Recently Baidu published a new product called Miaodong (秒懂), it stands for “quickly understand it”. Yes… Chinese don’t translate to English very smoothly.
So, what does it do…
The tool allows Chinese users to be able to share their video contents on Baidu Baike which is Chinese Wikipedia.
The obvious question that you might have right now is whether this new tool is of any use for you to market your business in China?
Well…
Because Miaodong is still young and in beta, the exact benefits of this new tool for marketers in China are still unclear.
But Here is Our First Impressions of Miaodong, So Far…
As with any new innovation, tools, platforms, and tech. There will always a be an adoption curve. This means that there will also be brave people who are willing to be the early adopter before the mass adoption.
This is true with any new technology. Back in the mid-90s and early 2000s email was still relatively new, and email marketing was cheap and extremely impactful, the same could be said for radio, television, Google Adwords, facebook, etc…
But with Maiodong this might be slightly different…
1. It Has the Potential to Reach High Viewership
First, even though Miaodong is still in its infancy, but it surprisingly it has a lot of viewership and viral marketing potential. Miaodong seems to be a new powerful channel of sharing video contents in China, and not to mention it is free.
This is Jay Chow a very famous Chinese celebrity and above is his music video on Miaodong. And in little over 3 days the video was able to reach 40,3903 views. But of course, being extremely famous as a celebrity will help you to achieve this number in just 3 days.
2. Submitting Video to Maiodong is a Pain
While Maiodong seems to be a great new channel for video marketing in China. The problem is submitting your video to Miaodong is painful…
Since Baidu keeps their review process unreasonable strict and without clear guide lines as usual, especially for their Beta products.
Getting your video approval to be displayed on Baidu Baike with Maiodong is like throwing a dart while blindfolded.
However, we can pretty safely assume that Baidu is going to commercialize this new product as we can see already with the example below.
If you search “Mercedes-Benz” in Baike you will see the Miaodong video but when you search “G20”, you won’t see Maiodong video on the Baike page.
3. It is Inaccurate
Most of these videos are being shared on Maiodong right now comes from Aiqiyi.com, Toudou, and they’re usually fan made.
This means that even though the review process is unreasonably strict as mentioned earlier, but since the videos are still submitted by fans there is still some inaccuracy as the tool is still in beta.
For instance, if you search “skin care” on Baike, a video will play that will inform you on the history of skin care. Even though it is our opinion that a demonstration video of how you can learn about the topic of what skin care is and how it will benefit you would probably better suited.
To wrap up, the idea of Miaodong is decent, but it is still too early to tell as to how it will impact your digital or video marketing to China. Many issues still needs to be fixed such as how to maintaining the content relevancy, content quality, and flexibility on public editing.
Your Turn
If you’ve had experience with Miaodong let us know what your experience are so far by sharing with us your though using the comments section below.
