A New World Version of Public Relations

01/05/2005 - While the last of the streamers from the New Year's celebration have been cleaned up and most of you have already packed away the Christmas decorations, we thought we would share with you one more story of holiday cheer from a place you might least expect it - China.

A few weeks ago an old buddy Lyle Wolf, who is now Chairman of Yilong Media, Yilong Media Group, a new Yellow Pages start-up with its headquarters in Hangzhou (just west of Shanghai in east central China) shared with me some of their efforts to bring Yellow Pages into the mainstream of Chinese thinking.

Lyle and his team came up with a very creative effort to introduce their new company to the area - a Christmas tree.

For those of you not familiar with the Yellow Pages industry in China, let's just say it's still a relatively new, but fast growing business. Yilong Media Group's mission is to provide modern Yellow Pages and related local advertising media products to Chinese businesses and consumers. Yilong's China Headquarters is in Hangzhou, the capital city of Zhejiang Province and one of China's foremost tourist destinations.

Since Yellow Pages in this part of China are still a pretty new concept the staff came up with the idea of sponsoring Hangzhou's first city Christmas Tree. Celebrating Christmas (such as it is in a country where most religions are not readily embraced) has become a big deal there, for a range of reasons -- a reason to party, have a good time and for the stores sell more stuff.

The Yilong team found time was too short to get a huge tree so they came up with the idea to build a 60 ft. artificial one. They convinced the City to let them put it up in a big park by the Lake (across from Starbucks - yes, modern civilization is available in China) where it would be very visible. Of course there was one crisis after another, but the team pulled it off. They even got China's premier fine art university involved in the design and general c ......