As December comes to a close and New Year approaches, it is time to take a look back as I did in October and November. Unlike many of my expat “brothers,” I spent Christmas at my China home. Thanks to Taobao, my family got a Christmas tree (a “real” tree, by the way) with a bunch of presents ready for my son Leo to dive into Christmas morning (see below).

Speaking to International Educators

After 2 weeks in the US at the end of November, I continued an insane travel schedule that took me to London to speak on “Capitalizing on China’s Digital Explosion” at the British Council’s “Going Global 3“, the UK’s largest international education conference. Jazreel Goh, Director of Education Marketing at the British Council, saw me speak in July at a China Economic Review forum, and quickly saw that education marketers who were trying to attract students to the UK should understand how IWOM influences how Chinese students make decisions to study overseas. We have received much interest from educators after the conference—nice to find new markets for our services.

Social Media Analytics World Tour Continued

While in London, I continued a sort of “world tour” of social media analytics firms that built on my meetings in Las Vegas with leading North American firms like Nielsen Online and Visible Technologies. Along with Violet, I met 5 companies in 2 days, each with a slightly different take on Social Media Analytics. It was very cool to “talk shop” with those with the same, super niche interest as we have at CIC.

CIC Birthday Bash

I flew to Beijing one day after coming back to London for a couple of meetings, and then back to Shanghai CIC’s 4th birthday party. We rented out a bar on the Huang Pu River (thanks to Phoebe’s great arrangement) where the different classes (i.e. 1st year, 2nd year etc.) of team members provided various performances. Also, different departments put together different videos which were, to put it mildly, entertaining.

White Paper Parts 3 & 4

Our massive white paper undertaking for Q3 finally came to a close with our release of Topic Three-The Diversity of Chinese Net Language and Topic Four-Reshaping the Relationship between Brands and Consumers. We put out a Net Language test as well (in Chinese) here. Adam has a sort of text version of the slide share deck here and a quick overview of the series here (thanks, Adam). As I wrote last month, thanks to the intelligence team for their tireless efforts at making this happen.

IWOM summit Completed

Finally, on Friday the 19th, I wrapped up all of my IWOM summit meetings with one final presentation in Guangzhou. After 15 or so meetings with top level marketing execs from our retainer client list, coupled with my meetings with global social media analytics firms, I think we have a good handle on what 2009 is going to look like for social media in China. More on this in January!