China’s social and mobile companies set to shake the tech world

Andrew W. Pearson
Additional contact information
Andrew W. Pearson: Qualex Asia Limited, Hong Kong

Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, 2015, vol. 3, issue 2, 135-150

Abstract: The days of China simply being a country that copies, pirates and counterfeits US and European technology are coming to end. Platforms like social and mobile are at the forefront of China’s current technological revolution. The interconnectedness of the modern world 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 found 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.

Keywords: Chinese social media; social shopping; WeChat; instant messaging; location based services; e-commerce; mobile affiliate sales; WeChat; Taobao; virtual social worlds; Singles Day (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hstalks.com/article/955/download/ (application/pdf)
https://hstalks.com/article/955/ (text/html)
Requires a paid subscription for full access.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aza:jdsmm0:y:2015:v:3:i:2:p:135-150

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing from Henry Stewart Publications
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Henry Stewart Talks ().