“As a result, employers and managers often send out work inquiries or tasks outside of normal working hours and prefer not to wait until the next business day for a trivial reply.” She adds that for conversations which require multiple rounds of interaction, WeChat is faster than email. Zhong observes that the boundaries between people’s work and personal lives are weaker in China. “This informality makes people more likely to respond instantaneously… the demand for immediate response is motivated by the cultural and business environment in China.” “WeChat, as a messaging platform, demands less formal working time than email,” she says. Zhong Ling, assistant professor of economics at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, believes WeChat fits into the Chinese working culture. In China, however, mobile apps often take precedence and it is possible to do all your online transactions once you are logged into an app with multiple functionality such as WeChat or Alipay (created by online retail giant Alibaba) You can book an appointment, pay for shopping and message your friends all within a single app. Matthew Brennan, a Briton who has worked in China since 2004 and is a consultant on Chinese digital innovation, says that having an email address in the UK is part of your identity as it’s required to register for many online services. Compared to email, QQ offered more interaction, with the ability to create avatars, for example, and instant messaging.īy 2012 QQ had 798 million monthly active users, but WeChat, also created by Tencent and released in 2011, would go on to become the most popular communication tool in China, just as smartphones would go on to replace desktop computers as China’s main computing device. QQ became a key reason for the cafes’ popularity, as it provided entertainment with features such as games, music and an early Chinese social network where people could post micro-blogs. But as the 2000s progressed internet cafes sprang up across China and were quickly embraced by young people. By contrast, there was one computer for every two people in the United States. In 1999, newly-established Chinese technology company Tencent released a product called QQ, based on the popular desktop instant messaging programme ICQ, which was owned by AOL.Īt the time, there were only 1.2 computers per 100 people in China, according to the World Bank. ![]() ![]() ![]() But the reasons why Chinese people prefer communicating over a platform such as WeChat may have been formed years earlier. With over a billion users in China, WeChat is a super app that is ubiquitous. “Chinese clients tend to use WeChat and send files on WeChat as the main way of communication,” she says. For her foreign clients, Hsu says she communicates via email and LinkedIn, but for her Chinese clients it’s a different story. ![]() She’s been working in Shanghai for six years. Email was a distant third on 22.6%.Įva Hsu, who runs a digital branding business, is Taiwanese and spent some of her youth living in the US. And that preference extends into the office: the 2017 WeChat user behaviour report compiled by Penguin Intelligence, a research arm of Tencent (which created WeChat), found that almost 88% of 20,000 people surveyed used WeChat in their daily work communication. Instead WeChat is dominant some 79.1% of smartphone owners are regular users of the app, while 84.5% of people who use messaging apps in China use WeChat. Deloitte’s 2018 China Mobile Consumer Survey showed that Chinese people checked their email 22% less than users globally.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |