I am happy to share our bi-annual review edition of our CIC watch report which you can download here. For the review, we pulled out some of the more interesting stories from our twice monthly CIC watch and put them into 3 categories including L+K+P IWOM Philosophy, Online Video Gains Foothold, and Netizens' Online Collaboration.

To see our previous 6 month review, see here.

On June 22, CIC had the opportunity to participate in a media event called “Hepatitis B IWOM and Behavior Seminar” hosted by Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) China in Hangzhou attended by over 30 major Chinese healthcare media. The focus of the event was the findings of our BMS commissioned study focusing on BBS conversations about Hepatitis B.

For the study, we looked at 117,752 messages around Hepatitis B issues written by 17,102 posters for October-December 2006.

Some of the key findings of the study are:
• Drug resistance and side effects are among top concerns discussed
• Hep B patients perceive that there is a “correct” sequence to selecting medicines (though this is disputed by some medical professionals)
• Over 70% of all posts expressed worry about posters’ condition or asked for help

Ultimately, BBS anonymous environment allows for Hep B sufferers to be very open in sharing their experiences and opinions (we of course did not and are even unable to collect any information related to posters’ actual identification) which makes the data very rich and a great source for insight. We are very proud that our findings led to a better understanding of the sufferers of this terrible disease. We are also proud that these findings are being used to better educate the media about their responsibility to get the latest, accurate information about the disease and its treatment to patients.

Some of the media articles reporting the event can be found here:
Link 1: http://hbv.39.net/hbv/zl/zlwq/253110.html
Link 2: http://www.ycwb.com/ycwb/2007-07/02/content_1534944.htm
Link 3: http://bbs.sz16.cn/topic.asp?boardid=20&topicid=28416

Last week we released our "The Talk About Phones" white paper. In the paper, we touched a bit on Chinese online community dynamics.

I thought it was pretty cool then to see that Matthew Hurst, on his excellent Data Mining blog recently referenced an article presented at the Communities and Technologies conference. The article, titled Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups, was written by Howard T. Welser from Cornell University, Eric Gleave from University of Washington and Microsoft Research, and Danyel Fisher and Marc Smith from Microsoft Research.

The paper discusses different roles taken by participants on online message boards (BBS).

There are many important social roles in online discussion groups: local experts, answer people, conversationalists, fans, discussion artists, flame warriors, and trolls (Burkhalter and Smith 2003; Golder 2003; Turner et al 2005; Herring 2004; Haythornthwaite and Hager 2005).

Digging deeper, the paper refers to research which characterizes the "answer people" in this way:

First, answer people tend to be disproportionately connected to alters with low degree. That is, they reply to relative isolates, authors who themselves answer few, if any, others. Second, their local (degree one) networks tend to have small proportions of three-cycles (i.e. their neighbors are not neighbors of each other) and they seldom send multiple messages to the same recipient (few intense ties). Finally, answer people tend to reply to discussion threads initiated by others and typically only contribute one or two messages per thread

There is still a lot to learn about Chinese online communities, but at this stage, we can at least see some similarities to what is happening in the West.

Take a look at this figure taken from our "The Talk About Phones" white paper. Here, we see that the "New Comers" (similar to "Isolates") are typified by those who ask a specific question, and then are never seen again. They usually have very few discussions and connections with the other members in the community. The Top Poster (resembling an Answer Person) in the community had more interactions with posters who wrote few posts than those who wrote many posts.

This figure shows the connections of the Top Poster with the 90 New Comers who posted only one message in Q1. We can see that these New Comers have NO connections amongst each other. Also, there is only one communication between them (hence the thin connecting line).

There's much more that we could analyze in this, but we think this has implications for brands that should not be ignored. These Answer People are self deignated "help desks" for brands. Their expertise and knowledge (which may help or harm the brand) is influencing the hundreds of consumers who come in into this "expert" and "trusted" community to ask a specific question. They are also influencing the likely thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of others who view the exchange (from naturally entering the forum or coming in from search engine).

My colleague Samuel was a substantial contributor to this article.

Note: I have edited this a bit from the original posting.

Sage from Pacific Epoch, in his column for MarketWatch, deftly integrates discussion of CIC's "Talk About Phones" white paper into analysis of Apple's opportunity for marketing the iPHONE in China. The column is provocatively titled "Apple not a factor in China handheld market." I wish I had thought of this angle when we released the paper last week.