Many Chinese OEMs have been rapidly expanding outside the country to capture a sizeable chunk of the smartphone markets in other emerging countries, and India has emerged as an important market for them. Over the last year and half, the Indian market has seen companies like Xiaomi and OnePlus launch their flagship products in the country. Even ZTE — among the largest Chinese OEMs — launched the Nubia Z9 mini in India yesterday for Rs. 16,999. Today, ZTE’s competitor in the Chinese market — Meizu — launched the M1 Note in India for Rs. 11,999. With the European and US smartphone market now saturating, India has become a key market for OEMs to continue their growth. However, since Chinese OEMs like ZTE and Meizu are little known in India, they have to heavily promote their products and create awareness about their products among consumers. In a bid to win over consumers though, the social media agencies of these companies have started using cheap tactics like paying bloggers and other social media influencers to bad mouth about their competitors. To make sure that the PR firms itself are never caught in the process of bribing bloggers though, they make use of social media influencers — people with lots of Twitter followers and Facebook friends — to get the job done for them. Example? See the email sent by a social media influencer hired by ZTE’s Nubia team to some bloggers from India.
Asus is also known to “bribe” bloggers by giving them vouchers of some popular e-commerce websites to post positive reviews about their products on their website or on their Twitter and Facebook feeds. PR professionals from OEMs trying to “bribe” reviewers to get positive reviews from them is not really new, and is something that has been going on since eons. So the next time you come across a person bad mouthing a product from a competing company in forums or on Twitter/Facebook, make sure that their opinion does not influence your final decision at all.
