Illustration: Liu Rui

The Internet is leading us all toward US filmmaker Andy Warhol's prediction, "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." But our 15 minutes of fame may not be as easy to find as we think.

There may be toddlers doing their thing on Youtube and cutely dressed dogs boasting hundreds of thousands of "friends" or "followers" on Facebook and Twitter. But the space is getting very crowded and breaking out to be an Internet "sensation" is a rare event. 

This is challenging enough for average people who have to think like a communications guru to successfully self-promote. But it is even more so for governments.

In an era when bold signs starting with "Do" or "Don't" are no longer able to catch an overwhelmed eye, even the authorities have to innovate to get their messages out.

In Western countries, where the concept of public relations was first properly established in the late 19th century, and plenty of distractions existed long before the birth of the Internet, governments have spent some decades honing their methods.

Successful examples include the "Clunk Click every trip" series, a TV advertising campaign launched by the British government in the 1970s to promote seat belt use in which famous DJ Jimmy Savile interviewed a young man who was paralyzed in a car accident because he didn't do his "clunk click" routine. There was also a milk carton campaign launched in the US in the 1980s in which the authorities printed the pictures of missing children on milk cartons to solicit help from the public.   

In the 11 years I have been living in New York, I've witnessed many such endeavors by the local authorities, such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg playing roles in hit movies to underline the city's tax cut program for movie productions, and the Department of Health featuring the painful struggle of dying smokers in TV ads to promote quitting.

The latest effort is the Department of Transportation's adoption of haiku, short Japanese poems, in newly launched road safety signs. One hundred and forty four such signs like this one: "Oncoming cars rush/ Each a 3-ton bullet/ And you, flesh and bone" are being erected at busy curbsides around the city.

This could easily make me jealous. The Chinese authorities have struggled with modern marketing for many years. When I was growing up, the messages sent out by the government were either top-down orders or watered down clichés that you either strictly followed or totally ignored. Authorities never bothered to put on an easy going face. And people never expected them to.

But things seem to be changing now. Recently several government entities have their official public announcements written in the Taobao style, a popular way of talking on the Internet initiated on the eBay equivalent Taobao.com. All conversations start with the intimate greeting of "honey," and then carry on in the way you would chat with an old friend.

For example, a job ad for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs lays out the qualifications like this, "Honey, have a bachelor's degree? Familiar with office software? Fluent English? Have a driver's license?" 

Police departments in different cities also start to experiment with new designs for wanted postings for criminals at large. In Yantai, it says: "Honey, the winter is here. It's cold. Come back home." In Shanghai, similar lines are accompanied by the image of a stuffed bunny behind a bar. And in Nanjing, pictures of the wanted are inserted in a popular online poker game.

These experiments do get criticized. Some people in China don't think it is appropriate for the authorities to use the light-tone of the Taobao style to talk about serious issues, especially in wanted notices. Similar complaints are heard in New York where some people think the advertisements for quitting smoking are too cruel and overly disturbing and that the haiku on the safety signs are too distracting for drivers and may cause more accidents.

But the broad level of discussion and argument about these efforts have proved their effectiveness. At least, more people get the messages no matter whether they like them or not. And the fact that two wanted people turned themselves in on the first day of Yantai's Taobao style postings, and that New York's graphic anti-smoking ads have prompted a huge surge of calls to the city's antismoking hotline, also provides supportive evidence.

The juxtaposition of Taobao and haiku also serves another function - to boost the sometimes deflated pride of Chinese, like myself, who live in other countries. The Chinese may have a lot to learn about basic public relations. But at least the stone face and uniformed monotone of the government is starting to change in many Chinese cities.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com