Professional teams

Ye used to teach courses on micro blog marketing as part of his EMBA course. He taught his students, who were all senior executives in major companies, that micro blog marketing needs professional teams to operate successfully .

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"We have 1,000 people working for weibo.com," said Liu Yongshuai, a computer programmer at the company. He said technical staff account for half of that number.

However, most PR companies don't employ enough people to conduct effective micro blog marketing, Ye said. Rondview Communications Network Co, a unit of Rebrand Consulting Co Ltd, formed its micro blog marketing team in 2010 and has added extra staff members this year because of the rapid development of micro-blogging. The team finished a series of promotional activities for the fast-food giant McDonald's Corp on weibo.com at the beginning of the year.

Wang Zhiwei, Rondview's media manager, told China Daily that the average cost of a micro blog marketing project lasting between one and three months is about 100,000 yuan. He said the PR companies can produce unobtrusive product placement. "Stars can just post a picture of themselves shopping at a particular mall or eating at a specific cafe, or simply reading an easily identifiable book, and that acts as good advertisement for the mall, the cafe, or the book. It is often difficult for followers to realize that what they are seeing is, in fact, an advertisement." However, he said it is still hard to find A-listers to do it.

In addition to searching for appropriate celebrities, Wang said the hardest thing is to come up with ideas that will attract attention on the Internet. "If the idea is not attractive enough, the effect will be minimal," he said. Also, because the business model of micro blog marketing is not yet fully established, many companies doubt its actual influence on consumers, he added.

Wang believes that micro-blogging is a useful platform for the promotion of products made by a well-known brand, but are not a good method of building up a new brand.

Sina Corp is not only a rival of the PR companies, but also of statistical analysis companies looking to grab a slice of a potentially huge market.

A representative of a statistic analysis business called Social Touch told China Daily that his team works on collecting information about micro blog followers, allowing its clients access to a vast pool of data about subscribers' preferences.

Still in infancy

Ye said all these types of operations are still in their infancy in China, and so the database is limited to "front page information" - age, job, address, hobbies, and other personal details - about the followers. "The comprehensive analysis of consumer behavior and psychology requires analysis of each posting, which most companies won't do because of the high cost," said Ye.

He said Sina Corp might look for partners to cover this business sector, providing great opportunities for the statistics companies. "It is wiser not to compete with Sina directly because it is easy for it to organize a 100-member team and they have the key database," he said.

With regard to the issue of privacy, Ye said a micro blog is a public place and followers need to be responsible and protect their own privacy. In other words, it is not illegal to obtain information from the content of a micro blog for business use if the user doesn't specify that the information is confidential in his or her postings.

Although weibo.com is considered China's most influential micro-blogging site by most analysts and users, Ye said t.qq.com, the micro-blogging website of Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Co Ltd will share the market with Sina Corp because its QQ chat software has accumulated a huge amount of users.

"Tencent also has greater financial power than Sina," Ye said. "Aside from these two players, the other micro-blogging websites or services will become followers without influence."

How to make money from micro-blogging will remain a hot topic for some time, but the Internet is a place of unpredictable changes.

"The business model for micro-blogging will become fully established over the next three to five years, but it is hard to predict its business potential after that," Ye said.

"Changes come everywhere and at all times. Something new will replace it sometime, for sure."