Inside the War Against China's Blogs

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Daqi seeded the Net with opinions linking the issue to a simultaneous controversy over Starbucks' (SBUX) presence in Beijing's Forbidden City. While Metersbonwe ended up losing the space, Daqi says the pressure helped the retailer win a lease for a larger store. "In Internet forums we said: A Chinese brand is being pushed out while a foreign brand is still located in the Forbidden City,'" says Daqi's Zhou. "We got intense and rapid response. People were very angry." Metersbonwe confirmed that Daqi helped with the Shanghai case but declined to comment further.

Plenty of companies are willing to pay for positive spin. PR outfits hire students to write postings that boost certain brands and criticize the competition, says a staffer at a Western PR firm in Beijing. The job description of one online help-wanted ad reads: "Publicize and popularize [products] via online forums and blogs. Send at least 50 propaganda posts per day." Workers are offered 1.5 cents per post.

Chinese Web Union is candid about doing this. It pays thousands of people to write nice things about clients, and it compensates forum leaders who spread positive information and quash bad publicity, says CEO Zhong Zhaochuan. "We write out topics and give them to members to put on forums," says Zhong. That's what CWU did for a big Subaru dealer last year. The Japanese automaker had raised the ire of Netizens because its Chinese name sounds like "death to the Eighth Route army," which was perceived as insulting to a Chinese unit that battled Japan in World War II. CWU urged forum leaders to delete negative comments, then asked its writers to post positive news about Subaru, Zhong says.

Daqi and CIC say they don't pay bloggers, but both companies acknowledge pampering online opinion leaders. The Internet companies invite these people to sessions where they can test and discuss new products. CIC, for instance, introduced L'Oréal to a popular blogger on women's makeup, a twentysomething man who calls himself "big brother Nicole." The French company has invited Nicole to events for its Lancôme brand and even flew the makeup-wearing Netizen to Paris. Conventional advertising "is focused on saying: My brand is good,'" says Philippe Lamy, a vice-president at L'Oréal China. "When someone on the Internet says it—an independent voice—it's different in terms of the credibility and influence it has."

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