Listening and engaging with the community is more important than ever. Social media tools allows them to freely discuss your brand openly. We have seen reports that social media spending by large brands have increased year over year since 2008 in the US. In Hong Kong, engaging the community is probably the last thing on most brands’ agenda.

Yahoo! Hong Kong, Hong Kong’s leading portal, has long provided a blog service here and can safely say most locals use them more than other blog providers. They have their own product blog (in Chinese) and it’s one of the most, if not the most engaging blogs in Hong Kong. I have never seen people comment like this, locally. The number of comments are anywhere between the teens to the thousands for a single post, the Yahoo! HK blog user community is buzzing.

However, the blog itself doesn’t get updated frequently and it doesn’t offer much content other than being a channel to communicate notify users of mostly updates or system outages, upgrades, etc.

So, why are users so active and leaving so many comments? Well, all the comments are of users venting their frustration with the releases or upgrades and the service and commitment in general, one after another, the negative comments pile up to the hundreds and even thousands.

But can you blame the community? Yes and no. Yahoo! HK has seemingly ignored these conversations that’s going on under their nose now and in the past and it doesn’t appear to affect their brand at all.

In comparison, Yahoo!’s other property, Flickr, having launched a Traditional Chinese version since 2007, has had a local community manager (but based in US) for a year now watching over the (Traditional) Chinese language community, mainly Taiwan and Hong Kong. She’s been active in their forums and communicates openly with them. It makes us wonder why there’s no such person dealing with the growing frustration locally.

I’m not sure how much longer they can ignore this, but I’ll admit, they’ve had “success” sweeping it under the rug for years, it’s bound to catch up with them one way or another.

Possible related posts:

• AliveNotDead - Online community for artists and fans
• Lifesterblog
• Youblog - The New Lifesterblog
• I am joining EditGrid
• Hong Kong Tourism Board meets Social Media