12 percent go to search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO has the potential to boosts website traffic. When website traffic increases, knowledge of your business will increase too. If a firm shows up first on a search engine list, they have an advantage over competitors. More viewers and more knowledge means more potential customers. Does your business rank high enough?

Email marketing is commonly thought to be cost-effective; however, this is only true if the money is spent correctly. Expenses like list rental, email distribution programs, and content creation are just a couple of the costs that can be damaging.

Nevertheless, email marketing has substantial benefits that validate the required expenses. Many of the costs such as content creation are a valuable investment as they can be regurgitated for other purposes. Like social media websites, email marketing can be an exchange of useful information. A client’s needs and expectations can be better met with good communication methods. A more rounded idea of what your customers want and how you can improve your current strategy can be given if you have the appropriate feedback. B2B companies should also want to connect with the clients or customers and build a relationship faster than their competitors can. If this is a healthy relationship, a firm can gain influence over the customer or client. Combined with good SEO management, effective email marketing can be of huge significance to a firms marketing strategy.

At EASTWEST PR we want to ensure you have the means to reach your current and potential customers with the most up to date methods. Contact us here to see how we can help market your business.

sina weibo

18 Weibo Tips That You Must Know (II)

1. Search for industry keywords, find out ongoing discussions and join them. For example, if you are a car company, you can search for “Want to by a Cruz?”. By doing this you can find out your potential customers and build your relationships with them.
2. Interact with your followers. Interactivity is the threshold for digital media relations, which differs from traditional media relations. Respond and forward your followers’ microblogs and pay attention to those who tag you in their microblogs. Therefore you can make your followers feel that it is a man with blood and thoughts but not a robot who is behind your weibo account.
3. Being nice, saying festival greetings for example.
4. Make full use of the 140 characters limitation for one microblog. Never just tweet a webpage address with nothing else.
5. Avoid any kind of verbal battles, quarrels or inappropriate wording.
6. Make your microblogs combination of words and pictures. A picture is always more attractive and understandable than its description.
7. Don’t leak out any business or personal information which should be under protection. It matters not only to your business, but also to your professionalism and character.
8. Learn how to use @. This will help your weibo to become rather a platform than simply a press release.
9. Make your weibo profile a unique theme, which can very effectively help you to show your company’s culture and values. Designing your own profile picture and backdrop is the easiest way of doing this.

Don’t want to be deserted by the era of microblogging? Contact us here! We are right here offering you our best weibo optimization service.

A research conducted by Forbes found out that  59 % of senior executives prefer to watch video instead of reading text, if both are available on the same page. 80% of executives are watching more online video today than they were a year ago. (Forbes Insight, December 2010).

Some key facts from the most popular online video platform YouTube:

• Videos on YouTube exceed 2 billion views a day.
• 70% of  YouTube’s traffic comes from outside the U.S.
• Over 3 million people are sharing online videos to at least one social networking platform.

According to Cisco, video will increase from 30% of internet traffic to 90% of internet traffic by 2013 (Cisco, 2010)

If you still think that online video is not for your company, think again.

In this post we outline a few differences between Google and Baidu.

1.  Different companies. Baidu is the largest search engine company in China while Google is an American company and is the largest search engine company in the world. Of course, the number of Google users is the highest in the world. But in China, the supremacy of Baidu is still unshakable.

2. Different target audiences. Baidu’s main target audience is China, whereas Google’s target audience is the whole world. This is very obvious on Baidu advertising and Google Adwords. For Baidu advertising, we can choose the China provinces as the promotion area for every campaign, but we cannot choose any specific foreign country. But on Google Adwords, we can choose any countries as our promotion area. This well reflects that the focus of Baidu is Chinese market, while Google focuses on the entire world.

3. Different languages. Most of the information or content on Baidu is in Chinese. Google aims to provide service to the entire world and provides translation of its services into other languages for those who cannot read English.

4. Different advertising costs. Compared with Google’s keyword per click costs, Baidu’s one is lower. In the Baidu advertising dashboard, we can choose daily, weekly or monthly budget. But for Google, we just can choose daily budget.

5. Different additional services. Baidu supports many extensional services for adapting to Chinese users’ habits, such as Baidu Baike, Baidu tieba, Baidu Zhidao and so on. All of these services are Baidu’s special products. Google’s extensional services usually work for the customers in the whole world, not only for Chinese people.

6. Different use of SEO. Google and Baidu SEO are very different for either keyword ranking algorithm, or website content or external links. Even if your Baidu SEO is pretty good, that does not mean that the Google SEO is also good.

To summarize, if your firm targets  a Chinese audience, Baidu is a must; if it targets both foreign and local audience, Google offer more possibilities. However for most of the companies with business in China, a mix of both is often regarded as the most effective strategy.

Amber shares why social media monitoring is so important and what you need to monitor to get the most value out of your social media activities.

You’ll find out why social media is the new phone and what this means to your business. Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to find out what people are saying, what your competition is doing and what’s happening in your industry
• How to tie your monitoring back to metrics to measure social media results to improve awareness, sales and loyalty
• What the Red Cross does right in social media
• How blogging and social media impact your metrics
• Whether controversy is a good idea on your blog
• Where to learn how to integrate social media into your business

Click on the link to watch Amber Naslund video interview from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

Source: Social Media Examiner

Here is the list of the 7 Strategic Emerging Industries

1. Energy-saving and environmental protection: Advanced and eco-friendly products, cyclic utilisation, industrial equipment and services

2. Nex generation information technology: Next generation communications network, cloud computing, triple play, high-performance integrated circuits, high-end software, Internet security, artificial intelligence

3. Bio-technology: Bio-medicine, bio-agriculture, bio-energy, bio-manufacturing, drugs/vaccines

4. High-end/advanced equipment manufacturing: Carbon fibre, battery industries, high-speed railway, aerospace, marine engineering and high-end smart equipment

5. New energy: Nuclear, solar, wind, biomass, geothermal and ocean energy

6. New materias: High-performance composite materials, materials with special features, nano-materials, rare earth, alloys, membranes, high-end semi-conductors

7. New energy vehicles: Plug-in hybrid vehicles and pure electric vehicles, fuel cells, hydrogen cars, solar cars

EASTWEST specialises in helping global companies to get noticed in Asia.

It’s very typical to associate one’s resolution to his or her bad habits, and vice versa. Although correcting bad habits is a very progressive thing to do, I’d like to view ‘New Year’s resolution-making’ on a more positive light. More than reforming, my personal and business NY resolution was centred on goal-setting. Goals identification was on top of the EASTWEST team’s agenda as we came back from NY holidays.

Most of the goals identified were not radically different from those of the past years. They are many to mention but can be summarised into five core objectives:

(1)    Navigating client relationships. ‘Clients first’ motto still prevails this year.
(2)    Improving health of the business. Asia has very much transcended the financial crisis of 2007-2010 and the number of prospective clients ringing in is a positive indication of a better year.
(3)    Growing people. People development through trainings especially in the area of Digital will continue to be a focus.
(4)    Using technology and selectively outsourcing. In the knowledge-based economy, we continue to innovate service and leverage new technologies and PR expertise to help clients and EASTWEST stand out. eastwestpr.tv is a very exciting product of this.
(5)    Connecting with influencers and honing our role as Connectors. Gladwell always inspire.

What are your PR resolves for the year 2011? Let’s connect now.