Who is Jia Junpeng?

You may not aware of who Jia Junpeng is, but in China, almost all netizen are familiar with this name even some of them have no idea why did this name become so famous.

The whole story starts with a post in an online game forum on July 16,2009. The topic was ‘Jia Junpeng, your mom is calling you home for dinner!’ The thread of the post was only 2 letters ‘RT’ which simply means as title suggests. Amazingly after 6 hours, there were over 400,000 reviews and 17,000 replies of this post. Many replies were pretended to be posted by Jia or Jia’s relatives, friends and even puppy. Then this miracle was reported by print media and TV show. People are all talking about this name and many photoshoped images spread on network.



The NetEase.com stands out and admits that the entire event is planned and operated by them on July 23, 2009. Because NetEase just took over the game World of Warcraft from The 9th City, and all the servers have been shut down for several weeks for waiting the new operating permission. This event has successfully grabs public attention and the search ration of this game has increased 120%.



So why did this succeed? There are several reasons behind.



a) Exoteric. The information is easy to remember and the post is something would happen around people.

b) Spreadable. The topic can be easily spread and everyone can transfer the name with others. Hence, the interaction enables more people to disseminate the information.

c) Diffusion over multi-media tools. The responses can be put on blog post, social network website, print media and TV. Hence the coverage is maximised.

d) Multiform replies. It enables the message to communicate with different forms, such as photoshop content, video and even merchandise in online shopping website such as T-shirt.



There are also dangerous issues of using this tactic. Firstly, the opinion leader is important since the virus marketing may be deviate from the objective by the participation of a great amount of people.

Secondly, it is important to grasp the period: since this may not able to last long time, so it needs to grasp every opportunities to spread the message out.

However, it may also generate negative association if the brand was promoted too obviously. And the brand maybe ignored if the message is not that apparent.