Corporate China | Weibo: Xiaomi buzzes In Singapore, LinkedIn hires in Beijing

Executives from smartphone sensation Xiaomi were playing their usual marketing tricks in the microblogging realm this past week, trumpeting an online promotion in the run-up to a more formal launch next month in Singapore, the first stop on the company's global expansion. Meantime, US professional networking giant LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) was moving more quietly in the other direction into China, where its recently hired top executive was tweeting about his ongoing hiring efforts as the company builds up a local operation.

I can't help but do a little armchair analysis about Xiaomi's Singapore launch, which is in the hands of Hugo Barra, a former US-based executive at Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) who came to Xiaomi in a high-profile defection last year. Xiaomi's chief executive and marketing guru Lei Jun has made it clear that Barra will head the company's global expansion this year, following its successful moves into the Greater China markets of Taiwan and Hong Kong last year. But it looks like Barra still has much to learn from his marketing master, as evidenced by what looks to me like a slightly sloppy first effort in Singapore.

But in Singapore Xiaomi declined to disclose exactly how many units it sold in that 8 minute frenzy, unlike Hong Kong and Taiwan where each promotion involved 10,000 Redmi handsets, known in Chinese as Hongmi. That lack of disclosure led some to question whether the Singapore promotion was just a stunt involving a very small number of smartphones, while others said the company was engaging in its usual "hunger marketing" tricks of creating artificial shortages to generate buzz.