By Shanshan, English PR Manager at Tianji, the number 1 professional social network in China (A Viadeo company).
The event that Crunched & Disrupted me – The TC Disrupt Beijing experience by a PR new-bird
First of all, I have to confess – I am totally new! Just joined Tianji a week before Techcrunch Disrupt Beijing, and this huge event just hit me like a storm as I began working at Tianji! As dear Karen Serfaty put it, “Shanshan, you are in the battle now…”
Now, preparation – There was a long preparation period for the making of the infographic, and finding the ideal gifts, T-shirts, balloons with banners, posters, flyers and brochures, or so I heard. Everyone else had been briefed by the wonderful marketing team. What was the most interesting part? I think it’s the fact that we finally learned what is considered “Chinese” and “intriguing” to the Westerners. And we can’t shake off some cliches: the cartoon dragon, hot-pot, children lighting up fireworks…, etc.
Getting Organized – Another big part of the preparation was getting everybody to sit down and coming up with the detailed work plan. That part was fun. The team learned about the Hackathon, Disrupt schedules and Tianji’s role in each of them. And we had to delegate all the tasks to team members. When everything had been covered and people nodded their heads, we realized that we also had to get a schedule down on the Excel spreadsheet with tasks, dates, time, contact info, to avoid chaos. And guess what? It worked!
Getting to the event – All the gifts, brochures and T-shirts were ready. Setting up everything on site was easy. The whole team wore Tianji T-shirts, and we looked very cute! Plus we worked with nice show-girls at the booth, who caught the eyes of all the tech guys there.
The Real PR Buzz – We got our best camera ready, and had to drink a lot of coffee to stay energetic during the Hackathon! To be honest, it is not that exciting for a non-geek like me, but that didn’t stop us from catching the candid shots with funny moments, the geeky looks, the atmosphere, and tweeting (on Weibo in China) at the same time! Big tech icons, famous speakers, industry experts and startup CEOs were all there busy with interviews. There were constant visitors at our booth, and we walked around to make sure we didn’t miss anything. There were a lot of interactions, but also a lot of planning. As the “handler”, I was assisting Karen with all the press interviews for Dan Serfaty and Derek Ling keeping up with the timing. Keeping track of their whereabouts became top priority. In the meantime, I couldn’t forget to always look for people carrying “Press” tags – you never know who you would run into at events like this! 
Techcrunch Disrupt Beijing has been a very memorable 4-day experience, and marked the beginning of my journey with Tianji. Because of the team-work done with the wonderful marketing and tech people, the trust and great support from everyone, the event turned out to be a great success. We’d like to sign off with photos taken proudly with Kaifu-Lee and Peter from Angry Bird!
More pictures here!
