Tangos at China Web 2.0 blog has a very interesting and articulate post about Chinese A-List bloggers allegedly receiving “spam” mail in the form of unsolicited press releases from Google China and/or its agency. If this is true, then it is unfortunate for such a great brand to fall into such trap.

Tangos is definitely on the right track when he says:

Nowadays more and more companies as Google have realized the power of social media, and been eager to make communication and conversation with them, but they should also realize they need to deal with social media in totally different way as they deal with traditional media.

Further, he says:

I think, the most important of all, they are required to make conversations with bloggers, rather than just sending notices to them, they need to engage in it.

* A conversation means more interactive and two-way communication, and each participant should be treat as a real person, instead of just one of they unnamed audience. So it is better if they could make one to one conversation with bloggers, and using the language of bloggers, as blog comments, trackbacks, and even links.
* A conversation also means they need to participant it as real person. It is obvious that someone from Ogilvy team left a comment in Zhanbin’s blog to say sorry and answer questions by Zhanbin, but the name of the commenter is “Very Sorry”. It is still not conversation.

At CIC, we strongly believe that brands should “participate” in conversations with their consumers and fans, not “talk at” them through spam or seeding. You can see this in our “LISTEN-KNOW-PARTICIPATE” approach to IWOM described here in English and here in Chinese.

If Google really KNOWS the net culture of China and bloggers, they will know NOT to send unsolicited press releases (or ANY press releases for that matter).

It is exciting to see brands making genuine attempts at engaging in social media. The ones trying are for the most part cutting edge. Unfortunately, brands on the cutting edge will also be the ones who will get the black eyes from which everyone else will learn from. I do hope that the blogosphere will cut Google some slack for having good intentions, but unfortunate choice of tactics and poor understanding of net culture. However, I am not surprised that fans would certainly expect more from a brand such as Google which built its brand on fans love and IWOM.