WeChat isn't social media.
Take it from someone who lives a quarter of the year in Shanghai and Hong Kong. WeChat is a DM platform, on which there are game, commerce, and payment apps. The closest thing we have to in the west is your phone's OS--without the ability to run anything like Facebook or Instagram.
Then you don't know what the word "social" means. Which makes sense.
Yeah . . . I think it's a little more likely that you're talking about something you've never actually used. And I can't fault you--it would be hard to understand WeChat without actually using it in its home culture.
You want to think that there's something like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter in China. But I'm here to tell you,
there isn't. WeChat is really different. I'm not just twisting you to win an argument, here.
Imagine that Snapchat were highly monitored / censored by the government--even your one-to-one messaging roll--and that it also allowed you to buy things or make payments. That's maybe the closest analogy? Again, it's more like an operating system in of itself than an app or a social service.
For our purposes here, the big fundamental difference is that you can't "publish" on WeChat. You can't be a "creator" with WeChat (unless you want to make a physical product to sell on it?) The state is the gatekeeper of publishing in China--end of story, no exceptions.
The other thing that's radically different about WeChat is that it isn't as abstract as Facebook or the 'gram or Twitter. It's deeply rooted into daily life--it's how you pay for lunch and your didi car, how you reserve your hotel, how you signal your co-worker to setup a meeting. WeChat helps you get with people face-to-face--it doesn't
supplant in-person interaction and socialization the way Western social media does for some users.
Look, I think the hurt, here, amounts to you
really liking the idea of what Social Media in the West used to be--the massive promise, the incredible opportunity. The ability to publish! And friend, I hear you on that. 2012, 2013, 2014--those were heady years. Facebook and Instagram and Twitter were blowing open whole new worlds of possibility. If Nikon had jumped into it in 2012 or 2013, it would've been the best decision they'd ever made, and they'd have had a few wonderful years riding into it.
I am saddened, too, by the end of that era of possibility. I really, really am. But, if you're engaged in business, as Nikon is, you can't live in denial. That's part of their problem now! You've got to look at the data, read the trend lines, watch what's going on, and plot a course with the clearest possible eyes.
Maybe things will turn around. Zuckerberg has made "fixing Facebook" his yearly self-improvement project for 2018, and maybe he will succeed in polishing off some of the stain the brand has picked up in the last year or two. But I would also suggest to you that Zuckerberg
acknowledging the problems in this way proves they are both real and serious.
