2011: The Year of Sina Weibo

Editor’s note: Sina Weibo produces an annual magazine. For the 2011 issue, I was invited as a tech blogger to discuss Weibo’s achievements and challenges. Here is the full interview–it’s different from the final Chinese will be due to editorial and PR concerns, but I wanted to share the full story with you.

The Chinese Zodiac says 2011 was the year of the rabbit, but many techies will likely remember it more as the year of Sina Weibo. 

Q1: What changed for Sina Weibo users in 2011?

A: Sina Weibo has changed an unbelievable amount this year. The most apparent was the major user interface revamp from 3.0 to 4.0, which adopts an SNS-style design, closer to Facebook.

But the most important change was the move to mobile clients, both the official one and third-party apps. These apps has changed user behavior, altered their approach to mobile networking. Chinese users with a Weibo account are much more likely to upload photos and share location information.

This all means that Weibo is also becoming a personal service for elite users. It has become a habit for them to check out updates in their timelines while going to and from work, just anytime they have a space ten seconds. Weibo mobile has become a personal tool of high stickiness–and that’s directly proportional to the amount of personal content they are pouring into the service.

Q2: What are future trends for Sina Weibo?

A: It’s obvious Sina Weibo is heading in a more social direction, it’s written all over the recent updates, especially Weibo 4.0. Sina Weibo is becoming a more personal social networking tool for elite users.

And with mobile, it’s also more accessible than ever. Users are becoming accustomed to sharing contents instantly via Weibo mobile. Of course, we also see that with the Facebook mobile client and Google+’s ‘instant upload’ mobile sharing. Users are now equipped with better tools: smart phones and faster mobile networks.

Q3: What value did Sina Weibo offer to companies in 2011?

A: Sina Weibo’s most valuable features for companies and brands are the combination of the Weibo base product (including Enterprise version), real-time data, the open platform.

Enterprise Weibo provides functionality that’s unique to Sina Weibo’s social communication style. Information now travels between 250 million users faster than any other social platform we have seen prior to Weibo.

Weibo is not just a one-way marketing channel, but also allows companies to communicate with their target consumers and receive instant feedback.

Because of Weibo’s real-time nature, Sina’s next key offering to brands is an analytical platform that crunches through user feedback. We have seen an explosion of Weibo social media management platforms; I myself used to work at a firm that offered one of China’s earliest social business management platforms. With these services, marketers are given clear visual solutions for them to understand exactly what is going on in Weibo that relates to their brand.

And last is Sina Weibo open platform, also a part of Weibo that has grown to accommodate more functionality. So far we have seen from the simple Sina Weibo Connect to more complicated entertainment applications. Marketers are gaining more sophisticated and effective tools to establish their brands on China’s social grid.

Q4: How can Sina Weibo satisfy corporate users?

For brands promoting on Sina Weibo, the foremost challenge is to have the correct mindset of using Weibo. The brand should know exactly what it is looking to achieve on Weibo. Because Sina Weibo is a new form of social networking product in China, Sina will have to educate ad clients on the correct promotional approaches on Weibo. Widgets, third-party apps and data support are crucial to effective promotion. But even more than functionality, Sina needs to provide education.

At present, most brands operating on Weibo do not have a clearly defined set of metrics to measure the effectiveness of their Weibo marketing. The default is to drive RT and comments rates as high as possible, but is that all a brand should really be driving for on Sina Weibo? I think not, and that’s up to Sina change.

Q5: What challenges does Sina Weibo face?

A: I see two major problems:

The first comes from the rapid growth of functionality. Users are still most attached to the base product: an enhanced microblog. We have seen some great innovation from Sina this year, but most of the other products received relatively lukewarm attention from users.

Take Photo Albums, for example. The concept of a separate album conflicts with existing features of photo upload via mobile or desktop and @ mention, which served to tag users before Albums came along.

So where does Albums fit in the Weibo product? Is it a necessary addition or just an extra addition because sites like Renren and Facebook have it? Other products like the recently launched Kandian are still not in open registration, but once again the question is: where does it fit into the existing product? And how will Sina educate users to adopt Kandian’s key product concept and value?

Overall, Sina Weibo is a social platform that should attend to the needs of an average user’s digital social life. But the challenge here lies in educating, luring him to reach out and adopt new features.

In a sense, it’s like adapting to the massive world of EVE Online, where a gamer’s conceptualization of how each feature in the game links together can fundamentally change their approach to game play (and here is a perfect blog post on this statement).

The second problem is nothing new, every internet product faces it: user retention. Chinese users are like a pirate ship that will turn in any direction in search of shiny gold (at least elite users operate this way). To defend against this, Weibo has to control the social graph, convince users to place more of their personal lives on the site, making them and their friends feel attached. Personally, I believe that the Timeline, which has not changed much since launch, will be a key to increasing the social level of Weibo.

Q6: What are the advantages and disadvantages of Sina Weibo as a social media platform?

This is a huge question, too big to address in detail here, so I will be brief.

In this interview I mentioned some points: Data, real-time networking, and instant sharing are the primary advantages that Sina Weibo inherited from its microblog roots. Functionality-wise Weibo’s timeline is a central social hub, it includes massive amount of data about virtually anything from an average user’s digital life. That’s Sina Weibo’s strongest advantage. But it can also be a weakness if not effectively curated: Weibo must prioritize quality over quantity.

Compared with other social products such as Renren, QZone, and BBS, there’s only so much you can say in 140-characters. Content can sometimes lack depth, expertise, and originality.