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....

Why companies monitor blogs

Nice article from CNET with overview of how companies in the US use blog monitoring.

Monitoring blogs as a source of customer intelligence:

"We pay attention to the blogosphere," said Scott Anderson, HP's director of enterprise brand communications, in a talk at the Syndicate conference in San Francisco in December. "Our audience is online. They're having discussions about us and about our competitors, and they're talking about the marketplace. It may be good, and it may be bad, but it's important for us to pay attention to what's being said out there."

"The blogosphere is a great place for customer intelligence," he said. "Things are happening very fast. Bloggers are considered to be people with real strong opinions. So it's a place where people are being really honest about what they think."

Monitoring blogs as an alternative to traditional forms of market research:

The premise behind services like these [Intelliseek, Buzzmetrics and (cough) CIC data], as well as companies' own internal Internet-monitoring programs, is that online discussions--be it in forums, on blogs or elsewhere--are a modern replacement for customer satisfaction surveys or focus group reports, which can take months to compile and analyze.

"When you're listening to the Internet, the discussion is taking place in real time," said Intelliseek spokeswoman Sue MacDonald. "We're able very quickly, sometimes in a matter of days, to pick up on what consumers are saying. If there's certain issues, like safety recalls or any mention of a boycott, we can set up an alert, so that we can alert a company or a brand so they can be on their guard and be ready to react, if that's what it takes."

Monitoring blogs for Crisis Prevention/Monitoring:

[Steve] Rubel pointed to public relations nightmares like that precipitated by Buzz Machine blogger Jeff Jarvis' much-publicized rants about his bad experiences with Dell and its customer service operation.

"When consumers have their own pen, they may not call in anymore," said Rubel. "They may choose to blog about it, because they think they'll get quicker service. Everyone has seen through different examples that they have to grapple with this."
In Summary: Monitoring blogs is great for tool for PR and for Market Research:

Ultimately, the point of tracking what online consumers are saying about brands is to be able to react quickly if something bad happens or learn from the good things people say. Either way, though, companies are learning they have to pay attention.

But what about China?

Most everything discussed in this article applies to China, though there are a few differnce between the US and China. First, the BBS message boards are as important, if not more important, that blogs as a channel for "the voice of the consumer." Second, the search tools for Chinese blogs and BBS pale in comparison to those for English (e.g. Technorati, Blogpulse), so companies that choose to monitor on their own (instead of working with a company like CIC data) will have a more difficult time than they might if they want to monitor English language blogs.

In upcoming posts, I will look to “localize” this article for China…stay tuned.