Speed, content, format, channel

How organisations react to the changing media landscape in China

An image taken from Volkswagen's cultural programme Rain Room. Photo: Volkswagen

There has been a tremendous change in the Chinese media landscape over the last several years. As in-house communicators, if we continue to do PR like in the past, we won’t survive.

According to the latest official statistics, China now has 710 million netizens, 656 million smart phone netizens, 549 million active WeChat (the Chinese What’s app) users and 236 million active Weibo (the Chinese twitter) users. Chinese people have changed their habits from reading news and sharing info from traditional media to social, digital and mobile too.

Currently, traditional media still plays an important role in leading tonality and providing authority for information in China. For instance, if people want to check the creditability of news or information, they will still refer to the country’s most authoritative traditional media, such as Xin Hua News Agency(新华社), People’s Daily(人民日报)or CCTV(中央电视台).

However, a large number of the journalists who used to work for traditional media, have now shifted their career to the new media. In addition, due to its dominance in China, a lot of discussions, issues and crises now start in social media. According to the data shared by the Research Department of People’s Daily Online (人民网), around 40% of crises now spread from social media.

This shift in emphasis to social media requires PR professionals to work differently than before. Therefore I would like to share observations in four areas of communication: speed, content, format and channel.

Speed

Traditionally, when an issue or crisis happens, companies were expected to give the first response within 24 hours. Under the social media environment, PR experts in China would now suggest to respond within a maximum of four hours. And they call these four hours “Golden Time”. Some companies even push it forward to two hours. Late response after the “Golden Time” can only result in more rumours and speculation and draw the risk of being criticised for a “lack of transparency and respect”.

Content

Content is still king. But – be short. Be down to earth. Be social and entertaining.

Chinese consumers are too busy and too tired to read lengthy info. 52% of Chinese people don’t like to read or only occasionally read “long” articles. So, make the articles short and simple to attract readers. Save their time.

In parallel, make the content entertaining and interactive. Life is not easy already, so let’s make the content pleasant, easy and fun.

Let me provide an example of some recent communication work from Volkswagen. The Volkswagen Group’s CEO Matthias Mueller visited China in June 2016 and was involved in several media interviews. At the time he was in Beijing, it happened to be the time of the annual Chinese students’ College Entrance Exam (高考). The whole nation was talking about this exam. To Chinese students and their families, the exam can change their whole life, depending on whether they succeed or fail.

“Content is still king. But – be short. Be down to earth. Be social and entertaining.”

In order to attract readers to the news from Volkswagen, instead of distributing an official press release, we used our corporate WeChat account to publish an article called Mueller’s “Special College Entrance Exam”. It turned all media questions into exam questions and published Muller’s answers and performance as if he was taking this famous “College Entrance Exam” in China. Of course, Chinese readers wouldn’t be surprised – Mueller outperformed in this exam and got full scores.

This WeChat article was very successful as the content is highly relevant to Chinese readers, making a German CEO approachable and admirable.

Format  

The same statistics mentioned above also show that 70% of the Chinese netizens enjoy audio-visual experiences.

In China last year it was the so-called “year of short video”. One Chinese online celebrity Papi Jiang (Papi酱)is a very good example of the power of short video. Due to the highly entertaining, grassroots, humorous and short nature of her online videos, she was able to collect around three million followers within the first three months active on the internet. And now, her followers are close to 20 million within less than one year.

In addition to video, H5 is also another popular format which combines the advantage of both mobile and social. There is also a fast trend to use high tech interactions like visual reality by many brands in China to deliver multi-dimensional contents.

Creativity is the key word to communicators. Be creative with the format of press release too!

Channel

People are getting their news more and more from social media channels. At Volkswagen, our own social media channels like Weibo and WeChat are now functioning as info-release channels in addition to other traditional channels. This is a must under the current media environment in China. Especially during crisis, instead of trying to stop others from talking online, it is much better to release fact-based and positive information from our own social channels.

As we first began to develop our own social media accounts, the awareness and number of followers were low. This is normal. A tip to develop interest in the account and spread awareness is to leverage other already popular accounts. For example at Volkswagen, in promoting the cultural programme “Rain Room” – the critically-acclaimed art installation at Yuz Museum Shanghai, we partnered with professional and influential media like National Geographic, and also with a number of online KOLs who have millions of followers. This tremendously helped the influence, reputation and content of Rain Room.


Data sources: CNNIC (China Internet Network Info Center), CTR (CVSC-TNS Research), Tencent 

 

Catherine Peng

Catherine Feili Peng is the vice president of Volkswagen Group China, in charge of PR and communications. Her main responsibilities include corporate communications for the Group in China, Volkswagen Brand PR and cross-brands communications. She has served at a number of multinational companies in China, including Bosch, Michelin, Reebok and RayBan. In 2016, she was named as an “Outstanding PR Contributor to the Chinese Automotive Industry” by a joint committee from China’s four leading automotive media.