The RISE Conference in Hong Kong at the beginning of the month was seen by many as a smashing success as it drew in more than 5,000 attendees and 500+ startups. This wasn’t too big of a shock as the team that put on these conferences drew in 20,000 for their inaugural Web Summit in Dublin; however, for the tech and startup community in Asia, it represented a refreshing change of pace from startup conferences that have traditionally dominated this sector of the globe.
“…overall it shined in a world of mediocre conferences in Asia. Asia needed something different, this is it,” said Volker Heistermann of Yushan Ventures.
That being said, there was something that our team noticed in preparation of the conference: RISE was completely absent from Chinese social media. Despite having a very active presence on western social media (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), RISE hadn’t done much in the way of building its presence in Asia’s largest market, whilst attempting to put together Asia’s largest tech/startup conference. It was the perfect opportunity for us to put our product to use.
With just 3 weeks to go until the conference, we formed a media partnership with RISE to “live-tweet” the event into China using KAWO’s ability to seamlessly transition western social media content onto Weibo.
After creating a Weibo account for RISE and reaching out to several KOLs, we were able to run a RISE ticket giveaway the week leading up to the conference to fans who followed the account and forwarded certain posts to their networks. Seeing how RISE was maintaining a very regular feed of western content, it took one of our team members no more than 30 minutes each day to plan, schedule, and publish nearly 10 posts a day. This effort came out to the effect of 10 tickets given away to Chinese fans and over 1600 fans gained over the course of 8 days.
The power of KAWO was exemplified at the actual conference in Hong Kong. With just two people on the ground and one team member available back home in Shanghai, we were able to publish 40 posts per day using KAWO without breaking a sweat.
KAWO’s functionality on the iPad allowed my colleague Tom and I to roam around the conference capturing the startups and speakers at an amazing clip. We were also able to take advantage of RISE’s in-house social media team by syncing up all of their accounts into KAWO. With the Inspiration Board immediately pulling in content from these accounts, our team member, Gracie, had no shortage of content to localize for the Chinese audience. By utilizing the communication feature on KAWO, there was no need to text or email asking her to post specific content, as all that information was relayed via the app.
We created the hashtag “#RISE会议#” to drive major exposure for the conference, and after all was said and done, it had received over 165,000 reads.
After two days, the RISE Weibo account had grown to 2,634 followers. It’s safe to assume that our ability to effortlessly provide a consistent stream of content allowed us to gain on average more than 250 followers a day.
With such a short runway, it was great to use KAWO to bring such an innovative conference to the Chinese masses. In doing so, we were also able to learn more about our product and just how far it can actually go. Without it, either China mainlanders would have been denied the experience or it would have been way more work for even a team that was twice as big.
I’m personally excited to see KAWO’s versatility lead to more ways in which foreign companies and brands can go about engaging the Chinese audience. If you’d like to learn more, go ahead and schedule a demo to see how global brands can leverage Chinese social media.