An online event is one of the few things a small team can do in China without a local office: it costs little, it reaches people in cities nobody is going to visit, and it produces something more useful than a brochure — a list of people who chose to spend an hour on your subject. It also fails more often than any other marketing action, and it fails in the preparation rather than on the day. What follows is written from the side of the person invited, because that is where every one of these decisions is judged.
The platform is not the question you think it is
The choice is usually made on features — screen sharing, breakout rooms, polls — and should be made on one criterion: does it open where the person already is, without installing anything and without creating an account. Inside the Chinese ecosystem that means the live function attached to an official account or a mini-program, the video channels inside the messaging app, or a domestic meeting tool for a seated technical audience that will take notes. The interface will have fewer features than what you use at home. It will also have an audience.
A Western conference link fails in a specific and very ordinary way. It opens a browser page that asks to install an application, which has to be found in a Chinese app store where it may not exist, after accepting a sign-up on a service whose pages load slowly or not at all from inside the country. Every one of those steps loses people, and it loses them at the worst possible moment: five minutes before the event starts, when they had already decided to come. Nobody writes to tell you this happened. They simply are not there.
Registration through a mini-program, not a web form
A registration form asks for a name, a company and an email address. The email address is the problem: it is not the identity a Chinese professional uses, so what you collect is either a disused account or a mistyped one, and the confirmation you send to it is read by nobody. A registration inside a mini-program works the other way round. The person is already identified, the fields that matter are prefilled, the confirmation arrives in the app they will be holding on the day, and the reminder an hour before arrives in the same place. The list you end up with is also a list you can speak to afterwards, which is the entire point of the exercise.
The hour, the day, the length, the shape
- The hour. Early evening, after work, or the middle of the long lunch break. A mid-afternoon slot that suits a European calendar lands in the most defended part of a Chinese working day.
- The day. Midweek. Not the day before a public holiday, not the week of the New Year break, and not a Monday morning. The holiday calendar also moves working days around the breaks, which is worth checking rather than assuming.
- The length. Shorter than you want it to be. People watch on a telephone, often standing, often doing something else. A tight session that ends early is remembered better than a complete one that overruns.
- The shape. A demonstration and answered questions, not slides read aloud. Show the object, the machine, the test, the workshop. A camera on something real holds an audience that a deck loses in the first minutes.
- The recording. Decided before, not after. Most of the audience for these events watches afterwards, and the replay is the asset — provided someone has agreed what may be shown and in what language it is captioned.
Who speaks, and how the audience arrives
The session is hosted by someone Chinese, speaking Chinese, who knows the subject well enough to reformulate a question rather than translate it. A foreign expert can appear for a segment — and should, because the factory, the laboratory or the designer is exactly what people came to see — but consecutive interpretation across a whole hour halves the content and doubles the length, and the audience leaves during the second translated answer. The working arrangement is a Chinese host carrying the thread, a foreign guest for a precise part, and someone watching the comments and feeding the real questions to the host as they arrive.
The audience does not come from the announcement on your official account, which reaches the people who already follow you. It comes from those people forwarding the invitation into the professional groups they belong to, where their colleagues and competitors read it. That mechanism needs something forwardable: a single image carrying the subject, the date and the code to scan, which reads on a telephone without being opened. Ask your distributor, your agent and the engineers you already talk to to post it in their groups, individually and by name. An invitation arriving from a known colleague is a different object from an invitation arriving from a company.
The real work starts when the session ends
- Write down, during the session, who asked what. A question is the only piece of qualification an online event produces for free, and it is lost within a day if nobody notes it against a name.
- Answer the unanswered questions individually, within a day or two, one message per person. Not a summary sent to everybody: the answer to the question that person asked, which is the only message they will read.
- Send the replay and the documents to the whole list, including the people who registered and did not come. Those absentees are a real part of the audience, and the replay is often what they were waiting for.
- Sort the list into three: those who asked something specific, those who watched to the end, and everyone else. Only the first two deserve a second message, and they deserve a different one.
- Put the recording and the answers to work: cut the session into short sequences for the official account, and turn the questions that came back twice into the next article. The event produced an hour of material; using it once is the waste.
Judge the event on the number of individual conversations it started, not on the number of people who watched. A small audience containing three engineers who asked a precise question is a success; a large one that produced no follow-up message was an expensive broadcast. Decide before the session who will write those messages, and block the two days after it in their calendar.