The article below is also my latest column post on iMedia Connection Asia.

My plan for now is to follow up next month with a sort of “part II” for the article to articulate ideas about how brands can actually connect to China’s developed and complex community landscape.

BTW, if you like this article, you might also like Paul Denlinger’s “A new kind of ad agency warrior” as well as Kaiser Kuo’s “Closing the marketing confidence gap Part II”

As the global internet community is striving towards a more connected online landscape, China’s new media is already showing signs of the ‘future’.

In its recently published report “The Connected Agency”, Forrester suggests that the agency of the future will be a “connected agency”, which should have “a deep understanding of consumer communities, helping brands create and nurture connections, deliver targeted, on-demand messages, and network for talent and insights.”

While the Forrester report does not cover China, the need for agencies to help brands connect is more urgent with an online consumer community landscape that is more active, more complex and overall more evolved than the West. The state of China’s online landscape is indeed so. For the country, the internet has always been social, and internet communities have always existed in the mainstream. In short, in China, the ‘future’ is happening now.

Unfortunately, in contrast to the greater presence and impact of online communities in China, it seems that agencies here are arguably less prepared and less knowledgeable than their Western counterparts. As a result, you often find agencies recommending copy & paste internet word-of-mouth (IWOM) strategies from the West that at best have little impact.

Before taking action, it’s important for brands to have an understanding of the different types of communities. Let’s take a quick review of the current Chinese internet word of mouth IWOM landscape to understand where brands have opportunities to connect with communities.

BBS as the core of the social Chinese internet
BBS, or topic-based online bulletin board systems, serve as the online nation’s “water cooler” for every kind of situation and topic imaginable. While bulletin boards in the West have existed for years, in China, they have not only been in existence for sometime, they actually dominate with 35.5 percent of the 210 million Chinese netizens who use BBS on a regular basis. Most importantly for brands, there are active product communities for almost every category including automobile, mobile phone, parenting and cosmetics. Taking just automobile alone, we see over five million messages per month coming from communities built around specific car models that include detailed product feedback as well as queries related to customer service. In China, BBS communities are the first place to look for active, mainstream and influential consumer communities.

Blogs as diaries
Blogging is absolutely popular, with 23.5 percent of Chinese netizens using blogs regularly. However, blogs, for the most part, serve as personal diaries for individuals (not “power influencers”).

Portals have blog “circles” around certain categories, but it would be a stretch to call these circles “communities.” Microblogging (such as Twitter- type applications) is beginning to take off with sites like fanfou and jiwai, but has yet to hit critical mass. While there are notable exceptions for some categories, including technology, for the most part, blogs generally have incidental product mention with no real community.

QQ as an ecosystem
Over 80 percent of netizens use IM, with Qzone and QQ groups covering over 70 percent share. QQ is for all practical purposes a social nework service (SNS). Compared to Facebook, it has 50 percent more active social network users. Most importantly, QQ has proved itself to be a capable partner for brands, leveraging its platform for massive reach, even if not deep engagement. An obvious example of that is Coke’s iCoke platform.

SNS has not achieved much traction — yet
While SNS has yet to gain traction in China, Xiaonei is the SNS to watch as it burrows into the university mindscape to provide an alternative to local university BBS. Xiaonei will need to differentiate itself in order to stand out among booming QQ and BBS, and gain attention from those using the Chinese “social” internet.

Q&A communities serving info seekers
Baidu’s “I Know” question and answer community, along with Sina’s I-Ask, and Tianya’s Wenda, has fuelled a segment that has not really taken off in the West. Brands like KFC are beginning to sponsor certain topics as a way to connect with targeted communities and it is worth exploring this hot area.

The many emerging others
Online communities that support product feedback and other consumer discussions already exist within BBS. We are now seeing new sites and applications which are trying to create better platforms for these communities. Dianping is a restaurant review site which will likely morph into a more successful Yelp. Douban is a music and book review community that fulfills the same need as Amazon reviews. Wodeyichu is a community site that leverages netizens’ propensity to show off their new purchases with pictures; Meeli takes this a step further as a site where netizens list their purchases, with pictures and pricing. These platforms are emerging and are enjoying varying degrees of traction.

Of course, awareness of the communities is just the beginning. How to meaningfully connect with, support and participate is the next and most difficult step. Navigating partners and strategies within such a varied, vibrant and complex IWOM media landscape is arguably more difficult than in the West even as the opportunity is more compelling.

Take Ford Focus for example: every month, there are over 150,000 messages around the car on automobile BBS communities. How can Ford be a part of these communities? Is it welcome? How can they join the conversation? In which communities are they being discussed? Are there other communities beyond auto BBS communities that might be relevant? To be a truly connected agency in China will require a different mindset that includes actually listening to and understanding local Chinese communities, not just knowing about them and treating them like a new media.