Utilizing the strengths of foreign employees in releasing Chinese media services

Q.Why did your company decide to take on interns? What did you aim to achieve?

In order to effectively respond to our company's beauty media services, "Beauty Park" in Chinese, we believed that we will be needing staff who can correspond in both Japanese and Chinese. Although we already hired Taiwanese people, the way websites and SNSs are used in China and Taiwan are different, so we decided that it is important to take various measures to include the voices of the people who use and see the Chinese and public relations sites. While planning to recruit more Chinese employees and gathering more information for such reasons, we heard about this program and decided to apply to it.

Intensively promoting marketing, event planning and sales to the Chinese

Q.What kind of internship did you run? What difficulties did you face and how did you resolve them?

For the beauty-related information media, "Beauty Park," we first had to make a Chinese translated site for the Chinese site releases, conduct a market research on beauty targeting Chinese women, and create contents in Chinese. Initially, we were concerned about the lack of knowledge and experience of the interns in marketing, as well as the language barrier, so we first asked them to not worry about their Japanese language ability and just come up with their own ideas, imagining what kind of services they would like to receive. As a result, I'm glad that I was able to receive many suggestions and use their opinions. We had an opportunity to invite the interns' Chinese friends residing in Japan to the company, and hold an event using their network. We could directly approach the targets at a practical place, and our contents were made more excitable.

A voice from an intern who is the same age group as the target of our site made a big contribution to the service release.

Q.Comparing before and after the internship, what effects did it have on you, your employees, or your organization?

A Taiwanese employee was in charge of a website for the Chinese market, but because the Chinese Internet services and SNS are particular, people weren't able to understand the site even in the same Chinese language. Nevertheless, we managed to obtain specific information due to interns from the local area and so could make a great progress in the development of our services. In addition, we were able to reflect important suggestions for the site from the intern in the assumed same age group. For example, the information on a presented report on how to use and post, and what topics and time on popular applications in China, such as "WeChat" and "Weibo" was incorporated in the regulation of operating the actual SNS for the China. The interns' achievements are impressive and we are planning to ask them to be return to our company to be continuously involved in our project after their program is over.