Items Tagged With New Media

I'm definitely not an authority on new media or tech but I have a personal interest obsession with following developments in the sector to stay up to date with what's around the corner and whether it's applicable to my business model or not.

So I woke up this morning to find everyone buzzing and debating on Twitter about Robert Scoble and how his account was deleted by Facebook in what has turned out to be a pretty big deal. I'm in no position to try and regurgitate the details but you can read Scoble's blog about it and Techmeme's got all the juicy details of what went down so far between Scoble, Facebook and Plaxo.

It didn't take long for David Feng (President of the Beijing Macintosh Union, former editor at blognation China, and founder of Beijingology) to chime in with a Chinese viewpoint that I found really interesting! As David says:

A Chinese Scoble might have initiated a PR war. He might have his guanxi or contacts breathe heavy down upon Facebook. He may already have solid contacts at Facebook, so that Facebook won’t have the guts to dezui (put more blunty, to “P-off”) Scoble. He might get downright “niu”, or strong and powerful (sometimes with a negative connotation).

I'll go off on a slightly related tangent and say that if this had all gone down in a China context:

• The folks at Plaxo wouldn't have even asked their most trusted blogger friends to try out a controversial new app behind Facebook's back. Especially if they knew it had the potential of resulting in account deletion by Facebook as mentioned by Michael Arrington in his TechCrunch blog about it.
• Scoble would have been too worried about permanently damaging what little guanxi he did have with Facebook and would have declined to move forward with risking his reputation and his Facebook account (and all the 5,000+ friends he built up on there) by being Plaxo's guinea pig for their new app.
• Even if Plaxo and Scoble still went forward with testing this unauthorized app out on Facebook, if this had gone down in China...Facebook would NEVER had immediately deleted Scoble's account BECAUSE they know that Scoble is an influencer in the very industry they are all in together. If there's one thing I'm learning from following developments of the tech sector, it's a very big industry but very small world in much the same way China business circles are. The reality is, in China who you are DOES factor into every action that is taken against you. Just look at the crazy viral controversy it's ignited so far. Again, if this was China, Facebook's CEO would've actually gotten fired whoever at the lower ranks of his company took it upon themselves to delete the account of such a high profile blogger as Scoble without consulting the PR Director or himself for that matter. Dirty laundry is never aired in public in China. Just as David Feng so correctly mentioned, that's the whole point of the Art of War.
• Lastly, even after getting his account deleted...the Chinese version of Scoble would have apologized to Facebook on the surface and explained to his readers on his blog that he didn't mean to cause such a public disruption over something that was meant to help Plaxo and Facebook work together on giving more power to the people. (So Communist sounding isn't it?) This would win Scoble big time public opinion points as a hero of the common man and save his face and likely result in his account being reinstated by Facebook who also wants to save their face in the eyes of the Chinese public.

LOL...ok, so that's my cultural lesson for today as it would apply in a China business situation. Relax, it's all HYPOTHETICAL people. The reality is, all the players here are American and this issue has nothing to do with China but there's a Chinese business lesson to be learned in these types of situations. The fact is, Facebook is looking to enter the China market soon and hopefully it won't export the American business culture it has into the China market...if so, they could very well find themselves in a situation where they deleted the account of some famous Chinese blogger with a lot of influence...and the WOM chatter against Facebook in China would never let up if that was the case.

Hmm...in that case, maybe Rupert Murdoch was smart in putting his wife Wendy as head of MySpace China after all. A Chinese Plaxo would think twice about making a famous Chinese blogger test out a controversial and unauthorized app on MySpace China because the head of MySpace China is married to a guy with a lot of guanxi in international and Chinese business circles everywhere. I'm just saying, it'll be interesting to see if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his 23 years of zero China experience translates to a very smart decision on his part in letting his local management team in China call the shots there.

All this hypothetical food for thought is making me hungry to have another listen at some good points Eric Rosenblum made during an interview I did with him on Why American Tech Companies Fail In China. Have a listen here.

Update: Scoble's Facebook account has been reinstated. No doubt an exception based on factoring who he is in the industry as an average no-name joe hacker would stay booted off and wouldn't get to jump the queue as i'm sure there are plenty of people with deleted Facebook accounts who are waiting for their turn to get heard.

Also check out Jeremiah Owyang's blog for Plaxo's side of the story.

5 days on Seesmic so far and I'm addicted. Talk about great WOM advertising eh? It would be every marketer's dream to have someone blogging their brand name and the word addicted in the same sentence. But nope, no one has paid me to endorse this company. LOL. Yet it has sucked all my time from Facebook and Twitter lately as I continue being intrigued by these video conversations taking place among people throughout the world who are part of its current pre-Alpha stage community...and I keep formulating ways in my head on how I can integrate their platform into the user experience of The China Business Network once it re-launches this spring.

As they say, the numbers don't lie. According to founder Loic in a recent Seesmic video, there are apparently 15,000+ people waiting in queue for an invite code right now. That and a whole lot of WOM seems to add to the buzz that these guys have already generated.

I've even added the RSS feed of the public timeline onto my blog to give you all a sneak peak of what people are talking about at any given time.

Don't know what Seesmic is all about yet? Hopefully the below video will help you out with a better understanding... yours truly is featured for a few seconds about 2:46 into it. LOL.

So I've been sick the past few days and put off giving Seesmic a try. That gave me plenty of time to take the invite codes Loic gave me so I could invite some folks in my network to give this a try.

I'll post my thoughts on Seesmic in more detail in the coming days. For now, have a look and laugh at my first video. :-) ...and if you happen to be a person who has an invite code, what are you waiting for? Don't let it go to waste. Get on there and either reply to the thread or record a new one. Once I get passed the "holy crap, i'm in front of a video camera" aspect of it, I really think this platform has a lot of usefull applications for both business and social networking. More on that later...

Update: Hey, pretty cool. As soon as I recorded the above video and it fed into the timeline for others in the community to see, I received replies from different people withing minutes saying hello back and welcoming me into Seesmic. Very interactive.

First heard about this from Loic Le Meur's mention of it on Twitter and his blog post. Apparently Gizmodo confessed to being responsible for disrupting a lot of businesses at CES. Have a look for yourself at the video they posted on YouTube

I can see how this would be funny to Gizmodo readers. But short term laughs at the expense of long term reputation probably wasn't a good idea. I'm helping out with the planning of the China New Media Conference taking place in October. The event is focused on bridging the gap between east and west when it comes to the tech sector. As such, there will be a lot of foreign companies invited to attend as it'll be a great opportunity to network and learn more from companies in China.

For example's sake, can you imagine if a stunt like this was pulled during a presentation by...say...Baidu's CEO? Once word got out that conference organizers had invited Gizmodo as a guest, we can kiss all guanxi goodbye...not to mention a big fat ZAI JIAN to our credibility as well.

Apparently the "blogosphere" in the US is divided on the issue. By the way, I hate that word. "Blogosphere" who made that word up? it makes me cringe when i say it...in the same way "the world wide web" or "information superhighway" makes me gag. Anyways, I digress. So the guy at PC World is buddies with Gizmodo and admitted he was biased in favor of cutting them some slack. Others like David Pogue for the NY Times considered it a jackass move.

By the way, heard a great tip from the follow up comments on Loic's post. Companies just need to tape over their IR ports on their monitors and it should solve that issue from happening in the future by copycats who want to replicate the same prank.