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There is always a high turn over of staff in China where a younger generation is often highly transient and looking for the next role that pays just a few extra RMB.. or so I thought. This was clearly my view before I started to dig around and explore this stereotype more further. After hearing from my team at SinoTech Group about the core reasons for choosing to stay or leave a company I was quite dubious that I maybe hearing the answer I wanted to hear and not the candid ones I needed as a manager looking to improve hiring and retention policy. So after asking my team I posed the same question online where I got 97 responses and to my surprise it reflected the SinoTech Group responses.

The question I posed to my team was: What is the key reason you would change jobs?

This week we saw the yet another marketing event being held in Beijing. This one, simply called, "Marcom Beijing 2010"was billed on their website as "the first international conference with exhibition on marketing and advertising covering the whole value chain of the marketing & advertising industry. It is designed to become the premier annual meeting place of media professionals from all over China and abroad".

Social Networking Sites (SNS) have attracted a huge amount of money, both from venture capital and more established corporate budgets, especially from the media industry. The primary Internet business model for content and social media services is advertising so for us marketers wanting to get the best outcomes for our clients; we must recognize and leverage evolving online user behaviors of these sites  – both in terms of audience demographics, depth of engagement and location of discussion. 

In this post, I want to highlight the last point about 'location of discussion'. Over the past year or so, I am seeing changes occur in the way our youth interact and engage online (Note: this trend also is crossing into an older demographic but at this time is most youth related). For this group, I have used the term the 'buzz generation'. A group of online users that play out their life stories online and develop deep internet only 'relationships'...  I think many of use would be surprised at opinions and views of the youth when asking about the level of trust that is 'given' to anomalous online friends and how this level of trust equates to changes in views, ideas and even buying/purchasing choices.

I bet if I asked the average Australian about Telstra spending 100's millions of dollars and owning a number of Chinese online publishers, many would be completely unaware if not completely surprised. Ask me about this strategy and I would say that on the surface this approach has merits and sound approach.... but like most things in China the strategy document with the impressive growth numbers and forecasts can often mask the 'greyness' of doing business in China and the inherent difficulties faced by a foreign (western) owner of a Chinese locally managed and operated business.

So when reading the news today about Telstra selling their position in Soufan via an IPO, I found myself wondering if this was done because they wanted to 'cut and run' or was it simply a case of taking a commercial perspective and making a good profit from an investee company?