On being Shanghai'ed and the power of Zhuanzai

In his post describing how I had been "Shanghai-ed" by the China Daily, Jeremy from Danwei mentions that "copy/paste" is an essential part of the culture of blogs and BBS.

There is a word in Chinese zhuanzai (转载) which means reprint, and is also used on the Internet to mean copying and republishing, invariably without permission. Because of the zhuanzai habit, all kinds of text and media can quickly get distributed on the Internet on hundreds of websites. This happens with news items, blog posts, photos, essays and articles. The content thus republished runs the gamut from pictures of MM (girlie pics) to political debate.

In the west, it is not uncommon for bloggers to copy/paste part of a news story or a blog (just as I did with Danwei above), but it is unusual for the copy/paste to be the entire post or news item without comment.

Virtual China, in a recent post, demonstrated how Chinese BBS forums become user controlled news distribution channels for "breaking news." Zhuanzai is big part of this naturally occurring, uncontrollable distribution "service," particularly for brands that experience crisis.

A typical brand crisis breaks online like this: an article from the Western media (sometimes one that is barely noticed in the country of origin) is translated/mistranslated/sensationalized by Sina or other portals who then create a "Crisis" page such as this for Colgate last summer. Then netizens, who want to be the "first" to tell such a salacious story to their online friends, will copy/paste the story in their favorite forums.



Looking at one crisis we analyzed for a US client, we can see that copy/paste makes up for a significant percentage of messages.


For blogs, the percentage was even higher.


To determine this, we identified all of the news articles from the period on the crisis subject and searched within the blog and BBS data collected to identify those which were copied. Interestingly, we found that negative sentiment was LESS during the peak of the buzz volume for the crisis than at pre-crisis and or early in the crisis because many of the mentions were zhuanzai with no real discussion. In other words, there was an inverse relationship between pure buzz volume (including zhuanzai) and sentiment.