Follow Alex Zhou at @alexzzf

While the Internet population in China exceeds that of the United States, the social media usage is getting intense. According to a BCG report, there are 221 million blogs, 117 million BBS and 176 million social network users in China. While Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are blocked (because of a lot of anti-government posts), Chinese equivalents are expanding quickly.

Differences between Chinese and foreign social media are rooted in culture and language. Today people seldom blame Chinese internet ‘copycats’. Instead, a new theory emerges - ‘5Cs of Chinese innovation’.

• Copy: We always start with something.
• Combination: By combining two things (i.e., instant messaging and virtual goods), you can get a great idea.
• Competition: As soon as there are two strong video sites, for example, they need to compete and differentiate, which leads to innovation.
• Constraints: Because you can’t do everything, the constraints foster innovation, even new business models (because online advertising isn’t workable, for example).
• China: It has to work for China, and the unique settings of the country, which might be different than for example a Japanese consumer.

Ok, let’s now take a look at how Sina Weibo (pronounced ‘way-bore’) implements these 5Cs and quickly thrive.

Sina Weibo is a latecomer to the microblog phenomenon. But launched in 2009, just about three years after Twitter, Weibo is by far the most popular microblogging platform in China. While Weibo is essentially the same concept as Twitter, there are a few differences: 

Though mobile phones are used to send less than 20 percent of Twitter updates in the United States, nearly half of Sina Weibo’s updates are sent via mobile phone. This phenomenon points to the growth of China’s mobile Internet, one of the biggest trends in China and Asia.

Weibo focuses on verified accounts. Although Twitter now has now brought them in, verified accounts are a much bigger deal in Weibo; they are given out far more readily, to all kinds of celebrities and brands, and a pretty “v” appears by every verified user’s Weibo entry. The most popular “weiboers”, usually movie starts or household entrepreneurs, each attracts millions followers.  

Perhaps the most striking difference between Chinese and foreign social media, however, is the length of communications expressed via microblogs in Chinese versus English. Twitter holds messages to 140 characters, which is quite short in English, especially if users want to include a URL. Since each character in Chinese is a word, 114 characters in Chinese translates into about 400-500 characters in English, according to a linguistic research, well beyond the text limit of a “tweet” in English. This language efficiency makes brands much easier than Twitter to conduct a social marketing campaign.

A comprehensive portal page. Weibo’s portal page features far more than Twitter’s, with extensive lists including rankings for individual entry, topic, and user popularity.

An automatic URL shortener. Enter any address — regardless of length — and it will be shortened to something like http://sinaurl.cn/XXX. While often handy, this will frustrate anyone that needs to make it clear to users exactly what link they’re following.

Embedded picture & video attachments. By clicking on thumbnails that can be easily added to any Weibo entry, pictures or video can be viewed without leaving the page. This is this handy for the user and provides opportunities for marketing, as brands can more easily associate visuals with entries.

Twitter vs. Weibo

Follow Alex Zhou at @alexzzf. Read his blog at alexzzf.tumblr.com.

Much has been talked about Chinese government’s efforts to censor the Internet. The government’s censorship is an important issue, but it is not the top priority of China’s 450 million Internet users. What’s their top priority? Connecting with other users online!

Chinese Internet users are actively engaging in social media and social networking. A study I read days ago found that Chinese Internet users are online for an average of 2.7 hours per day, considerably more than other emerging countries and more on par with usage patterns in the U.S. Looking at some social-related data, America has 21% of people who create original content, while China has 40% of people who create content. That’s a very significant difference. No doubt, usage of Chinese social media/networking is some of the most intense in the world.

I trust numerous UNIQUE factors are driving Chinese to engage in social media. 

Firstly, rural-to-urban migration is driving the online social interaction in China. It is mind-blowing to think that every year around 18 million people (most are young), equivalent to the population of Australia, move from rural areas to big cities. They are separating from families. They are panic. It is hard for them to dive into city-type social life. Connecting people on the internet is probably the best way to build up their own social scene.

During my summer internship at Kleiner Perkin’s China fund, I learnt my most valuable lesson from a Chinese social networking start-up. Quite different from other Chinese Internet ventures, whose founders are often admirable Chinese returnees educated in Ivy League schools bringing back U.S. models, none of this start-up’s management has any dazzling academic or career achievement. Moreover, none of my friends in Beijing and Shanghai, nor I myself, had ever heard of this site. Should a social site always make traction first with college students and young professionals? Definitely not the case for this start-up. From the very beginning, this home-grown social site has been targeting at millions migrant workers and combining social networking services and online games in very simple UI design. Users can log on through a computer at an Internet café or through their own cell phones.  Games are naive, but easily get you hooked. The rules of a top game are simple: each user owns a street with parking spaces. If he catches a friend parking illegally, he can ticket the offender and collect a fine. Once he earns enough (virtual) money, he can buy more (virtual) cars. It is not unusual for a user to own 10 vehicles, ranging from a Harley-Davidson to a luxury SUV. A migrant worker’s dream becomes a “reality” on this social site!

Another reason for the fast development of China’s social media is the loneliness of the one-child generation. Growing up in a one-child household makes Chinese children lonely and keen to connect, hence the obsessive use of the Internet, in particular social-oriented sites, by China’s young generation.

Last but not least, other factors include mobile internet prevalence (66% of China’s Internet users access Internet through mobile phones) and dull information from government-controlled media.

In the next blog, I am going to compare Twitter and Weibo as well as other major American and Chinese social sites. Who is learning from whom?  Stay tuned!

socialstartup:

thegongshow:

Great visualization of when and how valley VC invested in some of the leading consumer web services.

Good context on the funding ecosystem, for our April 13 class on investment and control.