I’ve cross-posted this from the new Ogilvy8 Blog that Ogilvy Beijing has created for the Olympics. There are eight bloggers — four writing in Chinese, four in English — and they’re covering a diverse range of Olympic-related topics. Here’s my initial post to the thing, which I would suggest you wait a day or two to check out, until more of the goodies are up on line.
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Here’s something to chew on. The XXIX Olympiad, which kicks off mere days from now here in Beijing, will be the first Summer Games, and arguably the first grand-scale global event, of the Web 2.0 era.

There’s ample irony, and for some perhaps a certain poetic justice, in this — that the capital city of a country so infamous for censoring the Internet should be the first to host the Games in the age of Internet video sharing, citizen journalism, social networking, of microblogging, and the myriad online services and tools that have empowered ordinary people. Significantly, Beijing 2008 will also be the first Olympics in which a sizeable percentage, if not an absolute majority, of those in the audience will have in their pockets or purses a device capable of sending text, pictures, and often even video around the world almost instantaneously.

In marketing communications companies like Ogilvy, when we talk about the ramifications of the Web 2.0 revolution, it’s usually in the context of the new ways in which brands need to engage with consumers. But there’s no hiding from the fact that the advent of the “read-write Web” has had implications well beyond the narrowly commercial. The impact is social and, as even the preliminary coverage of the Olympic Games throughout the blogosphere amply illustrates, undeniably political.

No host city, no host country, has ever found itself under pressure like this. Beijing finds itself not just under the microscope wielded traditionally by mainstream media, but perhaps as importantly, under tens and tens of thousands of microscopes of bloggers and vloggers whose impressions — good, bad, and indifferent — will be there for the world to find with no real effort on Google and YouTube. They’ll look under rocks, talk to the man in the street, explore corners of the city off the prescribed Olympic pathways, and taken together with the mainstream media reports, they’ll offer a broad, though I fear not always fair-minded, portrait of this place. But that’s the world we live in: it’s the world that Beijing has to come to terms with, too.

The rules of the road that forward-thinking brand managers, whether in public relations or in other disciplines of marketing communications, have developed in reaction to the new era of the media-empowered consumer apply to states just as they do to brands. Ignoring or blithely dismissing the conversations taking place would be sheer folly; worse still would be heavy-handed (and invariably doomed) attempts to squelch those conversations. Self-styled patriots in China’s own Web 2.0 milieu, whose instinct as we’ve so often seen is to fly into high dudgeon and engage unthinkingly in ad hominem attack, is totally counterproductive and only reinforces these precepts. Beijing and those who are proud of the very notable accomplishments of the city and the country need to learn how to engage better and more productively — not to respond to criticism with, “You’re guests in our home! How can you come here and start shouting about the way we raise our children, or complain about our cooking!”

Beijing — and Beijingers, and Chinese people all over whether in China or in Diaspora — need to see this as an opportunity to understand better how China is perceived internationally. It’s the same advice any brand manager would give to a brand. Only when you understand the full nature of criticism can you begin to respond, hopefully in a positive and civil manner, to that criticism. Some of it might be grossly unfair, but some of it will be genuinely well-intentioned. Hear it out dispassionately, and engage constructively.