Is your CEO a bo ke?

September 10, 2008 | Written by

Chances are, your CEO doesn’t have one of today’s most popular communications tools, a 博客. But don’t despair, almost no CEOs, corporate representatives or journalists in China have one – a blog, that is.

China’s most popular bo ke (bloggers) are celebrities like Xu Jinglei, a Chinese actress/director, whose blog on the portal Sina.com (CN/EN) could be by far the most popular blog in the world depending on how you count it.

But as for corporations, they are rarely seen in the Chinese blogosphere. Ruder Finn’s New York offices were recently graced by some colleagues from our China offices, who provided some interesting views on blogging trends and what kind of impact PR will have on that.

I was impressed with their techno-fluency, as I had assumed the Great Firewall of China would have all but quashed any kind of meaningful online conversation or influence that PR could have on it. As BusinessWeek put it a while ago, the Chinese agencies responsible for Internet censorship employ almost twice as many people as the CIA.

Those agencies have reportedly closed internet shops, monitored usage, arrested bloggers, intercepted emails and texts, deleted online commentary, and blocked companies from entering the market. My colleagues, for example, were particularly disappointed about Wikipedia and iTunes being banned in China, although both seem to have been unblocked at least partially during the Olympics.

The Olympics have shed light on democracy in China, but China has a long way to go before corporations adopt blogging there. However, there are some good signs:

• Traffic jam: With China’s Internet using population (253,000,000) approaching that of the entire population of the US (303,000,000), there’s clearly a huge market to be tapped, and with their top blogs receiving thousands of comments, there is a great interest in the possibilities.
• Forums: Popularity of forums like douban (EN (sorta)) have become credible sources of information for product reviews, opening at least some gates for corporations looking to engage consumers in conversations.
• Work-arounds: From a political standpoint, euphemisms for blocked words, videos, podcasts, and moblogging have offered Chinese netizens some greater freedoms due the difficulty of censoring such channels.

So, as Beijing Olympic memories fade and the Paralympics wind down, it will be interesting to see whether the world will continue to pressure China to open up. Do you think that PR professionals in China will be able to keep up with the changing trends?