May 26, 2013

Chinese film ‘Tunnel Warfare’, featuring a small town defends itself from Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and other anti-Japan films are seen at a DVD shop during a photo opportunity in Beijing. – Reuters pixHONG KONG, May 26 — Shi Zhongpeng dies for a living. For 3,000 yuan (RM1,500) a month, the sturdily built stuntman is killed over and over playing Japanese soldiers in war movies and TV series churned out by Chinese film studios.

Despite his lack of dramatic range, the 23-year-old’s roles have made him a minor celebrity in China. Once, Shi says, he perished 31 times in a single day of battle. On the set of the television drama “Warning Smoke Everywhere,” which has just finished shooting here at the sprawling Hengdian World Studios in Zhejiang Province, he suffers a typically grisly fate.

“I play a shameful Japanese soldier in a way that when people watch, they feel he deserves to die,” Shi says. “I get bombed in the end.”

For Chinese audiences, the extras mown down in a screen war that never ends are a powerful reminder of Japan’s brutal 14-year occupation, the climax of more than a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers.

Japanese foreign-policy scholars say more than 200 anti-Japanese films were made last year.

This well-nursed grudge is now a combustible ingredient in the dangerous territorial dispute over a group of rocky islands in the East China Sea, the most serious row between the two Asian powers since Japan’s 1945 defeat. It is debatable which side has the better case for ownership of the islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. The United States, Japan’s security-treaty partner, refuses to endorse either claim, only insisting the dispute be settled peacefully.

But decades of officially sanctioned hatred for Japan in China means Beijing is now caught in a propaganda trap of its own making. It has little room to negotiate or step back now that forces from both sides are circling in a potentially deadly standoff. Nationalism in Japan also makes concessions difficult for Tokyo. But the stakes are potentially higher for China’s ruling Communist Party under its new, strongly nationalistic leader Xi Jinping.

“It is going to be very hard for the current Chinese leadership if they want to compromise,” said He Yinan, a professor at New Jersey’s Seton Hall University who studies the impact of wartime memory on Sino-Japanese relations. “It will be rejected by the public, and the leaders know it.”

The tensions and the propaganda go far beyond the current spat. Underneath it all lies a struggle for power and influence in Asia between China and Japan – and political struggles within China itself. Many China watchers believe Beijing’s leaders nurture anti-Japanese hatred to bolster their own legitimacy, which is coming under question among citizens livid over problems ranging from official corruption to rampant environmental pollution.

POLITICS DRIVES OUTPUT

As sparring continues in the East China Sea, open hostilities rage on Chinese screens.

On the hilly, forested set of “Warning Smoke Everywhere” at Hengdian, the world’s biggest film lot, lead actor Jing Dong plays a young Chinese sniper taking on the invading Japanese in a second television version of a 2011 action film of the same name. In one scene, Jing and his comrades scramble through a village to reach a new firing position. In an interview between takes, the actor rejected suggestions that politics drives the output of these TV dramas and films.

“It’s a theme people have liked for a long time,” he said, wearing his Chinese Nationalist uniform with its distinctive German-style, coal-scuttle helmet. “That’s a fact.”

The film original, starring veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Ka-fai, was also released for foreign audiences with the English title, “Cold Steel.” Adapted from a popular Internet novel, it tells the story of Mu Liangfeng, a young hunter who is drafted into the Nationalist army for his marksmanship. He duels with a ruthless Japanese sniper, Captain Masaya, in a series of bloody encounters. Both marksmen are in love, Mu with a war widow and Masaya with a Japanese military nurse. But the film draws a clear distinction between the moral qualities of the two combatants.

“I want to marry a samurai, not a murderer,” Nurse Ryoko tells Masaya after accusing him of massacring civilians.

In the remake, director Li Yunliang says he isn’t trying to demonize the wartime enemy. “The Japanese soldiers in our drama also have emotions,” he says. “It’s the war bringing suffering to both China and Japan.”

The Communist rulers in Beijing will still find much to like. Pre-publicity material suggests the new storyline will have a harder political edge, concentrating more on the martial qualities of Communist forces who formed a united front with the Nationalists.

Actors, one wearing a Japanese military cap, pose for a photo during the filming of an anti-Japanese World War Two film at the Hengdian Film City in Zhejiang Province. WAR STORIES

Some film reviewers in China say that with the censors declaring so many other subjects off limits, it is only natural that the war dominates story-telling in a competitive market for viewers and advertising.

“Only anti-Japanese themes aren’t limited,” says Zhu Dake, an outspoken culture critic and professor at Shanghai’s Tongji University. “The people who make TV think that only through anti-Japanese themes will they be applauded by the narrow-minded patriots who like it.”

Zhu estimates war stories make up about 70 percent of drama on Chinese television. The state administrator approved 69 anti-Japanese television series for production last year and about 100 films. Reports in the state-controlled media said up to 40 of these were shot at Hengdian alone. State television reported in April that more than 30 series about the war were filming or in planning by the end of March.

On any given night, state-owned television channels bombard Chinese viewers with the heroics of the two major Communist armies in combat with the Japanese, the Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army. Elaborate plots tap the period’s rich history of deception, betrayal and collaboration.

In January, a tense seminar in Hong Kong brought together opinion makers from both sides, including senior retired military officers. There, the role of wartime drama was singled out as a major factor in plunging ties between the two nations.

“Yes, the Nanjing massacre did happen,” Yasuhiro Matsuda, a professor at Tokyo University and a former Japanese defence ministry researcher, told the seminar. “Yes, Japan did invade China. These are facts. But, when there are more than 200 movies coming out, you can imagine the negative effect.”

When Tokyo nationalized the disputed islands last September, buying them from a private Japanese owner, it provoked sometimes violent anti-Japanese protests in cities across China. In a telling indicator of the hostile mood in China, demand for Japanese products is falling across the board. Japanese exports to China for the year through March dropped 9.1 per cent to 11.3 trillion yen, according to Japanese customs figures.

Out in the East China Sea, both sides are so far exercising restraint. The risk of conflict through accident or miscalculation, however, remains high. Under Xi, China has intensified an air and sea campaign that military experts believe is aimed at wearing down Japanese forces around the potentially resource rich islands.

FASHIONING PARTY LORE

Anti-Japanese films were instrumental in fashioning some of the Communist Party’s foundation myths.

In the early years of the People’s Republic, these films showed Mao Zedong’s patriotic Communist guerrillas leading a heroic resistance. In contrast, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists were portrayed as corrupt, ineffective and aligned with treacherous foreign powers, principally the United States. A vast majority of Chinese born before the 1970s remember the black-and-white classics from this period.

One of them, “Tunnel Warfare,” is the world’s most-watched film, with an estimated 1.8 billion viewers by 2006, according the August First Film Studio in Beijing, the Chinese military production house that turned out the 1964 landmark and many others like it. In “Tunnel Warfare”, Maoist guerrilla strategies inspire resourceful peasants to dig extensive tunnel networks beneath their village homes, from which they emerge to harass the occupying Japanese.

Regular screenings during an era of tight political control and virtually no alternative entertainment meant generations of viewers saw these movies many times. They are often crude, with voiceovers making sure viewers get the point. The brutality of Japanese troops toward Chinese combatants and civilians is a staple, but the films paradoxically avoided over-vilifying the invaders. Japanese characters are rarely developed. Plot lines concentrate on Mao’s triumph in leading the resistance, rather than the clear battlefield superiority of the invaders, which had Chinese forces in retreat right up to the end of the war.

In this period, Chinese film makers conformed to a wider geopolitical strategy, where Beijing was anxious to avoid alienating Tokyo, historians say.

The Communist Party wanted diplomatic recognition from Japan and also sought to drive a wedge between Washington and its most important regional ally. Strict censorship ruled out researching or publishing material about Japanese atrocities. In a move that would be unthinkable today, Beijing treated convicted Japanese war criminals leniently at the 1956 war crimes trials it held in Shenyang and Taiyuan. None of the 51 prisoners who stood trial were executed or sentenced to long terms.

Textbooks from this time mentioned key events and battles but played down the scope and impact of Japan’s occupation. Film makers avoided the dramatic potential of atrocities such as the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. Some historians suggest the Communists were also determined to suppress movies or detailed historical accounts of major campaigns: Otherwise, attention would have been drawn to the role of the Nationalist armies, which bore the overwhelming brunt of fighting the Japanese. In the sacking of Nanjing, the Nationalists’ capital, Communist forces played little or no role in defending the doomed city.

JAPANESE ATROCITIES REVISITED

This changed in the early 1980s when Chinese film makers began to turn their cameras unsparingly on Japan’s wartime behaviour. Beijing had already won diplomatic recognition from Japan in 1972, and when the disastrous Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, the Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping abandoned its ruinous economic policies and began experimenting with market reforms.

For a ruling party desperate to recover its prestige and stamp out demands for political change, revisiting Japanese atrocities provided a useful distraction, historians say. In contrast, the party still vigorously suppresses any effort to document or publicise the calamities of its own making, including the starvation of tens of millions following Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward.

The official desire to foster nationalism intensified after the 1989 Tiananmen protests shook the party to its foundations. “Maybe the leadership realized that a memory of collective suffering at the hands of an external enemy is more effective in bringing people together,” said Kristof Van Den Troost, a film and history researcher at Hong Kong’s Chinese University.

One of the best known films of the era, “Red Sorghum” from 1987, based on a novel by 2012 Nobel prize winner Mo Yan, launched the careers of actress Gong Li and director Zhang Yimou. It pulled no punches, switching from a rich love story set in rural China to a blood-drenched climax in which the Japanese order a local butcher to skin alive a prisoner. “Skin him,” the Japanese interpreter screams at the butcher, who in an act of mercy stabs the prisoner to death and is immediately machine-gunned. The butcher’s assistant is then forced to skin another live prisoner, later revealed to be a communist guerrilla.

As war museums and memorials opened all over China, film makers were free to explore the orgy of killing and rape at Nanjing. Chinese estimates put the Nanjing death toll at 300,000. Japanese and some other foreign estimates are lower.

Today, while hewing to the official anti-Japanese line, some of these films are more subtle than their forerunners. In the 2009 box office hit, “The City of Life and Death,” director Lu Chuan controversially included a relatively sympathetic Japanese character. Sergeant Kadokawa, played by Hideo Nakaizumi, stands apart from his comrades amid the orgy of violence in Nanjing.

But film makers can go too far. Jiang Wen, the male lead in “Red Sorghum,” ran afoul of the state film administrator with “Devils on the Doorstep,” his second film in the director’s chair. The film won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize in 2000 but was subsequently banned in China. It mocks the confusion of peasants in a village in northern China entrusted with holding a captured Japanese soldier and his translator. Though the movie ends in a bloodbath for the villagers, censors attacked it for its sympathetic treatment of the Japanese prisoner and failure to depict the Chinese as selfless patriots.

LUDICROUS PLOTS

While studios continue to pump out drama, there are now signs scriptwriters are scratching for material. Critics inside and outside the government have been scathing about the ludicrous and violent plots of some of the more recent productions.

Some directors have merged war dramas with semi-mystical, martial arts action where virtually unarmed Chinese slaughter platoons of hapless Japanese.

In the television series “Anti-Japanese Knight,” an unarmed Chinese martial art expert tears a Japanese soldier in half from head to crotch, the divided corpse suspended in the air with a skein of blood connecting the pieces. In another scene from the same series, a Japanese soldier’s intestines are wrenched out of his abdomen in a fight sequence.

Under the weight of ridicule and disgust, officials from the State Administration of Radio Film and Television this month ordered a crackdown, insisting studios make “more serious” dramas.

Even Shi, the busy stuntman, is tiring of his role as a Japanese victim.

“I’m not good-looking so I play a Japanese soldier,” he said. “I would really prefer playing a soldier in the Eighth Route Army.” – Reuters

By David Lague and Jane Lanhee Lee

HENGDIAN, China (Reuters) – Shi Zhongpeng dies for a living. For 3,000 yuan ($488) a month, the sturdily built stuntman is killed over and over playing Japanese soldiers in war movies and TV series churned out by Chinese film studios.

Despite his lack of dramatic range, the 23-year-old’s roles have made him a minor celebrity in China. Once, Shi says, he perished 31 times in a single day of battle. On the set of the television drama “Warning Smoke Everywhere,” which has just finished shooting here at the sprawling Hengdian World Studios in Zhejiang Province, he suffers a typically grisly fate.

“I play a shameful Japanese soldier in a way that when people watch, they feel he deserves to die,” Shi says. “I get bombed in the end.”

For Chinese audiences, the extras mown down in a screen war that never ends are a powerful reminder of Japan‘s brutal 14-year occupation, the climax of more than a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers.

Japanese foreign-policy scholars say more than 200 anti-Japanese films were made last year.

This well-nursed grudge is now a combustible ingredient in the dangerous territorial dispute over a group of rocky islands in the East China Sea, the most serious row between the two Asian powers since Japan’s 1945 defeat. It is debatable which side has the better case for ownership of the islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. The United States, Japan’s security-treaty partner, refuses to endorse either claim, only insisting the dispute be settled peacefully.

But decades of officially sanctioned hatred for Japan in China means Beijing is now caught in a propaganda trap of its own making. It has little room to negotiate or step back now that forces from both sides are circling in a potentially deadly standoff. Nationalism in Japan also makes concessions difficult for Tokyo. But the stakes are potentially higher for China’s ruling Communist Party under its new, strongly nationalistic leader Xi Jinping.

“It is going to be very hard for the current Chinese leadership if they want to compromise,” said He Yinan, a professor at New Jersey’s Seton Hall University who studies the impact of wartime memory on Sino-Japanese relations. “It will be rejected by the public, and the leaders know it.”

The tensions and the propaganda go far beyond the current spat. Underneath it all lies a struggle for power and influence in Asia between China and Japan – and political struggles within China itself. Many China watchers believe Beijing‘s leaders nurture anti-Japanese hatred to bolster their own legitimacy, which is coming under question among citizens livid over problems ranging from official corruption to rampant environmental pollution.

POLITICS DRIVES OUTPUT

As sparring continues in the East China Sea, open hostilities rage on Chinese screens.

On the hilly, forested set of “Warning Smoke Everywhere” at Hengdian, the world’s biggest film lot, lead actor Jing Dong plays a young Chinese sniper taking on the invading Japanese in a second television version of a 2011 action film of the same name. In one scene, Jing and his comrades scramble through a village to reach a new firing position. In an interview between takes, the actor rejected suggestions that politics drives the output of these TV dramas and films.

“It’s a theme people have liked for a long time,” he said, wearing his Chinese Nationalist uniform with its distinctive German-style, coal-scuttle helmet. “That’s a fact.”

The film original, starring veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Ka-fai, was also released for foreign audiences with the English title, “Cold Steel.” Adapted from a popular Internet novel, it tells the story of Mu Liangfeng, a young hunter who is drafted into the Nationalist army for his marksmanship. He duels with a ruthless Japanese sniper, Captain Masaya, in a series of bloody encounters. Both marksmen are in love, Mu with a war widow and Masaya with a Japanese military nurse. But the film draws a clear distinction between the moral qualities of the two combatants.

“I want to marry a samurai, not a murderer,” Nurse Ryoko tells Masaya after accusing him of massacring civilians.

In the remake, director Li Yunliang says he isn’t trying to demonize the wartime enemy. “The Japanese soldiers in our drama also have emotions,” he says. “It’s the war bringing suffering to both China and Japan.”

The Communist rulers in Beijing will still find much to like. Pre-publicity material suggests the new storyline will have a harder political edge, concentrating more on the martial qualities of Communist forces who formed a united front with the Nationalists.

WAR STORIES

Some film reviewers in China say that with the censors declaring so many other subjects off limits, it is only natural that the war dominates story-telling in a competitive market for viewers and advertising.

“Only anti-Japanese themes aren’t limited,” says Zhu Dake, an outspoken culture critic and professor at Shanghai’s Tongji University. “The people who make TV think that only through anti-Japanese themes will they be applauded by the narrow-minded patriots who like it.”

Zhu estimates war stories make up about 70 percent of drama on Chinese television. The state administrator approved 69 anti-Japanese television series for production last year and about 100 films. Reports in the state-controlled media said up to 40 of these were shot at Hengdian alone. State television reported in April that more than 30 series about the war were filming or in planning by the end of March.

On any given night, state-owned television channels bombard Chinese viewers with the heroics of the two major Communist armies in combat with the Japanese, the Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army. Elaborate plots tap the period’s rich history of deception, betrayal and collaboration.

In January, a tense seminar in Hong Kong brought together opinion makers from both sides, including senior retired military officers. There, the role of wartime drama was singled out as a major factor in plunging ties between the two nations.

“Yes, the Nanjing massacre did happen,” Yasuhiro Matsuda, a professor at Tokyo University and a former Japanese defense ministry researcher, told the seminar. “Yes, Japan did invade China. These are facts. But, when there are more than 200 movies coming out, you can imagine the negative effect.”

When Tokyo nationalized the disputed islands last September, buying them from a private Japanese owner, it provoked sometimes violent anti-Japanese protests in cities across China. In a telling indicator of the hostile mood in China, demand for Japanese products is falling across the board. Japanese exports to China for the year through March dropped 9.1 per cent to 11.3 trillion yen, according to Japanese customs figures.

Out in the East China Sea, both sides are so far exercising restraint. The risk of conflict through accident or miscalculation, however, remains high. Under Xi, China has intensified an air and sea campaign that military experts believe is aimed at wearing down Japanese forces around the potentially resource rich islands.

FASHIONING PARTY LORE

Anti-Japanese films were instrumental in fashioning some of the Communist Party’s foundation myths.

In the early years of the People’s Republic, these films showed Mao Zedong’s patriotic Communist guerrillas leading a heroic resistance. In contrast, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists were portrayed as corrupt, ineffective and aligned with treacherous foreign powers, principally the United States. A vast majority of Chinese born before the 1970s remember the black-and-white classics from this period.

One of them, “Tunnel Warfare,” is the world’s most-watched film, with an estimated 1.8 billion viewers by 2006, according the August First Film Studio in Beijing, the Chinese military production house that turned out the 1964 landmark and many others like it. In “Tunnel Warfare”, Maoist guerrilla strategies inspire resourceful peasants to dig extensive tunnel networks beneath their village homes, from which they emerge to harass the occupying Japanese.

Regular screenings during an era of tight political control and virtually no alternative entertainment meant generations of viewers saw these movies many times. They are often crude, with voiceovers making sure viewers get the point. The brutality of Japanese troops toward Chinese combatants and civilians is a staple, but the films paradoxically avoided over-vilifying the invaders. Japanese characters are rarely developed. Plot lines concentrate on Mao’s triumph in leading the resistance, rather than the clear battlefield superiority of the invaders, which had Chinese forces in retreat right up to the end of the war.

In this period, Chinese film makers conformed to a wider geopolitical strategy, where Beijing was anxious to avoid alienating Tokyo, historians say.

The Communist Party wanted diplomatic recognition from Japan and also sought to drive a wedge between Washington and its most important regional ally. Strict censorship ruled out researching or publishing material about Japanese atrocities. In a move that would be unthinkable today, Beijing treated convicted Japanese war criminals leniently at the 1956 war crimes trials it held in Shenyang and Taiyuan. None of the 51 prisoners who stood trial were executed or sentenced to long terms.

Textbooks from this time mentioned key events and battles but played down the scope and impact of Japan’s occupation. Film makers avoided the dramatic potential of atrocities such as the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. Some historians suggest the Communists were also determined to suppress movies or detailed historical accounts of major campaigns: Otherwise, attention would have been drawn to the role of the Nationalist armies, which bore the overwhelming brunt of fighting the Japanese. In the sacking of Nanjing, the Nationalists’ capital, Communist forces played little or no role in defending the doomed city.

JAPANESE ATROCITIES REVISITED

This changed in the early 1980s when Chinese film makers began to turn their cameras unsparingly on Japan’s wartime behavior. Beijing had already won diplomatic recognition from Japan in 1972, and when the disastrous Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, the Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping abandoned its ruinous economic policies and began experimenting with market reforms.

For a ruling party desperate to recover its prestige and stamp out demands for political change, revisiting Japanese atrocities provided a useful distraction, historians say. In contrast, the party still vigorously suppresses any effort to document or publicize the calamities of its own making, including the starvation of tens of millions following Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward.

The official desire to foster nationalism intensified after the 1989 Tiananmen protests shook the party to its foundations. “Maybe the leadership realized that a memory of collective suffering at the hands of an external enemy is more effective in bringing people together,” said Kristof Van Den Troost, a film and history researcher at Hong Kong’s Chinese University.

One of the best known films of the era, “Red Sorghum” from 1987, based on a novel by 2012 Nobel prize winner Mo Yan, launched the careers of actress Gong Li and director Zhang Yimou. It pulled no punches, switching from a rich love story set in rural China to a blood-drenched climax in which the Japanese order a local butcher to skin alive a prisoner. “Skin him,” the Japanese interpreter screams at the butcher, who in an act of mercy stabs the prisoner to death and is immediately machine-gunned. The butcher’s assistant is then forced to skin another live prisoner, later revealed to be a communist guerrilla.

As war museums and memorials opened all over China, film makers were free to explore the orgy of killing and rape at Nanjing. Chinese estimates put the Nanjing death toll at 300,000. Japanese and some other foreign estimates are lower.

Today, while hewing to the official anti-Japanese line, some of these films are more subtle than their forerunners. In the 2009 box office hit, “The City of Life and Death,” director Lu Chuan controversially included a relatively sympathetic Japanese character. Sergeant Kadokawa, played by Hideo Nakaizumi, stands apart from his comrades amid the orgy of violence in Nanjing.

But film makers can go too far. Jiang Wen, the male lead in “Red Sorghum,” ran afoul of the state film administrator with “Devils on the Doorstep,” his second film in the director’s chair. The film won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize in 2000 but was subsequently banned in China. It mocks the confusion of peasants in a village in northern China entrusted with holding a captured Japanese soldier and his translator. Though the movie ends in a bloodbath for the villagers, censors attacked it for its sympathetic treatment of the Japanese prisoner and failure to depict the Chinese as selfless patriots.

LUDICROUS PLOTS

While studios continue to pump out drama, there are now signs scriptwriters are scratching for material. Critics inside and outside the government have been scathing about the ludicrous and violent plots of some of the more recent productions.

Some directors have merged war dramas with semi-mystical, martial arts action where virtually unarmed Chinese slaughter platoons of hapless Japanese.

In the television series “Anti-Japanese Knight,” an unarmed Chinese martial art expert tears a Japanese soldier in half from head to crotch, the divided corpse suspended in the air with a skein of blood connecting the pieces. In another scene from the same series, a Japanese soldier’s intestines are wrenched out of his abdomen in a fight sequence.

Under the weight of ridicule and disgust, officials from the State Administration of Radio Film and Television this month ordered a crackdown, insisting studios make “more serious” dramas.

Even Shi, the busy stuntman, is tiring of his role as a Japanese victim.

“I’m not good-looking so I play a Japanese soldier,” he said. “I would really prefer playing a soldier in the Eighth Route Army.”

(Reporting By David Lague in Hong Kong and Jane Lanhee Lee in Hengdian, China.; Edited by Bill Tarrant)

America has no tolerance for wealthy people griping about their financial woes. But they have concerns too.

This week Twitter announced a bold expansion of its year-old Twitter Cards program, giving marketers a new way to directly obtain interested business leads via the social media service.

The new Lead Generation Card is squarely aimed at business tweeters, and it functions a lot like its name implies. Marketers can now embed a card within a standard Twitter message, generally promising some sort of promotional offer (such as “50% off on your first visit”). When readers expand the tweet by clicking on the embedded link, they’re prompted to send their information to you. The neat trick is that the user doesn’t have to fill out an “I’m interested” form. Their name, Twitter user name, and email address are pulled from their Twitter account, so getting in touch is a single-click operation. On the back end, you receive this information directly, after which you can follow up with the reader to make your sales pitch. In conjunction with Promoted Tweets, the promotional punch of the Lead Generation Card could be impressive.

The Lead Generation Card is currently in beta and launched this week to Twitter’s managed clients. The company says it will be made available to small- and medium-sized businesses soon.

The Lead Generation Card is just the latest expansion to the functionality of Twitter, which originally limited tweets to a mere 140 characters of nothing but text. But now, as regular Twitter users surely have found, tweets can be embedded with all manner of extra goodies, including the popular Photo Card for embedded photographs and the new App Card for those who want to promote links to mobile phone applications.

The Lead Generation idea isn’t a new one. LinkedIn pioneered the concept through its advertising system, which gives marketers an option to overlay their page with a lead collection pop-up that’s similar to Twitter’s Lead Generation Card. LinkedIn’s Lead Generation prompt asks simply, “Would you like Bob’s Donuts to follow up with you on LinkedIn?” As with Twitter’s Lead Generation Card, potential customers can choose to send their information to the marketer with a single click.

This is a smart move on Twitter’s end and potentially a great option for small businesses. It’s a much needed step that may finally solve, at least for some businesses, a long-running, nagging problem with social media advertising. Many a business owner has now figured out that social media ads can make it easy to get additional followers on Twitter or Facebook, and then wondered what to do with them. For many business, followers and “Likes” are great, but they don’t necessarily lead to increased sales. A case in point: Last month the New York Times reported on Coca-Cola’s corporate study which took a hard look at its social media following. Despite 60 million Facebook fans and 700,000 Twitter followers, Coke “found that online buzz had no quantifiable impact on short-term sales.”

Could the Lead Generation Card fix that problem? And how long until Facebook follows suit?

For an election that was supposed to be about the big issues of the day, the special election in Massachusetts to fill the Senate seat vacated by John Kerry seems to be about everything but.

The big news this week was that Gabriel Gomez, the Republican candidate, called Rep. Edward J. Markey, his Democratic opponent, “pond scum” for campaign ads that Gomez did not like.

And Markey, who has not been highly visible with retail events on the campaign trail, has also been missing votes in Washington, according to The Boston Globe. He has not cast a vote since May 9, missing the past 40, The Globe said, including for legislation to approve the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a project he has said he strongly opposed.

His campaign said that Markey had been holding several behind-the-scenes events to line up institutional support from groups such as the firefighters union and that he had attended several fundraising events. The campaign also said that Markey had a 97 percent lifetime voting record; he was first elected to Congress in 1976.

Then there is Gomez’s refusal to sign a pledge to keep undisclosed, outside money out of the race. Markey has said the pledge is the central issue in the race and Friday reiterated his challenge to Gomez to sign it. So far, though, the only outside money in the race appears to be materializing on behalf of Markey.

NextGen, a group founded by Tom Steyer, a California billionaire and environmental activist who strongly opposes the Keystone pipeline, is preparing to get involved, according to his spokesman, Chris Lehane. In a memo to supporters, Lehane wrote that NextGen would be a “politically disruptive force” in the campaign, using online advertising and “guerrilla marketing.”

Various Republican groups have said they were considering spending on Gomez’s behalf, but they are waiting to see whether he shows signs of being able to win in deep blue Massachusetts.

Markey appeared at an electrical workers’ union hall here Friday to receive the endorsement of a fellow Democrat, Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston, whose loyal machine can wield considerable clout in an election. The mayor praised Markey’s stance against assault weapons and his ability to bring federal research money back to the state.

“This race has now been given a jolt of electricity,” Markey declared.

Menino told reporters later that he would “turn out my troops, that’s all, like we always do,” for Markey, and predicted that he would “win big” on Election Day, June 25, because he did not see much enthusiasm for Gomez.

He conceded that he did not see much enthusiasm for Markey either but said it was “building.”

In a brief scrum with reporters, Markey was pressed for why he had missed so many votes and for his reaction to being called “pond scum” by Gomez. He said that he would not resort to name-calling himself and that Gomez was trying to distract from the issues, such as the assault weapons ban, which Markey supports and Gomez opposes.

“This is a referendum on the Obama administration,” Markey said at one point, with little elaboration.

After Markey left, a group of six electricians, a couple of whom are out of work, said in an interview that they would vote for Markey but expressed little enthusiasm for him. They said that jobs and the economy were the most important issues for them but that Markey had not mentioned either in his speech, in which he instead lavished praise on Menino and focused on the assault weapons ban.

“Did he blow you away with his speech?” asked one, who like the others did not want to be named because they were straying from the party line. “Guns are not our issue,” said another.

These electricians said they would nonetheless vote for Markey because he was a Democrat and Democrats support the Davis-Bacon Act, the Depression-era federal law that requires workers on public works projects to be paid the local prevailing wage. Decent wages, they said, were their bottom line.

One said he liked that Gomez had been a member of the Navy SEALs.

“That says to me he has a work ethic, and he could do this job of senator at half speed,” he said.

Still, he said he would not vote for him because Republicans are anti-labor.

None of them had heard the “pond scum” comment, but when told of it, said they thought worse of Gomez. Gomez uttered it Thursday night after being asked about two of Markey’s campaign ads against him.

In the first, a Web ad, the Markey campaign showed a split screen. On one side was an image of Gomez, who was the spokesman last year for a group that maintained that President Barack Obama had politicized the killing of Osama bin Laden; on the other side was footage of bin Laden from a video used by that group.

In the second, a television spot, the Markey campaign said that Gomez was “against banning high-capacity magazines like the ones used in the Newtown school shooting.”

Gomez responded in speeches and in a campaign ad by mischaracterizing both Markey ads. He said that Markey had unfairly compared him to bin Laden and that he had blamed him for the school shootings; neither Markey ad made such an assertion.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Gomez was asked about his response to the ads.

“To put me next to bin Laden?” he said. “A former SEAL. Maybe he doesn’t realize who actually killed bin Laden. The SEALs did.”

Gomez added: “For him to be as dirty and low, pond scum, to like, put me up next to bin Laden, he’s just got to be called what he is. It’s that simple.”

The long-distance sparring has been going on since the two won their respective party primaries April 30. They will meet face to face in at least two debates, the first June 5 and the second June 18.

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10 ½ Ways to Take Advantage of “Social SEO”

Cheryl Conner
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The newest research says 80% of marketers aren’t planning to use Daily Deal sites in their upcoming campaigns

Social Media Examiner has just released its annual Social Media Marketing report. It reveals some interesting data about this year’s social media marketing trends. The entire report is available for download here, but I’d like to highlight some of the report’s most surprising and significant points. In a survey of 3,025 marketers, the study determined the following:

-The use of social bookmarking sites has plummeted from 26% of respondents in 2011 to just 10% in 2013. De.licio.us, DIGG, Friendfeed, etc., are rapidly falling in favor where marketers are concerned. (According to ebizMBA, the  most popular bookmarking sites are currently Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and StumbleUpon.)

-Forums (24% in 2011; 16% this year) and geo-location services such as Foursquare (17% in 2011; 11% this year) are also in decline.

-Respondents with more than 5 years experience are far more likely to use LinkedIn LinkedIn than the average respondent (92% vs. 70%).

-Marketers who spend more than 40 hours a week on social media are more heavily focused on Pinterest, Google Google+, Instagram and YouTube than those who spending 6 hours a week or less on social media marketing.

-Biz-to-Consumer marketers have adopted Facebook Facebook at a greater rate than Biz-to-Biz marketers; however, the opposite is true for LinkedIn. Although Facebook is the most important social platform for a strong majority (67%) of B2C marketers, Facebook and LinkedIn are tied among B2B marketers at 29% each.

-67% of marketers plan to increase their Twitter activities. This is a significant majority, but is down slightly from 69% last year and 73% in 2011. Younger marketers are much more likely to use photo sharing sites such as Instagram than their older counterparts.

-Here’s the biggest shocker, for me: the report says 80% of marketers have no plans to use daily deal sites, such as Groupon Groupon or LivingSocial in the near future.

About the Data: Of the 3025 marketing participants in the study, 56% primarily target consumers and 44% target businesses. 72% of the respondents are 30-59. Females represented 62% of the survey sample. 57% are in the U.S., with the U.K. (9%) being the next-most heavily represented country.

Some of the data is not surprising. The use of bookmarking sites and forums has never emerged as a mainstream tactic for marketing pros. In fact, as reported by fellow contributor David K. Williams, the most popular forums and bookmarking sites are most heavily skewed towards entertainment and ‘funny pictures’, current research maintains.

Reddit and Digg are the top social bookmarking sites that continue to have the most power remaining for marketing and managing traffic en masse. On the flip side, the most surprising finding in the new report is that 80% of marketers surveyed aren’t planning on using a daily deal site for their marketing efforts this year.Marketers’ Dream Come True?

The decreased plans for daily deals is the finding that, for me, presents the biggest surprise. In my experience (and that of others I have interviewed recently), daily deal sites are highly beneficial to brand marketers and products because of the “no cost” efficiency the model presents.

For example, Mike McEwan, owner and CEO of Very Jane (a daily deal site for boutique fashion, jewelry and accessories), notes that many of his sellers depend on the marketing they do through his site as their primary source of income. Says McEwan: “I have personally seen many small, obscure sellers and brands get their start from a daily deal on our site that went viral.”

Thousands of sellers market boutique items on etsy, eBay, or Amazon. However, each seller is in charge of their own promotion in these platforms and are competing with hundreds of sellers with very similar items. For a new or emerging brand to gain access to an efficient marketing avenue that is already established and efficient with no upfront costs would appear for many to be a marketer’s dream come true.

Lifetime Value of a Customer

For marketers who work for an established brand, daily deal sites may seem like a lose/lose proposition, since the most common model splits revenues between the manufacturer and the site at a ratio of somewhere around 50/50. When you consider that the “deal” is generally at least 50% off retail price, the math doesn’t seem to leave room for a workable profit. However, the lifetime value of a customer is the piece of the equation many marketers are inclined to ignore. Here’s the equation for the LTV (Lifetime Value) of a customer (courtesy of Brad Sugars, Entrepreneur.com):

(Average Value of a Sale) X (Number of Repeat Transactions) X (Average Retention Time in Months or Years for a Typical Customer)

Now the equation looks different. According to Sugars, it’s the lifetime value of your customers, in the end, that will determine the ultimate success of your company.  What are your own online marketing plans for the remainder of 2013? Do you agree with the study’s results? I welcome your thoughts.

Disclosures: Very Jane, quoted, is an agency client of my company, Snapp Conner PR. Snapp Conner has no business relationship with Social Media Examiner nor with Brad Sugars, ActionCOACH chairman and founder, whose LVC formula appeared in his column for Entrepreneur. Author: Cheryl Conner | Google+

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