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Beijing Mushroom Cloud Leaves Residents Concerned

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 13:31:27 +0000

Beijing mushroom cloud: What in the world is it? According to the AFP, the enormous cloud, which many describe as something you’re likely to witness following an atomic explosion, is the direct result of illegal straw burning. Although some have claimed that the cloud is actually the fallout from a chlorine leak at a chemical or an eruption at a steel refinery, Chinese authorities have insisted that nothing of the sort has taken place. If you’d like to insist that cloud is the result of some sort of industrial accident, chances are they will throw you in jail.

“Many farmers choose to burn crops that are left behind in their fields after harvesting,” Xinhua’s official news agency reported Monday. Area residents, however, aren’t entirely convinced that straw burning is the culprit.

Several videos featuring the peculiar cloud have recently made their way to YouTube. You can check out one such video below:

Before the mushroom cloud was spotted in the skies above Wuhan, officials struggled to explain a bizarre green and yellow haze that had slowly engulfed the city. The appearance of this unusual fog prompted the environmental department to issue a statement advising children, the elderly, and people with respiratory problems to stay indoors until further notice. Not surprisingly, face mask usage immediately went through the roof.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the entire story is that no one really knows where the cloud originated or why it continues to plague the area. Although officials are sticking to their straw-burning theories, some residents are deciding to leave the city altogether until the haze has lifted and a proper explanation has been offered.

According to the Huffington Post, pollution in China continues to be a major problem. In fact, authorities have asked the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to stop publishing reports on the subject, claiming that such readings were against diplomatic conventions.

Questionable Chaos, Eggs Break Out At iPhone 4S Release In China

Drew Bowling — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:58:14 +0000

Question: What gets Apple fans really excited? Announcing that they can buy the newest iPhone.

Question: What gets Apple fans really livid? Announcing that they can’t buy the newest iPhone.

This was the social experiment that unfolded today in Beijing, where Apple had planned to launch the iPhone 4S to China. But after getting a little stage fright due to the enormity of the eager crowd, Apple pulled the plug on the launch two hours before the release and postponed the release of the iPhone.

Tsk, tsk, Apple. You may giveth the iPhone, but you may certainly not taketh away.

The Daily Mail reports that after the crowd was informed that Apple would not be selling them the iPhone 4S, people took up my personally favorite way of expressing their outrage by throwing eggs at the Apple Store. Check out footage of the outraged would-be Apple customers in the following video provided by Reuters:

The iPhone 4S was apparently still sold in other stores throughout China today where crowds were presumably less intense and less egg-armed.

In a statement released to Reuters yesterday, Apple said that it has halted sales of the iPhone 4S altogether in Beijing and Shanghai “to ensure the safety of our customers and our employees.” Perhaps The following YouTube video allegedly of the “chaos” at the Apple Store although I think it may be satire:

This additional video, though, does show somebody, here described as a security guard, getting smacked around by some members of the crowd:

Mic Gadget is saying that a fight did break out but that it was between scalpers who got pissed about their lack of iPhone 4Ss to hawk. The New York Times is reporting that “an army of scalpers hired migrant workers to snap up products” such as the iPhone so that the scalpers can then flip the product on the black market.

Honestly, we’ll probably never know really how all this trouble jumped off in Beijing, but whoever started the mini-riot redeems one imperishable maxim: a few bad apples spoil the bunch.

Fans Flock Online For Olympic Coverage

Mike Sachoff — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:21:04 +0000

With the first week of the 2008 Beijing Olympics completed, Nielsen Online has released a report on how fans around the globe used the Internet to follow the games.

Fans in 10 countries visited Beijing2008.cn, the official web site of Beijing games, at a rate of 930,000 per day, with traffic surpassing one million unique visitors on a number of days, as they searched for Olympic results, news and video.

Two Olympic broadcast partner web sites, NBC in the U.S. and Terra in Brazil attracted a large amount of traffic to video content. Daily traffic to NBC’s video section averaged more than 1.5 million unique visitors, spiking on Monday, August 11, to over two million unique visitors.

Traffic within Brazil to the Olympics video section of Terra averaged 119,000 unique visitors per day, with above average traffic during the opening weekend.

"With the first ‘online Olympics’ in progress, the Internet has removed barriers related to international time zones, as fans have 24/7 access to updated Olympics content and video," said Jon Gibs, vice president, media analytics, Nielsen Online.

"Local, regional and global Web sites are benefiting, and with English, French, Spanish and Chinese versions, Beijing2008.cn is a popular destination for Internet users around the world."

Online traffic in host country China indicated strong interest in the games. ChinaRank, a large-scale Web site ranking platform, showed data that revealed more than one-quarter of China’s online users visited Olympics- related content on a daily basis. There was an average of 65.8 million unique browsers tracked daily, and viewed more than 4.6 billion Olympics related pages during the week.

Within in China, traffic to the official site, Beijing2008.cn, averaged 1.5 million unique browsers per day. American swimmer Michael Phelps appeared in the top 10 most searched Olympic terms during the week, as fans in China followed Phelps’ pursuit to win eight Olympic gold medals.

"Michael Phelps is clearly the global story of these games," said Gibs. "Online news, information and video have allowed fans from all over the world to follow his record-breaking performances and watch history in the making."

How Exclusive Sponsorships Can Backfire

Rohit Bhargava — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:22:00 +0000

There is a myth in marketing today that many people blindly believe about sponsoring events … that you always need exclusivity. The benefits of being an exclusive sponsor are easy to list, but there are some less considered negative aspects that could end up doing more harm to your brand than good. Let’s look at the stories of a worldwide Olympic sponsor for whom the strategy of being an exclusive sponsor may not be such a good idea … Visa.

Just about every Olympic traveller here in Beijing has a story to tell about one really annoying moment when they were trying to pay for something and learned that at all Olympic venues the only card they could use was a Visa and no other type of credit card. The fact is, people already have decided on their credit cards before arriving at the Olympics. Hardly any first time Olympic visitor is going to know that Visa is the only card accepted at the Games, and arriving here to learn this fact can make life very difficult and expensive. In addition, business travellers are often locked into a particular kind of credit card to use for work and finding that they cannot use it is a very big inconvenience that is blamed on Visa. The end result is lots of negative experiences and consumer anger against Visa, including several people I spoke to who even said they would NOT get a new Visa card because of this tactic. The incremental sales and revenue for Visa cards at the Games may be good, but the word of mouth generated for Visa at the world’s largest sporting event is nearly all negative.

Another example of the down side of exclusivity from the Olympics is what I remember from Foster’s sponsorship of the Games in Sydney. If you are among the many people in America who think Fosters is actually an Australian beer, let me burst your bubble. It is an American beer and before the Olympics in Sydney, you could not find it anywhere in Australia. During the Sydney Games, lots of Americans travelled to Sydney, which Fosters knew, so they purchased a large sponsorship where they were one of two kinds of beer served at events. I went to one beach volleyball event and vividly remember one side of the beer stand with the Aussie beer sold out, and the Fosters side with lots of stock untouched. It was an embarassing moment for Fosters. Added to that was all the Australians who talked about how Fosters was not, in fact, Australian.

There are likely many other examples of brands that should think a bit harder about whether an exclusive sponsorship actually makes the most sense for them. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes exclusive sponsorships can work very well, if the strategy aligns with the experience offered and way that the brand is integrated into the event. Adidas’ sponsorship of the Olympics works because they supply all the uniforms and custom made gear. Omega’s sponsorship works because they are the official timepiece at an event were time really matters. Not surprisingly, I think Lenovo’s sponsorship of the Games works for a similar reason. Ultimately, there are some brands who can realize the benefit of exclusivity and some that cannot. The trick is understanding where your brand fits before you drop a big chunk of your marketing budget into an exclusive sponsorship that won’t deliver the way you expect.

Comments

Miss An Olympic Moment? Yahoo To The Rescue

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:50:35 +0000

The time difference between China and America, plus the vagaries of NBC's scheduling, may leave people missing something at the Summer Olympics.

Bloggers Take Aim At Olympic Fakery

Mike Sachoff — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:57:51 +0000

Bloggers are expressing their anger today after it was revealed that China decided at the Olympic opening ceremony to have a cute little girl lip-synching for the real singer who had crooked teeth.

Nine-year-old Lin Miaoke received praise for her cute performance but organizers came clean today admitting that she was a stand-in for the real singer Yang Peiyi.

One blogger wrote,"There is nothing wrong with the singer’s looks! They are both beautiful little girls. Maybe they should have just killed the girl singer after she made the recording to keep the story hidden in true oppressive government fashion."

The organizers also admitted that some of the fireworks broadcast on television during the opening ceremony were computer generated.

Wang Wei, Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) vice-president and spokesman acknowledged that the fireworks might not have been live.

"On the day of the ceremony there were actual footprint fireworks from the south to the north of the city," Wang said. "However, because of poor visibility on the night, some previously recorded footage may have been used."

Another blogger took aim at the hypocrisy of Beijing. "Eager to put on a perfect Olympics, Beijing has swept its streets of fake designer handbags, pirated DVDs and phony corporate logos. That dedication to authenticity apparently does not extend to Olympics ceremonies."

Social Media’s Role In The 2008 Olympics

Neville Hobson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:28:10 +0000

The opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing gets underway at midday GMT today, an event that will be broadcast live on television across the world.

During the next two weeks, you’ll be hard pressed to avoid seeing and hearing about the Olympic Games whenever you turn on the TV or radio or pick up a newspaper at the newsstand.

For sports fans (and anyone else like me who simply enjoys watching a series of such spectacular events that celebrate what people can achieve), this will be an amazing two weeks.

So the mainstream media – and especially television – is the place to go, so to speak, to catch the full audio-visual majesty of these games.

I can see my PVR working overtime during these Olympics.

I’m also interested in the niche views – what individuals are experiencing that won’t make the mainstream coverage; what those individuals think about what they’re experiencing and how they interpret events.

Social media is the perfect means to do that. I have my RSS alert for blogs set up plus some specific keyword watches in FeedDemon. I’ve also subscribed to the special Olympics coverage at Global Voices which I’m sure will have some really interesting content.

I’ve done little more than that at the moment as the sheer volume of content out there is already almost overwhelming.

ReadWriteWeb has a couple of good posts about social media and the Olympics, about video and mobile. All a bit too US centric for me but useful nevertheless.

For my video consumption, I’ll be paying most attention to three resources:

The BBC’s Olympics coverage on TV as well as online (the reporters’ Olympics blog in particular) to get the mainstream media perspective.
To complement that, I’ll be checking in to the Qik 2008 Olympics event page which will aggregate live video from qikkers in Beijing broadcasting from their mobile phones. Unfiltered views, should be interesting.
I’ll also be checking the official Beijing Olympics 2008 YouTube Channel to see what filtered video content looks like.

And of course, there’s Twitter.

So many individual people will be tweeting and there’ll be no shortage of instant commentary and opinion.

One neat idea focused on today is #080808, an initiative from a group of Chinese bloggers:

8 is a lucky number for the Chinese, and 08/08/08 is definitely a very special day. Twitter users can add the hashtag #080808 to all your tweets about Beijing Olympics on the 08/08/08. Currently if you search for #080808, you can see a new #080808 tweet coming up every 0.5 seconds!

Plenty to get stuck into.

What resources are you using to keep with with the 2008 Olympics?

Comments

The Secret Of #080808 And The Beijing Olympics

Rohit Bhargava — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:00:38 +0000

Anyone who has been to enough events with social media creators knows that it is inevitable that people will find a way to connect and find one another. To a degree, Twitter first caught on from this need a year and a half ago at SXSW in 2007. I have witnessed it over and over, through examples like attendees of four conferences finding one another to share an evening of Korean BBQ in NYC a few months ago, or finding someone to hang out with as you are travelling to a foreign city for business. Social media creators are not just creating content, they are becoming experts at connecting with one another.

So I wasn’t surprised to see that the tag 080808 is catching on as a way for all of us in Beijing at the Olympics to find and connect with one another. Started by three Chinese bloggers (Flypig, Webleon and Babechloe) and described on http://tag080808.com/, this campaign is already bringing together not just everyone here in Beijing who is creating social media content, but is also becoming a brilliant way to follow all these live voices of the Games in a real time stream. As the Olympics kicks off tonight, this tag and the resulting conversations on Twitter will accelerate dramatically. For my part, I have already started tagging my content with this and will soon revise my Twitter icon to use the 080808 template created for the campaign (the image below is a compilation of current icons from a post about the campaign on Read Write Web).

In addition, I just sent out a Tweet about a blogger meetup that will be sponsored by Ogilvy and Lenovo where we can try to get some of the many diverse bloggers here in Beijing together for a drink and chat. If you happen to be here, send me a message at @rohitbhargava and let me know if you can make it to The Bookworm in downtown Beijing on Sunday, August 10th at 7pm. And even if you’re not in Beijing, you’ll want to start using this tag to find the best content and impressions from social media creators here at the Games. This is a case study in the making …

Official Image from the Tag080808 Site:

Comments

Getting Olympic Content On Your Blog

Rohit Bhargava — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:53:29 +0000

I just landed in Beijing and will be spending the next two weeks here as part of the promotional efforts for what I have previously called my dream project, helping Lenovo to promote its Voices of the Summer Games site that features 100 Olympic athletes blogging their journies to Beijing and experiences at the Olympics. Armed with my Nikon and a brand new super light Lenovo U110 Red Ideapad (PRODUCT PLUG/DISCLAIMER – I already love this machine, but it’s standard issue for Lenovo team members during the Olympics and I will be returning it after the Games).

As myself and my colleague Kaitlyn (aka – CatchupLady) get ready to create a flood of content from the Games, we had an idea for how this could also be the chance to conduct a little social experiment by offering some custom and exclusive Olympic content to ANY blogger who would like to take part. Think of us as your resident bloggers on the ground at the Olympics. We want to build out a core group of at least 25 bloggers who are interested in grabbing content that we will create (either blog posts or photos) and feature it on your own blog (either with or without your own commentary added). There are only two conditions to be part of this group:

You must include the standard line that will be at the bottom of each of our posts about how this is part of the Lenovo Voices Of The Summer Games Campaign and include the link back to http://summergames.lenovo.com.
You must provide separate attribution and link back to the original source of the content (either our Flickr gallery or one of our blogs – Rohit’s or Kaitlyn’s)

If you are willing to do both those things, leave a comment here or on Kaitlyn’s blog or send me a personal email at rohitaustralia [at] gmail [dot] com to be added to the list. In return, you will not only have our full permission to repurpose and use any of this content, but you will also be added to a list of people that we will be emailing first with links to exclusive content, new blog posts and anything else we manage to create. The main topics of this content will be stories about Olympic marketing and PR, real stories of athletes, discussions with Olympic athletes, sponsors, fans, training personnel or family members, and anything else we can think of. I will be doing this full time over the next two weeks, as opposed to my usual struggle to blog while still doing my day job. For the next two weeks, blogging will be my day job (and in case you are wondering, yes, that was as satisfying to write as it sounded).

Both Kaitlyn and I will also be seeking our your suggestions about any ideas that you might have for interesting blog posts or content to come out of the Games that you would love to see me focus on. If we take on your idea, you will have EXCLUSIVE rights to publish that piece of content first on your blog before anyone else gets it (we will share ahead of publishing it) and we will credit you with the idea and link back to your site. Finally, all bloggers that want to take part will be added to a list on this blog post, hopefully driving even more traffic in your direction as a participating blogger.

Easy enough? Let me know what you think or if you are willing to be part of this experiment. If it works, everyone will win … our client (Lenovo) will get more attention to their site and marketing efforts, you will have exclusive and interesting content about a topic that is relevant and heavily searched (Google linkbait, anyone?) and we will have a chance for our content to reach a wider audience. So, will you join the experiment?

Note: Please help spread the word about this through your social networks – here is a shareable link to this post: http://www.tinyurl.com/beijingexperiment

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Olympic Internet Ticket Scam Dupes Fans

Mike Sachoff — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:47:13 +0000

People hoping to attend the Beijing Olympic Games have become victims of an international Internet ticket scam in which thousands of fake tickets were offered the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said today.

The IOC and the United States Olympic Committee filed a lawsuit last week accusing at least half a dozen Web sites of selling bogus tickets. The action comes too late to help people find replacement seats at the Games.

The scam has affected people in Australia, New Zealand, U.S., Japan, Norway, China and Britain.

Olympic tickets are only sold through official national agents or the official online ticket store, tickets.beijing2008.cn.

"Anybody buying tickets for the Olympic Games should be careful to buy from an official source. Sadly, there are some fraudulent dealers, known as ‘scalpers’, who are out to cheat fans," said the IOC in a statement.

One of the sites named in the IOC lawsuit, beijingticketing.com was still operating, offering tickets to a variety of events, including Friday’s opening ceremony, with prices reaching $2,150.

The fraudulent site features an official Beijing Games logo, with a London phone number and an address in Phoenix, Arizona.

"Our sympathy goes to them. The IOC is concerned. We always told people to buy tickets from the official (Australian) supplier," said Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates on Monday.

Beijing organizing committee spokesman Sun Weide said he did not know the exact details of the Internet ticket scam. "So far I don’t know the details. We always encourage people to go through the regular ticketing channels. We are against ticket sales on the black market."

Tickets for events in Beijing were completely sold out last week with seats only available for competitions in co-host cities.