Feed fixed (I think)

I've had some complaints that an RSS feed could not be found with someblog readers. You can a feed by right clicking the RSS icon below my pic. If anyone continues to have trouble, please do let me know.

Thanks to Wong Joon Ian, Gemme and Micah for their help.

CIC data Chinese site launched

We launched our Chinese site last week on http://www.cicdata.cn and http://www.cicdata.com.cn.

Profile in Youth Daily (青年报)

CIC data is featured in the 3/9/06 Youth Daily (Chinese).

Different types of word of mouth

The most recent Economist has a pretty good WOM industry overview called Listening to the internet. Hat tip to Max Kalehoff from Nielsen BuzzMetrics for link. Max, who is also quoted in the article, wishes that more articles would focus on the power of blog/BBS monitoring for distilling consumer insight. I strongly agree.

More often than not, blogs and BBS research is often discussed in terms of their power to start or amplify crises. PR firms should, and in fact are, paying attention to BBS and blogs as a "media" that should be monitored because the opinions expressed can have a significant impact on their clients' reputations.

But I would like to step back for a minute and look at the bigger picture of online Word of Mouth. Olivier Blanchard has one of the most succinct breakdowns of WOM. He writes (I strongly suggest reading the whole post):

1) News-Related WOM: (Also known as Event-Related WOM.) For better or for worse, a product launch, a record store redesign, a re-branding coup, a class-action lawsuit or a big corporate merger can generate WOM. PR firms and ad agencies can (and should) play a significant role in facilitating WOM in these instances.

News-related WOM sounds like this: "Hey, did you hear about that promotion (...) is doing?" or "Hey, check this out: (...) is going to start selling a hydrogen car completely built out of recycled materials next year" or "(...) won Best In Show again. Isn't it like, five years in a row now?"

2) Customer Experience WOM: Exceptional products, service, and user experiences create WOM. Period.

Customer experience WOM sounds like this: "Hey, have you gone into their new store yet? It's the coolest thing." or "Hey, have you seen (...)'s new movie yet? It's incredible!" or "Dude, (...) makes the best cup of coffee I've ever had. You won't believe how good their stuff is!"

Due to the tradition of a controlled media, I believe that word of mouth thrives in China, even more so than in the West. And now it is moving online. With 40% of Chinese netizens as regular users, BBS is a mainstream activity in China, not one limited to hobbyist or niche discussions. Even 'niche' discussions are big in China. The largest mobile phone site in China has close to 500,000 messages every month while the largest in the US has closer to 100,000.

The opportunity for companies in China to not only listen but also learn from these discussions is immense.

Shanghai Daily: Bloggers lure blog watchers

The title is spooky, and the illustration in the offline copy is even spookier, but all in all I find Shanghai Daily's take on our progress in the blog/BBS word of mouth industry in China ok. I would have liked less emphasis on the privacy issue, since we only collect publicly available information that any of the 111 million Internet users in China can also access. However, not much I can do now about what the writer took away from our conversation. It is indeed a question we get asked by many people in China (but ironically is not discussed as much in the West within this context).

Washington Post: Blog Buzz Helps Companies Catch Trends in the Making

The Washington Post writes about the finalization of the Buzzmetrics/Intelliseek merger and purchase by VNU (owner of AC Nielsen and other Nielsen brands) and new company called Nielsen Buzzmetrics. I see this as further validation of Blog/BBS monitoring as a market research channel. No word on any their Asia Pac plans....

"DIY" BBS and blog monitoring in China

Apologies for the lag since the last post. But let's continue the discussion of BBS and blog monitoring in China.

Actually, China Web 2.0 blog pretty much summarizes the situation of blog search in China’s Blog Search Engines Suck. Not much more to add here.

For BBS, you won't do much better. Teein is the best, but still has a 2-3 day lag and misses significant sites and chunks of data. You can, however, select to view results by week and by month to at least give you an idea of the volume of messages you are getting within a certain time period, which is especially useful during crisis situations.

You can try searching within Google and Baidu as well for BBS, but the time stamps on the results are not accurate. Actually, Google has not time stamp at all. For both Baidu and Google, you can view results by different time periods such as 1 month or 3 months, but the time is determined by when the post was indexed, not when it was posted.

ChinaBBS is one of the more popular sites in the world (Alexa #67) and it focuses on aggregating BBS content. However, its search function is miserable.

Matthew Hurst lists some English language board search tools here, but none that I am aware of cover significant numbers of Chinese sites.

If anyone has a Chinese BBS search engine that they think is better than Teein, I would love to hear.