CSR Practice in Chinese International Corporation

Corporate social responsibility, known as CSR, is more and more important now for a company to promote a positive image. Despite this, I am still facing the problem of figuring out what corporations are required to do for their CSR. Is it charity or funding rising activities? Is it protecting environment or promoting human rights? Is it producing public service or improving social welfare which should be done by government? Or is it all above? One thing I am pretty sure is, CSR is a company's framework of social responsibility and will help to build its long-term and sustained growth.
Some people believe that public and business is a contradiction. There can be no commercial business with purely public service. In fact this is a misunderstanding. After all, it is not only reflected in the money and public fund-raising and assistance to conduct a simple blog. Moreover, it should reflect the sustained social behavior, activity, or even cause, such as creating non-profit organization, founded both the profit social enterprise and the organization of volunteer public service activities. .
Nowadays CSR reports has become an rapidly growing task for international companies and following the trend, Chinese enterprises are paying more attention to this fields. Additionally, CSR reporting by Chinese companies has increased dramatically over the past three years.

Lenovo, the Chinese IT giant, published their first CSR report in 2008 and did this annually after that. Liu Chuanzhi, the board chairman stated as below:
“Enterprises need to function within a framework of social responsibility. We first need to do our own business well and to provide better products and services to the general public. We need to pay taxes as required by law, create more job opportunities and expand social wealth. This is our fundamental duty. In addition to these requirements, we should give back to society as much as we are able to and shoulder the responsibilities that come with our successes.”
As to their report, in the past year, Lenovo popularized computer knowledge to 20 million users in the rural areas in China and further improved its environmental-management system. The company says that it will increase its carbon efficiency by 10% in the year 2012-2013.In bridging the digital divide, Lenovo launched the "PC to the countryside" program; in addressing climate change, Lenovo to further improve the environmental management system, and developed to the 2012/2013 fiscal year will increase by 10% carbon efficiency target; in public venture capital projects, through the implementation of two public venture capital program, Lenovo has supported nearly 30 public interest organizations.
And their achievement appeared in the end of 2010. According to the newest report made by The Hurun Research Institute, Lenovo is the best-performing corporate social responsibility programmes only after Bayer in China.

Lenovo（China）Corporate Social Resposibility Report 2010:
http://csr.lenovo.com.cn/download/index.aspx

Political Public Relations

Politicians always want to build a positive public image and their wishes even stronger than popular stars or normal celebrities. And this is a major task for public relations practitioners who working in political areas. Depending on the new technology, modern media has already gained more power among public compared with ever before, and political PR now is often about protecting or defending politicians, parties and policies from the media.
Compared with commercial PR, political PR is remembered most for the negative aspects. In the business world, it is not common to see attacks on competitors because the consequence maybe drawing attention to opponents. On the other side, in political areas, criticism and negative comments are common tactics. The second thing is personal characteristics – for a company the image of leader is important but not critical. However in political world, leaders of parties or government departments have much higher profiles and they are almost the heart of political PR activity. One of the effective evaluation tools is accounting how they are covered by the media.
It is a normal phenomenon that Western PR firms will be exhausted with enormous rules for public affairs or lobbying in China. For example, public affairs need to follow government leading on issues in order to have a sustainable development. And for most cases they have to be lead by provincial or local authorities as well as national government.

Google VS. Baidu

Google began in 1996 as a research project in Stanford University and now it developed into the largest search engine in the world. Besides the web search, Google launched a series of services including map, translate, mail, news and so no. Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world, and processes over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.
Baidu, the best Chinese search engine in the world, was founded in 2000. Baidu’s services including post – user forum, MP3, Baike – an online collaboratively-built encyclopedia and so on. And Baidu is the first in China to offer WAP and PDA-based mobile search.
In order to find the difference between these two search engines, I typed “mosjiang” in both webs and results came out like below.

Luckily, they all provided some information about me instead of others. Google’s results were my accounts on some social medias like Facebook, twitter and YouTube, which help me to build connection with me directly.
Compared with this, Baidu’s results were more like some further information. Such as one of my blog, my comment for movie which published before or my favorite music records on a music website. This information describes my personality without telling people any details. And this based on Chinese people’s habit – we want to express our views but we don’t want others know who we are. Another interesting point is there is no advertising shown in google page but in the right side of Baidu’s page, there is a post about using Baidu to promote yourself.

Then I tried again with key words – jasmine revolution. About 5,940,000 results came out in google and only 17,000 results were shown in Baidu. The words below the Baidu search bar means – according to related laws and policy, some results cannot be shown. What’s more, the second news in Baidu was nothing to do with jasmine revolution.
As for google I also think the results are very ridiculous. In their seven first results four were about China’s security control. It seems like that people care more about Chinese government instead of jasmine revolution.
All in all, every characteristic of Baidu comes out with a label “Made in China”, and that’s the reason why it succeeds in China. As for Google, it is the most popular search engine in the world, but it still a tool used by state apparatus to influence public opinion.

New Media, New Generation

In 2010 there was an explosive growth in China's new media industry. The following are brief introduction of major elements of China's new media.

Micro-blogging
Micro-blogs appeared on the time netizens had already lost their interests in long articles and asked for strong but short messages online.
Last year micro-blogs experienced a “big bang” with the number of Sina micro-bloggers (known as Sina weibo) almost doubling in no more than half a year. Seeing the huge potential, the other three popular web portals including sohu.com, qq.com and 163.com set up their own weibo services in the rest of the year.
And now even government officials joining this trend and registering their weibo accounts, it is predictable that in the future China's micro-blogging services will play a more and more important role in connecting the government and the public.

Search engines
As the most widely used search engine in China, Baidu's dominant position will challenged by several competitors in the coming year which including sohu.com, Bing comes from Microsoft and goso.cn from the People's Daily, the biggest newspaper published by the Communist Party of China.
Additionally, China Mobile, the leading company in mobile networks, is also preparing to produce their search engine together with Xinhua.

Team-buying
At the time Wang Xing, founder of twitter-like “fanfou.com” established meituan.com-the first group purchasing website in China mainland, it was a new page for China's group purchasing websites as a dramatically growth in 2010.
According to figures from a Beijing-based Internet analysis firm, at the end of July 2010 the number of online team-buying websites has already reached 900. What's more, most of them are small or medium size firms.
It is obviously that online team-buying will attract more and more Chinese netizens in the future. Experts warned that as a new consumption channel, the lack of supervision from laws and regulations will increase the risk, and online consumers should pay more attention to it.

Social networking
Compared with the fast developments mentioned before, social networking websites faced a really bad time in the latter half of 2010. Many small-size sites closed, even the leading kaixin001.com announced the reducing of daily hits.
The embarrassing situation came with the misunderstanding of social networking among most Chinese netizens. According to a survey, majority people join social network purely for games, and the most popular one is stealing vegetables and fruits from friends' farms. Also, many users admitted that the purpose of join networking site was interested in others' private information, while unwilling to share their own information.
"Networking itself is not the goal. What these websites should do is to create their own innovative products that can help netizens achieve more value through networking.” Media Expert Li Wenhuan advised.

Government websites
It has become a new trend for government officers to collect public opinions and feedback online in 2010. However, a staggering 78.5 percent of some 450,000 Chinese citizens surveyed were unsatisfied with government websites, according to a 2010 report.
The common complaints including that most government websites were not updated in time and there was no reply to netizens' comments. Additionally, many pages and resources could not be opened.
It is possible to protecting and achieving people's rights of knowing, participating and monitoring. And on the other side it will improve government's transparency and democracy. However it won't be easy to accomplish and there still have a long way to go for Chinese government.

3 Tips for Chinese Social Marketing

1 Learning the rules
Targeting the audience, defining the most effective approaches to reach them and receiving the feedback – this is the normal format of social marketing and it is also useful in china as everywhere else.
Don’t think you have 1.3 billion potential customers - It is impossible target people all around China. For instance, no one will talk the same way to Shanghaineses and Beijingers. Therefore choosing the best way to communicate which depends on the target area population you want to talk with.
Last but not the least, be well prepared for a much longer time than expected before to reach a desired results.

2 Keeping informed of trends
As a developing industry in China, there are new tools or methods appearing everyday. It is much more obvious when considering the biggest market and audience group in the world. Since the landscape changes so quickly, it is critical to catch up with the newest trends.
For instance there are some people still thinking Chinese are silent and don't like to participate in activities which have little connection with themselves. Such kind of big mistakes have been overthrown by unaccountable facts.

3 Strong network presence and participation
It is not only because of the biggest population of netizens, but also the fact that we running our own social networking sited which are different with any other countries in the world.
This tip is critical and should keep in mind for all the times. Becoming a part of social marketing network is not only about creating a website or registering a micro-blog account. It is important to get involved in. and interaction is the foundation of gaining trust and relationship.

Chinese Special Internet Spin Doctor

The"Fifty Cents Party" (五毛党) was first proposed on some official documents. They are professional internet commentators mainly working for provincial and local governments. Nowadays they have become one useful power to help government leading online public opinion and eliminating criticism.
When local governments found the difficulty of controlling public opinion online, they started hiring internet commentators several years ago. The reason of using professional commentators was local governments couldnot rely on central office to monitor and block every single piece of news about their own areas, therefore they need to figure out some useful solutions.

In the year of 2006 the Propaganda Department of Anhui Province first revealed the existence of internet commentators in their report: "Inspection of Propaganda and Cultural Work in Nanchang, Changsha, Zhengzhou" that "since October 2004, the Changsha Municipal CCP Committee Foreign Propaganda Office submitted to the principal leaders the publication". In order to serve their task, the organisations mentioned above and other similar units have already set up a special team and hired many professional internet commentators. At that time the salary for them was RMB 600 every month. Their major job is closely monitoring Chinese netizens' opinions, providing government information and guiding internet opinions. Normally they will focus on one topic every week and put posts on some biggest Chinese News web such as the People's Web, Xinhua Net and 20 other popular domestic sites. Commentators will be paid extra fee for each post besides from the basic monthly salary, which is counted as RMB 50 cents. And that's where "Fifty Cents Party" comes from.
Hunan Province (where I came from) is standing in the leading position of "Fifty Cents Party" for ages. In the early of 2006 they reached the goal of publishing 800 messages every month on the provincial webs. Additionally, in the same year, in order to hire more full-time commentators, the Propaganda Department of Hunan Province launched a campaign which advocated that "everyone can make 50cents". This piece of work greatly enlarged Hunan's "Fifty Cents" team, and made the foundation to create an invisible unique network landscape.
According to the newest report, internet commentators are becoming more and more popular now. Some experts even estimate that there are at least tens of thousands of them. Furthermore, there are special organisations set up to train these internet spin doctors as their job is more important than it would be in any country else in the world.
"Politically, the internet is more important in China than in other societies because it's the only public space where people can express themselves," said Professor Xiao from Beijing University.

For more information click here:
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/

Insight social media and Public Relations

As in China, more and more PR practitioners want to add social media tools in their campaigns, this is a make – up interviews based on research in social media’s usage and power. Hope it will be useful to others.

All data and resources come from:
http://www.cnnic.cn/