In past few days, there was some news about Baidu(China's Google) which put this search engine giant in China in a devastating position. The news is about that the owners of a Tieba(Similar to Google Group) were replaced by a sponsored organization without notifying the original owners. This irritated the original owners of the Tieba and also the public. People are complaining that Baidu is doing something ridiculous and evil.
The name of the Tieba group which was sold by Baidu is “hemophilia". It is a group created by people who are concerned about this disease and they can share their thoughts and knowledge on this disease.
By selling this Tieba group to the sponsored organization, Baidu can get a large amount of money while the sponsored organization can promote their service or products in this group. Unfortunately, this behavior irritates users.
After the original owners of the group posted the news online, the public opinion is exploded. Lots of people cannot believe that Baidu would sell the users because of money. This further causes series of boycott from users. Later, Baidu PR department made a statement that they had terminated the cooperation with the sponsored organization and would restore the owner rights of the original owners and they said the behavior was just a trial of a new business model to make Tieba profitable. They had terminated cooperation with some other Tiebas as well.
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But apparently people don't buy this statement as they think that this is a moral issue and it's not just a business cheat. They cannot tolerate a company which does evil. In fact, this is not the first time people are angry with Baidu. A few years back, Badu also intervened the search results to put some sponsored search results in front of their search results, but what worse is that companies behind those search results are selling fake products or doing something evil but Baidu didn't control them.
Baidu PR is definitely in a swirl. They have a long way to go to make though this crisis.
