China 'net stars commercial trend continues

Last November, I wrote that Chinese 'net stars like the Backdorm Boys were getting picked up by companies like Motorola to be spokespersons.

The trend continues. Not only have the Backdorm Boys picked up more steam recently, other stars have come into play.

1010job.com picked up JuHua Jie Jie (菊花姐姐) (the William Hung for China) for a series of TVC's earlier this year. You can see the video that made her a star here and two TVC's here and here.

Pepsi picked up the Back Dorm Boys (后舍男生) for its Pepsi Creative Challenge campaign and for their Mydadada campaign. The boys are also in a TVC with Nicolas Xie for the new Pepsi Max drink. (Disclosure: Pepsi is our client)



Interestingly, one of the earliest 'net stars, Fu Rong Jie Jie, never made the cross over to significant commercial success.

Most significantly, a couple of months ago, Sony Ericsson picked Tian Xian Mei Mei (天仙妹妹) as spokesperson for its "Simple Happiness" series of low end mobile phones. This "pure country girl" from Sichuan who became all the rage on Tom.com and Tianya.com BBS, was plastered on Sony Ericsson promotion media all over Shanghai (and I guess the rest of China): on light boxes on Huai Hai Road, in store displays (right next to their Da Vinci Code promotion), and on brochures.



What is different with other companies using net stars is that Sony Ericsson pushed Tian Xian MM as a significant part of their marketing for the series. She is not just on the net in a contest or in a viral video...marketing dollars are pushing her image both online and offline.

We track BBS messages for the mobile phone industry, and we noticed a significant spike in messages regarding the "Simple Happiness" series, and a significant part of it can be attributed to Tian Xian MM suggesting that this strategy is making a significant impact.

We are also beginning to see that some potential net stars are promoting themselves with success, such as dodolook. For months, she has been making her self promotion videos and even her own ads for brands (see her self made Pepsi ad below). She is gaining momentum as a net-star thanks to this self promotion. She recently got picked up by Mop ji-log (geek blog), is getting on TV shows in Taiwan and is getting more press.





The premise of sites like Toodou and Wangyou is that there is a desire for at least some individuals to use the net as their launching pad to fame. Even more interesting is that we are seeing that such sites are in a position to become the next "star makers." These sites recognize that they are actually new media channels and that their job is not to create stars, but to nurture a community which can create stars. Yes, Super Girl (the Chinese version of American Idol) and the zillion other reality TV shows will likely always take a primary seat for creating super stars, but not all stars have to be "super" to make an impact in particular communities as Tian Xian MM proves.

The fact that some sites like Tianya are following explicit strategies to make stars is another story worth writing about...and one that I will cover in an upcoming post...

Online tuangou "group purchase" giving offline retailers a run for their money

The Christian Science Monitor recently ran a piece on the phenomenon of online "group purchase" sites in China. The basic concept is that consumers can organize a group online to get "wholesale" prices from retailers or distributors.

Shanghaiist writes about his/her investigation of SHtuangou here. My wife and I just today completed the purchase on SHtuangou for a plasma TV and saved 500RMB vs the Guomei price (Guomei is sort of the "Best Buy" of China).

CIC data monitors tuangou sites because their forums are filled with consumer opinions and experiences about products and services, in particular those related to home decoration.

For example, we found some Nanjing IKEA fans congregate on 51tuangou and actually organize regular trips to the Shanghai IKEA.



As I said over 5 years ago, Chinese netizens (or netizens of any country) won't engage in e-commerce unless there is a compelling reason to do so, e.g. cheaper price. Chinese already use social media such as BBS to discuss products, services and prices. Using this network to bargain for products is a very natural extension for China where bargaining for price is a way of life and results in a truly unique Chinese adaptation of e-commerce.

If there was any doubt that these sites are affecting offline retailers, check out the pic of this sign I took in Guomei last month:



Translation: "We are not tuangou. We are better than tuangou. Changning Guomei declares war on Tuangou."

Thems fightin' words, indeed!

CIC data featured in IDG newswire article: BBS monitoring takes China consumer pulse

CIC data is featured in IDG wire article BBS monitoring takes China consumer pulse

China Web 2.0 blog recommends Qihoo for searching BBS (and I do too)

China Web 2.0 blog recommends using Qihoo as a tool to search conversations on BBS. We have been looking at Qihoo again the last month or so, and indeed, it is much improved since I wrote previous recommendations about BBS search engines. Zhongsou is also improved, though I think Qihoo seems to be more accurate and covers more posts.

One thing to keep in mind for companies who are seriously interested in tracking conversations is that while Qihoo, Teein, Daqi etc. are useful to get a feel for what is being said, they are not sufficient to obtain a deep understanding of how these conversations are impacting your business.

Here's how we approach work with our clients:

Find/collect messages:

This is the main function of search engines...helping you find what you are looking for.

1. Find enough conversations--search wide

For a study to be accurate and reliable, you need to make sure you have collected a significant, comprehensive or at least representative number of messages about the topic or topics you are studying. From our analysis, while the BBS search engines are improving, they still miss signifcant chunks of messages from big sites and especially from the "long tail" sites which may have less traffic, but which exert greater influence within certain communities which may be important to our cliets. For some clients, half our data can come from the top 20 BBS sites, while the other half of our data can be spread out over thousands of sites.

2. Find enough conversations--search deep

Certain industries such as automobile, consumer electronics, mobile phones and others have dedicated communities which can produce hundreds of thousands if not millions of messages a month. For example, one mobile phone site we monitor generates 500,000 messages. BBS search engines currently do not dig deep to get these conversations. And even if they did...what would you do with 500,000 results?

Make sense of the messages:

The next question is, once you have all this data, what can you do with it? While it is helpful to know how many conversations there are (buzz volume), don't you want to know what these conversations are saying? And if they are saying good things or bad things (sentiment)? Currently, this is beyond the scope of search engines (though some like Opinmind are trying in English. However, look closely and you will see the results are mixed).

If you are a company which generates few conversations, this is not a problem--read the messages to get a feel. But what if your company or industry has thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of messages every month?

This is where data mining/natural language processing tools come in. Companies like Nielsen Buzzmetrics, MotiveQuest, Cymfony and CIC data all specialize in not only finding how many messages there are, but what the messages are saying, what they mean, and most importantly, what clients should do.

Ultimately, what we do is more than just "new media monitoring" where you find/count mentions like you might do in traditional media monitoring. BBS/Blogs are filled with consumer conversations expressing opinions and experiences. Finding or counting them is not enough...understanding them should be the primary goal.

Sina bloggers write 130,000 posts and 200,000 comments a day

China Web 2.0 blog discusses comments by Sina's new CEO about Sina blog service:

According to Chao, in the last week of April, Sina Blog attracted 1.7 million unique users, with 130,000 Blog postings, and 200,000 comments on a daily basis, which representing a 100% increase for the last three months. 130,000 daily blog posts update! That’s really a big number, since Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day according to its latest report.

Wow. More evidence that blogging (and social media in general) is a major force in China.

Baidu Post Bar and Super Girl fans

Li Yu Chun, aka Super Girl, aka LYC, aka ChunChun still has quite a fan base. Just take her fan "bar" on Baidu post bar. Since June 25, 2005:

• 17,512,136 posts
• 926,656 topics
• 18,534 pages

Baidu post bar is a force in consumer generated media. YLC has a ton of fans, and Baidu post bar is where they meet. Post bar (read: community) is one reasons Baidu is beating Google in China. For many of the most passionate, active internet users, Post Bar is the water cooler.

CIC data profiled on ChinaTechNews

You can read the article here.

XuJingLei Dethroned: Sina blog home page now tops Technorati 100

Xujinglei is no longer number 1 on the Technorati 100. Sina's blog homepage is. Obviously, this is not correct as this page is a sort of directory for blogs on Sina. Looks like Technorati is working on figuring Sina blog structure as Keso suggested (see English summary here).

Thanks to Jie Wang for the tip.

BoingBoing, Xu Jing Lei and Questions of Influence

My post on Xu Jing Lei being No. 1 on Technorati was picked up by Matthew Hurst from Nielsen BuzzMetrics. In comments to this, his colleague Natalie Glance writes:

If you drill down into the Technorati search results, the overwhelming majority (at least in the first 100 results that I paged through) are links to Xu Jing Lei from MSN Space bloggers' "Custom lists". These custom lists are more or less the equivalent of Blogrolls from MSN Spaces. Thus, Xu Jing Lei is being propelled to the top of Technorati via blogroll links, not via active links from blog posts. In contrast, BlogPulse finds only 1534 links as of today, but they are all active links. BoingBoing has over 17,000 active links. Of course, neither blogroll links nor active links provide the definitive answer on influence, as has already been discussed in depth elsewhere.

My response to her was this:

Some points to consider in comparison are that BoingBoing publishes 20+ articles written by 5 contributors. Xu Jing Lei writes 5 or so articles a WEEK, so there is actually less content to link to. Yet, she still captures enough interest to get on so many bloggers' blog rolls and attracts hundreds of thousands of page views and thousands of comments per article (even a two sentence post comparing Beijing to Shanghai weather got close to 100,000 page views and 1900+ comments).

Understanding that Google page rank is also not the end all measure of influence, blogger ESWN does provide an interesting analysis here: http://www.zonaeuropa.com/200605.brief.htm, where Boing Boing has a page rank of 9 and Xu Jing Lei has a 5.

Whether she is No. 1 or 1,000 on the list is one issue. The bigger issue I think is the original one I raised in my first post and that is that Technorati was missing one of the biggest blog service providers in China, Sina. I am confident there are a lot more they are missing due to lack of pinging by Chinese Blog Service Providers like Bokee, Blogbus, and Donews. The fact that bloggers like Massage Milk, Pan Shi Yi and Zheng Yuanjie, all bloggers just as famous as Xu Jing Lei, are not on the list confirms this in my mind. Books of Pan Shi Yi and Xu Jing Lei's blog posts are currently top 10 best sellers in Beijing.

Also, in China where 40% of all Internet users use message boards on a regular basis (14% for blogs), many more links are made inside feedless message board posts, not blogs, so there are alot more links out there that Technorati is not capturing. As big as blogs have become in China, I believe that message boards are an even bigger source of consumer generated media with greater influence than blogs which is one reason why Chinese message board search and content aggregators like Daqi are in the top 20 most visited Chinese sites.

More thoughts on how Sina's structure contributes to the under-representation can be found here.

Keso weighs in on Xu Jing Lei and Technorati: Sina partly to blame

Leading Chinese IT blogger Keso (who himself gets tens of thousands of page views a day) weighs in on Xu Jing Lei's blog being number 1 on Technorati by suggesting that if Sina had a more "traditional" blog structure, her lead over BoingBoing would be even greater.

Danwei, in discussing Keso's post, says:

Xu Jinglei's blog is hosted on Sina, whose system draws no connection between a blog's front page and the individual comment pages below it. Front pages are of the form http://blog.sina.com.cn/m/xujinglei, while pages are indexed as http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/46f37fb501000317.

Keso says (via Danwei translation):

What I want to say is that even if Xu Jinglei's blog has claimed the top spot on the Technorati 100, compared with the leading advantages of Boing Boing, it in fact should be much, much higher than Technorati's figures. The vast majority of actual links have been swallowed by Sina's selfish blog system - these links all point to the non-existent blog blog.sina.com.cn/u, or to Sina's blog home page.

In sum, Sina's "blog" service has permalinks, but the links are not associated with any blogger. This means that Technorati's figure of 28,151 sites and 45,700 links to Xu Jing Lei's blog are to her front page alone and do not include any of her permalinks.

The bigger picture here is that blog service providers from China and other countries may not follow the "rules" that have been laid out in the west (either implicitly or explicitly) which Technorati and other blog search tools use to create such rankings or indexes. For that matter, bloggers may blog differently in every country (for example, in using trackbacks or even RSS feeds). It would be difficult to expect Technorati to keep up with each country's unique expression of Web 2.0 or "user generated media." Realizing this, however, means that we have to take rankings such as the Technorati 100 with a grain of salt (especially if we want to consider them as global rankings) and understand that they likely under-represent large chunks of user generated media.

Technorati responds? Xu Jing Lei Now Tops Technorati 100, ahead of Boing Boing

My question of why Xu Jing Lei, the Chinese movie celebrity who regulary gets thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of page views for each article she writes, was not in the Technorati 100 seems to have been answered. She is now Number 1, ahead of even Boing Boing.



It seems Technorati is listening AND reacting (as any good blog monitoring company should).

UPDATE: Technorati writes about the change on their blog:

Those of you paying attention to the Technorati 100 will have noticed that it is getting more international, due to the explosion of non-English blogs as Dave noted in State of the Blosphere. With today's update, the number one spot has changed from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin and friends to 老徐 徐静蕾 新浪BLOG by Xu Jing Lei.

Related buzz:

ESWN has another angle in the Technorati language bias as well as Google page rank here.

Fons gives an overview of the Technorati language bias here.

For more about Xu Jing Lei's blog, see ESWN's translation of a earlier profile here.

Chinese blogs and the Technorati 100: Where's Xu Jing Lei?

Technorati recently came out with their new list of the Top 100 blogs (of course, I can't see it because Technorati is blocked again, but that's another story for other bloggers) Fons referred to Ethan Zuckerman's post which asserts that Technorati's David Sifry's suggested decrease of Chinese language representation within the most recent survey is in fact due to Technorati not doing a good job of covering key Chinese blog service providers (BSP) like Bokee or Blogbus.

Ethan writes:

...it looks like Technorati has begun indexing a few more Chinese blogging sites… but it still seems to be missing most blogs on Bokee.com, for instance. I asked Isaac Mao, when I got the chance to hang out with him in Manila, whether Chinese bloghosts would start supporting pingservers any time soon. He pointed out that many Chinese geeks don’t see the advantage of having their blogs indexed by an English-language, American-hosted service…

If Technorati continues to blocked, there will be even less incentive for Chinese bloghosts to support pingservers.

BTW, for an excellent discussion on impact of Chinese MSN spaces on overall blog stats and to understand why it is the 8th most visited site in China according to Alexa, see Ethan's post here.

I wonder if they cover Sina blogs. I would think that the blog of Chinese movie celebrity Xu Jing Lei would show up on the list if they were. Just browsing through some of her articles, you can see she can get well over 100,000 page views per article and at least 1,000 comments per article, sometimes 3-4,000. I would be curious how many blogs can generate thousands comments per article on a regular basis. Granted, Xu Jing Lei is not your typical "citizen" blogger, but her not being on the list suggests that Technorati is missing Sina. And if they are missing Sina, Bokee, and Blogbus...then they are missing a big chunk of the Chinese blogosphere.

Another question: why does Technorati group both simplified and traditional character Chinese into the same group when you filter for language? This is another thing which makes me think they are not really focusing on Chinese language blogs.

As I have said previuosly, I still think blogs are not as meaningful as BBS to understand any sort of Chinese cultural zeitgeist. However, I think blogs shouldn't be underestimated, and Technorati is doing just that.