Opportunities for China listeners
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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As Britain bids to become a major trading hub for the yuan, new research reveals a bullish view among business leaders of future Chinese trade. And some of the key opportunities are to be found among China’s social networkers.

As China cautiously relaxes its currency controls, it’s no surprise that Britain’s chancellor George Osborne sees opportunities for London, which has historic business ties with Hong Kong, becoming the leading international centre for trading in the yuan (see BBC coverage). In fact, a new white paper from the newsletter Public Affairs Asia and public relations firm Edelman suggests that pretty much everyone is currently looking for a slice of Chinese action.

According to The New Realities, China’s latest Five Year Plan aims to increase domestic consumption and lessen the country’s dependence on exports – so it will be encouraging both inbound and outbound investment. However there are regulatory concerns in both directions.

Greater state engagement with Chinese business may reduce some of the beneficial effects being brought about by increased regulatory transparency – while on the other hand western protectionist tendencies may result in their regulatory bar being set a little higher for Chinese corporations than for domestic enterprises. At the same time, the report also concludes that multinational corporations are under-equipped to deal with the increasingly complex political, regulatory and stakeholder landscape that China presents.

It all sounds like rather a good opportunity for information professionals who specialise in compliance. And the news gets even better with the suggestion that one crucial source of intelligence is likely to be China’s vast and growing army of social networkers.

Kantar Media, a subsidiary of the global advertising conglomerate WPP, certainly seems to think so. It’s just announced that it is to acquire CIC, a leader in the Chinese social media listening and analysis industry.

“CIC will enrich our global digital expertise in capturing millions of online conversations and ‘making sense of the buzz’,” says Kantar Media’s boss Jean-Michel Portier. Indeed, as with all systematically conducted social media monitoring, the whole is almost certain to be greater than the sum of its parts.

That’s fine while people are just chatting about products – but already it’s clear that the Chinese authorities are worried about how to stop that morphing into discussion of weightier issues. Writing a sponsored piece in Public Affairs Asia, Grace Chen of the public relations agency Ketchum makes clear that Chinese social consumers – some of the most net-savvy in the world – can be ruthless when it comes to exposing official sloth and hypocrisy.

That could in fact be one reason why the government has cracked down on television talent shows, she continues. They involve voting – and the authorities really don’t like that.

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