No more Tweets in China

Taken from ADAGE.com

HONG KONG (AdAge.com) — China’s government has pulled the plug on yet another Western website, making Twitter unavailable to most users in mainland China since about 5 p.m. local time (5 a.m. in New York) and infuriating the local Twitterverse, which is already finding ways around the block.

The government has not publicly stated why it is blocking the site and doesn’t usually comment on the actions of China’s so-called net nanny, but it is widely assumed the government wanted to limit Twitter use before an important and controversial event — the 20th anniversary of the government crackdown on student protests in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

The authorities are also nervous about the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China coming up on Oct. 1, 2009.

“We’ve seen crackdowns on social-media websites and the internet in the past, near anniversaries or in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics [in August 2008]. After the event has passed, they tend to ease off,” said Thomas Crampton (@ThomasCrampton), Hong Kong-based director of digital influence, Asia-Pacific, at Ogilvy & Mather.

Twitter, an internet-based microblogging service that allows users to post updates called “tweets,” has seemed vulnerable in China from the start. Tweets cannot exceed 140 characters, limiting messages in most Western languages to just a few words, but 140 Chinese characters gives Twitter users the ability to post a full-blown news article.

Also, Twitter’s format makes it easy to spread messages quickly and easily and potentially mobilize people in public areas within minutes, a scenario that terrifies China’s Communist Party.

Blocking Twitter “will drive traffic towards domestically-run services [that don't allow] free-wheeling discussions like those that can take place on an open platform like Twitter,” Mr. Crampton said.

“The only thing that really surprises me is that it took them this long,” said Kaiser Kuo (@kaiserkuo), a Beijing-based China tech watcher and a consultant for Youku.com, a video website.

The government blocked other sites this week, such as Flickr, a photo sharing service owned by Yahoo, and two Microsoft Corp. applications, the e-mail service Hotmail and Bing, a flagship search engine that launched globally only this week. It has also started a four-month crackdown on unapproved internet cafes.

But the decision to block Twitter has prompted the most outrage from users in China today, where it took hold almost as quickly as in the U.S. Only a tiny fraction of China’s internet users have started using Twitter, and while it hasn’t been adopted by marketers in China so far, it has been steadily gaining speed in the word’s largest internet market. China had 298 million web surfers at the end of January 2009, including an estimated 70 million bloggers.

“It’s experiencing a boom in popularity,” said Oli D. (@djodcouk), a Shanghai-based blogger with one of the largest Twitter followings in China who declined to give his full name for this story.

Minutes after the site was blocked in China, indignant and often angry users tweeted posts with trend topics such as #gfw (which stands for “great firewall of China”) and even #fuckgfw.

Censors have blocked other Western sites in China, including YouTube in early March, presumably for videos on the site related to Tibet, another sensitive topic in China. Blogspot, Tumblr, Livejournal, Xanga, WordPress, Friendfeed and Microsoft’s Live.com are also blocked.

Ironically, many posts are still coming from users based in the mainland who are skirting the blocked site today with Twitter applications like Tweetdeck.

Such apps still work for many users, “which shows you just how effective blocks like this really are. There’s always a way for anyone with a modicum of tech savvy to get around it,” Mr. Kuo said. “It’s an aggravation, sure, but it’s not the end of the world — or even of Twittering in China.”

Taken from ADAGE.com

Rebranding Effort Aims to Keep Consumer Misconceptions From Affecting Sales

By Emily Bryson York

Published: April 29, 2009

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — Ever heard of the H1N1 virus? It’s the virus popularly referred to as swine flu — until the U.S. pork industry got involved.

The industry, fearing that uninformed consumers will avoid buying pork because they mistakenly assume the infection can be traced back to meat, has been lobbying to change the virus’ name, and its effort seems to be paying off with increased use of a new, if somewhat clumsy, moniker.

“It never should have been called swine flu,” said Dave Warner, director-communications, National Pork Producers Council. The sickness, named after its point of origin, is airborne and contracted by human-to-human contact. But some consumers hear the name and think they could get sick from eating pork, and it’s a real headache for the pork industry, which has seen other industries take hits from consumer confusion. For instance, the recent peanut recall affected sales of peanut butter, which was safe.

Mr. Warner said government officials are making an effort to refer to the swine influenza virus as the H1N1 virus, which is the strain’s more forgettable, scientific name. Cindy Cunningham, spokeswoman for the National Pork Board, noted that President Barack Obama and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have referred to the virus as H1N1.

Ms. Cunningham said her agency is working to help consumers understand that pork is safe to eat, “and that it is not a swine virus; this is human-to-human transmission.”

‘Reacting out of fear’
But it could prove a pretty tricky rebrand. The Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are still referring to the virus as swine influenza. “You can point to the sun and call it the moon, but it’s still the sun,” said Robbie Vorhaus, a crisis-communications expert. “Renaming it isn’t the issue; it’s helping people understand where it’s coming from. They’re reacting out of fear, and that’s not a good basis for communications.”

It’s clear the misconception spreads far and wide. Mr. Warner said some countries, including Russia and China, have restricted pork imports from the U.S. Such embargoes are unlikely to have real teeth, as the countries have restricted imports only from states where cases have been confirmed. The nation’s top pork-producing states — Iowa, Minnesota and North Carolina — remain unaffected by the restrictions.

It’s too soon to tell how much the misinformation is affecting sales at home. But Mr. Warner said his agency has a survey in the field to determine how much pork sales have suffered in the early days of the outbreak.

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