UCLA

The days of China simply being a country that copies, pirates and counterfeits US and European technology is coming to end. Platforms like social and mobile are at the forefront of China’s current technological revolution. We are truly living in an interconnected world and this interconnectedness is creating a whole host of ways to market a product and/or a service. Chinese blogs, micro-blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds are leading this new technological revolution. Companies like WeChat, QQ, Weibo, Hexun, Youku, Jiepang, Qieke, Ushi, Taobao and Ku6 are all experiencing exponential growth. In China, the competition for consumers is incredibly fierce, especially in the social media space. This competition, however, does have a dark side: many companies regularly employ ‘artificial writers’ to seed positive content about themselves online and attack competitors with negative news they hope will go viral. On the e-commerce front, Taobao has formed a synergistic partnership in which store owners on Taobao create accounts on Weibo and utilise it as a channel to market their products and communicate with customers. On the virtual social world front, China might also be leading the world with sites like yy.com, which have figured out a way to monetise karaoke. Technology has always moved at the speed of light, but today the barriers of culture, language and communication are falling by the wayside and China is finding itself at the forefront of this new technological revolution.