Students at a primary school in Jinan, Shandong province, learn the dance made popular by South Korean online video sensation Gangnam Style. Zheng Tao / for China Daily

Above left: A college student joins an activity to raise awareness of AIDS prevention in Wuhan, Hubei province, holding the popular online slang "Yuanfang, what do you think of it?". Above right: Employees work in the distribution center of a Chinese e-commerce company sending out goods purchased during the shopping spree on Singles Day, Nov 11, 2012.

A few years ago, if someone said Microsoft's popular MSN Messenger would shut down, that a smartphone could be used like a walkie-talkie or praised a 140-character online text called a micro blog, you would have thought they were out of their mind.

These are all part of the magic of social media, which is always confronted with challenges as well as opportunities. It's hard to overemphasize the influence of these new media on people, and the year 2012 witnessed a series of milestones in the industry.

Zhao Zizhong, head of the New Media Institute, Communication University of China, said social media reflects aspects of social life and the segmentation of these media is increasingly obvious.

"Social media vividly reflects social phenomena. For example, celebrities, always the favorites of newspapers and TV, have found a new stage in social media and compete with each other in the virtual world," he said.

Zhao said society's thinking is increasingly reflected in social media, such as anti-corruption campaigns online and government officials opening micro blog accounts to make their work more transparent.

According to Zhao, major social and business activities are interconnected in online media. For example, e-commerce providers communicate with consumers and run promotions online.

"Social media have special phenomena, such as virtual online celebrities and WeChat, which will keep popping up," he said.

Social media must be commercialized, he said, and the providers, such as micro blog platforms, should figure out a proper profit pattern.

"Social media may face big changes in the future. Their market is absolutely fierce and technology support is very important. Also, the attitudes of mainstream social media corporations play vital roles."

Fang Zhouzi vs Han Han

In the beginning of 2012, the hot topic was not Spring Festival, but the fierce online clash between writer and racecar driver Han Han and fraud fighter Fang Zhouzi.

The dispute was triggered by a popular blogger, Mai Tian (his online name), who wrote on Jan 15 that Han's works may have been written by his father, the writer Han Renjun, and his publisher Lu Jinbo, and suggested there was a team of ghostwriters behind Han.

Han Han responded the next day, offering 20 million yuan ($3.21 million) to anyone who could prove his works were ghostwritten. Mai apologized to Han on Jan 18, admitting he didn't have sufficient evidence.

Fang, however, started to post a series of blogs analyzing Han's articles sentence by sentence, and suggested Han Renjun was the ghostwriter.

Han Han responded on his blog and said he would publish the manuscript of his early work Triple Door, which brought him to fame in 2000. The manuscript came out in April.

In May, Fang said on Sina Weibo, a popular micro-blogging platform, that Han was only 164 cm in sneakers and had lied about his height. Fang's calculation was based on a photo of Han and the famous pool player Pan Xiaoting in which Han held a vertical pool cue in his hand.

Online attention shifted to Han's height, with some Internet celebrities taking bets on his height - the highest wager was 10 million yuan. Writer Liu Liu later posted a photo of Han standing against the wall and said he was 171.5 cm barefooted. Some netizens still have doubts.

Interest gradually faded and Han stopped responding to Fang's continuous attacks.

WeChat

WeChat is a new social networking application for cellphone users, which allows people to send texts, images, videos and voice messages, and get in touch with other users within 1 kilometer's distance.

Tencent, the company behind the popular instant messaging service QQ, introduced the application in January 2011 and promoted it to the international market three months later.

Like many applications developed by Tencent, it started as an imitation of the instant voice messenger Kik. WeChat also made knock-offs of other popular apps, such as image-sharing Instagram, random friend-finder Four Square, and personal social network Path.

The number of users keeps increasing and reached 100 million in March 2012. Tencent CEO Pony Ma announced on Sept 17, 2012 that WeChat had 200 million users. There are now more than 300 million.

That's more than half of the 424 million users of Sina Weibo, China's most popular micro-blogging service.

Since August, WeChat has opened public accounts, and many celebrities, media and enterprises started to join the platform, to share information - voice, photo and video messages - with netizens.

Party chief Xi Jinping took a special interest in WeChat, when he visited Tencent's headquarters in Guangdong province in December. He encouraged the company to keep up its development and make a contribution to bringing China's Internet industry to the world, according to First Financial Daily.

Virtual celebrities

In 2011, netizens were crazy about the Zen master cat Shironeko and the dog Shunsuke from Japan, both were well-known for being cute. One year later, however, it seems it's much easier to become famous online, dead or alive.

Yuanfang from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) became the new Internet favorite in October.

In the TV series Amazing Detective Di Renjie, Di, the Chinese version of Sherlock Holmes, often asks his Watson-like assistant Li Yuanfang for advice, "Yuanfang, what do you think of it?" The sentence soon became popular cyberslang. Chinese netizens have taken to using the phrase in everyday discussion.

Playing basketball, holding a machine gun and riding a motorcycle, Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu (712-770) is the busiest literary celebrity of the year. Netizens are obsessed with superimposing his likeness onto photos in high school textbooks.

Online charity

Sina Weibo launched its charity platform on Feb 17, allowing nearly 1 million of its verified users to initiate charity programs. More than 16 million yuan was collected for about 2,000 programs.

Of the 6,000 people who have received help, Lu Chao is probably the most famous.

Lu, 23, whose online name is "Lu Ruoqing", was diagnosed with leukemia in 2012 and had been updating her Sina Weibo micro blog about her treatment. She gave up stem cell transplantation because of the expected 400,000 yuan cost.

Many netizens supported and encouraged her after an online celebrity reposted her micro blog, calling for help from others in mid-May. Some doubted her identity, but the rumors were soon dismissed.

The well-known investor Xue Manzi started a program on Sina Weibo's charity platform, aimed at raising 1 million yuan for Lu, together with China Youth Development Foundation, a public foundation in Beijing.

The target was reached within three days. After successful stem cell transplant surgery in Beijing in July, Lu is recovering and often helps others with similar experiences, by reposting their micro blogs.

"Thanks to micro blogs, everyone can contribute to charity by donating several yuan or reposting. Many a little make a mickle, so that even one millon yuan can be raised in a day," Xue wrote in his micro blog.

Gangnam Style

The Internet has been bombarded with the song Gangnam Style by South Korean rapper Psy since it debuted on July 15.

The music clip began to go viral in late July when celebrities such as Tom Cruise, Britney Spears and Katy Perry either commented or shared the video on the micro-blogging service Twitter.

It became YouTube's most watched video in November, beating Justin Bieber's Baby, which previously held the record. On Dec 21, it made history as the first video on YouTube to reach 1 billion hits and now has more than 1.14 billion views.

Psy became an overnight global celebrity and even performed at the New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square, New York.

Meanwhile, various imitations flourished in China, especially the dance's horse steps, not only among celebrities such as TV host Zhao Zhongxiang, but also everyday netizens.

It was to be expected that in most Chinese corporations' year-end parties, Gangnam Style would be ubiquitous, just like on the Internet.

Online anti-corruption

It seems Chinese netizens have entered the era of online anti-corruption.

In 2012, a number of officials were relieved of their posts due to corruption or misconduct after Internet users exposed them online, and causing an immediate sensation.

Yang Dacai, the former head of Shaanxi province's bureau of work safety, was dismissed in September after netizens posted photos of him wearing several luxury watches, which he could not afford on his salary.

In October, Cai Bin, an urban management official in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, was sacked when it was exposed online that he owned 22 houses.

Some tipsters no longer hide behind the Internet.

Ji Xuguang, an investigative reporter, exposed the scandal surrounding the official Lei Zhengfu on Sina Weibo, with real name registration.

Lei, former Party chief of Chongqing's Beibei district, was sacked on Nov 23, only 63 hours after his sex video with a woman was leaked to the Internet.

Pu Xingzu, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University, told China Daily the Internet offers another platform to combat corruption, and it has proved efficient, but needs improvement.

"However, online anti-corruption must be combined with professional anti-corruption. Because it's difficult to ensure each online revelation is true, professional anti-corruption bureaus have to investigate and reach a conclusion," he said.

Singles Day shopping

Chinese e-retailers have successfully turned Singles Day, Nov 11, into the world's biggest online shopping spree. Begun in the 1990s, the grassroots festival is often observed by young single Chinese.

The popular Chinese online shopping sites Taobao and Tmall, owned by the e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, made a total sales revenue of 19.1 billion yuan on that day. It's more than double the sales revenue on Cyber Monday in the US in 2011.

Other leading Chinese e-commerce providers, such as Dangdang and 360buy, also joined the festival.

"Singles Day is just like a combination of Cyber Monday and Halloween. The former is for shopping only, while the latter is a festival for young people to relax and celebrate," said Chen Yuxin, a visiting professor from China Europe International Business School.

Chen said other Chinese festivals also have potential in the market, such as Valentine's Day and its Chinese version Qixi, and Chongyang Festival.

According to Yan Qiao, a public relations officer from Tmall, this year's Singles Day will definitely be Alibaba's most important shopping day, and they will carry on it as the new tradition.

MSN

In early November, Microsoft announced it will stop its Windows Live Messenger client service everywhere except the Chinese mainland, so as to support its Skype business. It said recently that the service would end on March 15. MSN users were gradually moving to Skype, which Microsoft bought in 2011.

MSN China said the MSN service on the Chinese mainland will not be affected and users can still communicate with their overseas friends on MSN, who have to switch to Skype.

For many post-70s and post-80s Chinese, MSN is part of their childhood and adolescence, as some have been using it for more than 10 years.

Office workers often use MSN because QQ is forbidden in some workplaces, and Chinese students abroad used MSN to communicate with their families and friends in China before Skype became popular.

In the fierce instant messaging market, MSN was losing many users in recent years, owing to its poor business strategy, unpleasant user experience and the popularity of QQ, WeChat, micro blog and Skype.

In 2010, MSN had 300 million global users, and two years later only 100 million.

"Multimedia instant messaging is the new trend in the market. MSN still offers service on the Chinese mainland but may not have many new users," said Jiang Qiping, secretary-general of the Information Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"We never deserted MSN, but it abandoned itself," wrote a netizen with the user name Xiao Chao.

Help!

In case of an emergency, your first reaction might be calling the police, but in the Internet era, some choose to turn to their micro blog.

In early November, Badaling Expressway, a busy highway that runs to northwest Beijing, was closed for more than three hours because of heavy snow, and about 1,000 vehicles were stuck on the road.

A netizen posted on Sina Weibo that a bus with 55 people, some of whom were elderly and children, were stuck without sufficient water, food or gasoline. Two teams of firefighters were on their way within half an hour to give food and water to the trapped people.

This is only one of the countless examples of how micro blogs can help people.

Anyone stuck in heavy rain, or who needs a car, umbrella, accommodations or food, can send a location-based message on Sina Weibo, so that others can track them or offer help.

According to Sina Weibo, seeking help on a micro blog is the first choice when the emergency line is busy. The fastest way to spread your post is to also provide your location.

In late December, a man named Zhang from Hubei province who was held captive by people running a pyramid scheme, sent his location on Sina Weibo to seek help, so that the police knew where he was and saved him.

Queen of the micro blog

Social media has become the new battlefield for celebrities, whose online fight for the top always draws public attention.

A-list actress Yao Chen, who debuted on Sina Weibo as early as September 2009, was crowned "Queen of the micro blog" in 2010, with the largest number of followers.

She has been enjoying her glory in the virtual world, but in the small hours of Nov 25, Xie Na, a popular TV hostess from Hunan Satellite TV Station, gained 200,000 more followers with her funny posts.

Xie wrote on her weibo that day expressing her surprise and excitement with her victory, and she said the situation wouldn't last for long so she had to make the best of her time to show off a little bit.

Her prediction was right.

Yao, who just got married in New Zealand, posted nearly 10 posts the same day, all about her trip. She regained the throne the next day, with about 50,000 followers more than Xie.

"I think people half-jokingly call me 'queen'. It's very silly to take it seriously. Each of my posts represents my opinion and attitude toward something, and I will speak up about what I want to say, just like before," Yao told China Daily.

The 10 people with the most followers on Sina Weibo are all actors, actresses, performers, TV hosts and singers except Kai-Fu Lee, the former head of Google China, who ranks 7th, with around 26,400,000 followers.

xulin@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 01/22/2013 page7)