卡梅伦开通并发布中文微博
When British Prime Minister David Cameron returns home from his carefully choreographed trip to China, he will be surprised by the dozens of business contracts that will start to flow in, as well as by endless questions from thousands of his new Chinese friends on social media.
当英国首相卡梅伦从精心筹划的中国之行返回英国时，数量巨大、纷至沓来的商业合同以及社交媒体上成千上万的新中国朋友无尽的问题将会令他惊讶不已。
I have long observed foreign politicians trying to engage with Chinese fans, sometimes in the millions, through social media. Their teams waste no time uploading their schedules, speeches and short ideas in English, French or other languages.
However, these messages usually fail to reach the Chinese public, mainly because they are not written in Chinese.
So I have drawn the impolite conclusion that most efforts by foreign politicians and their handlers to involve ordinary Chinese via social media have been pretty much failures.
But Cameron's team has made a difference. It set up a micro blog for the prime minister on Sina Weibo. Cameron is a latecomer, but for the prime minister it has been a case of better late than never.
By Wednesday, Cameron had uploaded seven posts, even though he only started to use the tool on Friday. Of the seven, three were posted as warm-up messages before he began his China tour.
Cameron has used the Chinese language in all of his posts, and two are bilingual. This marks a huge difference from the posts of other global political figures in the past.
In terms of content, Cameron's posts are all simple and original, and accompanied by photos. They are not mere recaps of official documents, schedules and speeches.
Not shy of advertising, Cameron has even managed to publish two posts about Land Rover in a short time, in an effort to help market the car brand to China's new rich.
The most interesting part of Cameron's excursion into Chinese social media is his team's ambition to set up a dialogue between the prime minister and the public. In one recent post, Cameron asked his followers to leave questions for him, saying he would answer some of them before he left China.
The number of Cameron's micro blog followers surpassed 260,000 in one week, roughly equal to the number of subscribers to two of his country's newspapers, The Guardian and The Financial Times.