Duke is Chatting in Chinese on Sina Weibo

A few Duke graduate students made the world a smaller place today by using Chinese social media tools to connect with prospective students.

Five students from the Pratt School of Engineering Masters of Engineering Management program led a group chat this morning on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Duke University maintains a public Sina Weibo page where we post content from the university for audiences in China, where access to Facebook and Twitter is generally restricted.

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Students and staff lead the group chat on Sina Weibo

 

Nearly  150 participants joined the group chat, posing more than 80 questions in an hour. Questions and comments focused mainly on the application process and the career opportunities for students who graduate from the program. Our discussion was very rich throughout the chat, as shown in the screenshot of the chat below.

Duke’s presence on Sina Weibo is part of a Chinese social media strategy developed by Laura Brinn, Duke’s director of global communications, and managed in partnership with the social media team I lead.  We partnered with Bridget Fletcher, Susan Brown and Erin Degerman of Pratt’s admissions and student services office in order to create this chat supporting their admissions priorities.

Duke also has a presence on Renren, a social network similar to Facebook that is popular with high school and college students. We have several Chinese student interns on our team who help manage and post content to these accounts.

What are you doing to connect online with your Chinese audiences here at Duke or elsewhere?

Duke_MEMP_Chinese

4 Responses to “Duke is Chatting in Chinese on Sina Weibo”

  1. Dar Forsythe January 15, 2013 at 5:12 pm Reply

    Bringing the world closer, technology is awesome! Super post.

  2. serdar ozgul October 5, 2013 at 6:55 am Reply

    awesome 🙂 and very nice; may i ask you a question, i want to put a modul to my webpage which is http://www.izmirtonerizmir.com . this modul is about the students who are from different countries and speaks english; so they communicate each other very easy,from one platform and online ?

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