The video embedded below is of Dick van Motman, President & CEO of DDB Group Greater China, Kevin Lee, Executive Creative Director & Partner, Leagas Delaney Shanghai, Ng Fan, Executive Creative Director, Saatchi & Saatchi Shanghai, and Lo Sheung Yan, Executive Creative Director, Northeast Asia & China Chairman at JWT. They are discussing the best ads in China for 2011.

Check out the best ads in China for 2011:

Want to learn more about how video can help grow your business? Check out EASTWEST’s Online Video offering.

If the video is not loading for you as you are in China please view the mirror hosted on Youku.

“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

This leads us to believe that iTunes can be an effective platform to promote and get noticed. If you’re asking yourself how to get your video syndicated through iTunes, it’s actually deceptively simple.

Step 1: Film Your Video Series

Before you are able to promote a video on iTunes you have to first have video to promote. However, only shooting a handful isn’t enough – you will have to have an entire series dedicated to your topic. Don’t overload your viewers though! It’s best to release on a more regular schedule.

Step 2: Create an RSS Feed

Now that you have your video series shot, edited and saved on your hard drive as a standard format, the next step is to create an RSS feed out of them. The only way iTunes will list a video series is if the creator of the series points iTunes to an externally hosted RSS feed it can syndicate. This means you will have to find a third party to host and create an iTunes podcast RSS feed.

Step 3: Promote

Now that you have your video syndicated to iTunes, it’s time to get out there and make sure that your video is found. This action should simply be part of your release schedule – every time you have a new episode posted let Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social networks know about it.

Want to get your name scrawled across the iTunes landscape? EASTWEST can help you get noticed.

One newspaper after another is going out of business across the United States. The same is happening in other markets as more and more people migrate to the web. Although newspaper ad spending was still 51% larger than Internet ad expenditure in 2010, newspaper spending is shrinking 1.4% annually.

A decline in Internet advertising?

The Internet in Asia is still nowhere near the potential that marketers are hoping for. With the economy in serious decline in many parts of the world, there has also been a drop in Internet advertising revenues.

Market share of internet advertising

Hong Kong and Japan: 10%

Singapore: 7%

China: 9%

Korea: 12%
Is the low performance of  Internet advertising caused by the general recession or the decline in retail sales? Professor Clemons argues that Internet advertising could lose its value and its impact due to the simple fact that advertisers continue to use traditional advertising formats, such as display ads, video ads. And these formats have proven to fail on the internet.

Ad revenues of traditional print media is declining. The ultimate failure of broadcast media advertising is likewise becoming clear. While classic advertising fails, search engines like Google or Baidu in China succeeds in web advertising with their search advertising whose value proposition is perfect for the web.

Google share of Internet market:

• 2006: 34.9%
• 2010: 44.1%

The reason traditional ad formats fail on the web is because people have no patience for them, as they did in traditional media. People want sites to get to the point; their attention span is diminished. An ad message that is pushed at a potential customer without their approval to view it, or when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, is a recipe sure to fail as a major revenue source for most Internet sites.

Web advertising should be valued in terms of the value of the business it creates from the new users it attracts to your site. This value is usually very small, which is why Web advertising works poorly and (while not completely useless) will be one of the smallest contributors to the future of the Web.

The problems with classic advertising

Clemons predicts that online advertising in its traditional form is going to be smaller than it is today. He thinks that it cannot support all the applications and all the content we want on the Internet. Online, he says, is not the answer. There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:

People don’t trust advertising and advertising is simply not trusted, not wanted, and not needed. A Forrester Research study also concludes that advertising and company/brand sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.
People don’t want to view advertising, they want to form our opinion of a product from trusted sources,  reviews and independent rating sites.

Marketers and their ad agencies are realising that we are not watching traditional ads as much as we used to. They attribute this to the fact that we have moved beyond newspapers, magazines, outdoor, and television, to the likes of video games, Smart Phones and the Internet.

A survey of people who had actually bought things on the Web revealed that only 12% of buying customers had arrived at the website from an advertisement. 88% of the shoppers had navigated there in other ways—via search engines and links. Proof, that if you offer content-rich pages, other sites will link to you.

Online advertising must create value for users. This would seem self-evident, but it has not been the case with traditional advertising, which was developed for captive audiences, and web users are increasingly anything but captive.

A new approach of communicating about products will have to be developed. The future of modern online advertising probably is about integrating product placement with high quality content. Less self-proclaimed “market leader” and “best products”  and more relevant information, reviews and editorials that support demonstrated facts.

The approach of PR seems more relevant than ever. Using true, planned and verifiable information to promote  goodwill between a firm and its audience: media, employees, customers, etc. In fact, according to the Custom Publishing Council and Roper Public Affairs, 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus an advertisement.

In conclusion, because consumers have now the power to find any information themselves and don’t want, nor need advertising to shape their mind, trust is the only way brands can use to re-create a relationship with consumers. Content creation replaces classic ads by helping firms:

• Become a trusted resource for their target groups

• Develop thought leadership

• Increase traffic to their website and social media accounts

Learn more about “content marketing and optimization”

Source:

http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~clemons/research.html

www.campaignasia.com

http://www.custompublishingcouncil.com

www.Junta24.com

Baidu’s Application for updating micro-blog content

Does this indicate that Baidu will take social into its algorithm? No doubt. Baidu is planning to adjust search algorithm by integrating the contents from microblogs. Due to Baidu’s new search algorithm is still in a beta stage, users can only search some certain keywords to get the micorblog’s results.

Early this year, Sina Weibo launched an independent search engine page which allows users to search friends, online activities, group chat, online vote and applications etc. It is believed by some industry experts that the era of micro search is coming.

Some SEO experts have predicted that as the number of microblog users increase dramatically, microblogs will generate more text, photos and videos than any other social media platforms. This also can explain why Baidu has decided to adjust its search algorithm.  Although the biggest Chinese microblog–Sina Weibo refused to cooperate with Baidu at the moment, we’ll just have to wait and see what Baidu does next with Weibo search results!

1. Corporations will look to leverage their social media efforts
2. People will communicate more using social media and less with email
3. Social Media mobile marketing will takes off
4. Google will “pagerank” and “map” peoples influence
5. Social search will become increasingly important
6. Sina Weibo will compete with Taobao for online shopping
7. More companies will create branded social media accounts instead of website
8. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline with people accessing social media via mobile phone during breaks due companies banning social media access at work
9. Sharing information no longer means e-mail
10. The Social Media  movement will desire to have quality, not quantity
11. Exclusivity trumps accessibility  in Social Media
12. Everyone becomes a marketer
13. Tools will develop to reduce noise and deal with RSS overload
14. Sina Weibo will become the Google doc/+/photos/etc. of Asia
15. Friend synchronisation tools will develop
16. Friend list sanitisers will keep your list clean
17. Social Media tools will help you organise people based on location and business
18. Organisations will continue to grapple with the social human web
19. Social Media Indigestion will increase
20. Social Media will become more personalised
21. There will be consolidation and shuttering of Social media businesses
22. Social Media Identity will become aggregated and segmented
23. The social media gold rush won’t be as lucrative as everyone thought
24. B2B goes social media
25. There will be Social Media Multi-Channel Integration
26. Google will buy Twitter
27. Blogger outreach from PR will get better
28. Companies increasingly crafting content for Social Media SEO
29. Sputtering economy will entice companies into the social media space
30. Microblogging in China will replace blogging
31. Live as it happens content search will become increasingly important
32. Better metrics for social media measurement will continue to develop
33. Twitter will continue to develop legitimacy
34. Online social media video will come into its own
35. Customer satisfaction driven by social media communities uprising will make companies see the light
36. Social media will create Ad Agency disintermediation
37. Ushi becomes the Chinese LinkedIn
38. With the rise of social shopping the ease with which people are able to see feedback .. with confirmed identities will change the eCommerce online shopping game
39. Ranking The Influencers (the engagers) as a measurable tool for new media
40. Twitter Will Get Recognized for its social search assets
41. Twitter will start to emerge as a relevant and updated information source
42. Influence will be defined by measurable variables

More predictions? Leave us yours!

Wants to know more about managing social media for business? Contact us for a proposal (reply within 48h)

Undoubtedly for PR professionals “pitch” media to attend an event, and the follow-ups afterwards for media coverage is a “routine step” in traditional PR method, however with more and more platforms available nowadays, “routine step” is no longer a fixed routine anymore, with the help of various tools online we can easily discover and secure media coverage by ourselves. Eg: through weibo (twitter), smartphone, blog, newsletter etc.

Here is a short summary of three ways which can be used to get more coverage without the help of journalist:

   1.    Take photos at the event and publish them via live social media channels

Remember interaction is the key in social media in order to draw attention from audience. Real-time updates will allow people to have more chances to communicate with you. Specially more and more journalists are also using social media to get the most updated news.

   2.    Use more photos in case studies or blog posts

It’s proved that generally people show more interests in visuals rather than plain contents, if they see their own pictures from the event very possibly they will want to cover that in their article without you reminding them, if space allows. Professional photography is highly recommended. So use photos to summarize the event with relevant contents where necessary.

   3.    Share events summary through various tools

Case studies, blog posts or event recaps should be shared with industry publications which don’t require the timeliness of the news. In this case it’s not appropriate to send to daily newspaper or publications that evaluate time of the news.

Asking for opportunities to be published in their e-newsletter or any other of platform they have besides the main one.

  4.    Video interviews – shoot, share, embed

Get your spokespeople and have them talk in front of the camera. Doesn’t need to be long, 2 minutes is a good timing for the length of the video. Remember to make the format more shareable so your audience can watch or download directly on your website, blog or social media sites instead of driving traffic to the media’s website where you normally send to.

Source: PR Daily.com, by Arik Hanson

http://www.prdaily.com/mediarelations/Articles/9819.aspx

In this post, we introduce 5 key internet personalities in China.

Yao Cheng

Yao Cheng, born on 5 October 1979, a native in Fujian Province, is the top sina weibo personality with the largest number of followers.

She graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 2003 and became an actress. Currently, she is part of the Xi An Flim Studio Cast. She acted in a Chinese show called “Legend of Martial Arts” in 2005, which was widely loved by the general audience.

Crossing the traditional media boundaries, Yao Cheng started using social media platforms to reach a wider group of audience. In September 2009, she started her personal weibo account, writing many interesting and humorous content. Her popularity on Weibo increased due to her being straightforward, real and sincere in what she writes. She also maintains a blog account.

Han Han

28-year-old Han Han is a man of many hats. A best-selling novelist, champion amateur race-car driver, wildly popular blogger and is also known as China’s most media-savvy celebrity rebel. Having appeared on China’s literary scene at the age of 17 in 2000 with his first best seller, Triple Gate, Han has shrewdly mined a seam of youthful resentment and anomie through his stories of anguished characters in their late teens and early 20s. One of China’s top-earning authors, he is widely seen as a torchbearer for the generation born after the beginning of the country’s opening to the outside world, a group the Chinese call the “post-’80s generation”: apolitical, money- and status-obsessed children of the country’s explosive economic boom.[60]

His main weapon is his blog, where he criticizes the Writers’ Association, literary critics, bureaucrats, city mayors, and whoever he takes it into his head to dislike. In a country where the old conventions and traditions are respected, Han Han is somewhat an underground force.

Xu Jing Lei

Xu Jinglei, born 16 April 1974, is an actress, director, writer, lecturer and singer. She was raised in a traditional Beijing family. Her artistic talent was realized when she was 19, leading her to enroll in a prestigious Beijing Film Academy. Before graduation, opportunities came knocking on her door to act in a few TV series and movies. However, her career boomed only after her graduation when she wrote and directed a movie in 2002, ‘My Father and I’, which won her multiple awards. This led to her appearing not just as an actress but a multi-talented individual. Since then, she became a superstar. However, instead of focusing on her acting career, she decided to be a guest lecturer at her alma mater.

Xu Jinglei started blogging in 2005 and garnered over 10 million viewers and she is one of the top celebrity blogger in China. In late 2006, Xu Jinglei started to expand her talents into singing and released her 1st album.

Lee Kai Fu

Lee Lee Kai Fu is the founder of Innovation Works. He had an illustrious career at top US software companies before founding Microsoft Research China in 1998. He joined Google in 2005 and a widely reported legal squabble ensued between Microsoft and Google over his ability to work for Google without disclosing proprietary information and trade secrets. However, he left Google China in 2009 to start his Innovation Work, which is a business creation platform that focuses on establishing the next wave of Chinese high-technology companies.

He is a prominent Weibo personality with 4.2 million followers and also maintains a blog. He has a following amongst the young and entrepreneurial in China.

Huang Jianxiang

Huang Jianxiang is one of the more famous sports commentators in China. His football commentary is highly praised and he has commentated at the FIFA World Cup and at the German Bundesliga. He also commentates during various multi-sport events such as the Olympic Games and the Asian Games.

He received international infamy during a World Cup commentary incident in 2006 when he yelled passionately during his commentary on a match between Australia and Italy. He received much flak for his blatant support for the Italian team. Subsequently, he resigned from CCTV on November 2006 and joined Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV. His blog and his Weibo updates are essential for any Chinese sports fan.

Do you need help to implement your China media strategy? Contact us for a proposal (reply within 48h)

                                                                                                                                     

 IEEE@SGWF 2011

Briefing

IEEE is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. IEEE was looking for PR support in China prior to the Smart Grid Word Forum (SGWF) taking place in Beijing from September 28 to September 29, 2011. The scope of work included an integrated approach combining web, social networking and media relations. 

The EASTWEST PR and Interprose teams were appointed to organize PR activities for IEEE prior to the SGWF 2011 forum with the end goal of media coverage for IEEE and their spokespeople. EASTWEST delegated 4 bilingual PR consultants and 1 professional photographer to be onsite throughout the entire event.

Strategy

EASTWEST leveraged creative PR tactics to increase IEEE’s visibility, get coverage for IEEE and their spokespeople. This includes but is not limited to:

• Recommend trending media topics for IEEE executives to comment on.
• In order to ensure the maximum media attention, EASTWEST identified the attractive angles and secured 4 email interviews from  key media prior to the event.
• Drafted media invite, and invited key media to attend the media roundtable
• Contacted key media from different sectors and secured 4 one-to-one interviews with the spokespeople of IEEE.
• Coordinated with logistics and necessary facilities needed before the event.
• Organized and conducted media interviews.
• Offered on-site media management with the presence of EASTWEST’s bilingual consultant.
• Filmed IEEE’s spokespeople after the media roundtable, which increased positive media exposure.
• Assisted with material design including a brochure and booth. Created Chinese webpages of this event.
• Leveraged social media before, during and after the event for more exposure.
• Used pictures and video to represent IEEE as a thought leader.
• Media follow-up and coverage monitoring to help client know the ROI of EASTWEST’s efforts.

Results

• 28 media in attendance to the media roundtable
• 4 one-to-one interviews arranged for IEEE executives including Jim Prendergast, Chuck Adams and Gordon Day
• 21st Century Business Herald – Ms. Zhang Han, Reporter
• China Economic Times – Ms. Zhang Na, Reporter
• Science &Technology Daily – Ms. Zhang Jiaxing, Reporter
• Energy Review – Mr. Yu Tao, Editor
• 4 email interviews secured from media post event 
• 4 video interviews carried out with IEEE’s spokespeople Jim Prendergast, Chuck Adams, Gordon Day and Mei Shengwei
• 3 press releases distributed on newswire which generated 90 clippings within two days
• 16 press articles published shortly after the media roundtable
• 12 media confirmed to publish news/articles in late October or November
• 300 follower increase on Sina Weibo during the event; 14 posts and 7 photos published with 62 re-tweets and 15 comments

Media Clippings

Attended media list