When three speakers disagree and all make sense

Johnny L. Chan

Alright, this could have happened everyday. Here in the radio program Marketplace, three of our prominent speakers at The China Speakers Bureau explain US companies what problems they might face when entering the China market.
They disagree profoundly with each other. Shaun Rein of research company CMR explains why companies fail if they do not adapt enough to the local market, like Google McDonalds and Wal-Mart failed to do.
Then Paul French, consultant at Access Asia explains how companies failed because they adjusted themselves a bit too much to the local taste.

The Kit Kat brand of chocolate did a watermelon flavored Kit kat. Chinese people, although they love watermelon, decided that watermelon-flavored chocolate was actually a pretty disgusting, and so they rejected that.

Then there is Johnny Chan of Streetsmart:

But John Chan of China Street Smarts says don't come too early, either. You might want to let the competition move in first and botch things on their dime.

What is illustrates is that there is not one solution for every company in every industry. All three disagree, but still make sense. You would need a bit more than a few minutes of one-liners by these smart guys. If you are interested in having one, two of all three as a speaker, let me know.

Explaning why the Olympic ads do not work - Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein

In another powerful argument Shaun Rein explains to Bloomberg why Olympic sponsoring is not helping the advertisers much in China this year. "Eighty percent of the Chinese does not care who the sponsor is," he says. "Advertisers fail to understand what the consumers want."
More at Bloomberg.

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you are interested in having him as a speaker, do get in touch.

Advertisers use athlete's parents for Olympic dreams

Tom Doctoroff

Olympic advertising touched on specific Chinese sentiments, by using Chinese athletes' parents to get their message out, writes the Wall Street Journal, quoting JWT's Tom Doctoroff:

"The parents were shy," says Tom Doctoroff, the north Asia chief executive of WPP Group's JWT, which made the Satine ad for the brand's parent company, Yili. "But they approved the concept."... "One of the reasons that Chinese people like Liu Xiang is his relationship with his mom and dad," says Mr. Doctoroff. "This makes him accessible to people."

Tom Doctoroff is one of the celebrity speakers at the China Speakers' Bureau. Please let us know if you are interested in having him as a speaker.

On the Olympics and our X-mas presents - Paul French

Paul French

The production of Christmas presents is getting under heavy pressure because of the restrictions on visas for China, tells China-guru Paul French the Guardian. Because buyers, inspectors and others cannot enter China because of the restrictions, our presents might be late or very expensive.

"With a lot of big international brands you have to do independent, external factory inspections for quality assurance and ethical issues because there's been too much trouble over issues like corruption. But at the moment factory inspectors can't get in to check orders.

"The government is saying in September everything will be back to normal, but that's too late for Christmas because everything has to be out by mid-October at the latest and for America even earlier, otherwise there'll be no glad rags on the high street. That may mean some factories go under.

"Smaller manufacturers are bitching that the Olympics are killing them. Two-thirds of textile firms operate on margins of less than 1%, so there's not much wriggle room."

Are you interested in getting Paul French as a speaker? Do drop us a note.

Barbara Krug, RSM, joins CSB

Barbara Krug

Barbara Krug, professor at RSM - The Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the leading business school in the Netherlands, has joined the China Speakers Bureau as a speaker. Ms Krug is an expert on the economic developments in China, especially the position of private entrepreneurs. She is also developing the China program of RSM and a prominent member of many academic fora.
Her research has helped helped to build up a database of more than 200 private firms in China, which allows to investigate the contribution of tradition and cultural differences within China or the notion of social capital in general, for the emergence and survivability of firms.

Added: 'governance' category

Image via Wikipedia

One of our best visited section on this website is the 'category' section, where we try to define what sections our speakers belong to. We get some pressure from our speakers, who can think of half a dozen other categories where they would fit in. But we also want to limit the number of categories, since visitors would lose their overview of what our China-celebrities and China experts could do, when the list would be much longer.
But when one of our speakers suggested we should add 'governance' as a new category, we could not find an argument against it. You can find it here. For the time being only a few governance experts, Shaun Rein of course and Paul French. Bill Thompson with his focus on intellectual property and Irv Beiman as our HR-specialist and environmentalist. Do expect a few more names here in the future as we finetune the system.

Explaining the Chinese internet - Sam Flemming

Sam Flemming

China just passed the 253 million internet users at the end of June, making it into the largest online audience in the world. Sam Flemming of CIC explains to the China Business Network how the internet works for companies and organizations outside China.
How to manage an online crisis, what is the power of the Chinese B BS's. Sam uses some of his most recent experience in working with corporate clients.
You can listen to the podcast here. Sam Flemming is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau, and you can drop us a line here if you are interested in having him as a speaker. More background on Sam Flemming is here.

William Overholt joins China Speakers Bureau

William H. Overholt

William H. Overholt, one of the leading academics on China, Asia and international relations and finance, has joined the China Speakers Bureau. Overholt recently joined the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University as a senior research fellow. Before that he was the Asia expert on the Rand Corporation.
Overholt published last year his book Asia, America, and the Transformation of Geopolitics, a leading document in this US election year on the country's international relations.
Dr. Overholt is the writer of the bestseller The Rise of China, one of the most compelling books on China's economic transformation in the 1990s. From unique perspectives he analyzed the emergence of a superpower and has remained an outspoken voice in looking at China's development.

The Western obsession with Chinese politics - Paul Denlinger

When Paul Denlinger gets a chance to explain US companies how it really works in China, nobody can stop him. He visited US internet guru Jeremiah Owyang in San Francisco and claimed space at his weblog.

For many observers, and particularly the mainstream western media, there has been a near-obsession with China’s politics, and when it comes to the Internet, the issue of censorship and the GFW, or Great Firewall of China. For most Chinese, as independent issues, these are much less important than the underlying social trends which have become much more important, and much more apparent. Aside from the much greater prosperity of China over the past thirty years, there is a single greater trend, and that is toward greater openness which has been achieved through cheap and easy communications. This greater openness has not been achieved solely with the Internet, but more importantly, through cheap mobile communications offered through China’s mobile network.

For more of Paul Denlinger's observations, go to Jeremiah's weblog. Click here to get more information on Paul Denlinger as a speaker.

Tips for picking a great speaker (8)

eliazar via FlickrThe intercultural dilemma's

Do not make jokes, is one of the main warnings we give speakers when they have to address an audience that is different from their own background. We are not only talking about addressing Chinese audiences, I have been listening to US speakers and had no clue what they were talking about. Great Chinese speakers, who are unable to catch a foreign audience. Before you address an audience, or invite a speaker, it is very important to explore common ground between the speaker and the audience.
It is not always a problem. I have been attending in Shanghai a great speech of a former Australian football player, Mark Taylor, who made many references to his sport, but he could get it across, even though I had no clue what he was talking about. But you need a truly great story teller to get that done.
The dilemma's starts at picking a speaker. I was once asked by a chemical company from Europe to find them a speaker able to "turn the heads" as they called it, at a meeting on innovation of a few hundred of their Chinese managers. We got them a shortlist of truly great Chinese speakers, not that easy, since innovation as a subject is still pretty young in China.
An enthusiastic reaction from a Chinese employee involved in organizing the conference confirmed we were on the right track. Unfortunately, her foreign bosses - the real decision makers - disagreed. They had no clue who these Chinese celebrities were.
The opposite happens too. I had to disappoint many celebrity speakers from the rest of the world, eagerly looking for opportunities to speak in China. But when they cross their cultural border, they are suddenly not celebrity anymore. A former anchorman of NBC is a mister nono in Shanghai. I have more than once heard conference organizers telling how they had to ask the hotel where they held their conference to move in their staff, changed into their normal dresses, so the famous management guru had no clue he did not have audience in China. In China, people and companies are willing to pay a lot of money to join the company of Bill Clinton, but there are very few people who would be interested for people who have not a similar status.
And for the non-Chinese, would you be interested in meeting Long Yongtu? Perhaps the name does not ring a bell, but he is a celebrity in China, and brought the country into the World Trade Organization.
Bridging those gaps is a major challenge, not only for the organizers, but also for us as a speakers' bureau.

Previous entries:
1. Introduction
2. When to look for an outside speaker?
3. Who is in the audience?
4. How does the organization of your event looks like?
5. What is your target?
6. Should we compensate our speaker and how much? (1)
7. Should we compensate our speaker and how much? (2)

Amy Sommers joins the China Speakers Bureau

Amy L. Sommers, partner at Squire, Sandres & Dempsey in Shanghai, has joined the China Speakers Bureau. Ms. Sommers is an award-winning speaker, working at the Shanghai office of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey in Shanghai. In a conversational style she is able to explain complicated legal issues in China in both fluent English and Manderin to lay audiences. Ms. Sommers has a wealth of anecdotes to illustrate the points she want to make.

In 2007 she won the Business Woman of the Year award of the Expatriate Professional Women's Society in Shanghai.

Amy L. Sommers has significant experience with corporate structuring, governance and operations issues in China. Her experience includes advising on a variety of international business and commercial transactions such as commercial financings, mergers and acquisitions, private placements of securities and dispositions of businesses and companies. She also counsels clients on various ongoing business transactions such as distribution, manufacturing and IP licensing arrangements, FCPA and anti-bribery compliance, customs and other government investigations.

China Speakers Bureau has gone live

Tom Doctoroff, one of our celebrity speakers

The website of the China Speakers Bureau has gone live this weekend. There is still some fine tuning to be done, speakers to be added and tools to be developed, but we were ready to the launch and went out of beta. Do have a look if you have time.
The site is meant to be a rather active one, reflecting the many debates where our speakers play a role and where we hope to provide excellent speakers on China, when needed.
We have a database of over 300 excellent speakers on almost any subject concerning China. Looking for a match with your needs? Drop me a line.

What is Coca-Cola getting for its Olympic investment

And the winner is....
WikipediaCoca-Cola is spending an estimated US$ 450 million for marketing during the Beijing Olympics, up to US$90 million in sponsorship fees and about four times that figure on additional commercials, events and tickets for Olympic activities. What is the return on investment of this sum, some experts ask themselves, like here in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Shaun Rein, managing director of the China Market Research Group, is asking some tough questions:

A survey this year by the Shanghai consulting firm China Market Research Group found that more urban Chinese thought Pepsi - not Coke - was an official Olympic sponsor, even though Pepsi is not sponsoring the event.

"The whole point of spending so much money for the Beijing Olympics was to really target Chinese consumers," said the firm's managing director, Shaun Rein. "The marketing people at Coke are going to have to take a really long look at the results."

Shaun Rein belongs to the China Speakers Bureau and is available as a speaker for your event. Do drop us a line if you are interested in inviting Shaun Rein.

Private equity firms turn to China - Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein

Private equity firms turn increasingly to China as their home markets in Europe and especially the US are dropping very fast, argues Shaun Rein, Managing director of China Market Research (CRM) today in Business Week.

My firm, the China Market Research Group, conducted interviews with managers at several dozen leading private equity firms in the U.S. and China to see if China is likely to remain a hot market for private equity, or if the credit squeeze will hit the region, too. Our findings showed optimism for investment in China. The vast majority of respondents felt that U.S. private equity investing will remain flat or drop in 2008 while China will post 30%-plus annual growth for the next three years.
In recent years, China has been a tough market for private equity, with too much money chasing too few deals, a booming local share market causing sky-high valuations, and regulatory hurdles hindering investment in certain sectors. Moreover, investors are also worried about the lack of financial transparency at many Chinese companies. While some of those obstacles remain serious, successful exits recently by Softbank and GGV from Alibaba, and Morgan Stanley (MS) and Crescent Point from footwear manufacturer Belle International show returns can be had for the savvy investor.

According to Shaun Rein, the days when it was hard to find good deals for private equity firms are over, now a substantial middle class is emerging from China's booming economy. Additionally, because of the drop of the Chinese stock markets, promising Chinese companies cannot get there a high valuation like in the past and have to look for alternative funding.
Shaun Rein is available as a speaker. Are you interested? Do drop us a line.

Tips for picking a great speaker (7)

A former US president does not come alone
bryanpearson via FlickrShould we compensate our speaker and how much? (2)

In the previous entry we mainly focused on the market for unpaid speakers, who would at best ask a compensation for their expenses. Many of the speeches, seminars, lectures and contributions in panels are given for free and for a good reason: in most cases there would not be a viable market for professional speakers. Here we are going to focus on those professionals and the reasons to choose them.

First a short note about the so-called celebrity market, as we did also for the unpaid speakers in the previous entry. This is most certainly the market that catches most of the media headlines and the fantasy of potential speakers. Speakers like Bill Clinton can ask huge fees and - although most of it is going in the case of Clinton to his charities - it is still the market most people know. Getting a celebrity status is very much determined by culture, a subject we will cover later on. Of course, Alan Greenspan is also a celebrity in China, but among the foreigners there are only very few who can claim that status also outside their own country, including the related price tag.
Getting those celebrity speakers is certainly possible, but you would have to take a long lead time into account and the additional burden. Even a former US president does not come alone and we would be talking here about a major operation.

But most of the speaking business is much more mundane.
When would it make sense to start thinking about a professional speakers from outside your own network? As we have seen unpaid speakers can have a problem. No-shows is not really a problem with professional speakers. In most cases you would sign a contract with them of a speakers' bureau and you can be pretty sure this speaker will show up. Of course, no contract could stop emergencies, but speakers' bureaus would have larger resources that would allow you to find alternatives on the same level pretty fast. Although, in our experience, we never had a speaker backing out after the signing of the contracts.
So, when you cannot allow yourself a no-show a professional speaker makes sense. But there is more.
Also, when you need a speaker who is going to deliver an agreed message in stead of an easy promotional talk, you would have to think about such a professional speaker. Speakers are standing on the stage with an intention and when you do not want a speaker to solicit assignments on stage, you might have to think about a professional speaker.
When you need a specialist to cover a rather specialized area, you might have to asked specialized speakers. For specialized assignments some of the speakers' bureaus have specialities to cater for specific niche market. You might use need just like you need headhunters when you have special needs for new staff.

Of course, you can do this process internally too and mostly in China this is still done internally. You can assign one of your capable and highly paid manager to get a qualified speaker. But we see that especially the larger companies cannot afford to do this highly qualified search internally, because your good people tend to be rather busy anyway and this is not the job you want to leave to somebody who has actually nothing better to do.
Of course, the need for a professional speaker has to be there: your board is visiting, crucial customers get together, your organization is in the middle of a change process, there are many occasions when a professional speaker is a great help. Often, in larger conferences, the professional speakers are just a part of the action. They would deliver a crucial key note speech, while other speakers would come through other resources and do their work often for free. It is a delicate decision making process and just like in any other urgency, you have to make a timely decision on when to get professional help for your challenge.

Now, what kind of prices are we talking about? Let's first focus again on the top-end of the market. Mostly the figures celebrities make are proprietary information, but in some cases we can use public sources to get an idea. Bill Clinton made, according to the information Hillary Clinton had to file when she decided to run for the US presidency, an average of US$200,000 per standard speech. For speeches in the US that would be up to US$150,000, but when he goes abroad, you can easily add another US$100,000 or more. Clinton would belong to the top-league, but he is certainly not alone at the top.
That mechanism works for most speakers: when you fly them in from another continent, prices would typically at least double.
The event organizers would also have to carry the costs that would come additionally, at least a return business class and a decent hotel and the "Blue M&M's" as one of the US firms called that, for the time of his or her stay. That could add considerably to the expenses, also because some of the top-end celebrities would demand (and get) a private plane. By working through a speakers' bureau you could try to reduce that kind of extra expenses through bundling different speaking opportunities, although as a rule the speakers' fee is non-negotiable.

Most of you will not invite the Clinton's for you party, but some of the game rules remain the same. Those fees would easily double for trips abroad and business class flight is considered to be the minimum. It is always the speaker who sets the fee and a speakers' bureau would get a percentage of that fee. Clients do not have to pay additional for the work of the speakers' bureau. That means that you cannot negotiate about the speakers' fee with a speakers' bureau. What a speakers' bureau can do if a speaker is too expensive for your budget is suggest alternatives, but the more expensive speakers ask mostly their fees for a good reason. Even quality speakers, you can have on different levels.
What is your cut-off rate, was one of our standard questions in the many talks we had with other speakers' bureaus before we took off in China. When are you no longer interested in dealing with clients or speakers? Nobody wanted to do deals below US$3,00o for a standard speech and we have taken over that benchmark. Most of our speakers are well above that level.
Are you shocked by those prices? You would not be the first one, but then you have to ask yourself whether you are looking for a professional speaker or not. As we have seen in the previous entry, when you play your cards right, you can even get speakers paying you. But we would not guarantee their quality.
In short, you need a professional speaker when they are crucial for your operation. You also do not hire McKinsey to clean your windows, do you?

Previous entries:
1. Introduction
2. When to look for an outside speaker?
3. Who is in the audience?
4. How does the organization of your event looks like?
5. What is your target?
6. Should we compensate our speaker and how much? (1)
7. Should we compensate our speaker and how much? (2)

Netting China's online buzz - Sam Flemming at CNN

Sam Flemming

"There are 210 million Internet users in China; that means 210 million publishers in China that can write anything they want," says Sam Flemming, founder and CEO of CIC, "the first IWOM research and consulting firm in China."
Sam Flemming, one of our leading speakers on the Chinese internet, is quoted extensively at the website of CNN on China's online buzz. Flemming is guiding companies in the murky waters of China's internet and does get more and more recognition for his ground-breaking work.

"The most-searched books on Baidu are Net novels, published on Internet only. Every year they'll be turned into real novels, then get turned into movies or TV shows. This Net-novel [movie] is going to star a Net star. That's Xiao Pang."

The computer screen flashes a familiar image of Little Fatty, the pudgy, pouty kid who was propelled to fame after netizens "PS-ed" (Photoshopped) his face into a series of visual spoofs widely circulated online, now cast in a feature film to be produced by New Line Cinema.

The super-rich "are beginning to dance without their chains" - Rupert Hoogewerf,

Rupert Hoogewerf

The super-rich are becoming a really sexy subject in the Chinese media. Today the Financial Times also describes this special group in Chinese society.

Below the super-rich level is the rapidly expanding class of millionaires. According to a 2008 world wealth report by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, China has 415,000 people who have $1m in disposable assets. This makes China home to more millionaires than any other country in the world.

Rupert Hoogewerf, in China better known as Hurun, has been following the super-rich for almost a decade and is a leading expert in this field. In the FT:

The super-rich "are beginning to dance without their chains", says Rupert Hoogewerf, editor of the Hurun Report. He argues that the country's new wealthy have gone through the initial stage of securing their family's financial independence and have established relationships with the government and paid their taxes, so there is no legal cloud over their head.

"In the next stage, they can really do anything they want, whether it is buying art or land or investing in a mine," he says.

Rupert Hoogewerf is also available as a speaker for your events. If you are interested in having him, do drop me a line.

Tips for picking a great speaker (6)

World Economic Forum via FlickrShould we compensate our speaker and how much? (1)

One of the hottest issues we encounter - both in our talks with professional speakers and our clients - is the matter of compensation. Of course, we are running a speakers' bureau, make a living from a percentage of the speakers' fee, but the market for professional speakers is much bigger and it makes sense to differentiate between different groups of speakers. Not in all cases getting a paid speaker is the best solution.
We divide the market in three larger segments: 1. the market for speakers who pay to speak; 2. the free speakers; 3. the paid speakers.

You might have started to laugh, when you read that some speakers are willing to pay to speak, but for some event organizers this is a serious business model. What you have to do is create an event with an audience that is so interesting for - mostly - companies, service providers, law firms, auditors that they are willing to pay sometimes huge fees to address that audience.
Now, this fine as long as it works for all the stakeholders involved. But all too often I have attended this such conferences (as a journalist I got often free access) where the quality of the speakers was less than sensational and the audience was bored to death with promotional talks. Even more often, the audience was regularly not the one that was promised to the speakers. The organizers would then not only collect speakers' fees, but also fees from sponsors in all sorts of degrees.
I trust that both other market segments are more interesting for the readers of this entry. When you are organizing an event and looking for a speaker, you have to make a clear choice for either of them, both have huge advantages and disadvantages that go beyond finance only.

Many of the speakers would share they knowledge and experience for free. That is not because they do not want to be paid, but because they cannot ask for money. That might be for a range of reasons. Let's first look at the top-end of this market, say, the celebrity market.
The former British prime-minister Tony Blair can be an excellent speaker if he is really into it, but he could not ask for a compensation when he was still in office. When he left he joined the Washington Speakers Bureau and can ask for a fee. That is mostly a rule for public speakers belonging to governments or larger companies: when in office, they are for free.
It is of course great when you can get the Shanghai mayor Han Zheng to deliver a speech at your conference, especially his appearance alone means so much more than what he is actually going to say. There are some drawbacks too. First, these people are very, very hard to get. You would need to have an excellent case to convince them to come. That counts double for Chinese politicians, who have over the past few years become very careful in accepting invitations from companies or otherwise events that even could have a commercial smell. Corruption might still be a problem in China, but unlike the booming 1990s politicians take much more care to keep their reputation spotless. Even the possible suggestion that money is changing hands, might be enough for politicians to back out.
A second problem in this league - and that goes beyond the politicians - is that of the "no-shows": your main speakers does not show up. My feeling is that the problem in China is bigger than elsewhere, but that might be because if have seen so many desperate event organizers who have to tell their audience, they have a problem. People's priorities shift so fast here in China, it is very hard to stay on the top of anybody's priority list for a longer period of time.

"No-show" is much less a problem in the lower leagues of less famous speakers and you would need more often need them. How often are you thinking about inviting the British Queen-mother for a key note? In stead of the Queen-mother, you can invite her representative, the ambassador. There is a whole league of excellent speakers, who are happy to give their presentation for free, because their and your motives are compatible. They might see in your audience a group of potential clients. Or they have already a relationship with our company, as a supplier, a service-provider or even customer. They are often all to happy to solidify an existing relationship and there is no reason why you should not use that trigger if it is available.
Another category are the so-called membership organizations, chambers of commerce, business association, but also neighborhood committees who would combine a smallish budget with excellent resources of expert members, who can be gently blackmailed into giving presentations for free. A lot of these membership organization have a basis in sharing knowledge and experience and they would mostly rely on their membership and only in exceptional cases rely on external speakers.
In many of these cases, the market value for these speakers would be rather low. When they would ask for a fee, the market would disappear. These meeting are just to valuable to let them disappear for financial reasons alone.

(I will stop here, since it is getting already pretty long. In edition 7: reasons to pick a paid speaker.)

Previous entries:
1. Introduction
2. When to look for an outside speaker?
3. Who is in the audience?
4. How does the organization of your event looks like?
5. What is your target?
6. Should we compensate our speaker and how much? (1)

Internet word on mouth

Sam Flemming

If you want to know what a compelling speaker can do to an audience, you have to watch Sam Flemming speak. He is one of the more eminent experts on how the internet in China can hit your bottom line, positively or negatively, and brings it in a very convincing way, supported by an avalanche of figures.
Here Sam speaks on a meeting of 1,500+ Dutch business people in Amsterdam on June 2008. More great footage is available. If you are interested in having Sam Flemming as a speaker, do drop us an email.

Tips for picking a great speaker (5)

via Wikipedia

In most cases, you want to achieve something by inviting a speaker. Those targets might be rather diverse. For an incentive tour it might be ok to entertain people, but when for example a speaker is delivering a key-note speech at a dinner of the visiting board of a Fortune-500 company, the task might be less entertaining.

Both kinds of assignments can be tough to fulfill. Explaining China to an audience that has little clue about the country is, speakers tell me, often harder than addressing an audience that has already a background in China or in an industry where you can relate to. But it is very important to set clear, rather measurable goals.

Measuring the success of a speakers is already tough, and our feedback forms are often forgotten when people rush of for dinner or other activities. But by setting a target before selecting a speaker we create a moment where we judge the feasibility of our clients’ plan. Every now and then we conclude we have to shift the target. Although, it does not always work.

An interesting moment was when a middle-sized company asked us for a speaker on innovation for an internal conference for their managers in China. It had to be somebody who would turn the heads of those attending the conference. We thought we were up to the challenge: we have some pretty famous people in our portfolio, although some celebrities do not want to be on our website.

We came with quite a lot of suggestions for speakers that would for sure turn the heads of the Chinese managers of this European company, but then we met a problem: the mainly foreign decision makers did not knew any of our famous speakers. The Chinese employees who were part of the decision making process were very enthusiastic when we discussed our proposals with them, but they did not call the shots and were actually not willing to challenge the opinions of their foreign bosses.

That selection failed, because we were unable to explain that the target that was set initially was very hard to achieve in a multicultural setting: very few celebrities in China are known outside China.

I'm not sure whether our client has draw the same conclusions, but for us this was a good lesson in setting sensible targets.

Our focus: China

little room for foreign celeb
in China
via WikipediaAlthough our China Speakers Bureau is still very much under construction, a steady stream of potential speakers is entering already reporting for duty in our mailbox. Not surprisingly a larger amount of Olympic champions, turned speaker, we find in our mailboxes as the Beijing Olympics near.
Reason enough to explain a bit more about the focus of our speakers' bureau since that will be slightly different from the traditional speakers' bureaus. Typically a speakers bureau would focus on a region. Not surprisingly: celebrities are often celebrities in their own country. When you are famous in the US, when you name is Bill Clinton or Colin Powell, you might have a chance in other countries, but otherwise a celebrity status is very much a local status.
Also traditional media, instrumental to create celebrities, used to have a regional focus: they did not reach outside their own regions.
The China Speakers Bureau is going to do this slightly different, although we have 'China' in our name, we do not focus on China as a region. China is our topic and we organize speakers worldwide who have a strong focus on China. We will extensively focus on the internet as a tool to promote our business.
Also, we do not limit ourselves not to China, but send our speakers wherever there is an audience.
Unfortunately, that makes our service less equipped for Olympic champions, unless they come from China and speak good English.