November 5th, 2008

Managing Your Online Reputation In China

Found on Business Week, a post about a Beijing-based PR firm helping companies “navigating the country’s perilous Web”. What is it about ?

A man in Tianjin had put a deposit on a Toyota Corolla, then started venting on the Internet when the car failed to show up after three months. Given the anti-Japan sentiment that rages in China’s cyberspace, the griping created a big risk for Toyota.

What did this PR firm do ?

The Beijing-based firm spotted the disgruntled consumer’s postings in one of the 500,000 online forums it regularly searches. Before the topic could draw much attention, Daqi put the buyer in touch with Toyota, which pressed its dealer to deliver the car.

So far, so good. Everything ended up gently and smoothly. Such PR companies apparently won lots of new contracts this past year, when angry bloggers attacked Carrefour, Nokia, Coca-Cola or Mc Donalds. Here is how they do this:

When online commentary turns negative, the monitors assess whether it might flare up. They figure out who’s generating the criticism—an irate consumer, a nationalist teen, even a rival. Then they consider how fast the complaint is spreading, and whether it’s likely to be picked up by Web portals such as Sohu and Sina. “You know it’s a crisis when Sohu or Sina has created a special page to collect all the news articles and aggregate comments,” as they did when bloggers angry about Tibet called for a boycott of Carrefour in April.

PR outfits hire students to write postings that boost certain brands and criticize the competition, says a staffer at a Western PR firm in Beijing. The job description of one online help-wanted ad reads: “Publicize and popularize [products] via online forums and blogs. Send at least 50 propaganda posts per day.” Workers are offered 1.5 cents per post.

Even if most of PR companies say they don’t pay bloggers, they acknowledge pampering online opinion leader, by inviting them at sessions where they can test products or even taking them on overseas trip.

What If…?

Let’s just imagine for a second that we use the same such a nice PR firms to work- not for but - against a rival brand… Let’s imagine that you enroll a few hundred students, who create each another dozen profiles on popular forums and you get an instant task force of thousands of bloggers, ready to hit the Web.

Just spice the whole thing up with a few algorithms to generate some web traffic, bookmark this on popular social bookmarking sites and spread the word on social networking sites… What do you get ? A disaster.

A typical example is how British Airways’ reputation was damaged by employee comments on Facebook, read the full post here.