Friday, September 5, 2008

Was the iPhone girl a fake?

the Foxconn girl

I have mostly ignored the hype of the so-called iPhone girl, a girl from the Foxconn factories in Shenzhen that became famous, because some of her pictures were left on an iPhone that emerged abroad. The Chinese internet has many of those hypes and I have only one life, that is also very busy without the iPhone girl.
But from a translation of an article in Yweekend (done by ESWN) an interesting twist shows up. According to "sources" (as we call them in the SCMP jargon) claim Foxconn has been setting up the whole hype from A to Z. The Chinese reporter give a nice overview of the affair, and then turns to Li Er, who has a reputation of setting up internet hypes himself.
"This is clearly a case of Internet promotion. You can tell just from the process. I know who handled this 'case.' It is a team of people. But I cannot tell you who they are, because I am acquainted with them."
Li Er analyized: "This 'most beautiful Chinese worker' is like that 'most beautiful cleaning girl' that we did before. The concept is completely identical. You bring up a clean and pure image of a pleasant-looking beautifu lfemale worker. The only difference is that this affair was triggered by having a foreigner post photos to an overseas website. But this is precisely where it is brilliant."
"The planners of this affair thoroughly understand the Chinese mind -- a lot of Chinese people think that anything that happens overseas must be real. On this point, they were very successful." Li Er said that almost all of the popular "most beautiful girls" on the Internet were promoted by Internet promoters from behind the scene.
These so-called "most beautiful girls" are part of the "girl series." From Tianxian MM to the girl who swapped a safety pin for a villa," they were all variations of the same "girl series." The rapidity by which iPhoneGirl became red-hot popular on the Internet showed that the planning and execution of this campaign was perfect and effective.
Take care, this is only based on one source, but it sounds pretty convincing to me! When it is true, it is certainly one of the better done scams on the Chinese internet.
More at ESWN.

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The internet is one of the major forces in China and at the China Speakers Bureau we are happy to have a range of speakers who are very familiar with both the internet in China and China's other media. If you are interested in having a speaker about this subject, do get in touch.
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