Did you hear about Weibo?

A lot of literature explains how much the Internet, mobile phones and social media are changing the way we interact with each other or do business. Breaking news is now tweeted around the world, and Facebook allows companies to interact with “friendly” customers. Twitter, Google, Facebook and Yahoo are global brands with billions of active users and massive impact on media and economies.

We rarely hear about Sina, the Chinese “Yahoo” created 14 years ago. Sina is a listed company with a market cap of US$ 4 billion that launched Weibo, the “Chinese Twitter” three years ago, and is transforming China faster than anyone can imagine.

Weibo, the most popular micro blogging platform in China, was launched only in August 2009 – one year after the Beijing Olympics – and already has 400 million users (i.e. 80% penetration rate for Internet users in China) with 40 million active daily users! Think about it…

Why such a growth? Chinese people are now empowered; they express themselves, create the news and share information through micro blogs in a transparent manner.

Some very popular bloggers have as many as 1 million followers, the equivalent audience of a newspaper… And, eventually reaching 10 million followers, they reach as many people as a local TV channel.

Fifty per cent of breaking news is on Weibo, distributed rapidly to millions of users in an unstoppable and uncontrollable manner…

Author: Christel Heydemann is Executive Vice-President of Human Resources and Transformation at Alcatel-Lucent and Member of the Executive Management Committee. 

Picture: The logo of Sina Corp’s Chinese microblog website “Weibo”. REUTERS/Stringer