Monitoring blogs for companies in China

In my previous post, I comment on CNET's recent article Why Companies Monitor Blogs. The article and Mr. Anderson’s comments are in the context of blogs and companies in the west. While blogs certainly get the headlines in China in terms of big numbers (some say 20 million) and occasional corporate missteps such as the recent Microsoft debacle, we believe that at least for now, BBS (message boards) are much more useful in terms of gathering marketing intelligence.

Let's look at some numbers. One BBS search engine recently told us they index 10,000 BBS domains (not forums), meaning that there is more that they do NOT index. From our own analysis, we estimate that one automobile focused BBS site has 1 million comments posted every month...the vast majority on topic about cars.

Now let's make it practical. Last month, for one of our retainer clients in the mobile phone industry, we collected hundreds of thousands of comments rich in consumer opinion and perception about everything mobile phones. We chose to collect from a select number of the most influential BBS forums for the industry; not all the forums, mind you, but the most influential. We now have hundreds of thousands of expressions of opinion direct from influential and informed mobile phone consumers about the latest, coolest, hottest mobile phones which we can analyze buzz volume, content and sentiment about all brands and models on the market.

Ultimately, what any company should look for is a solution to monitor ALL "consumer generated media" or what we call Consumer Internet Channels (hence our name...CIC data). This is exactly what Matthew Hurst from Intelliseek recently wrote in his comment on the industry. He writes:

The tools and products [of the industry] are actually aimed at a far broader content space - anything that is generated by users/amateurs/consumers/call-them-what-you-will. This includes blogs, but also boards [aka BBS], review sites, usenet, listserv data and beyond.

While we do also look at blogs for our clients, we believe that for now, blogs in China are just no match for BBS. There are certainly some very influential "A-List" bloggers in China, but very, very few compared to the west. This will change over time...but for now, BBS is where it's at.

More views on "localizing" "blog monitoring" in China coming soon....